Work Text:
Las Vegas is filled with familiar ghosts—Spencer can feel them clinging to his coat every time he comes back, but this time they drag heavily against his skin, trying to pull him down to concrete so he can melt between the cracks. Riley Jenkins, almost long-forgotten to the point that Spencer thought him entirely made-up, joins the host of half-faded spirits that follow him around.
The sun beats down on his shoulders, barely cutting through the cold chill that’s possessed him since leaving the hypnotherapist. Spencer rushes out faster than can be considered polite but doesn’t let that stop him from fleeing, anyway.
The entrance of the building opens to a busy street, office nestled downtown between rows of small stores and recurring characters—mostly homeless people or workers on break speed-walking past the bodies curled up in nearby alleys. A worse part of the city, still morbidly familiar. Spencer recalls sneaking out, hazy childhood memories after he graduated high school taking him back to times when he would wander similar neighbourhoods. Nothing better to do, just watching passersby and wondering what lives they were living. Imagine himself slipping into their skin for a moment, shedding the name Spencer Reid easy as water running off an otter’s back.
Neon lights from an Open sign hung up on a nearby convenience store door grates against his eyes uncomfortably, headache spiking under closed eyelids like lightning. Spencer shakes his head, forefinger and thumb squeezing the bridge of his nose as he hears footsteps follow behind him minutes later.
Rossi falls in step with him, presence heavy by his side. Derek is close behind, Spencer's eyes opening a sliver to see the two men on either side of him. Even just glancing at Rossi makes him turn his head away with a grimace, familiar words floating to the front of his mind.
Are you sure you want to go down this road, Rossi had asked him in that stuffy hotel room.
Sleep visited him reluctantly the night before, leeches clinging to his skin in half-awake nightmares that kept his heart beating like a drum in his chest. Bleary and tired, electricity buzzing under his skin incessantly, Spencer knew before he ever walked into that room that he wasn’t leaving without answers.
The body in his dreams—Riley Jenkins, he knows now—followed him for years, and finally he has a face to put to the killer.
So what, Spencer had thought, that the murderer was his father. He can compartmentalize. Treat this like any other case.
So what, he thinks now, hands trembling minutely as he presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, inhaling as the cold sting of morning air fills his shallow lungs. Nothing has to change.
Riley Jenkins was small and juvenile, limp and sad and cold flesh on frigid stone flooring. He sees worse, now, Spencer knows. That the children he’s interviewed and rescued and found dead in the past years he’s worked are so much more tangible and real than the imagined body of a neighbourhood boy he almost forgot existed entirely.
And yet every time he finds himself back there with a flashlight in hand and gun slowly lowering in horror, he feels about ten years old and woefully unprepared when faced with those black sneakers smeared with blood sticking out from behind a dryer.
Every single time he’s back there, Spencer’s a child playing dress-up all over again, wearing shoes too big and hiding behind doctorates like a shield, unable to process how truly small he really is. How small he always has been.
“You alright, kid?” Derek asks, breaking the permeating silence that’s spilled onto the street. Spencer shakes his head, speaking as he does.
“Yeah, yeah. Just,” He puffs out a sigh, short and punched. “I’m fine.”
“Reid,” Derek starts before Spencer shakes his head.
“Leave it,” He warns.
“Spencer,” Rossi cuts in, voice gentle in a way that grates against Spencer’s skin. He swallows back the lump in his throat, makes an effort to reel in the more visible aspects of his disorientation. Unsteady balance and vertigo sending his head spinning dragged under control, inch by agonizing inch.
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a victim,” Spencer snaps. His voice sounds unnatural even to him, twisted with something bitter that got dislodged in his chest back on that hypnotherapist’s couch.
“Woah,” Derek says. Just the tone grinds Spencer’s misplaced anger to a halt, shame pooling in his ribs as he continues. “You and I both know we’re just here to help, kid.”
Spencer’s jaw tenses, looking away. He nods once, sharp. “We’re both here for you,” Rossi adds. Frustration coiling in his stomach slowly fades, though he still feels vaguely ill.
“Now, what’d you remember back there?” Derek asks. Spencer almost startles at the question before realizing—he hadn’t been brought up to speed. It had just been Rossi in that room with him, faded from Spencer’s recollection of childhood memories while watching them from the safety of the office in the present. He’d almost forgotten entirely that there was a witness to it all.
Spencer’s stomach twists. He swallows back saliva pooling on his tongue; classic indicator that he’s about to throw up. Spencer ignores it. He’s wrestled down everything else, what’s a little nausea in the grand scheme of things?
