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The scratching sound of a dried out ball-point ink pen across the smooth paper of an opened notebook was something that Spencer had gotten accustomed to. Not that he liked it, per say, that definitely wasn’t it. But, after years carrying out a tattered notebook and pen to jot down little notes, he got used to his pens running out of ink. The squeaking of the ball in the chamber was grating against his ears, and it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and sometimes it made him feel like he had to close his eyes so he could think properly. But this was important, and something that he’d been putting off for too long probably, and he was most definitely too drunk to be writing a best man speech at nearly one in the morning on the Thursday before the wedding.
And yes, this was stupid and Spencer knew he was being entirely irrational. For god’s sake, he wasn’t even a big drinker, and for someone who knew so many words, there was no combination of any words, no language that could adequately string together the feeling in the center of his chest. It was stupid to get caught up in the emotions like this, especially when he should’ve been happy, maybe honored even, but he wasn’t. It felt like every time he swallowed there was sand in his throat and every time he fucking blinked there was a pressure like being shot behind his eyes. He felt like a child who’d experienced road rash for the first time, the discomfort from the raw skin and the refusal to let the wound heal, you just keep picking at the fucking scab. And yeah, it’s really hard to be excited about something that he would never have, something that he could never feasibly hold in his hands, it was like when a sweater had a loose string, and suddenly you’re pulling at it and you’ve unraveled the entire thing.
And boy was he pulling at the thread tonight, at this rate he was gonna be sitting alone, entangled in a pile of yarn, with a sad bottle of cheap wine open next to him. Writing a meek sentence, just to scribble the words out with the red ink pen in his left hand, he couldn’t bear to try to write something so untruthful with his dominant hand. It felt wrong, like some kind of sin to write lies across a page, just to read them to an audience of his doting peers in a matter of days. It- this was stupid. He heard JJ’s soft little voice telling him, ‘Quit it! You’re gonna think yourself to death, Spence,’ in his head, and suddenly he realized he was crying.
Sobbing into the sleeve of his cardigan like a boy whose mom is trying to force him to sing in the choir at church, big fat tears rolled down his face, like the ones of a petulant teenager who’d just experienced their first heartbreak. Except he wasn't a teenager. He was thirty three years old, sitting at the head of his long, empty dining room table, head in the crook of his arm, weeping like a little kid.
He was happy for them.
He was.
Then why was it so fucking hard to write a best man’s speech?
Probably against better judgement, Spencer took another long pull from the bottle, finishing it off, shakily wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, pulling the sleeve of his sweater down over his hand to wipe his nose. And maybe it was dumb to hold out hope like this, maybe it had been stupid to hope that the day wouldn’t come, and he’d never have to face this, but the day was going to come and pass like any other.
The sun would rise and set just like any other.
Quickly, as if set on fire, Spencer set his pen to paper.
There's a corollary for friends. When you meet a true friend, you'll be bound together through space and time for 500 years.
That could be enough for tonight. It wasn’t a lie, but he couldn’t bring himself to face the fact that it wasn’t quite the truth either. The headache that came from indulging in a little too much wine was starting to set in, and the pressure in Spencer’s chest was increasing, and if he didn’t turn his fucking brain off now he’d convince himself he was having a heart attack and he was in absolutely no shape to drive himself to the hospital.
Unfurling himself from his stupor, he picks his body up from the chair like he’s a puppet on a string, body acting without the help of his mind, heavy feet carrying him towards the bathroom. God his apartment was a mess, the opened, half read books scattered throughout the living room, scattered old files sat on the arm of his couch, like skeletons in an opened closet.
Pull it together.
He’d left his cell phone on the kitchen counter, next to the pho that sat in the takeout container, warmed up in the microwave, but he hadn’t touched it. Maybe that’s why he was drunk off a single bottle of wine.
Maybe. He’d never been much of a big drinker anyways.
He struggled into the kitchen, grabbing his phone, squinting at the screen, eyes bouncing from texts, brain slowed to nearly a normal person’s reading speed. Shaking his head, he clicked the phone off, shuffling to the bathroom, trying to keep his eyes cast down, so as to not have to make eye contact with his own reflection.
