Archive of Our Own

Spencer’s world is fragile. 

He learns it for the first time at eight years old, just starting high school, walking a new path in his multitude of tests to find the quickest route there when he spots a dead bird poking out from beneath a bush. 

He stops, stares at it. He’s never seen a dead animal in person - he’s not exactly in a rural area and dead animals don’t just show up as often as one might think. It’s not that he doesn’t know they exist, obviously he does, but he’s never seen one in real life. Only pictures in books, theoreticals, images he’s created himself. 

He considers before carefully nudging the bird further underneath the bush with his sneaker, and his walk home detours to the library and a nearby hardware store. 

The next day, he returns to the bush armed with a pair of gloves and three gallon-size Ziploc bags, just to be really, really safe. 

He takes care to layer each bag in one another, and then he dons the gloves, and moments later the bird is placed carefully inside. 

Spencer seals the three bags, wraps the whole thing in a fabric tote bag he brought, and walks the rest of the way home with the bird balanced carefully in his hands. 

The day after that, he goes up to his brand new biology teacher as of one week and says bluntly, “I want to do a dissection lab and use this space for it.”

His teacher blinks. Spencer knows it’s an unusual request from one of his normally-aged students; it’s an even more unusual request from one six years younger than the average class age. 

His teacher sets his pen down and turns to him. He has a way of acting, a sort of quiet presence that makes one feel taken seriously. His class is no-nonsense and difficult, but he values effort. 

“For what purpose?” he asks. 

“Personal.”

“What are you dissecting?”

“A dead bird. I found it on the sidewalk two days ago - I used gloves to pick it up and put it in the freezer. It’s been two days already, but it died recently I think. It’s only been through putrefaction and it hasn’t bloated that much,” Spencer rattles off, taking care of all the concerns an adult would have. He was safe about it, he read the entire book about the death of animals during his classes before picking it up. 

There’s a few moments of silence. The teacher seems to consider, before he then says, “I appreciate you asking me, rather than going behind my back.”

Spencer smiles and nods. He doesn’t mention the fact he’d already had a plan fully thought out if his implicit trust in this teacher had been misplaced, every outcome thought through. 

His teacher continues. “Spencer, why do you want to dissect a bird?”

It’s not judgmental - it’s more… probing. Like he can sense that as soon as he asks the question, Spencer falters, realizes he doesn’t quite know, and shifts awkwardly on his feet. 

He doesn’t know. He just… found the dead bird, and Spencer likes to learn, and… it sparked a strange fascination. Morbid, his mind supplies, from his recent endeavor in reading the entire m section of the dictionary. A morbid fascination. 

It seems stupid, now. What eight year old wants to dissect a dead bird? Spencer is as much aware of his abnormalities and accepting of them as he is aware of how not normal they are. 

Then again, what eight-year-old is in high school?

He looks down. “I- I don’t know. ‘S interesting,” he mumbles. His plan to dissect the bird anyway without his biology teacher suddenly becomes a viable option again. 

The teacher smiles. “It’s alright. All you need is for it to be interesting,” he says gently, and Spencer looks back up with wide eyes. 

“It’s too late now, but how about tomorrow after school? You can put the bird into the freezer here in the morning.”

Spencer’s grinning before he knows it, bouncing slightly on his feet. “Okay,” he says, and then, mustering up more excitement in his tone, “okay- thank you!”

His biology teacher smiles again, and Spencer isn’t even fazed on the walk home when a group of older students show up and leave him sitting on the sidewalk with several additional bruises, or when his mother breaks several plates claiming they’re radioactive material. 

He spends an entire hour reading three dissection manuals and preparing how he wants to go about this, and he somehow manages to sleep relatively quickly that night given the thrill running through him.

The teacher - Mr. Moore, Spencer makes sure to learn and remember - takes the bird in the morning and lets Spencer write his name in Sharpie on the bag, then lets him watch as he puts it in the freezer, closes the door, and hands Spencer the key to turn to lock it. 

He spends the entire day nearly vibrating, waiting for the last class to end. His teachers try to get him to do his work and he finishes it within minutes, dares them to protest - and argues with one, who’s quickly silenced when she sees that all of Spencer’s answers are right - and continues reading his fourth dissection manual. 

The last bell rings and Spencer makes it back to Mr. Moore’s classroom in under three minutes from a different floor. 

He isn’t even done with all of his students, still talking to one, but he gives Spencer an amused smile at seeing him appear so quickly in his doorway. 

Spencer takes the time to set up the items he brought - one journal with a black cover, because black is the color of death, his pen, and his bag placed carefully away from all of it. Then, he sits in front of a big empty space on the table, and waits. He would read, but he finished the fourth dissection manual and that’s all he brought with him. 

The student leaves five minutes later and Mr. Moore starts organizing some files on his desk. “You’re really excited about this, aren’t you?” he asks with a small smile. 

Spencer’s hands fidget under the desk. He could see how this could be taken the wrong way, so he attempts to wipe the smile from his face and curb his energy. “Um- it’s just interest. It’s cool, I mean- dissection.”

Mr. Moore laughs. “Spencer, it’s alright. There are whole careers built off of finding dead things fascinating, and plenty of people have it as a hobby. I like it when my students have a genuine interest in biology.”

At that, Spencer allows himself a single bounce in his chair and another wide smile, and watches impatiently as Mr. Moore finally stands up to unlock the freezer.

He talks as Mr. Moore gathers the various tools and equipment. “I identified the bird - a great-tailed grackle, one of the most common birds in Las Vegas. They live all over the place and are used to city life and being around people. Um, the one I found is a male because his colors are darker - females are dark brown, males are black, almost iridescent. It’s rare to find males, too, because females have a higher survival rate because they’re smaller. And smaller birds take weeks to decay, while larger birds take months. It happens faster in different conditions, and Las Vegas has some of those, like warmer weather even in the fall like right now.”

Mr. Moore stays quiet, but Spencer doesn’t ever get the feeling he’s irritated by it. Actually, his expression changes minutely with the things Spencer says, and he seems to be indulging the ramble with his silence. 

“I read four different dissection manuals before this,” and that gets an eyebrow raise, but Mr. Moore still doesn’t say anything, “and a book on animal decay before I even picked up the bird. I know all the routines and what I’m supposed to do.”

Mr. Moore hums, setting an array of sharp tools next to him. “Well, I will still be guiding you, if that’s alright. You don’t want to mess this up at all, do you?”

Spencer shakes his head quickly. He doesn’t - he imagines another dead bird won’t just pop up on the sidewalk again for him if he fails this. He wants to do it correctly, and his implicit trust in Mr. Moore has already deepened with the response he’s had to Spencer’s request. 

He smiles, finally setting the bag with the bird on the table. He pulls two gloves out of a box and hands Spencer the box, allowing him to take his own gloves and slide them on. 

Mr. Moore unwraps the bird and stands next to him, by the array of dissection tools. “Do you know how to start?”

Faced with the sudden prospect of actually doing it, Spencer hesitates. He glances at the tools, paragraphs and instructions running through his head, then back at the bird, dissection images and maps flitting through his mind, and falters. 

Mr. Moore pulls over his journal, opening it to the front page. Spencer frowns and turns another page, because he can’t just start on the first page. The first page is sacred. 

Mr. Moore doesn’t mention it. Instead, he taps Spencer’s gloved dominant hand. “Well, first you would set up your research notes,” he says gently, and Spencer latches onto the direction, sliding that glove off.

He taps the pen in the direction of the bird. “What do you think the cause of death is?”

Spencer squints, leaning over the bird. “Um. It’s not crushed, so I don’t think it was run over by a car.”

He changes angles, tilting sideways, but otherwise struggles to figure out anything more until Mr. Moore slowly pinches the tip of one wing and carefully spreads it out, pointing the pen at it. “Look at its wing.”

“Broken,” Spencer murmurs, eyes tracing the violent angle it’s twisted at. 

“And?” Mr. Moore prompts. 

“Birds who can’t fly are vulnerable,” Spencer says. “Maybe it starved to death?”

“Too many ground prey animals. Birds eat worms, remember.”

Spencer frowns. “Uh. Something attacked it?”

“Think. What are small bird’s predators in Las Vegas?”

Spencer read a book about this, too, though much earlier, and he starts rattling off species - “Roadrunners, some kinds of owls, Gila monsters-“

Mr. Moore cuts in. “There you go. So, what’s the cause of death?”

Spencer grins and takes the pen from Mr. Moore, who gives his own small smile and takes a step back, allowing Spencer to start writing in his notebook. 

Great-tailed Grackle

COD (cause of death): broken wing, natural predators

He sets the pen down and Mr. Moore returns his smile, nodding at the bird. 

