Work Text:
When Derek awoke, there were two things he was immediately aware of:
First, he had to piss.
Second, there was hair in his face.
Neither fact was inherently remarkable. He didn't remember what he'd gotten up to the night before, but a night of hanging out at a bar often resulted in a full bladder and a woman in his bed the morning after. And there was the start of a headache behind his eyes, though not how he was used to a hangover feeling. Too much Tequila, maybe - when he and Prentiss got competitive, anything went. Or Jager - he hadn't had that in a long ass time, wouldn't surprise him if his tolerance was weird. He reached blindly for the woman beside him-
The bed was empty.
His eyes snapped open, and the world was blurry around him. Whatever he'd had last night definitely didn't agree with him. Had he been drugged? It would explain not remembering going out last night, but he didn't feel like he'd had sex last night - either with a woman or completely against his will. Every part of him felt strange, and there was still something tickling at his forehead. He reached up to shove it away and caught sight of his hand.
His very pasty white hand.
"What the fuck?" His voice was wrong. High, raspy, sitting in the back of his throat instead of deep in his chest.
Panic started to grip him. He looked around frantically, trying to gain some sense of what was going on so he could start piecing clues together. He knew how to look at a scene and gather information. That was all he had to do now. Look for information and breathe. Because there had to be some rational explanation for this.
Maybe he'd been taken and was being held somewhere. Drugged to control him and get him there, which would account for the headache, the confusion, the strange feeling in his muscles, the bleary vision. Somewhere with...skin bleaching? What the hell would make his hand look like that? It was paler than his mom's. What could do that? Reid would know.
Where was Reid? The team? Did anyone know where he was?
He squinted, trying to bring things into focus. It was...his bedroom. Or at least it seemed that way. This certainly looked and felt like his bed, down to the dark red duvet he'd bought last year when his old one got too threadbare. That made even less sense. What kind of UnSub would drug him and take him to his own home, where they would have every disadvantage? Where Derek had three guns in various places he could easily access with his fingerprint lock on the safe but the UnSub couldn't get to? Even if someone trying to get to him knew where he lived, what type of activity would spur an UnSub to do things this way? Some kind of roleplay fantasy - an UnSub he hadn't noticed or acknowledged who believed they were in a relationship or wanted Derek to act that way? But why do- whatever happened to his hand? Why-
He reached to scratch at his shoulder, but it was in the wrong place.
It was connected to the rest of his body, or at least seemed to be, but it wasn't where muscle memory told him it should be. Instead of feeling his right bicep graze across his chest as his hand scratched his left shoulder, he felt a lot of empty space. He shifted his hand until it found his left arm, but it was small. Almost scrawny in a way he hadn't been since he'd been...what, 14? No sturdy bicep beneath his touch, torso too narrow, all meaning his left shoulder was several inches closer to the center of his body than he would have expected. And his chest, well-formed by years of work on the bench press and more pushups than he cared to count, felt almost sunken in, especially with how thin and spindly his right arm was as it draped across.
This kind of transformation couldn't happen in one night. Even in a few days - it would take months or years for this kind of atrophy to set in. How could-
Then he spotted them.
Mismatched socks at the base of long, skinny legs. One neon green with bright orange pumpkins, one with stripes in two different shades of purple. Peeking out from beneath navy paisley cotton pajama pants with light grey piping at the cuffs.
He'd seen those items before - not on himself, though. On Reid. Who else would wear those socks? Who else owned those kind of pajamas in the 21st century?
He cautiously raised his hands again in front of his face. Long-sleeved matching pajama shirt, silver watch just a little too loose because Reid usually wore it over his shirt sleeves, and hands he'd seen daily for years - holding cards, doing magic tricks, skimming down files and book pages...
What the actual fuck?
Clearly he had been drugged. There was no other explanation for it - nothing logical, anyway. But he could feel his hand resting on his leg- well, Reid's hand resting on Reid's leg, he guessed, but as though they were his own. He could feel the bed underneath him, the give of the mattress, the softness of the sheets. He could feel where the elastic of the socks held them in place. All of the sensations he was experiencing were tied to stimuli in exactly the way he would expect if that were his own body.
Before he could deal with any of the rest of it, he at least had to deal with the reason he'd awoken in the first place. With a sigh, he threw back the covers and padded to the bathroom. His feet felt disproportionately long, even though he knew they were only a half-size different in shoes; probably how narrow the rest of Reid's legs were, he concluded. Every part of him felt like he was ambling, spindly, like a baby deer trying to run along a mountain path instead of just a guy walking to his own toilet.
