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reiderwriter · 6 months ago

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She's a Silver Lining

Chapter Nine of I Can't Help Myself

Summary: Spencer comes to terms with your abduction.

Warnings: ANGST, Suicidal ideation, kidnapping, mentions of fetal abduction and murder of pregnant women, descriptions of abuse, descriptions of prenatal care, typical case details. Spencer is depressed.

A/N: I'm sorry this chapter is a day late, I literally saw God this weekend (I saw Taemin perform live), and really, all that's been on my mind is how God is Good (Taemin is hot), and so I haven't been able to write anything as depressing as this chapter. I hope you enjoy (?) it anyway~♡

Masterlist || tags are currently broken, I'm sorry ♡

Eight days. It had been eight days since Spencer had last seen you. Eight days since he'd screwed up his one job so massively that he'd lost you.

He'd lost people before. He'd lost people on cases. Victims, unsubs, bystanders, and family members who didn't stand a chance at recovering from their own loss. He'd lost Maeve, which was a little too similar to his current circumstances to think about too hard. He'd been losing his mother since he was born, and he'd really lost her again a few months ago. He'd lost Gideon. He'd lost Elle, too, before that. He'd lost Emily, and though she'd come back too, it wasn't the same. He'd lost Morgan, and then Hotch. He'd lost Alex Blake.

He'd lost nearly everyone in his life. Some of them had come back, most of them hadn't.

He'd thought himself immune to the pain of losing someone at last.

He'd certainly lost enough of himself in prison.

It may have only been 84 days, but whatever was left in him of hope before was gone. He'd emerged completely empty.

He supposed that's why he'd accepted the role at the university. There was nothing left for him to give to the BAU, but he couldn't be the one to leave.

As it was, he'd already been unsettled enough by leaving you behind when he'd finished up his time there.

It felt weird to him, saying goodbye. Not that he'd actually said goodbye. He'd kissed your forehead as he slipped out of your bed, sure, but you'd been neither conscious, nor fond of him in anyway. It was a parting gesture just for him and he hadn't been quite sure why he'd done it.

It was just a gesture and one he'd repeated multiple times after getting you back. You didn't know, of course. How could you?

He'd either woken up before you and kissed your forehead, or climbed into bed beside you late at night and greeted you then.

You'd lain side by side, drifting to sleep slowly, when he realized it had become a daily habit.

He hadn't any idea of what he'd do when you left.

And now you had. And it was his fault.

In the eight days since you'd been kidnapped, Spencer had come to terms with a few facts.

He knew 64,956 women were currently declared missing in the United States. He knew that 77% of adults reported missing were found in 24 hours. You weren't. He knew 4% were found in 48 hours. You weren't. Only 3% were usually missing still after a week.

You were somehow in that small minority, even though there was an entire team of FBI agents working around the clock to find you.

He'd had faith in his coworkers before. Before, he'd begged for their help, and they'd succeeded in 24 hours, even if the outcome wasn't preferable.

This time, he didn't beg. He had no faith. He just hoped to be present with a gun, loaded with two bullets, if this time went the way of the last.

On the eighth day after your abduction, Spencer finally returned home.

The damage from your abduction was still apparent.

Not that your captor had left many clues. In fact, they'd left none. Not even a fingerprint or a good angle on the CCTV. But he hadn't taken returning to an empty apartment well.

He slashed through the crime scene tape quickly, letting in hang in the doorway as he entered. The bookshelves he'd attacked were limping, leaning on each other for support after he'd ripped books off so violently he'd set them askew.

He'd kicked and ripped and punched the wall so hard he'd needed stitches that he'd absolutely refused to get.

He'd cried and sobbed into his bloodied and bruised hands until Emily had arrived, and then he'd cried some more, leaning on his friend, his sister, for her support.

Returning now, there wasn't a single tear left.

In the hospital, they'd addressed his flesh wounds, but the emotional ones would never hear.

You were gone. And now there was only a 3% chance he'd ever see you again.

Emily hadn't allowed him to stick around to make their jobs harder. She's placed him on house arrest - funnily enough, her house, where you should've been if he wasn't such a selfish ass - and assigned a watch.

She’d said it was for protection, but what she'd meant was it was to protect him from himself.

The rest of the team had avoided the topic entirely. They didn't know how to deal with whatever stage of grief he was going through. Many of them had comforted him the first time. They didn't know how to do it a second. They didn't know if they could.

After eight days, Spencer had left Emily’s apartment. He'd dodged the Agent she'd stationed alongside him, got into a taxi, and gone home.

Surveying the damage, he was surprised how deep the hurt had already cut to not feel much anymore.

He looked at the books splayed on the floor. It was a title that you'd been reading that week. One he remembered you using at the office, one that had been on both of your courses reading lists. He picked each of them up and put them back on the shelf. He righted each shelf and organised them neatly, how he thought you'd like them.