“Now we can start dissecting,” he says, and picks up one of the scalpels. 

An hour in, having been left to his own devices once he grew more confident in his actions, Spencer looks up to where Mr. Moore is grading papers. 

“Can I preserve the bones?” he asks. 

Mr. Moore looks up at him. He frowns, and Spencer’s stomach drops, but he seems to be considering. “That would take a while. How much do you want to preserve?”

Spencer looks back down at the bird, cut open, its insides on display and its blood on his gloved hands. 

To be honest, a small part of him wants to preserve it exactly like this, in this purgatory state. Sprawled out on the white parchment paper, black feathers sliced open, unclean, messy, staining his hands and the clean white of the paper. Death isn’t clean and he doesn’t understand why every depiction of it - taxidermy, bone preservation - tries to make it so. It certainly wasn’t a clean death for the bird, being half-hidden under a bush on the sidewalk.

But he thinks that would actually get him in trouble, so he swallows the strange desire and instead says, “The skull. And as many bones as I can.”

Mr. Moore takes a breath. “Well, the skull is a good starting point. I’ll compromise with you - we preserve the skull and the wings. I’ll even have the wings framed in a shadow box for display, if you’d like to keep them like that.”

Spencer’s eyes light up. “Um- the skull, the wings framed, and a few other bones?” he tries hesitantly, hopefully

Mr. Moore smiles. “Alright. A few other bones it is. Try to carve them out and set them aside.”

Spencer grins, and Mr. Moore returns to grading as Spencer continues dissecting.

School ends at 2:30pm, and it’s not until 8pm that Spencer finally finishes his dissection. He’s not worried, because he had Mr. Moore call his dad and tell him he’d be late back home. 

He’s happy that Mr. Moore has decided to stay with him this long. To be honest, he could probably spend another hour here, but he knows Mr. Moore also has a home to get back to, a family, and he doesn’t want to keep him from that. 

The bird is sufficiently torn apart, Spencer’s filled three pages worth of notes, pressed two of the feathers onto the fourth page, and has set aside the skull, an assortment of bones, and carefully cut both wings off. Mr. Moore said he’d take care of the delicate process of preserving the arrangement of the bones underneath the wings when pulling them out. 

He sets his scalpel down and looks up. “Um. Mr. Moore? I finished.”

Mr. Moore rises from his seat. “That’s good, because I’ve just caught up on grading assignments from the past week.”

He says it with a smile, like he’s happy he’s stayed here this long, and Spencer’s anxiety dissipates. He grins back, then looks back down at the ( organized, thank you) mess he’s made. 

“Um. How do I clean this all up?” he asks. 

Mr. Moore laughs. “Here, I’ll tell you where everything goes. Keep your gloves on- first, we have to dispose of the bird…”

At the end of it all, Spencer ends up with a shadow box displaying carefully arranged, clean bones of the wings of a bird behind glass; a little bird skull; a dozen smaller, miscellaneous bones, all cleaned similarly to the wings; three pages of notes, and two feathers adhered to the fourth page, filling two two-page spreads of the notebook total. 

Spencer isn’t particularly interested in the dissection part, so he doesn’t think the notebook will be a research notebook, but he doesn’t have anything else to put in it. There isn’t a purpose for it other than that one lab, and the fact the color of death is black. 

The title page stays empty, and nothing else is written in it, but Spencer hides the notebook carefully within his room. Somewhere that his mom doesn’t tear apart even in one of her episodes. 

The wings are displayed high on the top of his bookshelf, one that he needs to use a step stool to reach, the skull next to them. And the miscellaneous pile of bones is put in a small velvet drawstring bag, which for the next two months, he carries around with him. 

The little bones become a sort of comforting object for him, the texture interesting to run the pad of his thumb over and the shape fun to spin around in his fingers. He spends another few hours researching all of the bones in the great-tailed grackle’s skeleton, figuring out which ones he pulled out, becoming so familiar with the anatomy of the bird that he can recall the entire scene of dissection and name everything he was doing at the end of two months. 

It’s during Christmas break that he’s sitting in the living room, the little bag half-hidden in his lap, and he’s rotating a small, thin bone in his hands. 

It’s thin enough he could snap it himself. He doesn’t, but he just stares at it and thinks about the bird facts he’s learned. 

In the other room, something crashes. His dad’s voice. “Diana, the house isn’t bugged- would you stop breaking things-“

“I have to make sure, William-“

Spencer tunes it out. He thinks about bird bones being hollow so they can fly. 

And if he pressed his thumb in, right there in the center, and applied more pressure, the bone would snap just like that. 

“ Get away from me!”

“Diana-“

“Why don’t you believe me?”

“Because it’s not bugged! No one’s tracking us!”

Spencer adjusts his hold on the bone so he doesn’t break it, considers. Something else crashes and he jumps. 

His shoulders tense where he sits. He holds both ends of the little bone and stares at it, sitting rigid, thrumming with fear and anxiety and irritation. 

A sound. Too sharp to be a dish or something fragile. Everything goes silent, all of a sudden, and Spencer can feel the weight of the air from here.

“I’m sorry.” Soft and sincere. 

“It’s fine.” Tired, not quite so sincere. 

He flicks both wrists down. The bone snaps with almost no effort at all, and Spencer thinks about how fragile it is. How easily something that functions so well can break like that, with the wrong kind of pressure. 

In the other room, his dad’s footsteps echo up the stairs, and the house is silent. 

When Spencer is ten years old, William Reid leaves. 

Spencer doesn’t journal. He doesn’t keep a diary, because his brain runs too fast for that and he remembers everything. He tried once and he got bored within five minutes, having already planned out his entire entry and his brain deeming the activity pointless when the words lived in his head already. 

He doesn’t journal, but a journal is what you’re supposed to do when your entire world flips upside down. When everything has shifted on its axis - when one of the legs holding up your life has collapsed. 

Spencer takes out the book that’s the color of death and opens it to the next blank page. 

He hesitates. His dad isn’t dead. He just left - maybe he’ll be back. 

Spencer knows, deep down, irrefutably, he won’t be back. 

He starts writing. 

William Reid labels the top of the page. 

After that, he fills half the page with the entire last conversation he’d been present for, word-for-word. 

Then he stops and stares at it. 

Maybe. Maybe he’ll be back. It’s a hope Spencer can’t quash, and he turns two pages back to the front of the notebook to read all of his research notes on dissecting the dead bird two years ago. 

He’s memorized them, but he runs his fingers over the nearly-imagined texture of the ink, flips back to the page for his dad, and hesitates once again before starting to write. 

COD:

Weak. It rings in his head. He’d always be weak. 

Spencer thinks of the fairytales Diana reads him. In those, the knight is strong, and the knight doesn’t leave. The knight braves every storm for the princess.

Once upon a time, his dad had been the knight. Diana and William had been the king and queen, even, so clearly in love for the first five years of Spencer’s life. He remembers. 

It had started deteriorating around six, and by eight-

He still has the snapped halves of the bird bone in the bag. 

Spencer is still here. Not particularly by choice, but he plans on staying. 

He supposes he is the knight now. And his mom called him not weak, and his dad can’t refute that because he’s not here anymore, he thinks with a vengeance. 

COD: weakness

Spencer stands up suddenly and retrieves a small framed photo of his dad from his nightstand. He unclasps the back of the frame, pulls out the photo, and then gets tape from his desk. 

On the opposite page, he tapes down the photo of his dad. Like a proper altar. On the corner, he tapes the two snapped halves of the bird bone. 

William Reid may not be dead, but his father most certainly is. Spencer thinks he may have been dying for a long time. 

Spencer refuses to properly label the book. 

He does… half of a study, of sorts. He starts asking questions of how much death people have seen in their lives, and they obviously don’t like that, so he gets maybe three solid answers before he’s stopped by three different groups of students, a goalpost, and enough bruises that he has to start putting foundation and concealer on again. 

Of the three answers he got, none of them went above three deaths in their life. 

Spencer feels like he’s cheating with it - a dead bird isn’t even a proper death in his life, and William isn’t actually dead. He’s exaggerating. Emotional, William’s voice rings in his head. 

So, because they’re not real deaths, he isn’t labeling the book. It’s the color of death, it isn’t for death. He won’t be filling it any more. The average person doesn’t see that much death in their life. 

A few months after William leaves, he arrives back at Mr. Moore’s classroom. 

“Hey, kiddo,” he greets. “I haven’t seen you in two years.”

Spencer frowns. “You don’t see me in the hallways and at lunch?”

Mr. Moore smiles. “‘ See you.’ A term used for personal connection, like this, in that context.” He pauses, and then tacks on, “And you don’t spend your lunch period eating lunch anyway.”

