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Someone knocked on the door.
Spencer thought that might've been what coaxed him back to reality.
Blinking the bleariness out of his eyes, he forced himself to his unsteady feet. He propped himself up against the bathroom counter, and stared at himself for a moment.
Between the dark circles and the pale skin, he looked like a corpse. He'd seen plenty in his line of work to know.
The knock sounded again, and Spencer set about fixing his appearance for whoever was at the door. Removing his belt from his arm. Washing his face. Combing his hair.
Hiding the needle and vial to be taken care of later.
He straightened his clothes and took a deep breath, donning the mask of someone who was recovering. Doing fine. Getting better.
The mask he'd carefully crafted after the case in San Francisco two months ago.
It wasn't as if he'd done a good job hiding his addiction thus far. And he'd thought for sure when he'd piped up during the profile with the drug addict analogy – the only cry for help he could bring himself to make – that someone, anyone, on his team would confront him.
He'd thought it would be Gideon, considering their conversation in New Orleans. But he'd felt the scrutiny of Morgan and Hotch as well.
Of the profilers, the one he'd most expected to leave him be was Prentiss. He'd jumped down her throat the last time she'd said something, after all. (Or maybe he'd expected her to not be deterred. To try again, regardless of his reception of her. Maybe that's why it stung when she didn't.)
He waited for a week after the case for a phone call. Or a text. Or for someone to come to his apartment. No one did.
Hence the mask. He couldn't go on behaving like he had, drawing attention to himself. Someone outside his team would surely notice (say, Strauss).
The knock sounded again, and Spencer jerked, wondered how long he'd been lost in his thoughts, and left the bathroom, hoping it wasn't too obvious to whoever was on the other side of his door that he was high.
(Hoping that it was, and that maybe he'd finally get some help, now that he was at home instead of work.)
He needed the help. He tried, after that week of waiting, to do it on his own. He'd made it fourteen hours. Again, three days later. Only six hours that time.
He tried again last week. He made it to twenty-three hours before he buckled under the weight of withdrawal with no one to hold him up.
It would be almost impossible for him to quit without help.
His sock clad feet scuffed against polished wood as he shuffled to the door. He didn't get many visitors – his visitors amounted to his team and his next door neighbour – and the drugs in his system outweighed any paranoia he felt, so he didn't bother with the peephole.
The door swung open, and Spencer was met with the barrel of a gun.
A couple hours later, Gideon's phone rang, and a bouquet of freshly paid for flowers dropped to the ground, blossoms and petals scattering over the wet cement.
Spencer opened his eyes. And saw himself.
There was a light shining in his eyes, and he squinted around it to make out the image of himself hanging above him. He tried to move his head, away from the light, but it was frustratingly unresponsive.
Next, a hand to block out the brightness. Nothing. Not even a twitch.
His breath hitched in his chest. He couldn't move. At all. He wracked his brain for how he got in this position, but came up blank. The last thing he remembered was pushing a needle into his arm.
Did he overdose? Did someone find him in time to save him? Was he dead?
If he was, it was very different than his death on the floor of a cabin in rural Georgia.
“Oh, you're awake,” someone said. Male.
A face floated into his vision, and he blinked several times before he could place it.
Frank.
A chill raced down his spine, but his body didn't even move to accommodate a shiver.
“Took you long enough to wake up,” Frank said, moving away from him and out of his sight. “I was beginning to think I'd have to move onto Plan B.”
And then he was back, holding a pair of scissors. He began cutting Spencer out of his shirt, and for a moment Spencer was in high school again. The light above him was the Vegas sun, the metal slab underneath him a goalpost.
A rush of cool air as his shirt fell open, and he tried to squirm away from dark, evil eyes. Unsuccessfully.
“Oh, now that's interesting,” Frank murmured. Rough fingers grazed the skin of his inner arms. “Jason's precious little protégé. Tell me, Dr. Reid, does he know you're a junkie?”
Yes, Spencer answered in his mind. There was no way he didn't.
Frank laughed before echoing Spencer's own thoughts. “Of course he does. He wouldn't be much of a profiler if he missed this.”