It didn't help that the pajamas didn't stretch. Who the hell wore pajamas out of non-stretching fabric? Nothing moved with him, it just stayed stiff. Even his dress trousers for working in the office had more stretch than this, and he always changed out of them before wheels-up because even moving around the jet was more comfortable in jeans.
And why the hell was there no fly front to these things? Biting back an irritated groan, Derek shoved the pants and underwear down just enough to fish out his- well, Reid's - dick and take care of business. At least Reid was about the same height he was. Derek wasn't sure he could take it if he were suddenly six inches shorter and had to adjust his aim or anything. An inch taller was a lot less of a transition to deal with than it could have been.
Mildly curious, he glanced down - respectable, nothing to be ashamed of, certainly no reason Reid needed to hide it from potential dates - then tucked himself back into the underwear and stepped out of the pajama pants as he sidestepped to the sink so he could wash his hands.
The hands weren't so differently sized from his own - maybe a little shorter, but he'd always had what his aunt called 'Basketball fingers", like the greats who seemed to be able to reach halfway around the ball with one hand. Reid's palm was squarer, though, bonier, and easier to move in the joints. He bent the hand at the wrist experimentally and was surprised how much further it went than his own - until it almost seemed like Reid's palm could touch his own forearm.
This was too fucking weird.
He switched off the taps and dried his hands. "None of this makes any sense," he mumbled, but it wasn't his voice. It was closer to Reid's than not, though it sat lower in his register than the kid usually spoke. Still, it felt almost comforting to hear. Even though he knew he was the one forming the words, if he could focus on something familiar, ground himself, figure out-
"Whatcha workin' on, Pretty Boy?"
Reid sat at his desk, deep frown on his face as he scrolled through what looked like a blog post of some kind on his desktop computer. He may have avoided technology like the plague, but sometimes he did run out of books to read after finishing his reports and would use the internet to look for new studies to read. Or occasionally laugh at the fights people got into on the internet over stupid sci-fi shit - Garcia had gotten him into that particular pasttime. "A really weird study out of China. Nothing in Western media is picking it up, but I saw a couple of Korean articles about it. They claim they've figured out a way to transfer consciousness between bodies, but there's not enough information in any of what I can read that explains the mechanisms by which they claim to have done it. I don't read Mandarin."
"Consciousness transfer? Like 'The Fly'?"
"Probably more like 'Altered Carbon,'' Reid concluded, still deep in thought.
"Sure, until it goes wrong," Derek joked before heading over to grab another cup of coffee.
That had been years ago - when he'd still been at his desk in the bullpen. Had someone actually done it?
Reid would know. But he couldn't exactly call and ask him, could he? For one thing, if he was in Reid's body...where the hell was Reid? The most logical explanation - to the extent any of this could be considered 'logical' - was that Reid was in his body somewhere. Hopefully safely ensconced in Reid's apartment and not in danger somewhere...though if the kid could figure out how to throw a punch in the unfamiliar skin, he'd be a lot safer than he might otherwise be.
It was too strange of a thought. Reid's mind and his muscles. Sounded like the kind of thing a superhero movie would come up with. Meanwhile he had his own mind - good enough but nothing special - and Reid's scrawny ass. Clearly he hadn't gotten the good end of this deal.
He laughed to himself. The alternative was going nuts.
It felt strange to try to look for clues on someone else's body, but in the absence of any other ready clues, he removed his shirt and stood in front of his mirror, searching for...he wasn't actually sure what.
The lighting in Derek's bathroom had always been warm-toned - it made him look good, and feeling good was a much better way to start the morning than seeing someone who looked half-dead thanks to cool-toned industrial lighting. On Reid's pasty skin, it made him look almost jaundiced, his dark undereye circles seeming even more purple against the yellow tones.
Those weren't all that stood out in this light.
First there were the dots surrounding his elbow, the long-healed remnants of his addiction. Derek hated seeing them, thinking about the scared, traumatized kid who had come back from Georgia as a ghost and needed to escape that badly. At least there weren't any fresh ones - or even ones that looked like they had been added later. Everything seemed to have healed around the same time, the best he could tell. That was good.
But those were nothing compared to the rest of it.
