Elle left. Gideon disappeared. Emily’s gone. Hotch is suspended.
It’s just the four of them: JJ, Morgan, Reid, and Garcia. They’re taken off the active duty roster until a new Unit Chief is appointed. It won’t be Morgan. Strauss doesn’t trust anyone on their team. Whoever gets the job will be coming straight out of her pocket.
They’re in Garcia’s room discussing this when Morgan stands, swears, and punches a wall. Reid jumps. Garcia yells at Morgan to watch his fists. JJ doesn’t blink.
Two days later, she’s turned in her resignation. Morgan doesn’t last a week after she leaves before he’s packed his bags, too. With only a matter of days before Reid and Garcia are assigned to different BAU teams, two more exit interviews hit Strauss’ desk.
Reid finds himself sitting alone in his apartment, go bag still at his feet and satchel in his lap where he dropped them when he came home yesterday. He can’t regret what he’s done, even though he knows he should. He should be worried about money, should be looking for a new job, should be wondering how he’s going to keep his head above water now that the ground has dropped out from under him.
Instead of doing any of that, he stands up, taking his go bag and his satchel with him (funny, his fingers are still curled around both), and walks out of his apartment.
A moment later, he darts back inside, pulls a seemingly random book off his shelves, and shakes out the eight hundred and thirty dollars that had been tucked between the pages. He’s been saving it for an emergency. This seems to qualify.
He takes a cab to Morgan’s house, because somehow the thought of climbing into his own car is repulsive. When he arrives, he pounds on the door. “Morgan, I know you’re in there, I can see your car. Derek!”
There’s no response. He sighs. “I’ll come in anyways. I will!”
When Morgan still doesn’t answer (even though Reid imagines he can hear him breathing just on the other side of the door), he feels around the door frame for the key he knows is taped there. It’s not there, and it’s not under the welcome mat or either of the window sills, either. With another sigh, Reid fishes a pin out of his bag and picks the lock.
“What the hell,” Morgan says from his place on the couch when Reid calmly steps in and shuts the door behind him.
“Magician’s fingers,” Reid tells him. “Have you heard from anyone else? No one will answer my calls.”
Morgan scowls at him, clearly miffed about Reid’s presence and the fact that he more or less broke in, but then shakes his head. “Garcia won’t even text me back.”
“Right,” Reid says, “we need to find Emily first; she’s the most likely to leave the country. Come on.”
Morgan just snorts. “What’s the point in finding her, kid? The team’s not getting back together at this point.”
And suddenly, it’s like he pulls up short, unable to formulate a response. He doesn’t know what the point is, he just knows that there is something terribly, horribly wrong with all of them going their separate ways at once. “I, I don’t,” he stammers. “We can’t just…”
Then Morgan is there, hands gripping Reid’s shoulders and bending a little so he can look up at him. “Breathe, Spencer.”
He does, easily. The problem isn’t that he can’t breathe. It’s that for the first time in his life, he can’t think. He doesn’t know how to explain himself, doesn’t know how to tell Morgan about the desperate, cloying fear that rises up in his throat when he thinks about being alone again. Instead of trying, he says, “If you pick up Garcia, I can go get Emily and JJ, and we can meet at Hotch’s.”
Morgan looks at him, considering. “How ‘bout you come with me, instead? If you’re right and Emily’s getting ready to leave, it would probably be better if there’s the both of us there.”
“Yeah.” Something clenched up tight in his chest loosens a little, and he huffs out a noise that could maybe be a laugh. “That would probably be good.”
They go to Emily’s first, because something tells Reid that she’s leaving soon, and if they don’t catch her in time she’ll be gone for good and they’ll never find her again.
What they find is her in the parking lot of her building, throwing two suitcases into the trunk of her car. She stares at them like she has no idea who they are when they climb out of Morgan’s car. Reid’s never seen her so lost before.
He tries to think of every reason she should stay, pulls up every argument and all the logic he has in him, but what he says is, “Please don’t go.”
She’s hugging him before he’s finished speaking, and he tucks his head down so he can hide his tears in her hair.
