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In a better world, when Spencer Reid calls Aaron Hotchner a narcissist, the latter hears what he’s really saying immediately—pay attention, this is important. Pay attention, this is for you. And then, when Spencer reads out the wrong bible verse, he recognises it for the clue it is and runs to check. In that universe, the team comes to take Spencer home that same day, though they don’t rescue him—he does that himself. It’s a hollow victory, especially once Spencer pilfers two glass vials from the corpse, but it’s a victory.
This is not that universe.
In this universe, Hotch is too stunned, first by Reid choosing him and then by his reasoning
(he’s a classic narcissist. He thinks he’s better than everyone else on the team)
to realise the message that’s being sent. In this universe, Hotch sits silently by the monitors with Garcia, pretending he’s comforting her, pretending he’s waiting for them to turn back on, pretending to be doing anything but wondering where he went so wrong.
(In this universe, some unknown miles away, Spencer Reid makes a deal with the devil.)
Derek leaves the kitchen where he’s been trying to brainstorm with Prentiss and Gideon. He can’t face the looks on their faces anymore—the dwindling hope. He still has it; he has to have it. It’s not totally irrational—Tobias hasn’t come to kill Hotch yet. He probably won’t until he’s killed Spencer; he wouldn’t risk leaving his captive alive and alone. It’s cold comfort because if Spencer is still alive, then Spencer is still in pain, but it’s comfort, at least.
Derek’s taking one of Tobias’ bibles off the shelf before he even realises he’s doing it, opening it without knowing what he’s looking for. He only occasionally believes in God these days and trusts him even more infrequently, so he doubts he’s searching for comfort. Maybe somewhere deep down, the eight-year-old who hasn’t yet seen his father die is still alive and still believes, and still remembers that Genesis 23:4 is not about narcissism because that’s the verse he opens the book to, and his stomach drops to the floor.
He doesn’t even remember what he shouts, only that he does it loudly, and it gets everyone into the room save for Penelope, who remains at the monitors, unwilling to abandon them just in case that means abandoning Spencer. He hates to think of the feed turning back on and streaming to an empty room, so instead of calling Penelope in, he leads everyone into her space, holding the old bible so hard the spine warps.
“What’s going on now?” Penelope asks, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve.
“Genesis Chapter Twenty-Three, Verse Four,” Derek says and watches Hotch tense out of the corner of his eye. “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you, give me property for a burial place among you that I may bury my dead out of my sight.”
“That’s not what he said,” Hotch says. His eyes are wide, and his mouth remains open after he finishes speaking. It’s too similar to the terrified expression that had crossed his face when he’d been told he’d just sent his two youngest and most inexperienced agents to their UnSub’s property. Just like it was then, it’s such a human expression on his usually unemotive boss that Derek has to look away. “He’s in a cemetery?”
Things move quickly after that. Gideon pulls up the first time they saw Spencer, in case he gave them something else, and he had.
He looked right at the camera when he referenced poaching. How could we not see it? He knows intellectually that it’s hindsight changing his perspective, but it doesn’t change how that pointed stare makes him feel—like Spencer is looking through the camera and into him.
(Later, when he rewatches the tapes for the one and only time, he feels that Spencer had been looking into the future, that Spencer knew he—they—he would fail. The stare will feel accusatory, then. Hotch will find him curled over the monitor in archives, mumbling I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry like the Spencer in the video will hear him. Like it would change anything if he could.)
They’re leaving for Marshall Parish so quickly it’s disorienting—one second, the team has nothing; the next, they have a location, and like it so often is, when they get a massive break like that, it’s because of Spencer. He wonders if they’ll smile about it someday—that Spencer managed to solve his own kidnapping. Later, he will wonder if he jinxed himself.
It feels final in a way it isn’t—they will find Spencer and bring him home, or they will find the shell (Derek can’t bring himself to think the body, and certainly not the corpse) that remains of him and lay him to rest. Derek isn’t sure there is a Heaven, but he is sure that Spencer is going there, someday. Not today, if he has anything to say about it.
