Chapter Fourteen: Listen
AN: Thank you as always to my beta, Greeneyedconstellations
So, this may interest absolutely no one but myself, but I made a playlist for this story with a song for each chapter! The link is on the AO3 version of this story, on Chapter 14 (damn ffnet not letting me link)
Fair warning, there is spoilery stuff for later chapters in that link if you know the songs and have vivid imaginations, so beware that before clinking the link.
This chapter is Gollum's Song by Emiliana Torrini, although if you only look at one of the songs for the playlist, I really think Animal I Have Become by Three Days Grace is basically the anthem of this story.
Warning here because this is a heavy, heavy chapter with a lot of dark implications, and this is where the 'extremely dubious consent' comes into play.
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Dawn was casting pastel tendrils across the sky outside her bedroom window when Reid woke, and she couldn't help but think how close it had been that he would never have known this morning.
"My head hurts," he said, his voice so painfully hoarse that her own throat twinged in sympathy. "Emily?"
"Here," she replied sleepily, wiping her mouth and sitting up. The top of his head was barely visible from her position on the floor, his hair chaotically tousled. She wanted to slide up there and smooth it down, running the lank locks through her fingers; she knew what he'd do from experience, his face shifting into a sappy grin as he melted under her clever fingers.
What he would have done. Who knew how this new man would respond to her touch?
But god, how she wanted.
He sucked in a shocked breath, almost painfully surprised, and she waited to hear how he planned to break her heart today.
"You're here," he said plainly, and sat up, wincing. He studied her intently, eyes skimming over her body slowly, cautiously. "I thought… I don't know what I thought."
Remember when you used to pick the green beans out of your dinner because you didn't like the shape of them, she thought wildly. Remember when we decided to walk to the corner store for milk and it rained and you fell in a puddle, and I stood there and laughed until you couldn't help but join in. Out loud, she said, "You need a shower." He really did smell, of vomit and old sweat and near misses. He also needed sleep, and food, and his life back, but they knew it was only a matter of time until Foyet woke enough to drag him back to hell.
"Yes," he said shortly, and she remembered how he used to spin one word into seven, turning a simple question into a minefield of facts and figures and a practised level of eccentricity she couldn't hope to achieve in her lifetime. "Okay, yes…" Before she could stop him, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and tried to stand, the sheet pooling around his feet in a nest-like shape that did nothing to catch him as he fell. "Ow."
"Idiot," she muttered, pushing him off of her. He went reluctantly, slithering to the ground like a discarded rag, and laying sprawled and weak. "Oh, look at me, I'm Spencer Reid and I almost died – but I'm sure I'm just fine so watch me leap out of bed like nothing happened!"
He shot her a woeful look, and she took pity on him, threading an arm around his chest and trying to hide the way she twitched away from him nervously, almost with revulsion.
She'd never been scared of him before now, but she held him this morning and her heart hammered and her breath caught and she knew it was fear and nothing cleaner. He knew it too, and she saw the way the knowledge cut him deeper than any physical blow he'd been dealt.
Remember when I thought you could never hurt me, she thought, and almost gasped.
"Ahhh," he said suddenly, stilling in her grasp. "Wait, I… JJ is here, isn't she? I can't go out there."
Oh for fuck… "You can't be serious," she intoned dryly, refusing to look at his face, because if he was serious she was probably going to lose it right here on the bedroom floor, and if she started crying from laughter, those tears would turn real soon enough and all of her shields would be broken. "Spencer, who do you think saved your ungrateful arse last night? Trust me. JJ has now seen everything you have to offer. She's probably asleep anyway, she was exhausted."
The look of sheer horror on his face should have been hilarious. It struck her as odd that he still cared about things like modesty and his nakedness, when they'd all seen more of him than his body could ever show. "If it makes you feel better," she supplied, smiling with a Sergio grin that only made him look more frightened. "Rossi was in here too."
"My life is over," he whined, covering his face with one hand like he could shut out the world with his spread fingers.
She wished he could.
.
.
She hated him for the fact that even though she knew what his hands had done, what his eyes had seen, she still loved them. She had wondered if she did, doubted it even, but watching him eye the shower stall nervously, twitching like a horse about to race, she knew she did.
"In," she commanded. He did so immediately, and guilt instantly stabbed in her gut at the practised obedience of him. Then he turned and eyed her warily, and the guilt receded.
There was some spine still in that gaze.
"What are you doing?" he asked, eyes tracking her hands as she unbuttoned her shirt and shucked her loose slacks. She felt a strange rush of shyness at his open regard, as though it was the first time they were bare to each other instead of one of countless many.
"Making sure you don't knock yourself stupider by falling in the shower," she said calmly, tossing the clothes aside. He frowned, and there was no spark of interest in his gaze, or lower, and that more than anything spoke to how ill he remained.
If they let him walk out of here, there was no guarantee he wouldn't just sicken again, except out of reach this time. She tried not to dwell on that.
