AN: Heed these warnings. This is angst central. I'm stressed like a stressy stressball at the moment and this is how I've dealt with all that stressy stressballing. Sorry, characters we know and love. I PROMISE I'LL MAKE IT UP TO THEM LATER.
Warning for heavy angst, possible character death, sexual content, heavy references to recreational drug use and drug addiction, and grief/mourning.
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Chapter One: The Stumble
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"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
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When he's high, she haunts him.
She's in the pinch of the needle in his arm. The rush of the drug in his veins. The thrill of pleasure that follows; the comfortable nothing that sets in after.
What are you looking for, Dr. Reid, the federally mandated shrink they'd sent him to after the incident had asked him.
Oblivion, Reid thinks numbly, and laughs, and smiles, and depresses the syringe. And here it is.
When he's high, she haunts him.
At least until he finds his oblivion, and then he thinks of nothing at all.
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She falls in love with him on a grey day. It's a grey, whiny, piece of shit day, and the weather matches her mood. They're being run through yet another self-defence training session, and Reid is—yet again—failing anything even minutely physical.
Because, despite their hilarity, Morgan's wincing is getting on her nerves, she takes Reid aside on their lunch break and tries to teach him how to fall.
"Come on, skinny, you gotta roll out of the impact. Don't land like a fish."
Reid blinks up at her, doe-eyed and wheezing on the mat. "Why would you have just thrown a fish?" he gasps, coughing, and maybe she shouldn't have thrown him quite so hard. "Your analogies are illogical."
"You're illogical," she counters, and bends down to help him up. His hands are wide on hers, warm and bony, and she thrills like she always does when he touches her. It's rare, his touch. Rare and exciting, and damnit, it's just because he's attractive underneath the dork, that's absolutely it. Absolutely. "And you're going to lose your field agent status if they think you can't protect yourself if disarmed, genius."
He blinks. Smiles. The smile is shy and downward cast and if she didn't know him better, she'd call it flirting. It is flirting. The pad of his thumb skates over her palm. She's hot and itchy and a little bit silly all at once, and she blames the weather.
"Well, lucky I have a gun," he says, brushing down his pants.
"A gun you can't shoot." He's standing too close. Too close and too warm and he smells like Reid and she wants to tuck her nose against his neck and see if she can work out the intricacies of that scent. "I'm thinking of taking you outta the field myself. I'd…" The amusement vanishes. Too close. Physically, and everything else. Too close, too young, too much. "…hate to see you hurt."
He steps closer. Their shoulders brush. His breath is warm and coffee-sour. "Lucky I have a team to watch my back," he adds, and picks a blade of grass from her shirt. "My trust in you is implicit."
Later that day, he lands faultlessly and then performs probably the only perfect takedown he's managed since he was a goofy-eyed spit of a thing at the academy. She's oddly proud, and more than a little turned on.
It's three months before Hankel, and she falls in love with him that day.
She'll remember that later.
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He's contemptable, and she knows it. He can feel it in her touch, her eyes, her scornful gaze.
What's wrong with you, she mouths at him when he lets the mask slip on a case, and he just grins and deflects and hides how foul he really is. When he turns away, his shoulder bag bumps accusingly against his pelvic bone and he hears the ghost of a clink.
Don't forget me, whisper his weaknesses, and he wonders when it all went wrong. Remembers a grey day and blue mats and learning how to fall.
He's falling now, and there's no escaping this impact.
It wasn't supposed to be a date. They'd gone to a movie, their usual thing, but the power went out halfway through. Reid rattled off a list of famous power outages, complete with reasons and time-frames, and to shut him up she took him to an all-night ice-creamery that she knew would let him try as many flavours as he wanted if she smiled in just the right way.
And she's sitting here, he has sherbet on his chin, and it hits her that they're cheerfully debating the merits—or lack thereof—of Morgan's taste in music while wearing their nice clothes. Nice clothes, in a dinky little diner with red pleather chairs that squeak and groan, and tables that Reid had winced at until she'd asked for a cloth to wipe them down. This is a date.
It's a goddamn date from an eighties teenage coming of age movie, and she's frozen with the knowledge.