(Finding nothing isn’t even an option he considers. He forgets that closure does not exist.)
Derek glowers at the back of Hotch’s head as they leave for Marshall Parish. Hotch turns after a moment of staring, and Derek thinks, good. Let him see. For the briefest moment, he hopes Hotch hates himself half as much as Derek hates him right now.
Then they make eye contact, and despite himself, Derek looks away first, nausea rising in his stomach and throat as he realises that he couldn’t possibly measure up to that.
(He never does. Not even when they storm the shack on Marshall Parish and find only Spencer’s discarded shoes. Not even when they search the grounds and find nothing there, either).
“The fuck do you mean, we’re going back to Virginia?”
(Technically, Hotch said they were going home, but the word doesn’t feel true anymore. Home is people, not places, and Derek’s home is not intact if his people aren’t there.)
“We’ve been here over a week,” Hotch says, speaking with the same caution and precision as Derek uses to handle explosives.
“So, what, we’re giving up on him?”
“No,” Hotch says. “Of course not. I’ve spoken with APD and they’re going to continue to monitor the tiplines, and the Atlanta field office are aware of the situation as well.”
The situation, the situation. The anger that buzzes in Derek’s ears nearly drowns out Hotch as he keeps speaking.
“When we get home—” (Not home. Not without him). “—JJ is going to contact other precincts in Georgia and give them the information as well. They’re almost certainly aware already, anyway.”
It’s not untrue. Less FBI agents have died in the line of duty than most people expect, and most of those are…it feels wrong to call any death easy, especially those of people he’s worked with, but the majority are probably—
(Spencer could tell me the exact number).
—quick deaths during shootouts. The last time dead FBI agents made headlines was in 2005 when six of them and a hostage had been killed in Boston, and that had been such a controversy it had nearly cost Gideon his career. Spencer isn’t dead, but even the kidnapping of an agent, especially when that agent is twenty-five and already a member of one of its most esteemed units, is massive news.
Derek rubs a hand over his head. Stubble scratches over his hand in the manner that usually tells him he needs to shave again, but tonight, it’s the furthest thing from his mind. “I just feel like we’re abandoning him, man.”
“We’re not,” Hotch says. “And believe me, Morgan, I don’t want to leave anymore than you do. But if we don’t go home soon, Strauss will come down on the unit. If we go, we can work the case in our free moments with the backing of the bureau, but if we stay against orders, we lose a lot of resources.”
And damn him, when he says it like that, Derek can’t argue. It’s perfectly reasonable and objectively correct, and it makes him want to scream. He doesn’t like this. It feels childish and petulant to say it like that, but he just doesn’t—it all sucks.
It sucks that Hotch is making completely sound points, and Derek is still standing there and fuming. It sucks that despite the measured way he speaks, Hotch’s face is—the man always looks solemn, but he’s never looked properly sad like this. It sucks that Derek has been snapping at Hotch at every available opportunity since they found that shack.
(Because he needs to direct his anger lest it consume him, and Hankel isn’t around for him to direct it at, and he knows it’s awful, but Hotch is a distant, distant second in the list of people he’s angry with).
It sucks that the next words out of Derek’s mouth are, “it’s your fault we didn’t find him.”
He feels bad for it almost instantly because if he really interrogated his feelings on…this, those wouldn’t be among them. He doubts that even Spencer blames Hotch, wherever he is. Misquoting a bible verse to signal his location is a Hail Mary if there ever was one. If he’s honest with himself, he doesn’t like the look on Hotch’s face, wants it to fall away and be replaced with that familiar stoicism or, if he can’t have that, anger. He wants Hotch to scold him for his insubordination, if only so he can look upon a man he recognises.
It doesn’t work. Hotch wipes a hand over his mouth. “I know,” he says and leaves before Derek can apologise.
Work is quiet without Spencer.
Derek has become used to Spencer’s presence beside his desk, breaking up the monotony of the day with whatever comes to his head.
