Chapter Text
Spencer Reid was seeing ghosts. He had been for some time. The ghosts, they looked like people he loved, people he was not certain loved him back. He could not say when the apparitions began. It was hard to tell when they were real. The ghosts, they breathed like real people did. The ghosts, they tasted sweet.
He developed a hypothesis and discovered rules.
- The ghosts were always kind.
- They listened when he spoke, no matter his rambling.
- They smiled.
- The ghosts knew when he was hurt.
- The ghosts knew exactly what to say.
- They tried to touch him with gentle fingers.
- When they tried, they disappeared.
The people they imitated, the real counterparts to these ghosts, Morgan and Prentiss and the rest of the team, did none of those things. That was how he knew when to close his eyes and count to ten. That was why Reid stopped touching people. He was afraid to discover his favorite moments were invention. That their kindness was a false reality he longed to be real so badly he could taste oranges in the air. The scent of wanting what he could never have, citrus fruits in the wintertime.
Hotch kicked him and kept kicking. He said cruel things with a furrow in his brow. It was real. It was real. He hurt so badly with how real it was. This Hotch was no ghost. The ache in his ribs was proof of that fact. Still, Spencer understood. How could he not? Hotch moved the hostages out of his line of fire. Reid knew what he was thinking. Minimize the damage, even as he cracked ribs in Reid’s chest. Even as he turned him blue. What were bruises on Reid who had grown up covered in them? What could be lost there, when people’s lives were on the line? People other than Reid.
Hotch said things aloud he’d usually keep behind pressed lips. Called Reid smart guy. Called Reid a dalmatian. Less then, even. Said, “I think he got the message.”
Did he think these things of Reid? Had he always been thinking these things when he looked at Reid across a conference table, out his office window, when he thought of him at all. Did he think of Reid when Reid wasn’t around? Walking around his kitchen in sweatpants, after he said goodnight to his wife? Something about that sentiment made Reid’s chest hurt. It was only the bruising. It was only the pain.
Reid got the gun.
Reid took the shot.
Reid joked Hotch out of his guilt.
It was no different to Reid, Hotch’s apology. The case was worked. The day was done. It was wheels up in thirty, kiss your trauma goodbye at the door. What happened happened. Reid was a different person, then. Now it was time to go back to normal. They expected him to be himself no matter his wounds. The apology bookmarked that moment. There was no going back. There was never any going back.
But there were no jokes told to the jester. His guilt? It stayed right where it was. Waves in the pit of his stomach. Waves that threatened to drown him.
Reid took the shot.
Reid took a life.
Reid took his guilt home with him.
Spread it out on the coffee table and dissected it. Peered at it from all angles except from outside of himself. It was an impossibility to do it without his own eyes. Without his own brain. What would Hotch think about his guilt? What would anyone? There were some things analysis didn’t help. There were some hurts science couldn’t heal. This, he supposed, was one of those. He went to bed with shaking hands. No one noticed come morning.
Reid was used to being the king’s jester. When he performed mathematical feats, Emily poked his cheek and commented on how lifelike he was. Implying his inhumanness. Speaking aloud his isolation. The poke was real. She was not smiling. This was his reality. The team oddity. The team’s circus animal. A mermaid washed ashore and gawked at while he drowned. He’d perform miracles. He’d elicit laughter. They’d scoff and roll their eyes. They’d walk away while he spoke. Such was the way of the jester in the kingdom. At least he was allowed inside their walls. At least he was not left out in the rain.
Ghosts appeared while he was tied down, bruises forming on the bottom of his foot while his team watched from the other end of a lens.
Prentiss crouched in front of him and grinned.
Morgan ruffled his hair.
J.J. tilted her head ever so slightly to the side and told him to be strong.
Each time, the ghosts reached out their hands. Each time they dissolved into nothing just before they met his skin. Each time, Spencer’s resolve snapped. He had believed. He had believed. He had believed they had come to save him. They had not.
Hour by hour, the ghosts flickered. Spencer lost consciousness. Lost his breath. When the darkness came, and came it did, he saw them all, standing above him, bidding him goodbye. It was a shock. He thought he could make them understand. He thought he could make Hotch understand. Hotch, who listened with his furrowed brow. Hotc,h who said very little, but never anything cruel. The LDSK case was behind them, even if Hotch’s words still rattled through Reid’s head. It was supposed to be behind them. If Hotch could not understand, as he had asked Reid to, once, without saying a goddamn word, then there was no use in hoping at all.