He picked pillows up and rearranged them. He vacuumed the debris from the floor, the thin layer of dust that had gathered since he'd left, the splinters pf bookcase that had crumbled off, the shards of wall that were speckled with his blood.

He wept the entire time, though silent, until there were no tears left to cry.

Then he'd come across a tiny package underneath his coffee table, a single corner of plastic peaking out, begging for attention.

He'd picked it up and wept again as he found depths of sadness to reach further down than what he'd assumed to be rock bottom.

Aa he lay in a pool of his own despair, a new, haunting fact crashed from his brain to his heart. Since 1987, there had been 21 foetal abductions in the USA. 19 of them had ended in homicide, with the mother dying.

You made 22.

In the two months since you'd been abducted, you'd learned three things.

The first was that you absolutely loved Spencer Reid. You'd spent enough time sitting introspectively about everything in your life to realize you had to stop being so stubborn and admit just that. You'd been about there before all of this, but now you knew for sure.

You should be cursing the man that inspired your horror show of a life, after all. But instead, you thought about him and held back tears.

She gave you updates these days, testing your reactions to his name, waiting to see you crack, to see you cry, and sob and break down completely.

Today, Spencer had been to see his mother, she said. He'd broken down in her arms and caused her to have an episode. She'd hit him so hard, his face had already been bruised by the time she saw him.

The second thing you knew was that your baby was going to be born healthy. You had no plans of having a home birth, but now, at seven months pregnant, and large enough that you almost thought about doing your conception math again, you knew you were on track for giving birth in the room you'd been in for the last 58 days.

You hadn't counted.

She’d been good enough to tell you the date, the day, and her plans every morning when she visited you. She checked your vitals, your blood pressure, the position of the baby, your temperature, your heart rate, and recorded everything in her chart. She asked you how the pregnancy was going, almost as if she was the nurse she'd been training to be.

Her bedside manner was so good some days. You forgot entirely that you were tied down to the bed, ankle clamped down.

She let you walk for an hour a day, but recommended bedrest after that for health reasons. You didn't complain or talk back because she didn't like that.

She let you read, and she was even curious about your reading, asking you questions and taking notes as if this were just part of her regular college schedule, an office hour that had taken over her life.

You shuddered sometimes as she stared up at you with those big eyes, so wide, and young, and naive, and full of hatred, and evil, and you wanted to claw them out and scream for help, and stab her with the pencil she wrote notes with, and stab, and stab, and stab, and-

The third thing you knew was that you'd never hold your baby in your arms because you'd be dead moments after they breathed their first breath.

You knew, because she had told you as much everyday since you'd woken up.

In two months, Spencer had become more manic and self-destructive than he'd ever been in his entire life.

His world centred around you, and finding you, even as his 3% slipped to 1%, slipped to 0.1%, and he knew deep inside that he'd never see you again.

He hadn't returned to the BAU but had instead turned his home into an investigation room, emptying the walls so he could pin up information, evidence, pictures of you, everything he could find. It wasn't that he'd regained hope, but he'd grown so desperate that he suddenly gripped hard onto the only slither of it that he had left and refused to drop it. He was a dog that didn't know the game of fetch only conti he'd if he dropped the ball. His life would not go on without you.

So he searched. He knew how far along you were. He knew how far along a woman had to be for a c section, professionally performed or not.

He barricaded himself into his house and paced for days as his friends pounded down his door. He let none in. He didn't go out. He wasn't sure what he ate, or drank, or if he slept, but he knew he paced, and he thought, and he came up with theories.

After two months, Emily was tired of knocking.

“Spencer Reid, I am coming in,” she shouted from behind the door.

He usually ignored her. She couldn't pass the bookshelves he'd moved in front of the door anyway, even if his superintendent had given her a key.

This time though, he heard a banging, a creak and a crash as the bookshelves went down and Emily, who had left him and returned, made her way inside his apartment.

“You barricaded the door?” she said, looking at him.

He took a shaky breath and tried to answer as she surveyed his apartment, the mess of papers, books, string on the wall. He saw her stare down at the pile of sheets on the floor where he'd been sleeping, the bag of your things he had dragged to be closer to him.

He saw her look at the baby shoes, and baby grows he'd laid out neatly on the floor, and he saw the pitying look she turned on him.

“She's pregnant,” he finally said out loud, though you must've been 7 months along by then. “I'm going to be a father.”

“Spencer,” Emily said, grasping his hand, voice cracking from the strain of emotion that coated her tongue, making her voice thick. “You would've been an amazing father.”

“No. No-” he said, breaking away and moving back to his wall. “No past tense, I won't let you… I won't let you give up on them.”

“It's been two months.”

“So she's only seven months pregnant. I have two more months to find her, Emily. Two more. At least allow me that.”

The tears in his eyes streamed freely now as she nodded.

“We will…. you know we'll help you. We'll do everything we can, so come to the office.”

He didn't want to give up his space. His reminders of you, the baby grows, the information he'd gathered.

Equally, he didn't like Emily being in this space. She thought you were already dead, and he couldn't even look her in the eye.

