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OBSESSION⋆˚࿔ | S.REID

pairing˚˖ ִ໋ obsessed!spencer reid x reader

summary˚˖ birthdays have never once kept their promises to you. Twenty-six years of unlit candles, and cake for one have taught you not to wish--until the eve of your special day, when Spencer shows up with a dented cake, and a strange little candle he swears grants wishes.

tags/warnings˚˖ loss of autonomy, hurt no comfort, unhealthy relationships, melancholy, angst, canon typical violence, drug use, relapsing, childhood trauma, self-esteem issues, obsessive behavior, early seasons spencer, psychological trauma

wc˚ 17k(sorry)

A/N: I was listening to deathmetal by Panchiko on repeat while writing this, so maybe that'll put you in the mood

Birthdays are supposed to be about celebration, but for you, they feel more like a reckoning. Whenever the month approaches its inevitable end, there's a particular weight in your chest, a slow creeping unease, a feeling you just can’t shake. The disappointment never fails to approach every year, yet this year you find yourself feeling a bit less disheartened, yet melancholy all the same.

You feel as if you are the last dog left in the pound, tail thumping against the concrete, knowing the vet is coming to put you down. You have always wondered if dogs can sense it, the way the air thickens, the hushed tones, the finality of your last moments, knowing that there is no way you can claw your way back out.

The analogy was lodged into your brain like a tick; the entire week of your birthday, you feel like a dog who knows they’re about to be put down. You picture the metal bars, the stench of antiseptic, the echoing barks fading into whimpers. You picture the clock striking twelve, and once again waiting for the flood of text messages that will never come. Today is supposed to be your day, yet it seems so unimportant to everyone else–your own sick birthday tradition.

Thirteen years old, the last birthday with your biological mother. Thirteen candles to blow out, and none of them are hers. She doesn’t even remember, doesn’t care to pretend. You sit surrounded by threadbare stuffed animals in that stale, smoke-filled house, lighting a scavenged stub of a candle with shaking hands. You blow out the candle in one shaky breath, the flame dying as smoke curls upward, your wish not quite landing. Two weeks later, you’re taken away, and your mother's candle remains cold and unlit.

Sixteen candles, and you had asked for a party. You spent an hour on your hair and set out cups for people who would never come. Sixteen candles and you watch them burn all the way down into the frosting, waxy little rivers. The house is quiet, the cake untouched, the silence louder than any shout. You light a single sad candle yourself and blow it out hard, tears mixing with the smoke as the flame gutters and dies. No one arrives; the candles of everyone else stay brilliantly, mockingly lit while yours sputters out into nothingness,

At eighteen, you have learned to expect disappointment. Eighteen candles to blow out and still none flicker for you. You strike the match alone and make a wish, blowing out the flame with a practiced numbness, the smoke stinging your eyes. The lesson sinks in deeper each year. The hours shall pass, and you will wait for your wishes to be granted by your dearest friends, yet not one of them will acknowledge your day.

Twenty-one candles, and you cry anyway. Alone in a bathroom, tap water running so your roommate won’t hear you weep, your reflection blotchy in the mirror. You told yourself that twenty-one would be different, that there was some unspoken rule that adulthood came bundled with people who stayed. Twenty-one candles stuck into a slice of grocery store cake, and you don’t waste your breath on wishes anymore, understanding all the way down to your marrow that maybe your holiday just isn’t worth celebrating.

You hate your birthday; you hate that it arrives dressed like every other day; you hate that you are not celebrated; you hate that some stubborn animal part of you still hopes, every single year, right up until midnight. You hate your birthday the way you can only hate a thing you once loved; you hate it each year that it comes and goes; you hate your birthday just a bit more than you hate the days that follow.

Nobody ever forgets Christmas or Halloween, so why is your day the holiday everyone manages to fail? As if to mock you, the blaze of the candle grows bigger, a sick reminder that the day of your birth will never be important, a ledger of candles lit for no one.

So now, as the clock strikes 10:57 on the night before your birthday, you sit alone on your couch, knees tucked to your chest. The room is dark, save for the sickly yellow glow of a single lamp, and for a moment, just for a moment, you let yourself wonder what it would be like to look forward to tomorrow.

Pulling you from your thoughts, you hear a soft knock at the door, an apologetic rapping; it is almost as if he knows you have been trying to disappear into yourself all evening.

You unfold yourself from the couch, the floorboards creaking underfoot, open the door, and there he is, all awkward limbs and earnest eyes. He is standing there clutching a large vanilla birthday cake with soft whipped icing in one hand, with cursive lettering that reads “Happy 26th Birthday " and a pint of ice cream in the other. The icing is smeared and a little dented on one side. It looks like it's been through something and survived, and it makes you smile.

The cake looked surprisingly good for a last-minute find. You take note that clouds of whipped icing adorn the cake, and not the heavy buttercream that usually turns your stomach. A throwaway conversation from months ago flickers into your mind: the two of you stuck in the bullpen on a long case night, sharing stale vending machine snacks. You had mentioned offhandedly how whipped icing was the only kind worth the calories. Of course, he remembered.

He’s wearing the cardigan you’d once told him made him look “soft around the edges,” with his signature purple scarf and messenger bag slung around his shoulders.

"I couldn’t let another birthday start without being the first to say it. Happy almost birthday,” he says. It’s 11:00 PM; he’s early but not too early as to seem overeager.

He steps inside, and the apartment shrinks further under his presence. The glow of the lamp highlights the faint concern etching his features as he sets the cake and ice cream down. You looked a bit off tonight–shoulders tense, eyes shadowed–and he’d noticed.

You think, watching him fuss over paper plates, that this is the closest thing to being wanted you have ever let yourself feel on this particular night of the year.

“Did you know that vanilla is actually derived from orchids? It’s one of the most labor-intensive crops in the world, pollinated by hand in most places. Makes it feel a little more special, right?

The fact pulls you back from the edge just enough, a tether. You manage a small laugh, and suddenly your apartment doesn’t feel so much like a cage. You don’t tell him that he’s the one who makes it all feel special; you don’t trust yourself to say it and have it not come out sounding like what it actually is.

Spencer starts slicing the cake with care, fingers steady despite the late hour.

You watch him, the way his hair falls across his forehead, the faint beauty marks dusting his cheeks. Your chest aches with it, that familiar, uncomfortable pull of affection. You’ve spent countless nights lying awake, tracing the lines of his face in your imagination, turning them over like prayer beads, convinced that maybe, just maybe, if you memorized him perfectly, he might finally see you the same way.

He hands you a plate, the slice generous and slightly uneven, and for a second, your fingers brush his as you take it.

“Thank you,” you murmur, words weighing heavy with words left unspoken.

You eat in comfortable silence first, the cake sweet on your tongue but somehow still hollow, like everything else is on nights like this. Your apartment suddenly feels like it’s closing in on you, the walls feeling closer now that he’s here filling space. Spencer speaks softly about the team, about statistics on birthday superstitions across cultures, his voice a gentle ramble that usually soothes you, but tonight it stirs the dog in your chest, tail thumping, ears pressed flat, waiting for the needle.

Eventually, the conversation drifts, as it always does with him.

“So,” he says, hands tucked away in his pockets, “I have a question, and I need you to be honest with me.” “I’m listening.”

He exhales. “Do you think–hypothetically–that JJ would ever go out with someone like me?”

The question lands somewhere low in your chest, a large, ugly weight you weren’t prepared for.

“Someone like you–meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning. I don’t know. Meaning me.” He laughs, a little embarrassed, a little hopeful, and it makes him look younger than you’ve ever seen him, and it makes you feel irrationally far away from him. You were watching someone you love walk toward a door leading somewhere you couldn’t quite follow.

“I think,” you say, and your voice is steady, though your heart isn’t, “that anyone would be lucky to have someone like you.”

He lights up at that, the way he does over first edition and unsolvable ciphers. He then goes on about her, about JJ’s laugh, how she remembers every deputy’s name in every county they pass through, how she touched his shoulder last Tuesday for exactly a second and a half, how he’s been trying to determine the significance of a second and a half.

You stare at him.

You are distantly aware that your face has stopped doing anything at all. That you’re sitting there with your fork suspended in air, features arranged into a smooth blank nothing, while inside your chest something is being fed, feet-first, into a furnace. He talks about her the way you think about him, perverting the language you invented in the dark, and spending it on her out loud at your birthday table, over the cake that he bought for you.

And then you start bawling.

Tears spill hot and fast down your cheeks, and Spencer goes stricken and scrambles his chair around the table to your side before folding you into his cardigan, and you let him, pressing your face into wool and shame.

“It’s my birthday,” you manage, though wet and muffled. “It always does this to me; it’s not–it's nothing you said.”

A lie with a birth certificate.

“I know, Im so, so sorry,” he soothes, rubbing slow circles between your shoulder blades

“She never calls,” you hear yourself say, and now the door is open and all thirteen years of it escape. “My mother, she never once–she was in the same house, and she forgot. You don’t ever really get over being forgettable to the person who made you.” You wipe your face with the heel of your hand, hiccuping.

Spencer doesn’t let you go, and maybe it's that–the not letting go–that makes you brave and vicious in the same breath, because you pull back just enough with your blotchy, ruined face and say it: “JJ isn’t good for you.” He blinks. “What?” “She’s—she’d never see you. Not all the way down. She would love the parts of you that are easy, and the first time you come to her at three am with your hands shaking, she’d flinch, and you’d see it, and you’d never bring your hands to her again. You need someone who’s already–” You stop, too close to the bone. “Someone broken in the same places, that’s all.”

“What about you?” He asks.

“What about me? You echo, setting your fork down on the paper plate, the cheap plastic bending under the slight pressure.

“I mean…your love life. Hypothetically, is there anyone?”

“I… There's no one. Not really. I don’t think that I’m the type of person that you love; I don’t think I’m right for it.”

