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Somewhere in a small town in Wyoming, in a basement lit by a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling a man was laying on the floor. The stab wound in his stomach was just one of many wounds covering his body. There were small nicks, long cuts, vicious stabs covering his skin like a canvas. He was too tired to move anymore, sluggish from the blood loss and his own screaming and the torture he endured in general. He knew he was gonna die. He wasn’t surprised or upset or even disturbed by it. It was just a fact. The probability of him being found in time was very close to zero, and even though he believed in his team, he made peace with dying. He didn’t make peace with this basement being the last thing he ever saw though. And thus he sluggishly retreated into his memories, like he did every time he needed to escape reality.
The lights in his apartment were dim, just like here, in the basement, but not for the same reasons. He kept his lights dim because the sensory input of overhead lights was always too much for him and caused migraines. His apartment was never pristinely clean, but it wasn’t messy either. There was an endless amount of wooden shelves covering the walls and the books on them seemed to be whispering things to each other. The frozen smiling faces on the pictures of the team, occupying the rest of the walls, were seemingly listening to a conversation happening in the living room between two friends.
“How do you think the world is going to end?” - Penelope asked, sitting on the couch with a bucket of ice-cream in her lap. They just finished rewatching an episode of Doctor Who about another prevented apocalyptic event and it made Penelope wonder.
”It depends on your definition of the word. Is the end of the world the same as the end of humanity or is it the end of the universe or is it something else entirely? You know, there are 14 definitions of the noun world in the Merriam-Webster dictionary?” - Spencer replied - “But if we’re going with the definition that the world is Earth with all its inhabitants, I’d say it’s already ending. I don’t think the world would end in one major event, I think it’s going to be gradual and quiet. And look at it this way. There are already wars all over the world, there’s pollution and global warming, there are so many things going on at once that I would consider being world-ending”
With that Spencer scooped a little bit more of his own ice-cream.
”Sheesh, boy wonder, way to be optimistic” - Penelope shivered.
Spencer just shrugged: “If you were waiting for an optimistic response you probably shouldn’t have asked me. Or anyone on the team for that matter”. Penelope made a non-committal sound. “What do you think?” - asked Spencer.
“Well I’d like to think it’s not gonna happen anytime soon, but if it is, it’s going to be some zombie apocalypse and all of us will brilliantly survive it because that is what we do. And because I refuse to see the world without any one of us. That is the real end of the world - if any of the team dies in the field. ”
“Well, I don’t plan on dying any time soon, Garcia”
They laughed and ate even more ice-cream.
“Well, joke’s on me, here I am, dying 2 days later” - thought the man lying on the floor - he really didn’t want to think of himself as Spencer or Reid right now because that identity has been stripped off him. “Penelope’s gonna be devastated. She’ll still have the team to get her through it though. Morgan won’t let anything happen to her.” His mind shifted back to the semi conscious state.
He remembered how yesterday Morgan and him were boarding the jet, the constant overwhelming sound of the planes landing and taking off as present as ever. The weather was hot, there were no clouds and he was starting to develop a headache. He must have been squinting, because he remembered Morgan coming up to him and silently handing him his sunglasses. Those sunglasses were now laying a few feet away from him, crushed by the leg of his captor. He couldn’t help but feel sadder for the untimely death of an inanimate object than he felt about his own impending demise. The glasses were Morgans favorite. But when Spencer tried to protest Derek giving them to him, the only reply he got was: “Relax, pretty boy. I am sure they’ll look better on you than on me anyway, and besides, you can give them back at the end of the case”
”Sorry, Morgan. Not gonna happen now, I guess I’ll take your sunglasses with me to the grave” - the man deliriously giggled inside his own head. He was too tired to laugh out loud. “I wonder, was it the same for Emily? I’ve never been stabbed, she has. I miss her.”
A year ago, when Emily was visiting them from London, they went to a film festival. They had just left a screening of Leviathan, a movie that takes place in a northern russian village.
”What did you think of the movie?” - asked Spencer
“It’s honestly a little bit depressing. I think that, from what I know about russian history and from my year of going to school there, it’s pretty accurate. Things could change of course, but given the recent events, I doubt it changed that much. The government is a machine that eats people, especially there”.
“Yeah, I get it. You know that the name of the movie comes from a work by Thomas Hobbes? He compared the government machine to a leviathan, a biblical sea creature. The comparison is different in the movie though the movie seems to portray the government way worse than Hobbes does…”
”That’s interesting. The government is a leviathan, and yet both of us still work for the FBI”
“Ironic, isn’t it? What do you think Strauss would think if she heard our discussion? Anyway, which movie should we see next?”
”Yeah, let’s not think about Strauss. Oh! What about Ida? It’s a Polish movie, they say it’s about a young woman about to take her vows in a convent, when she finds out she is Jewish. So I think it’s going to be about the consequences of the Holocaust in Poland… Oh, and it won this year's Oscar”
“That sounds promising. Let’s go”
“Ida was a good movie” - the man thought. “I wonder what Gideon would think of it. We never talked about religion much. He did have a menorah in his house…”
He was standing in front of the door of (the!) Jason Gideons apartment. He still couldn’t get over the fact that the man approached him and convinced him to join the FBI. Well, the Academy for now. He finally gathered the courage and knocked. He heard footsteps and a slightly dishevelled Gideon was welcoming him and inviting him in.
“Spencer, come in, come in! How was your day? Academy treating you well?” - he asked while showing Reid where to put his satchel
”As well as I could have expected. It’s not high school, but it’s so different from what I got used to in academic environment. The physical section is the hardest”
”We can always waive the physical requirements, given your track record…”
”No, no, I want to do it. I want to be in the FBI because I earned, not because…”.
“Spencer, you would have earned it either way - your academic achievements tell a lot about your value to the bureau, and I for one would be happy to have you on my team, if that’s where you end up”
“I like profiling classes the most and I’m very successful there. I think there’s a high probability of that happening”
”Yeah, agent Lerenson already informed me of your roaring success. I’m really glad. Are you hungry? I make a great meal, or so I’m told” - with that, Gideon went to the kitchen to get the food.
Spencer was left alone and was looking at the apartment interior. There were pictures of birds on the walls and birdwatching books on the bookshelves, there was a record player in the corner of the room and a projector near an old sofa. There was a heavy looking coffee table right beside them and a book open somewhere in the middle. Altogether the room had a cosy old vibe to it. Gideon emerged from the kitchen with a pot of something deliciously smelling.”So what have you figured out about me while you were looking?” He asked with a knowing smile. Spencer turned bright red
”Gideon always knew this stuff. I miss him. I wonder where he is” - the man thought tiredly. “I wonder where Elle is too. She would probably be able to relate to my current predicament. I want to keep remembering. I want to remember something of her, of Hotch, of JJ, Alex, Rossi. I want to think of everyone, and I don’t think I’m ready to die anymore”. But he only managed to conjure a brief memory of one of their recent pasta nights, with twinkling in Daves eyes, rare smile on Hotch’s face, JJ, Kate and Morgan laughing. And than he couldn’t remember anything, because his vision turned completely black and unconciosness swallowed him whole
The man was laying there in a pool of blood and he didn’t see or hear anything anymore, he didn’t hear the sound of the door opening and the shouts of the word “FBI!”. He didn’t hear JJ and and Hotch frantically calling for him, he didn’t hear the medics and he didn’t feel them raising a gurney. He didn’t hear Rossi saying to Garcia on the phone: “He isn’t dead, Penelope. He isn’t dead”