"Household accidents are the most common cause of death." He grinned, and the grin slid off his face as his skin paled; dark eyes turning unfocused. She caught him as he swayed. "Or heart disease. I don't remember." His breath tickled her ear, and she thought of turning her head and pressing her lips to his, but her stomach roiled at the idea.
"Oh, you are going to be shit fucking useless at trivia nights from now on, aren't you?" she said, helping him sit awkwardly on the floor of the shower. He leaned his head back and squinted up at the taps. "Okay. We're going to do this sitting then. Lovely."
A slurred mumble was his only answer, bringing his legs up and letting his head loll onto his knees. She stared at his back, at the junction where shoulder-blade curved smoothly into wing; the unfamiliar shape of the muscles that powered the inhuman appendages. Okay. This was fine.
This was just fine. If they were any other couple, showering together would be simple. Showering together wouldn't involve squatting next to him while he tried to keep his scattered mind together; it wouldn't involve dodging around awkwardly placed wings or avoiding the areas of his body that still looked swollen and sore. It wouldn't involve the cold slippery touch of the glass against her ass as she tried to stop her skin from brushing against his.
Simple. Taps, turn to lukewarm. She'd never been so grateful for detachable showerheads.
It might be silly, getting him up and out of bed so soon, but maybe it would also show him that he could be clean still, at least on the outside. She owed him that, since she couldn't even give him the comfort of knowing she absolved him of guilt.
"Can I?" she asked gently, showing him the sponge. He shrugged, the water pattering against his shoulder and tracing down his back, leaving glittering droplets across the folded webbing of his wings. Okay, Prentiss. Just… don't think too much about it.
Start at his neck, ignore how his eyes are blank behind heavy lids, lost in whatever darkness Foyet had left him in; ignore the cords of his throat, tense enough that she worried that pressing the sponge against them would cut off his airway. Ignore the pulse that rambled on unevenly as though he'd just run a marathon instead of walked a hallway.
Shoulders. Back. Easy. Nothing really all that different.
If he noted how she paused when the sponge caught on long white scarring across his back that was new and horribly, horribly familiar, he didn't comment.
Okay, Foyet, she thought, scrubbing around those silver lines. Okay. I'm not gonna kill you when I catch you, because first I owe you every blow against him. Starting with a fucking whip, you cunt.
"Open," she said, tapping one of his wings. This time he did shudder, and she waited. And didn't say any of the things she wanted to when he reluctantly curved it open, casting shadows in the stall that danced in the stream of water and turned the light muted and fae. She found herself eyeing the continued barring of the whip-marks, but this time lacing the impossibly delicate skin of his wingspan. "This could have crippled you," she said instead, stupidly obvious, and he nodded slowly.
"The other is worse," he said, looking away. "It… got caught in something. It makes flying difficult. It's mostly magic anyway, wind currents and temperatures, but… I won't ever fly an obstacle course." He bared his teeth in a sleepy, fractured grin, and she traced her fingers over the bones of his wings, the sponge forgotten. His skin was cool under her fingertips, and she realized she'd forgotten to be afraid. "It looks like a whip, but it's not."
"Knife," she said after a careful beat of studying. All the better. I don't think Hotch would let me take a whip into the cell we keep him in.
He won't see a knife.
Almost without her consent, her fingers continued their quiet exploration of his body. She avoided his arms with their gilded reminders of his cage, but he wouldn't have thanked her for drawing attention to the rash of red dots along the crook of his elbow anyway. He closed his eyes, one leg slipping down and laying as straight as the lanky limb could manage in the enclosed space they'd both crammed themselves into, savouring a rare gentle touch.
His side, his chest, the skin over his heart. She splayed her hand flat there for a moment, and wondered if he still remembered how to love her. His heart beat like he did.
Sliding her fingers down his chest, along his belly, and it could have been sexual, except it really wasn't. Her leg cramped, and she sat slowly, carefully, her own legs tangling with his and their sides pressed against each other in a long line of heat, the showerhead held loosely in one hand and sending a steady stream of water to patter against his hip.
Resting those curious fingers against his thigh, her bitten nails tapping along the swirls of the hated tattoo on his leg. One of the few parts of him that was unmarked; Foyet would have gotten a sick glee out of the brand, she had no doubt of that. He wouldn't want to blur the cruelty of it with bruising.
It was a rediscovery, and in that long, quiet, frozen time of him dozing slightly under the warm water and her re-memorising every part of him, she realized that she didn't have to remember how to love him at all, because she'd never stopped.
Just like Doyle, she invited danger into her bed and relished the way it made her feel alive.
"What do you remember of us?" she asked, and he startled awake. Hazel eyes caught hers, and she knew in that moment she'd imagined the bloodied glee in them, because they could never be so fatally unkind.
"Being happy," he said eventually, and reached up to tuck a strand of wet hair behind her ear.
