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Dependence. That was how others described it. A dependence on drugs, or alcohol, or whatever the object of addiction was.
Dependence. Noun. The state of relying, on or being controlled, by someone or something else.
Control. That sounded about right.
He’d always known, logically, that addiction was both a mental problem and a physical one. He’d read the statistics, and talked to people who struggled, and not just on cases, either, Las Vegas was a hub for people with addictions. The body learns to cope with the narcotics pumping through the user’s veins, and coping turns to reliance, reliance to dependence. One day, you’re simply too far down the path to turn back around and walk out, the only way is forward. The only way, sometimes, is to get worse.
Each prick on a needle in the crux of his arm was accompanied by a flurry of knowledge he could never forget: Almost 21 million Americans have at least one addiction, but only 10% of them receive treatment, 4% of males in America abuse opioids, West Virginia has the nation’s highest rate of overdose deaths at 51.5 deaths per 100,000 people–
The list goes on, it always does. The thoughts get worse the longer he lets himself stew in them. The worst part of his addiction, Spencer thinks (because despite it all he will acknowledge, just to himself, that he is an addict), is that he is entirely self-aware of all the damage he is doing to himself. To his body, which already struggled year after year through the necessary physical requirement tests for the FBI. To his mind, the only thing that ensures people put up with his presence, the only thing that keeps him employed and not alone. But it's not enough to stop him. Once the wave of relief washes over him and the drug hits his bloodstream, it's too late to think about anything else other than the peace and quiet that settles over his thoughts. His mind is finally at rest again. That's all that matters in the moment.
No one means to become an addict. Honestly, Spencer thinks, no one ever really means to do anything. All Spencer knows is that one moment he was digging a grave, his own grave, the next Tobias Hankel was dead, and he was walking away with the small clink of a handful of glass bottles coming from his pocket. He didn’t even know why he did it at the time. He didn’t want more drugs, he didn’t want more reminders of the seemingly endless hours he had spent tied to that chair. He didn’t want drugs, he wanted peace. But after two days of torture and stress, he couldn’t seem to find the difference between the two.
He didn’t even feel bad about it at the time. He didn’t feel anything, just the freezing air hitting his skin like an ice-cold blast and the dried blood that was stuck to his sweaty skin. No one had checked his pockets, and no one had questioned why he wanted to return to the body for just a moment, the body of a man who tortured him. He wants to hate everyone for it, for not knowing, for not questioning him, for not looking in his eyes and knowing he needed to be stopped, but he doesn’t have the energy.
Most days feel like climbing out of a ditch just to jump back into it. Each time he uses again, each time his feet hit the floor of that goddamn ditch, a pit of shame settles in his stomach, and it gets bigger with each prick of the needle. He knows he is the reason he is getting worse. He is the one who keeps buying more, keeps shoving it into his veins, but stopping never feels like a viable option. His body has grown attached to the feeling of a needle in his arm. He’s too tired, too far gone, to truly consider stopping or getting help.
He’s made the bed, he might as well lie in it– no matter the consequences. Because he does know them, no amount of Dilaudid or numbing silence in his mind can delete the facts from his subconscious thoughts. There is only one outcome for an addict who refuses to get sober. But he can’t find it in himself to care.
He wants to believe that he’s good at hiding it, how much he’s struggling, but being constantly surrounded by people who decipher strangers' minds for a living means that their obliviousness could be nothing but a choice. It means they see him, they see what is happening to him, and they just don’t care. God, he just wants someone to look him in the eyes and tell him he isn’t doing well. He just wants someone to see it and realise his health is more important than his job. But if his friends won’t, he doubts anyone will.
That’s until he sees Ethan again. Ethan, who is so far away from the horrors of the BAU that being near him lets Spencer forget about the truth for a while. He can just sit and listen to music filling the room like a lavender haze. It’s stupid to do this with a case on, to ignore his teammates' calls. But he wants to be selfish for once, he wants to put himself before his job. He almost laughs at the thought. He needed this, and he still felt bad for it. Not bad enough to pick up the phone though. The music Ethan plays is louder than the dial tone, and louder than the voices in his head, he’d do anything to stay there as long as possible.
But it can’t last. Ethan wasn’t in the BAU, or the FBI, or even the government, he couldn’t pull him out of the hole he had dug himself into. No matter how much Spencer wants to. Thinking of Ethan makes Spencer feel like a caged bird dreaming of gliding peacefully through the skies. Thinking of Ethan is so close to dreaming of freedom that he can barely tell the difference anymore.