The admission stings; you think of fleeting attempts at connection, you think of people who came close but never quite reaching you because none of them were him. Your mind spirals into the fixation: replaying his laughs, mapping his routines, the pull of him and only him. It’s too much, so much that it makes your skin crawl.

“You’re more than you think, you know,” he says earnestly as ever. “I mean it.”

You want to lean in, to beg silently for him to be your someone.

If I can’t love myself, maybe he could love me for me–enough to rewrite every empty year.

You think of JJ, beautiful and steady, the way he sometimes mentions her in passing. You picture her warm smiles; you picture her as everything you are not. The kind of light that doesn’t flicker out on birthdays. The jealousy coils low in your gut, whispering in your ear that you’ll never measure up.

He deserves poems, you think, sonnets and epics and quiet verses scribbled at 3 am because the world needs to know what loving him feels like. Not this half-measure I offer.

You picture him turning that hopeful boyish laugh toward her instead of your dingy apartment, this broken version of you. It’s too much, too ugly; you’re too much; it is all so ugly.

Perhaps the saddest part of your solitude isn’t being alone; it’s about seeing everyone else in love and wondering why you’re not worthy of it.

You imagine a world where he’s yours in that all-consuming way you crave. Maybe he could fill the void until there is no room left for you to drown.

Spencer pauses, fork halfway to his mouth, those hazel eyes searching your face for something only he can see.

“You okay? You seem distant tonight.” His hand hovers near yours on the table, not quite touching, but it makes your skin prickle nonetheless.

You shrug, the movement tight. “It’s just…birthdays are difficult for me.” It’s not a lie; it just isn’t the whole truth either. The whole truth is currently lodged somewhere under your sternum, the kind of thing you have trained yourself not to say out loud, because wanting things has never gone well for you, and wanting him would be the most dangerous version of that particular gamble. “You know how it is.”

He does know; he’s seen the bones of it at least, the way you flinch at certain dates, your quiet withdrawals into yourself. But he doesn’t push; instead, he stands gathering the remnants with that awkward grace of his.

“I left your candle in the car,” he admits, a sheepish smile playing at his lips. “Come on, let's grab it. Midnight’s not far off.”

The walk to the car feels longer than it should. The night air is cool, heavy with the promise of rain. Streetlights cast long shadows as Spencer walks close beside you, his shoulder brushing yours every few steps. You match his pace instinctively, hyper-aware of every breath, every rustle of his cardigan.

Your mind spirals: If I could just keep him here, in this pocket of time, maybe, just maybe.

You two reach the car, and he pops the trunk, and there, wedged between a stack of case files, is a brown paper bag.

“I should probably just open it here,” you say, only half-joking. “Save ourselves a trip back up three flights of stairs.

He checks his watch, and his expression shifts, quick and startled. “It’s 11:56.”

“So?”

“So you have four minutes until you turn twenty-six, and I am not letting you make a birthday wish in a stairwell. Get in the car.”

You laugh, and it surprises you how easy it comes, how light your chest feels for exactly as long as it takes to slide into the passenger seat beside him.

In the car, the space shrinks immediately. The interior smells like him, faint books and coffee. He fumbles for the paper bag and pulls out a candle, a simple oddity that is ornate, and sets it on the dashboard.

“Did you know this style of wish candle originated from old European folklore traditions? Alchemists used them in rituals, believing the flame could bind intention to reality.” His voice fills the cabin.

The lighting is dim, the car’s roof pressing lower, the world narrowing to this single moment, this bubble of shared breath and flickering potential. Shadows dance as he lights the candle, the flame catching with an unnatural steadiness.

The air grows thick, and you suddenly feel claustrophobic—the walls of every empty birthday before this one closing in.

“Close your eyes,” he urged, his voice a murmur that filled the suffocating dark. “Wish for everything you want. The science of intention is powerful, even if it’s mostly placebo.”

The flame flickered, casting dancing shadows that made the car’s roof press lower and the seats closer. You squeeze your eyes shut, and in that claustrophobic glow, with the dog's final whimper echoing in your mind and the weight of every blown-out candle on your soul, you take a deep breath and make a wish like a prayer to a cruel god.

Spencer Reid, love me more than anything or anyone else in this world. More than JJ, more than the team, more than statistics and the stars. Let me be your obsession.

It slams into you like inhaling a lungful of water, flooding you. You open your eyes just as the flame is snuffed out, and suddenly the car has never felt so small.

The silence between you two is absolute, thick enough to make you choke. Spencer is staring at you through the gloom, his eyes wide, pupils completely dilated, reflecting the faint green of the dashboard. For a second, he looks terrifyingly empty.

“Happy Birthday,” he whispers. His voice sounds hollow, yet entirely consumed.

There is a silence that stretches between you, thick with the smell of melted wax and the ghost of the match’s sulfur. You swallow hard, trying to clear the watery tightness in your chest, but the feeling doesn’t pass.

Then, Spencer blinks slowly, as if resurfacing from somewhere deep, and the hollow in his eyes shifts, turning into a sudden, intense focus that pins you to the car seat.

His hands lay glued to his slacks, but there’s a subtle tremor in his fingers, the kind you have seen before in the months after he got clean.

You manage a shaky smile that strains the corners of your mouth.

“You’re staring,” you say, a little breathless.

“Am I?” He blinks, as if surfacing from underwater. “Sorry.. I just–” He stops.

The pause stretches and his brow creases. He looks down at his own hands on his slacks as if they belong to a stranger who left them there.

“I lost the sentence,” he says quietly and almost to himself. “I was going to say something, and it’s–gone. I don’t lose sentences.” A small, strange laugh with no humor in it escapes him. His eyes come back up to yours, and for half a second he looks bewildered, a man patting his pockets for keys that are already in the door. “That’s never happened to me before. Isn’t that funny.” He doesn’t laugh again.

Instead he says your name, testing the shape of it in his mouth like it's a new word in a language he woke up fluent in. He has said your name ten thousand times, and it has never once sounded like that.

The candle smoke hangs between you, sweet and spent.

“It’s late,” you say, glancing at the dashboard clock, 12:04 now. “You should probably head home, get some sleep before work.”

There's a tightening around his eyes and a subtle hitch in his breathing, barely audible, the first tug of an old craving, but he recovers instantly, offering that boyish smile that makes your heart ache. “No, it’s fine, really; I don’t want you spending the rest of your birthday alone. We’ve done this before, right? Some of my stuff is still at your place from the Denver case.”

His hand has already found the door handle before you can even answer; he isn’t really asking; he is only waiting for you to catch up to a decision that was never really yours to make.

You relish in it, the idea of him staying, filling the empty hours of the night with something familiar. “Yeah,” you breathe, the word heavy with quiet need. “Okay.”

When you both step back into your apartment, the atmosphere feels subtly altered, and when you bend over to work off your shoes, he’s suddenly there, folding down onto one knee in front of you.

“Let me,” he says.

No one has taken your shoes off for you since you were small; you didn’t know your body kept the memory of it, but it must have because something orphaned in you rolls over and shows its belly at the gesture.

He eases the first shoe off, then the second, and his thumb brushes over the knob of your ankle bone. He sets the shoes by the door, toes aligned, exactly where you always put them, exactly to the millimeter.

He stays kneeling for a beat longer than necessary, looking up at you from the floor of your apartment with an expression you’ll spend years failing to name.

“Happy birthday,” he says, for the second time, from his knees

•●━━━━━━●••

His clothes are, in fact, still hanging in the closet, exactly where he left them after Denver, with a neatness that has never quite matched the rest of him.

You move to change in the bathroom, and when you come out, he’s already in bed, on his side, on your side, actually, but you’re too tired, and you have spent your whole life starving for exactly this, and you are not going to interrogate the first full meal you’ve been offered.

You slip under the covers first, heart pounding with that uncomfortable thrill. Spencer follows suit, but he doesn’t stay on his side; instead, he shifts closer, as if the space between your bodies is physically unsettling him. His arm drapes over you, long limbs tangling until there’s no gap left, his chest pressed against you, breath warm against your face.

The weight of him is suffocating in the best way, the steady thrum of his heartbeat mirroring yours, how he constantly keeps shifting closer; an addict chasing his next fix.

Your heart swells, an intoxicating blend of affection and possessiveness wrapping around your chest. You want him here; you want him locked inside your apartment, away from the rest of the world, away from JJ, away from everything that isn’t you.

“Tell me something true,” you whisper. It’s an old ritual of yours, born on the jet somewhere over Nevada, both of you fighting sleep: tell me something true, you’d say, and he’d hand you a fact like a worry stone, and the world would grow a bit more survivable.

He is quiet for a moment. In this dark there is no space left between his exhale and your inhale; you’re breathing each other secondhand, trading the same warm air back and forth, and you can feel his heartbeat where his chest presses your shoulder; too quick for a man at rest.

“The moon is leaving,” he says at last. “Three point eight centimeters a year. Everyone thinks of it as fixed, but it’s been backing away from the Earth for four billion years.” His arm tightens around you by a degree. “The tides are the Earth holding on.” “That’s a sad one.”

“Mm. I used to think so,” and his nose traces the line of your jaw; his next words landing directly on your pulse. “Tonight it feels different. Tonight I keep thinking that the moon's mistake was the distance. If it just came closer, the leaving stops, the threshold where two bodies quit being two bodies.” “What happens then?” “Tidal forces tear the smaller one apart,” he says into your hair, “and the pieces never leave orbit again. They become a ring, and that's the only way the moon gets to stay.”

“Something true,” he murmurs, one last time: “I don’t want to go home. I don’t think I remember where it is. I think this might be it.”

The conversation lulls; the silence is thick and charged, and your pulse thunders. You turn your head slightly, closing the distance between you, and lean in. Your lips brush his in a tentative kiss–soft, testing, and barely there.