Spencer flushes. Mr. Moore’s been keeping track. “Um, about that. I- do you-“

He stops, the words sticking in his throat, eyes downcast. He shifts anxiously on his feet. 

Don’t ask, his brain yells at him. He’s in such a precarious position. He researched every single law on child endangerment. Every reason for CPS to be called, every valid reason for him and his mom to be separated. 

Child neglect is one of them. And teachers are mandatory reporters. 

It’s not child neglect, his brain automatically argues, the debate well-worn in his mind. We don’t have enough money. William doesn’t send enough. She’s not doing it on purpose. She’s not even doing it - I have control of the finances. 

Mr. Moore interrupts his thoughts by side-stepping him and gently closing his door. 

“Spencer,” he says gently, in such a tone that Spencer wants to burst into tears and have Mr. Moore hold him like he’s a normal ten-year-old, but that’s not what Mr. Moore should be and Spencer isn’t a normal ten-year-old so he doesn’t, “what is it?”

Spencer swallows hard. He hates asking this. He hates this. He doesn’t want to, so much that he wants to throw a tantrum about it, but Spencer has never been young enough to throw a tantrum ever, except maybe when he was two and literally could not speak or think coherently. 

“Um-“ he’s whispering now, and Mr. Moore crouches to listen. Spencer can’t meet the gaze that’s settled intensely on him, can’t look at the genuine concern in Mr. Moore’s eyes. “Do you- know- any paid research positions?”

Mr. Moore’s expression twists. “Spencer, you’re ten.”

No I’m not. William left and Spencer has never been ten years old since. He aged up to maybe sixteen, and then perhaps eighteen after that, after a month when he first dealt with the bills and a shortage of food in the house. And when he first got a check in the mail from William Reid for not-enough.  

“Even if I did,” Mr. Moore continues softly, “it would be highly illegal. No one would hire you.”

Instead of bursting into tears, Spencer falls back desperately on logic and blurts out, “Side jobs, then? N- normal kids mow lawns, uh- organize- clean-“

He’s stopped by Mr. Moore’s hands on his shoulders. Usually averse to touch, Spencer doesn’t even flinch, and instead it intensifies his urge to just collapse into the biology teacher and cry. 

But again, he reminds himself, he can’t. It’s a truth he’s been struggling to live with since William’s absence. Even William Reid had managed to hold him occasionally when he started crying. 

“Spencer, do you need money?” Mr. Moore asks bluntly. 

Spencer keeps his eyes fixed on the floor. “A teacher’s salary is- isn’t enough, you don’t have to, you have your own family-“

“Spencer.” He stops muttering to himself. “Do you need money?”

Damn. A word he isn’t supposed to say, but adults say it and he feels very much like an adult now, stuck in a child’s body. His eyes are watering despite his best efforts, and a tear slips through he hopes Mr. Moore doesn’t see with his head down. 

“Just pocket money,” he concedes quietly. That’s not suspicious, right?

Mr. Moore sighs. Spencer abruptly feels guilty, a kind of crushing weight that he’s being a burden to Mr. Moore, of all people, until-

“Okay,” he says. Spencer looks up, and Mr. Moore offers him a small smile. His thumb reaches up and swipes away the tear. 

“I have my own research side jobs that pay very well. I am willing to send you money anyway, but if you want to help, you can have a cut of the pay. Having the real experience will look good on your resume, at least, which I think you’ll need very soon given the rate you’re going through school at.” 

He winks, and Spencer’s chest lightens so quickly he almost feels dizzy. He stares, eyes wide, and that’s when the tears decide to come in earnest. 

Well, that’s definitely suspicious, but Mr. Moore laughs softly and pulls Spencer closer, wrapping his arms around him as he starts crying. 

And he murmurs, finally, near Spencer’s ear where he’s burying his face into his neck, “And I might just start bringing too much food for me to eat at lunch by myself,” and Spencer breaks down completely. 

He learns by the time he’s eleven that not only are teachers mandatory reporters, but that a teacher should never be alone with a student as a rule, and that they could lose their job over transgressions like that. 

There is never a single report to CPS. 

In Spencer’s senior year of high school, he’s assigned a biology project (not with Mr. Moore as his teacher, regrettably) to take care of a plant. 

He’s supposed to journal every stage of growth and every change in the plant daily. He makes a schedule for it, for when to water it and when to give it plant food; he pastes little images to the schedule of what the plant should look like when it’s healthy, what underwatering looks like, what overwatering looks like. 

He’s going to keep this plant alive. This plant will not end up in the book the color of death. 

For the first two weeks, it goes well. The project is two months long and for the first two weeks he keeps his plant in perfect health, sitting on his windowsill. 

Mr. Moore calls him in after school for a research project two weeks and three days in.

He drives him to a nearby laboratory, sets up the entire thing, explains it to him, and leaves Spencer be. 

Spencer gets lost in it. 

It’s not until nine pm that he even looks up from the project, as Mr. Moore walks in holding up one of the reports he was required to do, using Spencer’s data (double-checked, but Spencer understands. It’s Mr. Moore’s job on the line here.). 

“We’re all set for tonight, and it’s late,” Mr. Moore says. “We both should be getting home.”

He’s already told his mom he’d be late. He didn’t get a response back, so he’s not even sure she knows or cares. 

Spencer nods, starting to gather up the tools he’d been using. “Okay,” he says, and Mr. Moore sets the report aside before assisting in cleanup. 

Mr. Moore drives him home, and his mom is asleep on the couch in the same outfit she’s worn for three days, and Spencer slips upstairs silently. 

He gets upstairs and both of his windows’ blinds are shut. 

His eyes skip to the schedule for the plant and he’s three hours past watering time. He’s an entire day past feeding time. 

Guilt swells in his throat, makes his chest ache with the force of it, and he just barely doesn’t wake his mom up as he rushes back downstairs, prepares the water, prepares the food, and gives the plant both at once. 

Nighttime. After not getting sunlight for the entire day. 

Spencer watches the plant like a hawk for the next week, but it seems that one misstep has cost him his project. He documents the state changes anyway, the growth (or lack of) and the color. 

It looks like it’s being under-watered. Spencer starts watering it more often. 

A month in, he’s thrown the schedule away entirely and has his own schedule in his head. Water three times a day plus whenever the plant looks depressed, which is… all the time. 

He’s not saving it. He’s not keeping the plant alive. He’s going to kill this plant and its leaves are going to be pasted in the book the color of death and he’s going to have to write COD: Spencer Reid. 

But he is still twelve years old, and retains his childish optimism, and so he clings to the desperate hope he can save it. This plant was chosen specifically for its sensitivity; this project is partially to teach a sense of responsibility, to prepare you for college. 

He can save it. 

The plant is halfway wilted the very first time his mom hits him. 

It’s one of her episodes, because it always is, and the voices have turned her against the sun. Spencer just happens to be in the sun, in the backyard, studying for an exam, and she storms out yelling about how he’s going to be kidnapped by the government or something. 

He looks up, snapping his book shut on reflex.

She grabs at his arm, trying to yank him up from the ground, and he resists even though he’s pulled up into standing. 

“Mom- Mom, the sun isn’t-“

She tugs hard at his sleeve, enough that he stumbles a little. “They’re going to take you away, Spencer!”

Spencer stills for a moment, the entire moment surreal, as he stares at his mom. No they won’t, is all he can think, because I’m making sure they never see anything wrong. 

The thought is bitter, and Spencer feels like he’s thirty years old. Maybe older. Someone who’s supposed to have dealt with this kind of thing. 

He wouldn’t know; he’s twelve and dealing with this kind of thing. 

“Mom,” he pleads, and she focuses enough that he can get a word in, “the sun isn’t a government ship, it can’t just- beam me up from the ground. That’s not how that works.”

She starts dragging him inside. 

He follows, if only because her grip is iron when she wants it to be, resigning himself to several hours spent studying inside. 

He was enjoying the sun, though, enough that he tries again. “Mom, the sun is a star. It’s not a spaceship.”

She rounds on him. “Do you want to be kidnapped?” she yells, voice harsh, and then she lets go of his arm and the next thing he knows his head snaps to the side and pain blooms, stinging, on his cheek. 

He slowly looks back at her, sees her straighten back into normal posture. He doesn’t dare raise his hand up to touch the injury - the moment is frozen, and it feels as if drawing attention to it will tip the scales in a direction he won’t like. 

His mom huffs a breath, her expression unreadable save for irritation, and all she says is, “Just stay inside, Spencer,” before she turns around and walks back inside. 

So he does. Numb, not a single tear shed over it, he walks back to retrieve his books and goes upstairs to sit next to a dying plant and study for his exams with a red mark forming on his cheek. 

