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It starts like this: Dr Spencer Reid jerks awake from a nightmare with a pounding heart and dry mouth and he knows without a shadow of a doubt that his father is a murderer.
He doesn’t have the evidence yet—the where, the why, the how—but he’ll get it. His mind is sending him signals he cannot ignore, and his father’s face on the body of a murderer is as glaring as anything could be. His father had murdered Riley Jenkins, and Spencer had watched him hide Riley’s body behind the dryer, and with those two facts slotted into place everything else makes sense.
By the time his mother wakes and it’s a socially acceptable time to leave, Spencer is agitated, kept up all night by the adrenaline coursing through his veins and the sick feeling in his stomach. He tells his mom that he loves her very much, and that he’ll be back soon, and then he leaves the hospital on a beeline for the hotel.
He knows he must stand out from the crowd on the busy Las Vegas transit—though, really, people in this town ought to be used to dishevelled, sleep-deprived twenty-somethings with bags under their eyes and bugs under their skin. In most, the fidgeting would perhaps be a sign of drug use or impatience, but in him it’s simply the product of anxiety. He must stand out though, because people’s eyes linger on him, their gazes burning. He hears them whisper, too, about how bad he looks, about how there must be something wrong with him to look so awful. He winces and adjusts his clothing, hoping that the team won’t come to the same conclusions.
Luckily, when he finds them in the hotel, they all seem to be in a similar state—or at least Emily does, visibly suffering from a hangover. The others are laughing at her misfortune, and then turn their laughing gazes onto Spencer as he jogs through the door.
“What’d you do, sleep through your alarm?” Morgan asks with a raised eyebrow.
“Sorry to keep you guys waiting,” Spencer apologises, breathless, thrown off by the dissonance between the easy, carefree scene before him and the crime scene playing behind his eyes.
“Hotch is already at the airstrip,” JJ informs him. “How fast can you pack?”
“Actually, I’m gonna—I’m gonna stay for a couple of days.” He tries to nod in a self-assured way, though their penetrating gazes make it hard to feel quite so self-assured.
“Is everything alright?”
“Yeah, I just, I—I haven’t seen my mom for a really long time, so I’d like a few more days…”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Rossi says. “Take a few days. Do what you need to do.”
The team begins to head off while Spencer tries not to visibly vibrate in place. JJ lingers when the rest go, catching Spencer’s attention with a pointed, but not necessarily sharp, look.
“Hey, um, take care of yourself,” she says, and there’s a layer to her words that don’t quite make sense to him.
He just nods. “You too,” he says, and then, with a laugh and a gesture to her swollen belly, adds, “Both of you.”
JJ nods, then leaves, and Spencer stands alone watching the team disappear into the Las Vegas sunshine for a moment too long. His brief good mood, brought about by their presence, fades away, leaving him once more treading water in his dread. He turns to head out one of the other doors, where there’s no chance of bumping into them again, and nearly stumbles into someone as he does.
“Sorry—sorry—” he apologises.
The person doesn’t respond, just pushing past him, but someone else nearby mutters, “Watch where you’re going, moron.”
He frowns, shooting a glare to the man leaning over the slot machine. “That was unnecessary,” he says sharply.
All he gets in response is a bewildered glance as he marches away, a man with a mission and no time to spare for rude bystanders.
Morgan and Rossi are meant to be on a plane back to DC; Spencer is meant to be hanging out with his mom. None of them, then, are where they’re technically meant to be, but Spencer can’t help his irritation at their misplaced presence. He also can’t help that he is, apparently, incapable of lying to Morgan, who knows him irritatingly well.
“Let us help,” Rossi says. “Maybe together we can find out who killed him.”
But here’s the thing—
“I think I might already know.”
“So tell us about the suspect.”
“Truth is, I don’t… I don’t know anything about him.”
What memories Spencer does have are fragmented and vague. He may have an eidetic memory, but his early childhood is a hazy smear of time across the plane that is his autobiographical memory store. This is, he knows, extremely normal—most people have very few memories of their early childhood, and even fewer that are clear. Memories degrade with time, with revisitation, and childhood amnesia rewires the brain in such a way that the earliest years are no longer accessible.
Still, he remembers his face, as clear as it had been in his dream last night.
“He’s my father.”
