Chapter 41

It was strange.

Spencer sat in Rossi's back yard on that warm Indian summer day and considered the strangeness of it all. The last time he had been here it had been a warm, summer evening and JJ and Will had gotten married. After the wedding he'd gone home and written Maeve to tell her all about it. He recalled sitting right here and dreaming of Maeve, what she might look like, what their wedding would be like. He had loved her, of that he had no doubt, but in the end he still wasn't sure if the woman he loved had been the woman or the dream.

Laura was real.

Laura was real. She was flesh and blood. She was a little powerhouse that never seemed to shut down, that was always moving, doing, something. She was real hopes and real dreams and real plans to make the world better somehow. She was arms that reached for him in the night and hunger and heat and quiet murmurs of longing. And she didn't see him as some overgrown child who needed protection, she saw him as an equal, a collaborator, a friend. And she saw him as a man who could and would protect her and their children as best he could. He didn't think anyone had ever done that before, ever.

No, Lila had. It was part of her appeal back then, that she trusted him like that. There was something about that that just made him feel so humble and so strong, all at once.

Garcia came out, bearing her own coffee cup. "Hey." She said gently as she sat beside him. "How are you doing?"

It was an invitation to talk. "I can't decide." He admitted. "Sometimes it hurts so bad I'd swear I was dying, but other times I'm probably the happiest I've ever been."

"I can guess why it hurts." Garcia said gently. "Why the happy?"

"Laura. We're out and she wants to stay. She wants to keep going, you know, keep our family. I honestly wasn't a hundred percent certain it would last out here."

"What were her plans before all this happened?'

"Up in the air. She was on the verge of a major transition, getting her degree and leaving the university. DC had been one of the places she'd been considering, she was going to see if she could get some grant money together, set up a program here or in Baltimore, Detroit, some big city with a large low-income population. Before the Unsub got involved she was talking about how I might be the deciding factor, she was thinking about here so we could continue to…" How to put it?

"Go out. Date. Boyfriend/girlfriend thing." Garcia supplied."So this isn't just because of what happened, the baby and everything, you two really liked each other back at the beginning."

"Yeah. The Unsub profiled for a pretty good match." He looked into his coffee for a long moment. "That and it feels good to have you guys back again."

"Yeah, I bet. I'm sorry." She said sincerely. "I was so worried about you after what happened with Maeve, I didn't realize that maybe you just couldn't talk at all."

"I was knocking."

"I know. That was totally my bad and I'm really sorry."

"It's okay. But all this has made me realize that I really need a computer to bring home. I probably could have sent e-mail."

"E-mail?" Garcia was kind of shocked. "You really wanted to be consoled over e-mail?"

"No. But I could have told you that I wasn't able to talk and sent you a link to why. I actually would have liked someone to just sit with."

"Oh. See, I am totally getting you a tablet, you and Laura both." She moved and sat next to him, so she could hug. "I'm surprised you were talking at all when we got there."

"Laura and I didn't talk at all at first, except for when we had to. Oh!" There it was again, that bright, hot pain on top of memory.

Laura stood there in the pale light of the snowed over skylights and let the towel fall.

They had both been body shy at first but months of intimacy followed by growing through childbirth together had eliminated all the physical barriers. But tonight he wasn't, couldn't look at her with any kind of lust. Tonight there was nothing but silence, complete, shocking silence and the bottomless well of pain that absorbed all sound. "I'm sorry." He whispered. "We have to."

"I know." She murmured on a breath.

She was so achingly beautiful. He'd been struck, that first time, by how small her body was, how so much energy and passion could be contained in so little skin. Now her breasts were amazing, twice their normal size, stretched taut with the effort of containing everything Maggie needed to survive, pale with a tracery of blue veins, leaking liquid energy to the air, an absolute living miracle. But now there was no Maggie to need that energy her mother would have gladly, joyfully given her. Now her mother needed that energy, to be free of this place so she could later pass that on to Maggie's brothers and sisters. Now her body needed to be convinced that it needed to stop. And doing that to her was impossibly hard and cruel, especially on this day. But sometimes, he thought, remembering when Hotch told Jack to go solve the case, to leave his mother and go hide, sometimes fathers have to be hard and cruel to protect their children. I couldn't protect Maggie, he thought, although I wanted to and I tried. But I can still do something about the ones to come. "I'm sorry." He murmured again as she lifted her arms and he stepped to her side. "You really are beautiful." She just sighed in reply, the tears running down her face as he started wrapping the bandages tight around her.

"You okay?" Garcia asked.

Spencer nodded. "It happens. Happened after Maeve and Emily, sometimes a memory comes up. They're so real and it just…"

"I know. I'm sorry. I still get that way about my parents sometimes. I don't think it gets easier, you just learn to process." Garcia snuggled him in tight.

"Hey," said a voice behind them. They turned as Laura stepped out into the sun. "Oh." She said, with that sudden shocked look and gasp that told him that she'd just been swamped by the pain too.

"Come here." He held his arms open to her, waited until she could move, could come and settle near to him. "Okay?" He asked as he pressed a kiss to her temple.

"Yeah. It's just sun, you know. The sky."

All things Maggie never got to see. A look told him that Garcia understood too, "Yeah."