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She'd been expecting him.
She thought he might come over the first night, as raw as he'd been, but he was getting his mom settled and she was still under medical supervision. Even then, she'd been a little surprised to come home and find only the boys there. She assumed he'd wanted to wait until she was there, but still.
She had been certain he would show up the second night, when everyone was home and safe and had been ordered a mandatory 6-week break to decompress and process everything they'd been through. If anyone had things to process these days, it was Spence. She'd waited up for a little while, dozing in the chair in the living room, not wanting to miss the doorbell if he needed her.
By the third night, she had almost called him to be sure he was okay, but she had stopped herself. Maybe he was finally getting some sleep. Or at least his mom probably was, and she didn't want to wake them. She had sent him a text and received a cryptic, "We're fine. Thanks JJ." in response.
By the fifth day, she was starting to embrace the downtime a little. After chasing Michael around the park all morning she was discovering the joy of mommy-and-me naps in the afternoon. And there was something so blissfully simple about just cooking dinner with Will and eating as a family - when was the last time they'd done that three nights in a row? By the time she got the boys down and curled up on the couch, afghan around her shoulders, to finally finish reading a book she had started during her maternity leave, it was starting to feel like a tantalizing glimpse into how the other half lived: the people who couldn't recite the names of prolific serial killers off the tops of their heads. The people who didn't spend all day every day chasing down the worst monsters in all of humanity, who didn't look for clues in dead bodies for a living.
People who didn't spend every night wondering if they could have stopped two children from dying instead of only one.
People who didn't need to worry about their friend being stalked and drugged and framed for murder. Who didn't need to worry about their friends' children - or god forbid their own - being targeted by vindictive sociopaths.
She was shaken from her thoughts by a rushed rapping at the door. Glancing at her watch, she saw more time had passed than she'd realized - 2:14 am. She slipped her book onto the end table, held the afghan around her, and began toward the front door, only to hear another series of light, hurried knocks at the door. She quickened her pace, unlocked the deadbolt, and opened the door to reveal exactly whom she'd expected.
Even so, she was surprised at what she saw. No - surprised wasn't right. It made sense, and if she had really thought about Spence coming over she would have pictured exactly this, but still.
His eyes were wide, vulnerable, but almost sunken - hollow. His hair was more of a mess than usual, the wild tangle of curls seeming to shrink his face and make him look even younger, especially with his beard gone. His lips pressed into a tight line, as though he were trying to seem determined, but his posture was the picture of insecurity and self-rebuke: shoulders narrow and forward, hands awkward in his pockets. "I'm sorry, I didn't want to ring the bell and wake Henry or Michael. Or you, if you were asleep - were you-" His voice was the high, thin whisper that always broke her heart, and she shook her head quickly to reassure him.
"No, I was catching up on some reading."
"Me too," he allowed with a faint smile. That long with no books - or very few books - must have been torture for him, of all people, and she ached at the thought. "I'm sorry I didn't call."
"No need. I've been expecting you." He looked surprised at that for a moment, then seemed to think about it and nod to himself that it made sense. This is what they did. What they had done for years. He didn't say anything, and she got the sense that he wasn't sure where to begin - or whether to begin at all. "Spence, just come in," she urged him gently, opening the door wider, and he obliged.
He walked into the living room and seemed to stop there, as though unsure where to sit, just as he'd paused before the closed door at the BAU. She wasn't sure what to say, and before she could find the words he seemed to remember and course-correct, nothing but a quiet, "Right, sorry," to show that he had paused at all.
She couldn't imagine everything he'd been through over the past months. She knew some details, she could assume some others, but the idea of someone as brilliant and utterly rational as Spence essentially forgetting that he could walk through doors or sit where he chose was gut-wrenching.
He perched on the edge of the couch and she sat beside him, close enough to accidentally touch if he wanted. She had more physical access to him than most, and she didn't take that lightly - but it had to be up to him tonight. After everything he had been through, he needed to be allowed to control as much as he could. She would take her cues from there.
