Chapter Text
Reid blinked his eyes open to the cool, slate-grey steel of a gun aimed directly at his head.
“No sudden movements. Show me your hands,” ordered a gruff voice that emanated from a blurry figure standing at the end of the bed.
He couldn’t bring the man’s face into focus. His glasses must be somewhere on the bedside table but he didn’t dare to feel around for them until he had a handle on what the hell was going on.
Where was he? The room was dark, with just a sliver of daylight peeking out from underneath the blinds. His eyes swept upwards, taking in the high ceilings of an old building. Nothing seemed familiar. The sheets didn’t smell like his usual fabric softener and they had a scratchy, synthetic finish that was already making his skin crawl.
“I won’t tell you again, show me your hands now.”
He obeyed slowly, dragging his arms out from under the uncomfortable sheets and bringing them up above his shoulders. His head was pounding and his mouth felt parched. There was a weight in the bed next to him but the other person wasn’t saying anything in his defence.
A man in police uniform edged closer coming into focus, middle-aged but with a strong, athletic build. The light glinted off the handcuffs he was brandishing and Reid felt the cold steel close around one wrist before he was wrenched upright and his other arm twisted behind his back to close the cuffs.
“Wha’… wait, wait, wha’s goin’ on?” he slurred, not sounding like himself.
“You tell us, sicko,” the officer said, hauling him out of bed and onto his feet.
Only then did he realise he was completely naked. As he moved his uncoordinated limbs, he felt the uncomfortable traces of last night’s activities still crusted on his skin. He heard a disgusted sigh from the officer as he pushed him out to a living room that was just as unfamiliar as the bedroom had been.
Another police officer, a blonde woman, steered him firmly with an arm at his other side.
“Wha’s happenin’?”
“Sit him down. Don’t let him move a muscle,” the man instructed, leaving him under the watchful gaze of the female officer.
He tried to collect his thoughts but the room was swimming dizzily around his head, shifting in and out of focus.
“My… my glasses… please. Can you get them for me? I can’t see.”
He hated how weak he sounded, pleading for the thing that might help him recognise where he was and make sense of what was going on. His clothes or a blanket wouldn’t go amiss either.
“Can’t go back in there, the bedroom is a crime scene. We can’t remove anything until the coroner’s been and all the evidence has been logged and photographed.”
He understood all the words but he was struggling to see how they applied here. Crime scene, coroner, evidence logs – they were all things he was familiar with at work. But this was the weekend, even in his compromised state he was fairly sure what day it was, and he was sitting naked and handcuffed in an apartment he didn’t recognise. How could he put this puzzle together in any way that made sense?
“Crime scene… why?”
He couldn’t seem to articulate himself as he usually would, unable to connect the disjointed thoughts swimming around in his brain with the words coming out of his mouth.
“That’s what happens when you kill a guy then lie down for a nap right next to him,” she said, unable to keep the biting sarcasm out of her tone.
A cold shudder ran through his body. The weight in the bed next to him had been a body? Whoever it had been was now dead and he’d been asleep just inches away?
This was real. This was serious. He had to get his brain in gear and figure out what the hell was going on.
“Where am I? What time is it?” he said, trying to get a handle on things.
“Already working on your alibi? Good luck with that,” she replied.
“Please, I think... I don’t know… was I drugged?”
It felt like a hangover, a bad flu and a blow to the head all in one. He knew for sure he wouldn’t have taken any substances willingly but what other explanation could there be for why he was feeling this way, and why he had no recollection of how he got here?
“Please, you’re Metro PD? I’m FBI, I work in Quantico, the Behavioural Analysis Unit. I don’t know where my clothes are but my badge is in my jacket pocket.”
His speech was sounding a little less slurred, though his mind still felt like he was trudging through a thick fog, unable to think more than one step at a time. A name came floating to the surface of his mind from a case he’d worked with Metro PD. Maybe that would help.
“Detective Victor Barnes, I worked with him a couple years ago. Please, he’ll remember me.”
He felt, rather than saw, the officer pause. She called to her colleague in the bedroom.
“Hey, Andy. Guy says he’s FBI.”
The male officer appeared in the doorway and Spencer heard him scoff, feeling the eyes raking over his naked body as he assessed the truth of his claim. He could feel himself trembling slightly, whether through fear or the after-effects of whatever he might have been given.
“Fat chance, unless they started handing out badges to college kids.”
“My jacket. Please, if it’s here, my badge will be in it.”
He wondered for a moment whether he might have his gun with him too, in which case he could be getting himself in even deeper trouble, but no matter where he’d gone last night, he always had his credentials on him. He recalled a hazy vision of a bar and a guy, but it was every bit as fuzzy in his mind’s eye as his real-life vision was right now, the blurry outlines not quite coming into focus as they should.
“Holy shit,” he heard Andy say, passing something that must have been his FBI badge to the female officer. She hadn’t yet told him her name.