The darkness, as it always did, arrived with gloved hands and quietly, quietly, turned out the lights. When he came gaspingly back to life, Spencer was alone.
He grabbed the shovel.
He moved the dirt.
He dug his grave.
This was it. Death was a fair ruler. He could not cheat it twice. He had given it a good old college try. Still, somehow, again, he managed to remain upright and breathing. He was not certain he was alive despite these two facts. He did not feel so alive at that moment. He could not remember the last time he had.
At the end of the day, despite his appeals to his team, to Hotch, Spencer Reid had to save himself. That was knowledge he tucked away while Hotch yanked him into an embrace. While he hugged them, each by each, the voice coming from the depths of the sea in his gut, chanting, the real ones failed you. He could not argue against that fact. He had to admit, sometimes, he liked the ghosts far more.
After the rescuing of himself, Reid was struggling, and no one would say a thing about it. They knew. Of course, they knew. They could profile a man down to his socks. They could profile each other out of their secrets. How could they not know, then, his addiction?
Prentiss asked, “What is the matter with you?”
Morgan told him it was called empathy, almost dying. That he should use it to make him a better profiler. Reid opened up to him, and that was all he got in return? He knew better than to expect more, but still, it stung. Ants on a picnic blanket, finding bared skin.
On another flight, in another world, the ghost version of Morgan listened as he spoke. Told him it sucked what he went through. Told Reid he was sorry. The ghost version of Morgan said all the right things and reached out to touch Reid’s hand. Of course. Of course. It was a trick of the light. Morgan would never be that kind to him. Not out loud. Not like that.
He was kind to Reid in ways that told Reid Morgan would never understand him. Would look at him as if through the glass of an exhibit at the museum. Only curious until he got bored and drifted elsewhere. Only listened if there was a point, if he had a goal, if he needed to feel like a good person for asking someone like Reid if he was okay.
Hotch and Gideon eyed him from beneath their narrowed brows. At least they didn’t pretend. At least they were honest about not knowing how to help, not caring enough to try.
Later, when Spencer missed the flight, and the team grew more and more frustrated, the ghost versions of them were sympathetic. They acknowledged his problems, the fact that he had problems at all. They demanded nothing of him. They let him be.
Of all of the universes to be dropped into, this was the version in which he was the loneliest.
When Spencer tried to talk to Gideon while Ethan played piano across the room. He said, “I’m struggling.”
Gideon said, “I know.”
He could not tell if Gideon was real that time. Spencer kept his hands to himself. It was better, here, not to know. To think this was real. That someone, once, sought him out. Knew he was struggling. Wanted to help. Spencer was a coward. He wanted to think this was real more than anything. He stopped touching people if he could avoid it. Some things were better trusted than tested, even to Reid. Even to Reid.
Gideon left.
Morgan turned his back in the middle of a conversation.
J.J. cut him off while he talked of Pinocchio.
Thus were the relationships of a jester. As a child, Spencer Reid loved pressing on his bruises. Bruises of which he had many. He knew he was real when he hurt. He liked the hiss of them. The sigh of feeling, feeling anything, at the height of the pain. Elation, euphoria, when the pain ebbed. It would all go away, one day, the way he’d press where there ought to be pain and found, at some indistinguishable moment, the bruise had healed.
It was in that same vein the way Reid continued to believe questions asked after his interests, of what he did over the weekend. The pressing and then, when Morgan walked away, Prentiss rolled her eyes, Rossi told him to shut up, the height of the pain. It hurt. It would fade. Thus were the bruises, thus were the wounds.
In that little room, the metal table, the open window, Spencer knew how to talk them out of getting killed. Knew, too, that Hotch did not. The king fought with fists. The jester distracted the eye. When Hotch was shrugging off his jacket, loosening his tie, Spencer could see the future. They would not make it out alive.
So, he did what he did best. He opened his mouth and began to speak. Physics magic. Sleight of hand. His own simple existence. He could pull attention and hold it, his audience incredulous. His audience wondering what on earth this thing was in front of them. He hoped he could hold it long enough for the guards to come, hurriedly, back.
While the rest of the team would’ve told him to shut up, would have walked away, Hotch eyed him while rounding Hardwick.