Spencer can hear Rossi come to the realization that he’s not going to say anything—shuffling beside him followed by a small, barely there sigh. More like a quick, sharp exhale through the nose.
The story unfolds like a bad joke: hypnotherapy somehow uncovers memories of his crying mother, of clothes burned in their backyard, of Spencer in the middle of it all as a convenient witness. He doesn’t need to look at Derek to know that skepticism is painted on his face clear as day, paired off with badly-hidden pity or concern. Imagining it is enough for Spencer to taste bile in the back of his throat; he doesn’t need to see that look directed at him, too.
Rossi tells him the meat of it and Spencer cuts in once or twice to add a detail or two but neither of them speak about the worst of it. So innocuous yet taboo, slipping in and out of his mind like a far-off daydream that keeps trying to break into his conscious mind, escaping the subconscious.
I don’t want to be here, he had said, quiet and younger than he’s felt since he was digging his own grave.
Spencer rolls the words over in his head, overly-large warm hand on his shoulder pressed against him heavy as if it was touching him now. Following him into the present day, clinging to his coat like a ghost, pressed against Riley Jenkins’ side like old friends meeting again.
Rossi doesn’t bring it up, and neither does Spencer.
“I need to talk to my mom,” Spencer says, words numb on his tongue, clunky in his mouth as he speaks.
Finally, he braves a glance at Derek’s face. That look of pity that Derek seems to wield like a weapon isn’t there like Spencer had half-been expecting—just searching eyes and lips pressed into a thin line of concern.
“Alright,” He says finally. Spencer nods and turns slightly, eyes following the line of the building up to the window of the office he had been laying in just ten minutes ago. Something in his stomach twists.
“Alright,” Spencer repeats.
Then they’re off, leaving the office behind and taking all the memories with him. Spencer leaves, unnervingly and startlingly aware that when his childhood was excavated for spare parts, something got dislodged.
Much later, Spencer will come back to this spot in his memory over and over and wonder, never-ending, if this was something he should have ever tried to dig up.
The trip back home on the jet is near-unbearable.
Curled up on the couch, headphones over his ears while Andre Previn’s rendition of the Swan Lake plays in his ears, Spencer finds that fielding the looks Derek and Rossi shoot him on the way back without looking up becomes a practice in how much willing ignorance he can get away with.
Blue skies turn dark and sordid as they fly, sun dipping beneath the horizon and clouds morphing from white to unforgiving gray. Spencer watches raindrops thud against the glass like bullets, streaking down in rivulets a moment after making impact.
Here’s what he doesn’t tell Derek and Rossi: the world doesn’t seem any better off with Lou Jenkins in jail.
Closure in some sense helped—Spencer can’t argue against that. There was something a little comforting about it. Knowing that the man who killed Riley was dealt with one of life’s fatal hands; a father with nothing to lose, all the will he could ever need to see the job through, and a name to match the face of the unlucky bastard stupid enough to end up on the other end of his rage.
Guilt, heavy on his shoulders and a familiar friend to Spencer over the years, doesn’t disappear, but it eases on his sore bones for the night. Sleep comes almost easily, pulled away from that basement to see the sun again, grass under his feet as faceless children run under the open sky with him.
For one night, he thinks things are alright, but now—pulling away from Las Vegas, everything feels unfinished. Unsteady and wrong. Wrong in a way that Spencer knows would get him a concerned look and soft voices should he try to verbalize it. That exchange would have led to nothing but frustration and something near-anger bubbling up under his skin, tongue lashing out razor-sharp and cruel when he couldn’t find another way to release it all that emotion that didn’t involve a needle in the crook of his arm.
He feels crazy, a little bit. Stuck in a revolving push-and-pull: he wants to leave this mess behind, embarrassment and shame driving him to put his head down and breathe in through his mouth and out through his nose until they land. Another part of him screams that Las Vegas is hiding secrets and his father is at the centre of them all.
Thinking about it makes him sick. Spencer can’t say anything, though. Not to Rossi or Derek, not now.
There’s little else left to do in the city when they leave. Nothing that can justify them staying. William Reid continues to hold a successful job at a local law firm ten minutes away from his childhood home, walking away from the ordeal that felt like it had unraveled Spencer, tugging on a loose sweater string and watching a whole piece of his life fall apart.
“Reid.” He looks up, pulling one earbud out to listen. It's the first time he’s been called by name. Derek holds his phone up, a smile tugging his lips up at the corners. “JJ had her baby.”
