Warning for passing mentions of rape.
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AUGUST–ONWARDS
Cases came and went. The absence of Spencer stung, but the immediate urge to scratch at a phantom itch was beginning to ebb.
On another late evening in Quantico, David and Derek lingered at the elder agent's office.
The maturation of their friendship over the years was something neither of them would have foreseen, considering how rocky their acquaintance had been at the very beginning. However, Derek had found contentment in using David as a sounding board, a solace, even, and David was content to dispense whatever comfort, encouragement, or sage advice upon Derek that he could.
"You came in this mornin' lookin' content like you haven't in a while, Morgan. Talk to Uncle Dave. Give me deets."
Derek grinned at David. "I ain't tellin' ya nothin'"—he dramatically whipped his head from one side—"about nothin'"—and then the other.
"Hah! It looks like you're taking what I said to heart, kid." David looked pleased. "You took a hard blow a couple of weeks ago."
Derek cleared his throat. "Mm. I did."
He now had coffee with Savannah at the local café—three times in the past two weeks in the early morning before the two would separate and head to their respective workplaces. The conversations were light and encouraging, and they weren't too long, allowing room for future exploration and exposition.
This morning—their fourth coffee meeting—had been a strange turn in their budding friendship.
"I did," Derek repeated. "But I'm trying to work through it. And this morning"—Derek grinned—"things stepped up, I guess."
David's expression was a mixture of pleased and melancholy. This was good. He was listening. It wasn't an easy thing to do, but Derek was listening. "Care—to—share?"
Derek chuckled. "So, I have this neighbor," he began.
"Okay?" David perked in his seat and waved his hand to urge Derek to continue.
"She's just—she's a good person."
David smiled. "Do tell."
"She's a general surgeon at Bethesda."
"Ooh. How'd you meet her?"
Derek cleared his throat. "You asked about this"—he ran a finger down the whispery scar on the back of his upraised hand—"the day after we'd come back from Jersey back in the beginning of last month."
David perked a brow. "She patched you up."
"Yeah." Derek smiled, but it faded quickly. "I . . ." He looked down. "I didn't take it well, that night we got back from Jersey."
"Mm." David didn't need the details, and he wouldn't ask for them. That could remain private. But he empathized.
"Anyway, the next morning, she was knocking on my door cuz she'd—ah, she'd heard some stuff coming from my apartment. So she took me to her apartment—"
"Mm-hmm."
"—called into work late—"
"Mm-hmm?"
"—and—" Again, Derek held up his scarred hand, tapping it with his index finger. "Anyway, that's when Hotch called us in. So, you know, I answer the phone." He put his hand to his face as if speaking into a phone. "Morgan, I say. She steps away. When I was done, she told me she wanted me to get back to her later that night so she could see how this was healing up. I didn't. So she came to my apartment, did her thing, and then told me her name—"
"Which is?"
"Savannah."
"Ooh." David bristled with excitement. "Georgia," he sang. "And she got on your mind, hmm?"
"Hah!" Derek barked. "Eh, somethin' like that, yeah. But, yeah, she told me her name, and before I could tell her mine, she called me Morgan, and, well, I didn't correct her. A couple of days later, I went to hers so she could look at the hand again. Again, she calls me Morgan. I still didn't correct her."
"You're a sneaky ass," David said, grinning. "I feel like I know where this might be going."
"C'mon, now you know I'll milk a situation for as long as I can for a good laugh, Rossi," Derek agreed, laughing.
"Mm-hmm! Don't I know it."
"Well anyway, after that case up in Baltimore, I went to Savannah's place, and I asked her for coffee the next morning at Starbucks. I just needed to take myself out of this mental space, you know? Talk."
"Good on you, kid."
"I give the barista the name Morgan for the order, right? So they call out Morgan when the coffee's ready. So she still knows I'm Morgan at that point. We had coffee a couple more times. Morgan, again, for the orders. So they call out Morgan when the orders are ready. In this chick's head"—he double tapped the side of his head with an index finger again—"I'm Morgan. But this morning, we met for coffee again. This time I gave them my first name."
"Oh jeez. You strung her along, hah."
"Man, you should have seen her reaction when she thought I was going for someone else's coffee. The thing is, I didn't take it right away. I waited, like, a minute after the barista called my name a second time to really play it off, and finally I just went and took the coffee. She got li-vid."
David laughed.
Derek began mimicking her. "That's not yours. What's wrong with you? That's rude." He was flashing his smile throughout, and David snickered. "Okay, but her face, man? When I was just like, Well he's not takin' it so—another free coffee for me. I deserve it if I'm doing my federal duty to keep this Derek guy safe. I take a sip and make a disgusted face. This is awful; what the hell did this dude order? I ask. Rossi, her face just—" Derek swiped his hand in front of his face and his expression became stoney with a hint of disgust.
"This was her face, man. She says stuff like, I'm done. You're an asshole. You don't deserve anything, and you're abusing your authority. That's how you get pig-headed. It always starts small. We don't need to meet anymore; I'm good."
David shook his head. "I see where she stands on that and she is not wrong."
Derek held out his hands. "I didn't mean for it to go from zero to a hundred like that, and I had to fix it, man. While she was leaving, I had to stop her, had to pull out my badge, and she looked at it, and her face, man. She got so red. She was pissed until she was bursting out laughing. We laughed it off."
"You got her good."
"I got her real good. It was supposed to just be a joke. But. I dunno, I guess it ended up showin' me a lot about her character and how she could go from a hundred and dial it back down and still laugh it off."
"Mm. She seems like a good one. I hope it stays that way."
"I think in her mind she might've taken a chance with me, risked something or another. I know the timing's off, but she's pretty chill."
Something on Derek's face—even after making that assertion—bothered David. "Good." His expression evened out, and he tapped his hand on his desk. "You know, I told the kid just the night before he got taken—I told him this thing about alchemy."
"Alchemy?"
"Mm-hmm. 'Cause he'd told me about the painful dreams. So alchemy turns common metals into precious ones, right?"
