Chapter Text
Chip Taylor opened the door to the trailer he called home, feeling more tired than he had ever felt in his entire life.
He knew there would be no food in the refrigerator. There never was. Maybe there might be a beer or two.
That counts as food, right?
Calories, at least. Beer is made from bread yeast… It has sugar. Energy.
Everything felt weird but he just chalked that up to extreme exhaustion after a very long day of shoveling shit.
One step into the place he called home and he could tell something was weird. Off. Everything was hazy and disjointed and nothing was really right. He felt scared. When he felt scared… he called for help. Even if he knew, somewhere deep inside his psyche, that help was long gone.
“Liza?” he called out of habit as he opened the fridge, using the door to hold himself up when his legs felt like they might give out from beneath him. Normally, Liza would yell back at him. Normally, he wasn’t so nervous to be here… normally, his kitchen wasn’t so clean.
“LIZA!” he called again.
His voice echoed as he stared at the strange contents of his fridge. Nothing looked right. For one thing, it was clean. There was no old crusty stain stuck to the bottom shelf. There was no beer. The light didn’t flicker. In fact, the entire fridge looked different the longer he stared at it.
It went from barely visible in the darkness to lit up on all sides as the festival guy. The shelves were so clean. The room smelled nice and Chip had never been in this little trailer park kitchen without presenting a good meal that smelled like ass.
The fridge was still basically empty but now… there were vegetables present. Leafy greens. A bag of coffee with a fancy insignia sat next to a carton of eggs labeled “free range”. Three large bottles of electrolyte enhanced water sat next to a tupperware full of pasta with a bit of tape on it reading “Papa Pasta’s Carbonara 12/7”.
Rossi’s carbonara… I never did get to eat the leftovers.
He reached for the container with a hazy smile playing at his lips. His fingers didn’t feel like they touched anything but he was somehow lifting a forkful of steaming, fresh carbonara noodles to his lips as he grinned and slurped them up.
People were there. Was Liza having a party?
People were there. There with him.
Where exactly was he?
His kitchen didn’t look like this. His kitchen was a narrow galleyway with no room to turn around and no where to escape the smell of bad fried food crusted deep against the electric burners…
He was slurping noodles with his hand wrapped around a wine glass, hip pressed to a marble countertop while a bunch of beautiful people stood there laughing and smiling, slurping like he was…
“Spence, you came--a toast to Spencer!”
The end of the noodle slapped his upper lip and Chip opened his eyes.
He was no longer slurping noodles. There was nothing in his hands. No container of leftovers, no recollection of how he got here. He wasn’t even in the sad kitchen he once knew well.
He sat half-naked on the end of his bed. The bed he shared with Liza for the last six months. The Bed where he learned more about himself than he knew was possible to learn.
“Liza?” he called out when the lights dimmed and brightened frighteningly around him. He must have forgotten to pay the power bill.
“Thieves, Spencer, they’re THIEVES--don’t answer the door--”
“They aren’t thieves, mother, they’re the power company, we have to answer the door or they’ll shut it off, do you understand?!”
Those voices were not Liza’s. Those voices went deeper, they came from somewhere deeper…
It’s me. Me and Mom.
Mom? Spencer… she called me Spencer…
“Don’t do this to me, Spencer!”
Diana Reid.
That’s her name. My mother’s name.
How can that be her name… Liza told me my mom was dead. She showed me the death certificate… How can that be her name… why else would a ghost tell me that name again and again…
Where am I….
Chip scrunched his eyes shut against the painful intrusions, popping a prescription strength pill in her mouth… he felt awful but…. There was that name again… Spencer.
“You really want to cling to that shitty little nerd identity, don’t you?”
He sat up so fast he felt dizzy, his head pounding, something painful happening in his bowels he wasn’t sure what to make of--tugging, ouch fuck, stop--He knew his ex-girlfriend would not give him any peace to figure out something like this on their own, even if she was definitely dead.
Definitely dead… right? She is definitely dead.
“Liza?”
The hands snaking up along his back beneath his sweaty t-shirt made it clear that he wasn’t dreaming. Or… if he was dreaming… the simulation must be better than the reality.
Because Chip Taylor was ready to lie down and let Liza take him back to when things were simple and clear. He was too tired to deal with anything else. Liza was the easy way out…
Is she though, Chip?