Morgan and Rossi aren’t too happy about that answer. If Spencer’s being honest, he’s not too happy about it either, the implications clawing at his insides and leaving behind bloody gashes that he’s avoiding looking at too closely.
“What makes you think that?”
And so he tells them about his dream, and their gazes are sharp, discerning, piecing apart his words and assembling them into a profile right in front of his eyes. He stumbles over his words under the weight of it. “And I know—I know it’s not hard evidence, we’ll find the hard evidence, but I know what I saw,” he finishes. “I know what I know.” He feels more than a little breathless, like he’d just run a marathon rather than recounted a nightmare.
“Before we go down this road,” Rossi cautions, “you need to be sure.”
“He’s right,” Morgan agrees. “Some rocks don’t need looking under.”
“My mind is sending me signals. I-I can’t ignore them anymore.”
“Mixed signals. That’s what the subconscious is all about, you know that.”
And they talk, for a while, about Freudian psychology and a symbolic death of childhood and Spencer tries very hard not to fidget with agitation because he knows what he knows. Even if the truth is terrible, it’s the truth, and he wouldn’t be a very good FBI Agent—wouldn’t be a very good person—if he ignored it.
“I’ve come this far,” he tells them. “I’m not going back.”
And the implication is clear: they can do what they like, but he won’t stop until the world knows what he knows.
The two of them exchange a glance, and their resolve is clear as well: like it or not, they’re in this with him until he’s finished the job.
They go through the evidence, Morgan pacing the room as Spencer and Rossi take the chairs. These are the sorts of cases that Morgan hates, and Spencer feels bad for roping him in on it, but it mingles with the general sense of emotional malaise that’s been clinging to him all weekend and fades from the forefront of his mind. He struggles to focus on the casefiles, distracted by an overly-loud television from the room next door, indistinct voices filtering through the wall. Still, he could build a profile in his sleep, and it’s easy to throw about inferences with Rossi and Morgan, even if he is beginning to develop a dull headache from it all.
“Reid.” Rossi catches his attention. “I don’t need to tell you that this signature was need-based and sexual in nature. The man we’re looking for is a pedophile.”
Dark eyes on him, two sets, boring holes into his skull from the front and the side. No, wait—three sets? He could swear there’s someone behind him, but the door hadn’t opened, and Rossi, straight in front of him, hasn’t reacted like there’s anyone there. It takes all of his self-control not to look behind him.
Rossi leans forward. “So I’ll ask you again: are you sure you want to go down this road?”
Spencer allows himself a guilty glance to the side at Morgan; he doesn’t see anyone in his peripherals. He looks down, unable to keep Rossi’s gaze any longer, and he knows what he’s being asked. He does. And he understands their trepidation at what they might uncover as they pull this thread. But here’s what the two of them don’t understand: he’s already down this road. He’s been travelling down it for hours, at least, since he woke up in the dead of night with a sick realisation roiling in his stomach. Realistically, he’s been travelling down it for years, since the night his father murdered a kid only two years Spencer’s senior and covered it up with cowardice and childhood amnesia.
And so, even though his voice is choked and hoarse and wavering, there is only one answer he can give to that.
“Y-Yes. I—I am. I’m sure.”
And now he’s no longer the only one travelling down this road—Rossi and Morgan are in the car with him. Spencer’s not used to being the one behind the wheel. He hopes that he won’t be the one who causes them to crash.
Someone likes Gary B. Michaels for the Riley Jenkins murder. The three of them, being worth their salt, have to follow that lead, even if Spencer finds himself impatient at the time they’re wasting. He knows his father did this. However, his emotional brain has to step aside and concede to his logical brain that ruling out other suspects is part of gathering the evidence he needs for his conviction.
He also thinks that he might recognise Michaels—it’s hard to tell. The memory is hazy, devoid of context, ephemeral and barely real. All of his memories surrounding this case are. He catches his teeth on his consternation. The way memories are stored in the brain is something that science still does not fully understand: they’re processed by the hippocampus, then diffused out into various places in the cerebral cortex. If there is a single memory store in the brain, then psychologists and neuroscientists still haven’t found it. Best guess? They’re stored in pieces and fragments, squirreled away amongst the mechanisms of every other brain function, part of the cognitive scenery.
