Chapter Two: Memories, Please Don't Haunt Me
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Hotch lived, although Emily wondered whether he regretted that. The man that emerged from Foyet's knife was sharper, colder, more reckless. Angry at himself and angry at the world, as his family were taken from him for their own protection and vanished into the grip of WITSEC. None of them spoke about what they'd seen that day, the nightmarishly black smoke that had tried to kill them or the way Foyet's eyes had shone without colour, but Emily remembered.
The very fact that Reid wouldn't talk about it made her wonder.
She waited until he wasn't at work one day before looking up his employee file and finding nothing. Not just nothing of interest, but nothing at all. Special Agent Spencer Reid did not exist in the Bureau's archives. He had no employee number, no file, no records. His name brought up nothing at all.
Stunned, she closed her computer down, sat for a while in the quiet bullpen, and considered her next move. There seemed no point in asking the team; they didn't seem to realise there was anything about him that was odd, as though he could…
Hide his weirdness from them.
But she'd lived her life surrounded by weird. There was no hiding from her.
Emily reached for her keys, leaving without a word to the others as she decided where to go next.
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After some accidental sleuthing over Reid's shoulder the year before when he'd been reluctantly talked into signing up for a charity raffle, Emily knew his address. She'd never been there before tonight, finding herself in an unfamiliar neighbourhood with her cell switched off at her hip to forestall anyone trying to summon her away.
She needed to know. Not knowing was burning, chewing small bits out of her until there was nothing left but wondering. And it was a frightening prospect, invading his privacy like this, but so was the crawling notion that Foyet was going to go after Reid just like he'd gone after Hotch.
It took an alarmingly small amount of sweet-talking to get the building manager to let Emily into Reid's apartment, Emily making a mental note to speak to Reid about increasing his security once this was all over. But for now, she took advantage of it; she refused to find herself too late to save a co-worker from a monster once more, even if that co-worker was hiding something big from her. Here she was, waiting for the building manager to walk away and turn the corner until she pushed on the unlocked door of his apartment and slipped in.
It was both exactly what she'd expected and also nothing like it at all.
There was very little furniture in the apartment. The space echoed as she walked slowly in, the closing of the door resonating as though to compound her guilt. The furniture that was there seemed optimised for comfort over utility: a half-sunken in sofa shoved against one wall, three beanbags all varying levels of buried under books and papers, and rickety bookshelves lined with yet more books and a curious assortment of what looked like children's toys. Emily found herself staring at them, astounded. She'd never pegged Reid as the kind of guy to keep a broken toy train, or a selection of plastic dinosaurs that were faded from the sun, or a puzzle box with half the box missing. The books were the only things in the room that appeared to have had money spent on them. Everything else looked like… well, it looked like he'd found it. There were no electronics either, not that that surprised Emily: in fact, the only thing here that seemed to pull power was the truly incredible number of lamps stacked on every surface and propped in every corner. Every one of them was on, despite the daylight outside.
And there were no photos, no framed degrees. Nothing. Emily looked around the walls and found them bare. When she dodged the untidy piles of books to duck into the next room, she found more to ponder: the kitchen, but there was nothing in here to suggest it was ever used. There was no fridge. Inside the pantry, there was nothing inside except an open packet of peanuts with a single startled mouse skittering out of them and down into a hole at the back. In the kitchen, much the same as the living room, lamps lined every counter.
Now thoroughly confused, Emily moved down a lamp-lined hallway to the only other rooms in the apartment: a bathroom, which was untouched but oddly cold to the touch; what should have been a bedroom but instead, in this strange place, appeared to be storage for an even more eclectic assortment of damaged toys and no bed; and an office.
The office, unlike every other room, actually looked like an adult lived and worked here. The lamps were just as present as every other room, but the desk was in some semblance of order and the bookshelves seemed purposeful instead of miscellaneous. Upon that desk, Emily found neatly sorted piles of newspaper clippings and handwritten notes from what seemed to be encyclopedia and internet archive entries.
