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3AM rolls around, and Spencer’s still walking. This isn't uncommon - the hour, or the restlessness. He supposes he’s not really headed towards a destination, but he finds himself on a bridge somewhere along the banks of the Potomac, watching the snow fall and gather, and the water carry it away.
When Aaron Hotchner steps up next to him, he’s hardly surprised. By this time, Spencer’s phone is dead and his feet have long since turned from painfully cold to a wooden numbness in his sodden boots, and Spencer could honestly only laugh at the absurdity of the situation.
"It's a bit cold for anyone sensible to be out here," Aaron starts, analyzing Spencer’s expression, the discarded sweet wrappers in the gathering snow and the way his hair had started to freeze at the tips, "but I guess you never were completely sane.”
“I didn’t think anyone would find me here,” Spencer says, quietly, like an admission of guilt. He turns to lean back on the railings, and then explains, “sometimes I like looking out over the town at night.”
Aaron had brought a spare jacket with him, knowing that Spencer probably didn’t bring one of his own. Of course, he was right, and he drapes it around Spencer wordlessly; Spencer can tell it's clean, stiff from having been hung to dry several days ago and untouched since. It smells faintly of fabric softener and carries the lingering woody notes of something else that doesn’t quite come out anymore.
Spencer feels a pang of something he doesn't want to name as the heaviness of the coat swallowing his shoulders grounds him, something close to longing, that maybe he was sharing a moment like this with his own father instead of with his boss. The gesture feels so painfully parental that it makes his throat tight, and he balls his hands into fists to stop himself from reaching out.
“You know, there are better ways to confront your feelings than freezing to death,” Aaron says, staring out over the river and settling himself on the railings just as Spencer had, holding out a hand to catch the falling snowflakes and watching them melt between his fingers.
“When I started at the BAU,” Spencer starts, then pauses. “When I started at the BAU, I used to come here nearly every night to stare at the water when I couldn’t sleep. It helps.”
Aaron doesn’t need to think before he says, “it feels like you’re protecting everyone from afar.”
When Spencer gives him a surprised look, he smiles a little. "What? I'm a profiler too.".
Aaron turns Spencer’s admission over quietly, thinking back to those days when Spencer was so young, so innocent, easily moldable and so easily scared. Too easy to break. He remembers how he once told Gideon that he didn’t know how to raise Spencer emotionally, how he so badly wanted to treat him like his own son and how he hoped that Spencer wouldn’t grow up to be like them one day.
He knew, even then, that Spencer would wander out into the cold, and stand in this spot for hours.
“Hotch, I… I don’t know what to do with this guilt.”
Aaron carefully catalogues Spencer with a practised efficiency, analysing the way his gaze drifts from the skyline to the babbling river that fills the space his voice can’t; he stands up straight but keeps his face impossibly neutral.
“What do you think you have to feel guilty for?”
Spencer stumbles, maybe because of the frigid cold encroaching on his lungs, and maybe because for once, he doesn’t know what words to say.
Finally, the words do come. “Every time we work on a case, it’s because it's too late for someone. More than one someone." He swallows, "because it’s already gotten bad and because we’re their last hope.” He can’t bring himself to say it outright, I feel guilty about the ones we couldn’t save, because that would be an admission of wrongdoing, and that would make him too much like them.
There’s a certain type of adrenaline Spencer feels when he’s out walking at night, in the cold and the dark and looking down at the water from such a height as he is right now. It’s, by most measures, the ‘wrong’ thing to do: being outside, while the rest of the world is asleep safely inside. The adrenaline leaves his body all at once, and he finds himself too heavy for his legs to hold. He sinks into the snow that has piled up around him, one arm holding the railing, the other cradling a lukewarm flask of tea under his jacket, close to his body for warmth. Aaron doesn’t join him.
“You worry that maybe you’re just as bad as the UnSubs we hunt?” Aaron asks, hesitantly probing for more.
Spencer only responds with a non-committal hum, and Aaron feels compelled to keep talking.
“As much as I don’t like to admit it, this job takes a lot from us. If any one of us were to snap, it’d probably be justified.” He takes a deep breath, before continuing, “I stood on a rooftop once. I had Jack’s picture in one pocket and my gun in the other. I’d convinced myself that if I could see the world from up there, nothing bad could ever happen to him.” His eyes lock onto the water. He doesn’t look away. “It was just after Foyet showed up in my house, before Haley...” He stops to take another breath. “It took me a while to realise what I really wanted was control.”
Something twists in Spencer’s chest, hearing this rare admission of weakness from Aaron, the words tumbling out like Spencer was the first person he’d ever shared thoughts or feelings with. In some ways, he was, now. Spencer pushes the accumulating snow around absently with his feet, rolling it under his heel and hearing it crunch when he bears down.
“The first time you came back up here after that, I understood what attracted you so much to this spot.”
“Psychologically, height is interpreted to be both protective and a threat. We seek safety up high, but are more inclined to be fearful of things that are taller and bigger than we are. Some scientists think the fight-or flight sensation one gets from standing on the edge of a drop contributes to a heightened sense of control. There were 16,171 confirmed homicides in the United States in 2008. I don’t feel like I can help that. I don’t think I can help enough.”
“You know you can’t save everyone, right?”
A weight drops into Spencer’s diaphragm, latching onto his lungs and his heart and dragging it downwards into the rushing water below. But still he responds, with a complicated expression, “I know.”
“And you know that’s not your fault?”
“I know.”
Spencer’s left hand finds its way to an old set of scars in the crook of his right elbow, from when he’d been locked in that shed not many years ago. He worries it with his fingers, feeling how the skin becomes papery-thin and white, dimpled under the rolled up cuff of his shirt. Aaron sees this; observes how he goes back to this moment repeatedly.
He says nothing, because they promised not to profile each other. He knows Tobias Hankel was the first man Spencer truly blamed himself for not saving, and the second man Spencer ever killed. He won’t ever bring it up out loud, because he made a promise.
“Hotch?”
“Yeah, Reid.”
“How did you find me, anyway?”
“The cell phones the FBI give us have trackers. Garcia called me in bits the first time you came up here. I've made a habit of checking after hard cases ever since.”
Spencer frowns. Maybe if he’d had the energy, he’d make a point about privacy, and about how he’s a grown man and doesn’t need babysitting or taking care of. But in all honesty, he appreciated that there was someone looking after him in ways his own father didn’t. He’s glad Aaron never called him ‘Spencer’, only ever ‘Reid’. The snowfall begins to thin out, reduced to a few stray flakes landing on the top of their heads and melting into the surface of their clothes. Spencer runs through all the snowflake facts in his head, but can’t find one to fit this moment. He can’t find a formula for forgiveness, either.
He doesn’t know what else to say, other than, “thank you.”
“It’s late,” Aaron says, putting a hand on Spencer’s shoulder, hesitantly at first, then letting it rest there for a second longer than necessary. “Let me take you home.”
Spencer looks down at the water one last time, and then at the man who kept looking for him anyway.
“Okay,” he nods. “Okay.”