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Sergio tried to follow them back into her room, and she shoved him out with a scowl. He bristled, about to protest, and by the look on Rossi's face he was going to as well.
If they didn't trust Reid alone with her, why had they helped save him?
"Dave," JJ called from the kitchen. "Can you give me a hand with this?"
Rossi shot them both an unhappy look, teetering on outright disapproval. Behind Emily, Reid shifted uneasily, his breath still raspy. "Come on, hairball," Rossi said finally, jerking his head towards the kitchen. "Let's go help JJ before she ushers in a new ice age and you get turned into cheap mittens."
Sergio grumbled deep in his chest, a noise far too loud for the diminutive size he was at that point in time, and followed the older mage away.
"Don't be long," he sent back, his voice an itchy whine. "He has power again. He's not safe."
"Shows what you know," she muttered, because Reid didn't need power to be dangerous. Not to her. Shutting the door with a click, she turned and swallowed hard.
Reid watched her, naked except for the towel slung around his waist, and although she could still see the wasting lines of his illness along the curve of his ribcage and the gauntness of his face, she could also see the magic there too. His wings sat mantled away from his spine, almost threatening, his face a cool blankness that was almost a carbon copy of the look that Gideon had perfected.
He looked dangerous.
He looked like Doyle.
She wasn't going to lie and say that it didn't send a cold jolt of something hungry into her belly and lower, to pool between her legs. A dark arousal that she'd never admit to.
"You reached second circle," he said suddenly, tilting his head to examine her diploma framed on the wall by her bed. Sergio had insisted. "You should have been second circle months ago." His voice was deeper than usual, worn down by vomiting and talking without pause as the delirium had sunk in. She swallowed again and squeezed her thighs together.
Get it the fuck together, Prentiss, she thought angrily. How can you look the victims' families in the eyes if you jump into bed with the man who killed them?
"Are you still in love with me?" she asked suddenly, channelling her inner thirteen year old girl. The blankness on his face slipped, replaced with shock. He didn't answer straight away, and a claw reached into her chest and threatened to tear her open. She stood waiting.
When he walked towards her and wrapped his arms around her awkwardly, hesitantly, like she was fragile, she didn't react. He still hadn't answered. She just stilled in his tense grasp and watched a droplet of water slip down his shoulder, across his chest, along the faint lines of scarring on his belly down to the top of the towel… she snapped her gaze back up to his throat quickly.
"I don't know," he said finally. "It's not that I stopped loving you… I just… Emily." She blinked furiously, not sure if the burning of her eyes was tears or a sneeze but really fucking hoping it was the latter, because she wasn't going to fucking cry over him again, she'd done that enough. "Emily." A warm hand cupped her chin, tilted her face up to meet his eyes. Nimble fingers traced her cheek, a caress, her skin catching on the raised ridge of the scarring where they'd burnt his credentials off of him to stop his family from reaching him before they could rip his freedom away. She could feel his heart rattling, a drumbeat in his chest that said everything he couldn't.
"Let me in," she said quietly, the claw reaching down into her belly now and making it cramp painfully. She didn't want to see this, know this. Fuck, it was the last thing she wanted. This was how they'd breeched him originally, by exploiting the weakness she'd left in his mind.
But she needed it.
He took a shuddering breath. "The only times I've heard my name spoken since Tobias died is when you say it," he replied, trembling under her hands that had reached up and wrapped around him without her consent. "Some days I wake up and I can't even remember it myself. I feel like I've stepped into the body of Spencer Reid; invaded him. Pushed him out and continued on as though I am him. But I'm not, I'm an alien. I must be, because he loved you and I remember how that felt, but I don't understand how."
And then he opened his mind before she could reply, and she stepped in and found herself in a barrage of conflicting memories and thoughts and moments, in no particular order. Distantly, she heard someone call out.
Moving in an unfamiliar woman, an unimportant woman, feeling the rush of energy her release brought when suddenly she was there in his mind, startled, shocked, trying to flee. "Emily, wait!" he called, but she was gone. The nameless woman asked who Emily was. "I don't know," he replied, and realized he couldn't remember, his limitless capacity for memory failing him. Who was he?
He didn't know that anymore either.
Foyet pushing close, his mouth inches from his lips. "Don't move," the man taunted, even as he tried to desperately pull away, skin twitching with revulsion. "Come on, half-breed. Isn't this what your kind need?" Leaning closer, hot breath, and he gagged and couldn't move, couldn't stop him. Foyet craved control, and his was complete.
Sitting in the church side by side with Tobias. "It will help," he promised, and fingers, needle-sharp, bit into the skin of his arm and it did help, eventually.
A deer in the woods, picking calmly through the dew-bright grass surrounding the gravestones of his prison. It flicked an ear, eyed him, stayed calm. He was no threat to her. "Shows what you know," he said to himself, and laughed harshly. She ran, and her hooves clattered illogically like horseshoes on an asphalt road.