He wasn’t proud of the state he was in. Who would be?
Spencer’s bedroom was boring compared to the rest of the apartment. No funky decorations, no eclectic wallpaper, just a bed on a box spring, a small nightstand with a glass of water on it that had no doubt left a water ring on the wood of the table, a big window with long black-out curtains, and a thick, weighted comforter that his therapist told him was supposed to help with the nightmares. It didn’t, but it still almost felt like he was being held, so maybe it wasn’t so useless. He could feel the grit of his toothpaste in his mouth as he tucked himself into bed, without doing as much as take off his work slacks, phone plugged in and on the nightstand.
The big tee shirt he’d put on earlier in the night felt like a blessing as he laid in bed, drunk, with thick socks, and starched khakis on. The alarm clock on his bedside table read 1:57 am, and suddenly his eyes were filled with tears again.
This is so stupid, he thought, reaching into his bedside table and fishing out a sleeping tablet, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. He was a doctor, not a physician, but he had a PhD… three times over. For Christ's sake, he knew better than to take a barbiturate when he’d been drinking, but nothing sounded better than sleep right then. The pull of sleep seemed so far away.
He felt the sullen waves of drunkenness flowing over his body, the rocking of the stationary bed was a tell-tale sign. Sighing, he placed the pill on the nightstand and reached for his cellphone.
She was pregnant with his child.
But he couldn’t stop himself, breath running ragged in his chest, heart pumping blood through his veins so quickly he could hear it in his ears. The cell phone in his hand weighed about a metric ton, but he couldn’t stop himself, there was an empty hole in his chest that was expanding, and maybe he was being reckless - but, Spencer had wasted his entire life finding ways to be responsible, to push down how he felt, to drown it in something else.
He’d been stuck in this cycle for nearly a decade, remembering being paralyzed in fear over the way his voice trembled when his coworker even so much as looked at him. He remembered his twenty-fifth birthday so clearly now, coming to terms with it, growing and changing, breaking into the yearning. And for just shy of a decade - seven years, two hundred and fifty-six days, seven hours, three minutes and eleven seconds to be exact - Spencer absolutely drowned in it.
And for four years, one hundred twelve days, nine hours, fifteen minutes, and forty-eight seconds, he was content in it, content in the longing, contented in the idea of living inside something of a fantasy. God forbid to reach out and touch, to relish in the idea, to wistfully wrap himself up in the pull of it.
But, then there was that night in northern Montana, where it had felt like everything had changed, and the fire that had been licking at his heels for so long was starting to swallow him whole. When their bodies had clashed together in a way that he assumed only happened in the movies, and he let it consume him, god it swallowed him whole. His lips were tingling for what felt like hours, and his body sang in the heat of the moment, and it had been everything he’d hoped it would be.
And, so much more.
Fleeting. It had all been fleeting, like when you try to keep water from flowing out of the gaps between your fingers, you scoop up more, only to have it slip away from you. Water is always flowing back to its source, just out of reach. Fleeting like trying to corral a wild stallion, closing the gate expecting it not to run with everything it had. They were meant to run. And after all, you can’t put the reins on something that never even belonged to you in the first place.
Before Spencer knew it, he was quelling everything with guest lectures at Georgetown, cheap liquor, expensive slacks, first edition religious texts, and new ball-point pens. It was putting out little fires with obsessing over dead languages, adopting senior cats, memorizing Das Kapital in seven different translations, trying to solve the Three Body Problem, and babysitting his godson. It was doing things he had always done, but this time doing them, for the first time in his life, so he could learn how to forget.
Mary Mother of God, it was eating him alive.
The sound of the phone ringing was easily heard with the speaker pressed up to the side of his cheek. He was lying back, tears streaming down his face, slipping down his cheeks and into his ears. His breathing was heaving, almost like he was gagging on the air, his chest rising and collapsing with every gasping breath.