Derek tries so hard to remember them if only to recall the sound of Spencer’s voice high with excitement. The last time he heard him speak was when he quoted that fucking verse, sending up a signal flare that went unseen for just a little too long. More than that, Derek remembers the sounds Spencer made during his seizure and the words he said as he begged. Those can’t be the memories he holds onto. When he hears Spencer’s voice again, he can’t be thinking about that. He has to be thinking about—
(Did you know that they repaint the Eiffel Tower every seven years to keep it from rusting? Or that the amount they use weighs as much as ten elephants? Did you know that the United States Department of Agriculture defines a sandwich as being at least thirty-five percent cooked meat and no more than fifty percent bread? Did you know that “eye of newt” is just an archaic term for “mustard seed” and—)
He hadn’t even let him finish that last one. He regrets it. He regrets it all.
Everybody else speaks less, too. Derek tries to fall back into rhythm with Penelope, just to have something familiar to cling to, but the first babygirl that leaves his mouth after they return to Virginia tastes like smoke, and he doesn’t try again. Penelope calls him a new, creative nickname exactly once and then twists her face into an expression that suggests a similar aftertaste. The relationship isn’t lost, but it’s changed. He visits her office as often as before; only now, sometimes, it’s to hold her while she cries. Sometimes, it’s unclear who is holding and who is being held.
(Some months before Georgia, he’d thought to himself that despite having spent a significant amount of time with the unit before the arrival of Spencer and Penelope, he could no longer imagine the BAU without them. Now, he doesn’t have Spencer and some days, it hardly feels like he has Penelope, and he thinks he might have loved them too much. Held them a little too tight. Shattered them in his hands).
Hotch keeps his office door closed, which isn’t new, but now he keeps the blinds drawn. One day, two weeks after they come back from Georgia, Derek makes the mistake of opening his door without knocking and sees his boss with his elbows on his desk, holding his head in his hands, not moving even as Derek opens his mouth to speak. He closes the door, knocks, and tries not to be unsettled at how normal Hotch sounds when he says, “Come in.”
He wishes he was still angry. It’s an easy, uncomplicated emotion. This is…he thinks maybe only Spencer could tell him what this is called.
(It isn’t grief. Grief is for dead people.)
The team obviously continues to investigate Spencer’s kidnapping in their free time, which they have more of now than they ever had before. Their caseload is lighter, although he suspects that won’t last since they’re down one member and the rest are wallowing. Everyone has less paperwork on their desks (except for Hotch, who has more. Derek suspects those two facts are related) and thus more time to devote to Spencer, although that mainly consists of them harassing the Atlanta police for their information.
Speaking of the APD—they really have been very helpful; Derek has to give them that much even as the frustration builds and builds as the case stalls and stalls. Hotch had asked them, before they left, to contact them with anything even a little promising from the tipline. That worked for a while. The team came down to Georgia on the weekends, first taking flights and then occasionally braving the ten-hour drive when flying got more expensive than was reasonable. Not that the gas is cheap, but the idea of not going to Georgia is absurd.
Until, apparently, it isn’t.
In April, the brass put their foot down. Spencer is almost certainly dead by now, they say. It’s time to replace him, they say. They hang his picture up on the Wall of Honour like they ever gave a fuck about him. Derek breaks his little finger on the wall beside it, and nothing changes. Spencer continues to smile at him from behind the glass, baby fat still clinging to his cheeks. Spencer continues to be a memory.
David Rossi returns to the BAU, and Derek wants to scream. Spencer had talked incessantly about how much he loved Rossi’s books and how they’d been what got him interested in the BAU in the first place. About how much he wanted to meet him and thank him for starting him on the road to the FBI.
(On the road to his kidnapping).
And now, Rossi is here, and no matter how hard Derek tries to imagine what Spencer would say upon meeting his hero, what his voice would sound like, all he can think of is—
(I haven’t done anything. Tobias, help me. Help. The sound of air rushing between Spencer’s vocal cords as the muscles in his chest contracted. The sound of his head slamming into the ground as he seized. The sound of him dying. The relief that had coursed through him at the gasp he’d made when Hankel brought him back. The sound of the feed turning off and never turning back on. The horrible feeling of waiting. And waiting. And waiting).
