Work Text:
The unsub had run into an abandoned construction zone when he saw the police lights and sirens. The team had followed him in, going in pairs to search the grounds, vested with their guns drawn and flashlights perched on top. They knew the unsub didn’t have a gun on him, but they liked to be safe in case their intel was wrong. Surprises were most unwelcome in their line of business.
Derek heard it before he saw anything.
“Stop-”
The sound of metal reverberating, followed by a grunt and a heavy thud. He turned around to find the source, coming face to face with the unsub. He gripped onto an iron rod meant for construction but had now been salvaged into a weapon. By his feet, Spencer lay sprawled on the ground with blood dripping down the right side of his face and sinking into the dust covering the unfinished floor.
“Drop the weapon!” Derek ordered before he could let himself be swept away by anger and fear. The unsub stared at him as if he’d forced his hand, then let the iron rod fall, the clattering echoing throughout the grounds. Derek’s radio filled with chatter, asking what the noise was, if he had found who they were looking for. Damn right he had found who they were looking for, and it was taking everything in him not to let his trigger finger twitch. “Hands up and get on your knees!” Spencer was still, aside from the rise and fall of his chest. Head wounds bled heavily, he reminded himself. They could look worse than they actually were. He brought one hand away from his gun to turn on his comm. “I’ve got Garner. We need an ambulance. Reid’s been hit. We’re by the crane.”
Minutes later, he was released from keeping the man at the barrel of his gun, and he dove to assess Spencer’s injury. He tapped the side of Spencer’s face and breathed a sigh of relief when the man’s face scrunched up, and he let out a low whine.
“There he is. Up and at ‘em, kid,” he greeted. Spencer’s eyes fluttered open, then squeezed closed with another whine. He rolled onto his side and went to touch the cut, but Derek caught it, causing him to pout. “Ah-ah, you don’t wanna do that.”
“Wha happen?” he slurred, spurring the older of the pair to grab his flashlight and check his pupils. He wasn’t a doctor, but he knew the difference between a quick trip to the emergency room for stitches and major brain surgery to relieve pressure. Predictably, Spencer tried to roll away from it, but he kept a firm hand on his shoulder to prevent him. “Nooo.”
“Yesss, now open your eyes before I pry ‘em open.”
“Is bright.”
“And I wanna make sure you’ve not lost one of your lobes,” he grumbled. “Follow my finger.”
“Wanna sleep.”
“You can sleep at home. Right now, follow my finger.” As usual, Spencer was stubborn, but he did as he was told this time. He followed the finger in and out of his field of vision until Derek was pleased to find he could track the movement, and his pupils weren't blown. “Good. You’re gonna need a few stitches in that bad boy. Looks like you can be Frankenstein for Halloween.” He hoped to prompt at least a brief explanation that the monster wasn’t Frankenstein, like he heard every year around the Halloween season, but Spencer just hummed. He looked up to see if anyone else had heard it, and by the stares he got back, they had.
Paramedics made their way over and hauled Spencer onto the gurney. He huffed and lazily batted their hands away when they came too close, but there wasn't much strength behind it. It was like trying to stuff your drunk friend into an Uber at the end of the night, only Derek couldn't be sure the weakness wasn't from his head injury. Admittedly, he was beginning to fear on Spencer's behalf as he followed behind.
Spencer’s memory, his mind, was his lifeline. His assurance that he was all there and useful, even if he couldn't match up physically to the rest of the team. He overcompensated for those losses by remembering thousands of statistics, niche subject matters and processing massive calculations with nothing but a whiteboard to help him. If this was as bad as it looked or if Derek hadn't conducted the test properly, and if those combined led to Spencer losing his edge even slightly, it would ruin him. Even if it was a concussion that could be nursed at home, he'd be left reeling from the brain fog and inability to concentrate as he usually would.
“I’ll go with him,” Derek stated before anyone else got the chance to. His foot was already resting on the ambulance’s steps, so it was a done deal either way. They nodded and told him to keep in contact, not that he had much choice in the matter. “Don’t tell Garcia until we get the clear.”
“She’ll wanna know,” JJ warned.
“She’ll worry and commit a federal crime trying to get more information. I’ll handle it.”
Spencer thankfully improved a little in the ambulance, though he still wasn’t his usual self, which he couldn’t be blamed for. They asked for his name, which he readily supplied, but struggled slightly when they asked for further information, only being sure that he didn't want any narcotics, and Derek was more than ready to repeat that to any medical professional within a thirty-mile radius.
He hung around like a ghost as they worked, pitching in when he could and watching worriedly when he couldn’t. He found relief when they didn't try to change Spencer out of his work clothes and weren't running around him anymore.
“What happened?” Spencer asked as the nurse carefully stitched his skin back together. He winced and did his best to keep his fidgeting to just his hands as she worked.
“You still don’t remember?”
“I remember we went in to get Garner. Then…I heard something and-and I saw he had a-a,” he furrowed his eyebrows as he racked his brain.
“You’ll get a nasty scar if you keep doing that,” the nurse chastised.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I saw that he had an iron rod, and then I was in an ambulance.”
“He hit you with it. Pretty good, I’d say, to have you flat out on the ground. I don’t think you were fully unconscious, but you were out of it. I said you could be Frankenstein for Halloween.”
“Frankenstein was the doctor, and I assume you mean the monster in the movie released in...” his sentence trailed off as he tried to pick out the right year. Much to Derek's displeasure, he couldn't find it and gave up on the idea altogether. “My memory was impacted.”