"Em?" he asks, with the smile that's just the right centre between ridiculous and intense, and she can't find her words. Watches his fingers shredding the thin paper napkins, showering a snowstorm of white onto the oddly textured tabletop. His ice cream is melting in its bowl. It's a disgusting mix of every flavour that promises to be at least eighty percent sugar, and to cover her panic she reaches out and swipes her finger across the lip of the bowl, tasting it.
It tastes like sugar and blue, and she pulls a face. "Gross," she grumbles, reaching for a napkin, and he's laughing at her. "Your diet is disgraceful."
The expression he pulls isn't quite a pout, but it could almost be one, and she scowls at it. "It is not," he protests, dipping his own finger into the sugary goop and tasting it with no compunction for germs or for how dry her mouth goes watching his tongue flick over his bony knuckle. "I can cook."
There's two choices here. Brush that comment off, tease him a little. Things stay the same. On solid ground.
Or she can call his bluff. Prove it, she'll say, smiling in the way that gets the attention of the people she intends it to, and he will. He'll take her back to his compact little apartment, cook a meal that he'll probably be fucking fantastic at, she'll finally offer to wipe that tiny smear of sherbet from the jaw that's only faintly promising scruff, and they'll fall. Fall together. The sex will be fine, he'll kiss her like he wants to learn every part of her, and she won't be able to think of his hands in the same way again.
The spoon in his hand scrapes against the bowl. In the corner of the diner, a girl is chattering into her phone. Two men sit too close together and try to pretend no one has noticed. The waitress is bored. It's late. Emily feels reckless.
"Prove it," she whispers, and he does.
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She comes to his apartment one night and he turns her away. He can't do this to her. Can't drag her into this spiralling catastrophe that's become his life. If he does, she'll drown in it, just like he's drowning.
"Let me in," she snaps through the closed door, and he's barely buzzed and thinking longingly of oblivion. There's blood on the crook of his arm from where he's itched the red rash of bumps scarring his skin, and when he pokes at it, the skin is sluggish. Dehydrated, probably, he thinks, and holds back a laugh that she'll hear. Deal with that. If you let your health slip, they'll notice.
Of course they've noticed. They're profilers.
They just don't care.
The door smacks painfully into his foot when he yanks it open, and he knows the dim lighting hides his shame. Doesn't let her get a good look at him.
"Why won't you leave me alone?" he snarls, and channels all his pain and frustration into this moment. Make her hurt like he's been hurt. Make her go away and let him fall. "Why are you here?"
Her mouth is set in a mulish line, her jaw stubborn, and he wants to kiss that stubbornness away, feel her melt and become pliable under his hands and his lips. Wants and wants and wants, but not as much as he just wants to be high. "You need help," she says, and it's true, really, but not for the reasons she thinks he does.
"Why do you think you know me?" he says, instead of all of this. "We've been working together, what, a few months? What gives you the right? Because we fucked, Emily? Is that it? I didn't realize casual sexual relationships gave you the right to my life."
Reeling. She's reeling, stunned. He digs the knife in deeper.
"You're seeing more where there isn't anything," he says, and smiles cruelly. A bladed smile. A mocking smile. The kind people give children when they're being particularly obtuse. "I need help? I'm not the one clinging desperately to the slightest hint of affection. Want me to profile you? Desperate to succeed, abandonment issues, commitment—"
"Fuck you." She hates him. He can hear it. It sends a cold thrill of triumph and horror up his spine, something miserable and weak inside him curling up small and dying just a little. "Fuck you, Spencer Reid."
He laughs. "I don't think so. I try not to repeat my mistakes."
It works. She leaves.
He makes sure, this time, that he's high enough she can't slip into his thoughts.
No matter how much she tries.
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It's not just sex.
She wishes it was.
Reid fucks like he does everything else. With a careful, loving passion that takes her apart again and again and again and doesn't let her catch her breath. It's their first time, probably their only time, and she's been with so many men before, but never like this. Never so loved. There's a way he touches her that says without words that she's cherished, adored, and she thinks privately that he might touch every woman he's with like this. She seriously doubts Spencer Reid has ever invited someone into his bed he doesn't love, even just a little.
But it's the kind of sex that's impossible to put aside, impossible to forget. The kind that slips back into her mind in the early hours of the morning; not when she's feeling horny and empty, but when she's feeling bereft, slightly alone, thinking of something more. The something that leads to Sunday morning pancakes and three am trips to the ice-creamery and all the kinds of things that she normally runs a mile at.
