2006
.
January
There's an FBI ball in January that Emily insists he attend, announcing that if she has to dress up, then so does he. The ball welcomes partners of the attendees and, eventually, he works up the courage to ask Maeve to accompany him. To his surprise, she's remarkably eager, pinning the invitation up on the fridge and dragging him along to find outfits to wear.
When the night rolls around, he thinks he might be ill. This isn't an experience that he's used to, balls or formal occasions or walking around in front of his colleagues in his nicest clothes. The worry about everything—will he have to eat in front of them, what if the food is shared, what if there's an emergency, what if he embarrasses himself—is overwhelming and he finds himself sitting on his bed in his socks and shirt, staring down at the ties he can't choose between and thinking he might throw up.
Hands cover his, Maeve kneeling between his bare legs in nothing but a slip. "I'll be right there beside you," she says, and she is.
They walk into the hall side by side and without being noticed beyond the person checking their invitations at the door. That's how Spencer likes it—keeping to the side with Maeve's hand in his, noticing everything but his eyes always drawn back to how beautiful she looks in her deep green dress that clings so nicely to her body that he wants to trace his hands down the side just to feel how smooth it falls. But he doesn't get the chance, mostly because they're in public but also because he spots Hotch moments after that, standing beside a blonde woman Spencer assumes is his wife, Haley.
"Reid, glad you made it," Hotch says with a genuine smile as the two of them approach, stepped aside so that the rest of the team are revealed near him. They've clearly been catching up and Spencer suddenly finds him and Maeve the centre of a range of eyes, expressions ranging from gleeful to stunned, his own cheeks flushing red.
"Hi," he mumbles, feeling Maeve grip his hand and squeeze tight. "Uh, everyone, this is… my wife, Maeve."
His wife, who is terrifyingly quickly whisked away by JJ and Emily combined, leaving Spencer to face Morgan as Hotch leads Haley out to dance.
"Reid, Reid, Reid," Morgan says, shaking his head with a wide grin on his face, "my boy, you've been holding out on me!"
"Have I?" asks Spencer, confused.
"Yes!" is the retort. "Your wife is beautiful! I didn't think you had it in you, man." Despite his gentle ribbing, Morgan is beaming. "You just both looks so… happy, dude, you look so happy."
Spencer's pretty sure that, after that, he's joyful enough that nothing in this night can knock him down, not even when Hotch asks Maeve for a dance and returns her flustered and blushing.
"He's so handsome," is all she says after, which Spencer can't really disagree with.
.
February
Spencer goes missing, and a part of Maeve goes missing with him.
They alert her this time. They have to. He's gone for three days.
It's Hotch who contacts her, informing her that her husband had been taken, abducted, and that they're working on bringing him home. That they'll keep in contact.
That's a lie. She hears nothing until the three days are up and she's alerted as to which hospital Spencer has been taken to. It's a long flight and a longer drive there, the whole time sunk in a numb kind of waiting that's been her life for the past three days. Nothing but the fear from the previous year, but realer this time, calling in sick to work and sitting on their bed with her wedding ring tight in her palm and her cell on the charger beside her. Checking it every five minutes like clockwork, just in case she'd missed it ringing.
Three days of horror she'll never, ever forget, no matter how much she desperately wants to.
Hotch is waiting outside the hospital as she climbs out of the cab and walks on unsteady legs towards him, only distantly aware that she hasn't showered, has barely done anything with her hair except to pull it back into a messy ponytail, that she's looking at him like she hates him. In this moment, she does, despite the exhaustion written across every line of his body. Maybe he saved Spencer, she doesn't know—all she knows is that he's supposed to stop this kind of thing happening, and that he kept her in the dark. Some small part of her, twisted small and tight in her chest, wonders if he'd have told her if Spencer had died. If this is the bit where they say, "I'm sorry, ma'am, but—"
"Maeve, I'm sorry, but—" he begins, and everything goes quiet and still. There had been traffic behind her, even at this hour in this small, Georgian town, but it must have all up and driven away because she can't hear a thing anymore. Just a wiry buzzing and the distant feeling that she's falling. She's fallen. The asphalt burns against her knees, her fingers pulled painfully by the handle of the bag she'd packed for Spencer. Something falls from her shirt at the impact, something that she stares at when she regains her mind.
It's the paper-boat pin he gave her.