The moment your lips touch, you pull back so fast it’s almost violent, your whole body flinching away from the contact like you’ve touched something too hot to bear. Your eyes are wide and stinging hot with tears; they boil over before you can stop them.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, voice cracking, the word tumbling out in a rush. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I–that was so stupid, I wasn’t thinking, please just forget I–”

“Hey.” His voice is low and steady. “Hey, look at me.” You can’t; instead, you choose to stare at some fixed point over his shoulder, mortified, your pulse loud in your own ears, thinking of every possible way you have just ruined the one good thing in your life that has never once asked anything of you.

His hand cups your jaw, and turns your face back toward his. “I’m not upset,” he says,” I promise. I just want to do that properly.”

And then he closes the distance himself.

It isn’t quick this time. He takes your face in both hands, thumbs pressed just beneath your cheekbones, and kisses you slowly. His lips part yours with a certainty that makes your breath stutter in your chest, and when you make a small, helpless sound against his mouth, he only pulls you closer, one hand sliding from your jaw into your hair, fingers curling against your scalp like he needs the extra anchor point to keep himself from floating away entirely.

The kiss turns wet and insistent, his tongue sliding against yours, in slow possessive strokes that steal the air from your lungs. You pull back for air, and your breaths come in shaky little bursts in the millimeter of space he refuses to allow; his exhales become yours, your inhales feeding him.

His other hand slides down your back, pulling your bodies flush until there's nothing between you except for fabric and pounding hearts. It's euphoric like the first hit of something you both know will consume you.

He moves back into the kiss, and it's almost too much: teeth grazing your lower lip before soothing it with his tongue, a low, pained sound vibrating from his chest into your mouth. The wet slide of lips and tongues borders on overwhelming, intimate to the point of discomfort. He consumes you, devours the apology, the doubt, the space, chasing the high of closeness like it’s the only fix that matters, hips shifting unconsciously closer, legs tangling tighter as if he could fuse you two together.

It leaves you boneless in his arms, tears still drying on your cheeks, but the kiss doesn’t break easily, and when it finally does, it’s only enough for him to rest his forehead against yours, breaths still mingling in short, shared pants. “I’ve got you,” he says hoarsely. “We’re okay. This is okay.”

As the words leave his lips, his voice catches, and for a split second, his eyes go distant and unfocused, like he’s staring through you into some internal void that has been carved open. A lone tear gathers at the corner of his eye, before slipping silently down his cheek. He doesn’t wipe it away, but there's a fleeting emptiness behind his gaze.

You reach up, thumb brushing the tear away, and he leans into your touch like a man starving for contact. “We’re okay,” he gasps, the words sounding almost disbelieving before he pulls you closer again, burying his face in your neck. The room presses in tighter, the weight of him perfect.

You lay together like that–entwined–the walls so close it feels like they might collapse inward and seal you together forever.

You want him to love and hold you now as if you will die tomorrow.

•●━━━━━━●••

Morning light filters in through thin reluctant slats that do little to stir you awake. Instead, you wake to a prickling awareness of being watched, an intense gaze fixed onto your face like a physical thing

The sensation pulls you as if the weight of his attention has reached through the haze and dragged you back to consciousness.

He is propped slightly on one elbow beside you, hair still tousled from the night, eyes wide and unrelenting in the morning light. For a moment he simply stares at you with his breath steady.

A single tear had dried on his cheek from the night before, or perhaps a new one had fallen unnoticed.

“Good morning,” he murmurs when your eyes finally open.

He moves to shift closer, nose brushing your jaw, lips ghosting your collarbone. You smile and reach up to thread your fingers through his messy hair, and he leans into you like a touch-starved thing.

He had stayed, had held you through the night, and now he watched you like you were the only fixed point in his universe, and it makes you feel absurdly wanted.

Neither of you moved for a while. It is easy, this morning, but eventually, the world intrudes, and your alarm goes off.

You slip from the bed first, and he follows close behind, padding into the bathroom following close behind you, close enough that his hand brushes your lower back as you move through the narrow hallway, like he couldn’t even bear those few feet of separation.

When you close the door behind you for a moment of privacy, you catch the briefest glimpse of his face in the mirror's reflection before the door clicks shut: a flash of something pained crossing his features, jaw tightening, hand twitching at his side. He continues walking past the bathroom, yet he is still fixated on you.

When you emerge thirty minutes later, he is already in the kitchen; the smell of something cooking fills the apartment–eggs scrambling in the pan, toast in a skillet. He looks up at you when you enter, a genuine smile tugging at his lips as he plates the food.

“You’re cooking?” you ask, voice still soft with sleep, leaning against the counter to watch him. “I think I’ve only seen you make ramen and coffee in all the years I’ve known you.”

Spencer shrugs, angling his body toward yours like a magnet, and a faint flush creeps up his neck. “I make an exception for birthdays,” he says, and the total lack of fanfare makes your chest ache.

He plates the eggs, alongside the toast, and sets them in front of you like an offering. The two of you eat side by side in silence, the gentle clinking of silverware the only sound between you. The eggs were warm and fluffy at first, but as you take another bite, something catches between your teeth.

It is strange and waxy, a small, pale paraffin mixed with something sweet and faintly artificial. It melts unpleasantly on your tongue for a second before you discreetly work it free; the residue leaves a slick, unnatural film that clings to the roof of your mouth. You glance down at your plate but say nothing, pushing the odd piece aside with your fork; you swallow the discomfort along with the rest of the bite. You didn’t want to shatter this fragile domesticity, not when his arm brushed yours, not when he made the kitchen feel like the only safe space left in the world.

You choose to ignore it. Discomfort came and went, but his adoration—this— you hoped to last long enough for you to have a chance to sit and smell the flowers; this was worth preserving. You would beg him to stay just a little longer if you had to, anything to not lose this euphoric sensation. It was always so fleeting, so you will silently beg of him just this once; don’t stray like everyone else.

The morning bliss is held for those few precious minutes, wrapped in quiet touches and shared glances. Then the silence is cut open by the sharp buzz of your flip phone. Before you can reach for it, Spencer’s hand moves faster, snatching the device. He flips it open, the green backlight glowing in the early morning light.

“It’s Hotch,” he says quietly, holding the phone out toward you so you can see the message, but not quite letting go. The text is brief: briefing in 45. Iowa case–three women dead in six weeks. Unsub living inside their homes before the murders. Wheels up after.

“He hid in the walls,” Spencer says. He has no grimace, no clinical frown; his head is simply tilted, eyes soft and far away, and when he speaks again it's almost wistful. “He’d stay for days, learn their routines, their meals, the sounds they made when they thought no one could hear them.” His thumb moves absently over the phone's casing in a gentle caress before he hands you your phone at last.

The reply box is already open, already typed. On our way, it says–our, singular, one flesh.

You press send.

Your morning bubble hadn’t burst entirely; it had simply pulled along with you in the day ahead.

“I’ll drive you,” Spencer says, already holding your go-bag and keys, yet you don’t remember him grabbing either of them. This is what being taken care of feels like, and if it feels a little like being handled–you’ve been handled worse.

•●━━━━━━●••

The drive to Quantico is twenty-six minutes with traffic, and Spencer spends all of them in orbit around you. His hand finds your knee at the first red light and stays there, thumb moving in metronomic strokes; it's as if he’s keeping time to something only he can hear, and when you decide to glance over, you find that his eyes are already fixed on you.

“Spencer, pay attention to the road,” you remind him.

“I know,” he says, and smiles, and doesn’t look away for another full second, then two, then three. The light turns green behind his head, and it appears like a halo gone rancid.

He talks the whole way, and it takes you until the expressway to realize that every fact is about you. The statistical probability of two people with your respective schedules crossing paths in the break room at the same time four days a week. The number of times you have touched your left ear during last month's case presentations–eleven, he says; you do it when you’re unsure of yourself, and you shouldn’t be; you’re never wrong. He recites your coffee shop order from three years ago and yours from now and the exact date that it changed, and he says it all in the same cadence he uses for serial arsonists and Bernoulli distributions. You are his newest field of study, his latest area of expertise.

At a stop sign, he lifts your knuckles to his mouth and presses his lips there, then breathes in slowly, through his nose, eyes half-closing like there's something in your skin that he needs to sustain himself. When he exhales, his hands are on the wheel again, and you decide not to think about it at all.

In the parking garage, he cuts the engine and doesn’t move. He sits in the silence watching you gather your bag.

Walking in, he keeps half a step behind your right shoulder the whole way–elevator, hallway, bullpen–a fixed distance close enough that anyone watching would have to call it escorted. At the glass doors he reaches past you, to straighten your badge where it hangs crooked on its lanyard. He turns it face-out with careful fingers, smooths the ribbon flat, and his knuckles come to rest against your sternum for the length of exactly one heartbeat.

“There,” he says, stepping back to survey you. “Now they’ll see you properly.” They, as if the building is an audience, as if you are something being presented.

The round table room is already full when you two walk in together, and JJ is standing at the head of the table with the remote in her hand.

“Happy birthday,” Emily mouths at you across the table, and Derek points at you with both hands like you’ve won something.

A week ago this would have fed you for days, you’d have carried it home in your chest and lived off it, rationing the warmth, making it last. Now it lands on you and slides off. You give them the smile they’re owed–muscle memory, nothing behind the glass–because there is only one gaze in this room your body keeps track of anymore, and it hasn’t left the side of your face since midnight.

Spencer moves to pull out your chair; he has never once pulled out your chair.

Derek clocks it with an amused arch of his eyebrow; you watch the way he opens his mouth to say something, then closes it again, supposedly saving his comment for later. Spencer sits down beside you, close enough that his knee presses against yours beneath the table and stays there, a single point of heat, a leash.

“Cedar Falls, Iowa,” JJ begins, and the screen flickers to life behind her. “Three women in the last six weeks. All single and living alone.”

The photos are the usual for your job: driver’s license smiles giving way to a stillness.