She hates him a little, for doing this to her.
It starts in the kitchen, just like she thought it would. He cooks. He's great at it. "It's just chemistry," he says, and invites her to taste the sauce. This is where it goes off script. She doesn't initiate. He does. Him with his wide, steady hands and his clever, clever mouth, and she's trapped from the first touch of his lips.
Trapped as he lifts her onto the counter, her legs around his waist. Trapped as his hands slip under her shirt to rest around her sides, holding her firm. Protective. Trapped as he kisses her mouth and her jaw and, once, with painful care, the lines around her eyes that show when she smiles. She smiles a lot this night.
He takes her to the bedroom, eventually, and continues undoing her with every sweep of his hands. The surface of his glasses misting with the heat from her body as he explores her with his mouth, he's intense and focused and she feels like a case, a puzzle he needs to solve.
She tries to turn it into a joke to stave off the panic it brings. "Jeez, Spence. Anyone would think you're in love with me, the care that you're taking. I'm not going to break."
He blinks at her through the thick lenses, eyes dark and hazy, and doesn't say a word, just pushes slowly inside her, those eyes flickering shut.
She was wrong.
There's nothing fine about this. She's falling, and it's thrilling.
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"I'm concerned, Reid." Hotch isn't sitting like he normally does on the rare occasions Reid is called into his office. He's straight backed and serious faced, and he stresses the I'm to hide that fact that it wasn't him who'd voiced those concerns.
"You mean Agent Prentiss is concerned," Reid says flatly, and notes his slip up a moment too late. Agent Prentiss. Not Emily or Em or even just Prentiss. He may as well slap on a glowing sign that says I have an addictive personality and this is the only way I know how to protect her from that.
"We are all concerned," Hotch says mildly, and slips on a caring mask. A concerned mask. A lying mask. Reid feels his leg begin jittering against the floor, his arm itching, his fingers digging through the fabric of his pants. Micro-expressions he can't control. Tics. His behaviour betraying him. His team betraying him. "We're worried that after Hankel—"
Reid stands. "Am I receiving a formal warning?" he asks. Blunt.
"No, but—"
"Is this meeting mandatory?"
"Reid—"
"Has my conduct been unprofessional or hindered our work in any fashion?" Reid controls his breathing, slows his chest from heaving. Stops the quiver in his legs. Hides his hands behind his back. Stares his boss down in a way the old Reid never would have. Too bad, he thinks savagely, that that Reid never left Hankel's shack. You wouldn't have let him drown.
Hotch stands too. Alpha male can't handle a direct threat to his command. Posturing. "No, your conduct is adequate," he responds, and his voice is sharp. "Reid, sit—"
"Then, I'm leaving. Sir." Reid adds the last to soften the blow, and doesn't look back.
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Hankel takes him from them and they drag him back. Emily has nightmares after those horrifying three days. Nightmares of Reid leaning over a half-dug grave with his expression hungry, and her being a second too slow to yank him back. Nightmares of the gun going off. Nightmares of a chair and a graveyard and an empty seat on the jet.
Nightmares of the moment he'd seized and fallen still. She can't bear that. Can't bear imagining it. It breaks her to do so.
She can't even cling to him, despite this tentative thing that's still three months going strong, because he's shaken and sick and something of him shattered a little in that shack. She has to be the strong one, and she is, at first.
They release him from the hospital, and she's there when she can be. Makes sure he's eating. Makes sure he's taking his medication. Makes sure he's not drowning in boredom. Tries not to notice that he never turns the lights off anymore, and that if she throws a careless arm over him in her sleep, she'll wake up to him silent and shaking, staring blankly at the ceiling. He kicks the covers off in the night, sleeps with his back to the wall, and they're all pretending not to notice the cracks.
But she can't judge him, because she was worse. After Doyle. After everything.
She was worse.
And she can't even tell him that. Doesn't know if it would help him if she did.
Cases take her away. When she comes back, he's always a little more distant, a little less. This doesn't get better.
Instead, it gets so much worse.
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He's out. He's out; there's no dealer available short-notice stupid enough to sell to a fed, and he's not so careless that he'll go walking the streets to find what he needs.
It's not even just the drug that's tearing at him. It's been months. Months since her. Months since he chased her away with his words and his bladed smiles, and he's alone like he deserves and sorry for it. Pitying himself. Pathetic.
