T is for Trust
Title: T is for Trust
Pairing: Reid/JJ
Rating: PG13/R-ish
Summary: Something is very, very wrong.
Warnings: Language. Drug abuse/addiction. Over-angsty melodrama? Ha.
Notes: Another one of bubblesuds' amazing Alphabet Meme prompts. The time has come to torture these two again. *rolls eyes*
After a couple of years in the BAU, there isn't much left that frightens JJ. There are things that sicken her, of course, and things that sadden her, and piss her off, and make her paranoid, but fear? She's numb to it, maybe, or at least she's learned to shove it aside for more useful reactions to horror -- ones that will keep her alive, keep her sane, keep her moving forward instead of cowering back. Fear doesn't really register anymore.
At least, that's what she thinks when she walks up to Spencer's door on a Friday evening with half a lasagna - he always looks underfed, but he's been worrying her lately, looks in danger of falling into his own shadow and disappearing off the face of the earth, looks sick - and knocks, and the door swings open against the light pressure of her fist. It's not locked. Not even latched properly. Barely even closed.
JJ's heart drops like a stone into her belly, and goosebumps raise all over her body. It's instant. Physical. It's a sensation that's ingrained in her muscle memory, her nerve memory, from the first time she stepped onto a crime scene. Something is very, very wrong.
In under two seconds, she has zipped through a case-file of possible scenarios and debated half a dozen responses, deciding finally that she doesn't have time to go back to her car for her weapon - if there's anyone here who isn't supposed to be, they've already heard her, and statistics tell her that they're more likely to flee than confront her. Instead, she gropes for the switch she knows is to her left, hits the light, and shoves her pan onto the table, knocking Spencer's keys and a stack of mail onto the floor. They jingle and clatter. More noise. Good.
"Spence?" She calls his name into the darkness and starts to make her way towards his living room, from where the only other light in the place - the odd, low-green glow of the television, muted - is filtering into the hallway. She comes around the corner, every muscle so tight it feels like it's going to snap, and that's when JJ remembers fear.
He's dead. JJ knows death, and he's it: sprawled across his sofa, his limbs at angles no one comfortably sleeps in, his skin fatally pale in the dimness, his head lolling off the edge a centimeter from the sharp corner of his battered coffee table. He's dead, and she can't breathe, can't blink, can't make a fucking sound to call for help.
She's trained, though, a neat little Bureau machine in some ways - they all are - and thank God, because her body knows what to do even when her blood's turned to ice and there's a scream blocking her throat, swollen so large that it can't get out. She's at his side before she can figure out how she got there, two fingers pushed against his carotid, her head bent low over his narrow chest. She has to try with her other hand, too, before she manages to convince herself that the thrumming she feels, slow but steady, is his pulse and not her own.
The realization sends the breath rushing from her lungs, frees up space for her voice, and she starts calling his name, propping his head up and trying to shake him loose of whatever is holding him like this. "Spence! Wake up! Spence! Spencer!"
He blinks, disoriented and far too slow, and doesn't seem to know where he is for a moment. JJ leans up and flips on the lamp, holding his eyes all the way open with her fingers. His pupils are symmetrical and reactive, shrinking down in protest of the sudden, stark light. He tries to sit up, but he's clumsy, his palm slipping off the edge. She catches him and helps him right himself, and is comforted just a little by the warmth of his skin. "What's wrong? What happened?" she asks, her fingers curled tight around his, her eyes searching him for signs of labored breathing, pain, anything.
"JJ?" His voice is odd. Thick. It's an actual question, like he's not positive it's her. Like she might not be here, real, touching him.
JJ cups his face between her palms and stares right into his eyes, and then she knows. Then it makes sense. Skinny. Moody. Secretive. Shaky. Nervous. She shakes her head back and forth in disbelief, the lump coming back into her throat as quickly as it left. When she speaks, it's a thready almost-whisper. "You are fucked up. You are so fucked up right now. What did you take? Do you need a doctor?"
He blinks his confused, lazy blink at her again, then his mouth curls into a ghastly sort of smile. "I am a doctor," he says, then tries to laugh but gives up, closing his eyes again.