Frank rubbed against a particularly tender spot on his arm. Spencer would've winced if not for the. . . ketamine (that's what Frank used, wasn't it?) in his system. “I guess that explains why you were out for so long. This one's fresh, isn't it? You must've still been high when I found you.”
Spencer closed his eyes, the only way he can think to escape this. From their profile, Spencer remembered that Frank got off by watching the fear in his eyes. He wouldn't give him that.
He couldn't quell the terror in his veins, but he could cut off Frank's access to the sight.
A hand patted his cheek. “Stay with me, Dr. Reid. Don't make me force you.”
No.
Frank sighed. “Very well.” Some metal instruments clattered together nearby. “We can do this one of two ways. You either open your eyes, and I insert a speculum. Or you keep them closed, and I use my scalpel to open them for you. It's your choice.”
Spencer's eyes flew open in a panic. There was a chance – no matter how slim – that the team would find him alive. And if that were to happen, he'd rather go through the rest of his life without the additional complications a lack of eyelids would bring to him.
“Good choice.”
Frank walked over with the speculum, and Spencer felt some part of him crack.
“Now,” Frank said, once he had no choice but to watch everything that happened to him.
The light flashed against the scalpel twirling above him, and Spencer wished he hadn't deprived himself of the ability to blink.
“Where do I start with you?”
Apparently, it was with his ribs. Frank cut him open and removed one of his bones. He removed it from his body and wiped off the blood. “Beautiful,” he murmured. “Normally, I'd save this for later,” he smiled down at him, “but I have something special planned for you. Jason has a fondness for birds, doesn't he? Maybe you can sing for him.”
The door to Reid's apartment was kicked in, the team pouring in, guns held at the ready.
It didn't take long to clear the apartment, devoid of all life. They profiled their teammate's home, searching for any hint as to where he'd been taken. How.
The stash of drugs was found fairly quickly.
The marker tickled against the soft skin of his inner arm. For a moment, Spencer began to grieve for the loss of his left arm. He would adapt, he knew. People adapted all the time.
Knowing that didn't make the pending loss of a limb any easier.
His eyes were too dried out to water (courtesy of the speculum preventing them from blinking), but he would've cried if he could.
But the marker didn't circle his arm. It changed direction, about ninety degrees. Continued on, changed again, and one more time. A square.
Frank was talking idly to him. Spencer tried to tune it out.
The marker swapped out for the scalpel. “The ketamine will be wearing off right about now,” Frank murmured. “This might sting.”
The scalpel pressed against skin and broke it, and finally, Spencer winced.
It dragged, and the drag burned. A small whine escaped him.
“Oh, there it is.”
More dragging, more burning.
Spencer wished he could cry.
An envelope arrived at the BAU, addressed to Jason Gideon.
Garcia tracked it before they opened it, came up empty.
The conference room filled with anxious anticipation as the scissors sliced through the packaging.
Gideon reached in, pulled something out.
There was a heavy silence for a moment as they stared at the square of skin, covered with track marks.
Garcia left the room. JJ cried. Morgan hit the wall.
Gideon stared.
Frank hadn't given him any more ketamine yet.
Part of Spencer was grateful. He didn't need another addiction. Time was meaningless since he woke up here, so he couldn't track how long it had been since his last hit of Dilaudid, but he didn't want to risk an overdose. Not that he had much control of that, anyway.
Another part of him wanted the ketamine. Wanted to escape the pain, even if he still had to witness it. Wanted his body so overrun with depressants that it would slow his breath, slow his heart, until he went to sleep and never woke up.
Regardless of how he felt about it, the drugs were leaving his system steadily, and he was able to feel the sting of the scalpel as it dug into his skin and dragged. He flinched away from each cut given.
In the mirror above him, he could see the square of exposed flesh on his left arm where pale skin used to be. There was a haphazardly sewn up opening in his chest where Frank had extracted his erstwhile rib. Dozens of other cuts littered his body, with varying lengths and depths.
His mind turned over the oddity of Frank stitching him up, however crudely. It wasn't much of a distraction against the way his flesh was torn apart over and over, but he'd taken it.
Jason has a fondness for birds, doesn't he? Maybe you can sing for him.
Maybe Frank wasn't planning on killing him. There was something else he wanted, and Spencer was just a bargaining chip.
A toy to pass the time until his demands were met.