He blinked twice, as though trying to focus, then turned to look at her. "How's your head?" he asked.
"Fine," she replied honestly. "All the glass is out, nothing to worry about."
"Good." On a scale of 100, he seemed to relax by about 2. "Have you talked to Emily?"
"Yesterday," she confirmed. "She's good. Catching up on a lot of tv."
"You're sure? It's harder to tell on the phone, without micro-expressions to help-"
"Spence, she's okay," she asserted, quietly but a little stronger. He considered this a moment, then nodded, relaxing just a little more. Not nearly enough, but a start. She knew better than to ask if he was okay - of course he wasn't - so she started smaller. "Have you slept yet?"
"Since when?"
"Since you got out."
"No. Well- a little," he corrected.
"Spence-"
"I tried. But with everything going on, my mom's been having trouble. During the day she's been okay, kind of, but nights have been bad."
"Who's with her now?"
"I found a new nurse. It took a few interviews to find someone."
"They kept wanting to know what happened to the last one?"
He nodded. "Saying she was murdered by a woman I tried to help ten years ago so that the woman's girlfriend could play mindgames with me for four hours wasn't really good advertising." He managed the hint of a smile at his own joke, but his expression turned sad again - mournful, but mostly guilty.
"You had no way of knowing," she tried to reassure him.
"I know," he replied quietly, but it was clear that didn't make things any better. "I keep trying to tell myself that I had no way of knowing any of what would come from my series of stupid decisions, but they were my decisions. If I hadn't been in jail-"
"You wouldn't have been in jail had Cat and Lindsey not put you there. And killing Cassie was part of the means to their endgame. It wasn't some independent variable that could only happen once you were in jail on something unrelated, it was all part of the same plan."
"I know," he sighed. He sank forward into himself for a moment, elbows on knees, forehead in hands. "But it still feels like-"
"I know," she acknowledged, then admitted, "Stephen made me take the front seat."
He looked up, blinking, as though trying to decode what she had said. "What?"
"When we got in the car. Then the crash, and I'm okay but he died." It felt glib, like an understatement, but she didn't know what else to say. She knew there was nothing else she could say. He leaned into her shoulder for a moment, and she wondered if she had miscalculated the admission. What she had meant as an understanding of the guilt of unintended consequences he was feeling, he seemed to be taking as the prospect of losing one more thing in his life. Damnit. "I'm fine," she repeated, touching his knee in reassurance, and he gave a slight nod.
The silence hung between them for what felt like several minutes before there came a very quiet, nervous admission, "...I'm not."
Of course he wasn't. No one could be in his situation. But that felt almost dismissive to say. Instead, she opted for a gentle, "I know."
Words seemed to tumble out of him then, as though the admission had been what was holding it all back for too many days - or months, probably. "I can't think straight. I can't focus and it's like the world is moving faster than my brain can go. It took me too long to decode Scratch's references, and I keep feeling this rage. I lost my composure with Cat, I would have absolutely killed Scratch if I'd had the chance, and I don't know what's happening to me or how to stop it."
"What's happening is that you're angry, Spence, that's normal."
"This isn't normal," he replied. "This is-...Owen Savage." She knew the name but couldn't place it off the top of her head, and when she didn't respond with recognition right away, he barreled past her silence. "Owen Savage. 2008, West Bune Texas. He was a high school student who went after-"
"...the bullies who tormented him with an assault rifle," she filled in, the case clicking into place. "You're worried you're collecting injustices," she surmised gently. "I think you've had enough of them lately that you're entitled."
"You know, there are some unsubs who were almost guaranteed to turn out the way they did, and there are some who would never have gone down that path without something horrible and unstoppable happening to them, but Owen Savage didn't have to. Neither did Kyle Ecklund or Ronald James Underwood. If someone would have listened, would have just done something, they could have lived their entire lives without killing anyone. People had the chance to stop it, but no one bothered to."