Childhood memories get stored just like any other memory—they just get misplaced as the brain rewrites its pathways with age, like childhood toys dropped under the bed and lost in the move. If he could just recover those memories, wipe off the dust and see them anew, he’s sure he’d be able to find the piece that he’s missing, the thing that will blow this case wide open.
His frustration rises to a boiling point when even Garcia cannot find anything on his father other than a digital shrine to the son he’d abandoned, but a cool-down game of virtual poker and a conversation with a smoking hooker brings him a solution to, potentially, all of the problems he’s been having.
And that’s how he finds himself in a hypnotherapist’s office.
Hypnotherapy is a fascinating thing—it exists on the edge of pseudoscience, its legitimacy best judged on a case-by-case basis. It had fallen out of fashion in the latter half of the twentieth century as more scientific methods of examining and healing the psyche had been developed, but even today there are people who cling to it. It’s particularly popular amongst those attempting to treat addictions and phobias. Spencer had once had an in-depth conversation at a convention with a psychiatrist who believed hypnosis would make a resurgence in the treatment of psychological trauma, citing studies on somatisation and repressed memories to back his claims. Spencer had found his conviction quite compelling.
It’s possibly the only thing—other than his truly desperate need to solve this case—that prevents him from bolting out of the room as soon as he’s entered it.
The hypnotherapist, much like the agents in her office, seems very much worth her salt, at least. “Memories from that age can be difficult to interpret,” she cautions.
“I’m aware of the limitations of hypnotherapy.”
“Then you’re aware of suggestion issues. If you’ve looked into this case, you may have a bias.”
“Are you saying that what he remembers under hypnosis may not be real?” chimes in a sceptical Rossi.
“It’s a possibility. Either way, it’s a tough sell in court.”
“We won’t be using this for evidentiary purposes.” Well, not in any legal sense—Spencer will almost certainly be using this evidence. “It’s really just for me.” Then, hesitating, unsure of her reaction or how much he is giving up with the statement, “The suppressed memories are about my father.”
Rossi doesn’t leave—convinces the therapist to let him stay without a word from Spencer. Spencer could force him out, say that he’s not comfortable with the man being in the room, and he would have privacy for the whole affair. He doesn’t. He’s not entirely sure why, in the same way he’s not sure why Rossi even decided to stay. He sits on a chair and watches as the therapist lays Spencer back on a couch and coaxes him into a dissociated state, the world becoming hazy and warm with it.
The memories come easier, coaxed out of him with a firm, reassuring voice and a floaty sort of detachment. It’s six years before his father finally walks out of the door, but the fighting had started early, angry voices echoing up the stairs. The argument comes to a crescendo and an abrupt end, and then Spencer’s the one in a room with his father, and he doesn’t want him there at all. He pretends to be asleep, but his father sees right through it, and there’s a creeping sense of trepidation that, if he were more lucid, would perhaps be realised as terror.
“I don’t want to be here,” he tells the therapist, his voice a million miles away, and he can’t articulate why the memory scares him so bad.
She leads him away from the memory, to another one, to his father burning bloody clothes in the backyard. It is the evidence he was looking for, the lead to the break in the case, and its recovery is worth even the sudden and violent way he is pulled out of hypnosis and into the cold arms of reality. Rossi’s offering reassuring platitudes, and Spencer doesn’t know where he is for a few moments, but the trepidation and terror of the memories are more familiar in the present than they were in the past.
In the present, he can articulate why the memory had scared him, even if just to himself, and it makes more sense than most things in his life do. After all, his father had killed Riley, and Spencer had been a kid, all alone in a room with him—who knows what William Reid might have done?
It is normal to be afraid of a murderer. It is normal to wonder what they’ll do next. It is normal to be scared of further violence. Spencer may no longer be a potential victim, now that he is an FBI agent in his twenties and not a vulnerable child, but his gut instincts tell him that his father will hurt somebody else.
And he knows that no matter what, he cannot let that happen.
Rossi and Morgan are losing faith in him. The police never had any faith in him to begin with. The team likes Michaels for the murder, and as much as they like Spencer, they will not put stock in his word over what they believe to be hard evidence.
But Spencer knows, and he will get that evidence, even if it requires sitting in an interrogation room with his father and ignoring the way every cell in his body screams that he’s in danger.
