The swat team advanced through the house with the BAU agents, swiftly pacing with their machine guns held high, pressed against their faces and closing in fast on the lost souls in the basement. She sat in the dank, dark sub layer chained against the chair, battling her eyelids for control and consciousness. The decrepit man hobbled over to her, jaundiced and ill, and began to inject her upper arm with a clear fluid, despite feeble protests. Sluggishly her head bobbed up and down, the darkness inevitably crept over her entire body, chilling it, and she felt her heart rate begin to slow...slow right down. Then, gradually but rapidly, the darkness took her.
The door of the basement splintered, and immediately Derek Morgan ran in, bounding down the steps, taking them 4 at a time. His face was a tropic thunder on a blank canvas, echoed in every twitch of the muscular arm he used to hold the firearm to the unsub's head. The rest of the swat team spilled into the room, filing behind each other one by one while wielding their firearms menacingly. The panic and chaos of the raid masked the importance of the woman tied to the chair in the far corner of the damp basement, slipping ever so quietly into oblivion. Spencer ran down the steps, unlike Morgan taking them almost obsessively one at a time. He jolted to a halt and scanned the room, desperate to find the one person with whom he'd always shared everything. Almost like they were magnetised to her very presence, his eyes were drawn to the darkened corner and almost as if a flare ignited inside him, he knew she wasn't gone yet. Spencer was a calculated and overall calm person normally, however as soon as her slumped figure caught his attention his composure frayed and tears began pouring down his face. She felt cold and her heart rate was still gradually decreasing, blood pressure dropping...losing reality. He ran to her and knelt down beside the chair, checked her pulse while mouthing his steadily streaming thoughts and gently untied her before easing her to the floor.
"Harriet!" He called nervously to her, not nervous because he was shy, but nervous because he didn't want to lose his best connection to his own humanity...his best friend.
"HARRIET!" He called again, only slightly louder. He gently slapped her cheek, trying to provoke some form of reaction, but it was no use. He felt her pulse again, desperation beginning to kick in...
She had no pulse.
"Oh god, no, no, no, Harriet! Harriet!" He kept repeating. When she didn't respond, he bent his head down until his ear was nearly touching her mouth, staring intently at her chest to see if her shirt was moving. He realised she wasn't breathing, he took a deep breath himself, as if steeling himself for what he was about to do. 'CPR rarely works' he thought to himself over and over. 'She won't survive' he was certain this was it. In sheer terror and desperation, he wiped the tears from his face with his bare arm, catching the soft skin on his nose against the cold steel of his watch and cutting it, however he ignored it and opened the first 3 buttons on her blood soaked shirt; emotionally unprepared to touch the blood that drenched it.
"I'm sorry." He choked, guilt almost overwhelming him for what he was about to do to her. Clasping both hands together, he placed them on her chest and took one final breath before quickly bouncing his entire weight onto the skin above her heart. As soon as he went down he felt it; the sickening crack of at least two ribs as they splintered beneath the pressure of the thrust. He let out a dry sob and carried on, rhythmically forcing the blood around her body. He heard in the distance what seemed like an echo of someone- no, Hotch- calling for medics, but he couldn't stop what he was doing, it was like an instinct to him, the rhythmic and bone splintering thrusts came to him naturally and his body forced itself to carry on despite his muscles which screamed in agony. He kept it up for maybe 3 minutes- the longest 3 minutes of his life- and then an unlikely miracle happened. She jolted, then coughed, it was a cough shrouded in blood, but it was still a cough, a breath, a shining glimmer of hope that she might live. Her breathing started again, ragged and shallow, but it was better than he could ever have hoped for. Spencer's face broke out into an incontestable smile and he shook her shoulder gently, excitement beginning to overcome panic.
"Yes! Yes! You're going to be fine, keep breathing, you're gonna be fine..." He rocked off his knees and onto the floor so he was in a sitting position. Leaning back, he began talking to her again.
"You're gonna...you're gonna be fine..." He breathed, fatigued from the rapid exertion of his energy. "You'll be ok..."
The hospital was exactly how one might imagine a hospital; clean, brightly lit and impersonally busy. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote " I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy." and that saying no longer baffled Dr Reid. The hospital teemed with the excited hum of life and movement, yet the room he was in was silent aside from the consistent, steady bleep of the machines surrounding her. Her room was in the ICU ward, half the walls consisted of glass panes allowing doctors and nurses to fleetingly check on her without needing to disturb them. Harriet lay in the centre of the room, the skin on her arms a tangle of wires and IV drips, cuffs and opaque clips which pumped, drained and constricted until she resumed her place in her body. Spencer sat by the bedside, a thick book lay open yet almost forgotten on his lap. He wasn't paying it any attention; instead he stared into the air around them, piecing together his thoughts, trying to find the words that would work for when she came around. He sighed, almost inaudibly and then returned his attention to the novel. Minutes went by, then the minutes accumulated, they turned into hours, and soon those hours built up and became night, then as quickly as it had come, the fleeting night fled. During the night other agents had come, and other friends had gone, Elle and Prentiss had stopped by to wish her good health, Morgan and Garcia came to ensure that she was, in fact, alive and a few others came to see how Spencer was feeling. He was, however, the only person that remained when all was said and done.
