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geniusgub · 3 years

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north//chapter sixteen

genre: angst

warnings: prison, stabbing, solitary confinement, mention of deaths

word count: 3.2k

summary: spencer is spiraling. amelia is too. being apart is weighing on them and hope has run out.

pairing: season 12 spencer reid x oc

like, comment, and reblog :) enjoy!!

SPENCER

Guilt is a feeling I'm far too familiar with. Guilt is something I can't escape and guilt is something that has run my life. Guilt always seems to follow me wherever I go like a black cloud floating over my head.

I always thought that strong panic could easily outweigh guilt, but clearly, I've learned my lesson. As I hear the coughs and cries and screams of agony from the other prisoners on my cell block, the panic settles in my body.

Rossi told me I was a good person. He swore I wouldn't be changed by these people and this place and he was wrong. He was so utterly and horribly wrong and I know if he ever finds out about this, he would be so disappointed in me.

And Amelia. My beautiful, sweet, innocent girl. What if she found out about this? What if she finds out that I purposely poisoned a batch of drugs? What would she think? Would she hate me? Would she leave me? I'm barely surviving prison but I wouldn't survive her leaving me. I could never survive life without her.

But I'm doing what I can survive. But I had a million ways out of this situation. I had a million ways to get myself out of moving those drugs and instead any of those other simpler, cleaner, easier ways, I chose to poison them. I chose the way that would cause pain and suffering for those who have wronged me, and I unintentionally chose pain and suffering for the one person who has helped me out in here. And now that Shaw is gone and off to the infirmary, what's going to happen to me? Now that my protection is gone, am I at risk again?

But then the panic starts to dissipate. The panic dissipates and all I feel this guilt. Overwhelming, suffocating guilt. I feel horrible. I feel like the worst person to walk planet earth. I am the worst person to walk the planet. I watch all these men get rushed onto gurneys and run down hallways on the arms of correctional officers and it makes my heart sink.

I'm officially one of them. I didn't even want to move the drugs. I was so adamant about not allowing this contraband to be distributed to the inmates and I did everything I could to not have to move them, but I got pushed against the wall and held down, literally and figuratively. I had no choice.

And just when I don't need it, Tara shows up. She shows up, waving her doctorate degree in the air, telling me that we need to do another cognitive. Another cognitive. Another cognitive. She needs to dive into my mangled brain yet again to figure out what happened in Mexico just twenty-four hours after I poisoned half of my cell block. Another cognitive could help with Stephen's new way of finding Scratch. What is that new way? She didn't even say. I don't even want to know.

But it's something to do. It's something to distract from the guilt that's eating me alive. It's something to distract me from the things I think when I'm in my cell. It's something to distract me from the images of Malcolm shaking on the floor or Delgado bleeding out. It's something.

But even though it's something, the pain is there. The pain of Mexico resurfaces and hits me tenfold. The pain beats me against my chest and bolts me to my chair, stinging the scar on my hand. This isn't what I need. I didn't need to be reminded of my trauma as more trauma is unfolding before my eyes.

"You're helping Nadie and she's responding," Tara coaches me through the cognitive.

I rack my brain for answers and images and sounds and smells but it just comes up blank. "There's nothing I can do."

"And what about him? I mean, you must feel him in your peripheral vision, behind you somewhere."

"Yeah, he's behind me." It's almost like I can feel him standing behind me now, watching me to make sure I don't reveal his hidden identity to Tara. Why can't I just put Scratch's face there and this can all be over? I can use say it was him and I can collect my get-out-of-jail free card. "I can feel him watching me, and I'm--"

My eyelids fly open, desperate to erase an image that has materialized in my head. It's horrifying and bloody and there's no way it can be true. But it must be true if I'm seeing it. It's true. That's it. This is the big answer everyone has been waiting for and it's the answer nobody believed could be possible.

"What is it?" Tara's voice seems so far away and so distant.

"It was me. I killed her."

Tara's face softens and I don't know how she could possibly look at me like that. "Spencer," I rise from my chair and go rushing to the door, banging on it to alert a guard that this is over and I'm ready to return to my cell, "Spencer, that's not possible. Reid!"

I don't sleep a wink. I don't even lay in bed. I don't want to face the nightmares of me stabbing an innocent woman who just wanted to help my mother. An innocent woman who had a family and a husband or wife and children and a whole life to live. Selfishly, I don't want to see that. And maybe I deserve to. Maybe that should be my punishment for killing her, as if prison isn't punishment enough.

I sit on the floor. I work out until my muscles can't hold my weight. I stare at the wall. I gaze out the window. I do everything I can to stay awake and I'm successful. I contemplate celebrating when I see the sun starting to rise and I jump up to make my bed in the perfect way the correctional officers want it. If it's not perfect, I get in trouble. More trouble than I've already gotten in. I’ll get embarassed, humiliated, degraded, exposed. I don’t need that. I make the bed once, and then twice, and fix it a third time.