His dad likes Gary Michaels for the murder, too, and won’t tell Spencer why—he just tells him to drop it. He feels like that’s all anybody has been saying to him all day. Even the woman in the coffee shop this morning had muttered, “You should really let this go, you know,” at him when he’d passed her by. When he’d pressed her for clarification, all he got in response was a frown, a step back, and a, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, weirdo.” It’s been vexing him for hours.
Michaels turning up dead is yet another frustrating roadblock.
“You wanted to know if your father killed Riley,” Morgan tells him with a weary frustration equal to the one Spencer feels. “All signs point to no. You got what you need.”
“What I need is the truth.”
“If this print belongs to your dad, he could go away for a long time.” Morgan steps into his space, imposing, and Spencer can’t quite find it in himself to articulate that that’s the point.
His father is going to hurt somebody again, and soon. Twenty years is already too much of a cooling down period. If Spencer can get him off the streets, he can save a life. If he can’t get him for Riley’s murder, maybe he can get him for Michaels’. It doesn’t make as much sense, doesn’t add up against the evidence and conviction that he holds, but William Reid is a danger and Spencer will do anything to stop the inevitable. Even present a case that holds less water than the truth he knows.
Morgan manages to voice his convictions before he can. “You’re just determined to nail him, aren’t you? Doesn’t even matter what for.”
“If you don’t want to run it, I will,” Spencer tells him, heart pounding even as he holds Morgan’s gaze. He finds it strange, for a moment, being afraid of Morgan, before he realises it’s not Morgan he’s afraid of. It’s his father, and what his father is capable of, and what he knows will happen if Morgan stops him from stopping him.
Morgan glances wildly, even hopelessly, at Rossi, and then takes a step back. Spencer feels like he can breathe again. Morgan makes a call. Spencer settles into his relief for the entire trip back to Vegas—at least, until the call is returned, and yet another lead is snatched out of sight.
“It wasn’t your dad.”
Riley’s father confesses, and Spencer’s parents confess, and the case is all wrapped up in a little bow and shipped off ready for Christmas. Gary Michaels kills Riley Jenkins, so Lou Jenkins kills Gary Michaels, and Diana Reid watches, and William Reid makes sure none of them ever get caught. At least until Spencer arrives twenty years too late and undoes all of his dad’s careful work.
He thinks he would feel guilty for it, if he couldn’t feel the malice rolling off of his father in waves. There’s something cruel in William Reid’s eyes as he watches Spencer, and something taunting, like he knows that Spencer knows and also knows that Spencer has no way to prove it. Every lead has run dry, the case seems solved, and everyone else is happy to move on.
“But the knowing,” his father says, smile in his voice if not on his face, “you can’t burn that away.”
Spencer nearly cries from the weight of his failures. He apologises around numb lips, platitudes he doesn’t mean, and receives his parents’ comfort with a reluctant despair. The moroseness follows him all the way to the airport, where it resolves back into his prior agitated anxiety, causing him to pace back and forth in the terminal while he waits for their flight to be called.
“Reid, seriously,” Morgan says, “you’re gonna wear a hole in the floor with all that pacing. Or at least your shoes. Sit down.”
“Can’t,” Spencer returns. If he sits down, then this awful energy has nowhere to go, and he doesn’t know how he’ll react without an outlet.
“What’s bothering you?” Morgan asks after a moment. “And don’t say nothing, I can tell there’s something wrong.”
Spencer swallows down his instinctive I’m fine with annoyance. “I’ve just got this horrible feeling.”
“Yeah?” Morgan’s pressing for more details. He wants to understand. He wants to help. A fleeting hope rears its head that maybe Morgan will believe him.
“I feel like I got everything wrong. Like I really messed this one up.”
“Look, kid, we all make mistakes sometimes. Especially something like this, when it hits a little too close to home. It can be hard. I’ve been there. But we found the truth, and we did our best to mitigate the damage, and nobody got hurt. That’s the important thing. And now you have your answers, you can make your peace with it and move on.”
The hope dies just as quickly as it had been born. Spencer ceases his pacing abruptly, stopping a few steps in front of Morgan. “That’s not what I meant,” he says quietly. Then, louder, “I still think it was him, Morgan. I think we got the wrong guy and now Michaels is dead and my father has all the time in the world to hurt someone else.”