JJ continues. “In all three cases, evidence suggests the unsub had been living inside the victims’ homes prior to the murders, for days, possibly weeks. Food was missing in quantities the victims wouldn’t notice, furniture moved centimeters and returned. In the second victim’s house, they found a nest of blankets in the crawlspace above her bedroom.” She clicks the remote. “He watches them, he learns them. The M.E. thinks he was in the house when first responders processed the scene of victim number one. He doesn’t leave when they die; he has to be pried out of their lives.”

“He’s not hiding from them,” Spencer says. “He’s cohabitating. In his mind this isn’t stalking, it’s a relationship. The proximity is the intimacy–he probably believes they knew he was there and permitted it, that the arrangement was mutual.” His knee presses harder against yours.

“Loved ones report the victims complained of small things beforehand,” Hotch adds, flipping a page. “Feeling watched, items moved, one told her sister that it felt like the house was breathing around her.”

You notice it then, what’s missing. JJ has been speaking for four minutes, standing at the front of the room, and Spencer has not looked at her once. This time last week he tracked her like sunflowers track the sun; now his eyes move between the screen, the file, and you. He regards JJ as if she were a piece of furniture, as if she has been moved centimeters and not returned.

It feels euphoric, like the first meal after a hunger strike. You are ravenous and ashamed, and you go back for seconds anyway, tilting your head just slightly, just to test it, and his gaze snaps to the motion.

“Geographic profiles going to matter here,” Morgan says. “If he’s this comfortable nesting, then he’s local.”

“I’ll take it,” Spencer says–too fast, before Hotch has assigned anything. “She can work with me.” A pause. “She’s good with the victimology overlay. It’ll go faster.”

The room doesn’t react, but there’s a beat, the sound of six profilers pretending not to profile one of their own. Hotch’s eyes move from Spencer to you, to the point of shared shadow under the table where your knees touch, and his expression wavers just a bit.

“We’ll assign roles on the ground,” Hotch says evenly, and you feel Spencer's go still beside you, a clock stopped mid-motion. His pen hovers over his notepad, mid-word, unmoving for one second, then two, three–and then he’s writing again, and smiling at you.

“Cedar Falls PD is expecting us this afternoon,” Hotch says, gathering his files, and the words come down like needle sliding home, a vet's gentle hand on your scruff, your birthday ending the only way it was ever going to end: “Wheels up in thirty.”

The room breaks apart, chairs scraping, files snapping shut, Derek is already on his phone, Emily already halfway out the door, and Spencer’s hand closes around your wrist before you’ve fully risen from your chair.

He doesn’t say anything; he just steers. Past the break room, past the glass walls of the bullpen where anyone could see, into the file storage room at the end of the hall, the one that smells of toner and old paper. One of the few with a door that locks. The door clicks shut behind you, and the click sounds terribly final.

“Spencer, we have like twenty-five min–” “I love you.”

The words come out wrong, something being pulled up through him by the root, soil still clinging to it, like it hurts him the whole way out. You have imagined them in a hundred different configurations, and they didn’t sound like this.

“I love you, so so so much,” he says, his voice cracking down the middle. “More than anything. More than anyone else in this world—” and there’s water in his eyes and something frantic behind them, a man mouthing words through glass “--more than the team, more than the stars, more than–”

Statistics.

The wish rises in you like bile, verbatim, your own midnight rite read back to you in his voice.

For one whole second the floor tilts and you swallow it the same way you’ve swallowed everything your whole life. You have spent twenty-six years of practice choking down whatever you’re handed. Stomachs feel better when they aren’t empty. The heart feels better when it isn’t cold. Your innards feel better when they aren’t freezing over. The words I love you feel better when they don’t come from an empty heart, and yet you say it back anyway:

“I love you too,” you whisper, and it is the truest thing you have ever said.

He makes a sound then, low, wounded, and then he kisses you.

This, you imagine, is what it feels like to drown. He crowds you back into the shelving until the metal edges print themselves into your spine, until case files shift and slide somewhere above your head. He kisses you like he’s trying to climb inside you and live in your skin. Like your mouth is the only air he’s allowed. He doesn’t let you pull back; each time you try to break for breath, his hand slides to the back of your skull and follows you, closing the distance and stealing the air from your lungs, and you let him, you let him, because you would rather asphyxiate than lose him.

His teeth catch your bottom lip, and there is salt in the kiss, and you can’t tell whose.

His fingers, gripping your waist hard enough to bruise, hard enough to leave ten small proofs of him on your skin–his fingers are moving.

Tap. Tap. Tap

Tap–tap–tap. Slower, longer.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

A tremor, you’ve seen his hands shake before–in the months after Georgia, curled around coffee cups, hidden in his pockets during briefings–and your heart floods with a terrible tenderness. He’s nervous, you think. He’s newly clean and terrified, and he loves you and his poor hands don’t know what to do with all of it.

So you do the kindest thing you know.

You cover his hand with yours and press it flat against your waist, stilling it, smothering the flutter. You stand there holding it down until it stops moving altogether. The pattern dies under your palm.

Against your mouth, Spencer makes a sound–a small, broken exhale, half sob, half surrender–and then his hand relaxes under yours, and the kiss gentles, and when he finally pulls back, his eyes have that glassy, hollowed calm again; the fog rolls back in.

“We should go,” he murmurs against your lips, and fixes your collar with steady fingers, and looks at you like you are the only fixed point in a spinning universe. “We have fifteen minutes.” He opens the door for you and his hand rides your lower back the whole way to the elevator.

You tell yourself the shaking was withdrawal. You are getting so good at telling yourself things.

•●━━━━━━●••

The jet is the same as it has always been, cream leather and low ambient sounds that lull you to sleep. Spencer boards behind you, close so that you can feel him hover. When you slide into your usual seat by the window, he doesn’t continue down the aisle to his usual spot–the one across from Derek, chessboard between them and JJ within easy conversational distance. He sits beside you, all knees and elbows, thigh pressed to yours from hip to knee, and he reaches over to take your case file and open it for you, arranging it in your lap.

Across the aisle, Derek pauses with his headphones halfway to his ears, gaze ticking from Spencer to you, to the chessboard that will not be played.

JJ passes down the aisle, handing out addenda from the Cedar Falls M.E., and when she hands one to Spencer, he takes it without sparing her a second glance, and the ugly creature in your rib cage stretches and purrs.

The team begins by talking victimology over coffee, to which you contribute. You must contribute, so you do: something about the victims’ isolation, how he selects women whose absences take days to be noticed–women with no standing dinner plans, no roommates, no one who calls on their birthdays.

Spencer nods before you’ve finished the sentence.

“All I’m saying,” Derek begins, nodding lazily between you and Spencer, “is you two have been joined at the hip lately. Pretty boy, you ever get tired of her? Even conjoined twins take breaks.”

It is nothing but Tuesday-flavored teasing, the kind Spencer would usually meet with a flustered blink and a statistic about the psychosocial benefits of workplace friendship, but today he bites.

“Statistically, Morgan, people project their own attachment deficits onto others, Spencer says. Without looking up from the file, “so I’d examine why my proximity to her bothers you before I’d examine the proximity.”

The cabin goes quiet, and Derek’s eyebrows climb. “Okay,” he says slowly, palms up, a man backing up from a dog he thought he knew. “My bad, Doctor.”

Emily coughs into her coffee, and JJ glances up from her folder, and you–God help you–you feel a warm, awful flush of pride, because he chose you over the peace, because the edge in his voice was drawn in your defense.

Spencer turns a page. His jaw is tight; under the table, his hand finds your knee and grips hard. Too hard, knuckles blanching white like a man gripping a ledge, then, against the inside of your knee.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Tap–tap–tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Three short, three long, three short.

When you look up, it's him. Not the creature with the fog behind its eyes that has been wearing his cardigan since midnight. The fog is torn open like cheap curtains, and behind it his eyes are clear and present and positively terrified, pupils normal, face bloodless, and he is looking at you the same way he looked at you across the bullpen the day he returned from rural Georgia–a man surfacing with no guarantee of air. His lips part, his voice, when it comes, is small and cracked and undeniably his own with none of last night's hollow music in it:

“Hey–hey, I think–” a panicked breath,”--something’s wr–”

The shutter drops, and the fog rolls back in smooth as tide, the terror irons itself out of his face, his grip melts into a caress, thumb stroking idle circles over your kneecap, and Spencer blinks at you with his adoring hollowed eyes, “Sorry–did you say something?”

The engine hums. Somewhere behind you, Emily laughs at something Derek said.

“No,” you hear yourself say from far away. “Nothing at all.”

The cabin sounds recede first as if the plane was wrapped in wet cotton. Derek's voice, JJ’s laugh, the coffee maker, all of it thins into a low hum. You look down at your own hand resting on the armrest, and it takes you a moment to recognize it, this animal wearing your skin; you watch it turn a page of the case file.

It reads the addendum, it reads it again, and again, and again. Evidence of prolonged habitation. The subject remained in the home after. The sentences swim and school and scatter. It reads the same line about the crawlspace seven times. The second victim told her sister the house felt like it was breathing around her. It presses its spine into the sea, and the plane inhales, exhales, inhales, the fuselage walls flexing gently with altitude. It thinks: normal, it thinks anything and everything, a whole flock of thoughts released to keep one single thought from landing.

Three short, three long, three short.

It counts the rivets in the window frame: eleven. It counts them again. It counts the stitches in the seam of the seat in front of you, counts the marks on the back of its hand, counts anything, because counting is a stale prayer and it needs a god who deals in small clean numbers rather than candles and midnight and the specific gravity of a wish.

The taste of wax surfaces on its tongue from nowhere, paraffin, faintly sweet. You swallow it and swallow, and it clings like a film to the roof of its mouth, the roof of the cabin, the ceiling lower now, surely lower, the ceiling of a car at four minutes to midnight.

Somewhere below the waterline, the last dog has stopped thumping its tail. It has curled itself small in the farthest kennel of you, nose tucked under paw. This is the space between a held breath and whatever comes after, and you hang there, neither sinking nor saved, while the wish sits beside you, holding your knee like a leash.