A woman, bleeding, dying, screaming. Reaching for him, even as he paced the street outside the home of the one Foyet had told him to hunt. Turning away from the house, trying to shake the woman off. Recognising her as she began to slip into the dark. "Emily?" he called, and remembered. Synapses firing, misfiring, tracing patterns of recollection across the full surface of his damaged mind. He stopped hunting and somewhere a horse squealed like its throat was cut, red blood feeding the hungry ground beneath.
Relentless hunger. Primitive. Inanition weakening his body, atrophying away the entity that was once Spencer Reid and leaving the skeletal remains of the darkest parts of him.
Knife in his hands. Her screams and his. Shoving the memory away brutally and turning to face a smiling boy in a dark hat, a rope in his hands. Turned again and now it was a man, someone's son and brother and lover; a man who laughed and cried and died. A whole life spent that led to this moment, and he pressed his face against the ground near the body, tasting dirt and blood that wasn't his own, and he hoped to die.
Scrubbing at those hands until they were raw, but the blood refusing to fade from his vision, illusory palinopsia, a persistent activation of his visual memory creating the imagery, his mind malfunctioning; see how crazy he is now? Foyet laughing at him. "You're just like me now, Half-breed." Those words, close enough to his name, coiling into his brain like smoke, stamping themselves on his soul with indelible ink. Half-breedhalf-breedhalf-breed.
Just like me now.
Murderer.
One final memory, the freshest. So fresh that their noses burned with the reek of piss and infection overlaying a lighter, cleaner tang of straw. Foyet standing, staggering towards him, face twisted. It was him. The smell was him; his body rotting from the inside out. Half-breed backed away from that rot before it could spread to him, but he knew it was already inside him. "Get here," snarled Foyet, his hands claws, stumbling and slipping to the floor. It was a command, but it wasn't, lacking his usual biting force. He teetered, feeling the illness washing at him, trying to crush him. "Take this from me."
No.
He fled.
He went to her.
She let go and slumped, choking on what she'd seen, and the emotions that had come with it. Spencer was wrong. He hadn't forgotten how to feel – he'd felt everything just fine. He was drowning in the feeling of it, and now she was too.
When she surfaced, it wasn't Reid who held her, but Rossi, and the room swam with worried faces. "His name is Spencer," she told Rossi seriously, who looked confused and then doubly as worried. She needed him to understand. "That's his name. Not Half-breed, or Nothing, or anything that bastard used to control him. It's Spencer Reid."
And then it all went blissfully quiet for a while.
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Waking up on the bed he'd so recently vacated, she was for a long moment sorely thankful that her mattress was spelled for cleanliness, although a small part of her noted sadly that not even the nicer scent of him remained. The sun was winter-warm through her open window, traffic humming under the window. Mid-morning. She didn't even remember getting into bed.
She hoped to fucking god it was JJ who'd put her to bed and not Rossi. There were some things that she didn't need him to do for her, and that was definitely one of them.
"Silly witch," Sergio sent sleepily from his perch on the end of the bed, opening one eye to peer at her. "You took too much from him. You should have known what you would see would be terrible."
"More than you can imagine," she whispered back, ignoring the dull headache thumping behind her eyes and leaning forward to scratch at his ears. "Did the others leave?" I didn't say goodbye.
Sergio tensed. "JJ, yes."
Rossi was still here then. He was such a mother hen.
It hit her a second later who else he hadn't said.
Oh.
Oh.
She padded out into the living-room, her heart in her throat, and found Rossi and Reid playing chess.
Playing. Fucking. Chess.
Their voices murmured, low enough that she couldn't quite hear them, and they stopped when she walked in. Reid didn't look guilty, not quite, but some emotion shifted deep in his eyes, softening his face.
"You're still here," she said to him, quietly.
He shrugged, and moved his rook. "Foyet is… preoccupied."
The ghost of a harsh voice sneered in her mind. "Take this from me."
"No," she gasped, shuddering. Two pairs of eyes snapped up to watch her, curious and dull respectively. Rossi went to say something, but Reid softly said check and his interest swung back to the board.
"I do have to leave though," Reid added, as Rossi shifted his queen to block his knight. Emily watched silently. Black knight took the white rook. White castle to block the black queen. Black queen took the castle, left the white knight open to attack. They paused, waiting, the knight's life teetering in the tap of Reid's impatient fingers. Rossi didn't move it, just watched. Reid frowned, asked, "You'd risk your queen to save the knight?"
The older mage yawned. "I tire of the game. It's gone on for far too long."
It all happened quite quickly after that. Reid moved to take the knight, lost his queen in a fumble of hands that Emily didn't quite catch because she was caught up in the smile teasing the corner of Reid's mouth.
"Checkmate," Rossi announced, tipping the black king. It rolled onto the floor and tapped against the heel of Reid's shoe. He nudged it curiously, like Sergio with an interesting bug. "You play like you want to lose, Dr. Reid."