This, at the least, he doesn’t have to fake enthusiasm for. For the first time since landing in Las Vegas about a week ago, Spencer manages a smile that feels genuine.
“That’s great!” He says, sincere. “Did they say anything else?”
“It’s a boy.” The smile freezes on his face for a moment.
“Wonderful,” Spencer murmurs, half-to himself, a few seconds too late to pass the pause off as anything normal. He looks away from Derek, doesn’t want to see the look on his face as Spencer pretends he didn’t falter.
“You alright?” Derek asks anyway, dread settling in Spencer’s stomach at the question.
“Yeah, yeah, just. I’ll be back in a second.” He’s scrambling into the jet’s bathroom not even a second afterwards, bile rising up his throat without a moment’s warning.
The door just barely shuts behind him, locking, before he’s leaned over the cramped toilet, dry-heaving. Stringy throw-up drips from his lips as Spencer pants, inexplicably shaky. His hands tremble as he makes an effort to straighten up, legs weak and heart wavering in a way it hasn’t in years. Not until this week.
Flushing the toilet and rinsing his mouth out does little to help him. It’s the mirror that undoes him: after spending the better part of five minutes scrubbing away the filth on his skin he almost feels normal again—just to catch sight of his face and feel all that progress get washed away without so much as a second glance.
Hands bracing against the porcelain sink, he stares into his face, an enigma staring back. Bits and pieces that he can pick off and pair up against his mother’s: eyes the same hazel-brown, slope of the nose identical. Diana leaves her impressions in Spencer, skin-deep, while William follows and hangs off him like a parasite.
Spencer’s eyes trail up to his hair, deep-brown and lifted directly from his father. Hands, large and calloused, not dissimilar from his father’s when Spencer was younger. One of the few things that Spencer recalled of him in the past—those rare soft memories before his father left almost two decades ago.
He imagines it, for a moment. JJ’s son, young and vulnerable enough that nothing in the world was exempt from being a threat: parents the first and last line of defence. Then, William, overly-proud and attentive, relinquishing the role of protector to serve his own vices. Hands, large and calloused, leaving impressions in skin and biting into bone like parasites worming beneath base layers of flesh. The same hands Spencer tries to use to do good—right what felt like endless wrongs.
“Kid?” Spencer jumps at the knock on the door. “We’re landing soon.”
“Alright,” He forces out, unable to rip his eyes away from his reflection. There’s bits and pieces of William there, too. Maybe leaving behind Las Vegas will take him away from it all. Escape his inheritance.
Hours later, cradling JJ’s newborn in his steady arms, Spencer wonders how William could have ever looked him in the eyes after deciding to tear him apart.
A sunny day coaxes him out of his apartment in a rare show of sociability.
The leaves of the trees melt into the backdrop of the park like watercolour, diluted by sharp sunlight cutting through the green. Book in hand and settled in his usual spot in the park, Spencer can relax, finally. Away from the dim lights of his silent apartment.
Leaving Las Vegas behind a few months ago was the second-hardest time he had to leave the city. The first was after he had checked his mother into a mental hospital and drifted in the wind the moment he had nothing tying him to their empty, gray apartment anymore. Leaving then had been an exercise in courage: could he force himself to take the first step out, knowing there was nothing to catch him?
The answer had been yes, and led him to the doors of the FBI in due time. Now, however, months in retrospect, there was nothing to gain and nothing to lose in running. Just disappointment pooling between his ribs like swamp-muck. Spencer realizes he did little more than peel himself away from memories threatening to engulf him, dodging a tide of nostalgia trying to close over his head before he could hope to fight for air. He leaves behind the city that never sleeps and its pocket of suburban family-life, monotonous, to get lost in the never-ending whirl of BAU cases again.
The dramatics of it all makes it sound worse than it was, he thinks. On paper, the story unfolds quite simply. Spencer had nightmares of a boy. Derek and Rossi stayed behind to help him figure it out. He pieced together the puzzle, so he left.
And yet.
His eyes trail over the same line of text he’s been trying to read for the past five minutes. And yet.
“We missed you out here, you know,” Shawn tells him. Spencer looks up from his book, finally, to the teenager sitting on the bench next to him. The chess board set up on the stone has been turning intermittently, Shawn playing against himself while he pokes at Spencer verbally.
“Thanks,” Spencer says, sincere. “Just had to take a break.”