“Let me call my boss, he can vouch for me. He can get all this straightened out,” Spencer pleaded.
It would take more than Hotch to straighten things out if there really was a dead body in the bedroom, but he was choosing to deal with one problem at a time. He still had no idea whose apartment he was in and whether he would even recognise whoever the body belonged to. This could all be a terrible misunderstanding or an elaborate set-up by an unsub out to target the BAU.
They refused his offer to recite Hotch’s home number from memory, insisting on going through the Bureau switchboard so they knew for sure they were being connected to a legitimate FBI agent. After several minutes of phone tag, he heard the call connect.
The female officer outlined the basic facts of the situation, Hotch’s raised voice audible through the tinny speaker of the phone as they explained that he was in cuffs but hadn’t yet been arrested. Only then did Spencer discover they were in an apartment building in Georgetown and he was being kept here while they waited on a second unit to arrive with the coroner before they could bring him in to be booked downtown.
He heard Hotch’s no-nonsense tone once again and the officer relented, turning the speakerphone on and holding the handset out in his direction. With his hands restrained behind his back, all he could do was lean forward to speak.
“Hotch?” he said, realising how small his voice sounded.
“Reid, are you hurt?”
“No, I’m okay. But I can’t remember how I got here.”
He heard Hotch’s sharp intake of breath. It would scare anyone to have so little recollection of recent events, but even more so when that person had an eidetic memory.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can, Reid. Don’t say a word until I get there. Everything’s going to be okay.”
He hadn’t acknowledged how scared he was or how much he needed to hear those words until he felt a lump lodge in his throat. Hotch was on his way and he would know what to do.
The female officer took the phone back, not allowing any more time for conversation. His throat was still parched but when he asked for water, she just ignored his pleas, only speaking in hushed voices with her partner from time to time. He could hear their agitation as they wondered what was taking the medical examiner so long, even if they were calling her out on a Sunday morning.
Reid let his mind drift, unable to stay focused on the present which was too real and too frightening in his compromised state. He only began to come back to reality when he heard a familiar voice at the door.
“You can’t come in here, sir. You should have gone to meet us at the station like I told you,” the officer said.
“You’re holding an FBI agent in cuffs at a crime scene. There’s no force on this Earth that would stop me from coming straight down here,” Hotch said authoritatively.
Reid still couldn’t see clearly but there was no mistaking Hotch’s dark hair as he entered the apartment and came straight over to him, kneeling down in front of him and putting a hand gently on his cheek.
“Spencer, it’s okay. I’m here.”
The first thing Hotch saw was that Spencer was naked. The second was that he was trembling – with fear, exhaustion, humiliation, maybe a combination of all three.
He’d received the call half an hour earlier, and it was clear the officers had already been there long enough to bust the door down, find a dead body and handcuff Reid. Which meant they’d left Reid restrained and naked for at least 45 minutes, maybe more like an hour, in an exercise that was clearly designed to demean him.
“He needs clothes. How long have you left him like this?”
He pulled a blanket from the back of the sofa and draped it around Spencer’s shivering form, careful to cover his modesty since he couldn’t do it himself. There was a light sheen across his forehead, what looked like love bites peppered across his neck and his eyes looked glassy and unfocused.
“Have you called paramedics to assess him?”
“He’s a suspect. If he needs medical, there’s a doctor at the station who can look him over once we’ve booked him,” said the female officer, who had introduced herself on the phone as Officer Edmonds.
“Look at him. He’s clearly under the influence of something. Did it ever occur to you he might be a second victim, not a perpetrator?”
Her silence suggested that no, that thought had never crossed her mind. Hotch looked back at his subordinate, trying to force himself to assess the situation rationally and not react emotionally, no matter how much he wanted to lash out.
“Where are his glasses?”
“The bedroom is a crime scene, agent. We can’t remove anything from there until it’s been logged for evidence,” she said.
“It’s Supervisory Special Agent Hotchner, I’m the unit chief of the BAU and I’ve been at more active crime scenes than you’ve issued speeding tickets and parking fines. Until you can prove otherwise, he’s presumed to be a victim of crime and the least you can do is make sure he can see what’s going on around him.”
Hotch pulled his phone out of his pocket to dial 9-1-1, while the officer trudged reluctantly into the bedroom, emerging a moment later with a pair of glasses, dark-rimmed at the top and clear underneath. She handed them to Hotch, looking at Reid with disdain as though she didn’t want to have to touch him to put them on herself.
He unfolded them and placed them carefully onto Reid’s face, watching the transformation as he was able to focus once again. His eyes darted around the room as though taking it in for the first time and Hotch couldn’t miss the way his brow crinkled slightly as he clearly didn’t recognise what he was seeing.
“Where am I?” he asked, his voice still shaky and scared as it had been on the phone earlier, sending chills through Hotch’s body just as it had when he heard his youngest agent had been discovered lying next to a dead body.
“In an apartment in Georgetown.”