In June, Hotch tells them that, per his request, the APD will no longer reach out to them for every little update. They will no longer contact them about the tipline unless they genuinely think it’s Spencer because, by this point, Spencer has gone from being all over the Georgia news to being all over the national news, and the whole country thinks he’s their goddamn soap opera, calling the tipline to tell them they saw a slender brunette man just the other day. As if he’s not a person but just the latest thing to be obsessed over. As if they fancy themselves half the hero Spencer is. It’s useless now. Derek knows it is, and he knows Hotch pulling away from it is the right decision, but God.
Derek leaves the briefing room without responding to Penelope’s attempts to speak to him. He’ll go down to her office later and apologise and hold her if she needs it, which she probably will. He ducks into an empty office and locks the door behind him before dialling.
“Hello, this is Agent Morgan with the Behavioural Analysis Unit. I think my boss gave you a call earlier? About only contacting us about Dr Reid if you’re certain? …You can call me instead if you have any information. I’ll keep coming down when I have the time. Yes, just me. No. No, don’t tell anyone.”
He hangs up and pockets his phone before making a beeline for Penelope’s office. Maybe they’ll tattle to Hotch, and he’ll get in shit for this. Maybe they won’t. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does anymore.
In August, Hotch tells them that while they will continue to look for Spencer until they bring him home, the investigation is changing focus from searching for their friend to searching for his body. That’s been the official stance of the Bureau for a while now, but this means a shift in their unofficial investigation.
Derek shouts so much that he should probably have been fired for insubordination or at least reprimanded. He can feel every head in the bullpen turn to face the briefing room, his voice probably audible from the floor below them. But Hotch doesn’t tell him to stop or even to quiet down; he just sits there and takes it until Derek’s voice starts to crack under the strain, and he leaves.
He’s unsure if Hotch thinks he deserves it or if he was just trying to tire him out like a toddler having a tantrum. He’s not sure which would be worse.
He goes up to the roof and shouts wordlessly. Just once, because his throat burns like he’s been swallowing glass. The door to the roof opens behind him, and he turns to apologise to whatever security guard followed him up. Maybe he can get them to look the other way for just a few minutes. The air in the building is stifling, and he just needs some time before he goes back down and apologises.
Spencer’s replacement is standing there instead, and Derek turns back around, scuffing one foot like he means to kick some debris off the roof, but it’s spotless and well-maintained. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he mumbles, and the scale tips hard towards toddler having a tantrum.
Rossi approaches anyway and stands soundlessly beside him. At first, Derek thinks, asshole, and then concedes that he never technically told Rossi to leave. He allows it.
Neither of them speak. Derek has a sneaking suspicion that Rossi is waiting for him to break, as if Derek is being interrogated or, yet again, a very small child. His face burns, and he’s glad it’s not obvious on his complexion, but then his eyes start watering, and there’s no way to hide that except for turning sharply away.
Rossi, who profiles like he breathes, follows the movement immediately, and Derek breaks.
“Did you do this? Did you tell Hotch that Reid is dead?” It’s not a thought that’s consciously occurred to him before, so he’s just as surprised by the words as Rossi is. “You don’t even know him, man—”
The present tense does not go unnoticed. Rossi looks at the ground, the corner of his mouth pulling into an expression that can’t decide if it wants to be a frown or a smile.
Derek opens and closes his mouth, meaning to go on, but…
He’s just tired. He sits down.
“Can I speak now?” Rossi asks from above his head, and Derek gives him a glance and an eye-roll.
“My opinions don’t matter in this, clearly, so. Go ahead.”
“They do,” Rossi says. “I’ll just stand here if that’s what you need.” He does just that for some time until Derek finally tips his head in encouragement. “I don’t think you really believe I pushed Aaron towards this decision, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t. And you’re right, I didn’t know Dr Reid. It’s not impossible that you’re right.” He sits beside Derek. “…But it’s not impossible that Aaron is, either. Don’t you think it’s time to admit that, even just to prepare yourself for the possibility?”
