Work Text:
The first time he snapped at Emily—outside the homeless shelter—she was completely taken aback. Everyone has their limits, everyone snaps, but this was...out of nowhere. She’d just expressed concern and he"d put her down.
She wasn’t angry at him. And, God, she knew something was wrong. She knew it. But he shut her out—slammed the door and bolted the lock. Because that’s how it was with him. At the first sign of danger or concern he was gone, like a rabbit down a warren.
Emily went to Hotch. She mentioned the incident, and that she was truly worried about Reid. That she didn’t know what was wrong but she knew there was something. Hotch cut her off and explained what duty of care meant in the FBI. He didn’t have to say anything else. She understood. And she hated it.
She never said another word about it again. To Hotch or to anyone.
Emily started carrying Narcan when Reid’s eyes went glassy. When his hands started shaking. When he couldn’t eat without almost throwing up. She hoped she’d never had to use it. That it would expire one day when this was all just a painful memory.
She wasn’t stupid. Far from it. She knew that some of his actions could be explained by PTSD. Others couldn’t.
Emily just hoped that if it ever happened, she’d be by his side. That it wouldn’t happen on a random day off in his apartment, leaving his body to rot. (She had a nightmare about that. Multiple nightmares, actually. Soft tissue caving in and the smell of decay. Holding Penelope as she sobbed and screamed.)
The day it happened, he went to the bathroom. With his bag. He got a few weird looks from local officers as he stepped into the men’s room, but no one said anything. Because no one ever said anything.
It was normal that he took a little longer in the bathroom. (It was normal now).
Emily was listening to JJ and Morgan trade ideas. It was, for all intents and purposes, a normal moment. She was silently making sure he wasn’t gone too long, but she never looked at the bathroom itself, just the clock. The bathroom was a stone’s throw away.
It didn’t feel close enough. To her, Reid was a kid. She knew, yes, he was a fully grown adult with a gun and a badge. But she saw the little kid in him. She just wanted him safe and happy. Was that too much to ask?
The door opened. She turned to look, and—
He’d never looked worse. Huge pupils, eyes wide and terrified. He was deathly pale and sweating. She could hear him wheezing, foam dripping from his mouth. He was trying to communicate but no noise was coming out of his mouth.
Morgan would tell anyone how fast Emily moved. Up and out of her chair in a half-second, at Reid’s side in another. Shaking him and shouting at him. Tearing his shirt open to get to his shoulder muscles—one of the places that Narcan injections are meant to go. Rolling Reid onto his side after the injection and screaming at Hotch to call an ambulance.
Morgan would leave out the way she sobbed—great big heaving sobs as she held him on his side. He’d leave out the way she brushed his hair back out of his face, and the way she apologized over and over, a relentless torrent of I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry. The way Hotch had to yank her off of him as the EMTs arrived. The way she crumpled up after he was gone.
Emily and Gideon were alone in Spencer’s hospital room.
Dilaudid overdose, the doctor had said, and from the looks of his arms, he’s been abusing it for months. You’re lucky she had Narcan. He would’ve died.
The EKG was so loud. Tracking his heart rate, his pulse. The IV drip bag was almost empty—the nurse would be in again soon. He had about a million different wires on him, plus the oxygen. The Narcan had worked, but he’d started seizing not long after. He been awake briefly, but not enough to talk.
People wake up slowly. It’s not like the movies where they snap awake.
Spencer’s twitching hands made Emily tap Gideon. They move closer. A half-hour later, his feet shift under the covers. Twenty minutes, his head rolls over awake from them. It was a light rain of movements until finally, finally he opened his eyes.
They look haunted. Tired. Almost dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was alive.
The dam burst. Emily covered his cold, pale with hers and started sobbing. Gideon was next to her, his hand on Spencer’s shoulder.
Spencer sighed. It was too big of a sigh for someone his age. He looked past both of them, at the ceiling of his room. Slowly, he turned his hand over and held Emily’s.
He closed his eyes again.