He noticed Reid's left bicep first. All along the inside, near where it rested against his slim torso, were horizontal lines: faded thin white scars, from roughly 2" above his elbow (around where a short-sleeved shirt would stop) up to his armpit. They sat roughly in a column but not precisely. Most of them were about an inch and a half long, but a few stretched longer to wrap almost around his slim bicep, like he'd been unable to stop after the shorter cut and just let his hand keep going.
As Derek ran his fingertip over the longest line, he could practically hear the broken sob from Reid's throat as he'd made the cut. Maybe that was just his gasp caught in someone else's throat.
The outer part of Reid's left arm was almost worse - the scars more uniform here, but there were so many of them. Enough that he could barely tell which of the stripes were the colour Reid's skin was supposed to be and which had been held together with grief and panic and bandaids.
His right arm wasn't as covered - which made sense, Reid was right-handed - but the lines there were jagged, angry, visceral, like they'd been made by someone too upset to be content with neat lines made with his dominant hand. Maybe that was overthinking; maybe he'd just run out of space.
...Were they anywhere else?
Derek's gaze immediately dropped to the thin, bare legs holding him up, and his heart broke.
"Oh, Kid, no," he murmured. His voice- Reid's voice - echoed strangely against his ears. His thighs had been destroyed - long swipes, it looked like different widths of blades, criss-crossing over each other.
Different colours. Not all faded thin white lines that probably wouldn't have been noticeable in most light. These had been made over a longer time period, healed differently. It looked like some places had been cut over and over again- Derek swallowed hard, gripping at the edge of the sink.
One of the things they relied upon most when dealing with victimology in stabbing cases were the number of stab wounds. The more wounds, the greater the overkill, the more likely the person with the knife had hated the victim.
And the person who had done this had hated Reid. Wanted him obliterated.
It was hard to judge how old a scar was, especially in isolation, but some of the ones in the top-most layer certainly didn't look much older than the surgical scars on Reid's knee. Maybe the same age, maybe even a little younger because the surgical scars were wider and deeper and would take longer to heal than something shallower.
That was only a few years ago. He'd known Reid then. He had loved Reid then. Not that the kid knew, not that they ever said. But he'd been right there. How the fuck had he not seen it? How had he never realized- He had known about the Dilaudid even when Reid couldn't say it, how the hell could he have missed this? All those nights in hotel rooms, hanging out on the jet, grabbing food together, and he'd had no idea what Reid did when he got home?
A glove? I don't own shorts! The kid's almost amused admission before the baseball game felt so much heavier now, not a sign of someone who simply didn't have need for them but someone who would never dare show this much of himself in public. Someone who couldn't risk fabric slipping up a little higher above his knees, who had never worn a tank top in the presence of anyone else.
...How had he never seen Reid in shorts? Not like the kind he might wear to the gym or the beach or even to walk around DC when it got muggy, but to sleep in. They had shared hotel rooms often enough that he would have seen-
No, he realized slowly, heart sinking further. In his early years with the bureau, Reid had worn normal pajama pants or sweats. As he got older and could fully embrace and afford his 'grandfather's closet' wardrobe aesthetic, he had switched to matched cotton sets like something out of I Love Lucy. Nothing with shorts. Hell, he didn't sleep in anything with short sleeves. Derek had chalked it up to the kid always being cold. After all, he could be wearing a tshirt and Reid would have a long-sleeve shirt and a cardigan over it and never complain about being too warm from it. Derek had teased him, blamed it on Las Vegas compared to Chicago, on the fact that the kid weighed about 10 pounds dripping wet. He'd never thought about it being a sign of anything else.
It probably was just that Reid was cold, he reminded himself, trying to think about it rationally instead of feeling sick. Even if he were just trying to hide, he did wear short-sleeve shirts to work occasionally. And if it were about hiding instead of staying warm, he wouldn't need to add sweaters or jackets to do that - long sleeves buttoned at the wrist would be plenty. Derek tried to think through it logically. Tried not to picture Pretty Boy curled up into himself, look of intense concentration on his face as he slashed at his skin until he could feel better.
It was so much worse to think about it from the outside than to think about being in it. The body tended to forget pain, or at least to dim it with time, so that the agony he'd felt years ago didn't hurt so badly anymore. But the image of Reid - adult Reid, Reid as Derek had known him already Reid - tugging a blade across the already-full places on his thighs still made him want to draw the kid into a tight hug.
...Worse to picture than to remember being in it- fuck.
A chill swept down his spine, and he gripped onto the sink for support. Because if he was in Reid's skin like this...he assumed that meant Reid was in his. Which meant the kid could see...
