This is for the episodes "Our Darkest Hour" and "The Longest Night"

The first case that Spencer had to work with the team with his heritage revealed and it had to be a case like this. It had to be something so big, so consuming, and so very personal. Spencer curled his hand in and tried not to let his wings unfurl as he and JJ pulled up to the crime scene. How had he not anticipated how hard this would be? How difficult it would be to not fly off and find this Unsub and bring him to justice? He could, he knew. He could hunt him down much faster than the team could. But finding him was only half the battle. Bringing him to justice was the other half. To do that, they had to do things by the book—by human rules.

That was no real comfort when Spencer and JJ made their way into the house. An officer was dead, his sister on the way to the hospital, Derek was hurt, and a child was missing.

They found the team in the kitchen of the house, the paramedic just leaving Derek's side. One look at him and Spencer wanted nothing more than to reach out and wipe his injuries away.

"Derek," JJ breathed out, shock in her tone.

Derek pushed himself up from the table, wincing. "I'm all right."

"You don't look all right." Spencer said before he could stop himself.

The venomous look that Derek shot his way had him flinching back. "I said I'm fine, Reid. No thanks to you."

More than one sharp breath could be heard in the room. "Morgan." Aaron said sharply, a warning in his tone. It was a warning Derek didn't heed. He strode right up to Spencer and jabbed a finger in his chest. "Where the hell were you, man?" He hissed, voice pitched low so no one outside the room could hear. "Huh? Where were you and all your great freaking powers when we needed you? Where were you when that bastard was raping Spicer's sister, or when he made Spicer get on his knees before he shot him? Where were you when he took Ellie and ran?"

Though Spencer knew his answer would infuriate, he still spoke honestly, knowing that Derek deserved that. "I was trapped in a car, just like everyone else." He didn't mention that there'd been one of the locals in the car with him; there was no excuse that would make this better. Nothing that would make Derek feel any better or that would take away the losses that had happened.

It wasn't any real surprise when Derek's fist flashed out and connected with his face. The others cried out, but when Spencer remained still, not even moving an inch from the blow, they all froze. Derek, however, made a sharp, pained sound and yanked his hand in, cradling the now broken hand against his stomach. Spencer sighed softly. "I warned you when you talked about sparring before that hitting me isn't the best idea anymore." He reminded Derek gently. "It hurts you far more than it does me." Still, he moved forward and reached out before Derek could stop him. Gently, he curled his hand over Derek's and extended just a bit of his grace. In seconds, the broken hand was healed, as were the internal injuries, including his ribs and the concussion. The outside bruises he left there, because miraculous healing would look suspicious to the locals, but the inside ones he could heal without worry.

Derek jerked his hand back from Spencer as if he couldn't stand the touch. "Keep your hands off me." He growled lowly. "You want to help? Fly your archangel ass outta here and go find that little girl." That said, he turned and stormed out of the house.

The room fell silent with his exit. Spencer drew in a breath and let it out carefully and slowly. He felt JJ's hand settled on his arm in a gesture of comfort and he turned himself just enough to give her a small smile in a silent sign to tell her that he was okay. He couldn't argue Derek's words and they all knew it.

Silently, Spencer turned and walked away.

No one saw Spencer after that. Not until they were back at the station again. None of the local officers questioned his presence, but there were more than a few looks exchanged between the BAU members who knew that Spencer hadn't ridden back with any of them. They didn't ask where he'd been, though, or what he'd been doing.

When the call came in about a boy who said he'd just escaped from the Prince of Darkness, none of them questioned it when he vanished once more.

The room was quiet as everyone listened to JJ's voice playing over the radio. Spencer held himself still, only half his attention on the room here, the other half focused somewhere else. But he still listened. He listened as JJ gave their Unsub the words that someone should've given him a long time ago.

"I'm supposed to empathize with you. Sympathize. Understand." She told him, her words soft. Spencer heard her draw in a breath before her voice suddenly turned firm. "But I can't. Uh. That, that would be a lie."

