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No. 4: “I see the danger, It’s written there in your eyes.”
Cattle Prod | Shock | “You in there?”
He can’t remember anything before the pain. He’s bracing himself against a brick wall, uncomfortably warm air swirling around him.
He can’t feel his arm.
He can’t feel his arm.
His breathing hitches.
Derek crouches in front of him.
“Hey. Pretty boy.”
He doesn’t respond. Derek taps Spencer’s face, once, twice, a third time, more firmly. He doesn’t move, either.
Derek’s mouth twists with worry.
“You in there?”
Spencer swears he is. But it feels like moving through tar, like honey, sickly and smothering. He stares blankly. His head droops a little.
“Kid. Kid, please. ”
Spencer’s always known he wasn’t the best. He was never the strongest, the fastest, the most liked. But damn, he was smart.
Brainiac. Nerd. Boy wonder. Genius. IQ of 187. Youngest graduate of the FBI academy.
But right now, he doesn’t have a single thought.
Spencer’s both hyper-aware and completely oblivious to whatever’s happening around him. He feels a hand on his back, leading him somewhere (but where?). The crinkle of a shock blanket, something (someone) warm bracing the back of his neck, carrying him, speaking to him in soft tones.
The whine of sirens follows him into nothingness.
Derek rounds the corner, hand on his gun.
“There’s a warehouse out back,” he announces. “I’m gonna go check it out.”
Hotch nods at him.
Spencer joins him at the door. “Let’s go.”
They jog across the yard, cold autumn air pierced by soft sun. The dying grass bends beneath his combat boots.
Derek kicks down the door when no one replies to Spencer’s “Craig Wright! FBI!”. The pair turn every corner with guns raised, bodies tense. They find nothing.
(“It was routine,” Derek says helplessly, head in his hands. “It was normal. Well, as normal as something like that could be.”
Emily frowns. “You can’t blame yourself. There’s no way you could’ve known.”
Derek just sighs, taking a long sip of the shitty hospital coffee.)
There’s one final room. One final moment of peace before the storm. He swears that there’s an electrical charge, like hair raising before lightning.
Spencer glances at him for reassurance. “Ready?”
Derek kicks it down just as easily as the front door.
The sting of gasoline. Ticking.
His years in bomb squad have him moving before he even processes the girl in the corner.
“Spencer, move! ”
(“I didn’t even think he was that strong. I should’ve grabbed him tighter, been faster, I— fuck, I should’ve done something.”
He’s not sure why he’s still talking to Emily about this. He can’t really stop talking. That’s such a Spencer thing, he thinks. He didn’t know word vomits were contagious.
“You couldn’t have gotten him to leave her,” she replies, and Derek hates how right she is.)
“No! Get off!” Spencer shrieks, and Derek’s so surprised he lets him go. His best friend sprints to the corner, dropping to his knees.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“It’s okay, Alison,” he says gently. “It’s okay. Turn your head that way for me and close your eyes.” Derek finally sees the missing girl. She has two blonde braids and a gap between her front teeth. She flinches when Spencer shoots out one of the padlocks. There’s two left when Derek decides that the beeping has gotten far too fast.
Beep. Beep.
Alison is so small, swamped in a tangle of locks and chains. Spencer’s gun clicks empty, and he swears.
He hears Aaron’s voice in his ear. “Reid? Morgan? Do you copy?”
Derek thinks about the team listening to them die over the comm. There’s nothing they can do for the girl. There is something they can do for them.
Derek makes a decision.
Beep.
He grabs Spencer when his gun is down, throws himself at the door. Spencer’s arm comes up to shield his face. Derek rolls into the grass, trying to tug Spencer with him.
He’s not fast enough.
When the smoke clears, the entire team is at the warehouse. The rubble is charred and twisted, smoke choking out the bright sky. Emily coughs, chokes on ash, screams for Spencer.
There’s no reply.
Derek’s clutching his head, jaw set and hands trembling. She doesn’t ask about the little girl. Hotch radios for three ambulances.
Derek tells him to make it two.
The ambulances arrive within two minutes. Emily tries to shove Derek into one, but luckily she fails, because he ends up finding Spencer.