"Okay?"
"And I told Reid that his dreams worked that way, too—they could turn something awful like the bad dreams into something better like a trove of fond memories. It's neither here nor there, but I'm about to drop the same nugget on you. The point I'm tryin' to make is that I hope that the circumstances in which you met Savannah are eventually covered over by how the relationship actually develops into something more favorable, if it does."
Derek's throat thickened.
"I hope you don't feel guilty, Derek, about pursuing and having a relationship despite what someone you love is going through, or despite overcoming grief. Sometimes it takes us to strange places, but those places aren't inherently wrong—it's just the timing that really sucks. We're allowed to be happy even when we're feeling vulnerable."
David thought on his own. He had talked to Spencer about his Uncle Sal. Since Spencer had gone missing, he'd started working on a car that he'd found, a 1947 Pontiac Torpedo, remodeling it, gutting it, repainting it, installing new parts. He was taking his time with all of this.
Derek blinked the heat out of his eyes and cleared his throat. "Um—thanks, man. I mean, this definitely isn't a coping thing, it's—I mean, I dunno—I do like her. We're still at the friends stage right now. And for once I'm pretty okay with that draggin' that bit out. I'd rather wait 'til things—"
David's office phone rang, and he held up his finger to Derek, reaching to his phone with the other. "This is Agent David Rossi. Yes."
Derek stood, prepared to give David privacy.
"Morgan, wait!"
The urgency in David's whispered tone stayed Derek mid-reach of the door handle. Upon turning around, he grew curious at David's bemused expression.
"You have. Uh huh. I assure you that we're on top of this. Uh huh. We appreciate your discretion. I understand. I assure you that it's no issue for me. I insist on alleviating that burden. Yes, I do understand that, we're doing this according to her LAR's wishes. That's on us. We'll update you accordingly. Mm-hmm. Thank you." David hung up the phone, blinking. He still looked bewildered. "Huh."
Derek's brows were lowered. "What is it?"
"It's amazing how some people come out of the woodwork is what."
"Woodwork?" Derek parroted. "Who was it?"
"An erstwhile concerned party calling about Reid. Watches the news; connects the dots."
"Oh my god." It couldn't be. No, the conversation would have gone a lot differently. But what if? "Don't tell me that was Gideon ."
"Mm, no. Think almost 22 years back. Eh, well . . . not counting a very awkward and uncomfortable reunion a little over four years ago. You and I were there?"
Derek thought over the cryptic description.
"We were in Vegas?"
It took a few seconds to click. "Oh my god. That was William Reid."
David's eyebrows ticked for a moment, and once again his expression belied his feelings on that whole situation. It wasn't an easy one. "That it was."
"What did he say?"
"The guy's obviously not dumb. Guess he, ah, still watches what the kid does like he's always done." To this, he steeled his expression. "But also . . ."
Derek ticked his eyebrows at the suggestion, never having sat well with the volatility Spencer displayed leading up to the truth of what had happened all those years ago.
"Also," David started. "He'd gone to Bennington to visit Diana Reid. That was apparently his biggest clue."
Something alighted in Derek's eyes. "He knows about the letters and—"
"Yeah," David answered.
"Well, this is a little awkward," Derek murmured. "You told him that you'd keep him posted."
"I did."
"Will you?"
Again, David sighed. "I dunno . . ."
"Last time I remember, they're still estranged—he and Reid."
"They were. They're estranged, yeah, but Reid told us on the jet the full details."
"Yeah. And? You saw how Reid was before finding everything out. He was angry with his father and ready to pin anything on him."
"And by the time everything came to light—by the time we were back on the jet, he was distressed. He could barely talk. But he said his father wanted to try to rekindle their relationship, and that he didn't know how to approach this."
"Yeah, but that kind of family affair—that's not something we should be meddling in."
"Aren't we already, though?"
Derek sighed, clenching his jaws. David wasn't wrong. In the past two weeks, they were doing things that could definitely constitute as meddling.
"An update about his son isn't meddling. He wasn't a great father, but was he and is he a bad man? I dunno. It was a damn messy situation and probably still is. You know that kid."
"Mm."
"Besides, with the way he tried to ignore his pain over Maeve's murder, would it be a stretch to say that he probably did the same regarding his own father? He doesn't confront these things 'til they fester."
"Probably all started with the abandonment."
"M'yeah, probably. There should always be room for reconciliation, though, and we shouldn't stand in the way of that. At the end of the day, they are father and son."
DATE UNKNOWN | LOCATION UNKNOWN
When Spencer slept restfully, he found that there was always a little moment when he woke up when everything was good and right, because his mind had temporarily forgotten where he was. He felt like his conscious and subconscious were making some sort of secret pact to let him have a split-second of peace and safety.
Whenever that relief came, he would lay as still as possible and try to hold onto that moment.
It never lasted very long.
—
But Spencer sometimes awoke with a jerk, feeling his body floating before colliding with the dashboard of a car and realizing that the hard surfaces he crashed into were soft, pleasant.
Be water, he would think. It could flow, or it could crash. If he was as shapeless as water, then he could become whatever he was being shaped to become. He could relax, become formless.
He could flow, or he could continue to crash.
He wanted to flow.
—
When Spencer was in his clarity phases, these were the days when he was fully aware of what was going on around him, where he could reason on things, and where drugs weren't metabolizing in his system—or at least where they only lingered. On these days, he could often dictate how his visits would go based on what he smelled as either of his captors drew nearer to him.
He grew not to feel one way or another upon these visits—neither reacted with fear nor any sort of elation.
Beyond her scent of earth, herbs, flowers, and pine with that undertow of cleaner, something seemed to have shifted with the woman, though, and not very long after his escape attempt. His vigilance piqued, and he grew more sure of it each time she would soothe his aches after he was raped.
Smokey leather and grease could go one of two ways: it was either a neutral visit wherein nothing happened to him and he was cared for, or alcohol was soon pushed under his nose or the smooth glass bottle brushed his fingertips and he knew he was to be raped.