There are other options.
Other options for the oblivion he wants to stop her haunting him.
Other options to pretend that she never went away. Different drugs, different women. In one of them, surely, he'll find some semblance of what he needs.
Just this one time, he promises himself, and dresses with care. He's back at work, so he has to be cautious. Nothing that will linger into the workweek. His face is scruffy, two days unshaven, and he likes that because it makes him less Spencer and more whoever he is now. Just this one time so my appearance doesn't deteriorate. So they don't notice.
Rationalizing, another part of him whispers, and he shoves it carelessly away.
The club is loud, the music thudding and reverberating through his bones and his flesh and the jitter to his hands, and he's surrounded by people falling with no one to stop them. The floor is sticky under his shoes. There's a drink in his hands he doesn't remember ordering, the flashing lights are making his head throb along with the bass, and he finds what he needs. Takes what he needs.
Just for tonight. This one time.
The rush is old and new all at once and he's alive with it.
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It's a terrible idea, being dragged along to a club that Derek freaking Morgan of all people picked. He always finds the seediest ones; the ones with the grossest bars and the most over-priced drinks and the ever-present worry that their night out is going to end in a drugs bust or a brawl. Morgan seems to thrive on it.
She doesn't mind, not really, but normally by this time of the night Morgan's slipped away with his choice of lady, and she's found someone to keep her occupied. Failing that, she dances alone. She's rarely bored.
Tonight, she's bored. She's edgy. She's preoccupied with work, with Reid's blank eyes, with Hotch's quiet worry and Gideon's fatalistic assertion that it will all magically fix itself in the end. The bar under her fingers is waxy, and she drums along with the music, and scans the crowd. Profiles people just for fun. She's on the drunker side of almost fucked up, and should probably stop, but she's waiting for things to get fun.
The girl with the blonde hair and the purple high-tops is here to get back at her boyfriend, that boy is gay and hiding it, the man over there has children and wants to be anywhere but here, the couple against the wall are—
Familiar.
The rush leaves her giddy. She blinks, squints. Can't be sure she's seen what she's seen, but the man has his back to her and she knows that back. Knows the shape of it, the slightly-hunched body language, as though the man behind the aggressively shitty posture is trying to be less than what he is. The hair that's a shade too long and always messy. Even the long-sleeved shirts he's taken to wearing. She knows that one. It's hard to tell under the blue of the strobing lights, but she's sure it's the one she'd splashed coffee on when he'd slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a duck.
The rush is followed by cold. Because he's pressed against a girl that's wearing a shirt that shows too much tit and almost too much belly, and that's not his type. Maybe she's wrong. Maybe it's not him. The walk over there is long, growing longer, and she taps his shoulder as the girl looks at her oddly, young and wide-eyed and so fucking precious Emily could vomit.
It is him. He turns and stares at her like she's a ghost. Like he's unsure.
The music is too loud to talk, so she throws her hands up in a what the fucking fuck gesture, and he cocks his head and examines her slowly. Smiles to see her. It's a soft smile and she relaxes a little. It's a smile she hasn't seen in a while, and it makes her reckless. The girl complains, but Emily rolls her eyes at her—she's just so young, and she doesn't really think at the time that they're probably the same age because Reid stopped looking young months ago—and grabs Reid's arm. Drags him away. Attempts to. The ground is a little wobbly and she wobbles with it.
He catches her. Of course he does, she thinks, and feels herself leaning gratefully into that firm embrace. Like they've stepped back in time. He's himself again, holding her like she's precious, and she remembers a grey day and falling in love.
Talk. They need to talk. There's a corridor leaning away, staff only, but fuck it. It's quiet, secluded, and there's a bathroom with a lock on it that she can drag him into and find out what the hell he's doing here, out of his element.
That's the plan. That's not what happens. What happens is this:
She closes and locks the door, turns to face him, and their mouths crash together. He kisses her ravenously, possessively, almost violently, and she's fucking gone. Their teeth clack, her arse and back hit the door, and his hands are roaming every part of her and not pausing to take anything in. It's fast, crazy, reckless, and she's fucking gagging for it before he's even thought it though.