It wasn't new for him to identify with those unsubs in particular. He'd told her enough about what happened to him in school - and she could guess quite a bit - that she understood why. From what little any of them knew about his time in prison, she imagined it had to hit all of those buttons again - only worse. As bad as high school had been for him, she suspected even being a child prodigy in public school wasn't as bad as being a fed in max. And given that one of the guards had been helping Cat Adams... no one had listened to him. People had the power to stop things and they had chosen not to. "They didn't protect you. And they should have." His nod was pitiful, childlike, and she wanted to hold him tight. The idea of anyone hurting her best friend was bad enough; the fact that people had turned a blind eye to him being hurt was enough to make her angry. "You have every right to be mad about that, Spence. It's not right."
"It's not that, it's more that... when it's happened before, when I was a kid, I knew it wasn't right, and I got angry, but I never tried to blow up the school. I never tried to poison anyone. This time..." He hesitated, and his voice was shakier when he began to speak again. "You said you would have done it to survive. And that was part of it, I knew I didn't have many options, but I..." He ducked his head, ashamed, staring intently at a spot on the carpet as he choked out the admission, "enjoyed it. I wished they'd been hurt worse. If I'd had access to more chemicals, I would have done more. What if this means I'm really not any better than they are?" He looked up at her finally, eyes brimming with tears, looking so hopeless and scared as though this assault on his worldview had left him permanently unmoored, and this time she couldn't help herself. She pulled him into a tight hug, heart breaking as she felt how desperately his long fingers pressed into her back as he clung to her.
"You're not like them," she whispered. Of all the things she knew for sure, this was high on the list. "If you were, it wouldn't bother you."
"That's not true. Plenty of violent criminals feel remorse. After raping and murdering four women, Steven Dean Gordon felt so bad about what he'd done that he begged for the death penalty and fired his public defender so he could speed up the process in an attempt to make amends. If I could have killed Scratch, I would have - and I wouldn't have felt bad about it. I would have felt bad about not feeling bad."
"He drugged and killed at least a dozen people, caused the death of another dozen, and spent almost three years stalking and tormenting the team. I don't think any of us would have felt bad for killing him. I know I wouldn't have."
"How do you know?"
"Because I don't feel bad for killing Jason Clark Battle." She had always heard that the first kill was the hardest emotionally, that the act of taking a human life for the first time was supposed to break something inside of you, to change a person in unspeakable ways, but she had never felt that. Had someone else been her first kill, things might have been different, but after what he'd done to Garcia...she would do it again. Without hesitation.
"...I could have killed her, too," he admitted in a rough whisper against her hair. She doesn't need him to give a name; she knows. She pulled him off the subject so he wouldn't strangle her. "When she said what she did- I knew it was part of her game, but the thought of-" He was stammering a little now, his sentences disjointed, like he was too embarrassed to voice the words aloud. But she knew. She'd watched the whole thing, she didn't need to force him to say it.
Just because she didn't completely understand her best friend's one and only romantic relationship didn't mean she couldn't see its effects on him. The mere mention of his dead love's name was always enough to send his gaze a million miles away on the best of days. Let alone... "If she'd said that about Will, I would have had a hard time keeping it together," she admitted. He lifted his head in surprise, just as he had in the hallway when she'd admitted she would have done what it took to stay alive. He really did think he was the only one who felt emotions sometimes, didn't he? "Hell, if she'd just said she drugged him to impregnate herself, that would have been enough. Even without the..." There was something so gut-twistingly creepy about someone ordering their lover to impersonate someone else's dead girlfriend that made the whole thing even worse. "...illusion she claimed Lindsey used," she concluded euphemistically.
"But my reaction played right into her hand. When she gets a response, that means she wins."
"She didn't win," she corrected. "You figured it out, and we stopped her. We won."