Instinct guided her. They'd found too many Unsubs with their entire lives laid out in their collections of newspaper clippings to discount the fact that people just seemed inclined to display their backstories. Maybe out of a desire to understand themselves, but it also made Emily's job far easier. She appreciated it for that, even if the idea of exposing so much of herself was anathema to her.
And it didn't take long to find the one clipping he'd returned to over and over and over again, mostly because even though it didn't stand out at first glance, on the second… on the second, she recognised it. Recognised the photo, anyway, because she'd spent her entire life in the shadow of that moment.
There it was: an image of a small girl with dark, dark hair being carried from a snowbound forest wrapped in the jacket Emily still had folded neatly in the bottom of her closet. For the first time since that day, Emily picked up that picture with shaking hands and found the headline attached.
GIRL RESCUED, BOY DIES, IN SAVAGE BLIZZARD THAT STRANDED THIRTY
There were no names in the article. Emily read it four times, finding no identifying features in the story at all, not anything she recognised. She didn't remember a boy. She didn't remember the trip she'd apparently been on with twenty-eight other students from various accelerated programs around the country. She didn't remember a blizzard. She didn't remember this: that apparently the girl pictured—her—and another boy had slipped away from their school bus and out into the blizzard.
The boy had died in the snow. She hadn't.
Emily shuffled faster through the clippings, searching frantically for any name, anything, to tell her more about what had happened. Surmounting everything, a terrible fear: had she lured that boy from the safety of the bus on one of her ridiculous childhood rebellions against authority?
Had she been responsible for his death?
And there, there it was… she stopped and stared at what she'd found, tucked right to the back of all the others as though it was important enough to be categorised with the rest… but not in a way where the person categorising it wanted to see it without warning. That was understandable, as Emily read it and realised what it contained. There was a name, for sure. That was definitely a name.
It was a funeral announcement for a boy named Spencer Reid. Born on the twenty-eighth of October 1971. Died on the eighth of January 1984, aged thirteen, in the same blizzard that had tried and failed to kill her.
The photo on the announcement was him in the same jacket she'd been wearing. And she didn't know him like this, this young and smiling at the camera with his face so hopeful, but there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the boy pictured in grainy newspaper print would have grown into the man that worked on the desk beside hers, had he been given the chance.
But that was impossible.
A cold wind whipped through the room, tearing the newspapers from the desk and flurrying them around in a frantic eddy in the centre of the room. Emily turned.
"You shouldn't be in here," said Spencer. He was watching her with his expression ghastly, a fraught kind of pallid and his cane clutched tight in shaking hands. He looked… horrified. Utterly horrified. The wind seemed to ignore him, pulling at everything in the room except the small sphere of calm around his shock and dismay.
"You're dead," she whispered, closing her eyes and remembering, suddenly, cold hands in hers. "You died. I remember you… I remember you died."
"You're mistaken," said he, shaking his head furiously. "Emily, listen to yourself—how can I be dead? I'm here?"
But his shrill voice betrayed him. She didn't need to be a profiler to know he was scared all the way through, scared of her and what she might have discovered snooping where she wasn't welcome.
"I have coat in my closet, a jacket with a dinosaur on it," she said forcefully, encroaching on that space as the wind kept whipping at her, seeming to grow with his fear. "And your initials on it. I was found, wearing that coat. Your coat. You have the articles. Either you're that boy, or you're his identical twin with the same name—what am I supposed to believe, Spencer? And this apartment? This apartment isn't lived in, this isn't where a person exists. There's no food? No bedding?"
"Emily, stop," he breathed.
"Did I kill you?" she gasped out, the horror of that statement slamming home. She'd always been an idiot child, always. Getting into trouble and dragging her friends into it too—just like Matthew. Oh god, just like Matthew.
"No," he said. She didn't believe him.
"Maybe not on purpose, but you followed me out into that blizzard, didn't you? We could have been safe in the bus, but I slipped out and you followed and you died. Didn't you? I'm not crazy, am I? Answer me, Reid!"
The lamps flickered, the wind messing with them. Around his tightened hands, Emily could see frost building on the cane, tendrils of ice spinning around the wood in delicate patterns she couldn't quite make out the specifics of. For a split second, the lights were out and the shadows seemed deeper, more dangerous, the room growing icy and something cold beginning to trace down Emily's spine.