He swallowed hard against the rising nausea as he thought more closely about his own body, the one being inhabited by someone else (he hoped it was Reid; for all he knew it could be someone a lot worse, like Hotch or Prentiss. Or Garcia - he could deal with her teasing about whatever dirty things she had enjoyed while in his skin but not the heartbroken looks he would have if she ever saw everything else). The body with exactly four cigarette burns on the crest of his right hip from the first time he tried to wriggle out from under Carl Buford's touch, the first time he was big enough and strong enough to think he stood a chance at getting away. The body with thighs covered in thin pale lines - not as far down as Reid's; his stopped well above mid-thigh but did extend further up towards his hips, like a pair of slightly long boxer-briefs made up of long-healed hash lines.
No one knew. He had always been a lights-out kind of guy in the bedroom, maybe some candles to go with the vibe. Happier to give pleasure than to receive it. And even as a teenager, even when he'd been making those lines - tucked into his bedroom closet with the door closed in case his mama tried to come into his room without knocking, as mothers of teenagers too often did, clutching at the pocket knife his dad had given him when he turned 9 so tightly that it made his palm sweat - he'd known to be careful about placement. After all, he was gonna have to share a locker room with a bunch of guys. On his arms wouldn't work, and neither would his torso; too many people might see. They would be visible during shirts-versus-skins basketball scrimmages, or in the locker room after shucking off their sweaty uniforms and pads. If it could be hidden under his boxers, he stood a decent chance of not being discovered. And even when showering...anything that close to his junk, no one would dare look at for fear of being called gay (or worse). Giant slices on his shoulder, someone on the team might notice. But slices that no one could look at without being accused of checking out his dick? He'd be safe forever.
This was the last thing he ever wanted anyone to know about him. Well- almost the last thing. One thing was close, but the team knew that one already. The other was worse.
He strongly doubted that Reid could hear what he was thinking - he knew he didn't seem to be getting any conversation from Reid in his head, anyway. But with everything in him, his mind practically screaming, he pleaded Don't look under my watch. Don't look under my watch. I know you take yours off to shower because it's metal, but mine can stay. Don't take it off. Don't move it - trust me on this one, Kid, just leave it alone. Because rows of faded lines on his upper thighs were one thing, but the thick, dark, ragged horizontal keloid scar across his wrist - the one that had healed so poorly because he kept opening it back up for, kept trying to push just a little further, as though seeing how far he could go before the fear of his mama's devastation if he were to succeed pulled him back...
Reid would never be able to look at him normally again if he saw that. Hell, he could barely look at himself if he stared at it too long, and he'd known it was there for decades. Obviously. He remembered all the times he had put into making it look that way.
Reid was going to know what a fucking-
For once in his life, the insults towards himself didn't come. Maybe it was because he couldn't fathom throwing any of those hateful words towards the young man staring at him in the mirror, whose shoulders and biceps and thighs were littered with the thing he wanted to hate himself for. Because whatever things he said about the scared kid who had carved up Derek's thighs and hips and wrist like that also applied to Reid - to someone he loved so much, who had clearly been in so much pain for so long that the last thing Derek would do was yell at him.
He didn't want to yell at Reid. He wanted to hug him and tell him how adored he was and how, whatever it was that was tearing him apart, they could figure out a way to make it better. Maybe he didn't know how they'd fix it - Derek had never had an 'aha I need to stop' moment - but they would. He wanted to hold the younger man and reassure him that it was possible to stop this, to feel good - to feel great sometimes, even.
When Derek had joined the team, he hadn't been sure where he might fit in with the rest of the people there. He was the only ex-uniform, everyone else coming from within the FBI except Hotch, who had been a prosecutor. It had been a whole different group then, a lot more grizzled old white guys who looked down on him because he seemed to eager to prove himself. Then they had left, a couple at a time, until the team of misfits he now considered family had assembled. Of all the people he could have imagined being closest to, the flirty, ostentatious computer genius would never have been his pick. And of the people on the team he would have much in common with, he wouldn't have guessed it would be the rail-thin child prodigy with a thousand nervous ticks and an obsession with Star Trek.