There are hands around her, helping her up. Warm on her arms and, when she stumbles again, pulling her close. She's suddenly being held and, despite her fury at this man and his failure to protect her heart, she lets herself be held until her mind regains enough equilibrium to register him repeating the words, "He's alive, he's alive, he's alive," to her in a reassuring, steady hum.
She can't even think to hear what he's trying to tell her, just begs him to take her to Spencer, now.
Three days ago, preferably.
And, he does.
It turns out that what Hotch had been trying to tell her is that the man that took her husband, that took her beautiful, kind, vibrantly alive husband, did his best to kill him. Beat and tortured and drugged him. Came so close to succeeding. The doctors tell her that he's suffering withdrawals, that he's on anti-epilepsy medication to stall any more seizures—a seizure! —, that his heart-rate is being monitored to ensure that it continues on, as though that's ever been a doubt before.
She's told all this and then she walks in to find him asleep, but visibly broken. Bruised and battered all over and laying so still and rigid in the hospital bed that she knows his sleep is chemical, not natural. There's a bandage on his head and around his elevated foot, the arm that's visible to her marred by a line of swollen, red track-marks. She counts them. Fifteen. Fifteen times someone had taken his arm and forced a needle into it. As she counts them, she traces her fingers down, finding the places where his binds had ripped and torn at his skin as he'd struggled.
She takes the pin from her shirt and pins it to his, curling up beside him and waiting to wake. This room is a nightmare that she knows there's no waking easily from.
But, whatever's coming, she's ready to face it with him.
This will not break them.
.
March
Hankel's taken his wonderful life and he's flushed it through with pain. Spencer can't take it anymore, he can't take the cravings or the nightmares or the way that everything reminds him of that shack. He can't take the way that his struggles affect Maeve, as she stubbornly refuses to let him suffer alone. He's reduced to asking the most basic of things from her, for assistance with the simplest of tasks. The final straw is when he struggles to bathe alone, foot unable to be wet in the shower and his body too sore and stiff for him to fold himself into their tiny bath. It's mortifying, despite her having seen him naked before, sitting in the shower as she helps him wash without getting his foot wet, watching as she lingers over the fading marks on his arms.
She has nightmares too, and he knows she's trying to hide them from him. Knows because he lies awake more often than he doesn't, watching as her sleep turns subtly restless. When she startles awake, and she always does, she's half asleep and barely coherent, rolling to him and reaching frantically for any part of him she can find. When she finds him there, still there, she cries silently even when, half the time, she's already drifted back to sleep. It's such an unconscious, wordless pain that he's broken by it, adding it to everything else he's fighting against.
He dreams of getting high, of the clarity of that rush. The whispered promise of an answer to all this pain at the end of a needle, of the drifting nothingness that had followed. Tobias had been right. By the end, he had wanted it. Wanted it still. Wonders if he can make Maeve smile again if he's so stoned that he can smile himself, even as he knows that that's not the outcome of that choice at all.
When left alone, he's frantic. Securing the doors and the windows and checking every lock, sticking paper over both their webcams to keep out any unwanted eyes. He dismantles the kitchen chairs as an excuse to get rid of them, unable to explain just why the feel of the wood against his back makes him feel like screaming. He's terrified of going back to work. He wants to go back to work. He's terrified of being alone; alone is all he wants to be.
He has dreams of dying and they're not as horrible as he'd hope them to be. They're better than the alternative.
But, dying would mean leaving Maeve alone.
He wakes one night and can't stand it anymore. It's just over a month after he'd been taken; only the visible wounds are fading. It's too much. He can't do it anymore. He's not even sure what's driving this panic, except he'd dreamed of Maeve dressed in black surrounded by a fleet of sinking paper boats, not noticing that the water she'd stood in was slowly creeping up her body. The nightmare fades from his memory; the panic doesn't.
He wakes her and he's crying.
"They'd make things better," he's babbling, unsure of what he's crying about but not fighting the words as they come: "You'll see, Maeve, you'll see, they made things better."
Nauseatingly, she knows. "No," she says firmly, and holds him tight as he falls apart. "No, Spence. That's an illusion—the drugs didn't help you in there. They did nothing to help you."
"They made it stop hurting," he says in reply, voice muffled by her shoulder against his mouth. "I could make it stop hurting…"
"You're not going to do that." She sounds so sure, he's infuriated and soothed.
"How do you know?" It's not like she could stop him: he's alone so often, while she works, while she travels. Nothing is stopping him. Absolutely nothing. Not for the first time, he regrets not taking the drugs from Tobias' pocket, his hand stalled by the knowledge of Maeve's disappointment and his own unwillingness to turn her husband into a junkie.