He didn't know whether that thought comforted him or disappointed him.
The phone rang again. Gideon answered.
Garcia's fingers raced over her keyboard.
The rest of the team hung on every word, barely daring to breathe.
The line clicked. Fell dead.
Garcia's shoulders drooped, and she buried her face in her hands.
The needle sank into his skin, and the addict inside him jumped and cheered and took it greedily.
He'd stopped caring, for the most part.
“Can't have you passing out on me. Open up, Doctor.”
Spencer stared at him, not that he had anything else to look at. Other than the mirror, showing him every mark Frank had left on his body.
Frank grabbed something off the table. One hand gripped his jaw and squeezed until Spencer opened his mouth.
“There we go.”
Spencer cringed inwardly at the taste of metal on his tongue. It was uncomfortable against his teeth and gums.
He looked horrifically ridiculous in the mirror, mouth and eyes forced open.
Frank picked up the scalpel again. “You're a chatterbox, aren't you, Dr. Reid? I'm curious to see if you can maintain that.”
As it turned out, Spencer was wrong earlier, when he thought he couldn't cry.
Another package appeared. It was traced again, but no one was surprised when the trace turned up empty.
Garcia ran out of the room, faster than she had before. JJ turned a sickly pale. Prentiss sat at the table and put her head in her hands.
Morgan put his fist through the wall.
Hotch closed his eyes and sent up a prayer.
Gideon left; he didn't come back.
The tongue sat on the table, mocking them all.
Frank had been gone for a while.
Spencer ached. The ketamine had mostly worn off, and now the only things keeping him on the table were the straps.
The door clanged, and footsteps followed, and Spencer hoped this visit would be the one that killed him.
“I hoped I didn't keep you waiting long,” Frank said. “You'll be glad to know I finished your special gift.”
No. He wasn't glad, actually. He didn't want anything Frank could give him.
“Open up.”
Spencer obeyed, too tired to refuse. Besides, Frank had already removed his tongue. What else would he do to his mouth? Pull his teeth?
He didn't care anymore.
Frank held something in front of his face. “You know what this is?”
Spencer didn't, couldn't, respond.
“It's your rib. I've turned it into a whistle for you.” Frank smiled, something in his face going soft. It turned Spencer's stomach. “My Jane has one just like it.”
The rib-whistle was pushed into his mouth, and Frank clamped his mouth shut for him, not even bothering to order him. “If you would hold it there. I know that's a little difficult without a tongue, but you're an intelligent man. You can figure it out.”
Bile rose in the back of Spencer's throat. His own rib was in his mouth. A strangled, unintelligible sound snuck out of his mouth. It turned into a hollow whistle.
The next time Frank appeared in Spencer's line of sight, he was holding a needle and thread.
“You'll have to be still for this part. Don't want to mess this up and need to start over.”
The needle pierced the soft flesh of his lip, and Spencer discovered he had enough tongue left to scream.
The last phone call they received was a message with a time and place.
They brought Jane along to the train station, hoping to get Reid's location without her. Knowing they wouldn't.
Frank and Jane held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes. And they knew they'd lost her. Possibly for good, this time.
Frank gave the location of the warehouse he'd been keeping Reid in as he led Jane to the tracks.
“I know you enjoy birds, Jason,” he said, still refusing to tear his eyes away from Jane. “Maybe you'll enjoy the little songbird I left for you.”
He took her hand, and together they jumped.
The warehouse door slammed open, and the team raced in, flashlights and guns at the ready. They spread out.
Eventually, they found a door. Behind it, a hollow whistling sound, starting and stopping in increments. The door was opened to reveal a small room with a low ceiling.
A single table, lit by work lights attached to a yellow stand. Above that, a full length mirror attached to the ceiling.
On the table, a person.
Reid.
They approached cautiously.
His injuries were seen all at once, but sank in one after the other. Blood, dry and fresh, from dozens, possibly hundreds, of cuts all over pale skin. A deep gash held together by stitches directly over his ribcage.
Lips sewn shut around a human rib bone.
A low, hollow whistle with every breath.
Songbird carved into his chest, above the gash where his missing rib should be.
Reid opened his eyes. Glassy and empty. A flicker of recognition.
And he cried.