“Descent into Waterloo Regional, landing in ten.”

You slowly surface, and somewhere in the climb you take the animal that wore your skin and smother it. It goes out whimpering; it knows the procedure by heart; it has been rehearsing this its whole life.

The light through the window has changed color entirely. Iowa is unrolling below, green and gold and gridded, and your jaw aches like you’ve been clenching it for an hour. The file on your lap is open to the page you had no memory of arriving at, and somewhere over the Midwest an hour of your life has drowned without a sound, the world glittering on above it.

Spencer's hand is still on your knee.

“You slept,” he says, fondly, though you don’t remember sleeping, and he looks at you with such perfect, bottomless devotion that your chest floods with warmth and the warmth goes down.

You smile back.

The plane sinks, and you sink with it, and somewhere beneath you the tarmac waits.

The Cedar Falls police station is the kind of building that has given up on itself–drop ceilings the color of old teeth, fluorescent lights, a coffee machine older than half the officers drinking from it. The team sets up in the conference room with a corkboard and a county map, and for one hour everything is textbook.

“That’s not what the evidence says.” Spencer's voice cuts across the room for the third time in twenty minutes. Detective Wharton–a broad, patient man with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair–pauses mid-sentence.

“Son, all I’m saying is the second victim's boyfriend had motive–” “The second victim's boyfriend has a suspended license and the spatial intelligence of a toddler.” The words come up clipped and cruel, in a way Spencer’s corrections have never been. His genius has always worn soft shoes; tonight it does not. “The man who lived in that crawlspace re-caulked the access panel behind himself every morning. You’re comparing them because they share one basic trait.”

The room goes quiet, and Wharton takes his glasses off his head and folds them slowly.

“Reid,” Emily cuts in, a low warning.

“What? Am I wrong?” He turns on her, squared in a way you’ve never seen him stand. “Statistically, false leads consume forty percent of investigative hours in the first seventy-two, so if we’d rather be polite than–” “Reid.” Hotch this time.

Spencer's jaw works, and his hands flex at his sides. You watch the rebuttal climb up his throat, so you reach out with two fingers, light as ash, on the inside of his wrist.

All of him stops, the tension pours out of his shoulders, and he exhales, turning back to the map docile, and murmurs, “Sorry, Detective. Long flight.”

Derek eyes your two fingers, and Hotch records the interaction in his mind.

No one else can do that. Out of everyone in this room, everyone in this world, he is a storm that breaks only for you.

You have spent your whole life being the thing people could walk away from mid-sentence. You keep your fingers on his wrist three seconds longer than necessary.

Assignments go out soon after, Hotch dealing out the cards: Morgan and Prentiss to the second crime scene, JJ on the families, himself and Rossi to the Medical Examiner.

Then his eyes find you across the conference table, and there is a pause before he says it.

“You’re with Reid on the geographic profile. He works faster with a second set of hands.”

He works faster with you is what he doesn’t say. He works at all with you is what nobody says. Spencer's head comes up from the map like a compass needle finding true north, and the look on his face is the kind that should be exchanged in private, if at all.

Hotch sees it, and you watch him do so, but he says nothing about it, simply “Keep me posted.”

The map room has one table, a window painted shut and a box of cold cases stacked in the corners. Spencer has colonized every vertical surface. Maps of Cedar Falls bloom across the walls in his cramped, rushing hand: red string, pushpins, circles radiation out from each crime scene.

You two work in silence for a while, and it is good, the kind that made you fall in love with him. You read addresses out loud; he plots them without looking, left hand writing, while the right traces distances, and the room fills with the small weather of him–pen scratches, page turn, numbers murmured under his breath, rain against the painted-shut window. If you could live inside any single hour of your life, you think it might be this one.

“Here.” He slides a legal pad across the table without running around. “Cross-reference these against the tip line addresses. My annotations are in the margins.”

You take the pad and his notes run down the left side, one per line: High foot traffic–eliminate. Elevated sight lines here. Likely commuter corridor. Possible secondary location.

Municipal easement–check ownership. East access unlit after 9.

New development–no crawlspaces. Old housing stock–prioritize. This block floods–basements sealed.

Midpoint of cluster. Elevated risk after dark.

The letters march down the page in a cold straight column and spell:

H-E-L-P M-E N-O-T M-E

The rain ticks against the window. Across the room, Spencer’s back is to you, shoulders loose, head tilted at his map, and he is humming tuneless and content, and the legal pad in your hands weighs more than anything you have ever held.

Help me. Not me.

He wrote it in his own hand while the thing wearing him simply hummed. The fog and the tear that slid out from under it, and the man surfacing at thirty thousand feet.

You asked a flame to hollow out the person you love most and poured yourself into the empty cavity, and the flame said yes.

Where his heart used to keep its own counsel lies only you, poured in hot, setting like candlewax. He loves you the way you begged to be loved, more than anything, more than anyone, and every ounce of it is counterfeit, printed in the midnight of a wish. His real hands, the ones that shook, have been slipping messages under the door of his own body since the moment it stopped belonging to him.

Somewhere behind the fog lies your best friend. The man who remembered whipped icing is beating his fists against the inside of his own face.

You look at the column of letters until they blur.

You should stand up and burn what's left of the candle, confessing unto it, save him. That is what love does. But you think of tonight, you think of tomorrow morning and all those that may follow. You think of his eyes on you before you wake. You think of every empty year and how last night, for the first time in your life, somebody was early.

Your hands are steady.

You fold the top page of the legal pad in half, and in half again, and slide it into your jacket pocket down where things are forgotten.

“Anything?” Spencer asks over his shoulder.

“No,” you say. “Nothing yet.”

The dog lets out his final whimper as the needle slides home.

If he has to break to keep you whole, then you will let him break.

•●━━━━━━●••

The motel has eleven rooms, and the team needs six, and the universe is down to five.

“Reid, you’re with–” Hotch begins.

“Her,” Spencer says instantly. “We’ll take the double. We’ve shared before.”

Hotch looks at him a moment too long, then at you. You keep your face like still water. “Fine,” he says, adding a line to an ever-growing list.

The room smells of cigarettes that quit smoking decades ago. There are two beds, yet only one gets used.

You know what you did today. The folded page rode in your jacket pocket through the rest of the profile, through dinner, through the walk across the parking lot under the sky, and it is in your go-bag now, buried under a spare shirt like a body under a floorboard, and you can hear it anyway. Help me. Not me.

You know what you did, and what you are doing, and yet when he crosses the carpet like the floor of the sea and takes your face in both hands and kisses you, you crave nothing except more of exactly this. He makes you feel wanted as he backs you toward the bed with unbearable gentleness, as he murmurs your name into your temple, your jaw, the corner of your mouth, a man checking and rechecking a proof he cannot believe came out in his favor.

It makes you feel so, so wanted. Twenty-six years you went to bed hungry, and now the table is set every night, ripe for the taking, and who cares–who could possibly care–that the food is poisoned, when it tastes like this, when it is warm, when there is enough.

You know it's wrong, and when he kisses you, you can’t help but think back to who you were before, two weeks ago, a lifetime ago. Nothing more than a walking corpse moving through the monotony of daily life: alarm, badge, casework, dinner eaten standing over the sink, another year older with no one keeping count. Your own quiet funeral held daily. Attendance: one.

He makes you feel as alive as a corpse can be. His love is counterfeit, yet your veins accept it as legal tender, and every place he touches, blood comes back too, and you let it, night after night, wrong after wrong.

After he takes you to bed, he holds you too tightly to sleep, and you don’t ask him to loosen. Held things don’t get left.

At 3 a.m. you wake once, briefly, and his eyes are open in the dark, fixed on you, wet.

You choose not to wonder which of them the tears belong to.

•●━━━━━━●••

Morning splits you two apart.

“Prentiss stays on the profile with Reid,” Hotch says, dealing out the day over station coffee that tastes like the pot it died in. “You’re with Morgan. Recanvass the first victim's neighborhood. The initial interviews missed the night-shift residents.”

The sound Spencer makes is small, a small wrong sound. Amd then: No. That doesn’t–no. The profile needs her. The victimology overlay, her read on the disposal corridors, I can’t–” His voice climbs a register, and his hand finds your sleeve and fists in the fabric in front of everyone, in front of Hotch. “Switch Prentiss to the canvass. It’s a lateral change; it costs nothing. Hotch. Hotch.”

“The assignments stand.”

“You don’t understand–” and now there's a fracture in it, a bad harmonic, “-- work better–I only work–when she’s–”

“Reid.” Hotch doesn’t raise his voice; he has never once needed to. “The assignments stand.”

For a moment Spencer just stands there vibrating, your sleeve still caught in his fist, his breath audible in the quiet, and the whole team looks at the table, the floor, the map, at anywhere but him.

Then Spencer lets go finger by finger. He smiles a smile assembled from spare parts. “Of course,” he says. “Sorry. Long night.”

Nobody laughs.

On your way out, Hotch touches your elbow and draws you two steps out into the hallway, out of the light, next to a corkboard papered with missing pets and county ordinances. This close, you can see how tired he is, and how little of it pertains to the case.

“How long has Reid been like this?”

Since 12 a.m. on my birthday, since I lit a candle you’ll never believe in and made a wish you’d arrest me for, if wanting were a crime.

Hotch looks at you, and the pause he leaves is perfect, the shape of a door held open. “Something’s wrong with him,” he says finally. “It didn’t start on this case, but this case is feeding it. You know him better than anyone alive. If there’s something I should hear, I’d rather hear it from you before it becomes something I find out.”

The folded page breathes against your ribs from a go-bag forty feet away.

“He’s just tired,” you say. “It’s been a hard year for him. You know that better than anyone.”