JJ smacks him hard in the cheek, and he opens them. "Fuck you," she says, so low she almost can't hear herself. "Fuck. You."
He raises his eyebrows a little, approximating - and completely perverting - an expression she usually loves, and mumbles, "Okay."
The tears almost start right there - the prickling behind her eyes is rage, mostly, but it's also helplessness and sadness and a whole mix of other things she doesn't want to pick apart and call by name - but she swallows hard and sets to work. "Get up."
He doesn't move.
"Get up," she tries again. "I'll help you. Get up." JJ rises to her feet and holds one hand on his shoulder as he assembles his lanky limbs into a seated position. She guides him to his feet, makes sure he's steady, and then tells him to wait while she turns on the other lights. The room is in chaos, but she can't worry about that now; she has to worry about him. There, in the living room, she pushes his clothes around, looks underneath, feels around for anything out of place. "I'm making sure you haven't hurt yourself," she says through gritted teeth, and her inspection turns up nothing of immediate concern.
"JJ," he says again, this time a little more solid, a little less wrecked. "I'm. Okay."
"You are definitely not okay. Go to the bathroom."
"What?"
"Go to the bathroom. Go pee. Urinate. Use the facilities." She's making sure he can -- she doesn't know precisely what he's on, but she has a guess or two -- but she's also making sure he doesn't piss himself. That she doesn't think she could handle. "I'll wait out here."
She stands outside the door as he relieves himself, and calls through to remind him to flush. When he comes out, she hands him a full glass of water and instructs him to drink. He does. Slowly and laboriously, his eyes averted. But he does it, downs the whole thing, and when she takes the glass back, she lets her fingers touch his. The anger in her chest is fizzling out, smoking itself into ash in her lungs, and she thinks for a second or two that she might crumble.
"Come on," she says quietly. "You need to sleep it off." The truth is that she doesn't know what he needs, but what she needs is to not see him shuffling around in slow-motion, sweaty and pale and thick-tongued. She wants him tucked down in bed, sheets pulled over his wasting frame to hide it, eyes closed to her and to the world and to whatever he's doing to himself, so that she can pretend he's just fucking exhausted. So that she can know where he is and know that he's safe and know that there are soft things around him. So that she can pretend she didn't fucking see this, if only for a few minutes so that she can catch her breath.
"I don't..."
"You do."
"I've been...."
"Please."
Something registers with him then, seeps its way through the sieve over his brain, and he just stops and stares at her for a moment, like he's just now realizing what she wants from him. The bleariness in his eyes suddenly looks like softness, defeated and embarrassed and small, and he just nods at her.
"Thank you," JJ whispers, and cups his elbow with her hand and takes him to bed. The condition of the bedroom is shocking, not because it's in utter disarray like the rest of his apartment, but because it's not. The bed is made with near-hospital precision; the floor is clear; the drawers are all closed. It's like he hasn't been in there in days. He probably hasn't, JJ thinks, closing her own eyes for a second against the thought. She tells him to get undressed and starts pulling back the sheets, fluffing up the pillows, anything to not have to look. It was enough, the small glimpses in the living room. She doesn't think she could handle it all at once: all the pale, all the thin, all the mess.
When she forces herself to turn back, he's down to his underwear, but he's holding his clothes in front of himself, hiding from her. Not that it makes any difference now. "It's okay," she says quietly. "Just get in."
He lies down, faces away from her, closes his eyes obediently. JJ bends to pull the covers up. He smells like sweat, and she thinks maybe she'll make him shower when he gets up. Maybe. Or maybe by then he'll figure it out for himself.
_______________
So that she doesn't think, JJ cleans. She throws away days' worth of takeout containers - some of them still partially full - and hauls the trash outside. She washes a sinkful of empty glasses but no plates, no forks, no knives. There are spoons, though, and some bowls stained with sauce. Spaghetti-O's, judging from the cans on the counter. She sorts his mail, throwing away the junk and piling up the important things he hasn't opened. She puts her pan of lasagna in the near-empty fridge.