With time, there were shifts.
—
When another week had passed and his roots were recolored and the ends of his hair were trimmed, a heavier and heavier burden weighed him down. This was the fourth time. He was healthy and his hair grew quickly as a result.
God forbid that the woman should have any physical reminder that he wasn't their son with his roots growing in or his hair getting too long.
Spencer Reid was being stripped and snipped away to be taken over by someone else entirely—a person he didn't know but for whom he began to feel great sorrow.
—
As time passed, they eased up on drugging him as often or with such potency. His cooperation won their favor, tamed their wariness.
"You're so well behaved," the woman said often, tucking her hands. "Such a good boy."
He liked being told this, yes, liked when her hand would squeeze under his chin, but.
Sometimes he wanted it, the drugs. Derek would be ashamed of him, and his guilt needled him unpleasantly. He wished it were an actual needle—an actual drug—that flooded through him instead of those feelings of shame and guilt. He wanted whatever they drugged him with to rush through his veins, blanket his thoughts.
The depression, exhaustion, lack of streamlined thoughts, nausea, and the fever-dreams that lingered upon having the medley of drugs taken from him weren't worth it at this point. He'd rather not experience these things when they were wearing off.
A soft voice somewhere deep in the shadows of his mind that was day by day growing louder told him to fight this, though. So sometimes, he listened to it and he remembered the words that he always treasured:
'I'm here for you, kid. You know it.'
But he wasn't. Derek wasn't there. It was another week gone by. He hadn't found him yet. No one had.
—
If his head was clear, Spencer knew when Saturdays rolled around. His stomach would cramp and he would have pulsing headaches as he was given foods to cleanse and purify his system. But he knew: another week had gone by.
Another week.
And they still hadn't found him.
—
Once, minutes after the woman left, calling him her —-— boy, he imagined that she called him Pretty boy.
He kicked his head back in laughter, pressing himself against the wall. He didn't know what was funnier—the thought that Derek would never call him this because he would never see him again, or the notion that he would never call him this because every part of him was so marred.
His laughter came to an abrupt halt, and he began to weep. Best not to hear it. He wished to disappear them all from his memory.
—
He tried, a second time, to ask them their names. The first time he'd asked, he was only days into his captivity. Perhaps, now, after so long, with the trust that had developed between them, he could know who they were. On separate occasions, after wavering his hand until it met with the fabric of their clothes and his leg was given a tap tap to signify that he was being given attention, his hands fluttered in hesitation.
"Can I know your names?"
No was one response. The other was You already know this —-— boy; you've forgotten because you're sick.
He didn't argue it. But there must have been something better than The Man and The Woman.
He was The Son. The Good Boy. The —-— Boy.
Logic dictated that they should be Mother and Father. Mom and Dad.
Diana. William.
That soft voice told him to fight this. Don't do this, it said. Sometimes he listened. He withheld using the terms with the flicker of his hands, but the affection behind it began to linger.
The taste was neither bitter nor sweet; it was just a shapely weight that stayed his tongue.
—
Oxytocin is self-perpetuating and is a way for the body to reward itself.
Receiving touch fosters empathy, a sense of nurturing. Hugging and other forms of nonsexual touching causes the brain to release oxytocin, which stimulates the release of other hormones, such as dopamine and serotonin, while reducing stress-induced hormones, such as cortisol and norepinephrine.
—
In little time, and with the woman's ministrations, his left hand healed from the soreness. When his fingernails were clipped and filed, he let the woman massage his hands and lavish them with kind attention. She began buffing his nails, oiling them, and rub rub rubbed.
It wasn't unpleasant.
She would sometimes trace her delicate fingers over the contours of his hands, learning them, and he would let her.
It was intimate. She mapped out every part: the high hills and deep valleys of his fingers; the transverse and longitudinal flexion creases of his palms; the proximal, middle, and digital creases of each finger; hard knuckles of the back of his hands, his scars, the muscles. Sometimes the brush of her soft lips made those explorations, and he felt . . . cherished.
Once, when she was doing this, his mind flashed, and in the next moment, he was a fifteen-year-old boy at Caltech, sitting at his art horse bench with a large sketchbook before him. To fulfill his humanities requirements before receiving his first baccalaureate and for the pure desire to engage in something that wasn't wrapped up in academia, he took a couple of art courses. He came to love these classes, and one of them was for life figure drawing.
He wasn't unfamiliar with the human body, of course; he had studied biology, human physiology, and anatomy since he was a child, after all. He'd seen a nude woman—his mother when she wasn't able to bathe or dress herself. He'd never seen a nude adult man before, though.
And it was the first time that he was urged to perceive the human body with an eye that he never thought before—not clinically, not pictures or illustrations with diagrams, not his mother. Science, then, became art.
Later in the course, blind contour was introduced. It was a concept and artform that he found enthralling. In his privacy, he came to accept his own nudity, taught himself that it was okay; looked beyond what happened when that girl had asked him about his growing body or when those kids had stripped him nude back in high school; he could look at his growing body academically but now artistically. His eye was an ant, just as his professor told her students to use it as, and it crawled over the contours of his body, the swells of growing muscles underneath the fat that he gained and that was slowly crawling away, the disproportions due to his changing body.
Art history, then, to learn more about sculpture, about how people perceived the forms of the human body in space.
He and Maeve spoke a few times of visiting museums and galleries together, of taking some evening figure drawing classes together once everything was behind her, once she was safe, so they could both explore the concept with each other.
'You say your figurative works look like a childish version of Egon Schiele's work,' she once said in laughter.
'Mm. Yeah. My professor made the comparison and it sort of stuck,' Spencer had responded, chuckling. 'I tacked on the childish part.'
'I can't wait to see it. I'm sure you translate his kind of expressionism well in your work. To use one's eyes as an ant—it's such an intimate concept.'
Were his hands art to this woman? Were her eyes, her lips, her hands the ant that crawled over his hands, over his body, knowing him, digesting his form?