He knew Spencer’s strengths. He knew Spencer's weaknesses, too.
When it was over, in the car, Hotch thanked him for what he had done. A jester was a jester, even under intense fear. Still, Hotch admitted, he had not helped things. No, Spencer could agree with that. He hadn’t helped. But he knew nothing but his own skills, the same way Reid only knew his own. Had it been a fistfight to the death, Reid would have been the one with thanks to give.
“Haley wants me to sign the divorce papers uncontested, so nobody wastes money on lawyers,” Hotch said, suddenly, shockingly, rushingly.
Spencer frowned. A peace offering? An acknowledgement of Spencer’s sacrifice? He couldn’t tell. “You don’t want to?”
“What I want, I’m not going to get.”
Vulnerability. Reid looked at the edges of Hotch's profile, searching for the tell-tale blur. Hotch was stiff, the frowning of his brow in place as it always was. Reid, before he could stop himself, reached out and touched Hotch’s shoulder. Not a pat, not a grasp, but somewhere in the vicinity of those two actions.
Hotch was solid.
Hotch was warm.
Hotch was real.
He turned to Spencer, not frowning, but not smiling either. An eyebrow quirked in question. Beneath Spencer’s fingers, Hotch’s shoulder relaxed ever so slightly. It relaxed. A warmth appeared in Spencer’s sternum. Something born like a young sun. He’d have to drown it before it could thrive. Jesters did not get to touch kings like that.
“Making sure you’re real,” Spencer whispered.
“What?” Hotch asked.
“I’m sorry about Haley.”
“Me too,” Hotch said.
For the rest of the car ride, Reid held his hand, palm-up, in his lap. The feel of Hotch’s shoulder, the gentling of it beneath his own fingers, singing from his skin. He wanted to flex it, test that he, too, was real. He resisted that action. This one, he wanted to be real so badly, he’d allow delusions to make it so.
Spencer recognised all of the signs of himself in Owen, which was why he could not let Hotch shoot him. Why he could not let anyone. They would, he knew. Oh, he knew. They would the same way, had Reid’s own life gone just ever so slightly differently, they’d shoot him, too, without hesitation.
Spencer used his body as a shield and talked to Owen in a gentle voice. He smiled at the boy. He showed him what the ghosts could look like, had they been real. Had he been different. Had the world been changed. Spencer was kind to him, made him promises he would keep no matter what. If Spencer could not have such simple kindnesses, he’d put his life on the line to make sure Owen got one, at least. Just one was enough. Reid thought of the moment in the car. Yes, one was enough to keep going.
On the plane, Reid sat alone, his back turned. He felt errant eyes. He felt whispered thoughts. It was worse to be misunderstood by many than to be alone and himself.
Hotch slid into the seat across from him. Folded his hands on the cold table, sleeves rising with his movements. He was the judge in this kingdom, too. He had shrugged his billowing robes on.
Hotch said, “I should fire you.”
Hotch said, “You are not the only one in that room.”
Hotch said, “You’re keeping score, just like Owen.”
If Spencer had been keeping score, the world was winning. The rolled eyes, the disinterested gazes, the way they spoke to him only when they wanted something. Only when they wanted notebooks read at an inhuman rate or statistics they could use for the profile, for a bet, for the delight of having them at all. If Reid was keeping score, he had the right to do so if only to prove to himself that he deserved to feel a little hurt. He deserved to step in front of a bullet to save a kid who felt the same way he did.
“I know it’s painful when the person you identify with is the bad guy.”
“What’s that make me?” What did that make Reid? Truth was, he had seen himself in other unsubs before. More than a handful if he was being honest. If he was the only one in the room identifying with the bad guys, maybe he was in the wrong room.
“Good at the job,” Hotch said. Reid wanted to ask if Hotch ever identified with the bad guys. If he ever thought, in another timeline, that he could see himself pulling the trigger, sinking the knife, clenching his hands. But the judge had cast his verdict, and he was exiting to his chambers. There was no room for asking questions once his back was turned.
As he stood, leaving Reid alone, again, Hotch grabbed his shoulder. Squeezed, hard. It was real. It was real. Hotch came to talk to him. Hotch didn’t fire him. He was as kind as he ever was, voice soft and asking questions, not only to discipline him, but also to understand. The young sun in his chest was not gone. It was ageing, as all young things did. Soon, it would be stronger. Soon, Spencer would have to deal with it. Soon, but not yet.
