Disclaimer: Criminal Minds belongs to CBS, not me.

No slipping up if you slip away

He saw it coming, saw every sign, but it still caught him off guard.

He couldn't remember a time when his parents didn't fight. They used to fight in hushed tones after he went to bed, their voices fading into the thin walls. And then they started arguing louder, and louder. And now they fought in front of him, no holds barred, screaming and calling each other names, while he buried himself in books and made himself invisible.

His father didn't eat at home anymore. He came home later and later, choosing to sleep on the couch, and leaving before the sun came up. Diana went to work sometimes, but more often than not she stayed home, puttering about, typing aimlessly on her computer, flipping pages in her books. She forgot to make dinner, she forgot to do laundry, she forgot to take her medication.

Spencer had gotten pretty good at taking care of himself. He was in high school now, starting his sophomore year, even though he was only ten. He had learned how to get himself up on time, get himself dressed, get to the bus stop early. There was almost never any breakfast in the house, but he'd gotten pretty good at getting exactly the right amount of money from his mom's purse or his dad's wallet to get himself at least something to eat at school. Usually he stayed after school in the library to get his homework done. It was quiet there, and clean, and sometimes the librarians would give him something to eat. It was a long walk home from the library if he missed the bus, and it was always hot, but it gave him an excuse to get out of the house. It tired him out enough to sleep through his parents' fights.

His father left on a Tuesday.

It started off innocently enough. He'd gotten up early for school, gotten dressed already. And he heard his father screaming.

"You unplugged the alarm clock, Diana? You unplugged it?"

An indistinguishable reply from his mother.

"I don't care if you thought the president of the United States was using it to spy on you! You unplugged it, and now I'm late for work."

A long pause.

"What are you doing, William?" he heard his mother say, his voice rising, nervous and tight. "What are you doing with that suitcase?"

Spencer's blood ran cold. When his father spoke again, he wasn't angry. He wasn't loud. He was calm.

"I think we both know what's happening, Diana."

Spencer crept down the hall towards his parents' room. "No, William, you don't have to go-" his mother pleaded.

"There's nothing else to try, Diana. Not that you've really tried, but…"

"I have tried, William. You know I have."

He snuck into his parents' bedroom and stood silently by the door. His mother paced, her fingers over her mouth, fluttering in her favorite sweater pulled on over her nightgown. His father mechanically moved from the closet to the bed, dropping clothes into his suitcase.

"You haven't tried hard enough, Diana," William said. "You don't seem to take your condition seriously enough."

She exhaled, her voice caught in her throat. "I hate how the medicine makes me feel," Diana said. "It's like someone's wrapped my head up in cotton and I can't sense anything anymore. I don't feel like myself."

"And you do when you're unmedicated and you set the house on fire?" William asked coolly.

"It was just a little fire! I stepped away for a moment, and the curtains-"

"You left the burner on for five hours."

"It was an accident."

Spencer watched them fight, his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. This wasn't their usual kind of fight. He hadn't seen his father this calm in a long time.

"What if Spencer had been in the house?" William asked. "Your little antics have put him in enough dangerous situations before."

"He's fine," Diana scoffed. "He's so mature for his age."

"He's ten."

"Fine, if you're such a good parent, you take him, then," Diana said.

William dropped more clothes in the suitcase. "We've discussed this, Diana," he said in a low voice. "I can't take him because…" His voice trailed off.

"Because of what?" Diana challenged.

William paused for a moment and dragged his hand over his face. "Just leave Spencer out of it," he said. "This is about you. And your issues."

"He's your son," Diana said. "Anything you have to say, go ahead and say it." She gestured towards Spencer. "Go ahead."

William turned, noticing him for the first time. "Spencer, please go in the other room," he said, in that calm, edge-of-patience tone that he'd heard so many times before.

"Don't treat him like a child," Diana retorted.

William dropped his head for a moment. "I'm not going to have this conversation in front of him," he said flatly. He turned back towards the closet, the hangers clinking on the rail.

"Statistically," Spencer blurted out, "children who grow up in two parent households attain three more years of higher education than children from single parent households."

William turned towards him, frustration and disappointment written all over his face. "We're not statistics, Spencer," he said sharply, and Spencer drew back from him, his face falling.

"I'm not crazy," Diana implored.

William leaned towards her. "If you refuse to take care of yourself, I can't help you," he said through his teeth.

"I do take care of myself!"