He slumped back against the couch with a long sigh. "It doesn't feel like winning."
"I know."
There was another long silence, then pitifully-quiet admission, "It all just hurts."
She didn't know which part he meant: the self-inflicted stab wounds, the depth of his longing for Maeve, the pain of so much self-recrimination, or the headache from sleep deprivation. But looking over her best friend, she didn't doubt for a moment that his statement was true - and much worse than he could admit to. "I know," she murmured, gently rubbing his shoulder the way she would for an overtired, flu-stricken Henry.
"I can identify the causes, but I just...I can't make it stop."
It's times like this she wishes she weren't a profiler by training, that she didn't spend her days reading into every detail and assuming the worst would happen. Because an admission like that from someone with his history... he hadn't said it quite that way before, at least not to her, even when he had told her later how much he had been struggling. But maybe it was an overreaction; Spence was strong, he had stayed sober this long (as far as she knew), and just because she'd been enjoying an extra glass of wine or two after dinner the past few nights didn't mean that he meant what she thought he meant. There was a big difference between the two. "You will," she tried to reassure him. "It's not overnight, but you will." She paused, then opted to try the only tactic that had seemed to help all week. "I did. After Afghanistan, it took quite awhile before I felt normal again. And it still comes up sometimes."
"Anniversaries," he concluded knowingly, and she nodded.
"Yeah, you called me on that," she admitted with a fond smile. "But it's a lot easier now than it was."
"How did you get to that point? Because what I want...I shouldn't."
Damnit. She was hearing him right. And the problem was, she didn't know what in the world to say to help convince him there was another, more bearable way to slog through the hellscape. She didn't know of an alternative except for time and therapy, which she was sure he had been ordered to attend, and other than that...what else was there?
Meetings.
There were occasionally fliers or memos distributed to all FBI employees across all divisions that included information on, well, help that was available. There were confidential meetings for agents who had a history of addiction...right?
"Hang on." She started to reach for her phone and could practically feel him retreating into himself, assuming she didn't want to hear this or couldn't help - she couldn't, not in any way besides listening, but maybe- "There are people who can help, the list's in my email, so I'm just going to-"
He laughed - laughed! Just for a second, but it was there, and the faint smile remained. "It's the middle of the night, they don't meet now," he replied. "A lot of times, but not this late."
It didn't surprise her that he knew that. He remembered everything he read, and he got the same emails. "I wasn't sure, with the hours we all keep," she offered, settling back into her place beside him, arm-to-arm, knee-to-knee.
He shook his head. "Nothing between midnight and six. They're assuming we're all asleep. Or on-duty, there are a lot of beat cops there."
"Wait, you've gone?"
"Sometimes," he admitted. "Sometimes when the cravings get bad." It didn't take a profiler to see that they were bad now. "I don't know if it helps. There's almost no empirical evidence to support traditional twelve-step programs given that they rely mostly on the equivalent of prayer rather than science. By treating the indulgence of addiction and even addiction itself as a moral failing rather than a chemical dependency, it places the blame on the person rather than biology or neurochemical reactions. More and more doctors are recognizing it as a series of chemical reactions instead of a personal weakness."
"It's not weakness," she assured him, and he flashed a grateful half-smile to show he appreciated her saying it.
"I know. From a science standpoint, I know. But that's the thing - it doesn't feel like chemistry right now, it feels like..."
...like something to be ashamed of. Like a personal failing. Like yet another poor choice he could make to ruin everything. The defeated lines on his face made it easy to fill in the blanks.
He sank back into the couch again before continuing. "I don't know if it matters anymore." That scared her - hearing him say something to that level- Seeing her stricken expression, his words tumbled out quickly. "No no no - I meant- I was thinking about how many years it had been since I'd been sober, that's a badge of pride at meetings, and I meant I wasn't sure if that counted anymore. I wasn't- I mean I'm not-"
"I know," she replied, because she did. If she thought about it rationally for even half a second, she knew that. That wasn't him. Certainly not with how much his mom needed him and how seriously he took that. But given all the hits he'd taken recently, how exhausted and world-weary he sounded, it had been too easy for her overspent brain to jump there. "Why wouldn't it count?"