His desk looks like a hopeless task. Papers are jammed into drawers, sticking them shut. Loose staples dot everything like land mines. There are stacks and stacks of books, notes, folders, files, envelopes. Uncapped pens with leaking ink. Half-stuck tape. Nothing like his desk at work. He's always been more fastidious there than at home, she knows, but this? This is catastrophic. It's enough to set her teeth on edge. She sighs and sits down, anyway, moving a pile of miscellaneous crap from the chair to the floor, and begins to sort.
When she gets to the middle drawer on the left-hand side - the second one she's tackled - she pulls out a wad of paper, looks down, and stops short. As she reads it, her hand starts to tremble, and as she shuffles through, it gets more and more violent, until she has to stop and set the stack down in her lap. By the eighth page, tears are streaming down her cheeks and her shoulders are shaking, and she pulls her knees up into her chest, puts her face down, and sobs.
They're letters. Some of the writing is cramped and illegible, a parody of his usual script, but some of it, she can read. They're to her. For her. About her. Rambling sentences that run on the way he talks, without punctuation or breath, when his brain is moving too quickly for his mouth. Short ones, fragments, one-word proclamations that she can't even imagine in his voice. Beautiful. Shiny. Kind. Little-boy words. There's poetry - not his own, she can tell by the structure, the language, that it's been pulled from his memory in snippets, some of it left abandoned mid-verse. Drawings, too. Sketches of her - her face, her eyes, the curve of her back as she walks, complete with a mathematical equation scribbled in the corner. The geometry of an arc. The angle of her elbow as it leans against her desk.
It's madness. If she dug it out of a stranger's drawer, she'd be terrified, but here, like this, she's just sad. Bone-shaking, heart-shattering, gut-wrenching sad. It's the kind of sad that makes her want to howl, makes her want to crawl on her knees, makes her want to wrap herself around him, burrow into his sweat-sticky skin and bite into his heart and drown.
She remembers him in his hospital bed, after Georgia, after Hankel. She remembers sitting down on the edge and holding his hand while he slept and making promises she was sure he couldn't hear. They were for herself, really, to salve her guilt and her shame and the dry-heave of her belly - she wouldn't leave him alone again, wouldn't ever let him sit in the cold and the dark and be afraid, wouldn't ever fucking flinch - but she meant them.
This, right now, tonight, is the only time he has ever let her down. Not with his desk full of off-kilter, drug-addled love letters, but by needing whatever the hell he's using -- she hasn't yet worked up the courage to check the medicine cabinet or the nightstand -- to be honest enough to write them. By not trusting her enough to let her have his back.
JJ cries until her eyes feel gritty, until her stomach throbs, until her throat is dry. She cries until there are raw half-moons in her palms from gripping herself so tightly and her legs are tingling from being pinned beneath her for so long. She cries until she coughs and can't breathe, and then she lays her head down on the mess and waits for the tremors to stop.
______________
The next time she looks at a clock, four hours have passed. It's after midnight.
JJ leaves the desk the way she found it, shoving everything back into its own disaster. She rises, runs a hand through her tangled hair, and goes to check on him.
He's fast asleep, his breathing even and easy, one hand tucked underneath the pillow. For a moment, she stands over him and watches, her eyes fixated on the jut of his collarbone sticking out from the blankets. Without thinking, she bends to trace it, follows it until it disappears into the barely-round of his shoulder. It's the size of her palm, she realizes, closing her hand over. A perfect fit. His skin is warm, and the contrast makes her notice how cold she is.
She's fucking freezing.
He doesn't stir at the iciness of her hand, just leans into it a little, and that's what finally makes her knees buckle. JJ ends up on the side of the bed, all of the energy draining out of her like sand, and gives herself up.
She toes off her shoes, fits herself against his body, and closes her eyes. This close, she can still smell sweat, but there's something else, too. Something underneath. Something clean and familiar and comforting. His chemistry is still intact somewhere.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, to him or to herself or to God or to no one. After a second, she adds, "You scared the shit out of me." She presses her lips to the knot of bone at the base of his neck and kisses him goodnight.