His hips bump her thigh. He's hard already, gasping into her mouth until he slips his way across to her ear, tracing the lobe with a hungry tongue. Back to her mouth as his hands hike up the dress she'd second-guessed wearing tonight, fingers between her legs in a heartbeat, slipping inside her underwear, slipping inside her. There's no compunction or pause before she's suddenly being roughly fucked by his fingers in the gleaming staff bathroom of a seedy club. It's not like him. It's not like him at all, but his eyes are hooded prettily and shuttered shut, and when she moans and bucks onto those fingers, he bites down hard enough on her lip to draw blood.
Copper. She tastes copper and she tastes him, and he pulls away, licks her lip once quickly, pulling his hand free and bringing it to his mouth.
Jesus. Jesus.
If she wasn't gone before he'd pressed those slick fingers to his lips, tasting them, she fucking is now. Hands on his pants, on his zip, and before she can think twice he's bare and heavy in her hands as she guides him between her legs. "Wait," he says, fumbling with his pocket with fingers that are suddenly clumsy. It's the first time he's spoken and his words aren't as sharp as usual, hazed with alcohol and lust. "Condom."
He's taking too long. Taking too long and she wants and she wants and she growls with frustration. "I trust you," she mutters, letting her head slip forward, dizzy and needy, and he shakes his head and ignores her recklessness. Lucky one of us is sensible, she thinks giddily, closing her eyes as the foil packet appears between his fingers like a magic trick.
When it comes, her eyes are still closed and it's a thrilling shock. He thrusts home with a throaty grunt and without a pause, lifting her and slamming her back against the door in his haste. It's sudden, good, and she lets her head tilt back to smack against the door as well with a croaked moan. And again as he pulls back in a long smooth stroke that ends in a vehement thrust forward, finding his rhythm and tapping it against the door with her body in a way that makes her glad for their seclusion.
It's not like last time, not at all, but she doesn't really care because it's edgy and angry and feels rather like what she'd expect when she remembers the venom in his voice aimed at her. There are demons between them, in the stroke of his hip and the scratch of her nails on his skin, and she won't bring them to life by naming them just yet.
She's sinking, falling, on the bare edge of coming just from the tension of it, when he shudders and slumps against her, his rhythm becoming erratic and tense until finally, finally, skipping two beats as he pulses inside of her. It's primal, this sex, so she's shocked when his lips brush her shoulder and he chokes out an audible, Emily, that sounds hurt and shaken and so fucking tender that she immediately aches with it. It's followed by a groan that's more of a whimper, and she's knocked off whatever edge she was dancing on, suddenly cold and sober and vividly aware that she's missed something vital.
He pulls out. Stumbles away. And that's not right. He's never come first, never left her hanging, and his head is low, his hands uncertain.
"Hey." Her voice is soft. Soothing. "Hey, hey, it's okay." Her fingers catch his arm, try to catch him, but he jerks free.
"Don't." And it's back, the coldness. Like a slap in the face, he looks up and at her like she's a stranger, and she feels sick. "Don't touch me like that. Don't. Don't."
It's the repetition that gives it away.
Emily blinks. Peers closer. "Spencer," she begins, and his gaze snaps up again from where it's drifted down.
"What?" he croaks, and she winces at the dryness of his throat. "I never told you my name."
His eyes are huge, his body shaking, and she's going to be sick. Is sick. It suddenly slams home, all of it. Everything that hadn't made sense. Everything that now makes sense.
"You're fucked up," she says, and steps closer. He backs away until his back hits the wall and she wants to grab him and slap him and hug him and do his fucking pants up so he stops looking so obscenely lost, but instead she grabs his chin hard enough to bruise and stares into those eyes, the pinpoint pupils that see everything and nothing. "Oh, what the fuck have you done? What did you take? How much?"
He blinks. Once. Again. Mouth slipping open. "Emily?" he slurs, shaking, and his eyes are shuttering closed again. He sags in her arms, sinking to the ground, and she shoves away everything that this moment could have been, and makes sure he lands safely. "Don't. Don't tell Emily…"
She knows what to do. Does it on autopilot. Check pulse. Check airway. Call for help. She calls Morgan. She doesn't think about him as Reid or Spencer or anything that will make this more than what it is; just her helping someone in need of assistance, not a friend or a lover or a co-worker or anything that she could lose tonight.
She just does it on autopilot, and later it will sink in. Sink in and not let her go. The horror of this night.
He's high, and she's haunted by it.