Reid scrunched his eyes up in the way he always did when he was thinking, but it didn’t seem to yield anything.
“They said… there’s a body. Is it true?”
Hotch knew there was no way someone as good-hearted as Reid could be mixed up in anything criminal, but until he had all the facts, his lawyer instincts told him to keep Reid from saying or doing anything that might risk incriminating himself.
“I don’t know. Don’t say anything until we get you a lawyer, okay?”
He felt the officer bristle behind him as though vindicated in her suspicion, but he did his best to ignore her. It was simply good practice until they had a firmer grasp of the situation.
“I didn’t do anything Hotch. I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, shaking his head and groaning slightly at the movement.
“What’s wrong?”
“Headache. Thirsty,” he said, his speech choppy and so unlike Reid’s normal manner of speaking.
“Did you even give him any water?” Hotch asked, furious at the way the cops had jumped to conclusions and not even afforded him basic human dignity. They might not know Reid’s gentle nature or good character, but they could see he was thirsty and naked and they hadn’t lifted a finger to help.
There was movement at the door and he looked up, expecting paramedics, but it was a second pair of police officers along with a woman in a dark jumpsuit that meant she was from the coroner’s office.
She gave a cursory glance in their direction but was shown straight through to the bedroom. Hotch knew from what the officers had said that there was a body, but he still had no clue what had happened or how Reid was involved. His priority was keeping his young team member safe – both from harm and from possible prosecution.
He got up to get a glass from the cabinet but Officer Edmonds stopped him, arguing that he couldn’t touch anything. He was about to recite the rules of police conduct and all the ways she and her partner were neglecting their duty of care, regardless of whether he was a suspect or a potential victim, when the paramedics arrived.
They quickly zeroed in on Spencer, making their way over to him and introducing themselves as Carlos and Francesca. Hotch didn’t miss the way Spencer recoiled slightly when Carlos put two fingers on his neck to check his pulse, nor the glance between the two medics as he stepped back and let his female colleague take the lead.
“Can you tell me how you’re feeling, Spencer?” she asked.
“Uh, my head hurts. Everything’s… dizzy.”
Hotch was getting more worried the less coherent Spencer seemed. He’d sounded scared on the phone earlier but now, he was pale and shaking too.
“We’re just going to have a little listen to your heart and check your blood pressure and oxygen levels, okay?” said Francesca.
She shifted the blanket aside but paused as she realised that not only was her patient naked but he was also handcuffed behind his back.
“I need you to take these cuffs off,” she said to Officer Edmonds.
“Can’t do that. He’s a suspect in a homicide,” she replied.
“I need to treat my patient. He can barely sit upright, he’s hardly a danger. I can’t assess him unless you uncuff him.”
The paramedic’s tone was firm and left no room for debate, so the officer shifted forward reluctantly and unlocked the cuffs. Hotch could see the discomfort on Reid’s face as his shoulders protested after being twisted behind his back for so long.
They attached a pulse oximeter to his finger and slid a blood pressure cuff onto his upper arm, trading numbers and concerned glances as they took the readings.
“Spencer, have you taken any substances?” she asked evenly.
“Didn’t take anythin’ but… I don’t feel good,” he mumbled.
Francesca looked up at Hotch and Officer Edmonds.
“We’ll need to bring him in to the hospital to be checked out properly. His pulse, blood pressure and oxygen saturation are all lower than they should be and he needs a full tox screen.”
They secured another blanket around his waist to protect his dignity as they worked together to transfer him from the chair to the stretcher. Officer Edmonds stepped forward with the cuffs, ready to restrain him again.
“You can’t be serious,” Hotch said darkly.
The flash of anger in the paramedics’ eyes echoed his own.
“He’s a murder suspect. He can’t be left unrestrained. I’ll have to accompany him.”
“He’s not a flight risk, look at him,” Hotch argued, his eyes flicking over to Reid lying prone on the gurney, his eyes half-closed as the symptoms and the stress of the situation weighed heavily on him.
“It’s protocol,” she said, as though that was the answer to everything, and snapped the cuffs into place, one on his wrist and one on the gurney.
Hotch took one last glance around the scene, his experienced eye longing to stay and work out the truth of what had transpired here, but he needed to stay close to Spencer. He followed the gurney and its unhappy band out of the building to the ambulance.
“Which hospital?” he asked the male paramedic, Carlos.
“Riverside, you can meet us in the ED there.”
Hotch could see he would be fighting a losing battle with Officer Edmonds insisting on riding along, so he settled instead for putting his hand on Reid’s shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay, Reid. I’ll meet you at the hospital and we’ll get you feeling better, okay?”
The trust and vulnerability in Reid’s eyes as he glanced up from behind his glasses, looking for all the world just as he had when he first joined the team five years ago, almost made Hotch choke up.
He still had no real idea of what had happened to his youngest colleague – but he was going to do whatever it took to find out.