"You play with your heart on your sleeve," Reid replied almost inaudibly, and Emily wasn't sure they were talking about chess anymore. "I have to go."
Emily didn't kiss him as he left. He didn't even try to hold her. Somehow, Rossi's dark eyes on them made that impossible.
He just left.
And that was the last time she saw him until the day Hotch died.
.
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In her dreams, her mind sorted through the mess of everything that had happened to him. She forgot what it was felt like to feel well-rested, but in return she saw into his soul and shared it with him. Her dreams were cold and broken and she welcomed them, even though when she woke they were impossible to remember, except for the horror they both felt.
"Your mother was crazy too, you know," Foyet said one day, after Tobias was gone, and he missed him, oh how he missed him. He thought maybe he might miss Tobias more than the others, the ones he had trouble holding in his memory, if only because Tobias brought relief and company, and someone to share the fear, and without socialization the animal can become anxious, flighty, and are termed 'herd-bound'. What animal, Emily? Think.
"I know," he admitted quietly, pressing his head against the wall and trying to shut out the cruel voice. Schizophrenia; a mental disorder characterized by abnormal social behaviour and failure to understand reality. He didn't dare not answer. Last time he'd refused to answer, Foyet took his rage out on a family. Is this reality? He'd always been abnormal. That family hadn't deserved death.
Schizophrenia may cause hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking and speech.
"You're crazy now as well," Foyet kept saying. "They can't fix that. Maybe you always were. How do you know that now isn't how it's always been, and maybe your memories are false? You could have been crazy all along." He leered. "Just like me."
He was probably right. He usually was.
Schizophrenia causes a notable decrease in cognitive functions.
You're smarter than me now, Emily. You know what I'm telling you.
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Two days after he left, she finished the circle.
"It's not like I can test it," she said to Rossi nervously, as he traced his fingers over it. Hotch leaned over his shoulder, eyes following every curve and line. They both paused on her newest additions, Hotch looking confused, Rossi's eyebrow lifting. "I made some… it's different, I know, but it might…"
The rune from her arm, changed slightly, more emphasis on the essence of his name woven through it. Now instead of a warning, it was an announcement. It was her telling him this is who you are. Remember that.
And underneath, the pattern mirrored itself. It spread across the circle, overlaying the rest of the rune with loud, harsh lines that seemed cruel and discordant at first; until you noted the love in the lines and the proclamation of the mirroring.
The tattoo from his hip and leg. The tattoo he hated. Mirrored and therefore no longer half, but whole; a promise of what he could be again.
The circle was him and in it was everything she knew of him and more.
"Prentiss," Rossi stopped her rambling with a curt snap of his voice. She closed her eyes. Months of work. Almost a year. Probably a year now. She couldn't hear him tell her it was useless, that it wouldn't work. "Prentiss, this is genius. I don't think it could be done better."
"Well done," added Hotch, and he smiled.
Emily Prentiss wasn't the kind of woman who got mushy over praise, but she'd hold that quiet remark close for a very long time to come.
.
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Sometimes Foyet stopped him from sleeping. Sleep deprivation. The European Court of Sentience Rights once ruled that sleep deprivation lacked 'the particular intensity and cruelty implied by the word torture'.
They were wrong.
The hunger he dealt with, the thirst was easy to fix, but the exhaustion broke him. Once he could have said exactly why. Once he could have said how his brain was impaired, how his body suffered. Now he knew nothing but falling.
"Heels against the wall, there's a good Half-breed," Foyet said calmly, barely looking at him. He sighed and pressed his numb feet back, legs cramping, head spinning. He couldn't remember how long he'd been like this. It seemed impossible he could stay here much longer. He existed in a state of twilight; constantly slumping and jerking awake with a rush of nausea and shock that left him reeling.
It was a need to sleep so fierce he thought he might die if he didn't and everything in him screamed for rest.
"I didn't say you could sleep yet. Head up." Foyet loomed close, at some point he'd walked up to him... when, he didn't know. Do you? He tilted his head back and the world spun and flung him around, as though he was hanging grimly onto an invisible centrifuge and gravity had failed him. His eyes burned, his stomach cramped, and he knew he was going to faint or vomit, but he wasn't allowed, and Foyet's control was inescapable.
Humans weren't made to sleep standing up, Emily, not like the horse. Pay attention, please. The horse engages the stay apparatus in the hind legs by shifting its hip position to lock the patella in place. At the stifle joint, a "hook" structure on the inside bottom end of the femur cups the patella and the medial patella ligament, preventing the leg from bending. Are you listening? Do you understand?
"You know," Foyet said at some point, hours and days and years later, or maybe merely seconds. "You're nothing. If you were something, they would have come for you by now. That girl, that witch, I think you made her up. You made her up - you don't even know what love is, do you, Nothing?"
"Do I?" If he was nothing, how was he talking? Illogical.
Fuck he was tired. Listen. Remember.