William looked her straight in the eyes. "What day is it?" he asked.

Diana made a discontented noise and looked wildly towards Spencer. Tuesday, he thought, childishly willing the thought into her brain. It's Tuesday.

But she said nothing, and William turned away from her. "That's not fair," she said at last.

"I'm out of ideas, Diana," he said, calmly closing his suitcase and flipping the latches.

"You could take Spencer with you, just for a little while," she suggested desperately. Spencer looked from one parent to the other. Did she not want to keep him?

"Don't do this," William said quietly, and Spencer's heart sank to the floor. His father certainly didn't want him.

Diana drew her sweater around herself like a queen wrapping herself in an ermine cloak. "You're weak," she hissed through her teeth, and for a moment his mother was completely unrecognizable, her features twisted up in revulsion.

William met her gaze evenly. "You're right," he said, and he picked up his suitcase. His mother deflated, her attempt at gaining the upper hand vanished. William crossed to the door, and stopped. He looked down at Spencer.

Stay, Spencer thought wildly. Stay, stay, stay.

But his father looked at him, as if he was looking at a stranger's child and not his own. "Goodbye," he said quietly, and he left.

Spencer heard his footsteps die down the hall, the click and creak of the door opening, the steady final thud as it closed.

He looked up at his mother. "I'm not weak," he said, and his voice sounded small in his own ears.

Diana's face crumpled. "I know, honey," she said. She pulled him into a hug. Spencer pressed his cheek against her upper arm, her sweater comfortably scratching against his cheek. He heard his father's car pull out of the driveway, and he buried his face into her belly. She hugged him, her hand hovering over his hair, but he didn't feel comforted.

At first, his father's disappearance didn't seem to make a difference. William's presence had been scarce over the past few months. Now not only was he gone, but so were his belongings. The absence made itself fully known after the first few weeks- when there was no food left in the house, and the power went out. Of course. His father paid the bills.

Diana was no help, wandering up and down the halls, trying every light switch. Spencer dug out an old power bill and took his mother's debit card and handful of quarters to the nearest payphone to call and pay the debt. He didn't tell his mother. She thought it was a miracle when the lights turned back on.

He went grocery shopping for the first time on his own, too. This time he used the debit card to pull cash from an ATM- no cashier in their right mind would allow a little kid to use a parent's card unsupervised. He wasn't sure what groceries to buy, or how much to spend, but he managed to lug a couple bags home, his skinny arms straining under the weight of pasta and apples. He ate a lot of ramen, a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, a lot of cheap snack cakes.

Cooking was hard. His first attempts weren't very good at all. But at least now he had food to come home to, sometimes even lunches to take to school.

Diana went to work sometimes. At least, he thought she went to work. He wasn't always sure. She slept in a lot, spent the whole weekend sleeping sometimes. One day he came home from school, and she had taped newspapers over every window. "It'll help, Spencer," she said, her eyes too bright. "They won't be able to see us. Nobody can see us. We'll be safe."

He left the papers up. Better for the neighbors to stare than his mother to panic.

There was a part of him that was still waiting. Waiting for his father to walk back in the door, to apologize, to hang his clothes back up in the closet. Waiting for him to come back so his mother would wake up, get herself together, be his mom again. It only made sense. At least to him.

Then he found the letter. His dad had hidden it in his room, behind the nightstand. Spencer didn't open it for a long time. And when he finally read it, it was a lot of nothing- it's not your fault, you'll always be my son, be a good boy. He threw it away.

In his heart, he still wanted him to come home. But the line between his father and the dad he wished he had began to blur, until details started to get lost. He'd read once that that could be a defense mechanism. He chose not delve farther into that line of thought.

The worst was spring break. He didn't see his mother for three days, she didn't even leave her room to eat. Sometimes he would peek in and see her lying there, tangled in her blankets. Spencer found himself pacing back and forth in the hallway outside her room, vacillating from anxiety to worry to anger to frustration and back to anxiety. What was he supposed to do? Nothing in his books prepared him for this.

Finally, impulsively, he swung the door open and stepped inside. The bedroom was dim, afternoon light barely filtering through the drawn shades, the air stale as a sickroom and thick with cigarette smoke. The closet door was open, showcasing his mother's messy clothes and his father's empty half of the rail. His mother was lying in bed, surrounded by books, aimlessly flipping the same page back and forth. She still slept on the right side of the bed, leaving the left- his father's side- open and waiting.