Pairing: Reid/JJ
Rating: PG13/R-ish
Summary: Something is very, very wrong.
Warnings: Language. Drug abuse/addiction. Over-angsty melodrama? Ha.
Notes: Another one of bubblesuds' amazing Alphabet Meme prompts. The time has come to torture these two again. *rolls eyes*
After a couple of years in the BAU, there isn't much left that frightens JJ. There are things that sicken her, of course, and things that sadden her, and piss her off, and make her paranoid, but fear? She's numb to it, maybe, or at least she's learned to shove it aside for more useful reactions to horror -- ones that will keep her alive, keep her sane, keep her moving forward instead of cowering back. Fear doesn't really register anymore.
At least, that's what she thinks when she walks up to Spencer's door on a Friday evening with half a lasagna - he always looks underfed, but he's been worrying her lately, looks in danger of falling into his own shadow and disappearing off the face of the earth, looks sick - and knocks, and the door swings open against the light pressure of her fist. It's not locked. Not even latched properly. Barely even closed.
JJ's heart drops like a stone into her belly, and goosebumps raise all over her body. It's instant. Physical. It's a sensation that's ingrained in her muscle memory, her nerve memory, from the first time she stepped onto a crime scene. Something is very, very wrong.
In under two seconds, she has zipped through a case-file of possible scenarios and debated half a dozen responses, deciding finally that she doesn't have time to go back to her car for her weapon - if there's anyone here who isn't supposed to be, they've already heard her, and statistics tell her that they're more likely to flee than confront her. Instead, she gropes for the switch she knows is to her left, hits the light, and shoves her pan onto the table, knocking Spencer's keys and a stack of mail onto the floor. They jingle and clatter. More noise. Good.
"Spence?" She calls his name into the darkness and starts to make her way towards his living room, from where the only other light in the place - the odd, low-green glow of the television, muted - is filtering into the hallway. She comes around the corner, every muscle so tight it feels like it's going to snap, and that's when JJ remembers fear.
He's dead. JJ knows death, and he's it: sprawled across his sofa, his limbs at angles no one comfortably sleeps in, his skin fatally pale in the dimness, his head lolling off the edge a centimeter from the sharp corner of his battered coffee table. He's dead, and she can't breathe, can't blink, can't make a fucking sound to call for help.
She's trained, though, a neat little Bureau machine in some ways - they all are - and thank God, because her body knows what to do even when her blood's turned to ice and there's a scream blocking her throat, swollen so large that it can't get out. She's at his side before she can figure out how she got there, two fingers pushed against his carotid, her head bent low over his narrow chest. She has to try with her other hand, too, before she manages to convince herself that the thrumming she feels, slow but steady, is his pulse and not her own.
The realization sends the breath rushing from her lungs, frees up space for her voice, and she starts calling his name, propping his head up and trying to shake him loose of whatever is holding him like this. "Spence! Wake up! Spence! Spencer!"
He blinks, disoriented and far too slow, and doesn't seem to know where he is for a moment. JJ leans up and flips on the lamp, holding his eyes all the way open with her fingers. His pupils are symmetrical and reactive, shrinking down in protest of the sudden, stark light. He tries to sit up, but he's clumsy, his palm slipping off the edge. She catches him and helps him right himself, and is comforted just a little by the warmth of his skin. "What's wrong? What happened?" she asks, her fingers curled tight around his, her eyes searching him for signs of labored breathing, pain, anything.
"JJ?" His voice is odd. Thick. It's an actual question, like he's not positive it's her. Like she might not be here, real, touching him.
JJ cups his face between her palms and stares right into his eyes, and then she knows. Then it makes sense. Skinny. Moody. Secretive. Shaky. Nervous. She shakes her head back and forth in disbelief, the lump coming back into her throat as quickly as it left. When she speaks, it's a thready almost-whisper. "You are fucked up. You are so fucked up right now. What did you take? Do you need a doctor?"
He blinks his confused, lazy blink at her again, then his mouth curls into a ghastly sort of smile. "I am a doctor," he says, then tries to laugh but gives up, closing his eyes again.
