Title: Therapy
Author: Invaderk
Rating: T, edging on M if you're into reading between the lines.
Pairings/Characters: Reid
Warnings: Mentions of extreme violence and drug abuse. Non-sexual nudity (if that counts). Bizarreness.
Disclaimer: I own nothing, make no profit, and get nothing but sheer joy from writing this piece.
Summary: If violence is linked to Spencer's chemical need for substance, then he will rid himself of violence as best as he can.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to pabzi for being an amazing beta! 3

Happy Reading!

Therapy

The moment Spencer Reid arrives back home from a case, he falls into step with a meticulous routine. It doesn't matter the time of day, or how long it has been since he last left his house. If he has come in contact with some horrific montage of broken bodies and damaged psyches, he plays it out to the last motion.

In the United States, there are approximately forty-six murders a day.

They wrapped up another case just a few hours ago, with minimal damage for all parties. By the end, the team had saved three girls and lost only two—a victory, by numerical standards. And in the three days that it took them to save these three people, approximately a hundred thirty-eight others died by the hand of someone else; roughly one death per half hour.

The house is always dark and silent when Spencer passes over the threshold. He's standing there with his go-bag draped over one shoulder, almost leaning on the doorknob with his full weight. The flight back to Quantico was largely uneventful. He'd read several passages of The Faerie Queene to keep awake, and when that failed to help, he'd played a few rounds of cards with Hotch and JJ. The others had seemed comforted to be done with it for the weekend, but the tense feeling in his shoulders had remained long after the jet touched down in Virginia.

It remains even now, as he stands with his hand on the doorknob and an ache in his chest. Relief doesn't come until the routine is done, and he has yet to start.

Spencer can feel his legs quivering with anticipation as he shuffles further into the house and eases the door shut behind him. He drops his bags to the floor, all at once, and steps out of his shoes without even considering the light switch behind him. Then he makes a beeline for the other end of the house, first pausing by the kitchen table to set his phone and wallet aside.

In this country alone, a violent crime occurs every twenty-two point eight seconds. Statistics can be comforting to Spencer, who likes to believe that the world is largely harmless on the whole, that the nine-to-five man can almost always go without fear of being assaulted during his daily routine. But statistics can wound just as well as they can heal.

Before he reaches the bathroom, Spencer has loosened his tie and pulled it over his head. It lies flat, draped across his shoulder, the buttons on his sleeve cuffs undone and batting his wrists as he moves for the ones down his front. From the neck down, he undoes each one without looking at his hands. If he takes his eyes from the bathroom door, he knows that he might never reach it.

He steps into the white-walled room and closes the door before flicking on the lights. His shirt now hanging open, he pauses from the unbuttoning process to unknot his tie and toss it into the sink. He tries not to think of the smiling patterns beneath his fingers as he smooths out the fabric, or of where it may have dragged when he leaned over a rotting corpse beneath a noisy railroad bridge. If the tie is splotched with red, he throws it away regardless of his connection to it—perhaps it was a gift, or purchased in some exotic store in any given part of the country. Once the bathroom door has been closed behind him, the connections to his past do not matter until after the procedure is done. If the tie has not been abandoned to the trash, he fills the sink with hot water and a teaspoon of powdered detergent that he keeps in a cupboard beneath counter.

Throughout the process, Spencer keeps his mind methodically blank. He focuses on the feel of woven fabric beneath his fingers, trying to count the threads and differentiate among the textures. There is something about these quiet motions that keeps him from slipping into an unreachable state, something that could not be attained by conversation or even by sitting down to watch television. He's never experienced anything quite like it.

Well, almost nothing. He feels his mouth twitch as the taboo subject crosses into the forefront of his mind, shakes his head to keep the thought from growing into a monstrosity. Still, the facts remain.

Statistically, as many as 54% of those recovering from addiction experience a relapse at some point. Among the most common deal-breakers are obsessive thinking about drug usage, feelings of being overwhelmed, unrealistic goals for healing, trauma, avoidance behaviors, and ignoring the warning signs of relapse. Denial, essentially. It's the feeling he gets as he unfastens his wristwatch and tosses it into the sink with his tie. His belt follows suit a moment later.

Spencer keeps his bathroom hamper lined with a white garbage bag, because otherwise he might contaminate the rest of the house with his filth. To this he adds his shirt and undershirt.

With indissoluble care, he unbuttons the front of his trousers slowly, one loop at a time, relishing in the feel of the warm little disks against his fingers. The pants fall down his long legs to pool around his ankles, and he steps out of them before tossing them into the hamper with his shirts. Then he peels the mismatched socks away from his feet, pitches both these and his boxer shorts into the hamper. And only once he has tied the plastic bag tight does he cross to the shower, yank open the vinyl curtain, and turn the water on.

He can feel it now, anxiety's gentle thrum across his bare and crawling skin. His feet soak up the cold from the tile, but it does not help to bring him back from the edge. The little practices that used to keep his cravings in line have failed him, just as he has failed the forty-three others who died today as a result of anger, violence and despair. Once guilt is stripped down to its most basic components, there lies obsession, and with that, addiction.

Spencer knows this science, and he feels this pressure most just after a case, once the files have been signed and stowed away into a locked file cabinet. It's that desperate need to cling to something stronger than his own body—that which makes him feel that he, too, can be an unaffected nine-to-five man.

When one smokes, cooks bacon, or enters a coffee shop, the scent of these activities clings to clothing and hair. Studies have shown that no matter where the toothbrush is kept in the house, it will still pick up particles of things that most would rather not have in their mouths. Spencer thereby concludes that the same logic applies to crime scenes. So here he stands.