Something hot boiled in the back of Spencer's neck. He marched over to the window and threw up the shade. Diana frowned at the sudden burst of light but she didn't open her eyes. "Mom?" he said firmly.

"What is it, baby?" she murmured, her eyes still closed.

"It's the afternoon," he said flatly.

She didn't move. "I'm resting," she said.

"The doctor said you need to get out of bed."

She raised her head a little bit. "I've been reading," she argued.

"He says you need exercise," he pressed.

Diana rolled her eyes and sighed. "Well, that's because his idea of good literature is Our Bodies, Ourselves," she scoffed, but her voice sounded lethargic.

Spencer folded his arms, shifting his weight. He wasn't used to arguing with his mother. He sounded like his father. "Well, he's your doctor," he said.

"He's a Neanderthal," Diana said, and her head drooped on the pillow again, her eyes falling shut.

Spencer dropped his arms. She wouldn't listen to him. She never listened to anybody. He turned to leave.

"Where are you going?" she asked. Her voice was petulant, childish.

"I'm going to see if Jeff wants to play," he said. He didn't sound childish. He never did anymore.

"Come here," she said, and he hesitated. "Let me read to you." She patted the bed beside her. "Up, up."

He obeyed, climbing up next to her, the secondhand wooden bedframe creaking. She sat up a little bit, the most movement he'd seen from her in days, and spread several books out around him. "Pick one," she said.

He scanned them quickly. "That one," he said, tapping on the cover.

"Proust," she said, approval shining in her voice, and he smiled. "Beautiful choice." She flipped through the pages, finding the right page. "The smell of the madeleine, unleashing the flood of memory."

He settled back against the headboard. "For a long time, I used to go to bed early," she read. He watched carefully as he listened to her, her alto voice warm and even and more familiar than she'd been in a long time. "Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say 'I'm going to sleep'."

He leaned back, closing his eyes and listening to her. It had been a long time since she had felt well enough to read to him. Before his father walked out.

"Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them."

She paused to turn a page, and he sat up. "Mommy?" he ventured.

"What, baby?"

He slid his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. "When do you think Daddy will come home?" he said.

There was something hollow in his mother's eyes. Diana didn't answer him, just dropped her gaze and continued to read. Spencer sank down slowly, his heartbeat falling sluggish. She didn't say the words, but he understood.

He laid down on the bed beside Diana, his body cool and numb, and for the first time he felt the heaviness that kept his mother pinned into her bed. She rested a hand on his head, her fingers a little shaky, and petted his hair in fragile short strokes as she kept reading.

"My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mama would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time; she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow.

"So much did I love that good night, that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time or respite during which Mama would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her 'kiss me just once again,' but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold.

"And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquility she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a host, for an act of communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep."

Diana's voice was gentle and warm and rhythmic. He couldn't remember the last time she read to him, and he didn't know when it might happen again, so he let her read to him until he began to doze off, warm afternoon sunlight falling over his face and her cold thin fingers tangled in his curls.

Author's Notes:

Ouch ouch ouch.

I used the bits from Spencer's flashbacks in Revelations as a kind of bookend for this. I love writing gapfills and this is a part of Spencer's life that I thought really needed to be fleshed out. (There will definitely be more gapfills coming up, so if you have a favorite Spencer-centric episode, you can pretty much bet I'll be writing for it.)

Diana is reading from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, particluarly the first volume Swann's Way. I read through it to get a good idea of the context of the passage, and the description of a little boy waiting for his mother was really a punch in the gut. Spencer's father leaving was a major turning point from a difficult childhood to a non-childhood, and pretty much after this point Diana is kind of a ghost of the woman she used to be. I don't think Spencer got to be much of a child after this point in his life, and certainly he didn't have anyone to take care of him, he had to take care of himself and his mother.

(but I'm almost done writing the Revelations chapter, fifty pages later, and that's going to be fixed)

Also Dayanna had a great headcanon- a little bit of that is coming up in the next chapter. (That one's going to be a doozy, prepare yourselves now.)

Thank you to allieisrandom, -Fray-Chase, nitrogentulips, and fishtrek for reviewing! (Also- nitrogentulips, I have just the fic for you! I'll send you the link!)

I always appreciate reviews and messages! If you pop over to my tumblr (themetaphorgirl) I would love to chat or fill prompts!

Up next: they tied him to the goalpost and they left him to burn away in the sun.