criminal minds | one-shots ✓

6. and there's nothing i can do

when spencer spirals, he spirals hard.

his mind is like a minefield; there's acres and acres of it and it seems endless, but there's traps under the grounds he treads carefully. if he makes one wrong move, he'll trigger an explosive that'll leave nothing but destruction in its wake.

he supposes that's why elle and him get along so well - between the alikeness of their self-destructive natures and their reckless abandon, they both understand what it's like to be trapped in a tireless, infinite loop of exhaustion where it seems like there's only one way out.

she gets it. he gets it. they don't talk about it.

there's a lot they don't talk about.

like, for instance, the way elle lies and cheats. the way she flirts dangerously with spencer, not quite on the cusp of something more. the way she kills. the way she dissappears.

or the way spencer is more than willing to follow her around, as if she has the answers to solving his problems. like she doesn't make the ever growing crack in his psyche tremble with every body he hides and every knife he cleans for her. 

it's an unspoken sort of agreement. 

he closes his eyes, leans his head against the back of the couch and breathes. he hears her chuckle from next to him, her feet digging under his things. he cracks open an eye.

"what's so amusing?"

"oh, nothing," she sighs, heavy and lifting, "just... y'know. life. death. inevitably. et cetera. i'm sure you've heard it all."

he hums in what she seems to see as an agreement, already knowing where she's going with this. "as have you."

she grins, snarky and sharp, and sits up, using his weight as leverage. she leans forward, her shirt riding up to reveal her back as she reaches for something familiar on the table. there's a scar on the skin, angry though faded, a pale, jagged line in comparison to the naturally tan color there. he wonders how she got it, but doesn't ask. another thing they don't talk about.

"here." she says, handing him the familiar, as if it doesn't weigh as much as a life, as if it hasn't torn down what he'd taken so long to rebuild in a matter of a minutes. a syringe, a tie, a tiny glass bottle full of near clear liquid. so little, yet so much. 

he'd stop fighting it a long time ago, stopped fighting her. the incessant itch on the inside of his elbow, the shaking hands, her presence. 

when he knots the ribbon, tight enough to cut off circulation if he leaves it took long, and fills the syringe and pushes into his skin, there is a moment where he is ignorantly unaware of everything. nothing exists - not him, not the dilaudid, not elle. it all disappears. 

he's unsure how long he sits there, staring blankly outside. it's storming - water racing down the window pane as lightning flitters across the sky every once in a while, accompanied by heavy thunder. it's dark, has to be past two, already, and he should be sleeping, but -

he doesn't want to move. he feels the dulaudid start to fade, and listens to the storm, and the echo of elle's laughter, and he lefts himself drift.

.

he watches her from where he sits on the floor, back against the wall, with the turn of the screw between his legs. she's rambling about something written in the pages - something about ironically haunted ghosts and the people they leave behind.