Morgan stares at him in disbelief and then lets out a derisive laugh. “Reid, are you hearing yourself? I know you have issues with your dad, man, but this is getting ridiculous. He’s innocent.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. Because we solved the case, and we followed the evidence, and we found that he didn’t do it.” Morgan’s tone is deeply frustrated. “C’mon, man, what’s gotten into you? You’re not usually this irrational.”
“You’re the one letting a murderer walk free and I’m being irrational?”
“Except he’s not a murderer, Reid! We just proved it! You have all the evidence!”
“Well then the evidence is wrong!” Spencer’s voice breaks. “I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but I know he killed Riley.”
“You’re not making any sense—”
“Whoa, what’s going on here?”
Rossi’s returned, three to-go coffee cups in his hands, and it’s his reappearance that makes Spencer remember where they are. He’s suddenly uncomfortably aware that they must be causing a scene, passing eyes on them as the crowd gives the two—now three—of them a wide berth. Somebody shouts a mocking, ableist slur towards them, and Spencer flinches, tears burning the back of his eyes. Neither Morgan nor Rossi react, other than to look at him in concern.
“Morgan’s not listening to me,” he says before Morgan can speak. “I keep trying to tell him that we made a mistake.”
“That’s because we didn’t make a mistake! We have DNA evidence, Reid, what else do you need?”
Rossi’s sharp eyes have seen something that Morgan hasn’t. He holds up a hand. Meets Spencer’s gaze, for all Spencer has ever been able to hold someone’s gaze. “Reid,” he says seriously, “you seriously still believe that your father killed that kid?”
Spencer nods, relief flooding his veins. Rossi’s taking him seriously. “I do,” he says, speaking so quickly that he almost trips over the words. “I don’t believe it, I know it.”
“And all the evidence we found to the contrary? Your parents’ confession?”
“It was wrong. It was wrong, or we made a mistake, or they lied to me, or—or something, I don’t know, I’ll figure it out. I just need some time. I just need someone to believe me.”
Rossi’s still staring at him, still serious, still weighing all of Spencer’s words with the gravity they deserve. It makes him feel seen. Makes him feel heard.
“Reid,” he says, “can you tell me what we call it when a person’s behaviour is driven by an unshakeable belief that cannot be changed despite direct evidence against it?”
Spencer is thrown by the question, by the change in subject, but his mind is moving too quickly and so he answers before he can figure out why it had been asked. “A delusion.”
And then he freezes.
He sees, in a detached way, Rossi’s jaw tighten. Sees Morgan’s eyes go wide as he takes an unconscious half-step back. Sees the crowd continue to give them a wide berth, almost as if afraid of the scene that’s unfolding. Fear trickles in, ice in his veins, and he thinks he might also be afraid of the scene that’s unfolding.
He swallows, and it hurts, and the tears pricking his eyes begin to make his vision blur.
“That’s not what’s happening here,” he says, and he still feels off-kilter, like he’d misjudged the distance of a step and fallen down the stairs. Stomach lurching, head pounding, limbs aching, unsure of which way is up and which is down.
Morgan says, “Reid,” and now his frustration is gone, replaced only by a sympathetic horror that tastes like bile.
“I’m not—I’m not crazy!” he insists.
“Of course you’re not,” Rossi reassures. “Nobody thinks you are.”
“But you just said—”
“I think you’re sick.” Rossi’s voice is quiet. “And I think that when we get home you should speak with a doctor. I think you need help, and I’m going to make sure you get that help.”
“No.” And now Spencer is full-on crying in the middle of the airport, reeling away from his two teammates as if he’s been struck. “Guys, no, that’s not—I’m not—this isn’t—”
“Kid,” Morgan says, and he sounds downright heartbroken. He takes a step forward towards him, comforting hands coming down on Spencer’s shoulders. His voice drops into the tone he uses to speak to victims, sometimes. “You’re okay. I promise you’re gonna be okay. But I’m gonna need you to calm down now, alright?”
And Spencer—wants to. He would love to calm down, actually, because his heart is racing and his lungs burn and he feels like he’s going to throw up. He would love to calm down because he’s on the verge of a panic attack in the middle of a crowded airport terminal and he hates breaking down in front of anyone but this many strangers is a new level of humiliation for him. He would love to calm down because maybe then Rossi and Morgan will take him seriously and realise that he’s right, that they’ve let a murderer walk free, that he’s not—
That he isn’t—
That this isn’t—
This can’t be—
“I’m not having a psychotic break,” he whispers, and his traitorous brain wonders if his steadfast belief in that fact is a delusion too.