Or was she comparing him to that which he wasn't? Was she finding the differences between this—a mere echo of her dead son—looking for deficits?
Where did he fall in her eyes?
—
You're sick, the woman would tell him often, shuffling her hands under his own after giving his hand a tap tap.
He warred with himself, wondering if it was true.
Things didn't click quite as quickly as they should, or sometimes his head grew heavy but not with a headache or a dissociative fog. Sometimes he forgot things. He became nauseated sometimes for no reason, or he more often had urges to use the bathroom to urinate and would barely reach the toilet in time to hold it in when it was time to go. On rare occasions, he didn't even make it from the bed to the toilet at all, or he woke up and found he'd urinated on himself while he'd slept.
He was sick.
"But we're going to make you better. Before long, this won't be in you anymore. We're going to release you from this. And then you can come back to me."
So he thanked her. He didn't want to exist like this.
—
By this time, Spencer would usually sit at attention before the door even opened when he awakened from his repose.
He worried whenever they didn't come on time or when he wasn't fed on time or when the woman didn't assist with his care. It was the man who would deal with him during those occasions because she was too drained. While he wasn't averse to the man's attention—as it went back to that of fatherly doting—guilt pricked in him at the knowledge that her care for him often led her to feelings of malaise and fatigue. He wished he might get better.
Once, neither of them came for nearly three whole days, and on top of his intense hunger and headaches, on top of his urinating as far away from the bed as possible and failing to hold in his urge to defecate, he worried.
He also wasn't clean. So he removed his clothes, rub rub rubbed them against the concrete flooring until there were holes sizeable enough for him to rip them away from the chains, and he folded them neatly. He was supposed to have been bathed by now.
He first wondered if he'd done something wrong, but he knew—he knew for a certainty —that he'd been nothing but good. Very good. Well behaved. So something must have happened to them.
Had they abandoned him? Had they abandoned their purpose? Was he trapped here to starve to death and die?
By the end of the third day, the man arrived, and Spencer—convinced that whatever punishment this was must have been his fault, that he must have done something by action or by omission to irritate them—apologized.
And fearing that there might be a grander punishment looming, he added, "There's no need for any punishment."
But he was reassured by the man with a simple clap on his shoulder. The tensed muscles eased at the flood of relief. The hands tap tapped, tucked under his, and he was told that he'd not done anything wrong.
And then the man deigned to explain the situation to him without flourish: he'd gone away for the weekend on business, and the woman had come down with being unwell.
"She gets like this sometimes," the man then told him openly, "especially during the summer."
Spencer had thanked him and didn't seek clarification. The man didn't need to even give him that scrap of explanation, so he was appreciative of it. He was allowed to bathe himself and brush his teeth under the watchful eye of his captor, as he was a bit weak, and afterwards he was shaved. Within another hour, he had a belly full.
He was relieved that nothing happened to them—relieved that they hadn't given up on him.
He forgot to be relieved that they might have been apprehended and that there might have been a team of people looking for him.
—
The memory of his travels from his DC condo apartment to work used to be so vivid in his mind—the walk to the first train station, the coffee stop he would often make before boarding the next train, and the third system of transportation designated for Bureau investigators. He could count the steps, measure the time, take a whiff of the polluted, stuffed air at the underground station and clearer, ground-level open air. He could do it blind.
These were now distant.
Now, he better knew the steps of his morning ritual so well that upon settling into his reality after waking, he held up his hands to begin each step, waiting for the chains to fall away from his wrists so he could use the bathroom and brush his teeth—due east and return west.
After being fed and if it was a bath day, he would begin removing each article of clothing, folding them neatly, hand each to the man, then hold out his hands so the tub-use restraints could wrap around the wrists. He did the same with his pants and underwear once his ankle was uncuffed. After his ankle was recuffed with the restraints used for the tub, he would step forward—due north—and lower himself into the tub, offering his hands so they could attach the chains hanging between them to the wall. The eye hook had been replaced with a bar, which gave him more mobility.
On occasion, the ankle restraint was removed. It depended on their moods, or if he'd been raped. If it was the latter, it was never attached because the man allowed him to bathe himself most times, and he was docile as a lamb.
Spencer knew to lean his head forward and knew when to lean back so that he could be shaved as his body was washed. He presented his hands so the woman could wash them reverently the way she always did—so he could feel her lips touch his knuckles, his fingertips—and he would give a brief hum of comfort.
He no longer jumped when the towel touched or wrapped around his groin or cleaned him between his buttocks.
They never told him what to do or when to do it; he learned; he knew. It was routine.
When they were finished and he could step out the tub, he would stand still while being dried by the woman.
Before returning to the bed once she was done—south—he would take a step, stretch his limbs, hear the internal crack crack crack—of the vertebrae of his spine, the bones in his rotator cuffs, in his pelvis, his knees—stretch his nude body like a bronze-age man relishing his cleanliness in restricted freedom, a body in space.
The citrine-lavender whiff was pleasant as he made his way back to the bed without their assistance, palmed his way atop the bed until he touched the pile of new and clean clothes folded on the sheets: boxers on top, then the sweatpants, the t-shirt, and the sweatshirt on the bottom, always in that order, always neatly folded. So he put on his boxers, and he put on his sweatpants—left foot first, then right foot, so that his left foot could be wrapped in the restraint without any delay. And with a deep inhale, he would again take in that intoxicating scent of the laundered clothes.
Remove the cuffs around his wrists, put on his t-shirt, stretch his hands to receive the fabric that he pressed over his eyes immediately after his wet brace was removed, tilt his head left then right as the active noise cancelling buds were plucked out of each ear and replaced with another pair. Rinse and repeat.
The buds were never removed long enough to register any sound beyond the humming fan and shifting fabric. They never spoke to him, and they never made a sound—not a cough, not a sniff, not a hum or a laugh. That took discipline.
