Hey everyone, this is K, not J. I posted this on my AO3 account but I decided to go ahead and cross post it over here to J's FFN account, since I don't have one of my own.
So J and I got into a drunken argument and he challenged me to write a nephilim story kind of like his series, only how I think it should've been done, because apparently drunken-me had fantastic ideas about what should've been done with a nephilim Spencer. My brain went two directions. The other direction seemed to traumatize people, so I wrote out this version. Basically, it's all based off this question here:
"What if instead of finding Jesse, the young Cambion, a case took them to Vegas where they found a nephilim—adult Spencer with barely growing powers, visiting his mother?"
I took it from there and ran with it. This here is the prologue, so it's short, and I hope you guys like it.
There had never been a moment of his life where Spencer Reid hadn't known that he was, different. Even when he'd been so very young, he'd always known it, always accepted that it was just a part of him. He was different. Sometimes it was a bad thing—earning him mockery and beatings from his fellow classmates—but sometimes it was a good thing too. His mother had always made him feel like the things that made him different were also what made him special. It was something that he loved her dearly for.
No matter how different he became, no matter what happened, his mother always had some kind of spin on it to help put it into a more positive light. She never panicked. The same couldn't be said for his father. Where William feared the things his son could do, Diana embraced them.
Outside of the home she taught Spencer to keep them to himself and to be discreet, because discretion could keep him safe and alive. Inside the home, she treated the things he could do like they were normal. Like it was no big deal that he could make things float through the air, or memorize a text with just a single glance. Even when he told her about the pretty light that lived inside of him, she just smiled at him and brought him up in her bed with her and she'd lay there for hours and listen to him talk about his light and all the things it could do. She never made him feel like a freak. And when his father did, when William lashed out in an anger born of his fear, she was right there to defend her son every time she could. It only made Spencer love her more.
In that home, Spencer grew up knowing that he was different and that some people would celebrate it while others would fear it. That belief was reinforced when he was twelve and graduated from the Las Vegas public high school, again when he was thirteen and started college, and again when he was fifteen and he earned his first doctorate. He learned it even more when he was twenty and had three doctorates and three B.A.'s to his name. When the FBI came to him and asked him to join, when Jason Gideon hand picked him to join the BAU and he became the youngest to ever graduate the Academy, Spencer knew it was because he was different.
His team never knew just how different he really was, but what they did know, they may have teased him for but they also embraced him for it. They accepted him as who he was. And again, Spencer found himself in a place where there were a few who feared his difference, but where he was surrounded by those who enjoyed it.
He just never knew how different he truly was.
Not until Georgia.
Not until he was kidnapped during a case and made to face himself inside a small little shack at the hands of someone who swore they were doing God's will. Not until the day he was drugged and beaten until he overdosed and died on camera in front of his friends, and was brought back to life by the very man who killed him.
Spencer was brought down lower than ever before in that cabin and he brought himself down even lower in the weeks following as he lost himself in the very same thing that had caught him up there. He sought oblivion in the tip of a needle and for a short little while, it worked. It numbed him until he couldn't think or feel. Until he didn't feel different anymore; he didn't feel at all. He was the same as any junkie curled up on the streets.
Nothing penetrated that fog around him until the day his inattention and slowed reactions almost cost one of his friends their life because he'd been too low, craving too much, and hadn't drawn his gun in time. If Derek hadn't been there to draw as well, Emily could've very well lost her life because of Spencer. That was the moment he knew he had to stop. And that marked the moment that his life began to change, forever.
Spencer didn't notice at first that there was really anything 'wrong' with him, so to speak. All of the strange things that he noticed he just attributed to coming down off the Dilaudid. When the telekinesis that had been there his whole life started to go a little haywire, a little stronger than he'd ever noticed it before, he just figured it was sort of the same principal as the mood swings or the fluctuations of energy that he got as his body adjusted to no longer having the drug. When he started to get headaches, he figured that was a normal part of withdrawal. Even the growing ache in his back could be considered part of his withdrawals.
It was the other things that worried him.
Having grown up with a schizophrenic for a mother, it made Spencer painfully aware of the mental issues a person could suffer from and the likelihood that he could one day end up like her. So when he started to feel strange bursts of what felt like other people's emotions, or whispered words when he couldn't see anyone around him talking, he got scared. More than just scared—terrified.
No matter how old he got, when he became this afraid, there was only one person he'd ever been able to turn to.
Arranging for the time off was easy. Everyone had been so worried about him lately it wasn't difficult to convince Aaron that he just needed a bit of time. Soon enough Spencer was on a flight to Vegas to go and visit the one person in the world he knew he could count on more than anyone else—his mother. He was beyond lucky that she was in the middle of a streak of 'good days' when he arrived. She was coherent, knew where she was and who she was, and she knew him on sight.
He missed the days where he could talk to her about his problems. Where he didn't have to worry about cameras and doctors and nurses that might overhear what he said and try to lock him away with her. How could he tell her that he was hearing voices and feeling other people's emotions and not risk having anyone who overheard him think that he was crazy too? How could he tell her that the light he'd always carried inside of him seemed so much bigger, so much more, than it ever had before? He couldn't tell her about the very private, very discreet doctor that he saw while there, who looked at his head and his back and proclaimed that there were no physical reasons for either one to be hurting him the way that they were.
He definitely couldn't tell her about how he'd been curled up in his motel bed with his head pounding and had wished for a bottle of aspirin or something to ease it, only to have a bottle appear in his hand.
It was that one that truly brought home that this wasn't him going crazy, that the whispers and feelings that he was picking up weren't a byproduct of a mental break brought on by his kidnapping and subsequent addiction.
These were his powers, and they were growing.
That made it all so much harder to talk about. Because he'd been raised to keep this part of him quiet. He couldn't let other people know.
It wasn't just doctors and his coworkers and the Bureau that Spencer had to worry about finding out about these things—it was Hunters, too.
His years away from home had opened up a world for him that he hadn't known existed when he was young. The 'monsters' that he'd seen as a child and shied away from, the terrifying faces that sometimes lurked underneath people's skin, took on a whole new meaning when he saw them as an adult. The very first time he met a Hunter who saved him from one of those monsters, a monster he later learned was a demon possessing a human, Spencer had been full of questions and he'd been lucky enough to have a Hunter who had willingly answered them all. He'd explained about the whole supernatural world to Spencer and opened his eyes to so many things he'd never realized before. Not only did it answer his questions about other things, it answered a few about himself as well.
Spencer had walked away from that meeting with the knowledge that he was something supernatural, though he had no idea what, and that there were people out there who hunted things like him. He learned to respect the men and women who hunted and kept them safe from the things that no one else believed even existed—and he learned to fear them.
Little did he know it was Hunters who, in the end, would hurt him the most, and who would help to save him.