Derek scoffs. “He’s not dead unless I’m carrying his coffin myself, Rossi.” He looks down onto the street and at the people going about their lives. He wonders if any of them feel the way he does. “Is that why you came up here? To try and convince me Hotch is right? It’s not going to work.”
“I know,” Rossi says, standing. “And it isn’t. I only followed you to make sure you weren’t going to do anything stupid, and when I saw where you were going…I thought you might be.”
Derek stands and makes good use of the inch or so he has on the older profiler. “I’m not going to kill myself, Rossi. Reid’s still out there somewhere, I’m not going to abandon him.”
“And if it turns out he’s already gone? What will you do then?”
Derek finds what is possibly the one piece of debris on the roof and kicks it off the edge. “That’s not going to happen,” he scoffs, then changes the subject before Rossi can push. “So, how fired am I?”
“You aren’t. Aaron…he understands how hard this is on the team. On you. And it hasn’t been easy for him either.”
Derek doesn’t dignify that with a response; he just heads back to the access door now that he knows he won’t be pink-slipped when he goes back down. Rossi catches up to him before he can pull on the handle.
“Before you go back down,” Rossi says. “You should know that it looks like the official stance on Hankel is going to be that he’s dead too, soon.”
Derek lets go of the handle and turns around. “What? Why?”
“Dr Reid told Hankel to kill Aaron, right?”
“No, he only said that to give us a clue.” Which we missed.
“But Hankel didn’t know that,” Rossi says. “Or, hopefully he didn’t. But he hasn’t yet.”
“Reid could stall him—”
“For six months?”
Derek looks down and sucks his lips in between his teeth, biting until they start to hurt.
“From what Aaron has told me, it looks like the Bureau’s official stance soon will be that Hankel died of a drug overdose, and either killed Dr Reid shortly before, or he died shortly after of dehydration. So, soon the investigation will change from a manhunt for Hankel and a search for Dr Reid’s body to just Dr Reid. Aaron’s trying to fight it, but I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to.”
Derek stares at him. Soon, they won’t even be trying to put his best friend’s kidnapper behind bars. Soon, he’ll be expected to believe not only that Spencer is dead but that he just…wasted away. He knows what an awful death dehydration is. All their victims on a case died of it once, and Spencer wouldn’t shut up about it. It makes him feel sick even as he discredits it.
He yanks the access door open and lets it swing shut behind him without checking to see if Rossi is following him. He hears the door open again behind him, and then Rossi is beside him again. Silent again. He doesn’t ask Derek for an apology, and Derek doesn’t offer him one.
Hotch sends him home early (an expression of concern, not anger, he’d said. Derek wishes people would stop wasting time being concerned about him. He’s not worth the effort. Spencer would be. Spencer is. Spencer is.)
He picks Clooney up from his neighbour and lets him out for a run around the backyard. He rests his head against the door frame and looks into the horizon, scanning it like Spencer will emerge from behind the sun.
He doesn’t.
(He will.)
Derek spends every moment of his free time in Georgia. He knows the team suspects something is up when he stops extending or accepting invitations to go out. And when Derek stops turning up late at work with a self-satisfied grin, wearing the same clothes as yesterday. And especially when he falls asleep on his desk on Monday. Hotch sends him home again for that one.
(“Don’t make me lose another agent, Morgan, please.”)
He thinks at first that Hotch is threatening to fire him until he’s halfway home and realises it’s that concern again, filling his lungs and wrapping around his throat. His hands tighten on the wheel, and he turns up his music loud enough that the soccer mom in the other lane gives him a death glare.
Penelope definitely knows. He’d taken her with him a few times. It was easier when she was there. He’d gained a kind of manic energy sometime in April that made people look at him with either pity or fear, and Penelope had clung to her bubbly personality with her teeth.
Then, on November 1st, he’d popped by her place after work to see if she would join him after work the following Friday and found her setting Spencer’s picture on the ofrenda in her living room.
(She’d seen him looking and laughed awkwardly. “Um. I know it’s not mine, but you know, my stepdad—” Then, when she’d seen him looking at the picture rather than the whole display, her smile had fallen. “I don’t…I hope he’s out there as much as you do. If he is, I want to see him again and tell him how much we love him. But if he isn’t, I need him to know how much we did.” She’d kissed her index and middle fingers and pressed them delicately to the picture, not wanting to smudge it. He’d turned and left.)