Whenever the brace was removed and he kept his eyes clenched, he was never assaulted by light beyond the lids. They wanted him to keep his eyes covered, though, and he would obediently do so. Once, his hands had slipped—just slipped—down below. It was when his left hand was still smarting. Though he didn't see anything and the man's hand had snapped over his to keep his eyes shielded, he was later told that if his hands ever did that again—if his hands ever slipped—the man would pluck out an eyeball and feed it to him raw.
He didn't doubt it. His hands never again slipped, no matter how much they would quake, no matter how weak he felt.
So while some sound came through, light hadn't penetrated his eyes since the night he was taken.
After his hair was dried, he would lift his chin so the brace could be fastened upon his head and over his eyes. He would offer his hand to receive his sweatshirt, and afterwards his two hands were manacled back to the bed.
Unless he was receiving a severe punishment like the first one where he couldn't move from the bed, or barring when the man had gone for the weekend and the woman hadn't taken care of him, Spencer never went more than two days without a proper bath. Punishment these days were exceedingly rare.
There were rarely, if ever, any deviations from this routine. Rinse and repeat.
—
He put out his hand, and a cup was placed in it. His tube had been removed yesterday morning; today and tomorrow, he would be drinking his meals just like the previous day. He took a whiff of the pleasant tomato bisque. It went down smoothly, and he enjoyed the rich flavor.
She did that at times—let him smell what he ate before it was either pumped through the tube or—as done today—fed to him.
It was still the morning, so after finishing his meal, like most days, he was left to spend the next handful of hours however he wished. Some days, the woman stayed for some time, and they engaged in light conversation, wherein she reminded him of new words (he was sick, she would say, and he had forgotten them), and other days she'd leave after he'd been fed.
When she stayed, they spoke of flowers and plants and trees—of being one with the earth around them, of being of the earth—with her hands tucked under his.
"One day," she told him, "we'll bring you back to that place you love so much and that's where you'll rest. But not too soon. For now, we're going to make you better. You'll have your own children and nurture them just like your father and I have done for you. You're going to overcome this, and I'll watch you keep growing and blossoming."
Two days later, his tube was reinserted into his irritated and sensitive left nostril.
—
Spencer was entrusted to have the length of his chains slightly extended. Now, he could reach the bare ceiling with just a little hop when he stood on the bed.
It was never long enough to reach the sink or the toilet, for his body wasn't his, but it was long enough that he could nearly reach the tub if he laid flat on the floor with his arms flanked above his head and stretch his body as far as possible, reaching with his toes while trying to touch the tub. He knew that the tub was just beyond his reach because, without fail, whenever it was time for his bath and the chains attached to his hands came loose, and his legs were given more mobility, the tub was never more than a step away from the furthest point that he could reach.
He figured it was the man's doing, calculated precisely for him to be able to stretch to a certain distance and no further.
They made sure that there was no room for him to make his escape like he had attempted a while ago. The steps, though, began long before this escape attempt, and he wondered if one of his fellow captive predecessors must have done something that made them leery of ever completely releasing their next victims, even if they were around.
Maybe it was Noah.
Maybe that explained how he fell from a height of many feet in a planked position. Maybe he'd gotten very close to escaping this hell, but it instead claimed him.
If Noah had known better, he might know that oftentimes, this place was no hell at all. At least here, he was under no pretenses about what he might face. At least here, there was no deception—only the cold truth that death awaited him, and before that death, pain, pops of euphoria, and a growing contentment.
Either way, Spencer had more freedom, and for that he didn't complain, was genuinely appreciative, and said Thank you.
—
One day, a beam of understanding struck Spencer about the man, who had just taken him to and from the bathroom. He'd become increasingly benevolent since his escape attempt, which was beyond him. Surely, in most cases, a captor would increase their violence. As the locks were shortened, that beam of understanding turned into a literal snap of his fingers.
Understandably, the man misunderstood it. No one took well to being snapped at.
In return, that little snap earned him a resound, open-palmed slap before his face was mashed into the floor. After he was rolled and sat upon, large hands gripped his face, thumbs pressed under his jaws with the threat of strangulation, and his head was thumped against the ground just once.
Sitting astride him, he tapped his hands to speak, and then the rough hands were tucking into his. "Don't snap your fingers at me. Never do this. I'm not a dog. And don't do this to my wife. You want my attention without speaking, you figure it out," the man ordered after the brief assault.
Spencer didn't seek to correct this misunderstanding. But he did use it as an opportunity to figure it out, as he was told. The next morning when he was readying for a bath and the man finished collecting all of his folded clothes, Spencer tapped the back of his own left hand twice, as they did to his hands. A moment later, he received a knuckled tap-tap on his bare chest.
"You're intelligent," Spencer ventured to say to the man.
Both of his captors were—he knew this. But there was a precision to his captor's punishments, to his methods of subjugation, the length of the chains, the calculations it must have taken to abduct a federal agent. The slow-leak tire, the cones from Marion's abduction, his and Alex's probability of working together on the day that he was abducted, Marion's abduction and the misdirection with the phone, the probability that the team would concentrate so thoroughly on Marion's abduction that they were unaware of the danger just ahead, the leverage he used, everything.
"You're intelligent," he repeated. "I know this." There was no response. "What do you think of chess?" He awaited an answer. To his surprise, a delayed one came.
"I don't play it."
"You might be good at it. You might enjoy it. I can see it without a board."
It would be two-fold. Firstly, Spencer's mind was truly atrophying. Things weren't coming to him as quickly as they should. Chess could help reduce cognitive decline. Secondly, games such as chess or gō could reveal how a person thought, allow him to theorize further on the mind of his captor.
Threefold, actually. He was bored. The monotony was painful.
Tilting his head to the direction of his captor, he said. "Your wife asked me what would make me more comfortable. This."
Not a demand. But close.
The man said nothing in return but urged him to the bathtub instead, and he dipped in.