For now, he’d sit on the plane with it inside of him. He’d warm his fingertips against the fact that Hotch cared enough to be angry, cared enough not to fire him, cared enough to touch his shoulder so he’d never have to wonder if the moment was real after all.
Reid was held hostage.
Reid was dreaming nightmares.
Reid was pressing on bruises.
Pressing on bruises, pressing, and pressing, and pretending all the while it was helping them heal. But, still, they remained because of course they did. Time and time again, he took blows from ghosts. Bruises underneath bruises until they hit bone.
Reid had to stop believing when they were kind.
Out the window stood Hotch and Morgan while Spencer began to die. He could see, through the windowpane, as Morgan paced. As he grew angry. He was a knight. He drove bombs into open fields. He kicked down doors and carried out the desperate and the damaged. Spencer wondered, briefly, if he were a ghost. His clenched fists, his voice taut. Was that for Reid, or for the simple fact that it was not Morgan inside, this time? That it was not Morgan, saving the day alone? Dying for this team, being the one cared for, not the one having to care? With the glint of the glass, Reid's rising panic, it was hard to be sure.
Beside him, Hotch was calm. Hotch was cool. Hotch told him it was better for him to stay where he was. To find a solution. Hotch made no apologies nor rescue attempts. But there was a wavering in his voice. The slightest waver. Was he real? Was any of it?
Spencer thought back and could not remember a time when Hotch was a ghost to him. When the ghosts of what could, should, have been included Hotch. He had no frame of reference for the ways his ghost told on itself beyond touching him. Glass separated them. Spencer stared at him as they spoke on either side. The twitch of Hotch’s fingers against the phone. The deep-set frown carved into his face. Real or not real?
As he worked to cure himself, to rescue himself yet again, Reid thought it over. Turned it upside down. The involuntary give away of fingers unable to stay still in panic, even as his voice fought not to betray him. Was Hotch worried and worried about Reid? If he was, what did that mean? Kings worried not about their jesters. There were fools born every minute. Every goddamn minute. It would take nothing to replace him.
If Reid was not welcome in the kingdom, let him wail in the woods. Let him be the story parents told to children to scare them home before dark. Let him be a sign of their love, their willingness to give children nightmares they would carry with them their whole lives for the sole purpose of keeping them alive. Let them turn him into a monster. Let him keep people safe that way.
Spencer saw ghosts from his hospital bed. Prentiss and Garcia, Rossi and Morgan. They bent over him, eyes searching, for what he did not know. He was asleep, again, before he could ask. Before he could determine whether they were his dreaded inventions of what he wanted them to be. Before they proved to be spectres in the light.
When he woke, again, a cup of Jell-O sat on his little-wheeled table with a bite missing. He remembered Morgan, sitting in that very chair, scooping it out with a plastic spoon. Spencer grabbed the cup and held it to his chest. Proof, proof, what delightful proof that he was cared about, once, and had missed it.
Spencer refused to eat the Jello-O all day. While he slept, a nurse threw the half-eaten cup out. He wept the next morning. Wept and wept. Where had his proof gone?
No one visited him the rest of his stay. They all had other things to worry about.
It was not an opportune time to be shot in the knee, Reid could admit to that. But when was there ever an opportune moment to be shot in the knee? To be shot at all? He was certain there were statistics on that. Reid couldn’t say. He was in too much pain.
Despite the injury, despite being alone, he managed to keep the situation under control until backup arrived. When his teammates rushed to his side, he gestured them away. Don’t touch him. Don’t touch him. Let him believe the concern on their faces. Let him believe their instinct was to head toward him, to crouch, gently at his side, to worry and panic and call for medics with tight voices. Let him believe their gut reaction was kindness. He needed to believe that, just then.
It hurt when they did not fight him. It hurt when they did not prove they were real. It hurt when Spencer laid, yet again, in a hospital bed and each time he opened his eyes, each chair in the room was empty. The nurse brought extra in for his team, one for every member. Instead, they were used by his ghosts, who paced while he slept, who worried at their lips, who called people who called people who wondered how he was doing.
But, one by one, the ghosts disappeared, and Reid was alone.
In another hospital room, in another town, all the king's men gathered to worry about someone else. Reid understood. It was the king, after all, who lay wounded there. Spencer was no one. Still, while Spencer lay there alone, Rossi told Hotch about the case they worked without him. He said, “It was a happy ending.”
