Chapter Text
Cat decides, firmly and finally, that she is about to drive herself insane.
Granted, it could be argued that she is already insane, clinically speaking. In fact, it is probably written down in her file somewhere; possibly by Spencer.
That’s all in the past, she tells herself. In the grand scheme of things, two years doesn’t seem like a long time. It was only two years ago that Spencer was Spencie, and she was… well, a different kind of insane than she feels right now.
Different then this self-spiraling, torn between what if she’s right, and what if she’s wrong?
She throws her arm up over her eyes and kicks at the duvet which feels too hot despite it being the middle of November. Beneath her arm she closes her eyes tight and breathes in deep, but it doesn’t make her feel much better. If anything, her stomach starts to roll and that only makes it that much harder for her to calm her racing mind.
She needs to put an end to this; no matter where that ends up leaving her.
Unfortunately for her, she has made this decision at two o’clock in the morning, and on a night when Spencer may also be slowly losing his mind for completely different reasons than her.
Well, mostly.
She’ll jot that down as the final straw.
Breathing in deep through her nose once more – and this time convincing herself that it will help - Cat sits herself up and swings her legs over the edge of the bed. For a moment, she just sits there, letting her stomach settle and her decision cement in her mind. It doesn’t matter much; there isn’t anything she can do for herself for at least another six hours or so. But, better to have a clear head for what she can deal with right now.
She stands and pads her way out of the bedroom, stopping soon as she’s set foot in the hall and her eyes linger on the closed door of what used to be her bedroom.
She’s had thoughts about this room more often than not in the past week or so, but she pushes those into the mental box where she is storing the rest of her ever-increasing anxieties.
She knocks first, lightly. She doesn’t usually but it is late, and with any luck Spencer might have fallen asleep in the time he’s been in here.
Of course, she’s never that lucky, and when she gently pushes the door open she finds him exactly as she expected she would; sitting at the desk they bought at a yard sale, looking up at her with red-rimmed eyes.
“Hey,” He says softly, seemingly genuinely surprised by her intrusion. “Did I wake you?”
“How?” She chuckles, stepping fully into the room. “You never came to bed.”
He didn’t, for the record, not not come to bed. He came to the doorway, and he told her he wanted to keep looking at a case. She offered to stay up and help, but she wasn’t surprised at all when he told her not to bother and that he wouldn’t be long.
They both knew he was lying, and three hours seems like a long enough time to have pretended they didn’t.
They both saw the news earlier; it was playing on every channel. Missing teen found alive, recovered by F.B.I.’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Luke and J.J. walking the scene, a close up of Rossi sitting on the tail of an ambulance with the clearly traumatized - but alive – teenage girl who had previously been the subject of an Amber Alert after the murder of her parents.
Spencer fixes her with a defeated sigh, not quite meeting her eyes, and so Cat goes and sits down on the futon they pushed up along the side wall after an entire day of her cursing IKEA furniture as being the true product of sadists in this world.
She sits on the very edge, just watching him at first. He has his laptop open in front of him, with some kind of article pulled up on it that she can’t read from her angle but she would bet is a reporting on The B.A.U..
“I know it might not be what I think.” He finally says, his voice soft and his gaze distant. “I know it might have just been easy for either J.J. or Luke to call the other for back-up, likely even, and The B.A.U. is probably still an official title, so of course the reporters would use it.”
He pauses there, his face thoughtful, like he is debating if he really wants to say what it is about this whole thing that is bothering him.
Cat pulls her legs up to sit crisscross as she decides to say it for him.
“But Rossi was there.”
He nods. “But Rossi was there.”
She licks her lips, and watches him. She waits. He’s been in here stewing for three hours. He’s been running scenarios, checking out other news reports, searching for anything he might have missed over the last almost-year since Krystal Rossi died and The B.A.U. seemingly went with her.
“He didn’t look good.”
Cat doesn’t say anything, but no, Rossi did not look good.
“What if he’s been like this all this time?”
She sighs, because he probably has.
They didn’t go to the funeral. It was private, but it was still more people than Spencer had been comfortable being around at that point, and frankly she wasn’t eager to show her face. Spencer called, a few times, but he got exactly one answer on the third try and little more than a “thanks kid,” for his efforts.
“They didn’t not call you because they’re mad.” She finally says, Spencer already blinking away tears. “They might not even have not called you. You don’t know what happened. The whole thing could have been organized in ten minutes.”
“Rossi was there.” He reminds her, the whole reason this is such a blow.
From the little contact they’ve had with the rest of the quickly crumbling B.A.U. this past year, far as they can tell Rossi has practically been M.I.A. from more than just the emails he doesn’t send to them. He still works cases, but he does them solo. He doesn’t go into the office, and he only occasionally calls J.J. or Luke for a consult, and contacts Prentiss just enough to assure her that he is still alive and working.
No way he would have gotten to a scene like that at the drop of a hat.
“My point still stands.” She insists, “Whatever happened, we’re four hours out from D.C.. We wouldn’t have gotten there in time.”
“You don’t know that.”
She doesn’t, and he knows damn well it bothers her as much as it does him.