“How come?” Shawn’s almost indignant in a way that makes Spencer’s lips curl up into a smile. The knowledge that he was missed enough for Shawn to get upset over it. That his life left an imprint on someone else's.
“I used to play with a coworker friend of mine,” Spencer says, fingers rapping against the page of his book. “One day he just decided he didn’t want to play anymore.”
“So you gave up, too?”
He freezes, nearly imperceptible. Thumb running over the page of his book, grain against skin comforting him as the words settle in. His hair, grown-out long, so dissimilar to his father’s short and cropped cut, brushes his shoulders. Free-flowing in contrast to William’s neat grooming.
Gideon’s departure hit where it hurt in ways Spencer hadn’t expected—a letter explaining his abandonment addressed to him. Reimagining the past to create a palimpsest, new written over old. William left and Gideon followed. Maybe that was the trigger, the slow erosion of those walls he had built up in his mind. As a final parting gift, Gideon excavated Spencer’s flesh for those memories thought forgotten.
Isn't it unfair, in a way? Spencer wonders sometimes. That Gideon got away and left him with everything he tried to escape.
“Just the opposite,” Spencer says, “I tried to play through every permutation of moves on a chess board.”
He reinvents that night on his own, playing through all the possibilities. Spencer remembers the gun on his desk in vivid detail, carved into his mind the way everything else seems to slip into the cracks of his brain and stick. Sometimes he wonders if he’d even remember Riley Jenkins if he walked in on a corpse instead of a letter.
“That’s an infinite number of games,” Shawn says, disbelieving. Spencer’s amusement, strange as it is, overwhelms the bitterness. It’s just nice, talking with someone only concerned with chess. Refreshing.
“It’s not infinite, it’s just—it’s just exponentially large.” A smile threatens to poke at the corner of his lips.
“You couldn’t have played through them all,” Shawn says, an air of finality to his words. When he looks up, however, there's a challenge in his eyes. For a moment, it feels like looking in a mirror. Spencer sees that same urge to prove himself written in Shawn’s face, almost the way he felt before Tobias Hankel brought him back from the dead in a worn-down cabin that felt a million miles and thousands of years away.
“There’s an average of forty moves per chess game,” Spencer starts after a pause, “And I’ll tell you something, the more I played, the more I realized every single match, every single chess game, it’s really just a simple variation on the exact same theme.”
Every life Spencer lives is a remaking of the same key details. Tobias Hankel kills him and when he gets his second chance at life, it unfolds the same way.
“You know, it’s aggressive opening—”
Gasping awake on the floor of a dirty wood floor, every limb shaking and an ache spreading through him: one that follows him for years to follow.
“—Patient midgame—”
Always waiting, life dragging by in a slow crawl while tension creeps into everything around him. Spencer grows erratic, addicted, and wrestles his way back in an agonizingly-slow struggle to sobriety.
“—Inevitable checkmate.”
Years of struggling punctuated by a loss: William Reid becomes Jason Gideon. Everything ends in that same way it did once before, every reiteration of his life turning out the same.
“And I realized why my friend quit,” Spencer says. He knows, somehow, that he’s not talking about Gideon anymore. “He was tired of repeating the exact same patterns and expecting a different outcome.”
Every time he ends up back in Las Vegas, back in William Reid’s orbit, his life unravels. Every time he tries to find justice for himself, after years of finding it for others, Spencer ends up smaller than he was before. Broken down to nine years old and helpless, blank and unmoving in the face of overly-large calloused hands.
“So you have a lifetime of chess strategy in your head, and you’re just sitting on it,” Shawn cuts into Spencer’s thoughts, deadpan. In the same moment, his phone goes off, pinging with a reminder of a new case.
“I still use it,” Spencer says, thinking of following William Reid through Las Vegas like a pawn trying to check a king. Of circling through serial killer thought processes in endless games of cat-and-mouse. He’s graduated from playing across predators in parks at nine years old to sitting across them in interrogation rooms, instead. Adult and aware in ways he hadn’t been. “I just apply it differently.” Spencer finishes, getting up as he speaks.
When he turns to leave, he passes by Shawn. A last glance at his face and that imagined reflection of himself Spencer thought he had seen before disappears. Shawn is still himself and the man he imagined, twenty-five and naive, is a corpse on the floor of a cabin.
It’s fitting, anyway. Spencer never put much weight into the concept of reincarnation. Whoever he was before died and the skin he’s living in now is housing an entirely different spirit.