Two days later, after his second bathroom excursion and upon returning to his bed, something was seated there. Upon taking in the large square shape and the litter ones underneath his fingers experimentally, he was sure, for a moment, that the distinct forms—king, queen, knights, rooks, bishops, and pawns—might be a tactile hallucination.
But no. This was an indulgence. An overabundant, kind indulgence that he truly couldn't wrap his mind around.
Spencer licked his lips to preclude himself from smiling, ticking his nose to determine if he could—was he still near? He was. His eyes heated, his nose stung, and his throat tightened. His fingers touched his own chin and then extended outward in gratitude. And he couldn't help it—he smiled anyway.
But the bed dipped with the weight of his captor atop it before the tactile board was being shuffled away from him. Spencer rounded his head up and over to where he assumed his captor was, and then—
Tap tap. "You don't need to see a board. Then you don't need to feel one."
Oh.
What had this been, then? A taunt?
And yet.
Tap tap. "Show me."
A demand. A very curious one. Or, rather, his captor was intrigued.
So he did, explaining slowly the grid structure and blind chess, a popular way that experts played. Either the man knew the game well, or he had a shallow learning curve. He had proclivity for it—a strategist, a planner, tactical, masterful—as Spencer expected. The board and the pieces were never tucked under his fingers again, which was fine by him, because even without them, the games continued occasionally.
He wondered if the man only did this to demand sexual compliance from him. He received something, and the man might want something in return. So he grew cautious. It never truly came to that. He won often at first. He grew cautious of that, too.
But no. When he won, he was given a congratulatory clap on the arm, and that alone.
And when he lost, which did happen more frequently than he would care to admit as the games continued, he doggedly refused to allow images of Jason or Emily to be conjured in his mind. Instead, once, he wondered if the man looked anything like Gary Brendan Michaels with a little more girth.
He also wondered if he was losing because his cognition wasn't all there. The brain rot.
It was by this grand gesture—by engaging repeatedly in a game with his captive—that Spencer confirmed it: this man had cherished and missed his own son.
And so he thought. He always remembered knowing how to play chess. He wondered if it may have been his father who had introduced the game to him or if it had been his mother. He thought on a conversation with Maeve—a difficult one—and he had to wonder. His mother said that his father was always trying to put him into normal activities despite being exceptional. His mother took him to the chess park often, where he'd played baseball. But which had come first, and who had sparked the interest in the game? Had his mother—a person who found it difficult to streamline her thoughts beyond literature and the ever-looming government—taught him? Or his father?
It was a punch to his gut, and that sorrow for their son grew—and for both these people. But beneath that sorrow was a growing envy that this had been taken away from him in his later adolescence, that Noah might have wedged himself between them, or that the other victims might have.
He stopped entertaining the idea of having successors. He was the penultimate; he was confident of this.
Why mess with perfection?
—
Though it was rare, between blind chess moves, Spencer tried to engage the man in light conversation. They never got very far and were held during his visits where he wasn't raped. But sometimes they came before. Never after.
These highlighted that the man was an awful speller—whenever he needed to fingerspell.
He catalogued that information. A skilled chess player who most likely worked an expert artisan or craftsman's job and who didn't spell well. He probably worked below his intellectual abilities. Perhaps he was dyslexic. People with dyslexia were adept at recognizing visual patterns, and chess certainly had patterns.
—
On that note, there was no pattern at all for when or how Spencer was raped. It wasn't a constant, daily occurrence. Sometimes there were long stretches in between—days leading into a week if things were clear enough for him to count them. Yet, other times it was only a day or two apart from the next, or two days in a row, or—on the rare occasion—hours apart within a day, which he hated (the renewed soreness, having to bathe for a second time, irritating). He'd stopped counting them.
Sometimes the man raped him after a game or two of chess and sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he didn't wait for a game to finish before Spencer was presented with beer.
He would ask his captor to at least let it run its course—
'Please, let's just finish the game first and then . . . you might want to play another round.'
—but it never worked.
Just as Spencer noticed that something had shifted with the woman after the escape attempt, he knew without question that something had shifted with the man as well.
When the smell of the first bottle of beer was wafted under his nose, dread barely overcame him despite knowing what it conveyed he would suffer for an hour or so. He would worry his lips between his teeth shortly before parting them and latching them onto the mouth of the bottle, tilting his head back to drink it down. Sometimes the man would give him the bottle for him to drink the beer himself, tapping it or rubbing it at his fingertips.
After a few swallows, he would feverishly drink the normal two and a half to three bottles down and begged for another while his chest was still heaving, imploring the man to give him a fourth or fifth bottle, all so that he was completely hammered and out of his wits to remember what was to come, never mind that he often dissociated during. It was to obliterate the event from his mind, and he convinced himself that it was that reason only.
In truth, Spencer had begun to develop a tolerance to the amount the man usually gave him, so there was barely a buzz, barely any tipsiness. On rare occasions, the man indulged him and gave him another bottle, but those were rare indeed.
The man never asked for anything in return of those favors—a confounding thing for a person who thrived on power and control. Spencer sometimes imagined what his captor could make him do in return for these indulgences—what sexual favors he might demand of him in return.
Such was not the man's course, and Spencer was cautious but grateful. So he felt that he should somehow express his gratitude to preemptively evade any of these things. He kept it at a simple Thank you. The man would clap his arm, leg, or neck in his own form of praise before raping him.
—
Aside from his escape attempt, wherein he had vomited the beer and drugs, Spencer used sleight of hand on two other occasions to hide away the tablets when he was made to take them on his own. He wasn't caught the first time: he slid each of them into the pillowcase just before he was raped and had slipped the first set between his legs and into the toilet bowl when he was taken to the bathroom hours later. He was caught on his second attempt when he missed the lip of the bowl, and they must have clinked and clattered.
"I don't want to do this," the man said with aborted gestures. "I don't like it when you make me do these things."
He declared this before he lashed Spencer's hands—ten and five and five and five.
The woman grew merciful the following day and soothed the aches with ointment and with pungent, fresh aloe vera. He wondered if maybe the man didn't tell his wife about why he was punished in this manner—she'd never expressed any anger towards him.