An hour later, there’s a knock at his door. 

Only one person other than him is in this house, so he swallows hard, closes his textbook, and says hoarsely, “Come in.”

His mom opens the door. Spencer is so, so still, and his heart speeds up in his chest, and she rounds the corner with a smile on her face. 

His heart abruptly rises to his throat and Spencer freezes. 

It’s not stinging anymore, but he can still feel the impact of her palm on his cheek, and she’s smiling at him. After hitting him. 

His hope of an apology suddenly drops away with the rest of his stomach, with something… something light, and innocent, he hadn’t even known existed. 

“I’m glad you stayed inside, Spencer,” she says gently, happily. 

Because you hit me, he thinks helplessly. He also thinks he’s breathing a bit too fast. His heart is scarily loud in his ears. 

She leans against the doorframe and considers him, her expression softening even further. “You must’ve fell to get that red mark on your cheek.”

You hit me, he thinks again, before then, and you don’t remember. 

Spencer nods numbly. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s afraid he won’t be able to say anything if he tries. His breathing is still too short and too fast. He doesn’t know what’s happening. 

She hums. “Do you want to get ice cream from the place down the street to fix it?”

There’s a mischievous spark in her eyes. Once upon a time, maybe when he was four or five, he’d jump up in excitement and he’d follow his mom down to the corner where they sold ice cream and he’d walk back with her with the chocolate melting all over him, and he’d end up sticky enough that she’d give him a bath and the loss of a majority of the ice cream would be all better too. 

But Diana doesn’t read him fairytales anymore, and he’s the knight but he’s a tragic one, and his first thought when she offers is is the sun down?

He glances out to check - yes, the sun is down, it’s around nine pm. That means she’s less likely to freak out. He hopes there’s no space stations visible in the night sky. 

Five minute walk down to the ice cream store, five minutes back. Ten minutes outside, and they’ll have to pay with his money because Diana doesn’t have any because Spencer tried giving her an allowance, because he felt bad and having the responsibility he did felt wrong, and she spent all of it on a bunch of expensive, all-natural snacks he didn’t like because, apparently, there were trackers in the genetically modified food now too. 

He finishes his calculations, and between then and now his breathing has slowed but something in him has still gone cold, and he nods. “Yeah,” he says, forcing up excitement. He stands up, forcing a smile. “Ice cream will fix it,” he says brightly, with an innocence he hasn’t felt for two years. 

For the very first time, Spencer considers a new page in the book the color of death, and he considers titling it Spencer Reid . 

The next day, the concealer he applies holds up to the scrutiny of Mr. Moore, and he goes home to his dying plant, gives it more water, and spends the rest of the night studying and researching. 

The plant dies at the end of the two months. His teacher looks at it and deigns the cause as overwatering. 

Too much care, the teacher says, and Spencer feels nauseous and numb. He nods once, takes the grade back when it’s handed to him, and goes to Mr. Moore’s room after school. 

He seems to immediately sense something is very wrong, because he turns to Spencer as he walks in and his brows furrow. 

“Spencer,” he says, glancing down at the sad plant pot held in his hands, “what’s wrong?”

Spencer doesn’t look up at him. He’s too busy staring at the plant, because it’s so wilted the leaves may fall off if he jostles it too much, and he says blankly, “I killed it.”

Mr. Moore walks over to him. “The plant?”

Spencer nods. “Overwatering. Too much care.”

A soft sigh. Mr. Moore’s hands cover Spencer’s own on the pot, and he gently slips it from his hands. 

Spencer’s hands drop and he watches as Mr. Moore sets it aside, turning back to him. 

“Spencer,” he starts. Spencer stares at the third button of his shirt. “Do you know about the concept of entropy?”

Spencer blinks. He shakes his head, looking up at Mr. Moore with wide eyes, taken aback but interested in whatever the older man has to teach him. 

“One definition of entropy is the degradation of matter in the universe,” Mr. Moore says. He turns and traces one of the brittle leaves of the plant with his fingertip. “Meaning - everything dies.”

Spencer frowns. “I killed a plant by caring for it too much.” He doesn’t understand. Just because everything dies doesn’t mean it should die early. It doesn’t make it fine. 

He cared too much. It killed something. 

Mr. Moore hums. “You killed a plant because you’re twelve, you’re not a botanist, and nothing should rely on a twelve-year-old to live. Nothing healthy, anyway.”

He immediately thinks about his mother and the bank account he has open for her and the other account he has open for him and two more accounts for his savings and his college savings and another for house expenses. None of them are full enough for his liking. He thinks about the fact that in a week he’ll have four more bills due to pay and how much that’ll drain the house expenses bank account and Mr. Moore’s right, she is unhealthy because she’s relying on a twelve-year-old, because Spencer can’t do anything right-

“Spencer.” Mr. Moore interrupts his thoughts. “My point is that you were trying your best. But you are twelve.”

And then his voice softens so much, becomes so gentle that Spencer is ten again and William has just left him and he feels like sobbing in Mr. Moore’s room again. 

“You are growing up far faster than anyone should. I don’t just mean school. You haven’t had a parent attend a parent-teacher conference in two years.”

Spencer’s breath hitches and he stutters out in a small voice, “Y- you noticed?”

“The entire staff has noticed,” Mr. Moore says, and Spencer’s inhale jumps around a lump in his throat. “We legally can’t do anything unless there are signs of abuse or neglect, and… to every staff member here but one, there haven’t been.”

There’s tears in Spencer’s eyes. He really hopes he doesn’t make a repeat performance of his breaking down at ten years old in this same room, but he feels so fragile, so young and so old and Mr. Moore is so steady. He wants to fall and never get back up again. 

“You didn’t tell anyone.”

Mr. Moore sighs. “I knew you were getting money and food from me. I knew you weren’t homeless. Somehow, you put your trust in me and you seemed as if you had something stable. I would rather be the thing you can lean on in the storm than cause the storm.”

Spencer suddenly realizes he’s trembling. His breaths are too fast, and there’s tears in his eyes again, and he slips abruptly back into a repeat performance of two years ago as, standing in Mr. Moore’s classroom, he bursts into tears. 

Mr. Moore wraps his arms around him and lets Spencer bury his face in his neck and sob. Just as before, he murmurs something soft near his ear.

“Caring too much isn’t always a flaw, Spencer, and it isn’t your fault.”

The plant goes into the book the color of death. 

Pachira aquatica (money tree)

COD: Spencer Reid too much care overwatering

He preserves two of the leaves on the opposite page, and then he stands there with the dead plant sitting on the table next to college applications, next to envelopes holding household bills. 

The front page, and the notebook, finally get a name. 

Book of Death

Spencer graduates high school, and he hugs Mr. Moore, and he’s the only name he wants signed at the end of his yearbook, with his address and a little heart next to it. 

He’s accepted into MIT and CalTech with full rides; he takes CalTech because he wants to study with certain professors. 

It’s the middle of the summer, and Spencer shows up at Mr. Moore’s house. 

James Moore, now that he’s not actually his teacher anymore, but that sounds so wrong that Spencer doesn’t even entertain the thought. 

Mr. Moore invites him in, makes him grilled cheese with tomato soup and Spencer has a full, solid meal for the first time in three weeks. He’s been putting all of his money into his mom’s care, ensuring that the bills will still be paid when he’s at college, that she will be fine. 

And speaking of…

He finishes his food, joins Mr. Moore on the couch, and starts hesitantly.

“Mr. Moore?”

He’s abandoned trying to get Spencer to call him James. “Hm?”

“Um.” Spencer fidgets. “I- I would- like- would you-“

He stops. Mr. Moore turns to face him. Spencer’s face flushes and he refuses to look up at him, instead focusing on the curling intricate pattern of his living room rug. 

“I w- would like you to help with my mom. When I’m at college. Uh- I can pay for it, I just- she’s not-“

Again, the words stick in his throat. Spencer makes a frustrated noise. 

Mr. Moore rests a hand on his thigh. “Spencer. I’ll help. I’ll even pay for some of it if you’re struggling.”

Spencer’s throat burns and his eyes water and Mr. Moore is always so kind to him and he blurts out all at once, “She’sschizophrenicandItakecareofeverything,” and shuts his mouth. 

Mr. Moore is silent for a beat. He takes a breath, and then he says slowly, “ Everything?”

Spencer reaches into his backpack and pulls out the planner he takes with him everywhere. He flicks it open to the month of January, where every margin and every available space is scrawled in notes about their budget, about bill dates, other expenses, other sources of income, appointments, his homework assignments, things he had to do like apply for colleges and fill out financial aid and call certain offices to get the right information for what he qualified for. 