He’s slumped against a wall, face streaked with tears, hair soaked with sweat. He’s cradling his arm.
Oh god, his arm.
It’s marred and bloody and limp, tucked against his chest.
Derek stoops down, talks to him sweetly, but Spencer’s completely catatonic, besides the occasional twitch of his eyebrows or the downturn of his mouth.
When Derek’s whisked away by paramedics, he tries to argue, yells that Spencer’s far worse, but he relents when Emily promises to stay at his side, to make sure that he’ll be alright.
More paramedics come and wrap him in a shock blanket, and that’s when Emily processes that Spencer is in fact in shock.
He’s breathing shallowly, he’s unresponsive, and he’s so pale. It makes her nervous. She’s dealt with this before, but there’s something so different when it’s your friend. Your best friend.
Spencer doesn’t move when she squeezes his hand. She’s not sure what she expects.
In the ambulance, Emily sits near his head so they have room to elevate his feet. She pushes the damp hair out of his face, wipes the soot and tears away.
“You’re gonna be alright,” she says over and over to him, just in case he can hear. (Definitely not for her own benefit as well.)
The next few days pass in a blur. Spencer wakes up, gets his arm put in a cast, cries when he misses Alison’s funeral. Morgan beats himself up (unsurprisingly) and Emily tries her very best to console him. She’s not sure how to, though.
They don’t have to worry about work — they’ve all been suspended as the case is investigated. (Morgan says that they’re overreacting and that things blow up all the time. Rossi tells him that he’s spent too long in bomb squad.) So they do the only thing they really can do: wait.
The team starts waiting in shifts at the hospital until he’s discharged; Morgan and Garcia, then JJ and Rossi, and then her and Hotch.
On a night when she’s in the waiting room with Hotch, their hushed conversation is interrupted by the faint sound of shouting.
A nurse bursts in. She’s one of the nice ones, she lets them visit Spencer for just a little longer than their allotted time.
“We can’t calm him down,” she explains, breathless.
She’s already running over.
“What happened?” Hotch asks.
“He had a nightmare. Kept on calling out for… Alana? Ally? I can’t remember.”
“Alison?” Emily supplies.
They round the corner on his hallway.
“Yeah! Yeah, that was it.”
His sobbing was audible from the hallway. She thinks she might cry too — he sounds so afraid.
Hotch turns to her. “Give us a minute,” he says, leaving no room for argument. She lingers at the doorway when he sends out the nurses.
Earlier, she probably would’ve made some sort of quip about how she should probably go in instead of him, that emotions aren’t his strong suit; now, though — watching him gently disentangle Spencer’s clenched fists from his hair, watching him rub his back and whisper something that she can’t hear from her distance — she thinks it was good that he went in. Sometimes she forgets that Hotch is a dad. It’s in moments like this that she remembers.
Emily decides to give them space. She walks a big circle around the inside of the hospital, goes up to a vending machine and buys m&ms (Spencer’s favorite). When that doesn’t take as long as she hoped, she ducks outside into the night air. Streetlights paint thick wedges of yellow onto the sidewalk below. There’s a man is a wrinkled suit smoking a cigarette near the bushes to her left.
She watches life move on.
She wonders if the world would’ve stopped if Spencer had been just a little closer to the fuse, if Derek hadn’t grabbed him.
Emily knows the answer is no. That the world doesn’t stop for anybody.
But it just might stop for him.
She steps back inside before the chill reaches her fingertips.
When she returns, Hotch’s kneeling at the side of his bed, cradling Spencer’s trembling hand in his larger ones. Both of them are breathing slow, heads are drooping.
She decides not to wake Aaron. He looks so peaceful. Also, he deserves a crick in his neck for how crabby he’s been lately.
Emily can’t see well in the dark blue wash of the room, but in the sliver of moonlight, Spencer’s face is relaxed, brown lashes fluttering against his cheeks.
She watches the rise and fall of his chest.
He’s okay , she reminds herself, pushing away the image of his marred arm, the sound of static over the comm.
He’s okay.
Emily leaves the m&ms on his bedside, next to his glasses.
He’s okay.