In that moment, he gasped and shrunk back, pure terror lining his face. Not of her though, she didn't think… but of those shadows. The flickering dark.
She remembered the dark. He'd died in the dark, the dark she'd led him into.
"What are you?" she asked.
The lights went out.
For the briefest of heartbeats—the second between one blink and the next—the room snapped into darkness despite the sun outside and, in that second, where Reid had been standing, she saw a terrified child. Small and slim with the cane in hand now long staff of knobby wood instead with a peculiarly hooked end. His hair was white instead of brown; his eyes blue instead of hazel; and, most astoundingly, she knew him, despite all the differences.
And then she saw the shape behind him.
"Reid!" she cried, her gun in her hands before she'd thought it through. "Get down!"
He whirled around, adult to her eyes again and moving with obscene speed across to the other side of the room in what seemed like one effortless bound, his feet barely touching the floor.
No, she realised, looking away from that lurking shape as her brain glitched over that leap: his feet weren't touching the floor. But there was no time for her to focus on that impossibility, because Foyet leaned into the room and smiled at them both.
"Boo," he said. "Did you really think those could stop me, Jack?"
He pointed to one of the lamps, the bulb within shattering with a pop and cascade of glass shards. Emily stared as he repeated the gesture again at another, and another, and another, until every bulb was shattered and the air glimmered with the settling residue of the glass.
The room was icy cold and no one spoke.
"There, isn't that better?" said Foyet. As he stepped into the room, the carpet crunched below his shoes. "Nice and properly… frightening."
"We're not scared of you," Emily said coldly, her gun unwavering.
Foyet stopped, raising one eyebrow and smiling. The smile was obscene. It seemed deeper than it should be, the shadows on his face collecting in the lines of his skin and making every expression garish. It felt like midnight, despite being barely past noon.
"You aren't," said Foyet eventually, nodding at her with that same midnight smile. "But… oh, he is. He really, really is. Can't you smell it?"
Emily didn't want to turn her back on this man, not after what he'd done to Hotch, but Reid wasn't making a sound behind her and she was wary of him right now. So, she looked.
And she regretted looking.
He was slunk up against the wall with every part of his body knotted tight, his fingers buckled against that wall and his cane at his feet. She could see every inch of white around his staring eyes, nostrils flaring as he struggled to breathe around an utterly consuming fear she could tell was crushing the lungs in his tightening chest.
"I told you, Jack," whispered Foyet, dodging her and leaning towards him. Her finger itched to fire, but they were in a residential apartment with no guarantee against her bullet going wide into a wall and, at the same time, her finger wouldn't obey her. "I can help with that… the fear. You've spent thirteen years trying to outrun who you're meant to be, your purpose. Why do you think the fear is so overwhelming? It's a part of you, a glorious, encompassing part of you. Your centre. And it's why you can't outrun me… because I am you, and I'll always follow your fear."
"I'm not Jack," wheezed Reid out of his barely open lips. "I told you that night that I'm not Jack, and I won't become like you."
"You won't be strong?" hissed Foyet, his shape twisting and, for a moment, as though there was another being superimposed under his slighter frame. Something taller and lankier, with the kind of darkened eyes and spindly fingers Emily had only ever expected to find as a child, skittering out from under her bed.
"I won't be a nightmare," said Reid. It was the first time he'd sounded sure. Suddenly, in the face of that, Emily could move again… and she did. Neither of them were paying attention to her, as she sidled around Foyet and slid her gun more firmly into her hands, ready to bring the butt down on the back of the man's skull.
"Pity," said Foyet coldly. "I always did think that he chose the wrong one last night. Don't you think so, Emily?"
Emily froze, gun raised and in a precariously open position as Foyet turned and smiled at her.
"Don't!" cried Reid, lunging to grab his cane and raising it high. Emily caught a glimpse of a great icy light sparking into life above him, some tremendous storm localised within this very room—and then Foyet grabbed her arm and yanked her with him as he flung himself to the ground to avoid Reid's blow. She expected to hit the floor but found nothing there, tumbling down and down and down as though there was nothing below her except an endless void of darkness and cold.
