One moment he was on the bed, halfway under the blankets, then next he had Reid slammed up against the wall, one arm across his throat, with no memory of moving.
When he came to himself again, Reid was grasping at his arm, both long-fingered hands barely big enough to close around his forearm; his eyes were wide, terrified, his mouth open but no sound emerged.
Shocked out of his rage, Derek dropped his arm like he'd been burned, throwing himself backwards, away from the doctor who slid bonelessly to the floor, staring at him. He slammed into the bedstand and welcomed the pain.
Derek had thought that he wouldn't be able to bear the pity that he'd have seen in the genius' eyes when he found out the truth, that that was the worst look that Spencer could direct toward him. He was wrong. What he was seeing now was a hundred, no, a thousand times worse.
Spencer was terrified.
Of him.
For good reason.
Derek dropped to the ground as well, staring blankly at his hands and drawing in heaving breaths.
… the man who loves you more than anything…
Derek shook his head wildly as Garcia's words stabbed through his mind, burning him like acid. Over and over he shook he head until he couldn't stop shaking it, until all of him was shaking, too.
Across the room, Dr. Spencer Reid was trying to regain control of himself, trying to stop the adrenaline that was pounding through him in reaction to Derek's attack. He shouldn't have pressed, he knew he shouldn't have… It was just, Derek wasn't talking and he needed to, needed to get this out of him… But he had refused to talk…
He was hyperventilating, he needed to stop, he was getting dizzy. He was shaking, too; was it the hyperventilation too, or the fear? Both, maybe. Probably.
Oh God. What had just happened? Had Derek really just tried to hurt him?
He couldn't think; he was frozen in place, unable to accept what had happened, to think what to do now.
Neither moved. Time passed as they stayed frozen, eyes on the other, terrified. Twice, Derek opened his mouth to say something, widened his eyes as if something particularly terrible had just appeared behind Spencer, and rapidly snapped his mouth closed again.
For his part, Spencer couldn't bring himself to try to say anything at all, his voice frozen in his throat as his brain ran in the same circles over and over again, like a hamster on a wheel futilely trying to escape the snake right behind it.
The ring of Spencer's still-on cell phone scared them both; Reid tried to jump away from the noise in reflex and only ended up smashing his head into corner of the wardrobe holding the TV, yelping in pain as it contacted the same spot that had cracked into the road of the alleyway previously.
"Spencer!" Derek said in sudden concern, grabbing the phone and quickly turning it back off before moving forward as if to help. His voice and his movement startled Reid, who threw himself around the wardrobe, scooting backwards away from the older profiler who'd frozen when he moved, the terror on the doctor's face slashing him to his core.
"I-I-I gotta g-go clean up. H-hands, remember?" Spencer said in a rush, holding up his scraped hands both as proof and as if he was going to push the other man away. Derek nodded slowly, trying not to scare the other man further. This was only getting worse with everything he did, he was screwing this up so badly…
"Okay. Okay, Reid. I'll be waiting in that chair when you come, out, okay? Take as much time as you need," Derek said as if to a terrified animal, which, at this point, was not that far off base.
Reid, nodding frantically, threw himself into the bathroom, slamming the door shut with a bang and the audible click of the lock. Derek dragged himself into the chair without caring how he got into it, trying to ignore the muffled sobbing that had started nearly as soon as the door had closed.
What had he done?