“Do you think it’s me?” She asks, and she knows she shouldn’t. She knows it isn’t fair. Sure enough, Spencer looks at her with a new sadness in his eyes and she finds herself blinking away her own.
“It is not you.”
“It could be.” She argues, deciding she has already opened this box, and it is a likely possibility. “Rossi took me on but whatever is going on down there, you and I both know he isn’t actually calling the shots right now. Things have to be fragile. Something tells me they aren’t exactly eager to call down their pet criminal.”
She can’t help the sneer that comes out towards the end. Two years, she reminds herself again, is not a lot of time.
It feels like it is, but it isn’t. It feels like prison was a lifetime ago, and her days contracting murder even further back. Over the past two years she has done everything that’s been asked of her. She’s searched through cold case after cold case, she’s met with her parole officer on a weekly basis either virtually or in person, she’s even worked a required thirty-hours per week of community service in a local women’s shelter. She’s helped, exactly as she was brought out here to do and then some, and while they’ve never put an official term to it she and Spencer have become something more than unwitting partners.
Actually, they have become very witting partners.
But, it still isn’t enough, and she can’t bear to think about what it means if it never will be.
“I’ll call J.J. in the morning.” Spencer breaks the silence, “Find out what happened.”
She nods, she hadn’t exactly been aiming to pull his head out of his own swirling anxieties with the use of her own, but she’ll take what she can get. He’s thinking more clearly, making a plan, and she very nearly blurts out right then and there that she has her own ideas of something they need to do in the morning.
But, this will be better. He can sort things out with his friends early, find out what is going on with The B.A.U., and then when his mind is at ease they can deal with other things which need to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
Spencer does call J.J. in the morning, but she doesn’t answer. She does, at least, send him a text later explaining that she just hadn’t had a minute at the time, and she’s in the middle of a case right now, but is it important?
He almost tells her that it is, but then she would worry, and his fear of being forgotten or Cat’s of being ostracized are not things which she needs to be dealing with while she is in the middle of hunting a serial killer.
So, he tells her she can call him tonight.
“Sorry,” Cat huffs, marching her way from the bathroom to the living room and pulling him from his thoughts. “Let’s go.”
He furrows his brow as she snatches up her shoes. He checks the time on his phone, and sure enough, they’re running a little bit behind schedule.
She is clearly well aware of this fact, judging by the way she is racing through the tying of her sneakers and muttering to herself.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call Fiona?” He asks, referring to her parole officer. “You still look a little pale.”
“I’m fine.” She insists, stopping only long enough to glance up at him. “Just tired.”
He frowns, but he doesn’t press the issue. She’s been a little under the weather lately, starting with a minor cold two weeks ago that quickly evolved into the flu. She tested negative for Covid, twice, but the shelter where she does her community service asked her to stay away for a few extra days anyway. She’s been better the last couple days, just a little low-energy at this point.
“Come on.” She huffs, standing and pulling on her jacket, and he swears she sways on her feet just a fraction as she does so. “Let’s go before she ends up calling us.”
Spencer drives her to the shelter. On the way there she swallows down nausea, tells him “no” when he asks if she wants to make a stop for some coffee, and asks if he got in touch with J.J.. When he says that he didn’t she tries not to let her annoyance show on her face, and then she changes the subject to one of the cases they’ve been looking at.
She’s thankful he has a theory on it which he is willing to babble on about, because it keeps her from replaying last night and this morning in her head.
Her plan had been to wake up early this morning; she knew he would likely be up early as well to try and catch J.J. before she went anywhere for the day, and sure enough he was, but she wasn’t. Instead she slept to her normal time, and then to make matters worse she got into the bathroom and midway through her shower she’d needed to jump out and get sick.
At least she managed to stave off the panic which started coming on after that. It’ll just be a few more hours. A few more hours and all the uncertainty will be over; all she has to survive is one more day.
She doesn’t hate working in the women’s shelter. In fact, today, it is exactly the distraction she needs. The shelter isn’t huge. It’s an old farmhouse that serves as a kind of first-point of contact for victims of domestic abuse or runaways. Thankfully, there isn’t anyone staying at the moment and so mostly Cat just spends the day cleaning up the place and answering a few phone calls from social workers whom they’ve dealt with before. She’s mostly alone; another small grace. Mrs. Duncan - the woman in her sixties who runs the place - is in and out for most of the day, either making a grocery run or off harassing the city council to give them more funding. The only other person there today is a college intern who is too busy typing up a paper while they have the quiet day to be much of a bother, or to notice when Cat locks herself in the bathroom a little too often.
So the day is easy, but it drags, and by the time Spencer picks her up at the end of it she feels as though her head is spinning and she knows she can’t keep what’s gnawing at her under wraps for another second; she is going to lose her mind if she tries.
“I need to stop at CVS.” She murmurs as she all but collapses into the passenger seat, just barely aware enough to make sure the door clicks closed at her side.
Spencer eyes her, wearily. “You think you need another Covid test?”
She sighs, rubbing at her temple. “No,” she mutters, her eyes closed as she tips her head back against the seat. “A pregnancy test.”