JJ smacks him hard in the cheek, and he opens them. "Fuck you," she says, so low she almost can't hear herself. "Fuck. You."
He raises his eyebrows a little, approximating - and completely perverting - an expression she usually loves, and mumbles, "Okay."
The tears almost start right there - the prickling behind her eyes is rage, mostly, but it's also helplessness and sadness and a whole mix of other things she doesn't want to pick apart and call by name - but she swallows hard and sets to work. "Get up."
He doesn't move.
"Get up," she tries again. "I'll help you. Get up." JJ rises to her feet and holds one hand on his shoulder as he assembles his lanky limbs into a seated position. She guides him to his feet, makes sure he's steady, and then tells him to wait while she turns on the other lights. The room is in chaos, but she can't worry about that now; she has to worry about him. There, in the living room, she pushes his clothes around, looks underneath, feels around for anything out of place. "I'm making sure you haven't hurt yourself," she says through gritted teeth, and her inspection turns up nothing of immediate concern.
"JJ," he says again, this time a little more solid, a little less wrecked. "I'm. Okay."
"You are definitely not okay. Go to the bathroom."
"What?"
"Go to the bathroom. Go pee. Urinate. Use the facilities." She's making sure he can -- she doesn't know precisely what he's on, but she has a guess or two -- but she's also making sure he doesn't piss himself. That she doesn't think she could handle. "I'll wait out here."
She stands outside the door as he relieves himself, and calls through to remind him to flush. When he comes out, she hands him a full glass of water and instructs him to drink. He does. Slowly and laboriously, his eyes averted. But he does it, downs the whole thing, and when she takes the glass back, she lets her fingers touch his. The anger in her chest is fizzling out, smoking itself into ash in her lungs, and she thinks for a second or two that she might crumble.
"Come on," she says quietly. "You need to sleep it off." The truth is that she doesn't know what he needs, but what she needs is to not see him shuffling around in slow-motion, sweaty and pale and thick-tongued. She wants him tucked down in bed, sheets pulled over his wasting frame to hide it, eyes closed to her and to the world and to whatever he's doing to himself, so that she can pretend he's just fucking exhausted. So that she can know where he is and know that he's safe and know that there are soft things around him. So that she can pretend she didn't fucking see this, if only for a few minutes so that she can catch her breath.
"I don't..."
"You do."
"I've been...."
"Please."
Something registers with him then, seeps its way through the sieve over his brain, and he just stops and stares at her for a moment, like he's just now realizing what she wants from him. The bleariness in his eyes suddenly looks like softness, defeated and embarrassed and small, and he just nods at her.
"Thank you," JJ whispers, and cups his elbow with her hand and takes him to bed. The condition of the bedroom is shocking, not because it's in utter disarray like the rest of his apartment, but because it's not. The bed is made with near-hospital precision; the floor is clear; the drawers are all closed. It's like he hasn't been in there in days. He probably hasn't, JJ thinks, closing her own eyes for a second against the thought. She tells him to get undressed and starts pulling back the sheets, fluffing up the pillows, anything to not have to look. It was enough, the small glimpses in the living room. She doesn't think she could handle it all at once: all the pale, all the thin, all the mess.
When she forces herself to turn back, he's down to his underwear, but he's holding his clothes in front of himself, hiding from her. Not that it makes any difference now. "It's okay," she says quietly. "Just get in."
He lies down, faces away from her, closes his eyes obediently. JJ bends to pull the covers up. He smells like sweat, and she thinks maybe she'll make him shower when he gets up. Maybe. Or maybe by then he'll figure it out for himself.
_______________
So that she doesn't think, JJ cleans. She throws away days' worth of takeout containers - some of them still partially full - and hauls the trash outside. She washes a sinkful of empty glasses but no plates, no forks, no knives. There are spoons, though, and some bowls stained with sauce. Spaghetti-O's, judging from the cans on the counter. She sorts his mail, throwing away the junk and piling up the important things he hasn't opened. She puts her pan of lasagna in the near-empty fridge.