JJ is at Garcia’s, and the two of them are curled up on the sofa watching some reality show that Reid doesn’t recognize. JJ’s eyes are red, and Garcia’s hair doesn’t look like it’s seen a brush in days. Neither of them hesitates to come with them. Reid doesn’t think any of them know what they’re doing anymore, and maybe putting the group of them together is a bad idea when they’re so lost and drifting, but he thinks that the world will chew them all to pieces if they don’t stay close to each other to fight it off.
When they get to Hotch’s, he’s the only one who looks like he’s still surviving in the the world under his own power, even if the circles under his eyes are darker than usual and Reid swears there weren’t that many lines on his face a month ago.
“What the hell?” he asks calmly, when he sees the five of them standing there, disheveled (Reid), with messy hair (Garcia), and in pajamas (JJ). Emily is clearly dressed to travel, and Morgan is sober at the moment but he smells like stale beer.
They shuffle around on the doorstep, no one quite sure what to say. Reid finds that he’s holding hands with JJ and Emily and he can’t quite remember when that happened.
Hotch steps back to let them in, and they troop past him and make themselves uncomfortable in the living room. Reid is sitting in between JJ and Emily on the sofa, and now they’re holding hands too, in a messy tangle of fingers in his lap. Garcia takes the recliner, Morgan perches on the armrest, and Hotch sits on the coffee table facing them all.
There’s silence for several minutes.
“You all left the BAU,” Hotch says after it becomes clear that no one else is going to start the conversation. “I know that.”
“Emily then JJ then Morgan then Garcia then me,” Reid says. “Have you heard from Gideon?”
Hotch shakes his head. “He’s in the wind. For his sake, I’m not going to try to find him.”
Emily and JJ both move in closer when he shrinks back into the cushions. “Right. Of course.”
Another few minutes of silence, and then Garcia speaks. “So this is going to make me sound terribly pathetic and un-adjusted,” she says hesitantly, “but just what day is it?”
“Saturday,” Hotch says, at the same time Emily says, “Friday.”
“It’s Saturday?” she asks, blinking. “Damn it, I missed my flight.”
“Where were you going, anyways?” Morgan asks her, sounding just barely curious. Reid thinks he’s probably just trying to keep someone talking to beat back that painful, creeping silence.
“France,” Emily says. “Gonna go visit some friends. Or, was going to. Is it really Saturday?”
“You lost time?” JJ asks, biting her lip as she leans around Reid to peer at Emily. Emily shakes her head with a wry smile.
“The entire last three weeks have sort of blurred together. I think I’m still struggling to process.”
“You don’t have to go,” Reid says, and it surprises him how quiet and hoarse his voice is. What surprises him even more are the words that come out next: “We don’t have to work for the FBI to keep doing our job.”
Even the silence seems to surprised to jump in. No one says anything, but it’s not quiet like it was before, and Reid realizes that they all knew that’s why they’re here, and that they’ve all just been waiting for someone else to say it.
“That’s true,” Hotch says, his voice even and calm. “Though we rely a great deal on help from local law enforcement, which we wouldn’t be getting without the FBI behind us.”
“But we’re always the ones who always take down the unsub,” Morgan points out. “Regardless of how helpful the local cops are.”
“And sometimes they’re more of a hindrance than a help,” JJ mutters.
“Hey, I can do my job just as well from my own laptop,” Garcia adds. “Even if I won’t, um, technically have permission to access the things that I usually do.”
“Look, I’m either doing this or I’m living off my mother’s money and pissing around in Europe,” Emily says dryly.
“We wouldn’t have the jet,” Hotch tells them. “No government vehicles. No funds. No paychecks, for that matter; I doubt any of us could hold down any other job while we did this.”
“It doesn’t matter,” JJ says fiercely, her fingers digging into Reid’s and Emily’s. “People will die without us, Hotch. We’ll find a way to make it work.”
“Other people will still be doing the job,” Hotch says, not seeming at all put off by how angry JJ is. “We weren’t the only BAU team.”
“No, but we were the best.” Morgan’s voice is low and quiet and firm. It’s not quite the same voice he uses when he’s trying to coax a confession out of a suspect, but it’s so close that Reid almost jumps. “We are the best.”
There's another pause, quiet but not silent. Reid tries not to count the seconds. Everyone tries to look at everyone else without seeming like they are. Reid keeps his eyes trained on Hotch, almost afraid to breathe.
"All right," he says finally, and all eyes snap back to him. "Let's do it."