It didn't matter. He confirmed unequivocally on these two occasions that the beer, too, was laced with a drug. And he found that he preferred being raped when he was given the other drugs anyway. They—or at least one of them—were enough to blanket his mind and ease its horror if he wasn't dissociating.
—
But then he thought that maybe he should try to hide them away again and eventually collect enough to induce an overdose.
He didn't, though, and tried to wrap his mind on what stayed his hand.
—
There was never a specific position for him to assume before he was raped. It changed up without a pattern: on his back or on his front, on his knees or laying down, on the floor or on the bed, with his head pressed against the soft fabrics or abrasive ground below or wrenched back with the man's hand gripping the brace or his hair.
He accepted this.
Except, the man experimented with an entirely new position just days after his escape attempt—after their constant touches had slowed to their regular routine—and seemed to derive some pleasure out of it since it recurred a few times more.
It was the position Spencer was in today, with his calloused feet planted on the ground as he was bent at the hips over the foot frame of the bed with the harsh wrought iron digging digging digging into his hips. Spencer's fingers grasped at the horizontal bars where the cuffs were tethered close enough to the bed frame that there was no slack at all. The man gripped the bars, too, caging him. As it went on, the sweat of Spencer's hands caused them to slip and curl beneath him, crushed by his weight and the added weight of the man draped over him. When he had no more strength to keep himself upright, his feet slid from underneath him. The bolted bed didn't give or shift with the strength of the propulsions, and the man kept him anchored like a pig on a spit.
This one was particularly painful, and Spencer dreaded it, knowing he would feel the tramline bruising—that which wasn't present in dark or faded colors with Noah's freshly-buried body or with Victim B's adipocere-covered trunk—across his hips and pubis for days, as well as pain from the strain in his wrists and shoulders and clavicles. And if the man did it just right, one of the vertical bars crushed his penis and left it tender for a couple of days, too.
Maybe the man was getting closer to achieving that which he hadn't been able to achieve with each rape. Maybe there was little emotional conflict as there had been before. Maybe he was beginning to enjoy this more.
—
But neither Spencer nor his rapist was ever fully unclothed; his pants and underwear were mostly ever pushed down just enough if he was prone or on his knees, or removed if he was supine. The shirts always remained. All cuffs, too, remained, and at least one limb was always properly tethered.
On that note, with except for that single push the man had urged from him after his escape attempt, Spencer still wasn't made to actively participate in any way during the rape, wasn't told to move one way or another. Except. Since then, his rapist occasionally had him ease down his own pants and underwear before violating him. Most times, the man preferred to wrangle them down himself.
No degrading act was forced on him. Foreign objects never came into play.
He was grateful for these forbearances and so found the rape sufferable. He'd seen victims who went through worse. This was negligible. It didn't prevent the dissociating.
He still didn't know what kind of rapist to classify this man as, and he didn't know if these things were an eventuality.
If he was lucid enough to register the touches, sometimes the hands gripped him like a lion clamping down on its prey, sometimes they pulled on the roots of his hair to wrench his head back, sometimes they scratched, and sometimes they pressed.
And yet. As time passed, a hand would curl and linger on his skin or a thumb would tap-tap; beer-laden puffs of air would pulse on his bruised cheek; a hand wrapped around his sore neck and didn't squeeze but rubbed or kneaded instead; a hand would slide underneath his shirt and splay upon his abdomen or chest, or wrap around his waist, fan out, remain there; a hand would slide down his thigh.
The hands never went to his genitals.
He couldn't understand how the man could keep the momentum for so long, but it was always long yet always ended with an abrupt pull.
No ejaculation. No orgasm. Occasional flaccidness.
The longest was of the man just pressing into him in that robotic manner, and by the time Spencer had rolled out from his dissociation with the understanding that his rape was over, he had no headache or dizziness or nausea at all. It must have been a couple of hours later, surely. That, or his growing tolerance to the drugs meant they didn't hit as hard as before, which was too bad.
But there it was: the swell of flesh pressed against his backside, the grip of fingers loose on his sore hips, and an unmoving pressure of a softened phallus still within him. It seemed the man had stopped completely, still settled within him, and just stayed there doing nothing.
Spencer shifted in discomfort, pulling away. The man loosened his hand on one hip and seemed to work up his erection again before the perfunctory violation resumed. Spencer had wondered—was convinced—that his captor may have also dissociated while raping his victim on that occasion.
He wasn't whole.
—
Sometimes the man made him use the bathroom in between giving him the beer and starting the actual violation and cleaned him with the hose, and sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he could smell and feel his own fecal matter after being raped, and sometimes he didn't.
Spencer once begged him to at least have the courtesy to use protection. Not a complaint. A request. He tried to reason with him medically—in broken but ever-improving Sign language—on why the man should use it. He was denied and was later punished by the woman for suggesting that her husband was unclean or defiled. Ten lashes and five and five on his hands; on his bare back, buttocks, and legs another ten and five and five and five and—
He never asked again.
But he tried to do the same regarding lubrication, again explaining why using a sufficient amount of lubricant was another necessity and could prevent complications. On this the man was more considerate, and he began to use it more often and generously than not.
Spencer could tell by its scent and mucousy texture: it was pure, fresh aloe. He should have expected nothing less from his captors and was sure that it was the woman's doing. Natural, uncomplicated, of the earth, and a normal alternative for lubrication.
He failed to realize, though, that by using it so uninhibitedly, it made the girth of his rapist's penis easier to penetrate him, and he didn't know which had been worse. Slippage allowed him to feel more distinctly the slow, shallow retractions and thrusts stretching at his muscles. It was a startling new sensation that he'd not felt beyond the fiery rending before.
Not bad. Not good. Just. Different. Preferable to the pain, certainly.
He was ruined; he knew he was.