And then Tara waves around her doctorate again. She swears she needs more time with her “patient” and I'm dragged away after breakfast. I'm put in cuffs that dig into the bruises and cuts around my wrists and cuffs that make me bleed and cuffs that I still feel on my skin even after they been taken off.

I cant see the images anymore. I can't do it. I can't continue to be haunted by what happened in Mexico and I can't keep seeing Nadie's face in my head, whether I'm sleeping or not. I don't want to do another cognitive and see, yet again, that I'm a killer. I don't need it to be confirmed to me time and time again that I'm a murderer and that I deserve to be in prison until the day I die.

"I cannot keep doing this anymore, okay? I told you, it was better if you all just stayed away. You're making it worse." It's a beg. It's a plead for Tara to leave and not come back.

But Tara insists. She insists that my mind is just playing tricks on me. She wonders why I don't realize that. She wants to know why I'm not thinking things out. The cognitive yesterday gave her an answer she would rather not have. She confirmed yesterday that I'm a murderer and now she's back to see if she can force my brain to play a trick.

"Spencer Reid is incapable of killing an innocent woman in cold blood."

I lean close to Tara, but not too close. I'm not telling a secret. It doesn't need to be whispered. "You have no idea what I'm capable of."

"Look," Tara sighs, "prison is a difficult place. You've probably had to do things in here to survive that you would never think of doing in the outside world, things that make you feel guilty. But the brain has to handle that guilt, has to process it. And sometimes it spreads that guilt around into places it doesn't belong."

Guilt always seems to follow me wherever I go like a black cloud floating over my head. No matter where I go, the guilt is there. The guilt of killing an innocent woman, the guilt of abandoning my mother with basically a stranger, the guilt of leaving my girlfriend behind, the guilt of poisoning other prisoners. It's all there, all the time.

I stare down at my hands, raw and bruised and calloused and rough. "I could see the knife in my hand."

"We know that Scratch uses drugs to change our perception of what's real and what's not," Tara tells me. "He could dose you and tell you that you, I don't know, your favorite color is black and you'd believe it wholeheartedly. He could dose you and make you believe anything he wants and you’d never remember. That's what he does. That's what his drugs do."

She convinces me. I don't know how she managed to do it so easily, but she did. She convinces me to go through with the cognitive and in no time, my eyes are shut and I land back in that dingy, dark motel room with Nadie beside me.

I tell her what seems obvious to me. Someone bursts in the room, I move the knife to get closer to a stabbed Nadie and that's how I cut my hand, there's a mist over my shoulder, I turn to look at who it is but I can't see who it is.

"Do you recognize him?"

"No," I shake my head, scrunching up my face in frustration. He's blurry, but he's spraying me and it's getting more blurry.

"Focus, Spencer. Concentrate on who it is."

I clench my hand, pain shooting up my arms when the cuffs dig into my skin. I squeeze my eyes tighter and focus in on the image, and it actually gets clearer. I can see better. "It's Scratch," I whisper. "It's Scratch. It's Scratch. It's him. And he's drugging me. And I hear him say something."

I can see Scratch's distorted hand swirling around as she sprays me in the face, dousing me with her disgusting drugs. "What does he say?" Tara prompts.

It's time. It's time to go.

I see her holding out a pair of car keys to me, nails painted perfectly black, as she speaks in a sickly sweet voice. My eyes pop open. "Time to go," I repeat, "she says, time to go and then she just walks right out of there like she didn't have a care in the world, like she wanted me to chase her!"

It wasn't Scratch. It was a woman and I'll be here forever. If it was just some woman, there's no way to get me out of here. I'll die in this prison.

"It wasn't Scratch who framed me. It was a woman."

///

AMELIA

///

I'm not sure why I keep going back to the BAU. Nothing good ever seems to happen there, not since Spencer got arrested. The only happy memory I have is getting the smuggled letter from Spencer, but that isn't enough to cancel out the tears and the panic attacks and the pain that I've gone through on the sixth floor of this building.

So I'm not sure why I gravitate back here. It's probably because of Penelope. It's probably because I like to stare at the knick-knacks on her desk or stare at my own artwork on her walls and wonder if I could produce anything even close to that. Penelope herself is a reason to spend almost every day in a federal building filled with guns and pictures of dead bodies. She's one of the few reasons I'm afloat right now. After I throw an appreciation party for Jenna, I'll need to throw one for Penelope.

When I step out of the elevator, the first person I see is Emily. She's hurrying past the elevator, but when she sees me, she halts. And with the smile she gives me, I know something is wrong. For a moment, I debate not even getting out of the elevator so I don't have to face whatever new bad news I'm about to hear, but I know that I'll have to hear it eventually.

I step out, staring down at my tennis shoe-clad feet. "What now? Spencer's trial already got pushed back."

Emily clutches the case files in her hand and waves me along. "Come on, I'll update you."

The walk through the bullpen seems to take a million times longer than it usually does. But Emily finally leads me to the round table room and the first thing I notice is the face of a brunette on the screen. Penelope smiles when I enter, giving me the weakest wave I've ever seen from her.