“Morgan residence,” The rich baritone sound of Derek’s voice came through Spencer’s speaker and for a moment he was sorry he’d called, and his breath got caught in the back of his throat, the outrageousness of this was catching up to him quicker than he’d intended. He held his breath.
The silence was deafening.
“Hello?” Derek said again, inhaling sharply through his nose.
“Derek-” Spencer gasps out, hating how it sounded like he was choking on his name. The two syllables had been heavier to push out than he’d originally imagined.
“Reid it is two o’clock in the fucking morning-” Morgan breathed out an annoyed sigh of relief over the other side of the phone, only for it to be followed by a harsh intake of breath. “Are you ok?”
Spencer was silent for a moment, trying desperately to steady his breathing.
“You’re crying,” the older man stated, not giving Spencer any time to get a word in edgewise. “Spencer, are you having a nightmare?”
“Yes,” he sobbed out in reply, lying right through his teeth, draping one of his arms around his middle, trying to steady the heaving of his chest.
“Hey, hey,” Derek’s voice quieted, just above a whisper now, losing any annoyed tone he’d originally taken on, and Jesus Wept the crying man wanted to slam his head into a wall. Spencer could hear a door shutting behind him, quietly. “It’s alright, Spence. It’s okay. It was just a nightmare. You’ve been here before.”
Taking a moment, Reid takes a deep breath through his nose, exhaling through his mouth, repeating it a couple of times, trying to stop his heart from hammering so furiously in his chest. This was so stupid he winced. He had never been called stupid in his entire life, but boy, had he done stupid things. This was royally stupid.
“Good.” Derek hums, Spencer can hear how tired he is. “ Good job, Kid.”
“I went to bed drunk,” he says, seemingly out of nowhere, and his breath hitches, almost like a hiccup, but Spencer would vehemently deny it.
“I can hear that,” Derek chuckles lightheartedly, and Spencer can hear the stupid grin he’s sporting. “It’s been a long time since this has happened. What’s going on?”
Boy, what kind of answer could Spencer give to that?
“I don’t know,” He says, quietly, clenching his eyes shut, biting back whatever was clawing at the middle of his chest.
“Are-” Derek cuts himself off, sighing. And it’s quiet between the two of them, the line nearly silent save for the sound of soft breathing crackling through the speaker.
“Say it.” Spencer dares, voice watery, feeling a silent pain spread through his head, exploding behind his eyes. It wasn’t quite anger, wasn’t quite envy, it was something else entirely.
“Are you craving?” Derek asks, and suddenly he knew the feeling: yearning.
Spencer barks out a laugh, oh if he only knew. “No.”
“Liar,” Derek laughs in response.
“I’ve been clean, Morgan.” The last name felt foreign on his tongue, it felt like weeping in the bathroom at the team’s Christmas party, a little too drunk on white wine.
“I believe you,” Derek defends himself.
“You know me better than anyone,” Spencer murmurs, the words coming out heavy and jumbled, maybe he should’ve eaten dinner. It felt like sitting in a park in midtown, book open to the same page, while the rain pours furious and spiteful, and a knot forms in the pit of his stomach when a text coming through saying that he’d rather meet for drinks.
Spencer wasn’t a big drinker.
“I know, Pretty Boy,” and god did that sting, his voice was nothing but kind, and there wasn’t even a hint of resentment in the words . But, it felt like scrubbing his hands raw in the sink, and it tasted like white tequila, oversleeping, then lying to his boss. It felt like a shame, it felt like losing something he’d never even had.
“I’m sorry.” He coughs, cringing at the high-pitched tone of his voice echoing back slightly across the line, the sound of Derek’s sigh clearly audible to Reid, but probably only because he’d been listening for it.
He wasn’t a big drinker.
“You know you don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
“You should get back to sleep,” it was too much. He wanted to feel sorry he’d called, but he couldn’t find it in himself to be, not with the way that Derek’s voice felt like taking a breath after breaking the surface of a pool of water, finally letting your lungs fill with oxygen.
