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When she gets thirty seconds to check her phone, it's fucking Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner and Austin hears "Reid" and "hospitalized" and "critical" and her heart starts going in the wrong direction. Mike notices and calls Sherri over so he can pull Austin aside and say, "What is it?"
"My boyfriend's in critical condition in a hospital in Virginia," she says, and she can hear herself like she's a hundred miles away. "Can I have the rest of the day off?"
Mike calls her a cab and pays for it, saying he doesn't want her driving, and she can pick up her car later.
SSA Hotchner left his number, but somehow Austin does not want to be calling Spencer's team leader when she's still full of "bwuh?" and "gah!" and "no!" and "what the fuck!" and "is he okay?"
She doesn't call Penelope Garcia in the cab, either, because then she'd be talking on the phone going from the cab to her apartment, and she's a little bit wary of that, nowadays, because it means she's not as alert as she could be.
But the second her door is deadbolted, she's hunting the phone number out of her address book and only screws up dialing once, okay, maybe twice.
And she is not going to pull out her hidden stash of smokes. She isn't. Really. Fuck. Where were her patches, again? While the phone rings, she finds some of the gum in her purse, which means she nearly chokes on it when Penelope Garcia picks up.
Austin is just scattered enough to wonder if Penelope Garcia always answers the phone with, "Speak, mortal, and be enlightened," or if she had some sort of caller-id with Austin's number, before she manages to get her gum out of the way of her tongue enough to say, "Hi, it's Austin, I just got a message saying Reid - "
"In the hospital but stable!" Garcia says immediately, tone changing. "He's okay. We found the - wait, I can't tell you that on the phone. I can't tell you a lot on the phone, actually. Did you want me to find you a cheap fast ticket out here?"
Austin hadn't actually thought that far, but the second the FBI tech analyst said it, she says, "Yes - wait, can you do that? Is that, like, imposing - " and she's already moving to throw stuff into a bag.
Including her toothbrush. Because Spencer will give her such a hard time, if she forgets it.
"Trust me," Garcia replies, "this is the work of a second - the only question is how fast you can get to the airport."
Penelope Garcia is a wizard of epic proportions. That's the only explanation Austin can think up, in the mad rush through security.
She wouldn't normally do this, but it's . . . intuition. Which, Spencer tells her, is just her subconscious mind working so fast her conscious mind can't make the connections. When she's sitting on the plane, her bag safely in a carry-on up above her, she starts to pick apart the intuition.
It was the critical, on the message, sure, but it was also how fast Garcia started telling her he was okay - and it was how fast Garcia cut herself off, in explaining what happened.
Also, she thinks, as the beverage and snack tray comes around and she realizes she hasn't, you know, eaten since this morning, because the call came before her break - also, it might be time to admit this relationship has come to the point of, you know, a certain amount of importance.
She figures it's only fitting that one that started with her nearly getting eviscerated hits a milestone when he nearly dies on a case. She figures this, because if she thinks about it too hard she's going to freak out, and that's just dumb.
It occurs to her that it's kind of funny that Kevin Lynch did that whole big "BAU Auxiliary" thing, and it's SSA Hotchner and Tech Analyst Garcia Austin's calling - and, apparently, SSA Derek Morgan once she gets on the ground, because that's the number Garcia gave her.
Well, texting. He's not allowed to answer his cell in the hospital, and apparently he's the one camped out at Spencer's bedside.
Shit.
She really, really wants a cigarette.
The second piece of the fucking gum she pops in her mouth just isn't the same.
She runs into a little bit of flak when she gets to the hospital and the security around the ward she wants into try to tell her that the patient she wants to see doesn't exist, and she does not flip out, because they are just doing their job, and this is a hazard of Spencer's job, and all of that, and besides, they only do the run-around a little bit before the very, very, very welcome Emily Prentiss comes to the rescue.
It's Emily, halfway there, who tells Austin that it was anthrax, and just how bad it was. Austin has to sit down for a second, because that's terrifying on a million levels. And because shock sometimes makes her take leave of her tact, she says, "No wonder you look like Hell."
"Sleeping in a chair doesn't help," Emily agrees, as Austin gets up. "Home, and a shower - you have no idea how appealing these things are."
Of course, she's not going anywhere until Spencer wakes up, which is kind of a given. Austin sometimes wonders if all the teams get this, well, almost incestuously close, or whether it's just a feature of -
Well, how fucked up everyone on this team is.
It's not like she hasn't been paying attention to Spencer's stories. Or like she can't read between the lines. In fact, a lot of having a relationship with Spencer is reading between the lines he doesn't realize there's a "between" to.
When they get to the room, Austin mentally downgrades Emily to Limbo, because Spencer looks like Hell, and wow, would she never have had that thought process before the two hour explanation of Dante's Inferno.
Which leaves a little pang, because Spencer looks so animated when he's explaining things, and right now, he looks like death. The machines he's hooked up to, and their beeping, are actually really comforting, because they make the death-look a lie.
Derek Morgan stands up when she comes in, and there's a handshake and a reintroduction and he insists that she call him Derek. Emily asks if they want coffee, and suddenly that seems like a great idea, and then she goes, and Austin sits down with a sudden, really bad case of stalled brain.
"Dr Kimura says he should be awake sometime tomorrow, and he's completely stabilized," Derek says, sitting back down in his chair on the other side of Spencer's bed.
"That's good," Austin says. "Emily told me some of what happened, when we were walking up." She pauses, and adds, "I'm going to need someone to run over which parts of that I can't tell anyone else. Like, later, though."
Derek says, with a weirdly companionable wry smile, "Pretty much all of it."
"He had a really bad case of the flu?" Austin offers.
"That sounds good," Derek agrees. He holds up a small plastic cup. "Jello?"
Naturally, Spencer wakes up right when she steps out to use the bathroom and wash her face. He gets a really cute surprised look on his face - well, surprised and totally out of it, but one of those drips he was on was morphine, which was not going to make him happy later - when she comes in though. "Austin," he says. "What - what are you doing here?"
Derek's laughing at him, which is a little bit mean, but Austin just says, "What, a girl's not allowed to come visit her boyfriend when he gets the flu?" which is probably also a little bit mean, but otherwise she's going to do something soppy and embarrassing.
Spencer trades "surprised" for "confused", which is also cute, while she pulls her chair over. "I didn't have the - " and then agent-brain catches up with Spencer-brain and he stops.
Austin reaches over to squeeze his hand. "I know, Spence. Agent Hotchner called me, and Penelope got me a ticket."
"You didn't have to come," he says, and then immediately, "I mean, I'm not unhappy you did, or anything, but - "
"I know," she says. "I came anyway. This place has great jello." She leans over to give him a quick kiss, and it lands somewhere between his forehead and his temple.
"I wouldn't know," Spencer says, and points at Derek, "he ate mine."