He isn’t angry about it, partially because Penelope is a very difficult person to be angry at, but he stops asking her to join him. She hasn’t given up because that’s not a thing she does, but she hopes Spencer is alive. Derek believes.
He remembers scoffing privately at Cheryl Davenport, claiming to feel her sister was still alive, but he thinks he gets it now. He’d know if Spencer was dead like he’d know he was missing an organ.
On his way down to Georgia, he thinks absurdly of the Headless Horseman. Spencer had talked about it once during one of his few uninterrupted rambles. The case had gone well, and the alcohol had been flowing, and everyone was more tolerant than they usually were, smiling in fond exasperation as he went on and on rather than cutting him off.
Derek doesn’t totally remember the details, but he remembers Spencer talking about how, despite modern depictions, the original The Legend of Sleepy Hollow implies that there may not be a Headless Horseman at all, or at least that the person who chases Ichabod Crane is not a supernatural being. The morning after the “Headless Horseman” launches his head at Ichabod, the unfortunate man’s hat is found next to a shattered pumpkin. The implication at the end of the story, Spencer says, is that the “Headless Horseman” was simply Ichabod’s romantic rival in disguise, aiming to drive him out of town.
It’s a better story, Derek thinks, and Spencer’s ramble had actually kind of made him want to read it, though he never got around to it. He’s never found the concept scary like other people, just…kind of sad. A decapitated soldier, searching endlessly for the missing part of him and being turned into some spectre for it.
He pulls up in front of the Cobb County Police precinct in Austell (no sense in sticking to Atlanta—in two days, it will have been nine months since Spencer was kidnapped, and in four days, it will have been nine months since they lost track of him. Hankel could be anywhere) and greets its commander outside.
The handshake is sweaty and nervous, and Derek can feel the commander’s eyes on him as he walks inside. Once the doors close behind them, he can feel half the other officers’ eyes on him, too. He’s gained something of a reputation, it seems, and he’s grateful it hasn’t followed him outside the Peach State. It’s only a matter of time before it does, though, or before the team gets a case in Georgia and somebody recognises him as that FBI agent who won’t stop harassing people for information about a dead man. And then Hotch might really fire him.
The commander starts to explain to him in halting tones that he, like all the rest of them, has little more to offer the investigation. I wish I could help you more, Agent Morgan, I really do, but—
Derek checks out. He’s heard this speech so many times from so many different people that he could probably recite it himself. If he was some nineteenth-century townsperson, he concedes he might fear a headless man who liked to chase people on horseback. But he doesn’t think that he could ever hate him.
“Thank you for your time,” Derek says, interrupting the commander halfway through some rambling speech probably meant to calm him. All it does is make him itch. He turns and walks out of the precinct as the commander stutters himself into silence.
He can still feel the eyes on him as he closes the door. He feels them at work, too. The sense everyone has that it’s only a matter of time before he either explodes or collapses or both in sequence.
For a moment, he wonders if maybe he isn’t the Horseman, hunting for closure and feared for the crime of the search. Maybe he’s Ichabod, a pathetic man driven away by something that, in the end, isn’t even real.
His phone dings.
Penelope: sorry i’ve been calling you but you haven’t been picking up :( are you okay? you kind of left in a hurry the other day. i know you’re prob busy but tell me when you get this?
and stay safe. please. i can’t lose you too.
He sobers and texts back “fine” because however he feels, he won’t leave Penelope hanging. She’s too good for that. Too good for him. Too good for the universe. He hopes it doesn’t take her away, too, like it has the rest of the good things in his life, aside from his family, whom he never sees and who will never understand him no matter how hard they try.
He pockets his phone before Penelope can respond and starts the car. Just because the police don’t have anything for him doesn’t mean nobody else will. He can spend the weekend asking questions. He always spends the weekend asking questions.
He always ends it without answers.
In December, he gets them.