He’s shaking—every inch of him enveloped by anger-turned-adrenaline even as Samantha Malcolm is led away, her box of dolls clutched to her chest so tenderly. Spencer walks away from the scene, overtaken by medics and agents who can tend to the women left behind in the aftermath better than he could in his state.
Jenny Larson, Abigail Moore, Linda Krauss. Countless others, too, must have ended up in the crosshairs of Dr. Arthur Malcolm. Bile rises in the back of his throat just at the thought of it: research centred around the effects of trauma on prepubescent girls. Samantha Malcolm was a case study on the worst of it, traded away for new victims funnelled straight into Dr. Malcolm’s assumed-safe company.
His unsteady steps lead him to the curb of the street, a few houses down from the swath of cars and red and blue lights. Sinking to the sidewalk, Spencer ends up with his forehead pressed against his knees while he finds the strength to push down anger. His fists stay balled up and nails press crescent imprints into his calloused palms.
“Reid.” Spencer doesn’t look up, eyes closed as lightning strikes up the back of his eyelids.
“Go away, Derek.”
“Kid—”
“I really can’t do this right now, so just.” His jaw clenches, shuddering for a moment before pulling himself to his feet. Spencer doesn’t look at Derek as he tries to move past him, back into the whirlwind of action that can pull him away from all this.
“Spencer,” Derek says. It’s not stern or strong or decisive. Just soft. A feather-light touch against Spencer’s thickly-built walls. It sends them crumbling, anyway. Spencer stops, eyes sliding closed as he turns his face up to the sky. Mockingly bright.
“C’mon, kid,” He continues, stepping impossibly closer. “You’ve been off for a while now. You know I’m not gonna push you, but come on. What’s been bugging you?”
He exhales, slow and tired. Shakes his head once.
“It’s a lot,” Spencer says, finally. His voice betrays him by shaking. “And somehow, not really that much at all.”
“C’mon,” Derek prompts, finally next to Spencer. Solid and steady by his side. Spencer doesn’t quite know how to handle it anymore. He’s adapted to this slight gap that’s grown between them since Las Vegas almost a year ago, unused to the familiarity.
Those words, thousands of miles away but still pressed into his head follow him. They still echo in Spencer’s head, sometimes. You’re just determined to nail him, Derek had said. Doesn’t even matter what for.
Everything about that week is clear-cut and neat but acts like a smudge on a window at the same time. Time blurred together even with his eidetic memory, which has failed him twice. Always in Las Vegas, while William Reid is always the common denominator.
His gaze drops down to his hands. Calloused, remade in a ghost’s image, familiar yet not. Imprint of crescent nails pressed into his palms grounding him in reality.
“‘Are you sure you want to go down this road,’” Spencer quotes to Derek, slowly. He can tell that Derek doesn’t remember the words the way he does. It’s always Spencer, after all, sitting on years of memories everyone else would be happy to forget. “That’s what Rossi asked me, back then. When we figured out what happened to Riley Jenkins.”
“Riley Jenkins?” Derek echoes. “That was almost a year ago, kid.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says, almost coming out as a bitter laugh. “You’d think that I’d, uh, have moved on by now. Since the case was laid to rest.”
“Yeah,” Derek agrees slowly, though he doesn’t seem to believe in Spencer’s conviction. His face morphs into that familiar concern tinged with confusion. Even as realization threatens to creep up on the edges like a vignette.
“You know, even with an eidetic memory, there are things I forget,” Spencer says. He can’t figure out why he’s dancing around it—the words reluctant to leave his mouth.
This is the first time he would have ever said it aloud, Spencer realizes. His hands tremble.
“Spencer, what are you trying to say?”
“Even if I did decide to take him to court,” Spencer says, very quietly, “I don’t think any proof I could scrounge up from decades ago could lock him away. I think that I thought it was just a more… clear-cut case to put him away for murder. For something that’d stick.”
Derek stares, almost confused, before Spencer catches it. The moment the clearer details of that case filter back into his mind all at once, like a punch driven into his stomach. “Your dad,” He says, the words hitting Spencer in the chest like a gunshot.
“Yeah,” Spencer agrees. Everything still feels numb and untouched, floating through time without anything anchoring him to reality. He thought he’d feel better, somehow. Unburdened.
“Reid, if there’s something I can do—a proper investigation—”
“We already tried that,” Spencer cuts in, almost amused despite himself. “Remember? He’s clean. Besides,” He adds, when he can tell Derek is ready to speak again. “I think some things—this—just. Needs to stay dead.”