It was about 11:30am when it happened. It was tiny, a tremble of one of her tired fingertips, then a barely audible sigh, but it all led to the same thing; the flickering of her eyelids, the breaking of day. She blinked a few times, sluggishly at first and then they became rapid and controlled. She glanced around to better understand where she was, and then it hit her. She was back, she was finally home. She smiled weakly to herself.
"Spence." She muttered gleefully. His head snapped up from his book and he beamed at her.
"Hey, how're you doing?" He asked her, again in a low voice that was barely recognisable as speech. It seemed as though he was taking precautions with his volume as he didn't want to give her a headache. She however, just wanted to return to normality. She smiled, this time at him.
"You know me. Love hospitals." She informed him sarcastically, her voice at normal volume. She attempted to take a deep breath in, then it was like she hit a barrier at full force and she winced in agony.
"Yeah be careful, you've got three broken ribs and they're worried it could lead to more internal damage if you don't take it easy." He told her quickly. She frowned at him and tried to sit herself up a little better.
"Broken ribs? I don't remember breaking any of my-" She was cut off again, another shock of pain as she tried to sit up.
"Which part of 'take it easy' are you struggling to understand?" He asked her incredulously. She grinned at him through gritted teeth.
"I'm fine." She told him, her voice dripping with faked boredom. He stood up and began walking to the door.
"You've just been recovered from an abduction where you were held for 4 days and severely beaten, not to mention injected with more narcotics than a Mexican drug mule, so no I'd say you're not fine, I'm gonna call a nurse." He babbled at his famous Reid speed. She shut her eyes, took as big a sigh as she could and grinned. He wasn't about to let up and let her get on with life. She opened her eyes and she could see him stood just outside her room, visibly more relaxed than she'd imagined him to be in this situation. He had one hand in his pocket and the other he was using to hail a nurse as if she were a cab. He smiled apologetically at someone as the nurse walked in and bustled around her for a good two minutes before scribbling something messily on a brown clipboard. She turned on her heels and walked out the door. Harriet waited a couple of seconds and then frowned.
"I did get beaten...but not that hard." She began, confused. "So, why are my ribs-" and before she could finish her question, she was cut off by Spencer, who looked at her apologetically.
"In order for CPR to maximise its potential life preserving abilities, you have to push down pretty hard...hard enough to break the persons ribs..." he semi confessed, looking at her with a mixture of sheepishness and guilt. She held his gaze for a few seconds and spoke.
"Spence, was it you? The CPR, was it you?" She asked with a fixed gaze on him. He nodded. She returned the nod and picked up his hand which was resting on the bed. She held it in one of her wire bound hands and smiled at him reassuringly.
"Good." She whispered. She was playing with his hand, staring at their hands and trying to find words that would express how grateful she was that he'd figured out where she was. She couldn't find any so she just looked back up at him, not releasing his hand and began to speak.
"I'm just glad it wasn't a stranger...there...you know..." She trailed off while shaking her head slowly. He wasn't looking at her anymore; his eyes were trailing around the floor, trying to avoid painful eye contact because he was burdened with the guilt of breaking her further. She squeezed his hand.
"Hey." She said, trying to get his attention off the floor. He looked sheepishly up at her, head still facing the floor.
"I'm glad you did it, okay? If three broken ribs are what it took to..." She trailed off, unable to face the possibility of the alternative. "I'm just glad you were there to, you know...thanks Spence." She finished, grinning at him. He nodded, burden seemingly lifted, the air in the room seemed to shift and get a lot lighter. She sniffed.
"So how far away was I from, you know, dying?" She asked casually. He blinked a few times, shocked at her matter-of-fact demeanour, and then started trying to formulate a response.
"I uhh..." he cleared his throat, frowned and then continued. "Well you didn't have a pulse...so technically..." He couldn't finish his sentence, and the air dramatically changed again and got heavy around them again. The mixed emotions in the room were suddenly too overwhelming for Spencer, and he dropped his head to the floor and blinked quickly to make the building tears vanish. Harriet didn't need to see the tears to know that his guilt was consuming him. She leaned forward in her hospital bed, untangled a few wires and held her arms out to him, beckoning for him to join her. He glanced up at her, a saddened yet relieved expression on his face and he carefully wrapped his arms around her, taking extra precaution not to disturb any of the tubes or wires that were preserving her wellbeing. She leaned her cheek on one of his shoulders and closed her eyes, the relief of being safe still gradually sinking in. In all of Spencer's life, he'd never felt as relieved as he did in that one minute, that one minute, of that unimportant yet vital hour of that totally normal day.