"Because you're stronger than that," is her reply, "and because you're not alone. But, something needs to change."
He's expecting her to force him into the therapy she's been pressuring him about, but she doesn't. The next day, she comes home early from work with two weeks leave and an announcement: they're going on the honeymoon they haven't had time for yet, far from here and far from the trauma that haunts them both.
.
April
The cabin sleeps. It's a silent honeymoon, which is how they like it. The shack had been loud: Hankel's whispering and the hissing of the offal and the—
But that's far away and not relevant to here.
This high in the Rockies, it's still snowing. A soft, light drift of snow that blankets everything. The cabin they're in is a perfect mix of them both: Spencer's esoteric love of everything rustic and Maeve's longing for more modern comforts. It's a one room deal that's forty-percent sunken bed, the wall behind them a window looking out over the sudden drop below. Right now, it's white. Just, white. Like they've fallen off the edge of the world together while resting comfortably in a bed made for just them.
They lock themselves in this tiny, perfect world with nothing but their books and their blankets and the fire crackling across the room, and they heal together. It's impossible to feel afraid when the view reminds them of how small they are, when the room keeps them huddled tight, when they know they're everything to each other.
They test their boundaries with each other.
Spencer asks her to tie him up during sex, a whispered request. She's horrified at first; he talks her into it.
There's panic, of course. A fast heartbeat, quickened breathing, the muscles in his arms bunching as he fights the desire to buck against the loose binds.
She very nearly safe-words him out.
But all these things calm, as the snow whispers against the windows. He repeats, "He didn't take this from me, he didn't take this, he didn't take this," and asks her to keep going. He knows that she understands; this is them fighting to reclaim what he's lost.
And they both know they're going to win, because they love each other too much not to.
.
May
Spencer recovers slowly, but he does recover. They return from their honeymoon feeling lazy and spoiled and sore in all the most wonderful places. It's a feeling very much like being in love: this hurting, gorgeous sense of warmth.
It doesn't last.
At this point in time, he's leaning heavily on her to escape leaning on his demons. It's what a partnership is about—being strong when the other can't be—so she bears his weight bravely and never complains, even when it means she's going to work exhausted, even when it means his short temper grates on her. Even when she's angry herself, because she wants the Spencer of before back—the one without hidden hurts and triggers, the one they'd tried to refind in that silent cabin in the Rocky Mountains. But the snow is gone, and that Spencer is gone too. They've been changed by this experience.
They have to learn to live with that.
.
June
Going back to work is just as painful as he'd feared. The cases are more confronting than they've ever been, every victim bound and murdered a stark reminder of what could have happened to him if he'd been a little unluckier, if his team had been an iota slower in finding him. It's hard to concentrate and even harder not to panic, knowing they see it in his eyes and are judging him for it.
It's Maeve who brings him back to earth.
"Tell them," she orders him when he admits how horrifyingly hard he's finding it all. "They know how to help you. That's not judgement you're seeing, Spencer—it's worry. They almost lost you too."
And he trusts her completely when it comes to things he struggles to understand, like people and the way they still somehow persist in loving him, so he does as she says. He tells them.
He tells Hotch, who isn't surprised that he's struggling but is surprised that he came to them for help. He schedules more therapy through the Bureau's trauma counsellor, which Spencer is wary of but finds to be stunningly helpful once he begins attending.
He tells Gideon, who sits him down and talks him through the worst of his worries. No, he's not going crazy—Gideon's known this feeling too. No, he's not weak—any of them would have reacted as he did. No, it wasn't his fault—the job is unpredictable, and they'll do better next time.
He tells JJ, who hugs him tight and tells him once again that she's sorry, and he tells Emily, who takes him down to the gym and makes him practise disarming an opponent over and over and over again until he can, eight times out of ten, get her gun from her hands. "There," she says after, when he sweaty and sore and surprised to realise that he hasn't thought once about the drugs, "now it won't be you again."
He tells Morgan, who goes very, very quiet and then tells him how scared he'd been when Spencer had been gone. "It's not gonna ever happen again," Morgan says firmly, "I won't let it."
Overall, it's not as hard as it could have been, coming back to work. It's still hard, but not impossible.
He's thankful for that.
.