Rossi insists that Spencer be seen as soon as possible, meaning an ER visit as soon as they land. Spencer would have put up a bigger fight if JJ hadn’t just given birth in the same hospital and he hadn’t been promised a chance to see her and the baby before being forced to wait for an ER psychiatrist in a crowded waiting room for hours.
He at least manages to convince Morgan and Rossi to wait for him in the ER after checking him in, making his own way to JJ’s room and knocking gently on the doorframe as he pokes his head in. “Is there room for one more in here?” he asks.
“Spence, hi.” JJ’s voice is soft, exhaustion belying her every move. She seems happy to see him, and a part of him wonders if this will be the last time that’s true.
“Welcome back.” Hotch nods to him, and Spencer nods back, and it’s surreal, after hours with a Morgan and Rossi who seem convinced that he’s some sort of delusional ticking time bomb, to be treated like a normal and rational human being. To be treated like he’s still the respected genius Dr Reid, and that there’s nothing wrong with him.
He forces the thoughts out of his mind and does his best to focus on the reason he’s really here. “Wow. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” Will nods.
“How is it that I just went through fifteen hours of labour and you look worse than I do?” JJ teases.
Spencer tries not to flinch.
(Schizophrenia is characterised by two clusters of symptoms—positive and negative. Addition and subtraction. People usually only think about the positive symptoms, the hallucinations, the delusions, the disordered speech—little attention is paid to the negative symptoms, the loss of ability to care for oneself, resulting in both physical and psychological self-neglect. Looking terrible is, in fact, a symptom of schizophrenia, in as much as it has often been a symptom of being Spencer Reid in the past few years.)
“No, don’t be ridiculous,” he says, too quiet, and he’s not sure if he’s speaking to JJ or himself. His next words are for her, though: “You look beautiful.”
That seems to set off some unspoken cue, Will leading everyone else out of the room on a hunt for coffee, leaving Reid alone with JJ and her baby. He tries not to feel nervous at the prospect.
“You okay?” JJ asks him.
“Yeah, yeah, you?”
“Yeah, yeah, you sure? ‘Cause there’s… there’s something I want to ask you, but it can wait.”
Spencer’s not sure it can. Not if Rossi and Morgan are right. Maybe not even if they’re wrong. “What is it?”
“Will and I were talking, and, um… We want you to be Henry’s godfather.”
There’s ice in his veins. It should be an honour, but with the revelations of the last twelve hours, it feels like a death sentence. “I don’t even know,” he stammers. “I-I don’t know…”
“Here. Do you want to hold him?”
He takes a step back when she motions to pass the baby over. “I—I shouldn’t—Rossi thinks I might be sick, actually, I’m supposed to go meet him in the ER after this—”
“What?” She gapes at him. “You should have said! Spence, you don’t have to be here if you’re not well.”
“I-I wanted to be here. Sorry, I can go—”
“No!” She grabs at his arm, baby cradled against her chest with the other arm. “It’s alright, seriously. You don’t have to leave. We’ve really thought about this, you know? If anything should happen to us, it’s up to you and Garcia to make sure this boy gets into Yale.”
Spencer has half a mind to make a joke about the choice of school. Yale had been his backup school—Dr Spencer Reid could get his godson into CalTech with one phone call. He’d do it, too, for all he generally finds nepotism distasteful. But that would require him to be this baby’s godfather, and being this baby’s godfather is a responsibility he’s too cautious to accept.
If he’s right, then he’s the son of a law-evading pedophile and murderer; if Rossi is right, then he’s his mother’s son in the worst possible way, doomed to spend the rest of his life betrayed by his own mind. Either way, it’s too terrible of a fate to inflict on the infant in JJ’s arms.
“I’m flattered, JJ, really,” he stammers, “but I can’t—I couldn’t possibly—”
“Spence, there’s really no one else we would rather ask,” JJ reassures.
He shakes his head. “No, it’s not—” He glances back. The others are still not here. He lowers his voice and tells her, “Rossi and Morgan think I’m sick.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that,” JJ says slowly. “It’s why you’re not holding him, remember?”