“Yeah, you nearly had your head caved in."
"I've got a headache."
"I’d be seeing stars too.”
“You see stars because,” he paused for a moment, swallowing thickly as his eyes darted around as if he was physically searching the files stored in his mind for the right fact. “The neurons in uhm- begins with an o- oculus? No, no, occipital? - That's it, your occipital lobe fires spontaneously and your brain interprets them as flashes of light.” It was enough to soothe the unease from losing the thread before. The facts were all still in his brain; it would just take longer to get them out.
“Yeah?”
“It’s like when you press your hands against your eyes, the pressure against your retina stimulates the same lobe.” He clasped his hands together, pulsing the pressure as a grounding weight.
“Knowing that help the pain at all?”
“Not in the slightest,” he replied with a smirk. “Thank you for coming with me.”
“Kid, if I wasn’t halfway in the ambulance already, it would’ve been a fight to get in there with you.” He hummed but couldn’t feel pleased for long before the nurse snagged on an area that hadn’t been fully numbed yet.
“So,” the doctor began. “It looks like a concussion, most likely moderate, but that’s a description of the injury, not the symptoms. You can expect some brain fog in the coming days, mood swings, trouble sleeping and concentrating. We’ll keep you overnight for observation, but you’ve done well on the tests we’ve given you. It’s more so a precaution.”
“Is that necessary?” Spencer asked.
“We recommend it, but if you have someone who can observe you for the next day or so, then releasing you in the next few hours can be an option.” He looked over to Derek nervously. As if he’d ever say no to the kid.
“I can watch him.”
“Oh, then we’ll be by with some medical release forms. We’ll provide you with a list of symptoms that you’ll need to look out for, but all going well, you’ll just need to book a follow-up appointment with your healthcare provider to take the stitches out.” They jotted a few things down on their notepad before taking their leave, getting back into the fray of the emergency room.
"You know, you could just drop me off. You won't have to stay."
"Maybe you did lose some of your smarts if you think I'd do that," Derek told him, lightly shoving him in the shoulder.
"You don't mind?"
"Let me call the doctor back, you're clearly losing IQ points." Spencer huffed out a laugh.
“You’re sure he’s alright?” Penelope repeated. She’d asked the same question since she clocked in for work, greeting her coworkers at the door before diving straight into it. Of course, she called Spencer and asked if he was alright, but that would always be a biased source, and she promised she wouldn’t go searching for herself.
They'd been unintentionally taking turns to feed her the same information they had, and each time there’d be a few pensive minutes of silence before she asked again. She hung on tightly to the knowledge that they looked after one another when they left for cases; it was her only comfort that, whilst facing off against the worst of the worst, they at least had each other. When one of them came back with so much as a scratchy throat, her mind jumped to the worst-case scenario, so when Derek made his appearance, she was quick to continue the cycle.
"He's fine."
"How was he feeling? Did he look okay? Did he have brain fog? What was his memory like?"
“Tired. As okay as anyone can with a gash like that. Yes he did. His memory was fine, just buffering," he answered, counting the questions on his hand so she could hopefully see how overbearing she was being.
"Don't try to soothe me with tech speak. Is he buffering like YouTube, or is he buffering like the site went down?"
"Baby girl, seriously, it’s just a concussion-"
"Which is still bad!"
"-and he spent most of the time napping because sleep is necessary for recovery, his words nearly exactly. He’s alright,” Derek assured her.
“The doctors said he’s alright?”
“Yes, they said he would have some concentration problems and brain fog, but he’s in working order. He was fine when I left him last night, and he said he'd be in today. He’ll be here any minute.”
“He’s earlier than this,” she insisted.
“And he also takes the metro.”
“Concussions are serious! He’s already got so much brain in there, and it’s been bashed against his skull. What if it's like when you throw apples at a wall?”
"Who throws apples at a wall?"
"Very bored kids who's mums keep giving them apples when they specifically asked for cuties, not that there's anything wrong with apples, they're just not the cuties you've been asking for and-" He held onto her shoulders, grinding her rant to a halt and forcing her to look up at him rather than wave her hands around as she gazed longingly for the genius to come walking through those glass doors.
“Baby girl, he is fine. I was there when he got the stitches. I drove him home, and yeah, he was a little out of it, but he will be fine. He knew where he was, he knew where he lived, and he knew the digits of Pi. The kid is fine. Got it?”
“Did he know all the digits of Pi?” He took his hands away, and she pointed at him in her gotcha moment. “Ha! He didn’t know all the digits of pi!”
“He got hit in the head with an iron bar!”
“Iron rod, actually,” Spencer corrected.
In a flurry of neon pink and beads, Penelope rushed over to him and caught him in a tight hug. His arms were pinned to his sides, but he did his best to return it in the capacity available to him.
“I was so worried about you.”
“I know. You texted me around thirty-two times over the course of two hours.” Her eyes, once closed in relief, snapped open, and she made some space to inspect him. He looked tired, but he always did, so that was nothing new. A goose egg had formed on his temple, and whilst the bruising looked sore on its own, the large cut that had been stitched together across it did nothing to ease it. Other than that, he looked fine. She just didn't feel fine when looking at him.
“Around?”
“I estimated.”
“Estimated?” she fretted.
“I’m still experiencing some brain fog,” he admitted, almost ashamed. “I’m okay.”
"Yeah?
"Yes."
“You’re okay,” she sighed, nodding to herself. “Next time, wear a hard hat.”
"I'll keep that in mind," he replied with a smirk.