July
Despite the struggle to keep her head above water over the past few months of Spencer's rehabilitation, she's still awarded at work for her efforts. The award comes with a small ceremony of appreciation as well as an offer of publication and discussion of her taking on doctorate students in her own lab, and it's all so exciting that she doesn't quite know what to do with herself. And she's stupidly excited to go home and tell Spencer, right until she realises that the day on the email she's received puts the date down as the week he's due in Seattle for one of the FBI recruitment drives in the colleges there.
And the job always comes first.
When he gets home that night and finds her already in bed, he's tired but calmer than he's been in a long time. For the first time since Hankel, she feels like she can see hints of himself showing through the wary exterior he wears—he's not excited about his work anymore, not yet, but he no longer looks like he's considering his own funeral when he talks about it.
"Hey, beautiful," he murmurs, crawling in behind her and kissing her shoulders. Still dressed with only his gun missing, she rolls to meet him and studies him closely. "How are you?"
She decides to tell him. This is a good thing, this part of their lives coming to fruition—and he needs to share in the good parts of her work just as she shares in the terrible parts of his.
So, she does.
He's even more excited than she had been, dragging her from the bed and dancing about with her, the life in his face finally returning as he whoops and chants about how clever she is, his beautiful wife. It's moments like these when she realises how silly she is in her low moments, worrying about whether or not she's loved—she clearly is and doubts that he'll ever stop doing so.
"I'm going to be there," he announces to the room, far too loud to be telling just her. "I've decided—there's no way I'm missing this!"
And, he is.
She doesn't know how he manages it, but when she stands to receive her award and looks back at the crowd, he's waving at her from the back of the room. To her surprise, there's a man there with him laughing at his exuberance. When he sees her looking, he beams as proudly as though she's his own daughter.
It's very strange, and strangely rewarding.
"Hi, hello, look how amazing you are!" Spencer cries when she walks down to them after and shows him her award.
"Well done, Dr. Reid," the other man says, introducing himself as Jason Gideon. She knows that name. He's the man who introduced Spencer to profiling, the one member of his team she's never met.
"We stayed for this—we'll have to drive through the night, but I was determined," Spencer whispers to her, smiling a secret smile just for her. "For some reason, Gideon backed me up on this."
Maeve looks at him, the intense man who's changed hers and Spencer's lives so much. "I think he knows the importance of the little moments," she says, just as softly.
After all, it was one meeting with him that brought them here: she's as thankful as she is sorry.
.
August
They go to New Orleans for a case, a year after Katrina had ransacked it, and he stays behind after it's all done in order to find a friend.
Ethan hasn't changed that much at all. The years have added a little weight to him and removed some of his brightness, but his eyes are still as kind and his smile is just as quick. It's not like when they were at college, but it's something new and just as good: a genuine adult friendship not based around murders or work, something Spencer treasures.
They talk about everything, about Maeve and about Maurice and about the years yet to come. They talk about the past. They talk about their hopes and their futures.
They talk about Hankel. About the drugs and the cravings and how close Spencer had come to disaster.
"I don't know what would have happened without Maeve," Spencer admits, seeing Ethan study him closely. "I don't think I would have had the strength to… well." He leaves that unsaid but feels his hands tremble on the glass he's holding.
"You're stronger than you give yourself credit for," Ethan replies simply. "You always have been."
"How do you know?"
And Ethan laughs, leaning forward with his glass tipped precariously: "Trust me," he says, "after all, who ran and who stayed?"
Spencer isn't sure if he's referring to the Academy, or the time they were mugged, and he says, "Would you have given in?"
All Ethan says is, "Yes."
.
September
She has a week off in September while the labs undergo a routine inspection entailing the use of most of the equipment, and she can't decide what she wants to do with all that free time. The obvious answer would be to spend it with her husband, but he's back at work and, even if he wasn't, he tells her she should spend it doing something for her. In the end, she decides to stay at home and do nothing but read.
This isn't how it plays out.
She comes home from work on her last day to find that Spencer's been called into work, but he's left her bags packed on the bed and tickets sitting beside them. It's a weekend trip away with her friends that they've organised without telling her, and she's so furiously happy with Spencer for helping them do so that she's not sure if she wants to hug him or stamp her foot at him. In the end, she decides that it's just because she's overwhelmed at the thoughtfulness put into this gift that she's so mad about it, and her one regret is that she leaves before he comes home.