Spencer swallows. “Sick like my mom sick,” he clarifies, and watches as horrified realisation dawns on her face.
“God, Spence, I’m so sorry.”
Spencer shakes his head. “So I can’t—I can’t be his godfather, because if something happens to the two of you, I can’t guarantee—I won’t be able to—”
JJ looks at him, heartbroken, then down at her baby, and then back up at him.
“I still want you to be his godfather,” she says quietly.
“But I’m—”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. Take it from someone who was actually raised by someone with schizophrenia, you don’t want—”
“We do,” JJ says firmly. “You’re not your mom, Spence. Even if you are sick like her, that doesn’t mean you’re going to end up in the exact same place. And even if you do, I know you’ll still love Henry. I mean, you love him this much now, and you’ve known him for all of five minutes. The fact that you’re so freaked out by this only proves to me that you can be trusted with his wellbeing.”
“That’s a lot of trust in me.” His voice comes out as a whisper.
“Let me trust you?” she whispers back.
And despite everything, he finds he cannot say no to that.
After hours in the cramped and uncomfortable waiting room chairs, surrounded by a whispering and judgemental crowd, the ER psychiatrist cannot deliver any concrete answers. She is able to determine, through a series of questions and psychometric tests, that Spencer is currently experiencing an acute psychotic episode, something that makes his skin prickle to confirm. It sits uncomfortably up against his understanding of the world, and it doesn’t make any sense, even if Rossi and Morgan’s expressions convey the opposite sentiment. Fear overwhelms him, heady on his tongue, and it takes all he has to sit there and quietly receive the news.
Whether or not he has schizophrenia, however, is another question entirely. Schizophrenia requires the duration of the symptoms to be at least six months, and the longest they can provide evidence of his condition for is several days. She schedules follow-up appointments with his primary care physician and another psychiatrist, prescribes a round of antipsychotics, and records a preliminary diagnosis of schizophreniform disorder, to be reviewed after a six-month period. There is a chance that this is temporary.
There is equal chance that this is forever.
Morgan wraps an arm around his shoulders as they head out into the parking lot. The sun is not quite ready to rise, the sky light with pre-dawn. Morgan asks him, “How’re you feeling, pretty boy?”
“Scared,” Spencer admits quietly.
“Anyone would be,” Morgan reassures. “We’ve got your back, you know. Whatever you need, we’ll be there to help.”
He’s warmed by the reassurance and distressed by it all the same. “The worst part is,” he continues, “that I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I don’t know if I’m scared because I might be losing my mind… or if I’m scared because my dad’s still out there, and I’m still certain he’s going to kill again.”
Morgan’s grip around him grows tighter, a silent show of comfort where words have failed. Spencer leans into it, closing his eyes, allowing tears to prick against the lids. The future is full of uncertainty: he doesn’t yet know how this will affect his job, or his relationships with the team, or his own self-image. He doesn’t know what or how he’s going to tell his mom, if he tells her at all. He doesn’t know when his father will strike again or if anyone will catch him next time he kills a kid in cold blood. He doesn’t know if the fear that has driven him for days now will ever go away.
What he does know for certain is that the sun is rising, that Morgan is holding him, that Rossi had paid for the ER visit and the prescription, that JJ still trusts him with her son’s life. He clings to those things like a liferaft. The diagnosis may not make any sense, and reality may have sidestepped him and left him reeling, but there are still parts of this whole thing that he can salvage. He has to believe that, so he holds onto it with all his might and banishes the traitorous part of his mind that has begun to question if every conviction he holds is another delusion.
In the face of uncertainty, he needs something to be true, and so he decides that it’s this: there are still many things worth living for.
He opens his eyes and walks forward with his fear, Morgan at his side and Rossi just ahead. They pile into the car and Spencer allows himself to sag against the window, watching the world fly by as exhaustion rears its head. He holds the bag holding his new prescription in his hands gently, like a baby bird that has fallen from the nest. Everything about this is new and dangerous and terrifying, but the drive home is the same as it’s always been. He’s seen off at his apartment, and he fixes himself a quick breakfast to take alongside his first dose of medication before collapsing into bed.
It ends like this: Dr Spencer Reid falls asleep with the sunrise on the first day of the rest of his life, and for the first time in days, he does not dream at all.