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The worst part is that he knows she doesn't mean it.
Spencer thinks he might cope better if his mum actually meant to hurt him rather than whatever her brain told her he was, if the words and slaps that stung equally were truly aimed at him.
Crash, she calls him, and Spencer feels something inside him die every time. He wonders what she would do if she remembered; she'd be devestated, she'd apologise profusely, she'd hold him close and bury her face in his soft curls and cry... and so he can't ever tell her, can't ever let her know.
At five years old he comes home from the chess park already exhausted, already hurting, already shaking, already ready to just curl up and sleep forever... but today he's a government spy determined to read her mind and then his left cheek is red so he rushes to his room before the right one can match.
(He can't tell her about what Gary did, and years later when he hears the words a mother always knows he wonders how she figured that. She had barely known her own son at times.)
At eight years old he disolcates his shoulder 'falling off his bike' and rehearses his lines over and over and William Reid pretends to believe him. This time the painful grip and wrench of frantic fingers had wrenched the joint from its socket because Spencer had poisoned his mothers food. It had tasted funny, she'd said, but when he comes home with his arm in a sling she only tuts and fusses and asks him what he's done to himself now. The lies he recites aren't just for the nurse at the hospital, they're for Diana too.
At ten years old his father leaves and Spencer is told he isn't weak, so why does he feel like it? Why does he feel so tired, so numb, so lost?
He wonders for a moment what it would be like if he didn't have to be strong, if he could just be safe instead.
At twelve years old he comes home at three in the morning, shaking and dazed and drenched from the rain. His eyes are bloodshot and he can still hear the taunts of his classmates ringing in his ears from hours ago, all he wants is a hot bath and a hug and to be told that he's worth something - that everything will be alright. Instead he gets scalding tea thrown at him, hands crushing his throat, and his mother screaming at the demons inside him to die. He wants to.
At eighteen years old, Spencer Reid is weak after all. He gives in, gives her over, and the look of betrayal Diana gives him haunts him for years afterward.