Another pair of hands were on him now, holding him at the hips while Liza kept his shoulders pinned to the sweaty old mattress of his mind. His heart skipped a beat to hear her voice again. He wasn’t sure if his throat might be slit or not but he had to respond. He had to tell her how he felt about her while he still had a voice… after she had been robbed of hers.
“Violet? Violet, oh my God, Violet…”
There she was. Climbing off the bed, naked. Completely naked. Her eyes wide open just like the wound on her throat. Just like he found her, staring at nothing. Chip started sobbing even though that made everything blurrier. Violet pressed her head to his and suddenly he felt a jolt that made him see stars and feel colors. It was not pleasant.
“Shh… Spencer. Save your strength.”
“Listen to her, baby, you’re gonna need that strength!” JOLT. PAIN. WHIR. FLASH of white.
“Love is our true destiny…”
He wanted to answer her but he couldn’t. Not in time. BOOM. scream. GOD--
God was never there to save you. According to his plan, you’re playing right into his hand, baby. Just like I did. Just like you will again.
Chip fought the anesthesia hard while they wheeled him into surgery. He didn’t know what was going on, so he fought like hell to keep anything from happening.
He failed.
Another jolt made him mad. It hurt. He could hear Liza laughing from behind him at his pain.
“My name’s not Spencer… it’s…. It… what’s my name, I know it’s not… Spe-Spencer….”
He wasn’t actually speaking while the surgeons worked to fix every single internal injury Dr. Spencer Reid had incurred during his nearly year long hiatus into the underground.
Ethan Delacroix waited in the ICU family room, counting the seconds until he saw those men and women in suits pushing doors open without a fuck given to protocol.
He stood because that’s what people did when they met at the potential deathbed of a shared loved one.
Ethan had never met Aaron Hotchner but he knew who he was instantly. Reid was pretty good at giving descriptions so long as he didn’t draw them…
“Ethan?” Hotch asked.
“Hotch. Good to meet you finally,” Ethan responded, pulling the stiff G-Man into a big old hug regardless of the guy’s consent for contact. Hotch pushed him away two seconds into the hug, straightening his tie with a grimace.
“It’s nice to meet you as well.. But I am here to find my agent. You said you sent Dr. Reid here when he found you--I need to know everything about that interaction and I need to know Reid’s status now--”
Ethan shrugged tiredly and pointed down the hall to the closed off ICU.
“His status is there. I just know he was almost dead when he wandered into my bar. He didn’t recognize me at all. He went down fighting, hard.” Ethan backed off toward the double doors he’d been guarding for hours while the FBI figured out what to do. He knew how it worked, more often than not.
Agent goes missing after a traumatic event. Agent doesn’t turn up for months. Agent presumed lost.
Agent Reid suddenly reared his head in his memory. Ethan didn’t know how it happened but he knew enough to know that the BAU had failed, in a sad, funny, devastating way that made him furious.
He didn’t feel like talking to any of these people who just let it happen. Sadly, he had to talk to them. He had to be the bad guy who told it straight while they all sat there assuming everything would be fine.
Spencer almost died. He might have by now. These people he trusted knew he was missing for months… I would have found him, I would have found him in days while it took them months to care, months until they had a crime scene worthy of their title….
FUCK YOU, ASSHOLES!
That was just about the extent of his ability to think at the moment. Ethan forced a few deep breaths before he turned to face the man in charge of this Unit that had cost his best friend so much over the years.
He had to just… accept it. If he wanted to help Spencer, he had to start where Spencer would start. And clearly, his team had no idea where that might be. He chose to approach the man in charge first when he walked over with his hands in his jean pockets, already shrugging as if he was an idiot who knew nothing.
Vegas had taught him a thing or two about faking it. Clearly, growing up in Vegas had taught Spencer Reid a few things too many until it all caught up with him.
Ethan watched them all file into the tiny conference room at the North Las Vegas
“Sit and wait, Agent Hotchner. Sit and wait like I will until he’s released. If you can do that, you might impress me. Til then….” Ethan shrugged and bit his lip. “Just know you finally fucked him up. I hope you will always know just how much you fucked him up, even before this apparent mishap.”