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Derek stared at the drag marks for so long that he just knew that it was going to be imprinted in his mind when he went to sleep.
There was a silver lining and it was that there didn’t seem to be much evidence of blood so it was more likely that Spencer was alive, just kidnapped.
Kidnapped by the person he thought was a witness.
It would’ve been so easy to blame JJ for Spencer getting taken, but what else could either of them have done? Spencer had been the one to figure out that Tobias Hankel was their unsub and they’d split up to confront him in the barn but he hadn’t been in the barn.
“Morgan, I need your head focused for this,” Hotch said and Derek had to give himself a shake.
Spencer had literally moved into his apartment completely a week ago, just days before they’d helped Sarah get situated in his old apartment.
“Pretty quaint for having a homicide here,” she’d said with a glint in her eyes. “Thanks for the digs, sugar, you got the short stick rooming with Derek.”
Spencer had laughed while Derek scowled at her. It had taken them months to get back to normal after he’d told them what Carl Buford had actually done to him, and even now their relationship wasn’t quite back to what it was, but it was better than it had been.
All because of his partner.
His partner who was currently missing.
Derek rubbed at his eyes and steeled himself. “Right, I can do this,” he said out loud, less to Hotch and more to himself.
“Garcia just arrived, come on.”
“Okay, right out of the gate, I can tell you this guy’s self-taught,” Penelope said, fingers tapping against the keyboard as she flicked over multiple screens. “His mainframe is totally idiosyncratic, but it's pretty brilliant. But it’s totally tame stuff, video games, software, sports. Seriously, if I had to guess whose system this belongs to, I would say a crazy smart high-school kid.”
“Garcia, that doesn't make any sense,” Derek pressed, trying not to come off too frustrated.
“Well, that's what I've got.”
“A mission-based killer like Hankel would need constant reassurance—” Derek’s hands gesticulated like Spencer did when he got really into his explanations. “—religious manifesto, violent images, something.”
But Penelope shook her head. “Nothing, baby. Nothing.”
“What about the MPEGs of the murders he posted online?” he asked instead. “Does he sit and watch those over and over?”
And that gave Penelope pause as she frowned. “Ok, that's weird.”
“What? Talk to me.”
“They're not even here,” Penelope said, irritation blooming. “All I have is a site he set up once he commandeered people's webcams, and he keeps a running clock, and at a certain point, each one is bookmarked with a different heading.”
There were three currently on the screen. Adulterer, liar, and thief.
"This guy sits here for days and just watches these people, and he waits for them to commit a sin,” Derek realized with a horrible sinking feeling.
“Yeah, but Reid’s completely innocent,” Penelope said, looking back to him.
“If you dig deep enough on any of us, we all have our sins, including Reid,” he said heavily.
There was exactly one incident that he knew without a doubt that Spencer would consider the worst thing he’d ever done to date even if it had helped his mother in the long run. It was a hard thing to do, to turn eighteen and have your mother involuntarily committed because she was a risk to herself and others.
Diana Reid was better managed now but Spencer had said that she’d gone off her meds while pregnant with him and he didn’t think that she’d ever fully recovered from that backslide. Her end began at his start, like that poem of Randall Garner’s had said.
Spencer used to obsess over it but rationale had won out in the end. It was Diana Reid’s choice to go off her meds, just as it was William Reid’s choice to leave his young son behind because he was a coward who didn’t know how to deal with a prodigious child or a mentally ill partner.
No, Derek wasn’t pissed about it, and he definitely wasn’t thinking about Hankel stabbing Spencer as many times as the murders he’d already committed.
If he wanted to keep his head on straight to get his partner back, he couldn’t think about it.
“Guys! Get in here!” Morgan shouted and they rushed into the room that had clearly been Tobias Hankel’s primary focus, the room full of monitors that Garcia had been trying to dissect.
And on each one was now the image of Reid, blood matting his hair against his temple, wrists bound clearly uncomfortably enough that he was shifting them as he struggled to focus.
“He’s been beaten,” Emily was horrified.
“Can’t you track him?” JJ demanded.
“Hankel’s only streaming this to his home computer,” Garcia said grimly. “He's rerouting to a different IP address every thirty seconds. I can't track him.”
“I’m gonna put this guy's head on a stick,” Morgan hissed under his breath.
This was the kind of thing that Internal Affairs had been looking for when they’d been monitored for two weeks on cases and Morgan was toeing that line between personal and professional closely enough that he could just feel Hotch’s stare boring holes into the back of his head.
Forcing Reid to choose a potential victim to live knowing the rest were on the chopping block…Hankel was a sick son of bitch and Morgan was going to put him in the ground.
Reid always saw the best in people, finding ways to relate to hardened killers was difficult but he always found it so much easier to relate to the ones that were mentally ill, likely because of his own experiences with his mother.
And right now, he was caught between two and Morgan couldn’t do anything to help him.
As soon as the feed cut, he was slamming a hand angrily into a door and storming off.
“Reid, if you’re watching, you’re not responsible for this, you understand me? He's perverting God to justify murder. You are stronger than him. He cannot break you.”