Reluctantly, he nodded, lifting himself up on legs weakened by insurmountable grief, and he followed her to Quantico.

By the end of your third trimester, you wondered how you could ever have gotten so big. When you gave birth, the child inside of you would only be the size of a small pumpkin. You felt like you'd swallowed five regular size pumpkins whole, and you felt you were still expanding.

The point worried her. She'd broken two glasses in tantrums this last week alone, measuring you every day.

The closer you got to birth, the more agitated she grew.

“This demon inside of you is going to kill you. I won't even have to do it myself,” she'd whispered to herself, or to you, as she took your vitals that morning.

“Please don't say that.”

“Why not? You're a whore, and you're going to give birth to a devil. You have seduced my soul mate, because you are a jezebel and the Lord is punishing you.”

You'd needed all the strength you could get for these conversations. Even one tear, and she'd erupt and put a knife at your neck. With only a few weeks left, there was no saying whether she'd speed her plan along.

“I did not seduce your soul mate,” you said as calmly as you could muster, taking deep breaths, hoping that she would mirror them and calm down.

“Do we have to watch the fucking video again?” she spat at you, stomping around to the side of your bed and pulling out her phone. She queued up the video quickly and you averted your eyes.

She turned them back quickly, holding your head in place as she forced you to watch your own office space. She showed you the videos of you and Spencer talking, teasing each other. She showed you the video of you insisting you were not attractive to him. She showed you the video of Spencer fucking you on the sofa, though she screamed and cut her fingernails into her skin the entire way through.

She even showed you the video of her attempting to seduce Spencer during their office hour. It was the first video in her collection, the first time she'd set up the camera. She used your entrance as proof that you were breaking her apart from her soul mate. From Spencer.

You were a whore who had thrown herself at him in anyway you could, and you had trapped him with a baby.

She was going to free him from all responsibility so he could be with her.

“My baby will be your devil,” she said as the video ended, and you forced your heart to settle.

“It is not your baby.”

“Spencer won't know that. He doesn't know it's your baby either, and who are the authorities going to believe when I show up with his child. One paternity test later, and I'll have him, and we can be a happy family together, and we can live happily. I'll take in your devil and raise it as my own, and we'll forget about the whore who almost ruined it all.”

The psychosis was so clearly written on her face, you were surprised no one had caught onto her state yet. She was devolving. She'd been calm, and contemplative the first week. She'd laid out her plans still, her insane plans, and seemed somewhat coherent.

Then she'd began rambling about the devil and soul mates, and you'd pitied her, even in your fear.

Now you were just glad she counted your office tryst as your conception date, and you'd never corrected her.

She still believed there was a month left until your death. You knew it was days.

You just prayed your baby could buy you some time.

“Professor?” she said as she carried away the tray of items she'd checked your vitals with

“Yes.”

“You are not in love with Spencer Reid,” she said, as if trying to convince you.

“No,” you said, trying to convince yourself though it was hopeless. “I am not in love with Spencer Reid.”

The first lead in the case came on your due date. Patient confidentiality was, happily, overlooked by a few doctors when he pressed the issue, needing to know until when he was counting down.

He'd done the rough math himself, but he needed a professional opinion.

The lead came in the form of an email. The university was cleaning out your office to make way for a new professor, despite his insistence that you'd return, and they needed him to collect things.

And though he knew you'd be giving birth that day, and he had run out of time, something compelled him to go and do this menial task on today of all days.

Luke had joined him, and then so had JJ and Emily, and Penelope and Tara. Rossi had even arrived to watch you pile books into boxes that were supposed to have lived on these shelves for a long career. Everyone in the room was so busy watching him, waiting for him to crack, that it had to be him to find it.

At first, he thought it was a hole in the couch. It was so dark and black, its curved corners giving the illusion of introversion. Then he'd touched it and felt the rough bump.

“Penelope, here, now,” he breathed out, gasping for air as he finally pulled the tiny spy camera free and thrust it into his friends hands.

He had a lead. He had you now.

The first hour of labour was inconvenient only because you weren't alone. She'd been tending to you all morning, fussing over your food, trying to maintain the right amount of prenatal vitamins as she usually did, but she'd ran out of two bottles, and the pharmacy wasn't open.

You sat still and uncomfortable, trying to not even flinch as your water broke, too afraid of death to be thinking about the life you were bringing into this world.

The second hour ticked by much the same until she left.

The third came, and you ceased your screams of pain, even as your hands bore holes into your sheets. She returned, and you knew there wasn't much longer until she knew.

By hour four, she had your legs spread and was watching you deliver your baby, and you knew the same blade that would sever your umbilical cord would also end your life.

By hour five, you were so delirious with pain that you thought you saw Spencer. You heard his voice cooing to you as you pushed. You felt his hands wipe away your sweat, smooth the hair from your eyes. You heard his voice announce your daughters birth, and you felt his lips against your skin as you finally gave up fighting and drifted into oblivion.

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