His desk looks like a hopeless task. Papers are jammed into drawers, sticking them shut. Loose staples dot everything like land mines. There are stacks and stacks of books, notes, folders, files, envelopes. Uncapped pens with leaking ink. Half-stuck tape. Nothing like his desk at work. He's always been more fastidious there than at home, she knows, but this? This is catastrophic. It's enough to set her teeth on edge. She sighs and sits down, anyway, moving a pile of miscellaneous crap from the chair to the floor, and begins to sort.
When she gets to the middle drawer on the left-hand side - the second one she's tackled - she pulls out a wad of paper, looks down, and stops short. As she reads it, her hand starts to tremble, and as she shuffles through, it gets more and more violent, until she has to stop and set the stack down in her lap. By the eighth page, tears are streaming down her cheeks and her shoulders are shaking, and she pulls her knees up into her chest, puts her face down, and sobs.
They're letters. Some of the writing is cramped and illegible, a parody of his usual script, but some of it, she can read. They're to her. For her. About her. Rambling sentences that run on the way he talks, without punctuation or breath, when his brain is moving too quickly for his mouth. Short ones, fragments, one-word proclamations that she can't even imagine in his voice. Beautiful. Shiny. Kind. Little-boy words. There's poetry - not his own, she can tell by the structure, the language, that it's been pulled from his memory in snippets, some of it left abandoned mid-verse. Drawings, too. Sketches of her - her face, her eyes, the curve of her back as she walks, complete with a mathematical equation scribbled in the corner. The geometry of an arc. The angle of her elbow as it leans against her desk.
It's madness. If she dug it out of a stranger's drawer, she'd be terrified, but here, like this, she's just sad. Bone-shaking, heart-shattering, gut-wrenching sad. It's the kind of sad that makes her want to howl, makes her want to crawl on her knees, makes her want to wrap herself around him, burrow into his sweat-sticky skin and bite into his heart and drown.
She remembers him in his hospital bed, after Georgia, after Hankel. She remembers sitting down on the edge and holding his hand while he slept and making promises she was sure he couldn't hear. They were for herself, really, to salve her guilt and her shame and the dry-heave of her belly - she wouldn't leave him alone again, wouldn't ever let him sit in the cold and the dark and be afraid, wouldn't ever fucking flinch - but she meant them.
This, right now, tonight, is the only time he has ever let her down. Not with his desk full of off-kilter, drug-addled love letters, but by needing whatever the hell he's using -- she hasn't yet worked up the courage to check the medicine cabinet or the nightstand -- to be honest enough to write them. By not trusting her enough to let her have his back.
JJ cries until her eyes feel gritty, until her stomach throbs, until her throat is dry. She cries until there are raw half-moons in her palms from gripping herself so tightly and her legs are tingling from being pinned beneath her for so long. She cries until she coughs and can't breathe, and then she lays her head down on the mess and waits for the tremors to stop.
______________
The next time she looks at a clock, four hours have passed. It's after midnight.
JJ leaves the desk the way she found it, shoving everything back into its own disaster. She rises, runs a hand through her tangled hair, and goes to check on him.
He's fast asleep, his breathing even and easy, one hand tucked underneath the pillow. For a moment, she stands over him and watches, her eyes fixated on the jut of his collarbone sticking out from the blankets. Without thinking, she bends to trace it, follows it until it disappears into the barely-round of his shoulder. It's the size of her palm, she realizes, closing her hand over. A perfect fit. His skin is warm, and the contrast makes her notice how cold she is.
She's fucking freezing.
He doesn't stir at the iciness of her hand, just leans into it a little, and that's what finally makes her knees buckle. JJ ends up on the side of the bed, all of the energy draining out of her like sand, and gives herself up.
She toes off her shoes, fits herself against his body, and closes her eyes. This close, she can still smell sweat, but there's something else, too. Something underneath. Something clean and familiar and comforting. His chemistry is still intact somewhere.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, to him or to herself or to God or to no one. After a second, she adds, "You scared the shit out of me." She presses her lips to the knot of bone at the base of his neck and kisses him goodnight.