Derek’s heart had stopped beating the moment Spencer’s had, he just knew it, staring at his body on the screen, limp where the Charles Hankel alter had flung him into a seizure.
Tobias had a drug problem, dilaudid, and Spencer had no health issues that would lead him to having a seizure…unless he’d given some of it to Spencer, believing he needed to numb him to manage his ‘father’s unrelenting abuse. He’d given him enough to OD on and Spencer had no interest in medication of any sort; he wouldn’t even get properly diagnosed for his migraines to be able to get medication to manage them when they got bad.
Derek would rather him alive no matter the cost, something he knew Spencer would never agree with.
He stood there struggling to breathe around the knife in his heart.
Spencer couldn’t be dead, no. It would be a night without stars, a day without sun. No more waking up to the smell of brewing coffee or picking up his books scattered across the apartment because Spencer was searching for a specific historical case to crack the one he was working on. No more silencing his words with a kiss that devolved into fucking him on the couch as Spencer choked on his name, scratching lines into his back.
Then Tobias Hankel rushed back in to thrust his hands against Spencer’s unmoving chest repeatedly, breathing for him.
Derek’s grip on the chair Penelope was sitting in was so tight that it threatened to splinter, only relaxing as Spencer took in a ragged breath and coughed harshly.
“Oh my God,” JJ moaned in relief, a hand pressing to her chest in utter relief that they were all feeling.
“You came back to life,” the median alter, Rafael said. “There can be only one of two reasons.”
“I was given CPR,” Spencer said roughly, still coughing.
“There are no accidents,” Rafael disagreed. “How many members are on your team?”
“Seven.”
“The seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. The first sounding followed hail and they were thrown to earth.”
Hotch made a startled sound in the back of his throat. “He thinks it's Revelations, the seven archangels versus the seven angels of death.”
The chair scraped loudly as Hankel forced Spencer upright once more before making a demand that Derek knew he would never comply with.
“Choose one to die.”
“What?” Spencer’s shoulders gave a little jerk.
“Your team members,” Rafael said shortly, “choose one to die.”
But it was another knife in the heart to hear his partner say: “Kill me.”
“You said you weren't one of them.”
“I lied,” Spencer said, his words still slightly slurred, undoubtedly from the effects of the drugs he’d been given. He was ordinarily so precise when he spoke, unless Derek got his hands on him and reduced him to a stuttering mess that still struggled to get his words out.
“Your team has six other members,” Rafael pressed on. “Tell me who dies.”
“No.”
Garcia took in a sharp breath as he pulled out a revolver, sliding a bullet into place before spinning the chamber and then taking aim right at Spencer’s forehead. “Choose and prove you’ll do God’s will.”
“No,” Spencer repeated and everyone flinched as the trigger clicked.
“Choose,” Rafael repeated.
“I won’t do it.”
Another click.
“Life is a choice,” he said.
“No,” Spencer said flatly.
Click.
He was rapidly running out of empty slots in that chamber. He just needed to pick one of them, none of them were going to take it to heart. Spencer was stressed, he’d been drugged and beaten, held for two days by a man with only one personality that seemed to have any interest in letting him live.
“Choose,” Rafael said and Spencer wavered.
Just pick one, baby, Derek thought desperately.
“I choose…Derek Morgan,” Spencer said finally. “He’s good with his hands, not much else, and he’s always trying to tell us how to do our jobs,” Spencer said and the air rushed out of the room but a smirk ticked up onto Derek’s mouth. “Genesis 23:4: Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.”
It was the kind of assumption that other people made about him, he knew, one he knew that Spencer was guilty of when they first met. He wasn’t all brawn no brain, but it was understandable why someone would think that with how he looked in comparison to Spencer.
“Haven’t you heard,” he crooned, catching Spencer with his hands at his slim hips, “I’m good with my hands.” And then he’d kissed him as Spencer’s hands fumbled to rest on his shoulders.
Good with his…hands…
Spencer had been shifting his hands a lot the first time they’d seen him, hadn’t he? Was that really because his cuffs were uncomfortable?
He and Desiree were up to the basic alphabet in ASL, but they both kept getting distracted by their jobs.
“You can’t take that to heart,” Gideon said to Derek immediately as the feed cut off again. Hotch was already out of the room.
“What?” Derek blinked at him. “I’m not, why would I be?”
Emily’s eyebrow arched up. “I mean…Reid did insult you to Hankel. Even under pressure, some people would take that personally.”
A laugh bubbled up before Derek could stifle it. “That is an old joke between us,” he said. “We talked about assumptions that people make about us.”
Besides, Spencer could insult him as many times to an unsub and Derek would let him off every time.
“He got it wrong,” Hotch said coming back with a bible flicked to Genesis, extending it to JJ. “Read Genesis 23:4.”
She accepted it frowning. “I am a stranger and a sojourner with you. Give me property among you for a burying place, that I may bury my dead out of my sight…I don’t understand, how did he get it wrong?"