—
No more kicks or stomps rained on him after he was raped. He wasn't often lashed with the belt or on the rare occasion slapped or backhanded or punched. Why there was any violence despite his docility, he didn't know, and attributed it to the man's own experiences. On the rare occasion, a fist burrowed in his side or in his belly and sometimes after he doubled over or fell to the floor, or before he even could, the man would curl over his bent body, hold him close, fan his palm where the last blow had landed.
Although it didn't follow each time he was raped, the severity of the asphyxiation increased, and he often blacked out for a few seconds. It was alarming, escalating behavior, and deadly. It was starting to leave noticeable differences, physically and neurologically. The painful coughing, sore throat, tender bruising, even the ear ringing—he knew these would come. These were early indications of an internal injury. But he wondered if this might be why he was having the issues with his urination. And he knew it was affecting his cognition—the chess matches falling out of his favor, the occasional question of if he had known a word before in ASL and if he'd just forgotten it, restlessness and inability to sleep. This was increasing his risk of a traumatic brain injury.
But afterwards, he was made to bathe himself if he could.
And then the man would hold that spot above his cuffed ankle every time he was laid in bed, would sit there for an hour, began doing so for two hours, and on the rare occasion sat there for what Spencer deemed was the whole night.
—
Three times there was a flutter beneath his navel that caused his own flaccid penis to twitch to tumescence and near rigidity for a brief period.
The first was when they both massaged his aches from an unexplained, severe beating they both doled out. He'd later wondered if it might be outside pressure working against them that induced the violence. As their hands worked and worked over all his flesh during and after the bathing, heat swelled around him, and an overwhelming sense of relaxation and rhapsody and correctness, of sensation and constancy.
It happened, too, when he was just wrapped in the arms of the woman and she soothed him not long after she'd fed him one day, folded herself around him and just held him.
It was a door that he steadfastly refused to peer behind. He'd dedicated enough time when the rapes first began dwelling on why he didn't get an erection in the face of this.
He didn't want to dwell on why his body surrendered during those specific occasions and if—maybe—there was an emotional component to any of this. Considering that these two people were supposed to be facsimiles of his own mother and father, the implications were disturbing. This was a door he wouldn't open.
He didn't want to dwell on where he fell in this—if this was purely physiological or if this was also emotional. The sexual response cycle could be ushered by emotions—desire—and then physiology—arousal—these two could collide like liquids of varying density rushing at each other. It was a betrayal unto himself.
He didn't want to dwell on the possibility that they might also be drugging his food or at any other time with something to make him more pliant. There were natural foods that were known to increase libido or sexual responsiveness, and the woman—he felt that she could be versed in this.
He didn't want to dwell on any of it.
He dwelt on why his team hadn't found him yet. There was no energy to be disappointed or frustrated. It left him empty.
—
Once—and only once—after Spencer was all washed and clothed after being raped, instead of wrapping his loose hand around his ankle, the man eased him further onto the mattress on his right side, closer to the wall, climbed back into the bed, and pressed his whole body alongside his back, curling his leg and arm over him.
It was as if the man was trying to absorb him for how tightly he held him until the limbs relaxed, until the warm breaths puffing against his neck were slow and even and he knew that the man had fallen asleep. His heart had pounded away, he trembled, and the man didn't so much as shift.
Like water, we are truest to our nature when we repose.
He had fingered those keys again after reaching back and touching the man's belt loop by his left hip. He touched each one of them, ran his fingers delicately over the ridges until the keys warmed.
He could have taken off the brace and at least seen the face of the man who had devastated him.
He could have removed every shackle from his limbs and put them on the man.
He could have killed the man.
Such wasn't his course in the passing hours. No, instead—
Oxytocin is self-perpetuating and is a way for the body to reward itself.
Receiving touch fosters empathy, a sense of nurturing. Hugging and other forms of nonsexual touching causes the brain to release oxytocin, which stimulates the release of other hormones, such as dopamine and serotonin, while reducing stress-induced hormones, such as cortisol and norepinephrine.
He loosened his tense muscles, remained ever still against the warmth encasing him—against the abdomen swelling and contracting against his back from the slow inhalations brought on by a deep, fulfilling slumber—convincing himself that there was no point to any of those things. The man would find some way to prevail against him. If not him, then his wife would.
After he sought to just ride through this, after his own breathing slowed and he shifted to better nestle himself and the arm tightened and the heat of those breaths continued to huff against his neck and he could admit that this was not unpleasant, it was the third time he'd tumesced.
When the man awoke hours later, his hand landed on Spencer's sore neck like it did whenever he was pleased but had lingered; the thumb rubbed against the column of flesh and then trailed to his jaw. And then the man pulled away.
The ensuing absence of his presence, the momentary change in the air's pressure before its return to normalcy to signal a departure, and the profound guilt and shame at having done nothing in the previous hours left Spencer's body wracked with his weeping.
—
On occasion, the tub was filled with warm, soothing water by the time Spencer eased himself in after being raped and strangled. This stopped. Someone could drown that way.
Taking mastery of his own death wasn't allowed, and was equated with attempts to escape, he learned. He didn't actively attempt to take his own life. He just dipped his whole body under the surface and—though he knew the differences in theory—wondered just how different drowning would feel to being strangled.
His head was wrenched up. When he broke the surface, he was slapped again and again with a palm the span and strength of an iron pan, and then he was shaken.
The hands tucked under his. "Why did you do this? Why would you do something like this?" the man asked him again and again.
Spencer didn't respond. How could he make sense of or explain what he'd just done?
The man then told him that another attempt wouldn't come without punishment: he and his wife would keep Henry and take Jennifer and Will out of the picture. The man told him that if he succeeded with killing himself, he would do the same thing anyway.
And yet.
After the harsh declarations, the man pressed Spencer's dripping, drenched head to his chest, fingers latching onto him and lacing into his hair, grasping onto his bare shoulder with a fierceness that broke the skin under the entrenching nails.
How strange.
Spencer did nothing but let himself be held. Behind the cotton flannel pressed against him, he could feel a chamber pulsing near his face, thrumming, beating, rushing.