“Yeah, everything. Um- I have several accounts open for our savings, my college savings, extra money for me, money for her expenses, house expenses, and then I’ve been taking care of her since I was ten - my dad left then, but he sends checks every week but they’re not enough, and I also have been trying to make sure I get into college with a full ride because I can’t really afford anything less but I’m smart enough for it, really-“

“Spencer.” Mr. Moore cuts him off with a hand on his leg. 

He’s quiet after that, looking conflicted for long enough that Spencer fills it with his thrumming anxiety. 

“Really, um- you don’t have to, I can- college will have more opportunities, and I’ve been told I’m a commodity because I’m so smart and young, and it’s fine, I’m sorry, Mr. Moore-“

He closes the planner and abruptly stands up, shaking off Mr. Moore’s hand on his leg and shoving the planner back into his bag. Guilt fills him, embarrassment and shame pressing down on him, and the anxiety that Mr. Moore might call CPS now and- oh, God, he might call CPS. 

Spencer freezes right there at the same time Mr. Moore catches his wrist and pulls the planner back out of his bag. “Wait-“ he slides it from Spencer’s hands before he realizes what’s happening, and flicks it open again, and starts scanning the pages. 

Spencer feels as if he can’t breathe again. He’s paralyzed, watching Mr. Moore see every single responsibility he’s had for the past two years, see every crossed-out note and phone number and names and offices and-

“Wow,” he breathes. Both of his eyebrows raise, and he looks up at Spencer. 

Spencer swallows hard and blurts out, “You can swear,” because adults didn’t like to swear around him but Mr. Moore looks very much like he needs to swear. 

For some reason. Spencer doesn’t get it. His dad left and he loves his mom and only one of them was capable of doing all of this, so naturally Spencer did it. 

It’s fine. He’s… mostly done it well. He’s seen adults that do it worse. 

Mr. Moore breathes out a laugh, and then he glances back down at the planner and goes dryly, “Well, shit,” and Spencer laughs too and some of his anxiety dissipates. 

Some of it. The next thing Spencer blurts out is, “Please don’t call CPS.”

Mr. Moore’s expression does a strange twist, the same thing it had done when Spencer had asked for research positions at ten years old, and he looks down again. 

“Mr. Moore?” Spencer’s heart skips a beat. “I- I don’t want to be taken from my mom. It’s- I’m asking you. I’ve asked you for help. It hasn’t all been me- I’m fine, I promise. Please?”

He feels like crying. Mr. Moore is horribly silent for way too long and Spencer’s heart only picks up the pace with every minute. 

Then, he sighs, and his shoulders slump like he’s making a very bad decision, and he closes his eyes. “I won’t call them,” he says quietly. 

All of Spencer’s breath rushes out of him so fast he gets a little dizzy. “Thank you! I- thank you, Mr. Moore, I promise-“

“The only way you can go to college by yourself is if you emancipate yourself from your mother. Then there is technically nothing for me to report.”

Spencer blinks. Mr. Moore’s expression is intense, a sort of seriousness he usually didn’t express with anyone except for the bad kids in class. That kind of intensity was as rare as Mr. Moore raising his voice, which was almost never. Spencer witnessed Mr. Moore properly raising his voice as a student once, in a class with a group of other kids, and the entire group including Spencer didn’t dare misbehave even a little bit for the entire rest of the class. 

He frowns, a little off-put by the intensity. Mr. Moore only did this when he really believed in something, so Spencer feels it would be a bit rude to deny it given all Mr. Moore has done for him. 

Even though Mr. Moore overestimates just how many people are in his corner in this life. “Um- but I’d need a court visitor, and I- I don’t have any other adults who would…”

“Spencer, I’d volunteer.” Mr. Moore says it like it’s a simple fact. “I wouldn’t ask you to do something like that and not help you with it.”

He’s still being intense, but it’s tempered with a little humor, a warmth that Spencer wants to lean into. He nods, offering a small smile. 

Even as taking that kind of help makes him anxious. “Yeah, I will.”

“I mean it.” Mr. Moore’s hand taps the planner on his lap. “You shouldn’t-“ he takes a breath, and Spencer suddenly realizes he’s witnessing Mr. Moore’s easy control be actually moved by something, and that something is him, “-you shouldn’t have had to do this.”

Spencer frowns. It doesn’t matter whether he should have, he had to, and he did. It was that or be separated from his mom, and that was unthinkable. Spencer never liked change. 

Mr. Moore sighs again. “But you did, and you did it well.” Spencer’s breath catches. “You did it better than a lot of adults do.”

Something warm spreads through Spencer, the same thing that happens every time he was praised for his academic work, but this time it’s for his care of Diana, and it’s gone so invisible for so long that he simply stares with wide eyes at Mr. Moore, like he holds the answer to everything. 

“I’m proud of you, Spencer.”

He blinks, and it’s wet, and Spencer doesn’t have the time to ask why before there’s suddenly tears running down his face and Mr. Moore is pulling him close and he’s curling into his lap and burying his face in his shoulder.

Mr. Moore invites him to stay for dinner, citing that his husband is out of town for the weekend. Spencer stays, and has steak with rice and green beans, and he feels completely full for the first time in weeks when he falls asleep on Mr. Moore’s couch after dinner, leaning on his shoulder. 

He wakes up just enough to feel a rocking sensation and smell Mr. Moore’s cologne, face pressed into his shirt. The world is hazy, he’s still sleepy, but then he’s laying on a bed and he drifts in and out as his shoes and socks are taken off. A blanket is pulled over him, and he watches Mr. Moore’s back as he walks out, turns the light off, and shuts the door with a quiet click. 

Spencer blinks into the hazy, shadowy off-whites of the room, closes his eyes, and falls back asleep. 

The first time Spencer wears a suit is at the age of twelve. 

Mr. Moore takes him to a tailor’s shop and guides him through picking out a quality suit. He pays for it even when Spencer argues with him about it, and a week later Spencer’s walking into Mr. Moore’s kitchen with a frown. 

“I went to the library and read eight tutorials on how to tie a tie-“ he tugs at the lopsided knot, making a frustrated noise, “-and it’s still not working-“

Mr. Moore laughs, crouching down in front of him. He takes the tie with his hands, lightly nudging Spencer’s away, and within a minute he’s deftly tied a neat knot and pushed it up against Spencer’s collar.

He folds down the fabric, pulls a little bit more at Spencer’s suit to adjust it, and Spencer stares down at all the movements. 

He looks up at Mr. Moore. “How did you do that so quickly?”

Mr. Moore smiles. “Practice. And my hands are significantly larger than yours.” He wiggles his fingers before standing up and Spencer frowns again, measuring his hand against the size of his tie. 

He shrugs his shoulders, pulling at the fabric, skin tingling from the feeling of the shirt against his skin, the way the tailored seams hug his body. “It’s itchy,” he mumbles. 

“Oh, I know,” Mr. Moore says. “Comes with the territory. I think you’ll grow out of it soon, so that suit isn’t made with the softest fabric.”

He has another deep frown, and Spencer shifts restlessly in the suit, swiftly messing up every single adjustment Mr. Moore had made. 

“Are you ready?”

Spencer looks up. “Um- yeah!” He runs to the room he’d changed in, returning with a folder filled with documents. “Everything’s here. I- do I look professional?”

Another laugh. “The most professional twelve-year-old I’ve ever seen.”

Spencer grins, and then he follows Mr. Moore out to his car, and together they drive to the courthouse. 

The mood doesn’t last for long. Spencer’s laughed at within the first minute of arriving at the courthouse by an older man, and he offers his best glare up at him. 

He waits three hours with Mr. Moore for the proceedings to start. He reads all three books that he brought, and by the time their case is called he and Mr. Moore have started playing tic-tac-toe on a pad of legal paper. 

Finally, they go in, and from then on the very, very slow death of the childhood of Spencer Reid is finished. 

It’s a long performance. Spencer straightens his back, holds his head up, ignores how scratchy his suit is and the tag that’s sitting wrong against his neck, and he proves to the court that he’s on par with adults in taking care of himself. 

He tells them about taking public transit, rules he’s known since he was four. Grocery shopping he’d done a couple times at six years old and every week after ten. Appointments and bills he’d already been planning and paying himself for two years, but he doesn’t mention that; cooking and cleaning he’d been doing for two people since eight years old, when William Reid decided he could care just a little bit less, and put just a bit more onto his genius son. 

Fighting with insurance, and the doctor’s, his mom, the pediatrician, the optometrist, the dentist’s, the dermatologist one time, the pharmacy. The system was very much against a ten year old making the decisions, and Spencer had learned how to bullshit nearly everything. Even though adults wouldn’t like him calling it that. He could carve a day out and spend it with one number on hold for hours while he did chores, and then talk all the authorities in patient circles until he got what he wanted. 