"Do you?" Foyet asked, quirking an eyebrow, and he trembled.
"Maybe," he mumbled. Maybe
.
.
Time crawled. It had never gone this fucking slowly before. She thought days had passed, but it was still Monday when she looked at her calendar. No cases. No working on the circle, although she obsessed on it in her mind until she could have cast it blindfolded.
No sign of Reid.
"Maybe Foyet will die and I won't even need to use the circle," she complained to Sergio after the fourth time she'd checked the clock to find that the minute hand hadn't even shifted.
"If Foyet dies before you use the circle, Reid is lost," Sergio pointed out, and her mouth went dry at the reminder. They were working on a time limit, and he'd chosen now to become illusive. "We don't have the benefit of wishing death upon him yet."
"He won't die," she said, biting savagely at the nail of her index finger and tasting copper. "Not until he's brought Hotch to his knees. And that's not going to happen."
At least no one else had died.
At least not yet.
.
.
She closed her eyes for a second on the train and
Tobias screamed and Nobody covered his ears and thought of horses prancing in a ring.
At least it wasn't him this time.
opened them again and considered the possibility of never sleeping again.
.
.
What felt like years later, but what was actually only that same night, she sat on the fire escape with her legs dangling over the edge, watching the sunset and enjoying the bite of the cool air.
"You look cold. Get a blanket," Sergio instructed, clattering onto the grate and looking up at her.
"Not yet," she murmured, and ran her thumb over her silent phone. Only when he shares it with me.
Not long now.
"Sergio," she said, turning and kneeling on the escape in front of the cat who'd become her constant, since almost before she could remember. "When I cast the circle, promise me you'll keep back."
He opened his pink mouth and sneered at her. "I'll do no such thing. You'll need my strength or you'll burn yourself out."
Running her hand down his smooth fur, she marvelled at how someone so tiny and belligerent had become so damn important to her. "I don't need your strength, cat," she teased, sticking the tip of her finger in his ear. He yowled furiously and tried to bite her, swiping sharp claws that barely missed her hand. "I have my own. Besides, you must be getting low on lives by now. Let's not risk the ones you have left."
He blinked and three dancing light-bugs appeared around his head, casting gold-green patterns on his fur. "I have plenty." His voice was outrageously smug. "I keep them in a matchbox for stupid witch emergencies." Reaching up, he batted at the bugs with a clawed paw, tail twitching.
"That's sixty years you're smacking around, cat," she scolded him. She grabbed him and pulled him into her arms, ignoring his old-man-cat grumbles. "Show some respect to the time."
His purrs took the sting out of his soft rebuke. "I've lived a long time, Emily. I do what I want with the time remaining."
Climbing back through the window with him in her arms was a challenge, but she managed it with a dogged determination. "Just stay back, Serge. Don't waste them on me."
"Cats do what they want and want what they do. You can't change cats, no more than you can change the past. You'll exhaust yourself trying."
She was definitely getting something with wings next. No more stubborn cats.
.
.
In the time that he was quietly calling PT (Post-Tobias), Foyet took his phone from him.
"You don't need the pain this will bring," he said with false kindness, and crushed it under his foot. The hunger started up almost immediately, his only lifeline with them gone. It was mostly psychosomatic, but soon it would be real. He'd starve, again, and that was the point because if he starved, there were things that he might have to no
Then he sent him to watch the Emily please, tell him. Tell him what you see. He'll die if you don't.
I'm not crazy
Something snuffled under him he pressed his belly to the wood and
.
.
JJ named her son Henry, and he was perfect. All sleepily flailing limbs, carefully formed fingers and toes, and tiny pointed ears that had Garcia almost in tears when she saw them. Will watched his family and beamed, and Emily wondered if the child would grow to love winter like his mother, or whether he would take after the promise of the power of rivers and waterways like his father.
"A water elf, JJ?" Morgan remarked when Will ducked out to get a coffee. "You know that snow melts in rain, right?"
JJ laughed and cuddled her son close, beaming with the self-satisfaction of every new mother. Hotch hung back, his hip to the wall, his face guarded. "Winter is nothing without water," she remarked proudly, and Garcia almost cried again.
The tears were unstoppable when they asked Garcia to be little Henry's godmother. "Ohmygod, yes yes yes," the tech nymph babbled. "Oh, Henry, I am going to spoil you!" She paused, looking back up from the baby in her arms that JJ had happily passed over. "Wait, do I have a co-godparent?"
JJ swallowed hard and looked down at the blanket, and Emily wished she could take that question back and bring the happiness back to the elf's face. "Not yet," she said quietly, running her nails over the coarse fabric of the hospital bed. "I haven't had the chance to ask him."
Hotch made a very quiet noise that could have been a cough, or it could have been his heart breaking just a little. She could never quite tell with him; he chose the strangest moments to remind them he was human. "Soon," he said quietly. "He'll be home soon."
.
.