Spencer didn’t quite know what was happy about it. He wasn’t happy at all.
Garcia said, “You’re my bitch now.”
Prentiss said, “There’s a lot to hate about you, Dr. Reid.”
Morgan asked, “Is it really that hard for you to be normal just one time?”
Rossi said, “So, how long is it going to take you to get in that ditch?”
Spencer said, “I have an extra ticket.” No one responded.
Pressing on bruises. Pressing on bruises. Maybe he ought not to be pressing on his bruises.
Spencer did not understand why he was not welcome in the kingdom, despite the tithing he had paid. What did the king require that Spencer had not already sacrificed?
He gave them his brain.
He gave them his body.
He gave them his blood.
Spencer, it seemed, was not the jester nor the wailing. He was the boy bagged, the boy sunk in a lake, for being too much for the village to bear.
A new case arrived with the June. In it, each victim radiated isolation in a way Reid felt in his own chest. It was only obvious, then, for him to lay down on the tracks.
The victims were found in their cars, all in the same parking lot, an empty space on each side. A row of cars, a row of coffins. Six of them. They had been trapped there, in their vehicles, despite undamaged doors. Despite their keys still sitting inside. The victims, in their desperation, began to eat their hands. They all had their debts to be paid. Student loans and hospital bills and coping mechanisms that came gift-wrapped. If ghosts tasted of citrus, desperation was its rotten counterpart.
Reid told no one. He snuck off alone. He didn’t have to pretend at all that he was desperate enough to see the flyer and to join the competition to survive, alone, in his car the longest and win a cash prize. A large cash prize. His mother’s expenses were weighty and, really, he could use some good luck.
When he arrived in the parking lot in the middle of nowhere, six other cars were scattered throughout. He remembered his instructions from the man on the phone. Park with empty spaces on either side. Lock your doors. You may bring water, but nothing else. I’ll be watching.
Reid left his phone at home.
Reid brought only water.
Reid pulled into a space with emptiness on either side.
Reid did not know that he wanted to be rescued this time. He was fine being found too late.
He looked around at the other people. A woman in her late thirties, a mother by the looks of her back seat. A man in his sixties with cancer, probably. The ones parked beyond he could not see. But he knew them. He knew them. They, too, were the people sunk. The people tied up in canvas sacks and sent sailing down into the water. The people who tossed them over the edge did not even stay to watch as they fought, and fought, and came here to drown.
Didn’t they deserve an audience, at least? Didn’t they deserve a witness?
If the king required more from Reid, let them chop off his hands. Let him go dancing to death, bleeding from his wound, knowing the king would see them, his long fingers, and smile.
Hotch would figure it out, eventually. Hotch would understand, eventually. The way he shrugged off his jacket with Hardwick? He had flashes of Reid’s own pain inside of him.
He wanted to be wanted.
He wasn’t going to get what he wanted.
After twenty-four hours, the first ghost arrived. Reid was surprised to find the sound of the door opening, the shift of new weight inside the car. He turned to find Hotch, sitting beside him. He was surprised. He made no attempts to mask that. Not here, not now, as he starved to death on his own stubbornness.
“What are you doing?” Hotch asked. He had shed his suit jacket and his tie, much like the prison. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows. Bared skin. Temptation. Reid’s fingers twitched. The sun in his chest wanted warmth. Wanted fodder. Hotch wasn’t the only one that wasn’t going to get what he wanted.
“I’m desperate, didn’t you know?” Reid laughed.
“Where are we going?” Hotch asked. He gestured to the keys in the cupholder. He came dangerously close to brushing Reid’s skin. He fought the tug in his chest and recoiled.
“Where would you like to go?” Reid asked.
“What I want, I’m not going to get.”
“What do you want, Hotch?”
“To feel better.” His voice was even, but there was that wavering. Reid heard that before, out the windowpane. What did it mean? What did Reid want it to mean?
“Me too.”
“I’m sorry,” Hotch said.
“Me too,” Reid said.
“Talk to me,” Hotch said, “Tell me about the stars.”
So, Reid told him about the stars. He talked until his voice went hoarse, and then he kept talking some more. Not once did Hotch tell him to shut up. Not once did he zone out. He asked follow-up questions. He wanted Reid to keep talking.