If it were anyone else, Spencer thinks they would have argued. Maybe pushed him against his wishes, eroding already-crumbling walls until Spencer would end up shutting down entirely.
Derek, though, understands. He’s the same as Spencer, at least in this respect. Hiding his own skeletons in the closet. Though Spencer thinks he’s just a little different in the details. Derek hoards secrets, while Spencer only holds one of his own: that he’s died twice over. Once in Tobias Hankel’s cabin but for the first time, years earlier, late in the night in his Las Vegas bedroom. This is the difference between the two of them—Derek’s learned to live and grow while Spencer is digging up demons he shouldn’t be touching.
There is a corpse hidden in Spencer’s childhood home, and it is his best-kept secret.
Or it was. Now, Derek shares in the knowledge of his private dumping ground.
“I get it,” Derek says. Even when it looks like it pains him to say as much, he does. Spencer nods in reply, and finds himself ever-thankful for it. “I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
“I know now,” Spencer says without thinking. Derek’s eyebrows furrow at the words before he nods again.
“As long as you know that,” Derek agrees, though it’s almost reluctant. The conversation reaching its natural end, Spencer is ready to walk away: the conversation wrapped up neatly while the buzz of activity farther away seems to slow after the victims and suspect—Samantha Malcolm, he reminds himself—are taken away.
Then, Derek speaks again.
“And, Reid.” Spencer turns back. Derek’s gaze is a heavy weight on his shoulders, pressing him back to solid ground in a way so startling it nearly makes him flinch. “I’m sorry, kid.”
He doesn’t have to ask what for—Derek understands. He’s probably the only one who could, and the words are almost a cool balm on an old bruise coming from Derek.
“I’m sorry, too,” Spencer says. This time, he does step away, making his way back to the crime scene. Spencer already knows where he’s going to end up. Samantha Malcolm must be at the local police station by now.
Funny, he thinks, even as he ducks into a car. That he knew what Derek meant with his apology—exactly what he was sorry for. Spencer doesn’t even know what he was sorry for when he said it back. Maybe for Samantha Malcolm, or Jenny Larson, Abigail Moore, and Linda Krauss. Maybe for Riley Jenkins and that justice for his death wasn’t enough for Spencer.
Maybe for himself, Spencer thinks much later, staring at the popcorn ceiling of his room in the dark. Maybe for his nine-year-old corpse hidden under the floorboards of his childhood home.
Spencer’s nine and playing chess in the park, green fields and blue skies. He’s sitting across from Gary Michaels and he’s entirely too young to be where he is, glasses pushed up his nose with small hands plucking chess pieces and shifting them across the board.
Diana Reid drags him away and William Reid helps to cover up Gary Michaels’ murder. Spencer returns to Las Vegas and digs up old graves before walking away with nothing to show for it but the wrong father behind bars.
Spencer’s twenty-eight and watching Shawn play chess in the park. He walks up to him, staring at the game over his shoulder as he watches him spin the board, playing against himself. A mirror of his own childhood staring him in the face.
He’s not the same person Spencer used to be: that person is gone, dead at twenty-five. But Shawn is talented in his own right, a spitfire. The snatches of life that he sees Shawn live are enough for Spencer. Knowing that every kid that plays chess in the park doesn’t remake that familiar faded childhood is relief in its own right. Something Spencer hadn’t realized until now.
Aggressive opening, patient midgame, inevitable checkmate, Spencer thinks. All clear-cut and clean put on paper.
That Las Vegas trip was almost the same: A nightmare brings him back home before he solves a case and leaves. Everything in between is tucked away between vowels and consonants.
And still, Spencer thinks, watching Shawn spin the board again. It’s not quite as simple as reports ever try to document. The path might be the same, but the victor is never as easily determined. Even if William Reid won years ago, there’s new games to play—new predators to put away, justice to serve. Reparations to his nine-year-old self made post-mortem over and over.
“Checkmate in twelve,” Spencer says finally, a small smile poking at the corner of his lips. Drawing an end to a game started nineteen years ago might not feel like a death sentence, anymore. Maybe more like freedom from ghosts that have been dragging at the ends of his coat for almost as long.
Shawn looks up, almost surprised to see him, before he scoffs good-naturedly. “No way.”
Spencer hums, taking a seat in front of him. “Let me show you.”
The board spins between them. The corpse about a thousand miles away stays buried. Spencer sinks into the game and can almost feel those calloused hands on his shoulders fade away in the whirlwind of it all.