"Who's that?" I ask, gesturing to the screen.

"That's Lindsay Vaughn." Emily explains, sitting down at the table, gesturing for me to do the same. It's the first time I've ever sat here and I almost feel unworthy. And I can tell I’m taking Spencer’s usual seat. That just feels wrong. I shift unconmfortably, wondering if it would be better for me to stand or move to a different seat. "A long time ago, Spencer had an interaction with Lindsay and her father on a case. Her father was a hitman so at the end of the case, the two of them were put into Witness Protection. Well, apparently, Lindsay left and she teamed up with Scratch."

"So this Lindsay girl is the one who drugged Spencer in Mexico and killed Nadie?" Emily nods. "So does that mean he's coming home?" It's too sweet of a thought. It's too easy. Of course he's not coming home. It's too easy.

"No," Emily shakes her head now, and my chest deflates. I should have expected that. "He identified her voice but there's no evidence. The team is out searching for that now."

"Her voice? How did he do that?" I glance frantically between the two women and watch as they look between each other.

"Okay," Emily leans close to me, and places her hand atop mine, "I have to tell you two really hard things right now. Just take a breath and I know it's hard to stay calm but you need to try," my teeth dig into my cheeks as I nod, but I don't promise. I don't make promises I know I'll break. I don't make promises unless they're to Spencer. "This girl, Lindsay, she killed Cassie and abducted Diana."

My eyes widen and I rip my hand away from Emily's grasp. "She took Diana?"

"She did," Emily reaches for my hand again, but I don't let her touch me. She sighs but continues talking. "She was stalking Reid for a while. She had pictures of him on a few cases, she even rented an apartment right next to his."

"Oh my god," I breathe out, leaning my elbows against the table and putting my head in my hands. "I can't believe it. He's in prison! What the fuck does Scratch and this bitch want with Diana?"

"We don't know," Penelope finally speaks up, "but we're doing everything we can to help Diana and to find her."

I stare down at the wood on the table and take a long breath through my nose, filling my lungs with stale air that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. "You said there were two things. What's the second thing?" I look up now, and I make the mistake of looking at Penelope first. Her eyes immediately fill with tears. It's about Spencer. Well, this is all about Spencer, but this news is Spencer.

Emily gulps and this time, she doesn't try to reach out for me again. "This morning, Reid stabbed himself in order to get thrown into solitary confinement."

I almost don't have a reaction to this at all. My eyebrows just raise in the tiniest bit because I don't believe it. Spencer stabbed himself? My Spencer? My Spencer who wouldn't even kill the spider in my bathtub. He had to catch it in his hands and release it onto the balcony. Someone who won't kill a spider wouldn't stab themself. Why did he stab himself? Why?

"You're not serious," that's the only feasible response I can think to come up with. "That's not--"

"It is, and it's a good thing, I promise." Emily tries to give me a smile but it only enrages me.

Penelope's eyes widen. "Emily, don't pro-"

"No!" I lose my cool, and as my voice raises, tears streaming down my cheeks. I jump out of my chair, knocking it over, but I don't even care. "Solitary confinement is not a good thing! Solitary confinement is where people go crazy and start seeing things! So don't tell me that Spencer stabbing himself is a fucking good thing because it's not! I'm tired of everyone promising me things that fall through! That's not what promises are for! Spencer could go crazy in solitary confinement and that's horrible!"

I turn on my heel and run for the door, pushing past JJ and Stephen, who don't even bother to try and stop me. Surely, they heard me yelling. But I hear heels behind me and I know Penelope has followed me and she's the only person I'd be willing to talk to right now.

She follows me all the way to her lair, and she even opens the door for me, allowing me to enter first. "She didn't know about the whole promising thing, Amelia, I'll tell the team," Penelope says quickly, pulling me into a tight hug when the door closes. "I'm so sorry. I wish I could help with more than just a hug, but this is all I can do."

"I wanna help him," I cry, squeezing her waist. "I don't want him there anymore and I wanna bring him home and hold him and--"

"And we're gonna get him out. We've been working with all the energy we have to get him out and find every scrap of evidence there is to exonerate him. I know you don't agree with Emily, but Reid is safe in solitary. He won't be around the other inmates. He won't be around the people who beat him up, and that's a good thing."

"That might be the only good thing about that. And poor Diana. She must be so scared, and so confused, and so lost. I don't know how she's functioning right now."

"We're gonna find her," Penelope pulls away, rubbing up and down my arms. "We're gonna find Diana, exonerate Spencer, and put Lindsay and Scratch in prison."

I smile through my tears, wiping my cheeks. "I think I'm gonna call Jenna and go home. I don't wanna interrupt you guys but the last thing I want is to be alone."

"That's a good idea. I'll keep you updated if anything happens." Penelope starts to lead me towards the door, holding it open for me.

"Don't." I shake my head, walking to the elevators. "I don't want updates. I just-- just do your jobs. That's all I need. I'll see you soon, Penny. I love you."

TAGLIST

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