Spencer recounts to the court the life he’s been living since ten years old, though not in those terms. Mr. Moore vouches for him - calls him exceptional and gifted and volunteers to be his court visitor during his college years. 

He gets the job, and Spencer becomes a legal adult at twelve years old. 

He leaves the courthouse with Mr. Moore and thinks again about writing his name in the notebook. 

Spencer goes to college. 

He visits on weekends to his mom, who tells him about the nice man who cooks meals for her sometimes and has brought her books. He spends one day a month walking around the city, visiting museums and landmarks with Mr. Moore. 

He thanks Mr. Moore and doesn’t think he knows just how deeply he means it, every single time. 

Latrodectus hesperus (Western black widow)

COD: three different shoes (maybe the heel actually killed it) (Eva panicked)

(A taped-in photo of a twenty-year-old feminine person with short dyed green hair and dark goth clothing crouched down next to a smushed spider in a dorm room, making the peace sign while grimacing. In Sharpie, in a different handwriting in the corner of the photo is written: ALMOST DIED! )

Spencer (the pet rat)

COD: Adam, neglect

(Two taped-in photos, both featuring a little white rat. In one, a nineteen-year-old masculine person with short platinum blonde hair sits on dorm building carpet with the rat cradled in both hands. In the second photo, the rat is leaning up and sniffing at a piece of banana held by two fingers out of frame, the nails clipped short.)

Eva Black

COD: Eva Black suicide Spencer Reid a high fall neglect

(The words are scribbled over so much it's nearly unrecognizable. A couple spots on the page have dried strangely, as if they had been wet.)

(One photo of a twenty-one-year-old feminine person with short hair dyed dark blue at the roots, wearing goth clothing with long sleeves. They are sitting at a table in a university library, large windows behind them, looking up at the camera. They’re holding a pen, their notebook, a textbook, and two other books in front of them. Next to them, Spencer is twisted halfway back in his seat, smiling up at the camera as well with his own textbooks and notebook in front of him.

(One photo of Eva sitting on a dorm bed covered in a black comforter. The photo is only lit by golden fairy lights strung up behind them, illuminating the wide smile on Eva’s face, eyes closed in clearly loud laughter.)

(A newspaper clipping from the Los Angeles Times: INVESTIGATION INTO DEATH OF CALTECH STUDENT EVA BLAKE: SUSPECTED SUICIDE)

Spencer finishes his first degree at sixteen. He makes a fake ID and spends the summer cheating every casino in Las Vegas out of its money. He applies to MIT and goes for his second and third degrees, and visits Mr. Moore again before he leaves. 

Spencer turns eighteen and sends his mom to Bennington, talks once again to Mr. Moore, and meets Jason Gideon. 

Diana Reid

COD: Spencer Reid

(This page has been scribbled over and torn out.)

Two years after he meets Gideon, when he’s twenty, is the first time he enters in the word ‘death’ into a search engine. 

Death - Wikipedia

Death - Encyclopaedia Britannica

He spends two hours scrolling, searching every single definition of it and every article he can find, and after that he spends three hours in the library collecting as much material written about death as he can. 

He comes across a ballad between death and a lady. 

He gets into the BAU at twenty-three. He ends a case with bruised ribs and a gun cooling in his hands and a dead man. 

Phillip Dowd

COD: Spencer Reid

(A taped-in photo of Phillip Dowd’s ID photo.)

He goes to the library and searches up ‘death’ and ‘entropy’ and ‘butterfly effect.’ He spends weeks obsessing over Dowd until he tapes his victims’ photos up on his wall. He spends those same weeks pressing his fingers into the bruises on his torso, spending days with them throbbing, exacerbating them until they take double the time to heal. 

It hurts when he breathes. Spencer takes deeper breaths. 

Elle Greenaway

COD: William Lee, Spencer Reid

(A taped-in photo of Elle looking at the camera. She looks a little bewildered, but she offers the camera a little smile and a wave.)

Spencer is kidnapped. 

He opens his eyes to a full-body ache, a single light burning into his eyes from above, and a single bullet labeled God’s will loaded into a gun. 

He thinks, he has so many sins he could confess to and all of them are written in a little notebook with a black velvet cover. 

One of his kidnappers is an archangel. Another is a priest, of a kind, not ordained but just as dedicated to a religious cause. His third kidnapper is himself, if something fundamental in his childhood had gone a different direction. 

He thinks about butterfly effect, and Mr. Moore. 

Spencer dies for the first time at twenty-five, in a cabin in Georgia, laying on the floor with his hands cuffed in front of him. 

He spends the last few minutes of his life in terror, and pain, with his vision spotting gray as he tries to breathe, convulsing on the old wood. All he can think is, my name is going in the book the color of death, and relief colors the pain. 

He’s not religious, but he sees a light and then it fades along with him. 

Something that isn’t all Spencer comes back after CPR. Something is gone, something vital. 

By the time there’s a gun pointed at him and a demand to choose one to die, Spencer is thinking about the dead bird he dissected at eight years old and he’s thinking maybe he should choose himself to die. Maybe he should refuse until that gun goes off and someone else can write his name in the notebook of death. 

Spencer looks up at the barrel of the gun pointed at his forehead, and thinks about the statistics of Russian Roulette, and he doesn’t blink. He refuses, and he doesn’t flinch the first time the gun shoots empty. 

Choose. Spencer wants the gun to go off. His heart pounds in his ears. No. Empty shot. He doesn’t flinch. Choose. Spencer hopes it goes off and kills him. I won’t. Empty shot. He doesn’t flinch - he’s disappointed. Choose. No. Empty shot. Choose.  

The dissected bird. Cause of death: natural predators, broken wing. Spencer thinks about Bible verses and the rest of his team and he comes up with a way to save himself. 

It looks like fear to anyone else, his hesitation. He swallows hard and looks away and the gun stays steady at his head and the entire team thinks Spencer is only afraid. 

I won’t choose, Spencer doesn’t say. There’s a 50/50 chance that gun fires if he refuses again. Six bullets, four empty shots. Two slots left. Charles Hankel is not a kind man and Spencer is of no real use to him. 

He hesitates because the word no is on his tongue once more, and his whole body aches and he’s had statistics of addiction running through his head along with statistics of addiction and autism, a higher likelihood, the entire time, and he already wants Tobias to return to take away the ache. He could take away the ache, all of it, right now. 

But he has killed enough people and things in his life, and it is not only his life on the line. There are things more valuable than himself he needs to save. 

“I choose… Aaron Hotchner.”

Three hours later he’s remembering William Reid, confessing while his head is still hazy from being high, and twenty minutes after that he’s kneeling in the dirt of a cemetery and digging his own grave. 

It’s surreal. Spencer puts more effort into that than he should. He’s acting to please Charles, sure, but he has some time to reflect before his strength flags and he thinks-

(An image of Spencer Reid, laying in a grave in Georgia. The grave is dug messily, too shallow, like the person who dug it didn’t have enough strength to finish it. There aren’t any flowers and the grave is unmarked.)

he thinks-

He’s already dead. 

he thinks-

He should be in this grave anyway, should’ve been in it hours ago. 

he thinks-

Spencer always thought he was very good at digging his own grave, until the time came to actually physically do it, and what do you know. Physically, he can’t do it. 

he thinks-

He bets if he irritated Charles Hankel a bit more, if he just existed a little longer, he could dig a different kind of his own grave and be shot anyway. 

he thinks-

Or Charles Hankel would just leave him. 

Spencer digs two vials of Dilaudid out of Tobias Hankel’s pocket while he’s still warm and a handful of grave dirt from the ground.

Spencer Reid lives. Unfortunately. 

Spencer Reid

COD: asphyxiation

COD: Dilaudid

(A small, Ziploc bag of grave dirt is taped in.)

Marshall Parish Cemetery, Georgia

(A medication label: Dilaudid.)

(A shard of glass held in with tape.)

Tobias & Charles Hankel, Raphael

COD: Spencer Reid 

(A taped-in photo of Tobias Hankel’s ID photo.)

(A taped-in photo of Charles Hankel’s ID photo.)

Spencer visits his unmarked grave eighteen times in the month after Hankel. Eleven times in the second month. Thirteen in the third. Ten, eight, ten, eleven, and finally four, when he visits it only once every week. He slips from one addiction to the next - it doesn’t hurt to breathe anymore but he sticks the needle in his arm a little too aggressively sometimes. 

The final count is once per month on average he lays in his unmarked grave and stares up at the night sky.