Everyone in the room went still. This wasn't part of what she'd been told to say. This, in fact, was the opposite. Yet they could only listen as she went on.

"The truth is I don't understand what you've done. I don't sympathize with you killing people all these years, and I especially don't understand you taking Ellie. What I can do is tell you what a mother should tell you." Her voice changed a little again and Spencer found himself wanting to actually smile a little. Because that was her serious, 'mom' voice, the one she got when lecturing. "That you can't take away your pain by hurting someone else. That it doesn't make all the nights you went to bed scared and alone any better if you scare someone else the way you're scaring Ellie. What happened to you, it isn't fair, but what you're doing to her isn't fair either and if anyone should understand what that feels like it's you. You have the power. You can do what you wanna do. But for once, you can choose to use that power to do for Ellie what should've been done for you. You can choose letting her go. You can choose teaching her that, yes, there are monsters and it's okay to be afraid of them. But it's not okay to let them win. And it's not okay to be one."

Her last words rang through the room, all the more powerful for the softness with which they'd been delivered.

Some of Spencer's tension suddenly eased and he actually visibly slumped. His friends noticed, but didn't call him on it, though he got more than one questioning look. They might've pushed it more, but only a minute later, a ringing phone interrupted the silence. It was Emily's phone. She took a step back from them to answer it, her voice low. "Agent Prentiss." She paused briefly and Spencer could see as her body tensed as if bracing for something. "Yes, hello doctor…yes, sir, thank you."

There was another ringing, but the team all had their eyes on Emily. She closed the phone and turned around and all of them saw her smile, though she directed it at Derek. "The aunt's going to be okay. She's got a bit of a recovery ahead of her, and it was pretty touch and go there for a bit and he was sure they were going to lose her, but he says she's better. He doesn't understand how, but she's better."

The good news just kept coming. The detective, the one whose phone had rang, turned to them with open shock and joy on his face. "He let her go!" He told them. All eyes snapped to him and watched as he asked the person on the phone "Where?" A pause, and then he was grinning at them again. "He got out of the car and he, ah, he just let her go. She's in a house about six blocks from here."

"Where is he now?" Derek asked quickly.

"Uh, he's in another house up the street."

Everyone was moving quickly. Behind them, Spencer heard Aaron's voice on the phone with JJ, telling her "JJ, I don't know if you know, he let her go. You did it."

No one saw the soft smile on Spencer's face.

It didn't really surprise Spencer when his teammates ambushed him on the flight back home. Something told him that this might be the norm for the next little while. His teammates were observant, that was their job, so it wasn't all that surprising that they'd noticed things with him. His disappearances, or things in his body language. Spencer had been human long enough that he still had a lot of the same human mannerisms. Those hadn't vanished with the return of his grace. He hadn't suddenly turned into a super stoic angel like some of his brethren. That had never been who he was.

They waited until the jet was in the air before they pounced on him, at least. Spencer had to smother a smile as everyone crowded around him while still trying to seem like they weren't actually swarming him. Emily, however, was straightforward about it, bless her. She dropped down right in the seat next to him and bluntly said "So, what'd you do, Reid?" She grinned at him. "Cause I know how the doctors were talking before and Ellie's aunt, she shouldn't have made it."

He shrugged one shoulder and looked down at the book in his hands that he hadn't really been reading. "I didn't do much for her." It was true. A miraculous healing would've been beyond suspicious. "I just healed a little. Enough that she was out of immediate danger. The rest is up to the doctors."

"And the rest of the time?" JJ asked. "You disappeared on us more than once, Spence. What'd you do?" There was no accusation in her tone. She wasn't trying to imply that he'd done anything bad. If anything, her tone was wildly curious.

JJ might've been the one to ask, but the others were all staring right at him, waiting for an answer. Even Aaron was giving him a rather intent look. Spencer distracted himself from having to look at them by keeping his eyes on his book while he marked his page and put it away in his bag again. "I was hunting down Ellie. I knew a general area, so it didn't take me long to find her. Then I just sort of, kept tabs on her. Watched over her." Made sure that their Unsub didn't kill her.