Tell him more.
Tell him more.
Tell him more.
The young sun in Reid’s chest was now burning. It hurt, to feel. It hurt. Pressing on bruises. Holding down on them until tears formed. What was one more?
“You’re the only one who is kind to me,” Reid said. “I could love you so easily.”
He turned, and Hotch lifted his hand, all that exposed skin, bringing it toward Reid’s on the console.
“Don’t,” Spencer said, Hotch freezing in mid-air, a jerked hover in the space between them. “Please.”
But Hotch brought his hand down, and when Reid blinked, Hotch was gone. The smell of citrus, even here.
Okay, that one hurt.
On the third day, Spencer understood hunger. He thought he had before, the way he watched people be kind to each other. The way he watched Garcia bake cookies for Hotch despite his knee, watched when everyone stopped what they were doing to ask Morgan if he was okay after he was attacked in the Spicer case, watched when they crowded Garcia’s hospital bed. The way every single person on the team attended Garcia’s play.
He had had an extra ticket, before. He had asked and gotten only silence. Yet, there they all were, watching the play Garcia had not even asked them to attend. Had pointedly not told them to attend. Yes, he thought he understood hunger before.
But, as Hotch continued to appear in the passenger seat, to ask him questions and look at him softly, to try to understand him and his actions, the desperation only grew with the growling in his gut.
He would not eat his hands. Those were meant for the king. A parting gift.
Spencer was out of water, he was out of time, he was off, in another universe, where everything worked out, and he hadn’t felt the need to do this at all. In that universe, Hotch kissed his cheek. In that universe, everyone got what they wanted.
As he closed his eyes, as the heaviness pressed against him, he found he liked it. Pressing on the bruise of his entire existence, pressing through his chest to squeeze his heart. The height of the pain. Voices, calling his name.
Hotch’s voice, calling his name.
The window shattered at his side, glass rainfall. It registered in another universe, the cutting of his skin. The door opened, and hands from that other universe grasped his cheeks, said his name. The hands were frantic. The hands were on the run. The hands pulled him, roughly, from the car. The asphalt was recently warm, but that was fading. Reid liked in-between states. The sun was setting in the sky above. A bruise. How kind.
Hotch’s hands skittered Reid’s body, seeking blood. Wanting to find blood, somewhere to place the blame. A mix of relief at not finding any and the panic of not having anything to do with his hands to help. He let out a breath. A crack split through his voice as he called for medical. Reid was surprised by this.
There it was. The release. The sigh. Spencer was euphoric even as he fought to stay awake. He couldn't lift his arms, but he managed to twitch his fingers. Hotch understood. Hotch was a man who had long ago learned to repress everything. He had lived his whole life through involuntary twitches.
Hotch held Spencer’s hand, tight in his own. He was furious the way a man who did not want to be furious but couldn’t help it was. The way a man who did not know how else to show love except through clenched fists was.
“Thank God,” Hotch muttered and, at the same time, “How could you be so stupid?”
An ambulance arrived, and Hotch let go of Reid’s hand.
“I’m riding with him,” he said to the paramedic. His voice was stern and cold, and the paramedic could not argue with a glacier like that. Did not even try.
Where were the king’s men, Spencer wondered? Where were the realities of all of his could-have-beens?
“You gave up,” Hotch said as the paramedics grew arms and worked over Reid’s body. “You gave up.”
“I am not welcome in the kingdom,” Reid rasped, voice raw from talking to the air for hours. Talking to the Hotch that lived inside his head. “I think I invented you.”
Hotch had stopped touching him. He sat, hands rubbing at his temples. Reid knew what he was thinking. He’d have been thinking the same thing, had Hotch come tumbling from that darkness.
“I wasn’t alone,” Reid said. “The ghosts kept me company.”
“The ghosts?” Hotch blinked up at Reid, eyes focused with exquisite intensity. He was thinking of nothing but Reid, just then. The sun set. The sun rose. Reid’s chest was a world turning too quickly, threatening to hurtle off course.
“The ghosts of you.”
“What do the ghosts say?” Hotch asked.
Spencer smiled. “They are kind to me like no one else is.”
Hotch’s face betrayed a flinch, but his body remained stiff. What side would win in this war, the war of a king against himself? Reid was once a betting man. He put money on the body before the flinch, though the sun in his chest whispered something else. Something worse. Something far more hopeful. Something far more painful.