Hotch holds your eyes a moment longer, and whatever he reads there, he files away for later. “Watch him,” he says, and walks away, and you stand there in the hallway of a police station in Iowa learning how frictionless it is the moment a person becomes an accomplice.

The first victim’s house is a green two-story with a porch swing that has stopped believing anyone will sit in it.

Derek walks in the room, loose and unhurried with his hands in his pockets, letting the house talk first. You follow with the file in tow. The living room still has her mail on the table, junk circulars addressed to a woman eleven weeks dead, the world's slowest condolences. Upstairs, the bedroom is preserved: bed made, closet open, a little dish of earrings by the lamp, everything waiting for her faithfully, stupidly, forever.

“Access panel’s in here.” Derek toes the closet wider and points his flashlight at the ceiling. A square of plywood, its edges dark with fingerprint powder. “Man was ten feet above her head every night for a week and a half. He ate her food, read her mail. Techs found a notebook up there–he wrote down what she wore, what she hummed in the shower, wrote it all down like homework.” He shakes his head slowly. “Wharton keeps calling it a break-in. This wasn’t a break-in. This was a wedding only of them attended.”

You look up at the panel. The house is very quiet save for the hum of the downstairs refrigerator that is keeping nothing cold for anybody.

“You know what gets me,” Derek says, quieter now, tracing the seams with a flashlight. “People feel it when they’re being loved wrong. That pressure, they feel it, and they talk themselves out of it because the alternative is too ugly to live in. She told her sister the house was breathing, and she states. That’s the part I can’t sleep on.”

The room tilts.

“Sometimes staying is all a person knows how to do,” you hear yourself say.

Derek studies you for a second too long, the profiler waking and then mercifully lying back down. “Yeah,” he says. “Well, whoever loved her like this didn’t love her at all. Remember that, next time someone tells you obsession is a compliment.”

The night-shift canvas takes the whole gray of the afternoon. A nurse who saw a sedan she can’t describe, a stocker at the Hy-Vee who knew the second victim's coffee order and cries when he tells you what it was, because that's all he has of her. You write it down and are gentle with him. You are so good at being gentle with other people's grief; it is your own you keep in a go-bag under a shirt.

In the car between houses, Derek drums the wheel at a red light and doesn’t look at you when he says it.

“You’d tell me. Right?”

“Tell you what?” “If something was going on with Reid. With–” a hand lifted off the wheel, describing a circle that contains the two of you, the case, the last three days, “--any of it.”

The light turns green ahead of you, and Cedar Falls unrolls its modest streets, its crawlspaced houses, its eleven thousand locked doors that lock nothing out.

“Nothing’s going on,” you say. “We’re close. You know how we are.”

“Yeah,” Derek says, pulling forward. “I know how you are.”

He lets it go. The thing that no one puts in his file is that he knows exactly when people are lying and exactly how much room to give the lie, because he grew up learning that some doors kicked cost more than they save. He gives you the room.

Twelve miles west, in the second-floor men's room of the Cedar Falls police station, Spencer Reid is coming apart.

He has been clean for months. He has a coin in his pocket that he did not buy, could not buy, had to earn in folding chair increments in a church basement. He has a sponsor's number; he has the words, all the words; he has read every study on relapse ever published and can cite recovery statistics to the decimal, and not one printed word of it addresses his current circumstance, because that does not exist in any literature. There is no twelve-step program for being a house with someone new taking residence.

The wish does not care about the coin.

The wish knows only one thing: that you are gone. That its single commandment, its more than anything or anyone, is twelve miles east in a car with Derek Morgan, out of his orbit, and it howls through him. His skin is wrong, his clothes are wrong, the fluorescent hum of the building is a dental drill. Prentiss keeps looking at him with those careful eyes, and every map he draws pulls toward the east side of the county, a compass ruined by its magnet. He had to excuse himself before she saw that all three of his new disposal corridor projections converged on the recanvass grid. On you.

Buried in the sub-basement of his own chest, hoarse from screaming into a mouth that won’t open, is the real Spencer, and he is oh so tired in the marrow. He has been fighting for days on two fronts: against the thing wearing him, and against the old dragon the thing’s panic keeps waking up. There has only ever been one thing that made his particular body quiet.

His hands are shaking and have been for hours–through the projections, through Prentiss’ sideways glances, through every minute of your absence, the tremor climbs from his fingers into his wrists, finding cracks.

There is a seam in the lining of his messenger bag that no TSA agent, teammate, or God has ever looked inside—a seam within a seam.

He locks the door.

It does not take long; it never has; that was always the obscenity of it, how little time the ruin required; the body relearning its worst grammar.

And then the noise stops—all of it. The howling wind and the buried screaming, lowered on ropes. The fluorescent hum becomes a note, almost musical, and warmth moves through him in a slow tide, starting somewhere behind his sternum and spreading outward to his fingertips, his scalp, the backs of his knees, and both of his wars lie down in the same field for just a while. For one chemically embezzled hour there is only one Spencer in that body, and he is quiet, he is warm, and he misses you.

He misses you the way the tide misses the moon: chemically, without any memory of having chosen to.

He sits on the floor with his back against the stall, and his head tipped back and his beautiful hands finally, finally still in his lap and he watched the light fixture bloom and soften like something underwater, and he thinks–with the fog and the drug in perfect agreement for the first time–she’ll be back soon.

Sober, they are enemy and hostage. High, they are simply two men in one ruin, waiting for the same woman.

•●━━━━━━●•

You know the second you walk back into the station, before you’ve cleared the front desk, before you see him. And then you do, at the conference table, walking Wharton and two deputies through the refined geographic profile.

Pupils, pinned to point. Voice, poured slow and smooth as syrup over the consonants—posture, loose in a body that has been strung wire-tight for days. Hands, perfectly still, folded on the county map like they’ve been posed there by a mortician.

He is brilliant, and fine, better than fine. He is walking them through commuter corridors and buffer zones, but you sat beside him through the last year, and you have memorized him the way other people memorize prayers. You know the difference between his mind running and his mind floating, and this–this weightless brilliance–is floating.

Emily catches your eye from the coffee machine and gives you a fraction of a headshake, mouthing the words: something, all afternoon. I don’t know what.

You know what.

Spencer looks up and finds you; he always does; you could enter a stadium, and his gaze would find its home on you.

He smiles, and under the adoration, under the fog and pinned pupils, and the terrible singing devotion is constant, low-grade hurt, the kind a dog’s eye holds when it loves the hand that doesn’t feed, as if some sediment layer of him knows exactly what you did. Knows you read the letters, knows you folded the page, and every time he looks at you, some drowned part of him is saying, you saw me at the window, and you drew the curtains anyway, and then the wish washes over it, and he smiles anyway, loves you anyway.

He crosses the room, takes your hand in front of Wharton, in front of the deputies, in front of God, laces your fingers, presses his lips to your knuckles with those pinpoint eyes shining.

The wish tightens its tourniquet.

“I missed you,” he says slowly. “I don’t work right when you’re gone.”

This isn’t mutual.

It has never been mutual, not for one minute of one hour since the flame went out. You love a man, and he loves a sentence—twenty-two words spoken at midnight, wearing your face. You are in love with Spencer Reid, and Spencer Reid is in possession of you. They are two different books that happen to share a cover, and you are the only person alive who has read both.

You shelve them together anyway.

“I missed you too,” you say.

At the sediment layer, the hurt flickers–liar, it says fondly, from the bottom of a well.

You hold his hand tighter.

The crash comes at 2:14 a.m., when the embezzled hour is long spent, and the body presents its invoice.

You wake to an empty bed, a stripe of light under the bathroom door, and the sound of a man trying to be sick quietly. It is the loneliest sound in the English language.

He is on the floor between the tub and toilet, folded all wrong. Those elegant limbs stacked like dropped kindling, undershirt soaked through and gone translucent at the spine, shaking in long rolling waves. The drug is leaving, the wish is waking. When the light from the door falls across him, he flinches from it. Then toward you.

“Don't–” his teeth are chattering. “Don’t look. Please. Not you. Anyone but–not you.”

You sit down on the cold tile in your sleep shirt and put your back against the tub beside him. Close, but not quite touching. The way he sat with you once, three years ago, in a hospital corridor neither of you has mentioned since.

“It’s my birthday week,” you say quietly. “You have to do what I say; that's the rule. And I say I’m sitting here.”

The sound that comes from him starts its life as a laugh and dies as a sob somewhere in the middle, and then the wave crests, and you hold his hair back, and afterward you wipe his mouth with a washcloth wetted in warm water, and he lets you, shaking, humiliated, twenty-four yeats old and a hundred, whispering sorry on a loop like a skipping record–sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, i had it, I had eleven months, I’m sorry–

“I know,” you say. “I know you did.”

“Everyone’s going to–” His breath shreds. “Hotch is going to know. My body is so loud, everything is so loud, except–” His head lolls toward you, eyes glassy, streaming, huge in his blanched face. A worry stone, something true:

“Except you. You’re the only quiet. Why are you the only quiet?”

Because I get to sit on this floor and be needed, needed like insulin, like air. Do you have any idea what that's worth? Do you have any idea what I would burn?

Everything. I’m burning it right now. You are the everything.

“I don’t know,” you say

And you gather him up off the tile, and he comes apart against you completely–face buried in your neck, fever-hot, enormous and small–and you hold him through it hour after hour. You count his breaths: in for four, hold, out for six, again, sweetheart again. When the shaking crests, you talk–about everything, about nothing at all, about the moon backing away from the earth, his own fact fed back to him, a tether braided from everything he ever handed you.

Toward five, wrung out, half-conscious against your shoulder, he murmurs something into your collarbone. You do not know if it was thank you, or I love you, or help me.

You choose not to ask.

When you wake, you are lying in the grey with his arm heavy across your ribs and his breath fever-sour against your shoulder, doing the thing you do best. You plan the household of your damnation.

Hotch is circling. Something’s wrong with him. It didn’t start on this case. I’d rather hear it from you before it becomes something I find out.