He wants Ethan to look at him and tell him he’s been living in a twisted nightmare. That the last few months were all a dream. That he would wake up soon, and Tobias Hankel would be nothing more than a figment of his imagination created by his subconscious in a fitful night of sleep. Entirely imagined and entirely fictional. He hoped that Ethan would shake him out of the dream and tell him he had never touched drugs, never bought them, never sought them out, never used them. But the most he can do is point up and show Spencer there is a light to crawl towards.
Ethan can’t pull him out, climbing out of the hole is a job left solely to Spencer, and Spencer alone.
He tells Gideon he’s struggling. He waits for Gideon to fix it. He waits for Gideon to say something. He doesn’t. So Spencer promises to never miss a plane again. He doesn’t mention the only reason he won’t is because he’d rather die than disappoint the team. Even sitting right next to him, Gideon’s never felt further away. The man he looked up to, relied on, is drifting away from him, slowly but unmistakably.
He’s not totally oblivious; he knows Gideon is disappointed in him for letting it get this bad, he just hopes that Spencer is disappointed in him just as deeply. He can’t imagine ever letting anyone else in the team suffer alone for so long, even Emily, who he’s barely had the time to know. He’d lay down his life for any of them. It hurts to be given proof they wouldn’t do the same. For a split second, he wonders if they are ashamed of him, before he washes away the thought in favour of mentally reciting the first hundred numbers of pi– a grounding technique he had held onto from his youth when his mind felt too deep to stand up in. But it still lingers behind every dissection of their behaviour. He’s a profiler, he knows how to follow the evidence, even when he hates the conclusion.
He sees the shared glances they send each other when they think he can’t see, the whispers hidden behind half-filled coffee cups that are quickly disguised by mundane comments about the weather and constant workload when Spencer enters the kitchen area of the office.
The day he decides to get truly sober starts like every other day for the past few months. Despite promising Gideon he would, in every way except plainly after seeing Ethan, he doesn’t stop completely. It’s almost impossible to stop without help. But he can’t ask for help, his team has already denied it to him by looking away. He won’t ruin the quiet deniability that floats around the office by admitting he needs help. It's easy to lie and pretend he’s doing ok.
Until it's not. It's such a small thing it's almost laughable. No one else would have cared. Morgan is leaning against his desk, coffee cup in hand, waiting for Hotch to arrive back from a meeting with Strauss and asking about his evening. Spencer says he spent most of it reading a book, which is true for once. But when Morgan asks which one, his mind blanks. He can’t remember.
He can’t remember.
He’s never forgotten something, anything. Especially not something like this. Yet there he was, mind blank and all memory of his previous night’s reading lost to the wind. He had known, more in a vague symptomatic sense, that memory loss was common in drug addicts. He had never expected to experience it himself. For the first time in months, for the first time since he was digging his own grave, he feels dread settle in his stomach like it's meant to be there. He slaps on a smile quickly and blurts out the name of a book he hasn’t read in years, he’s not even sure he owns a copy any more, but it is a quick enough response to evade Morgan’s painfully suspicious eyes and deflect questions back towards his friend’s adventure on his night out.
Hotch comes back from his meeting and Spencer immediately asks for 14 days off to visit his mother. He claims that she is severely unwell after a bad reaction to new medications and the doctors think it would be beneficial for him to be around for at least a week if possible to help calm her. Hotch agrees before he even finishes fabricating his explanation. A look in the unit chief's eyes tells Spencer that the man knows the real reason, but he can’t find it in him to care.
“Spencer,” Hotch calls out as he is dismissed from the office, calling him Spencer, not Reid, for the first time in weeks as he seemingly stumbles towards his next words unsurely, “Stay safe.”
He definitely knows. Turning out the door, Spencer tries to bury the resentment that swims between his rib cage, the resentment that calls him to scream in pain when all the man offers for his deniable knowledge is a ‘good luck’ and ‘safe travels’.
He swallows the retort that there was no safety for an addict and promptly vomits in the first stall of the bathroom in a fit of nerves, grabs his satchel and walks out of the BAU office with barely a nod or goodbye to anyone. The only stable thing in his life is the dread of going home– the dread of being left alone with only his thoughts and urges. Talking to Hotch doesn’t change that, if anything it's made it worse. Now there are expectations with his time off.
The expectations were simple: go home and fix yourself. Come back and forget what happened. Come back when you’ve finally gotten better. Hotch’s eyes, if not his words, told him to come back sober, to come back healthy.
He travels home on autopilot. Any moment of stoppage or silence is a possible moment of reconsidering. The next few moments happen in a flash before he can even think about what he is doing. His keys in his front door’s lock. Glass bottles in his hands. Liquid down the sink. Snapped needles in the bin. Deleting numbers from his phone. Even though his mind will never let him forget the sequence of numbers that lead towards his dealers, he thinks it's the act of deleting them that should mean something more than trying to physically ‘forget’.