And wonders if someone else will deem this parish a good place to kidnap someone. Wonders if it’ll be him, alone in a cemetery at night with no one aware of his whereabouts. 

He wonders if he’ll die and stay dead this time. 

Adam

COD: Spencer Reid, Amanda

(A taped-in photo of Adam’s hotel employee ID photo.)

Spencer contracts anthrax. This time, the painful breathing is permanent. 

He takes deeper breaths. 

He’s shot in the knee. He doesn’t take pain medication for the first four days since he’s discharged, until there’s tears in his eyes, and he succumbs to the minimum amount required. 

He presses hard into the injury until he can feel the hurt past the medication. He takes an entire month longer to heal. It hurts to walk from then on. 

Emily Prentiss

COD: Ian Doyle

(Emily Prentiss’s ID photo.)

Spencer spends a total of seven hundred and forty-two hours studying every piece on death he can by the time he turns thirty. He turns thirty and he doesn’t tell anyone. He thinks, he shouldn’t be thirty, and when he buys himself a little cake from the store the numbered candles he sticks in it read 25. 

The team remembers his birthday after he tells Emily, and they throw him a surprise party. He smiles and laughs and blows out the candles that read 30 now and he wishes he was dead. Still dead, anyway. 

He visits Mr. Moore again. 

Mr. Moore was a young teacher when Spencer was twelve, somewhere in his twenties, and now he’s somewhere in his forties and hasn’t aged a bit. He frowns when he sees Spencer, running a hand through his hair. 

“No solicitors,” he says. “I already pay all the bills I’m able to.”

Spencer catches the closing door with his hand. “Mr. Moore- it’s Spencer. Spencer Reid.”

He stops. Turns to look at him, and looks him up and down, and Spencer pulls out his ID. 

Mr. Moore raises both eyebrows. “An FBI agent, huh?”

Spencer smiles. “Um- well. I saw the effect of saving someone’s life personally.”

Mr. Moore’s expression twists in the same way he remembers it did at twelve-year-old Spencer, but at thirty years old Spencer can recognize it for the frustration and conflict it is, and Mr. Moore turns to go back into his house, leaving the door open in a silent invitation.

Spencer walks in, closes the door behind him, and follows Mr. Moore to his kitchen. 

“I wasn’t saving you,” Mr. Moore says. The entire house smells like bacon - Spencer supposes he’s having breakfast for dinner. “I was stumbling around in the dark with too much power for my own good.”

“And it worked,” Spencer says, frowning. “You helped me. I probably wouldn’t be where I am now without your help.”

I’d probably be an addict. Or dead, and he ignores the bolt of longing at that thought. 

“How well? You spent two years being the parent to your own parent. I should’ve stepped in more, should’ve seen it. I didn’t do much good on my own, did I?”

Spencer takes a breath, but Mr. Moore interrupts him, putting the spatula down and running a hand down his face. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be saying this - you probably just came to say hi, and see your old teacher.”

“Mr. Moore,” Spencer starts. “I talk to victims a lot in my line of work, and a common thread between them is blaming themself for situations they have no control over. You’re right - you were stumbling around in the dark. But you were trying your best to help me. That’s all you could do.”

Mr. Moore sighs. “I should’ve called CPS.”

Spencer is thirty now, and he’s well past childhood, but he spent six years with that bone-deep fear and even now just the words send a bolt of fear through him, even as he can simply dismiss them a breath later. 

“That wouldn’t have helped.” He hesitates, and continues. “Of everyone in the world right then, there was one person truly looking out for Diana Reid, and- and that was a ten-year-old Spencer. No one else could’ve. The situation would have spiraled if you had.”

“You shouldn’t have had to,” Mr. Moore repeats, quiet, as if devastated on Spencer’s behalf. 

Spencer, as usual, doesn’t feel it. He understands why - he never believes someone should be sympathetic on his behalf. It happened. He dealt with it. It’s over. Spencer doesn’t like wasting any more time thinking about it, because then he may just miraculously forget it. 

“But I did. It worked. Diana is safe and I’m-“ he falters, always stumbling over the new year he’s spent alive, “-thirty years old and an FBI agent. I have friends, people who care about me. And the first person to really, truly do that, other than my mom, was you.”

Mr. Moore buries his face in his hands. “God,” he mumbles, and then lifts his head to look at Spencer. “You have always been full of so much love. Since you were eight and asking me to dissect a dead bird you found.”

The sentence is so-

Spencer’s world stills for a moment. Mr. Moore calls his survival love?

He blinks, and Mr. Moore continues. 

“Most kids- especially eight-year-olds- would have… I don’t know, I didn’t teach students that young except for you and I’ve never had kids of my own, not much experience with them otherwise… but they might have left the bird on the sidewalk, or torn it apart out of curiosity, or maybe just buried it.”

Spencer frowns. “I did tear it apart out of curiosity.”

“No. You checked out a library book on preservation of dead animals, picked the bird up from the sidewalk, read three dissection manuals in a night, asked your biology teacher to dissect it, and then read a fourth the next day.”

Spencer thinks of the hundreds of unsubs he’s seen, the people who mutilate and cut into other people because they’re curious, because they see something others don’t. They research too. They plan how to do it without getting caught. 

Spencer had a plan to do it without getting caught too, if Mr. Moore denied him. 

He’s not seeing what Mr. Moore is. He certainly doesn’t call his little notebook of death an act of love. 

“You wanted to learn about it, and you were kind about it,” Mr. Moore says. “I saw what the bird looked like when you were finished. You dissected it with so much care and precision. You took four pages of notes on it and wanted its bones preserved to be displayed.”

The world is blurring very slightly. Spencer can’t find any words, only stares at Mr. Moore. 

“The pursuit of knowledge is an act of love, Spencer.”

“It can be hurtful,” Spencer blurts out. “It- people have done horrible things for knowledge.” He can think about at least four different unsubs he’s gone after recently. Several events in history. Multiple fairytales, fantasy books-

“It’s a form of love anyway, but you were never hurtful. You were kind. You spent hours researching that bird - you told me. All because you found it dead on the sidewalk and decided it was worth knowing more about.”

Spencer’s eyes are watering slightly. Mr. Moore continues. “And then you spent every year since the age of ten taking care of your mother, when it should’ve been the opposite way around. Hell, you were smart enough - you could’ve called CPS yourself. But you didn’t. You stayed, all by yourself, and even now you tell me that you were the only person who really cared for her in the world at that point. You came to me crying about a plant you killed because you were a twelve-year-old being given the same responsibility that the seventeen-year-olds in that class were being given.”

Fuck. Spencer might have a fourth instance of starting to cry in front of Mr. Moore. 

But he’s thirty years old now, not ten or twelve, so he blinks the tears away quickly and doesn’t. He’s practiced at this now - he shoves them down, tries to focus on Mr. Moore. 

“You went into a career field dedicated to helping people, Spencer, in possibly one of the gentlest ways you could’ve ever picked - by studying behavior. You decided you wanted to see the person above the violence.”

Spencer looks away, blinking rapidly again. “This isn’t how I expected this to go,” he says quietly, shakily, and Mr. Moore laughs. 

“Me neither. But my point is- you care so much. I don’t think you ever got appreciated enough for it, but you love more than most people I’ve ever known, Spencer.”

Something breaks in Spencer, and he abruptly looks back at Mr. Moore. He feels like he’s falling, like he’s suddenly gone off a cliff and now he’s in free fall and he blurts out, “Mr. Moore, did you know schizophrenia is genetic?”

Mr. Moore’s expression changes, but Spencer finds all the words tumbling out before he can stop them or think about them. “I’ve been having headaches. Migraines. Um- my dreams are weird. I don’t- I-“ his hands are shaking and he’s stumbling over words. “I- I got tested but they said nothing was wrong, and- I snapped at them, because there is, but it’s not- it’s not that, but I’m having headaches anyway and if they- if they can’t find anything wrong, what else could it be, I have five degrees and I can’t-“

Hands on his shoulders. Spencer flinches and Mr. Moore removes them, and Spencer takes a step forward to get them back around him. 

Mr. Moore doesn’t lift his hands again. Spencer keeps going. He’s always been good at rambling and this is no different, every concern and fear spilling out of him unprompted, fueled by the panic spiraling through him. 

“This- this is the age it usually s-shows up and I- I don’t want to be like my mom- God, it sounds so cruel when I say it but I don’t, I don’t- I can’t stand years in a mental hospital being- being poked and prodded and pitied, I might just-“

He’s shaking. Mr. Moore decides he’ll try again, and lifts his hands to Spencer’s shoulders, and Spencer abruptly cuts off with a hitching breath as he takes two more steps forward and buries his face in Mr. Moore’s neck, arms wrapping around him. 