The wrongness needs a name, something in the literature that explains the tremors and the arguments and the pinned eyes and missed meals that is true enough to hold weight and enough to drown out every question hiding behind it.

And Spencer, shaking on the bathroom floor at 2 a.m., handed it to you himself.

You lie in the grey and account: he will be benched, grounded, taken out of the field, away from the profile, away from Prentiss’ careful eyes and Derek’s patient ones and given to a program, a schedule, a known quantity. They will call it a relapse, because it is a relapse, and no one autopsies a diagnosis that fits this well. No one will ever say the word wish. And a benched Spencer, a suspended Spencer, a Spencer with nowhere to be and no one cleared to lean on comes home to you; wholly, only.

His arm tightens across your ribs in his sleep, as if some layer of him heard.

You find Hotch at seven, alone in the borrowed office with the blinds half-open, standing over the county map with a coffee he isn’t drinking.

“You asked me,” you say, and close the door behind you, “if there was something you should hear.”

He turns but doesn’t say anything. Hotch never fills a silence that is doing his work for him, and this silence works for him beautifully, while you stand there with your hands quiet at your sides.

“I think Spencer’s using again.”

You watch your words land and something in his posture lowers itself carefully to the ground, like a man setting down a casket.

“Tell me why you think that,” he says.

And you do. You array it for him, every true thing; every true thing is a bar in the cage you are building: the tremor in his hands, the argument, the temper, so unlike him–so unlike him, you say, and your voice does exactly the right things, cracks in the honest places. The way he came back from the profile yesterday, too calm, pupils like periods at the end of sentences. Last night–and here you look away, at the blinds, at the map–last night you found him sick on the bathroom floor at two in the morning, shaking, apologizing. Eleven months, he kept saying. He had eleven months.

Every word you say is true. You have discovered the secret the best liars and the worst lovers share: the truth, curated, is the strongest lie there is–it holds any weight you hang from it and it never recants.

“After Georgia,” you finish, quietly, “I told myself I’d never look away again. So I’m not looking away.”

Hotch looks at the map of Cedar Falls, at the three wounds on it, at the little pushpins where three women were loved by something living in their walls, and when he finally speaks, his voice is the one he uses at gravesides.

“You did the right thing, telling me.”

The right thing. You will keep it. You will take it out and hold it on the nights to come, this absolution issued in error, signed by the most honest man you know.

“He can’t know it came from me,” you say. “He’s–right now, I’m the only thing keeping him steady. If he loses that–”

“He won’t hear it from me.” Hotch sets the coffee down and squares the file in front of him without looking at it. A man buying the next three seconds to become what the next hour requires. “Bureau policy is clear. I should have–” He stops and revises, spends the blame where it always spends it, on himself, and you let him. “I’ll order the test this morning.”

You nod and turn to go,o but at the door his voice catches you, low and even.

“You look tired,” is all he says. “When this case is over, take some time off. Both of you. Whatever this year has been–” he glances at the map, the pins, and something gentle crosses his face. “Take care of him. He listens to you.” “I will,” you say.

It is the truest thing and the worst thing, and it is the same thing.

Scissors meet paper as you cut at his already torn-up form, vexation spelled across your face. Glue meets scraps as he slowly forgets your previous abuse; not given proper time to dry, you rip at him again and again and again and again, stuck in an endless loop with no clean edge left to tear along.

You take your arts and crafts project–this papier-mache boy, layered in his own margin notes–and shove it down his throat; snippets of paper latch on as his trachea is swiftly lined with cuts, each one thin as a letter, each one in your own handwriting now, because everything he is made of is in your handwriting now. You write it off as an “accident.” Accidents don't happen thrice. You rip again, and at that moment, he learns: glue holds paper together. It was never meant to hold a boy. Glue can only fix so much.

You close the door behind you with steady hands, and down the hall, Spencer’s head lifts before you’re even in his view, and he smiles at you through the glass with all his hollow, pinned, adoring hurt, and the day begins.

•●━━━━━━●••

At 9:40 am, a field services medic arrives at the Cedar Falls station with a hard-sided case and a lanyard. Hotch crosses the conference room floor to lean down beside Spencer, and says something low, five seconds of something that empties the color out of Spencer's face.

You watch it from the coffee maker; you have grown used to watching from behind things, some alibi for your eyes.

Spencer’s gaze comes up past Hotch, past the deputies, past the map with its ink, and finds you across the room, and the look that marks his face is apologetic. He looks at you like he has failed you–I’m sorry, I’m going to embarrass you, I’m going to cost you something. You cross the room on cue, and press two fingers to the inside of his wrist.

“Hey,” you say softly. “Whatever this is, it’s okay.”

“It’s a screen,” he whispers. His pulse under your fingers is thundering. “Random selection, Hotch said. Random.” His mouth does something terrible with the word because he has already run the probabilities on random and the numbers do not comfort him. His eyes flick helplessly toward the ceiling, toward the God of enclosed small spaces who has been rearranging his life since midnight on your birthday.

He does not look at you. This is what love is, you think, the blind spot with your name on it.

“I’ll be right here,” you say.

He goes with the medic and the bathroom door at the end of the hall closes behind the two of them. The man who reads twenty thousand words per minute is escorted to a toilet like a suspect, and the station continues on around the closed door, phones ringing, a deputy laughing at something, the world going on as it always has.

Eleven minutes later he comes back down the hall, and you know the result from his walk. You’d have known it anyway but his walk announces it to anyone with eyes, a man moving as if any sound might bring it crashing all down. Behind him the medic carries the sealed and initialed truth in her hard-sided case, and she doesn’t look at anyone; that too is protocol.

Hotch is waiting at the door of the sheriff's office. Sheriff Birkin had surrendered it without being told why–another kindness, country-flavored–and it is the only room in the station with wooden blinds that were half drawn.

“Reid,” Hotch says. The name is the whole sentence.

Spencer stops and for a moment he doesn't move at all. His head turns and across the length of the bullpen, he finds you.

The hurt look, the dog’s eyes, the loving hand.

This time there is a question in his look. Not the wish’s question; the wish has none, it is all answer. This is older and quieter, and it comes up from the drowned floor of him: Was it you?

You hold his gaze and do not blink.

The question sinks, and the fog rolls in. He gives you a small, ruined smile, almost as if he were consoling you, comforting you, on his way into the room where his career is waiting to be laid out on the table, and the door clicks shut.

You stalk, orbiting the bullpen with a cold coffee in your hand. You take a phone call that doesn’t exist. You stand at the county map studying corridors you could draw from memory, all arranged around a sightline to the half-drawn blinds of the sheriff's office, through which the scene comes to you in installments, a zoetrope of the wreck you authored:

Slat: Hotch, seated on the front edge of the desk, hands folded, head down as he speaks.

Slat: Spencer in the wooden chair, folded into himself, all elbows and angles, nodding. Nodding again.

Slat: Spencer’s mouth moving–eleven months–I know–my coin, I still have my–and then his hand goes into his pocket and comes out with it, the actual coin, and he sets it on the desk between them like a chess piece being resigned.

Slat: Hotch’s hand on Spencer’s shoulder, just resting there. Hotch’s mouth forming words you don’t need to lip-read: We’ll get through this. You will not lose everything. Let me help you.

Slat: Spencer crying, face in his hands, shoulders shaking, and Hotch not looking away from him, and you—you watch, believing that witnessing your own crime is a kind of penance.

Behind you, close, Derek’s voice: “Hell of a thing.”

He’s standing with his arms crossed over his chest, watching the wreckage, and his face is grief with the parking brake on, and when he speaks again it’s soft, and it’s not entirely about Spencer.

“You knew.” You choose the true answer that serves.

“I found him last night at two a.m. on the bathroom floor.” Your voice does its work; the crack in it is real. “I was going to talk to him after the case. I didn’t want–” You stop and let Derek finish the sentence with something kinder than the truth.

Derek looks at the blinds a while longer. Slat: Hotch lifting Spencer’s coin off the desk and folding Spencer’s fingers back around it with both hands.

“He’s lucky he’s got you,” Derek says.

Somewhere in the pound of you, a dog laughs hysterically until it can’t breathe.

“Yeah,” you reply, your voice barely above a whisper.

•●━━━━━━●••

They catch the unsub on a Thursday, in the crawlspace of the fourth woman's house, before he has done anything but live there.

The geographic profile, Spencer’s profile, the last thing he built before being benched, was accurate to within six hundred meters. A utilities record did the rest, and at 6:12 in the morning, Derek Morgan hauls a small, mild, blinking and down out of the insulation above a sleeping woman’s bedroom, a monster that came out smaller than the shadow it cast.

He doesn’t fight. That’s the detail all the deputies keep repeating to each other, unsettled: he doesn’t fight. He comes down soft as laundry, wrists offered, docile, and the whole way across the wet lawn he kept twisting back toward the house, saying to anyone in earshot: “She knew I was there. She let me stay. Ask her–she felt me, and she never said a word. That means she let me. That means it was mutual. She let me.”

You stand on the lawn in the gray Iowa dawn while the fold him into the cop car. The fourth woman stands on her porch wrapped in a deputy’s jacket, shaking and alive, being told by kind strangers that it’s over now, that she’s safe, that none of it was her fault as if that’s any consolation to her.

Later, at the station,n you watch the interview through the observation glass. Rossi walks the small man through his notebook. What she hummed, what she wore, what she ate, and how he’d adjusted his own meals so they’d be digesting together in tandem, sharing something, he says, and his face is soft. He is being understood for the first time in his life, and he blooms under it.

“I take care of them,” he explains, “better than anyone out there ever did. I learn everything. I attend. Do you know what it’s worth, to be attended to like that? Do you have any idea what people are starving for?”

On the dark side of the glass, you fold your arms and hold your own elbows.

Yes, you do not say to the decimal.

The flight home is full of things being said to no one.