“When I was shot,” Spencer continued, “they filled all of the empty chairs at the hospital.”
Hotch blinked at Reid, paramedics placing an oxygen mask over his face and stopping whatever it was he was going to say, mouth left half-open by the interruption. Spencer let his eyes close. He couldn’t fight enough to open his eyes, to see, for certain, if Hotch was real or if he’d been another figment of a lonely imagination at his most desperate for hands to pull him from his depths. For hands to try and stop the bleeding.
“I’m sorry,” Hotch said, half-real and half-ghost. Finally, finally, someone apologized for leaving him alone.
Waking in a hospital room was more familiar than Spencer wanted it to be. Familiar, too, were the figures pacing his bed. Morgan with his fists clenched. Prentiss worrying at her chin. Rossi leaning against the doorframe. J.J. hunched and close to weeping. These were all familiar sights.
Spencer blinked and blinked again. Still, they remained. He was wrong. This was wholly new.
“You’re real,” Reid said, voice coming out near a whisper. All heads in the room whipped around despite his softness.
Morgan turned, grin splitting through the concrete of his worry. “Yeah, kid, we’re real.”
One by one, they approached Reid and touched him, a graze of his foot beneath the hospital blanket, a pat on the arm, a ruffle of the hair.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Garcia said, kissing his cheek. “Scared all the color out of me.”
“We can’t have that,” Reid said, smiling.
“No, we definitely can’t,” Morgan agreed.
As they stood around, eyes full of worry at the fact that Reid had done what he had done, gotten himself into that situation, that hadn’t opened his goddamn door, all their sharp edges stayed sharp. Reid wanted to cut himself. He wanted scars as proof.
Morgan went to find a coffee to sneak into the room while J.J. slipped out to call Will. Rossi tagged along with Garcia to rummage up some snacks. Prentiss joined them, linking arms with them both as they walked down the hallway. It was orchestrated. It was intentional. Hotch appeared in the doorway as if by magic.
His anger flooded the room, jumping from his stiff shoulders, willing to drown, seeking relief anywhere else. Not a ghost, then, Reid figured. But he’d said the same thing on the ambulance, and in the end, he wasn’t so sure. He had only touched him on the asphalt. That could have been invented with ease. Desperation was the inventor of ghosts, and he had been desperate.
“We need to talk.”
Reid rolled his eyes. Definitely not a ghost. Or, maybe, just a shitty one. Sometimes, if he was unlucky, the ghosts said things he didn’t want to hear. Things he needed to hear, sure, but that didn’t mean he liked hearing them. Acknowledging his drug addiction, for example. Demanding he talk to someone about what he was feeling. Telling him he was stupid for missing all of the signs of his own isolation before it was too late to change his role.
Reid watched as Hotch approached the chair beside him, pulling it up until he could rest his elbows on the bed. Reid’s sun sent flares out. Sunburn. Blistering. Global fucking meltdown.
“You’re real this time,” Reid said, studying Hotch. He was almost certain. Almost.
“I’m not one of your ghosts, Reid.”
“You were, before. In the car.”
“What did I say?” Hotch asked. He was so different from the ghost in the car, all buttoned up in his armour.
Reid shrugged. “You asked me what I wanted. You asked me to tell you about the stars.”
“I’m sorry. We were so wrapped up in ourselves, in the cases, we failed to notice your struggling.”
“I’m not welcome in your kingdom,” Reid said, shrugging. He looked to the doorway. “I’m used to my exile by now.”
“You are,” Hotch said, too loud, too hard, too much. “There is no kingdom without you.”
“I don’t believe ghosts,” Reid said, turning away. No matter how much Reid wanted to hear those words, the real Hotch wouldn’t say them. He’d swallow them, thickly, down. But Reid thought the real Hotch would not have admitted to his not getting what he wanted either, and he’d done that.
Reid blinked and blinked, waiting for the big reveal. Waiting for the fist to arrive. Sometimes it took a while. That did not make it hurt any less when it finally, finally, landed. This would be the worst one yet. “It hurts too much, their promises, when they disappear.”
Hotch’s face contorted, growing angrier, before he caught himself. He shifted as if he were restrained, tied to the chair with only inches to move in any direction. “How do I prove it?”
“Prove what?”
“That I’m real.”
