Chapter Text
Part One: How Does My Head Not Split With What's Inside Of It?
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“Ask me how I did it.” Cat grins wolfishly, leaning back in the steel chair. Spencer stares at her, but the shock factor of her announcement wins out and he concedes.
“How did you do it?”
“I had Lindsey dose you in Mexico,” She drawls, “You blacked out and lost time- and I gave her very specific instructions to get you in the mood.”
“What, did she pretend to be you?” Spencer snaps, narrowing his eyes.
“Why, would that have worked?”
Spencer’s stomach turns over.
“No.” He cuts back, far too quickly. He can’t stand this woman.
“Yeah, no I know,” Cat scoffs, equally as dismissive, “Believe me, I know exactly where I stand on the ‘Spencer Reid Hot or Not List’.”
There’s a split-second as they stare each other down that has him wondering for a second if she knows exactly what he’s thinking, exactly what disgusting thrill flares in the depths of his subconscious during their face offs- knows that she gets his blood pumping in a way that’s mostly with utter contempt and fury, but a little of something else too. Some sort of dark competitive streak that he would never, ever admit to having.
“I told her to pretend to be Maeve.” Cat says slyly, barely containing her smug glee.
She doesn’t need to say anything else. The air suddenly seems to be sucked out of his chest and the room becomes hot and impossible to breathe in. Snatches of memory come back to him, flickering through his mind in fractured pieces. A breathy voice in his ear whispering encouragement, anxiety and fear that’s soon quelled by the affirmation that it’s Maeve- beautiful, smart, fierce Maeve- who he loves so dearly and trusts implicitly. Relief flooding through him, a little confusion too because Maeve can’t be here- Maeve is gone, she’s- no. She’s here. She’s here and she loves him, and her long dark hair is swishing before his eyes and she’s got her hands on him.
He’s only ever been able to dream about what’s happening before his very eyes. He’d always imagined that she would be shy and chaste, that he’d take her home after a date where they’d delved into each other's minds and kiss her sweetly on her doorstep. She’d deepen it, and invite him inside and they’d be nervous but happy as they explored one another’s bodies. Spencer would lay her down on her bed and worship every part of her with fervour until she knew exactly how much he loved her.
There’s alarm bells ringing somewhere in his head that this isn’t how Maeve would be- the dry hand wrapped around his dick jerking him off with clinical boredom doesn’t seem right, the sharp nails that catch him on the upstroke wouldn’t be found on his late girlfriend- she couldn’t have nails like that working in a lab. But the overwhelming hazy cloud of lust and relief he’s in seems to smooth all of that over and leaves him hazy and pliable until that delicious hot, familiar heat builds in his stomach and he’s coming-
Bile rises in his throat and he jolts up from his chair, rushing out of the room and ignoring every foul, disgusting insult that spits out of the woman in front of him’s mouth. He slams the interrogation room door shut, blood roaring in his head and tears prickling at his eyes. JJ is in front of him, handing him a file with a tight, withdrawn look on her face and telling him something about a timeline. He glances at the page she hands him, that one stupid box that’s ticked ‘yes’ lazily in some doctor’s scrawling handwriting- such an easy slide of the pen for whoever drew it and such a life altering, shattering consequence for him. He hurls the paper at the two-way window furiously, scrubbing his watering eyes with his free hand.
“Sorry- I’m sorry, it’s not you.” Spencer apologises immediately to JJ. She nods, barely, but doesn’t say anything. She probably doesn’t know what to say- not in this fucked up situation, not to him as he is now. He’s not the same person he used to be- not the same Reid that she went to that soccer game with all those years ago, not the same Reid that gingerly held her newborn son in the hospital, not the same Reid that cried on her couch for ten weeks, and not even the same Reid that she visited in prison.
“We need to search her cell,” Spencer hears himself saying roughly, “Why didn’t we search her cell? Why didn’t we do that before even talking to her, we should have been ahead of this. We let her get ahead of us, I let her get to me!” His voice is angry and dangerously high pitched and if there was anything else left in the room for him to throw, he probably would. He has no idea where these impulses are coming from, and he feels sick at the fact his strained, terrified voice sounds uncomfortably similar to Diana Reid’s.
JJ goes, and it’s the longest ten minutes of his life standing and staring at the evil bitch grinning to herself and pawing his watch as he waits for his friend to come back.
“Spence?” She says quietly behind him, and her voice tells him all he needs to know straight away but he lets her continue, “We found an insemination device in her cell. It’s crude, but that’s undoubtedly what it was fashioned to be. There’s um- there was a condom too. They’re bagging everything up now to send off to a lab, and Garcia’s putting a rush on it all and a paternity test too. It might not even be-”
“It’s mine.” He cuts her off, sliding down the wall to the ground and resting his forehead in his hands. “I remember.”
JJ pauses.
“You remember?”
“I thought it was just- I don’t know. A hallucination, or something. It was faint, but there. I thought maybe just my brain was trying to fill in gaps with what it wanted to, to protect me or something? I don’t know, I don’t have a real hypothesis. I couldn’t make sense of why I’d have brief flashes of Maeve in the middle of everything that happened in Mexico. Once she triggered it, it all came back to me.”
“Spence,” JJ says softly, “You thought you remembered holding the knife. Your memory hasn’t been perfect through all this. It might not be yours.”
He doesn’t bother to respond.
They get the paternity results within hours- having been ‘lucky’ enough that the vial of blood the prison hospital had used to confirm the pregnancy was still on hand and and usable, and Spencer’s DNA already being documented on his bureau file for comparison meant that they could race it through in record time.
The baby is his.
He doesn’t know how to react- whether he’s going to explode in a violent outburst or crumble inwardly and fall to his knees and sob, or what. He finds himself standing frozen, unable to move or process the information JJ’s reluctantly confirmed.
“No.” Spencer breathes, “No. No, no, no, no, no. This isn’t- this isn’t possible. You can’t- you can’t just- it takes an average of three tries of intrauterine insemination for pregnancy to occur, and that’s under perfect conditions in a clinical setting with controlled variables. Sperm has to be kept as close to sixty eight degrees as possible to ensure motility, there’s no way she could have done that. There’s no way she kept it viable for the whole journey from Mexico to smuggling it in prison, that’s not possible. This isn’t possible, you can’t just steal someone’s y'know- and suddenly have a baby!” His voice is shrill and hysterical and he has no idea what’s even coming out of his mouth, but he can’t believe this. Even if Lindsey had- had raped him, because that’s what it was, it was rape- it would have had to take a miracle for a pregnancy to be achieved from that.
“It is, Spence. It’s possible, and it’s happening.” JJ says, squeezing his shoulders tightly. He can’t meet her eyes.
His nails dig bloody crescents into his palms as he repeats statistics in his head and wills his breathing to slow down. It's fine, 1 in 8 known pregnancies end in miscarriage. It's fine.