It's an amazing weekend. They learn to scuba-dive and a sea turtle swims so close to her that, if she hadn't been so shocked, she could have brushed its shell with her toes, and they do nothing but drink strange, fruity punches and stay up far too late for the entire weekend. They talk about life and love and what's to come, and only once is she brought up short when Carly asks her when she plans on giving them baby geniuses to spoil from afar. All she can do is shrug, because they're far too busy to be thinking about that anytime soon and, besides, she doesn't know if she can spare the time from work.
She goes home sunburned and relaxed, finally sure that life is working out, and wildly excited to tell Spencer all about it. But the apartment is silent, despite his keys on the hook, and the bedroom is empty.
She finds him asleep on the couch, cuddled up in a ball with a pillow hugged tight to his chest and his go-bag as a pillow. Laughing and deliriously in love with this strange man, she finds a spot to nestle in close and curls up beside him, asleep in minutes despite her sunburned arms and the way her ass hangs off the edge of the couch.
.
October
Their first wedding anniversary is spent hundreds of miles apart, him in a hotel room with Morgan investigating a serial arsonist, her at a conference in New York giving a speech on her research in neurobiology. In a short break between rushing around precincts, Spencer finds himself sitting on his bed in the hotel room watching her speech on his phone propped against the lamp.
Morgan watches too, commenting once that he has no idea what she's talking about but avidly interested anyway. "She's brilliant," he says finally, as the applause dies down and Maeve begins to take questions, her cheeks bright red but managing to answer the queries with minimal social awkwardness. "You must be proud."
"I am," Spencer says quietly, despite his emotions being a muddle of pride and worry. Morgan looks at him, eyebrows lifting, and he curses that he's surrounded by so many bright minds. "I just… I don't know. Look at her—she's the smartest person in most rooms that she's in—"
"Even yours?" Morgan teases gently, which Spencer could argue yes but won't, because he's trying to make a point.
"—and she's using that intelligence," he finishes grimly. "While I'm…"
"Ah," says Morgan. "Working alongside mere mortals, solving an endless series of crimes instead of, I don't know, devising some kind of system to cure psychopathy."
"Yeah, I guess," Spencer admits, deciding not to be pedantic about the details. "She's excelling in her field. I'm a…"
"Field agent with the FBI." Morgan scrubs at his face with his hand, expression unreadable. "Look, man, I don't know what it's like having a brain like yours, none of us do. Even Hotch is a low-key genius and he doesn't have what you've got. But you're not wasted here. Next time we solve a case, save a life, remember that we wouldn't have done it without you."
"Yes, you would have," Spencer argues. He's not integral here—he's not integral anywhere, not in the way Maeve is. "You'd still save lives without me."
"Not as many," replies Morgan. "Not as fast."
.
November
She comes home to find Spencer playing chess alone with a chessboard she doesn't recognise. For a second, she smiles, right until she realises that he's drunk and morose, putting the white king in check and then shoving the board from the table and dropping his head into his arms.
"What happened?" she asks him, putting her bag and keys down and taking a seat beside him.
And he tells her.
His job has claimed another soul. Jason Gideon is gone. Leaving in the night with nothing to remember him by except a chessboard and a letter that she reads and hates him a little for. It's not enough. Oh, she understands his pain—just look at how Spencer had struggled earlier this year and how much she would not have blamed him if he'd given up and walked away from it all—but even if he's hurting, that doesn't mean dropping his family along with his work.
"I'm sorry, Spence," she says honestly.
All he says in response, his breath whisky-strong and burning her nose a little, is, "What's it matter, everyone leaves."
When he comes to bed that night, only somewhat sober, they have sex because he pushes for it. She's not sure it's a good idea, but he's drunk and miserable and clearly looking for something. It's not good for either of them.
They give up halfway through and neither sleeps at all.
.
December
New Year's sees them drunk and silly, re-enacting their youths as Emily goads them all into drinking far more than they would have without her. They're all desperate to relax, to forget everything that's happened this year, and they're more than successful.
By the time the clock ticks to midnight, the party has spilled outside of Morgan's home. They're spread out around the lawn in loose groups of revellers, Emily and Morgan mock wrestling, Garcia telling Morgan's friends all the stories of him she can remember, Hotch standing quietly alone watching the sky with a beer bottle in hand.
But Spencer doesn't see any of this until after because, as the pop and whistle of fireworks begins to sound over the city, he's cuddled up to Maeve with their backs against a poplar tree, whispering to each other giddy memories of meeting each other in between kissing each other fiercely. It's a celebration of another year, a celebration of the years that have passed before, and—most of all—it's a celebration of surviving.
And a declaration that they'll continue to do so.