And then she hit the ground and knew nothing at all.
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When she blinked awake, it was snowing heavily. She struggled up, her early-November clothes nowhere near warm enough for the thick gusts of winter-dry air slamming into her from the north. The snow was falling hard enough to weigh her down in seconds, frantically trying to walk with the wind in a desperate attempt to get out this cold. It was so dark, so frozen, she couldn't even see her hands when she raised them.
"Reid!" she cried.
He didn't answer.
There was a light ahead. It flickered against the snow and she ran towards it, pushing through the snow beginning to bank up. Her boots slipped and skidded on the ice that was deceptively buried beneath the fresh snowfall and she almost tumbled into a waist-high fence that knocked the air out of her stomach. But the light was closer and, as she climbed that fence and pushed nearer still, she found that the source of those two blinking eyes in the darkness was the precariously pitched bus half-embedded in a ditch beside the rapidly disappearing highway. She could see the vaguest suggestion of people moving inside the frosted windows, the lights within the bus chugging on with the headlights as the motor tried and failed to catch, over and over again. Emily fought her way to the door, raising her hand to knock.
It slipped open before her hand could strike it and she found herself watching as a small boy slid out the barely-there gap, turning sideways to make it. The door fought him. It hadn't been mechanically opened, just forced by his little hands, and she realised that the bus was years out of date, as were the clothes he was wearing. Woollen gloves and hat of tan and orange, wearing a heavy coat with a dinosaur on the back, and she caught a glimpse of his wide eyes behind thick glasses as he landed in the snow and almost vanished, falling into it. When he reappeared, he looked around, fear clear in his expression as he realised how dark it was.
"Get back in the bus," Emily cried, grabbing for him. "What are you doing, you'll die out here!"
But he ran right through her like she wasn't even there, Emily gasping and pressing her hands to her stomach that he'd passed right through.
The shock of that kept her there, until a sound muffled by the growing blizzard snapped her out of it. The door of the bus went again—wider this time as a girl leapt out fearlessly: a girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a cocky smile as she looked around and then focused on his already fading footprints in the snow. Emily, as the door slowly closed behind her younger self, saw more small faces staring out fearfully, some of them clustered around a buckled figure who lay, unmoving, over the steering wheel.
"Emily, come back!" cried a voice from within the bus. "You'll never find him! It's dark!"
"I'm not scared of the dark," said the smaller Emily proudly, marching right past her older self as she followed the smaller boy into the storm. "We'll be back with help!"
Emily didn't want to follow them. She knew how it ended, even if she hadn't remembered exactly how it had started: with this broken-down bus that she now remembered had been like an ice-box once the heater had stopped working, and with their driver sick from something she hadn't been old enough to understand. He'd just collapsed, leaving Emily and Spencer and twenty-seven other kids alone.
"Come on then," said Foyet, stepping out of the darkness as though his body was composed of it and offering her his hand. "Don't you want to see what you could have been?"
"No," said Emily honestly, but Foyet sighed and rolled his eyes. Again, Emily saw that gruesome shape within him.
"Fine," said Foyet, snapping his fingers.
The bus vanished. The darkness returned, broken by a light by her shoulder that gleamed weakly inside a glass case. She pressed her fingers to the frozen surface, rubbing the frost aside and finding that it was an emergency phone perched on the windswept edge of this lonely highway. Nothing for miles but more dark, more snow, and the phone was hanging out of its cradle, suspended by its cord.
Emily looked at that for a while. Around her, the blizzard stopped as suddenly as if someone had flicked a switch, but Emily knew that that hadn't been what had happened that night. It had gotten worse.
They'd found the phone, called for help, and then it had gotten worse.
Emily turned to run back to the bus—she knew innately which way it was—but then stopped. Because, they hadn't gone that way, had they?
"Sometimes," whispered Foyet's voice around her, all around her, "it's very clever to be afraid of the dark."
In that deathly, lying silence, Emily turned and walked the other way from safety. Down the slope behind the phone, the one that was too steep to climb back up with all that ice frozen down it. The one that, with the blizzard paused, she could see the trail leading down in a wobbly, chaotic line. Lost and confused.