Spencer thought back to the Hotch in his car. The ease of his shoulders, the curve of his smile. Then, too, he pictured the Hotch in the ambulance. Ramrod straight, his glacier voice.
“Was it you in the ambulance?” Reid asked.
“Yes.”
“You found me.”
“Yes.” Hotch’s voice threatened to break on the word. Relief, Reid thought. The painful sigh of relief. Euphoric, but at what cost?
He reached out his hand, inch by inch, grasping at Reid’s against the bedspread. Hotch clutched it, hard, in his own.
His hand was rough.
His palm was warm.
His pulse was hammering.
“Does this prove it?”
“Yes,” Reid said, choking. The sun burned inside, painfully so. It was real. It was too real. He’d wanted Hotch to touch him. He’d been afraid to ask for it. Scaring the ghosts away with his eagerness. Scaring Hotch away with his need.
But, Hotch knew, somehow. He knew. He wouldn’t let this moment be erased by ghosts.
“You’re real,” Reid said.
“I’m real,” Hotch said.
“He’s asking if you’re real too? What’d you do, pretty boy, hit your head while you were starving yourself to death?” Morgan appeared in the doorway, all the king's men on his heels. He beckoned them forward with his charge into the room.
Everyone arrived at once, filing through the doorway. Eyes found where Hotch clutched Reid’s hand too tightly against the bedspread, knuckles going white. Despite the impropriety, despite how private Hotch was, he refused to let go, even when Reid began to pull away to save him from this very revelation.
Morgan set down a coffee cup, and bags of chips were passed around, crinkling filling the room. A nurse peered her head around the doorway and frowned. Seeing Hotch’s glare, though, she scurried away with a request that the volume be kept under control.
“There aren’t enough chairs,” Rossi said, a lightness in his voice. It was true, there weren’t enough chairs. All eyes in the room did the math.
Hotch stood, releasing Reid’s hand so quickly, it took a moment to thud against the blankets. Oh, oh. Hotch would touch him until it became inconvenient. Hotch would comfort him just long enough to be sure he wouldn’t go and get himself killed.
God, he had to stop pressing on this bruise. The bruise in the shape of his wanting. A wound in a shape Hotch would fill, if Hotch wanted to. And oh, he wanted Hotch to want to, though he knew he never would.
A hand tapped at Reid’s shoulder. He looked up to find Hotch gesturing with his hand. Scoot over. Make room. Reid shifted against the railing and watched, mouth open, as Hotch squeezed in beside him. They were not holding hands, but Hotch’s entire side pressed against Reid’s.
He had shed his jacket. He had loosened his tie. He had rolled his sleeves up like his ghost had, once. Warm skin against warm skin. It was at once intimate and mundane. To passersby, it would seem familial, friendly. To Reid, because it was Hotch and not, say, Morgan or Garcia, the act was more. Judging by the averted eyes around the room, the team saw it too. The only one who seemed unbothered was Hotch, who tapped at his phone, murmuring with Garcia and, after a few minutes, the sky was projected onto the ceiling. He pressed harder against Reid’s side, making sure he knew he was real, this was real. “Tell me about the stars, Reid.”
Rossi slipped into the abandoned chair while Morgan went hunting for another.
Reid had to press one more time. He opened his mouth and began to speak. “Saturn would float if there existed a body of water large enough to hold it.”
As he talked, at random, about matters of the sky, he looked around at the team sunken into scavenged chairs, licking Cheeto dust off of their fingers, glancing at him with tired eyes, and he forgave them. None of them rolled their eyes, none of them disappeared inside their heads to somewhere more interesting than him. Not once did Hotch inch further away, no matter the comings and goings of scrub-clad strangers. He forgave them because they were real. He forgave them for not being his ghosts.
They were not perfect people, his team. They did not understand him. But they were trying. For Reid, that was enough. It had to be enough.
He had been pressing on bruises for a lifetime. He had learned to love the sting of them, to crave the pain because of the knowledge that it would, eventually, fade. But he knew now that doing so was not, in any way, helping them heal, and he wanted to heal. He wanted so badly to heal.
With Hotch pressed against his side, with his team of crammed-in chairs, Reid knew he had no use for the ghosts of what should have been any longer. Spencer Reid had been seeing ghosts, but he would not ever again. He preferred the reality, for the first time in a long time. He needn’t invent anything to make him believe he was not the loneliest in this universe. Not anymore.