“Reid doesn’t get things wrong unless it’s on purpose,” Derek said with certainty. “He’s in a cemetery…Garcia, can you go back to the first time we saw Reid?”
“Why?” Garcia asked. “What are you thinking?”
“I need you to focus on his hands.”
“But I thought—”
“Do it, Garcia,” Gideon said and she looked from one man to the other before pulling it back up.
“Sign language,” Emily realized with breathless relief.
“Can you send me the closeup video of his hands to my phone?” Derek asked. “I’m going to send it to Desiree to see what he’s signing.”
The reason that they’d picked it as their bonding activity was because no one else knew sign language. Spencer had asked Emily if she knew it and she’d asked him why he’d asked and Spencer had responded airily “No reason.”
SOS, he texted Desiree, need to know what these signs mean.
It took five seconds before his little sister was calling him.
“Derek, what’s going on?” she asked cautiously as he stepped out of the room to speak with her. “You can just ask Spence to translate signs, you know, he’s further along than I am.”
“Desiree…he’s the one doing the signing.”
The silence stretched on uncomfortably and all Derek could hear was her sharp breath on the other end. The cuffs were clear on the wrists in the video he’d sent her so she could only draw the worse conclusions.
“O-okay, give me two seconds,” she said, stuttering and clearly overwhelmed. The silence returned as she watched the video silently. “It’s just one word that he keeps repeating: Poach.”
“Poach? Thanks, Dee, I’ll call you later—”
“You better,” she threatened.
And then he was back in the room. “He kept signing the word ‘poach’. Were there any reports of poaching in the past two days?”
They found him collapsed beside a freshly dug grave, revolver in hand, clearly the shot they’d heard had come from him and Hankel was dead.
“Reid!”
Hotch reached him first, rolling him over and searching for a pulse that Derek knew he wouldn’t be able to find.
“He’s alive!”
JJ let out a moan of relief, bracing herself against her knees to keep from keeling over. Derek was just glad that Hotch decided to send her and him with Spencer while the rest of them stayed back at Marshall Parish.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” JJ asked nervously, fingers twitching together as they say in the waiting room to hear the word from the doctor.
They didn’t really teach a class on how to handle kidnapping at the FBI, but they should’ve. Spencer was malleable in so many ways but even Derek didn’t know how he’d handle all this.
“I hope so,” he muttered grimly.
“…how did you know about the sign language?”
Derek’s mouth twitched. “Emily knows a lot of languages,” he said, “but she doesn’t know that one. He’s pretty conversational in Russian but she knows some of that so he wanted to learn a language she didn’t know…I think he was annoyed because she made a comment once about something he said over the phone.”
JJ choked on a little laugh of her own. “He’s too particular.”
But Derek liked that he was so particular.
“Agents?”
They were standing immediately.
“H-how is he?” JJ asked immediately, her anxiety returning once more.
“Definitely could’ve been worse given two days of captivity,” the doctor said tiredly. “He’s dehydrated, his left ankle is pretty badly sprained and the bruising is gnarly…broken ribs from CPR and he’s looking at a rough withdrawal.”
“Withdrawal?” JJ asked.
“He tested positive for opioids and he’s definitely showcasing signs of paranoia…he’s already trying to leave against medical advice.”
“What?” Derek balked. “Let me go talk him down.”
JJ followed at his heels.
“We could at least mitigate some of your withdrawal symptoms here, Dr. Reid!”
“Listen, I say this with so much respect for your profession,” Spencer said emphatically, “but I would rather die than stay in a hospital for longer than necessary. I am not crazy, I don’t need to be here!”
His leg was in a splint, but he was standing with a hand clenched around his IV pole, eyes just a bit wild. The blood dried against his hairline was so out of place that Derek ached.
“Spence—” JJ tried to reach out to touch him, but he took a skittish step back, wincing on his bad leg.
“Spencer.”
JJ couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard Derek call Spencer by his first name.
“Derek, I don’t want to be here,” Spencer pressed, but, if wonders would never cease, he let Derek reach out to the hand that was clinging desperately to the IV pole.
“I know,” Derek said gently, “but you’ve been drugged, you’ve been tortured…you have to at least stay the night to be looked after.”
“I just want to go home,” Spencer said weakly.
“I know,” Derek repeated, “but we want you to be looked after first…can you let the doctors do their job tonight? And I’ll see if Hotch can get us back tomorrow, okay?”
“Promise?” he sounded so young, fighting vainly against his own consciousness.
“I promise and JJ’ll make it happen if I can’t,” Derek was quick to assure and JJ nodded quickly.
“We’ll get you home tomorrow, Spence, I promise,” she said, already mentally formulating an argument.
And Derek managed to catch him as he slumped over, depositing him back in the bed with relative ease as she helped with his splinted leg before resituating the blanket over him as the nurse reentered to hook him back up to fluids.
She wondered if the dilaudid was playing up on his already present fear of a schizophrenic break.
Which was definitely not helping.
Still, JJ couldn’t help but wonder how you got over something like Tobias Hankel. She wouldn’t even know where to begin.