"Do you like them?" He turned away from the stall and looked at the girl as she smiled at him, mud on her boots and on her nose.
"Sorry?" he asked politely. He tried to look past her, to not breathe, to do anything but think of how hungry he was, starving almost. He wanted to cough. He didn't want to scent her. He did anyway, the rich human tang of her filling his nose; a heady mix of coumarin, sebaceous oils and the provocative salinity of her perspiration. He was aghast to feel himself responding to that scent, turning his body slightly away from her so she wouldn't notice.
"Horses?" she said with a husky laugh and moved closer. He wanted to back away, but something predacious raised its head in the back of his brain, and she was close enough that he could see the pupillary response of her arousal. His body did what he was unwilling to do, summoning her. Now he did step back.
She had to be twenty-two, no older. Closer to his age than his witch was. What are you doing?
"Wait," she stammered, looking confused. "I… don't walk away."
He could taste her heartbeat.
A hoof crashed into a stall behind him, equine teeth snapping at his shoulder, and the moment broke. She blinked, then laughed nervously. "Sorry, he's the herd leader of a sort," she joked, and her tone was a weak imitation of the velvet that filled his witch's voice. "He thinks he has to be so tough and protect everyone - and Emily, this is important. He needs to know that everyone isn't safe, and that someone is watching them."
"I don't like horses," he said suddenly, walking past her quickly to get to the door. He couldn't do this. He couldn't take this innocent and tar her with his touch. "They frighten me."
She laid a hand on his arm; the feel of her fingers burned him, and he turned on her with a savage need. "I don't normally do this," she said, smiling with her eyes. She wanted; he could smell it.
He swallowed.
"What's wrong?" Sergio watched her in the dark of her room, tail rustling across the covers restlessly.
"I hated riding horses as a kid," she murmured, more to herself than him, her dream slipping away and just leaving dread, like all the rest of them had. "So why can't I stop dreaming of them?"
"Freud would have a field day with you," was his only reply.
.
.
Hotch stood in front of the cameras and told the world about their friend.
His speech was many things. It was Hotch talking about a man, almost two years lost, who deserved to be remembered. It was him reminding the world that behind the veneer of George Foyet's control was a man who would have died for any of those victims, if he'd been given the chance. It was a mocking reminder to Foyet that when they found him, and they would, he would remain unremembered.
Not once did they say his name. If they had to mention him, they used terms such as 'the unsub' or 'suspect.'
Spencer was the important one here, the press release said. Remember Spencer Reid. Remember all those who had been lost. Remember those who were nameless; those who had had their names stolen.
The calls began to roll in. People talked about their kin, demonkin, lost to being bound and sold, lost into the darker places in the world where no one cared for them. Over that week, newspapers printed stories from demons who'd survived.
"Our thoughts are with our kin," said one of them. "We know his pain, and share it."
Another was a letter to the families of the victims, and it didn't mention Reid at all.
"I didn't know the people you've lost, but I know loss. My husband worked at the scripture. He smelled of vellum and ink and smoke, and I used to know he was home by the scent of him before he even walked in the door. I would still fake surprise, so he was never disappointed. One day he hugged me goodbye, and kissed me and he was whiskery and smiling and finite.
They bound him first. In his death there was no honour. They bound him and under their control, he performed atrocities. When they turned their backs on him, he took the boy-child's body they'd caused him to brutalize, and he threw himself into the ocean. In the waves, he found retribution with the child in his arms.
I never said goodbye to him. When I smell ink now, I cry because once I was happy.
My thoughts are with you all, for I know that the tears never dry."
The world began to change, just a little, and they knew it would enrage the spectre that haunted them.
"Is this a good idea?" asked Morgan as they stood in the bullpen and watched a news anchor argue with a man whose face was obscured on the phone-in box, and who was only listed as 'expert.' Expert of what? Emily wondered. "He's gonna take this out on Reid."
"Look at that and tell me we shouldn't have done this sooner," Hotch said quietly, as the screen flickered and changed to a fuzzy image of a building, the faces blurred of the people that moved around it in a mix of dark SWAMT uniforms and smaller forms that they carried.
Crackdown on the trade of demons after public support grows announced the headline cheerily, as though it was a good thing that only now people cared.
"Hope it does piss him off," Rossi added. "We need him sloppy and hasty. We're running out of time."
.
.
Are you listening, Emily? Let me teach you how to control a man. How to reduce him to nothing; how to take him apart and rebuild him as your creature.
First you isolate him.
Give him a taste of home. A phone perhaps, with the names of those who loved him tucked within the memory. Take it away again. Leave it just out of reach. Make him forget home was ever an option.
Take away food. Take away sleep. Take away comfort. Then give in a little; make him thankful for the little you give him. Make him beg.
Make him thankful to beg.
Take away his name. The nameless cannot hope. Now give him a new one. Who is he now? Not who he once was.
Remind him that no one is looking for him.
Good. Almost done.
