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“Spencer?” Her voice echoed on the tiles, as she walked into the decrepit bathroom.
There on the floor in front of her, laid the boy genius. He attempted to move his needle, while he looked at her with glazed over eyes, his hair laying messy and unkept in front of his eyes.
She stood there, gazing at the smartest man in her world, a complete victim of the drugs in his system.
Ever so faintly, he smiled at her. It wasn’t even a ghost of a smile, just the corners of his mouth being tugged at like a marionette on a string.
His head rolled over to the side, resting against the cold wood on the bathroom cubicle.
“Spencer…” her voice, was barely a whisper as she stretched out her hand to his face.
He was as cold as death, the colour of his body being drained further and further into an abyss he couldn’t crawl out of.
“Why?”
Spencer had spent every night asking himself that until he placed the needle into his vein and pushed the plunger.
“Why?”
Her words echoed in his mind, empty of any other thoughts, the words could only bounce off each other.
He reached his hands slowly to her arm, his grip weaker than a babe’s. Drugs were a great equaliser in that respect. A man as stunning as Dr Spencer Reid laid in a pale crumpled heap in front of her, void of his usually limitless mental facilities.
“I…” The words sounded choked through chapped lips, like English was a language foreign to him.
Slowly, a tear fell down his cheek, pooling at his chin. One singular tear, tracing a map through the grime on his pale skin. It took all the water left in his body to summon the tear that fell down his cheek, and it was destined to spend its life in isolation, without a partner.
“JJ” was all he said, before his grip on her wrists loosened again.
Her hands moved to his neck, as she pulled him in a tight embrace, shoulders shaking as her tears wet his greasy hair.
She sobbed softly into his hair, her grip on his shoulders tightened as her own continued shaking, soundless sobs exiting her throat.
Spencer’s eyes, like glass, like a taxidermy animal, gazed into the distance, numb to both his body and JJ’s distress.
She pulled back, hands gripping his shoulders to look at his empty eyes once again.
His hair was lank and greasy, tangled beyond recognition as clumps of hair lay on the floor, either from stress or his own anger at himself. His skin was pale and shallow, like it had been stretched across a blank canvas, waiting for a personality to appear. His lips were chapped and broken, skin breaking at the edges of his mouth as he pointlessly tried to swallow his words.
Worst of all, however, were his eyes. Eyes that once danced with delight, and bright at any given moment were now empty. No light could find its way into the black pits that had become the gateway to the soul. His eyes had seemingly sunk further into his skin, and dark bags clung to each of them like a life source. Beneath his waterline was a dark tinge of red, smudged like a messy artwork.
A man once so particular, so neat that his pens were organised by manufacturer and production date, lay in her arms like a poorly made Picasso. None of the quality she had come to expect with Spencer was there, he was just empty. Empty like his apartment, like his desk, like every aspect of his life because he was terrified to fill the void because what if it was all taken away? Every piece of his life was clinical, enough personality to display, but not enough to find depth. Even the way he administered his drugs was clinical. Small Band-Aid patches scattered over previous injection sites, presumably to stop infection.
From his chapped lips, he spoke “I just wanted the pain to go away.”
JJ looked at him, looked at the way his shoulders curled in to hide himself, the way his legs were scrunched beneath him, the uselessness of his left arm and realised below him was not a man, but a living corpse.