"Because of Mexico."
"But that wasn't your fault. You didn't take the drugs voluntarily. Why would that count against you?"
"I didn't take them voluntarily with Tobias Hankel, either."
"Not the first time, but you did later," she pointed out. "That's different. You haven't kept taking them this time, right?"
He shook his head. "No - they were awful. I couldn't focus, I couldn't remember anything, it took days before I started to feel like I was in my own mind again."
"Then I don't think it counts against you, Spence." He nodded but didn't respond otherwise, as though he still wasn't sure. Or like he knew she was right but couldn't manage to convince enough of himself of the fact to really absorb it.
They sat in silence again, and she found herself relishing the sound and feel of him just being near her - and a free man, and no guard shouting that they weren't allowed to touch. The relief of knowing that the only demons left - surmountable as they were - for him to battle were internal... it meant more to her than she could express.
She hoped that helped him a little, too. She knew it would, eventually, once he could start adjusting back to a more normal state.
Starting with one key element.
"When did you last sleep?"
"Two nights ago."
"How long?"
He blinked, trying to figure it out, seemingly needing to work overtime to remember; it hurt watching him struggle to put his brain into gear. She hoped this would help, at least a little. "Couple hours."
"When's the last time you slept more than 3 hours in a night?"
He thought about it - hard - for an extended period before finally admitting, "I don't know." The words sounded foreign coming from him, and he seemed just as thrown by the response as she was.
"Then that's too long. C'mon - lie down." She slipped off the couch to give him space, but he simply stared up at her. "Spence."
"I don't know if I can." He looked as defeated as ever, scared, and like he might start crying from exhaustion and frustration like Henry used to when he was a toddler. "I'm exhausted, I know that, but I don't know what's waiting for me."
She tried not to let slip how much it hurt to see him afraid of his own mind again. Putting on her best mom voice, she tried a different tack. "It's okay - I'll be right here."
"No - don't be ridiculous. You need to sleep, too."
"I'm fine, I slept today while Michael did," she replied, sitting on the floor beside the couch and looking up at him. "So you get some rest, and I'll be right here if you need me."
He started to protest, but she assumed he could tell from her expression that she wasn't backing down. Either that or he was too tired to fight anyone anymore. He slowly toed off his shoes and laid down on the couch. After a moment of thought, he tugged a throw pillow into place under his head and tried to relax. She unwrapped the afghan and laid it over him, then smoothed back his hair almost instinctively and was met with an exhausted but genuine smile.
She grabbed her book off the end table and sat on the carpet, back against the couch. As she flipped open to the last dog-earred page, she heard a quiet, "Hey, JJ? How'd you get me out of there?"
"Emily went to the judge. We gave her all the evidence we had, and it convinced her."
"The judge allowed an ex parte conversation like that?"
"Apparently," she replied.
"Well, I suppose it's not ex parte because she's not a party. But even so, I would have thought-"
"Spence."
"...right. We'll talk tomorrow?"
"We'll talk any time you want," she replied, and that earned another sleepy smile as his eyes closed.
She half-expected him to fall asleep practically the moment he was horizontal. She had certainly knocked out pretty quickly her first night home after the showdown with Scratch. On the other hand, she half-expected him to be unable to force himself to relax enough to do more than drift in and out of nightmares. What she hadn't expected was the moment about ten minutes after he laid down when he seemed to snap like an overtaut rubberband, every limb going limp and heavy and teartracks appearing on his cheeks. The release took her by surprise, but god knew he needed it. "It's okay, Spence," she murmured as she tucked the afghan up around his chin and settled in for the night. "I'm right here if you need me."