Alcohol or drug use by a perpetrator is behind approximately 30 to 50 percent of violent crime. Those who have experienced the grotesqueries of violence are significantly more prone to its re-creation. In all of his experience, Spencer has come to understand that the remains of brutality, like smoke on a jacket, keep hanging on long after the victims have been stowed away to rest. If violence is linked to his chemical need for substance, then he will rid himself of violence as best as he can.

This is Spencer on the brink of relapse. He is Panic if Panic can be stripped naked and shivering with the force of maintaining its deteriorating willpower.

He steps over the lip of the tub and into the stream, where the water is as hot as a branding iron and his entire body tenses with the pain it brings.

After any gruesome case, Spencer goes straight for the shower to wash away the specks of blood, the tiny droplets of sweat that accumulate on his palms and back when he runs his hands over a case file. Having an eidetic memory is a mixed blessing in many ways—with it he saves lives, facilitates his team in a way that no other could manage. Ingenuity also means that he continues to witness crimes even once they've reached their end. He sees death in the daytime, when he's sitting on the jet and holding his breath so that he doesn't breathe in the invisible spatterings of gore on his shirt. He washes his hands as frequently as he can. It helps, but the fix is only temporary. Until he has dug his nails into his hair in a lather, rinse, repeat version of casework therapy, he cannot breathe.

Spencer does this now, tilting his head back against the scalding stream to melt away the day's terror. He squeezes too much shampoo into his palm and scrubs it all into his hair anyway. He scratches from front hairline to nape, digs his knuckles into the roots and runs his fingers through, and through, as if trying to peel his scalp away. Shower steam fills his breaths with vapor, and he worries that the heat might cause him to faint. The water has all but cooked him; his chest and stomach have flushed lobster red. And still, he moves on to soaping up the rest of his body, soaking it in and washing it away. The suds that run down his neck and chest, down his legs to pool around his feet, take with them the screams of women and mutilated children. Burning families. Scarred fathers. He rubs at his face and arms until satisfied that he no longer carries the evidence of violent crime's victims.

Today, he and Hotch had pulled a teenage girl from her assailant's closet. He can see her ever-clear in his mind—the deep gashes on her face and neck from where the UnSub had tortured her, the raw lines around her wrists. The moment Spencer had cut her free from the coat rack, she'd latched on to him as if he were her own father. He feels her weight threaten to drag him to his knees as it had in that bedroom. Spencer scrubs viciously at his neck, where her fallen tears have dripped and dried. He flexes his fingers on the bar of soap until he can no longer feel her hair between his fingers, from when he had cradled her head while she buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed, and sobbed.

When he has scoured his skin raw and rinsed every bit of soap away from his body, he steps back so that the last of the soap will run down the drain. He is Panic if Panic, like a snake, can peel its skin away to emerge anew.

Spencer feels dizzy and sick, his body and face aching from the unbearable heat and the grinding of nails against flesh. For just a moment he believes that he is done, as if he did not design this two-step program himself. And though it works wonders, he has to admit that he dreads it every time. He turns around in one slow, blank-faced motion, feet splashing on the tile, and reaches out an arm. His hand finds the spigot knob and grasps it, knuckles whitening from his grip, and Spencer takes a deep breath. He turns the handle over, all the way to the opposite end.

There's a moment's pause—just a fleeting fracture of a beat—until the cold hit his face like a brick wall.

The first time he ever did it, he'd panicked, slipped, and almost broken his wrist from its contact with the ground. Even six months later, he cannot help but turn his cheek against the freezing spray. For all his ingenuity, he is but a man. Like the others, he needs to breathe and plow his way through the cold, to wipe his mind clean of the death he encounters on the job. If it means that he has to die first, then he will die clean and sober. It's better than the alternative.

His stomach seizes with the effort of staying still, nails cutting little crescents into the palms of his hands. A pained growl escapes through his gnashed teeth. He's convinced that he is drowning, that he has plunged through the ice and cannot find the hole through which he fell. But even as he begins to quake from holding his breath, he feels the panic begin to drain from his chest. This is what healing feels like, and it hurts like all Hell.

This is Spencer, coming back to life.

His breath escapes him all at once, letting go with a gasp that ricochets off the walls of the shower stall. Panting, he lets his head fall. The freezing water runs over his shoulders and neck and down his back, and he focuses all of his energy on easing the tense muscles in his torso. He waits, patiently, until he can no longer feel it when he bites his lip, and only then does he shut the water down and stand there in the silent fog of his bathroom. His breaths still come in short little huffs. Droplets of water drip from his sopping hair and down his face, clinging to his eyelashes and pooling in his ears.

Spencer dries himself before stepping out of the tub, and dresses thereafter. His reflection looks pathetic, he thinks, catching sight of himself in the mirror as he's stepping into a pair of sweatpants. He bears the marks of his fingernails everywhere that he can see. Long, red criss-crosses across his arms and stomach almost blend in with the rest of his pink-tinged skin. Spencer gives himself a grim nod of approval.

When he wanders out into the kitchen for a cup of tea, limping on his bad knee, a blinking light catches his eye from across the room.

It's his phone, waiting for him where he left it on the table—how long ago was it? He can't say for certain. It's certainly been a while. For a moment, he considers not picking it up at all, but curiosity gets wins him over in the end. Slowly, he reaches out and takes the phone from the table.

He has to read the text message twice in order to process what Morgan is asking him.

hotch said this was a bad one for you. you ok kid?

Spencer blinks, hard. He flexes the long fingers on one hand to find them still stiff with cold. All he can hear is a distant ringing—a dull, numb sound that has since replaced the shrill cries for help. At least for now.

Spencer stares down at the phone in his hand for a few more seconds, then purses his lips and sends back a response.

I feel fine.

xxx

Fin.