“I don’t feel like you should be alone right now,” Derek says earnestly, and Spencer’s turning to dust in his bed, sprawled out, falling to pieces right in the comfort of his own home. Isn’t that how it always goes?
“I’m thinking about teaching full-time,” He replies, and Derek sighs. He’s more than used to Reid’s inability to stay on one topic, his brain moves more rapidly than Derek could ever hope to keep up with, and it doubles down when he’s in distress, working twice as hard to get half as far. Spencer knew that Derek knew better than to even try to keep up.
And that almost made it worse, didn't it? That he would sit there and let Reid go, let him ramble, and just sit there, nodding, letting the corners of his lips curve up into a little bit of a smile, and damn him for it. Damn him for all of it, because once again Spencer was confronted with the worst part of it, hands down the very worst part of his job: the fact that he could have been sitting here floundering in this unfortunate part of himself, and he was smart enough to understand that everyone could see it. It’s an understood BAU rule not to profile your coworkers, but he knew how they all were, and that made it so much worse.
Because the sick reality was that Derek Morgan knew that Spencer Reid was hopelessly, desperately, fiercely, regrettably in love with him.
He knew.
“Finally run out of patience for the BAU?” Derek asks, the inflection in his voice denoted disbelief.
“You know it isn’t like that-” Spencer replies, but he gets cut off. Suddenly, the conversation is shifting and now he’s gotta play defense, frustration curling in his stomach.
“Then what is it like?” Derek presses, his tone deepening. And, there’s something in his voice that Spencer can’t pick out without seeing him, he couldn’t see body language, there was something left unsaid and it would kill him if he couldn’t figure it out.
“Don’t be a sadist.” He sighs, putting a hand over his eyes, for little reason, it was pitch black in Spencer’s bedroom. Anger bloomed in his chest, passive and quiet, almost like he could ignore it if he tried hard enough.
“We both know I ain’t being a sadist, Genius.”
Spencer almost laughs, but just a meek puff of air comes out, feeling the residue of tears on his cheeks drying, tightening the skin there. “I’m drunk, and this was a mistake.” The words flow out like a hiss, more bitter than he’d intended.
“You know you can call me anytime you need me.”
Spencer laughs this time, even though he knew nothing was funny. “Sure, Morgan.”
“You’re my best friend, Spence. You know that-” Derek murmurs.
“This is the last night it’s gonna be like this, you know that.” He whispers, distraught, losing control on it, the lid was coming off and he couldn’t stop himself. He was spiraling and the sweater was unraveling and he couldn’t stop himself from devolving into complete and utter honesty.
“What are-”
“You know exactly what I mean. You know what? I shouldn't have called. This was fucking stupid-” Spencer spat, his words jumbled and slurred on the end, waves of the wine coming back to bite him in the ass, when he needed the confidence most.
“You’re fucking drunk, kid.”
“Don’t call me that!” He groans, feeling a sob getting caught in his throat, coming out somewhat of a strangled whine. “All those nights that you made me your own, Derek. And you expected me to just- I don’t know- not expect me to think it was all my fault?”
“Reid-” Derek sighs, and he can hear it. The frustration in his voice; that was what did Spencer in. “You know that we can’t have this conversation.”
“I wasn’t trying to have a conversation!” He nearly screams. “I just need some- god- I know it didn’t mean anything, but would it have killed you to just pretend for a minute that maybe, just maybe, it did?”
“I’m getting married in two days, Spencer.” Derek deadpans, voice tight with less emotion than Spencer hoped he would have. He wanted to be selfish, he wanted Derek to drop everything and run to him, he wanted to be held. God he wanted to be held like he mattered more to Derek Morgan as more than a best friend, but it couldn’t be that way. It wasn’t that way.
“You’re right,” He responds, voice thin with emotion, everything that he had felt so boldly just moments ago was bleeding out of him, like he’d just been shot in the face, leaving him curling in on himself, sniffling softly. “I’m sorry. Derek, I didn’t mean to do this, I'm just…”
“You’re drunk, and you’re craving. I can tell ‘cause you can only quell addiction with something else, and I know you’re not a drunk. And your mind is racing like it does after you have a nightmare-”
“Stop profiling me after I just poured out my heart to you,” Spencer crows, a weak smile almost playing on his lips, a ghost of an emotion he could almost feel.