In a lot of ways, he and Reid were opposites. Anger or dissociation under pressure versus fear but clear-headed problem-solving. Easy confidence versus whatever the exact opposite of that was. Extroverted and enjoying a night out versus only wanting a night in with a stack of books. Chaffing under father-substitute figures of men in positions of authority versus desperately trying to please them. Renowned ladies man versus...well, he wouldn't have been entirely surprised if when he took a leak earlier, it had been the first time someone had touched Reid's stuff in quite awhile. Garcia had once said that, if the team had met in high school, JJ would have been making everyone'e social life hell, Derek would have shoved people into lockers, Prentiss would be over in the corner with the other gothy burnouts, and she and Reid would be playing Dungeons and Dragons in the library. It wasn't really true, but he got that was what people thought of him. Of Reid, too.
But Reid was also fiercely loyal and protective of people conisdered family. He was guarded and deeply private and couldn't ask for help no matter how badly he needed it. They'd lost their dads at the same ages, and while there was a lot of difference between dying and leaving, the sense of void hanging over both of their teenage years had no doubt shaped them. Derek had wondered occasionally if there were other similarities, owing both to Reid's lack of surprise at his father potentially being a sex offender and to the really weird vibe between the kid and Gideon, but there was nothing concrete and he assumed he was projecting and overthinking. Reid loved kids and family and seemed to wonder if he was too...wrong to get to have all that - not that he ever said it that way. Not that Derek would ever admit to feeling the same. But in the quiet places they didn't talk about, they were a lot more similar than anyone else.
And Reid knew that feeling. The one that made the scars happen. The one where everything was too enormous for words and then got nice and quiet. Or where everything felt like he couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't breathe, and then it could all pour out along with the slow trickle of blood. The one where he knew it was wrong and would hurt people so badly if they knew, but also where it was all he could think about all afternoon. Getting home and slipping into his closet and feeling the only thing that made sense. The feeling afterwards, like he was completely spent but also like he could finally face the rest of the day - doing his homework, watching tv, eating dinner, acting normal even as the shame seemed to burrow deeper into his skin by the second.
Reid knew the feeling of the next day, when the fabric of his underwear would brush against the fresh wounds and remind him without warning - in the middle of a math quiz or when he got up to change classes or when he dried his sweaty palms on his jeans before he started his English presentation. When the hot water hit it in the shower and he gritted his teeth together, trying not to hiss and cry out and laugh all at the same time at the feeling.
Derek didn't know anyone else who knew that feeling. He knew there must be people out there who did - self-harm was more common than anyone wanted to admit, especially for men. He was sure Reid probably knew the actual numbers. And if he were being honest, the chances that he'd known someone with the same experience was probably a lot higher than he thought - he just hadn't known he'd known. He would never have guessed this about Reid.
No one would ever have guessed it about him.
He hated that Reid knew the feeling. He hated that the kid had felt that awful for so long...because it wasn't the kind of thing a person did first. It wasn't the result of a single bad day. It was the type of coping mechanism that someone developed after months and years of feeling like everything was wrong, like everything hurt.
He hated thinking of Reid in that much pain. As a kid was bad enough, but how recent some of those were...
He wondered if Reid still felt that bad and had just turned to something else. Maybe the drugs had been what made him stop. Or maybe coming off the drugs had made him pick it back up again. He couldn't really compare the age of track marks and razorblade slashes at a glance.
He wanted to talk to him, to beg the kid to call him when it felt like that, to tell him they could figure it out. But what the fuck would he say? Hey, kid, woke up in your body. No idea why. You haven't looked down my shorts or under my watch yet, right? Good - don't. Anyway, can we talk about when you last took a razor to your thigh and why? This wasn't something they talked about.
It wasn't something he talked about. Ever. And Reid would be embarassed about it - god knew he was.
He checked Reid's forearms again, almost a habit, as though he thought it had changed in the past five minutes - or over the past ten years. Making sure there weren't any scars there, anything vertical. The skin was exactly the way he had seen it day in and day out. Still no signs of wanting to die.
That wasn't entirely accurate, he corrected himself. Still no signs of him trying to bring about his death from that particular method. He had no idea what else there might have been. His one truly grotesque scar didn't paint nearly as dire a picture as would have been warranted back then.
His head was throbbing now, his eyes stinging with tears. It had to be something about the way different people's tear ducts worked or something, because he wasn't someone who cried - not unless someone died, and this wasn't- As far as he knew, Reid was fine. Clearly his body was, with no indication that Derek had ended up in here because Reid's mind or soul had been destroyed. Reid was probably exactly as freaked out as he was but was okay.