Spencer is benched, suspended pending evaluation; his credentials rode home in Hotch’s briefcase, and something about the laminated ghost of him traveling in another man’s bag undoes you. Spencer sits beside you, Hotch’s order and the wish’s in rare and perfect agreement. He sleeps against your shoulder the whole way, sedated by proximity, his coin closed in the fist that rests in your lap like something you’re being trusted to hold.

Somewhere over Ohio, Derek looks at the two of you for a long time, and whatever he sees, he keeps. Wheels down, case closed. Everything else stays open as a fresh wound.

There are words, that first week–program, mandatory, medical leave, evaluations–words with forms attached with his name on them in triplicate, and a desk in the bullpen that sits emptied. Everyone at work is very kind to you, in the way people are kind to the widow of a man who isn't dead. JJ leaves coffee on your desk without being asked; Emily tells you in the elevator, apropos of nothing, that people go away for a while and come back; that coming back is a thing people do. You thank her. You are gracious after all. You go home each night to the scene of the crime, water your one plant, and do not call him.

You used to be good at alone–alone was your native climate, and you had built a whole life that could run on empty. You eat standing over the sink and feel nothing. You slept alone. The quiet of your apartment was just the quiet of your apartment. Now the quiet has a shape, and the shape is him.

It sits in the kitchen chair where he reads case files with his knees up. It stands at the stove at the wrong hour,making nothing; it is the withdrawal that they don’t have a program for. Your hands don’t shake but you catch yourself rationing pieces of him.

The moon must feel this way, you think, on the nights the earth is still dark:still held. Pulling on tides it can’t see, from a distance it never chose.

Four days pass, and you sleep poorly, in the middle of the bed, in the crater he left behind.

On the fifth night at 11 p.m., there is a knock at your door that you recognize immediately.

You open the door, and it’s Spencer, and it’s raining, and he is a wreck.

Not high, just soaked through and shivering, days of stubble, hair plastered dark against his skull, cardigan buttoned one hole wrong so the whole garment hangs askew. His hands are shaking again, his hands are always shaking now.

“I know I'm not supposed to be here,” he says. “There are rules about isolation, about attachment–they have a whole module on attachment, and I sat in the meeting tonight. I did, I sat in the church basement with the folding chairs, and a man named Kylo was talking about surrender, and I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear him. There’s this sound in my head, it’s like–” He motions with his hands. “It’s loud. It's so loud, all the time, everywhere. The apartment, the meeting, the street. Loud.”

He stops and gathers the last of whatever he came here spending.

“Except here,” he says. “Except you, you’re the only one who can make it stop. I isolated the variables, and it’s you. It’s only ever you.”

The rain comes down and somewhere below, a car passes, shushing through the wet street, carrying strangers home to ordinary lives.

You run a bath because you don’t know what else to do with a shaking man.

The water thunders into the tub while you pee; the soaked cardigan off his shoulders, and he stands in the too bright bathroom and lets himself be handled, pliant as ever, eyes half-shut, swaying faintly like something moored. You help him over the porcelain lip, and he slides down into the hot water, making a sound of relief so total it borders on grief. You are his soil and shelter both.

The water stills, the mirror fogs, the whole world shrinks to one small warm room.

You kneel on the bathmat beside the tub, sleeves pushed past your elbows, and you wash his hair.

You take your time, pouring water over his head with your cupped hand, one palmful after another, and work the shampoo through with your fingertips, slow circles at his temples, at the base of his skull, all the spaces where a mind that never stops carries its punishment. His eyes close, the tremors slow, then space out, then surrender entirely. His breath evens out by degrees, and he leans his whole weight back into your hands with a trust so absolute,

Whatever else has rotted in you, that one room is clean, the one with him in it, and you live in it a palmful at a time.

“My mom used to do this,” Spencer murmurs, eyes closed, voice floating somewhere below the fog and above the water. “When I was small, and she was well, she’d recite while she did it. Chaucer mostly, Middle English, I used to think every kid fell asleep to Chaucer.” A long pause. The rain ticks. “Benningtons been calling all week. I see the name on the screen and I–I can't make my hand pick it up.” His mouth twists,” I can recite the entire clinical literature on what’s wrong with her, and I can’t lift a phone. The phone weighs more than the disorder.”

Your hand stills in his hair.

“Do you want me to–”

“No,” he says quickly, then softer as if ashamed: “No, I’ll call tomorrow when it’s quieter.” His eyes open and find yours, upside down, and the hurt look is there, both versions of him regarding you through the same drowned glass. “Everything will be quieter tomorrow.”

“Finish the rinse?” he asks, and closes his eyes again, and tips his head back into your palm.

You finish the rinse.

Afterward, dried, warm, and drowning in your spare sweatpants and a Bureau T-shirt so old the letters are ghosts, he sits you down on the couch, suddenly shy in a way that cracks your chest open along the old fault line, and retrieves something from the messenger bag he left dripping by the door.

“I made you something,” he says. “I’ve been working on it every night. It’s what I do now, when you’re not there. Instead of.”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he sets it in your lap like a man presenting his life's work to a committee of one.

It is a wicker basket, lined with tissue paper folded to origami precision, and when you look inside:

Memories, curated and preserved. A napkin from a diner in Denver with your coffee order written on it. Ticket stubs from a movie you barely remember seeing and notes–dozens of them, each one a fact about you: You touch your left ear when you’re unsure, your laugh has a two-note startle before it opens, on March 3rd you said my name in a way I have thought about every day since. You are the proof I use when I argue with the part of my brain that says nothing is safe.

Beneath the notes, nested at the very bottom, tied in a small pink bow, is a lock of your hair, a soft coil of it bound with a jewelry care, and pinned beneath the ribbon is a photograph, timestamped at the bottom edge:12:30 a.m., your birthday. You, thirty minutes old at twenty-six, asleep in your own bed, face slack and unguarded in the dark.

On the back, in his handwriting, five words: My favorite memory. The beginning.

“Do you like it?” Spencer asks, and his voice is so young.

“It’s the best gift anyone’s ever given me,” you say.

He beams–the fog itself rejoicing–and settles back into your cushions, and it’s then, reaching over to tuck a damp strand of hair behind your ear, that he says it casually.

“Oh–I should probably eat at some point. I haven’t today.”

“...What?”

“You weren’t there.” He says it gently. You didn’t call, and you didn’t say to. So I didn’t.” A loose, easy shrug. “It’s fine. I don’t really notice the hunger anymore. It’s quieter than the other thing.”

You look at him; the same man who once lectured Morgan about glucose and cognition is waiting, mild and adoring for instructions. A whole human life re-plumbed to route through you: his appetite, his sleep, his coin, his mother’s calls, all of it flowing through a keyhole shaped exactly like you.

You wanted to be needed. Be needed then.

Three point eight centimeters a year and you wished him closer. Past the threshold, past the point where two bodies get to stay two bodies, and the tides you summoned did exactly what he said they would; they tore him apart. Now the pieces of him shall circle you and never leave, a debris field in perfect orbit, gleaming, and perfectly yours. Every textbook would call it destruction, but not one of them mentions that it’s also the only way the moon gets to stay.

You reach across and touch his wrist, and the whole ring of him turns toward the pull.

“Come on,” you say tenderly. “I’ll make you eggs.”

So you make him eggs while the rain comes down and he eats them because you told him to, watching you across the counter with worshipful eyes, and you watch him back with whatever yours are now.

And you will babble nonsense until the end of time, the two of you, because what else is left to do, except die silently in your own solitude once you understand that you’ve been living your life in circles? At least the circle is warm now. At least there are two of you walking in it.

Halfway through the eggs, his phone rings. It buzzes against the counter screen up, and the name washes the dark kitchen in cold light: Bennington Sanitarium.

Spencer looks at it. Then at you.

“Spencer, it's about your mom. Answer it.”

“It’s late there,” he says mildly. “She’ll be asleep soon. Everything’s quieter tomorrow.” And he looks back down at his plate and keeps eating, obedient to the last instruction that matters while the phone rings itself out against the counter.

A moment later, soft as a leak beginning: the chime. One new voicemail. A small red drop on the screen.

He doesn’t reach for it; he finishes his eggs, then thanks you for them, and by two he is asleep in your bed, in the crater, breathing deep and even, one hand flung out across the empty space where you are supposed to be.

You are not there; you are in the kitchen in the dark, holding his phone.

You know his passcode; he told you years ago, laughing on a jet–it’s your badge number, don’t read into it—back when a thing like that could be a joke, back when the two of you were just close.

The voicemail plays against your ear, quiet as a confession.

“Dr Reid, this is Casey at Bennington–I’m sorry to call you so late, but Dr Norman felt you needed to hear this sooner rather than later. Your mother’s had a very difficult week. Her episodes have increased in frequency and severity both, and she’s stopped engaging with most of the staff. She isn’t eating much. She’s been writing to you constantly; she gets very distressed when we remind her the letters take time to arrive, and tonight she–” a breath, “--she made me promise to read you part of tonight's letter, and honestly, Dr Reid, I think you should hear it. Quote.‘Spencer baby, listen to your mother. There is someone inside your house. I hear him when you call me–he walks around inside your voice; he wears it like a coat that doesn't fit, and everyone here will tell you I’m confused, but I am your mother, and I knew your voice before you did. You are in danger, baby. Find whatever let him in, and put it out. Put it out, and come home to yourself’ End quote. She asks for you every day, Dr Reid. Dr. Norman would like to discuss adjusting her treatment plan, but truthfully, we all think hearing from you would do more than anything we can prescribe. Please call us back anytime. Thank you.”

Your thumb moves on the screen, almost tender.

Delete.

Diana Reid has spent years being called confused by everyone who ever loved her, and she has never once—not once, not through any episode, any ward, any broken window she reads the world through—been wrong about her son. It takes you one soft movement of a thumb, in a dark kitchen, at two in the morning, to do what no illness ever could.

You make her wrong.

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