And that's where they sat for a while. In a hospital just on the outskirts of Quantico sat the two lonely, mixed up kids from the hot city of Las Vegas, holding onto nothing but each other and their unending need for justice.
"Easy, easy, easy- hey which part of 'easy' are you finding difficult to understand?" Spencer babbled at Harriet. She'd finally been cleared from the hospital and allowed by the nursing staff to go home, Hotch had forcibly made Spencer take the day off to make sure that she was settling back into their apartment with no problems, and so far all he was doing was fussing. They'd just reached their front door and she turned, looked at him and sighed.
"If you're like this all day, I'd rather you went to work." She grumbled. He smiled at her thinly, pulling out his keys from his pocket.
"I'm not allowed to go back to work, believe me; if I were you'd be totally alone right now." He smirked at her, unlocking the door and holding it open for her. She rolled her eyes at him and walked through, the bruises on her face and chest still throbbing like crazy. He laughed at her as he followed her in.
"Relax, I'm kidding. I know what you're going through right now and I wanna stay and help." He said, his voice padded with the unknowing innocence that only Spencer has. She smiled at him, peered around their apartment and inhaled deeply, allowing the comfortingly familiar scent of books mixed with fresh apples. A smile flickered across her face, the comforted smile of someone who'd been in a jail cell for a thousand years and had only just returned to the warm familiarity of their home. He brushed past her and threw her bag carefully on her bed and then he walked out into the sitting room before lazily throwing himself on the brown suede couch in front of him. Harriet grinned mischievously at him and then leaned on the back of the couch, ruffling his hair as she did.
"Does this mean you're my bitch for the day then?" She asked playfully. He jerked his head lazily and swatted her hand away.
"I'm never your bitch, I dunno where you got that idea." He retorted, and she replied with a loud exaggerated laugh.
"You're always my bitch Spence. Always." She said, still a glimmer of a smirk on her face. She moved stiffly over to the couch swatted him to the other end of the couch. He shuffled over and picked up the TV remote, flicked the TV on and started scanning through the channels. She slowly lowered herself down onto the couch and winced in pain as she knocked a bruise against the wooden interior. Spencer heaved himself up and frowned lightly at her, still leaning his back against the middle of their corner couch.
"You okay?" He asked her, the concern in his eyes leaking out and into his voice. Harriet closed her eyes and smirked.
"No, not really." She confessed quietly, her smile slid away and she sighed heavily, the weight of her injuries taking their toll on her mentally and physically. She was starting to feel like she'd wasted everybody's time trying to find her and for what; for them to find a beaten, bloody and useless agent at death's door. She opened her eyes to look at him and he knew exactly what she was thinking. He rocked forward and shuffled round so that he was facing the widescreen TV and made sure he was sitting right beside her. She began to complain about his fidgeting.
"Seriously what the hell is the- Ohhh! I love this film have you SEEN this film?!" She exclaimed, eyes widening and grabbing the remote to crank up the volume. He frowned and stared at the TV.
"Yeah, 'The Time Machine', you know this film is rife with scientific inaccuracies, firstly the type of metal he uses to actually make the framework of the machine-"he began, but Harriet cut him off.
"I was looking for a yes or no answer really." She quipped, still staring at the TV. He smiled awkwardly and coughed.
"Oh uh, yeah, yeah I have." He said slightly confused, sinking back into the comfortable silence of the apartment with the only noise exception being the TV.
An hour passed and there had been no phone calls, which was unheard of for the BAU agents, but it wasn't uninvited. Harriet broke her gaze from the TV and cast a lazy eye around the apartment she hadn't seen in too long a time. Everything was neat, everything had its exact place; she always thought it was super convenient sharing a place with a guy who almost certainly has OCD. The dull beige tones on the wall soothed her beyond belief and they made her recognise where she was as home. Spencer had fallen asleep while counting scientific errors in the film and so he was slumped (what looked quite uncomfortably) against her, his head resting against her shoulder. She inhaled deeply, still counting her lucky stars that she was home and alive. The warmth of the apartment, the couch and Spencer leaning on her was beginning to overwhelm her senses, and so she carefully rested her head on his and closed her eyes, eagerly waiting for sleep to embrace her.
I am so into Criminal Minds right now it's unreal! I honestly am trying to get The Walking Dead fanfic finished but my heart isn't in that series anymore. I don't really write one shots so I hope this is good, any reviews from Criminal Minds fans or otherwise would be fab! Thanks guys, hope you keep reading my works. -Hannah