Turn him into you and then flaunt the creature you've made of him. Make sure he knows they revile him.
And then kill him. He's dead already; he has been from the first day he was taken. What you're killing is the idea of him, the hope that he can recover.
If you've done it right, he'll thank you for it.
.
.
Two days after the press statement, Hotch died.
Emily thought numbly when it was quiet again and the blood had been washed out of her hair that they should have known sooner. They should have known straight away, as soon as the knife had curved into his flesh the first time. What good were their credentials if they could be surpassed with a little bit of knowledge, a whole lot of a magic, and a man who had the ability to put the two elements together?
As with all moments that haunted them, they moved both very slowly and very quickly.
Slowly was waiting in the bullpen, joking together. Slowly was Hotch being late, and the faintest sign of concern appearing in Rossi's eyes. Slow was his phone ringing out, just like Reid's had that day. Another empty message. "You've reached SSA Aaron Hotchner. I'm not available, please leave a concise message, and I will return your call."
I'm not available.
I'm gone just like Spencer Reid.
Say another goodbye, Prentiss.
"I'll head over there," Rossi announced, and that was when everything became fast again, because a man stepped out in front of him and he was a stranger, until he wasn't. He dropped his glamour and it was Reid, and their palms ignited with their boss's pain.
It was Reid and there was blood on his hands and every eye was on him. The building churned with the realization its defences had been breached.
"He's got Hotch!" Reid cried, and he stunk of burning, twitching maniacally, pain twisting his features with his wings thrown outwards in a soundless exclamation of agony. None of them moved. "Hurry! Foyet has Hotch and he's killing him!"
None of them moved, but everyone else did.
Gunfire. Magefire.
Reid was so focused on them, he dodged neither.
"Spencer!" shrieked Emily, possibly Morgan, maybe both of them, but Reid howled inhumanly and fell, ignoring their fear. Blood pooled on the floor, patterning the desks where his wings flicked it, splattered on Rossi from the impact, and someone was screaming now.
"Stop, stop! Stand down!" Strauss roared, her voice magically enhanced, but the damage was done. "Don't shoot him!"
Reid shot upright and vanished in a clap of bloody wings and the whirl of his passing sent a humid wash of storm air throughout the room.
He left behind the stink of fear and waytoomuchfuckingbloood the possibility of it all coming to a horrendous end.
Rossi charged for the exit, but Strauss called after him, "Dave! Stay here – I'll send SWAMT. You all, stay here!"
"Like fuck we will," he shouted, not stopping. Shadows curled at his fingers, nothing like Foyet's, but still threatening. "I'm going, and so are they. We'll beat them there."
"Dave…" Strauss trailed off.
Their palms went cold. The runes blackened.
"Oh no," Strauss breathed, staring at Rossi's hand. Another agent gasped.
"Nope," Rossi snapped, and shot out of the exit. "Not today, Aaron."
They followed him and no one stopped them.
.
.
They reached him and his life was a guttering candle in the wreckage of his home.
For one sick gut-wrenching moment, Emily thought that Reid had done this; made this mess of the man they all admired. This mess of wounds and red and Rossi, covered with Hotch's blood as well as Reid's now, holding his life in and hollering for a medic and for JJ. Cold flowed, buying them precious time, and Emily wondered if it would be enough to hold him here.
Reid couldn't have done this.
There would be no coming back from that if he did.
"Jack needs his dad," Morgan said loudly, bluntly. His voice suggested that Hotch pick himself up and stop fucking around. "Don't you dare die on us, Hotchner. Don't do that to him."
Bleary eyes opened. Hope flared in Emily's breast, and she stepped forward. Her foot almost skidded on a bloody pool, sounding out wetly under her heel. When she put a hand against the wall to steady herself, it came away red. Later she would find blood in her hair and wonder how it got there.
"He looks like me now," Hotch mused, and smiled, and then closed his eyes. He flirted with death, and they could all see the skeletal touch of it on his slack features.
All the magic in the world at her fingertips, and still she watched him slip away.
.
.
They said he died in the ambulance.
They said his heart stopped.
It showed what they knew about the human heart. Emily knew that even if his physical heart ceased to beat this day, failing to begin again when they coaxed it to, and if they buried him alongside Gideon in the cold October ground, it wouldn't really have stopped.
It would continue in the smile and the laugh of the son he cherished, and in that he would be remembered.
If she died, she wondered who would grieve.
And she wished it was her instead of him.
Maybe next time it would be.
.
.
She wasn't sure what she expected when she got home from the hospital where Hotch clung grimly to his continued existence.
Him to be sitting near her fridge maybe, or curled in her bed, wadding her best towels into his injury with his crooked grin and sheepishly guilty that he'd made another mess. Apologising for being so rude as to bleed in her home.
She expected him to be there to be patched up, just like he had in the past.
Instead she found blood. That was expected.
He wasn't there. Unexpected.
She stayed up all night, but that didn't change.