It's two weeks of feeling like he’s going to die. He can’t sleep most nights, can’t eat when he’s awake. His hands shake and he cries alone, curled up in a ball in the centre of his bed for hours. The ache in his bones, in his muscles, in his mind, feels never-ending. The analog clock beside his bed is the only proof of passing time. His blinds are closed and most of the lights are off in his apartment, save for the hallway light near the front door just in case someone comes to check on him. They don’t. He tries not to hate them for not giving him help he didn’t ask for.
On the fifth day, he finds the energy to get out of bed and force food down his throat. Days have passed without him and he is sure the team has barely noticed his absence. He has barely noticed it himself. He tries to read to distract himself, but when it takes him five minutes to read a single page, words dancing around and losing meaning somewhere between the page and his mind, he puts it down and doesn’t pick it up again. On the sixth day he searches the apartment for any dilaudid bottles he might have missed and hates himself for each second he questions whether the search is to confirm there are no bottles left or to find some to use. He doesn't find any, so it doesn’t matter either way he supposes.
By the seventh day he still can’t remember what book he was reading, the one Morgan had asked about. So he starts the lists. Lists of things he can remember with certainty. Things he shouldn’t forget.
Morgan likes his coffee with milk but no sugar. He hates horror movies but will never turn down an invitation to see one. He calls his mother at least once a week and twice when there is a difficult case. Three times if it's a difficult case with children involved.
Penelope’s favourite hair accessory is her purple flower clip and she's worn it 254 times since he met her, including the first day they met. She applied for her position with a CV written in pink glittery ink and Hotch still keeps it in the top drawer of his desk, it makes him smile even after the worst cases. She is always at work early in the morning after a bad case so no one has to suffer alone.
Gideon keeps a copy of each of Spencer’s dissertations in his office cabinets. They are professionally bound and safely tucked away but worn from constant reading and handling. He always hands out food during cases, he knows the rest of the team gets too zoned in to remember they need to take care of themselves.
JJ loves butterflies, she has a small book of butterfly classifications in the bottom drawer of her desk. She always has snacks on her somewhere, used to being on the go with work and a young child, but somewhere along the way, the team’s favourite foods have found their way into her handbag next to her own.
Emily is a not-so-secret goth music fanatic. She listens to that style of music on the way home from cases, always low enough to not be heard unless right next to her. He isn’t sure how she manages to fall asleep to it. But she always does. She picks at her nails when she’s nervous, but she tries to hide it under her desk most of the time, or in her pocket if she isn’t sitting.
Hotch stays at the office after every bad case for at least an hour in case anyone needs to talk, he knows they don’t all have someone to talk to when things go bad. While he waits to see if any of them need him, he always calls Haley and Jack to make sure they are safe, no matter the time of night.
These things are important. He will not forget them. He refuses to. The lists get longer as the days go on. His hands shake and his writing is slow but he keeps writing anyway. He will not forget. His days become a perpetual cycle of craving, denying and feeling like he is dying. On the tenth day, he feels disgusting and manages to get himself into the shower, he drags a plastic chair in with him to sit on and refuses to consider it defeat. Cold shivers rack his body, forcing him to turn the water towards a scalding hot temperature. He barely feels it, his hands still shivering as if he were outside in the snow, but his skin glows bright red at the heat.
By the morning of the fifteenth day, he was dressed and sat, coffee in hand, on the subway to work. Life continues to turn despite the itch in his arm and the headache in his skull. He has things to do, people to disappoint, and people to make proud. Morgan asks how his mother is, he says she has settled now and the doctors think it will remain that way. He smiles and nods and turns back towards Emily to ask about her weekend. The rest of the morning is depressingly normal, as if he had spent the last two weeks in pain alone. But the shake in his hands has gotten smaller, so that must mean something. He supposed that meant he was getting better, even if he didn’t feel it in his heart or his head. Heath started with the hands, Spencer supposed, or at least it did for him.
Hotch stares at him through the windows of his office. He stares back. Hotch raises an eyebrow. Spencer just nods. The silent request for sobriety being silently fulfilled, alone. Hotch smiles, nods back, and returns to his own work.
Gideon’s blinds are closed over his windows. For a moment, just a split second, he considers going to him. Not even to say anything. Just to look the man in the eye and hope he understands. But there is work to be done and files to be written and papers to be reviewed. The world has spun for 14 days without him. It did not stop all those months ago, shovel in hand and pockets full of Dilaudid.
There is an itch in the crook of his elbow that Spencer won’t scratch. He will spend the rest of his days avoiding it. That is his punishment for his sins, the result of his confession to Hankel.
He keeps the list of things to remember in a pocket of his satchel. Folded neatly and tucked away. He does not forget.