The jet went silent for a moment. Derek was the one to break it, and he sounded like he wasn't quite sure whether to be surprised or angry. "You found her, but you didn't get her free?"

"How could I?" Spencer countered, looking up at the man who had been his best friend for years now. He could see the flash in Derek's eyes, but he needed the man to understand. He needed him to stop and think about this, not just react. "Derek, you're not thinking clearly about this and you need to. If I flew in there and transported Ellie out, what would've happened? At beast, I could've kept myself hidden so no one would've known it was me, but everyone still would've known that a girl magically disappeared from one place and reappeared somewhere else. I don't know if you can even begin to understand the kind of hysteria it could cause if people actually believed her story, or the effects it could have on her if people didn't and she had to live with that the rest of her life. Worst case, I didn't hide myself while doing it and everyone found out who and what I am. Do you really think that would go over well?"

The jet fell silent after that. Spencer could see that Derek hadn't thought of any of that before. Understandable, really. He'd been too upset. Too worried. Too angry. He was thinking now, though. They all were. Spencer took complete advantage of that to point out things he hadn't before; things that he'd thought they would all understand without being told.

"There's only so much I can do to help on cases without either giving myself away, or messing up the case." He told them bluntly. "I'm pretty good at covering my tracks, and making myself invisible is beyond easy. But even if I can get in and stop an Unsub, even if I can rescue the victims, we have to stop and think about the effect it'll have on the case. It sounds cold, I know, but we have to think that way. All of us do. Because, sure, I can tell us where to focus sometimes. Sometimes I might even be able to point and say 'this is our Unsub'. But unless we have the facts and evidence to back us up, what good is it going to do?"

"I never thought of it like that." JJ said.

"My skills in profiling are still most likely going to be the biggest help in regular cases. Sometimes, like in this one, I can help in other ways. I can do like I did with Ellie and go find them and watch over them, make sure they're okay, make sure they're alive. I can keep a child from dying. In a sense, I can play the part of the guardian angel that you see on TV and such. In missing children cases, I can really help out. It's not as easy to find someone I don't know, but I'm better equipped than the average human to find them. But, guys," He spread his hands out beseechingly, needing them to hear him and understand. "I can't just walk into a town and point and say 'there he is' and have you guys go arrest him. And I won't always have the answers. I'm an archangel—not my Father. I'm not omniscient or omnipotent."

"What you can do is enough." Aaron said. He leaned back in his seat, fixing Spencer with a serious yet contemplative look. The one that said he was taking facts and shuffling them around in his mind. Finding all the ways they went together and all the ways they could be used. It was part of what made him such a good leader. He was smart, caring, kind, and confident, all things that a leader needed. He knew them all, knew them well, and knew how best to utilize their individual skills. After a second of thinking about it, he said "If you let me know ahead of time what you're going to do, I can send you out with Morgan or I can make up some excuse for you to be somewhere so that the officers won't get suspicious of your absence."

A small smile touched Spencer's lips. "I can do that."

Aaron smiled back at him. "Then I think we can make this work."

It was when he got home that afternoon that Spencer felt the shockwave blast across the Heavenly airwaves, that connection that all angels shared. Thankfully he managed to get inside and slam his door shut behind him before he hit his knees just inside his apartment and clutched at his chest as his newly returned grace cried out in grief and loss along with every other angel in existence.

Michael and Lucifer were lost. They were locked together, in the Cage. The apocalypse was over.

There was no one around to see as the lost archangel wept for his brothers.

So right now, I'm not doing every episode of season 6. I'm doing quite a few, and I have big plans for some, but I'm not revisiting all. I am, however, mixing other things in there, so it won't all be episode related. Anything you want to see, feel free to let me know, and thank you all so much for your Kudos and Comments, they are wonderful and inspiring :D