She followed that trail until she found the end.
As she stepped over the fence they'd tried to huddle against, the darkness faded around her for just a moment. A full moon broke overhead, looking down upon this scene. Shining a grim light upon it.
Emily walked until she couldn't, numb from the cold and numb inside too as she crouched beside the two small figures curled so close together they almost looked like they'd been sculpted there as an example of how picturesque childhood could be. With white cheeks carved from marble and sculpted-closed eyelids of a faded blue, the lashes lined with ice and lips so perfectly shaped in purple stone, Emily found the two children looking so dangerously formed out here in the snow and knew they were dead. The both of them. Her with her black hair torn wildly by the wind and frozen into those jagged spikes, and him with his glasses gone and his jacket atop her. They held hands, the branch that she knew they'd been using to try to navigate through the snow to avoid falling into drifts laying abandoned at Spencer's knee. It was knobby and hooked oddly at the end.
"He gave me his coat," Emily said numbly, looking at his uncovered arms that were wrapped tight around her and seeing, in the moonlight, the slightest lift of her chest. "I didn't kill him, but he still died because of me."
Foyet didn't answer. Emily turned fast, finding herself alone in the moonlight.
He was gone.
But she wasn't alone.
When she turned again, she found that there was a boy crouched beside them, his eyes shocked wide as he looked down at himself. One of his hands was leaning on the knee of the dead boy; the other reached out almost by itself to curl around the branch, which crackled gently under his fingers as though coming to life.
His hair was white and, when he looked around wildly, she saw his blue, blue eyes.
"Spencer," she breathed, stunned, as he stumbled up and back into the snow. But he didn't fall into the drift like she—and he—expected. His bare toes pressed onto the snow… and held. He stood upon it as though he had no weight at all, looking down as though he didn't know what was going on either.
But his body was still there, and hers soon too.
"I don't understand," he said, looking up and speaking to someone above him. She looked up too, but there was no one there but the moon. "Why me?"
But there was no answer.
"No," said Spencer, his eyes narrowing behind their glasses. She saw a shade of ferocity there, something that he certainly didn't have now, even in the guise of his adult form. "Not her too. That's not fair."
Silence. If something replied, she didn't hear it.
Spencer, apparently, did.
"I'd rather be afraid," he said quietly, crouching and reaching the staff out to press to the snow beside them. Emily watched, stunned, as the snow leapt back, repelled by that staff's tip. And it kept receding, as he walked in a circle around them and drew a line between her and that creeping cold, leaving the two children curled on the clear ground. Spencer, the ghostly Spencer who she could now tell was as much a part of the winter that had killed him as the wind was, raised his staff with a thin, worried yell and closed his eyes, the same tremendous storm building above him and sending sparks of icy blue and white to light up the storm above. No one looking would have seen it as a natural light show. No one could.
And, when lights appeared—flashlights, she realised, summoned by those curious lights in the storm—Spencer glanced up once at the now moonless sky, nodded, and vanished back into the dark as men appeared to scoop her from the clear ground she lay upon.
Emily swore, trying to chase that ghostly figure, but he was gone and she tripped—
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—and woke under a swollen moon, staring up at it from the ground where she, in the present once more, lay. It was the courtyard outside her apartment. She had no idea how no one had seen her lying here and panicked, struggling up as her entire body ached from being in the cold for however long since she'd been dumped there. And her cell-phone in her pocket was going wild, missed calls and texts from her co-workers after she hadn't returned from work. It only took opening one to realise how much trouble they were in: Reid hadn't returned either.
"Fuck," said Emily, wondering how the hell she was going to explain this madness to Hotch when she barely understood it herself. Everyone was, as she expected, all still at work where they'd been since both her and Reid had vanished into the afternoon. She told them as much as she could—that Foyet had attacked, that she'd been overwhelmed and woke up at her apartment hours later, and that was fine but she didn't know where Reid was.
And, despite hoping that he'd return so she could ask him what the hell the night Foyet had shown her had been about, that didn't change.
Reid didn't return.