...he hoped he was okay. He wasn't sure what other coping mechanisms Reid might have adopted. Derek knew that wasn't fair to assume - after all, he hadn't adopted any, unless people were considering dancing with beautiful women and occasionally having consensual adult fun to be a maladaptive coping mechanism. ...At least some members of the team probably would. And given that he'd woken up this way with no memory of the previous night, he couldn't guarantee that was incorrect. Still, it felt different when it was Reid.
For one thing, he cared a lot more about Reid's safety than his own. Not that he was about to admit that.
It felt a little silly to still have secrets now, given everything Reid could see.
He walked back into the bedroom, legs still feeling gangly below him. (Reid was only an inch taller, and Derek had always sworn that inch was the kid's long neck. Were his limbs really that much longer, too?) He sat heavily on the bed, trying not to let his fingers linger on the newer scars - but it was impossible. When had it been that bad? Was it a terrible case, or just a random Wednesday? He knew it wasn't nearly as simple as 'had a bad day, going to cope'; sometimes it built for weeks. Sometimes it felt like it was over nothing. Sometimes it almost felt like something he did because he was bored and it was a habit.
None of that knowledge made him feel better about not noticing Reid struggling. He should have known.
He swallowed hard and reached over for his phone; he found Reid's instead. It had probably been in whatever pocket. Sure enough, there was a pair of glasses on the nightstand as well. Cautiously, he unfolded the arms, pulled them on, and breathed a sigh of relief as the world got clearer - though no less confusing. He took a moment to figure out how to navigate Reid's ancient device - he would have sworn no companies even made this kind of phone anymore, because he was pretty sure the last time he'd had one like this he'd been a beat cop - and found his own number. He pressed the button to dial and hoped - desperately hoped - that whatever this was had only affected the two of them so he wouldn't have to go tracking down some strange Secret Santa tree of body-snatching.
"Hello?" Hearing his own voice echo through the phone felt strange - and whoever was speaking sounded even more freaked out than he felt.
"Reid?"
"Yes? M- Morgan, please tell me I'm not crazy."
He hadn't even thought about that part, about the whole other host of nightmare scenarios Reid had to be going through right now.
"If you are, then I am too, Pretty Boy." It sounded too strange, hearing his words and cadence in Reid's voice as filtered through his own jaw and inner ear. No one ever sounded the same to other people that they did to themselves, for reasons he knew Reid had explained at some point during a long drive across Oklahoma, but this was three extra steps of bizarre.
"I don't know what happened, I woke up and it was like this."
"Same here. Are you at home?"
"At my home, yeah. Or at- how are we defining 'my'? Is it the consciousness that defines-"
"Small apartment, green walls, a million books?"
"Yeah." He thought he could hear a faint smile, but it was harder to read his own body language being done by someone else. If it had just been Reid on the phone, in his own body, then it would have been easier.
"Stay put, Kid, I'm coming to you."
"Okay." A moment's pause, then a panicked, "Wait."
"What?"
"Don't-...don't look. I don't want you to see..." Reid whispered, but hearing it in his own voice made Derek shiver. They both understood each other too well.
"You don't look, either," he requested. He wanted to give more specifics, but part of him felt like that would just make Reid's curiosity get the better of him and make him more likely to look at those specific parts.
He wondered if Reid had already seen and that was why he was trying to warn him, to try to preserve his own sense of dignity. It was what Derek had wanted to do.
"O- okay." He sounded shaky, but it was impossible to tell which part of this day was causing that. There were more than enough reasons.
"I'll be there soon. Hang in there, Kid." He hung up the phone, then considered his next move. If he picked some of his own clothes...well, not only would they hang off his current frame, but Reid would know he'd seen. But no way was he going to drive all the way over there - and spend however long it took trying to figure out how to undo whatever the fuck had happened to them - in old-man pajamas that didn't stretch. He grabbed a pair of sweats with the sturdiest ties and knotted them tightly around the too-slim waist (seriously, Pretty Boy, eat more actual food and stop living on so much coffee!), shrugged into a tshirt that would normally fit snugly across him but currently hung off his frame. He worried for a moment that the sleeves wouldn't be long enough to cover the scars, but with no biceps and narrow shoulders it draped to his elbows. He shoved his feet (covered in those ridiculous socks) into his boots and groaned as they were close to a size too small for Reid's feet, then grabbed Reid's stupid phone and his own keys and headed out.
They would figure this out. All of it: first, how to switch them back; and second, how to make Reid's mind a little gentler on himself.
And third, once this was all over, telling him he loved him. There were a lot of things they didn't talk about that needed to be said.