“I’m sorry- I’m uncomfortable.” He breathes in, laughing nervously.
“I know. I’m sorry, Der,” Spencer replies, rubbing a hand over his face, slowly slipping from distress to wistfulness, his breathing finally relaxing. “I- I know you knew I just couldn’t bear to - who do I have now?”
Derek sighs across the line, the crackling of the sound ringing in Spencer’s head. “I’m not disappearing, Pretty Boy,” He states, plainly, almost as if it were going to fix everything, as if it somehow made everything fine. “You need sleep, Garcia’s gonna be waking you up soon to enlist you in helping with decor tomorrow. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for calling. I’m sorry you had a nightmare.”
“It’s okay,” Spencer lies again, feeling tears well up again, the sting in his nose returning from holding everything in. “Thanks for picking up.” He breathes, shakily.
“You know I always will.” And, honestly, that statement was a little too confident for the little voice inside Spencer’s head that screamed what if what if what if.
“Yeah.” He hums.
“Goodnight, Spencer,” Derek drawls, the tone of frustration having completely evaporated from his voice.
A silence settled between the two of them, soft breathing echoing back and forth, just waiting for the other to build up the courage to hang up the damn phone.
“Derek?”
“Yeah, Genius?”
“Will I- I know statistically humans are more than likely to meet more than one person in their life who is-” He swallows thickly, trying to steady his trembling voice. “What if I never-”
“You will.” Derek says, quietly, before Spencer can even finish his sentence.
“Goodnight, Derek.”
“Goodnight, pretty boy.”
“Happy birthday, junior G!” Garcia smiles, holding out a small present, wrapped in shiny, pink paper with an obnoxious gold bow on top of it. Rossi stood next to her, arms over his chest, flashing the doctor a timid smile.
“Rossi, Penelope” Spencer smiles at the pair, a
real smile,
the kind that reaches all the way to your eyes. “Thank you.”
“I know you don’t like to make a whole deal out of your birthday, but we thought we should… you know get you something at least. I know you’re spending your birthday with Henry and JJ, but we- the Bureau just loves you a lot, that’s all.” Garcia rambles, smiling, infectiously.
“I mean it,” Spencer grins, taking the present from her. “Thank you guys. All of you.”
With nimble fingers, he begins opening his gift, finding a 3 pack of Pelikan Rollerball Pens and a 10 pack of Uniball Rollerball Pens inside, all different colors, a card taped to the back of the packages of pens. These were nice, expensive pens that would be good for grading, it really was a thoughtful gift, and truthfully, Spencer was thankful it wasn’t another pair of funky physics-themed socks.
“Woah!” Spencer exclaims. “This was so nice, thank you, guys!”
“Derek said you don’t like ballpoint pens, and you’re thirty-five now, so we figured it’d be better to get you a big boy gift,” David chides playfully, tapping Spencer’s shoulder.
Derek.
“We figured he knew best. Hell, he named his damn kid after you and all-” Rossi kept rambling, but Spencer wasn’t listening, mind traveling back to northern Montana and the beautiful sunsets over Big Sky Country. It didn’t hurt like it used to, didn’t leave him gasping for breath, like any second he’d just combust completely. No, it wasn’t like that anymore.
It was something he’d grown accustomed to, and it wasn’t so hard anymore.
Getting over Derek was a lot like getting over using ballpoint pens. It never really went away, it just got easier.
Opening the card, he gazed down at the names scrawled across the stupid card that sang Happy Birthday in a chipmunk-style voice. And sure enough, down at the very bottom he saw it.
Happy Birthday to our Best Man<3 in Savannah Morgan’s beautiful script. Have the best day ever. Love, The Morgan Family - Derek, Sav, Baby Spencer, and Clooney, too.
He was happy for them.
He was happy.