This time he doesn’t cry, but it’s a near thing. 

I might just kill myself, Spencer finishes his thought. 

He’d never really wanted to. Dying had been something he found interesting, had never been a dealbreaker in plans he made - but he never actively pursued it. 

If he was sent to a mental hospital, if he went into the same life as his mother, Spencer knows he would find a way. He has an IQ of 187 and he’s looked after his mom for years in the Bennington Sanitarium. 

He’s listed in his head at least a dozen different ways to die in that place if you were dedicated enough. 

Mr. Moore hushes him. “It’s not cruel, Spencer,” he murmurs. “There’s a reason people are sympathetic to patients in sanitariums. It’s not the best way to live, even if it is the most pleasant for their situations.”

Spencer manages to pull back after a minute or two and cross his arms defensively, immediately off-put by the feeling of being vulnerable, especially to someone who he hasn’t seen in so long. “I’m sorry. I- this wasn’t supposed to go this way.” He looks down. “I just wanted to say hi. I didn’t mean to-“ he gestures at the space between them. 

“Don’t apologize.” Mr. Moore offers a small smile. “Come on, stay for dinner. You can even sleep here if you don’t have a way home tonight.”

He fidgets. After a moment, he returns the smile, and hesitantly he follows Mr. Moore to his familiar, old dining room table. 

Maeve Donovan

COD: Spencer Reid

(Maeve’s ID photo.)

(A torn piece of paper with Maeve’s thesis title printed on it.)

(A torn piece of paper with Diane Turner’s thesis title printed on it.)

Spencer reads Diane’s entire thesis on cell death, on whether people can feel their cells dying just before they actually do. 

Diane’s experimental study is biased - she used her parents. 

Spencer sets up the same experimental study. 

Diane Turner

COD: a bullet

He folds up a booklet of paper and tapes it into the journal, then leaves five more pages free from the original entry, and begins his own experiment. 

The subjects are every single victim who passes from suicide. He keeps notes on the study for years and years after Maeve’s death, continuing Diane’s thesis research in private. 

Spencer’s experimental subject becomes biased too - he enters in himself, one day. A person alive after death. 

Scientifically, he had felt his cells dying, in a way, because he was asphyxiating. A slow death. It’s cheating on the research. The entire thesis is nearly improbable, but Spencer indulges anyway, and he consumes hundreds more books and poetry on entropy, death, the cessation of things. 

Alex Blake

COD: N/A (I’m happy for her) (She left)

(Alex’s FBI ID.)

Her gun had to be turned back in to the FBI. 

James Moore

COD: Spencer Reid too much care unsub

(James Moore’s ID photo.)

(Eleven preserved bird bones held by tape.)

Spencer gets an injury so bad he’s hospitalized for a month.

The entire team is listening when Spencer tells Cat about the concept of entropy, that she’ll have to shoot him before he lets her walk out. None of them know how much he hopes she does, how much he means that statement. 

She almost shoots him. He feels the cool press of the metal barrel against his jaw for days afterwards. 

Derek Morgan

COD: N/A (

He left

(Morgan’s birth announcement for Hank Spencer Morgan.)

Aaron Hotchner

COD: N/A

He left. 

(Hotch’s ID photo.)

Spencer has complications with his mother. 

She doesn’t remember who he is, and he has the wild thought that she’s growing into the delicate constitution of a bird, and then he thinks of the bird he dissected at eight years old and the bone he snapped and he walks out of the sanitarium. 

He spends six hours researching death at three different libraries that evening. He goes home and presses so hard into a bullet wound graze he got a week ago that it starts bleeding all over again, the entire thing reopened violently, and he presses harder, digs his nails in, then spends an hour bandaging and stopping the blood and then washing his hands of the red staining them.

He isn’t actively trying to kill himself. He wishes he was dead every day. 

Spencer Reid

COD: asphyxiation

COD: Dilaudid

COD: weakness

(A small, Ziploc bag of grave dirt is taped in.)

Marshall Parish Cemetery, Georgia

(A medication label: Dilaudid.)

(A shard of glass held in with tape.)

(A small Ziploc bag filled with an acidic powder, from mixing drugs.)

Something dies after prison. 

Two real deaths, now: a cabin in Georgia, and three months of federal prison and a deadly chess game with his mother’s life on the line and a hunt for Emily. 

He has never wished for a person to die more than he wishes for himself to die; Spencer has dreams about putting an entire clip of bullets into Mr. Scratch. 

He visits his unmarked grave in Georgia sixteen times in the month after leaving prison. He falls asleep in it one night, wakes up, and walks back to his hotel and gets a flight back home. 

It’s one of the best sleeps he’s had since leaving prison, surrounded by grave dirt, laying three feet in the ground. 

He goes insane during the months he spends teaching, even though he loves it. 

“Is anyone else auditing this class?” Spencer asks, and dozens of hands raise, and he wants to scream. 

They want him for his intelligence. His looks. Everyone likes him after prison. He feels like there’s something feral trapped inside him, like the last gentle part of him is a rabbit cowering in the corner from something predatory within. 

He is never wanted for himself. Don’t you have anything better to fucking do, he wants to yell at them. Go build your own damn future. Let me teach actual students and stop-

He catches a conversation from a group of girls outside his class. Isn’t Dr. Reid hot? Yeah, I would definitely hit that. Age is just a number. 

Hands down his shirt. Sitting in a chair blindfolded. All this and brains too. 

Sitting in a chair. Not blindfolded. High. Spencer, it’s Maeve. Shhh, you want this. 

Spencer has to go to the employee’s restroom and throw up. 

He snaps back at Linda Barnes. He loses his job temporarily. He goes more insane during the more months he spends teaching. Even though he loves it. 

He teaches a class on entropy. One class period, in which he tells the students he’s going to make it fun, and he teaches them all about death. 

The girls are silent. Everyone is silent, especially the ones who try to mock death and he rapidly shuts them down. 

It’s the best class he’s taught, he thinks. 

Ben’s Believers kidnap him. He offers once to be shot, in favor of letting the girl go free. He offers himself up again, in favor of Penelope Garcia, a ray of sunshine and light so much brighter than he’s ever been. 

He doesn’t die either time. When his actual time comes up, he’s so close that his eyes are watering and he’s convinced that maybe this time he’ll die and stay dead, and then Emily rescues him. 

He’s grateful he’s still alive. He’s disappointed he didn’t die. They coexist, and Spencer pushes into every single bruise he’s earned, and he lives on. 

Unfortunately. 

Hostage situation. The gun is truly pointed at him only once. 

You? Gone to prison? The unsub doesn’t believe him. Spencer stays silent, doesn’t even try to correct him, and that feral thing inside him bites and claws. 

Why JJ, he thinks at the unsub. He’s trying to save her, so he doesn’t actually want attention drawn to him, but he would like the unsub to simply shoot him. 

He saves JJ. He lives. He earned a couple nicks from the glass shards that exploded and he digs into them so much that they take two weeks to heal instead of one. 

Another date with Cat. This time, he grieves his not-girlfriend, the relationship before it even officially started. 

He spends two hours thinking about entropy. The degradation of matter in the universe. Meaning - everything dies. 

Almost everything he touches dies, it seems. He speeds up entropy, accelerates it, causes a kind of mutation in the system that fails it. The only thing that doesn’t die because of him is himself, it seems. 

He considers social suicide. Finding Cat. Kissing her hard enough he may just devour her and then running away with her. Sending his entire life up into flames. 

He returns to the BAU and debriefs and Max is something that doesn’t die because of him. 

An explosion. His ears are ringing, and he’s cleared, and six agents die instead of him. 

Six. Six agents. Not him. He still fucking lives - he wants to die. He doesn’t ever want to actually do it. 

Six. Six. Six. Six. The number echoes in his head. 

He passes out. A brain bleed, they say, slow enough that he has an entire dream sequence of his life and he’s given the choice to fight and live, or to slip into darkness. 

It has been ten years since he died in a cabin in Georgia. It has been five years since he died in a six foot by nine foot cell in the Millburn Correctional Facility. 

The only thing that doesn’t die because of him is himself.

Because it is his choice, Spencer fights. He wakes up and attends a farewell party. 

He smiles, and laughs, and dances, and wishes he was dead, and lives. 

Unfortunately.  

Spencer Reid

COD: asphyxiation

COD: Dilaudid

COD: weakness

COD: explosion, brain bleed

(A small, Ziploc bag of grave dirt is taped in.)

Marshall Parish Cemetery, Georgia

(A medication label: Dilaudid.)

(A shard of glass held in with tape.)

(A small Ziploc bag filled with an acidic powder, from mixing drugs.)

(A medical wristband.)