Chapter Text
“It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realise what’s changed, is you.” - Eric Roth
Sometimes, Reid likes to think of his mind like a porcelain urn. Well-kept and valuable; filled to the brim with knowledge, of the useful but really quite specialised variety. He likes the analogy, not just for the idea that there's only a finite amount of things he can really know before the cup spilleth over after all, but how he can almost visualise the damage that's being done after all these cases.
A tiny spiderweb of surface cracks spreads its way across the delicate design. Crazing, his mind supplies, the irony not lost on him at all. Eventually these cracks will get deeper and the urn will shatter into a million pieces, and all the precious statistics and secrets he's been keeping safe inside will spill out, lost forever. He knows not to press on these cracks, not to tempt fate, and instead just pretend they're not there, pretend nothing's wrong.
This UnSub had made the job unbearably personal, in a way that none of them had anticipated. A head in a box, that's a message all right, but the scale and complexity of the book cipher, the personal touches - it angered him how intimately the UnSub could see into their lives. These were private matters, Gideon's cabin, Elle and Morgan's holiday, Reid's mother, no business to each other, never mind some deluded child abductor.
He stares down the Fisher King unarmed and tries to talk him down, but really, if he'd actually thought about the implications in all this, he'd know how it ends. Sir Percival asks the wrong question and the Grail is lost forever. A failure dictated by history, passed on through the years.
But this isn't some folk tale, this is real life, and nearly getting his legs blown off in the process wasn't exactly a foregone conclusion. He's not Sir Percival, Knight of the Round Table, who can fix crippling sickness with a single question. He's Doctor Spencer Reid of the FBI, still trying to find his feet in all this, pushing down the feeling that it's all his fault to begin with. There's a girl in this building who's been caught up in someone else's delusion for years and a dear friend lying on a surgical table with her chest splayed open to the world. All because he couldn't keep his rambling mouth shut.
That being said, he really tries to save this UnSub. Garner's not evil, he's just sick, that's all. But a bomb is a bomb is a bomb and the ringing in Reid's blown-out eardrums drowns out all sense. Some people can't be saved, he tells himself, but it doesn't make it any more okay.
*
Can you forgive yourself? He can hear his own words circling in his brain, even after they find Rebecca, even after the long evening's over. At approximately 35,000 feet in the air, he takes his mother's hand, painfully aware of how much she hates flying, painfully aware that even this is of little comfort. He reads her Chaucer's A Knight's Tale, the word on his lips familiar to him from childhood. She looks disinterested, concerned. Her son’s a government employee and that makes him the enemy. Reid knows that deep down she could still probably analyse the poem six ways to Sunday, meds or no meds.
But he's no shining knight and when he waves goodbye to her at Bennington Sanatorium he still doesn't know if he can answer his own question. He'll still write every day, sure, with a little more personal detail redaction, but whether he makes good on any promises to visit more often remains to be seen. This case has opened up old scars, ones he didn't want the team to see. He's not ashamed, but he's angry and the worse part about it is that he knows it's completely misplaced. He can't blame his mother for this, but he can't blame Garner either, and all that leaves is himself.
The sanatorium makes his skin crawl and as soon as his mother's out of sight, he turns and leaves as quickly as he can. This could be you someday, his brain unfailingly supplies as he strides out of the high wrought-iron gates, not looking back. The thought twists in his stomach, as statistics about genetic factors in paranoid schizophrenia involuntarily flood his mind.
*
It's a balmy evening in late September and dusk is slowly closing in around him, but he keeps walking, refusing to look at the towering building behind him. The air is beginning to feel clammy, but he walks straight past his car, staring ahead at the horizon. He doesn't know where he's going but he's sure he'll know where to stop. The team probably won't expect him back until the morning, and the plane will wait, so a couple of hours in his old haunts won't hurt anyone. He remembers this neighbourhood like the back of his hand. Not just the streets and intersections because with an eidetic memory and an affinity for maps he knows his way around virtually anywhere, but this place has the additional sucker-punch of bad memories.
There's the hospital where he found out he was violently allergic to carbenicillin. Who knew he was so prone to life-threatening experiences, even as a child? There's the high school, with its full gamut of unpleasant experiences lurking behind the surface. He can't bear to look - a lot has changed in a decade and a bit, but it still makes his stomach turn. He remembers being physically sick some mornings with fear of approaching those ugly brick walls, and that feeling won't just go away with a lick of paint. There's the football field, the goalposts protruding into the sky, silhouetted against streaks of pink and orange. Reid tears his eyes away, focuses them firmly on the ground, pushing down the memories and nausea with it. It was a clear night back then too; the sunset was so beautiful. But you tend not to notice these things when you're crying your eyes out.
Lips pressed firmly into a thin line, Reid realises he's reached his destination. A quaint suburban house sits mutely in front of him. Lights on inside, beige family car parked out front. A typical nuclear family, he profiles. Toys in the garden suggest three children, two female, one male going by the array in front of him, all around elementary school age. White picket fence needs a lick of paint, the guttering around the roof is coming loose; tiny suggestions here and there that both parents work; he predicts there's another car in the garage. Just an ordinary family.
He wonders how he would have profiled it when he lived there.
It would be a lot livelier now, filled with the voices of happy children, parents calling that dinner's ready, laughter at animated movies on the television. Not like when he was a kid. Growing up, he remembers the silence. Every creak of the floorboards, every sneeze from the dust felt like it reverberated around the house, louder than gunfire. Nearly every room was filled with books and papers, of all topics and in all states of array. A veritable goldmine. More like a death-trap, he thinks to himself, shoving his hands into his pockets. He remembers dodging towers of toppling books, tripping over stacks lying on the stairs haphazardly, the dust that seemed to settle everywhere, tickling his throat, coating his lungs. He loved books, but the grime and neglect that permeated the house seemed to cling to him, his hands never feeling quite clean.
The outside light flares into life, shaking Reid from his thoughts. It wasn't his place to be standing outside some unknown family's house. It wasn't his home any more, even if it had been for eighteen years. There's no sense of yearning though, no desire to see inside. This place had been a haven, but now it was just a house. With a slow sense of disappointment beginning to seep into his bones, he realises that whatever closure he had unconsciously sought by coming here was just a lesson in futility.
He sleeps little that night.