A Season In Hell

prologue

It all started when Diana Reid died.

Actually... no. It started way before that. Ten years to be exact. That's when Spencer Reid got kidnapped by Tobias Hankel which resulted in his temporary death. Being dead led to some interesting discoveries that Spencer, with all of his scientific knowledge, couldn't explain away. Like meeting a grim reaper that looked just like a regular woman and her telling him that it wasn't his time yet. That Winchesters were important and that he wasn't allowed to die like this.

Once he returned to the land of the living Reid pushed his memories from the afterlife aside. He had other things to worry about. At first all he could think about was how and when he'd get his next hit. Then it became about withdrawals and sobriety. And then life just went on and on and Reid tried to just forget all about that fateful day all those years ago.

Here's the thing, though. Reid wasn't one to forget. It never fully left his mind. They were always there, the what-ifs. What if his trip to the afterlife hadn't been a drug induced hallucination? What if there actually was more to this world then what he believed to be real? What if his mother had been right?

Growing up she'd always tell him stories about monsters. About witches and demons, ghosts and vampires and the hunters that protected the world from all the evil things. She'd tell him that his uncle John was one of those hunters, that he was keeping them safe. Those stories sparked his love for halloween and horror and as a child he thought that that's all they were. Stories. As he grew up he realized that it was all very real to his mother, which he chalked up to her paranoid schizophrenia. But now after all his years at the FBI, Reid couldn't argue that he had seen many things that were impossible to explain with his limited world view.

Still, he wasn't going to do anything about it, he had nowhere to start and with his mothers condition worsening he'd rather spend his time taking care of her.

But that was all before. Before Mexico. Before Prison. Before Cat Adams and Lindsey Vaughn teamed up to ruin his life and ultimately succeeded at it. Before his mother's death.

Reid was impressed with himself for holding out on the dilaudid for as long as he did. Ever since Linsey drugged him in mexico, ever since the heroin, which wasn't his drug of choice but close enough, he had been craving it again. This was only made worse by being locked up and loosing everything he cared about.

The thing that eventually kept him above water for so long was his determination to sort through his mother's things.

That's when Reid stumbled upon his mother's diaries. He spend days reading through all of them, searching for traces of his mother between the pages. The books went back decades and reading them felt like Reid was purposely tearing himself apart. They documented Reid's childhood, his mother's love for him, their lives together but they also showed her slowly deteriorating mind. But at least they gave Reid something to keep his brain busy.

He started with the newest and went backwards until he was reading through words written before his birth. And that's when he found him.

John Winchester.

The name wasn't unfamiliar to Reid. The grim reaper had called him Winchester which hadn't made a lot of sense to him at the time. He didn't know anyone named Winchester.

He did however know the man that his mother wrote about. She used to refer to him as Uncle John, and Reid could remember meeting him maybe a dozen times growing up. He'd stop by every once in a while and he was always nice to Reid, he'd take him to baseball games and the zoo, he'd send him a birthday card every year and maybe a present on Christmas. When he was young Reid always assumed that John felt sorry for him because he didn't have a dad.

Apparently that had been false.

Apparently John had only tried to make up for the fact that he hadn't been there to raise Reid himself.

They met in a casino. John was on vacation with his friends and just turned 21. Diana had been dragged along by a friend. They spend the weekend together  and stayed in touch afterwards.

According to his mother she didn't mind John leaving, they stayed friends and when she found out that she was pregnant he even offered to marry her but Diana wasn't interested.

She wrote about how John was as present in Reid's life as she could expect from someone living all across the country. Then he got married and had kids with his wife and Diana never resented him for it. At least not according to her diaries.

And then... Then John's wife died.

At that time the schizophrenia had already set in so when Reid thought back to those times, he'd always assume that  the monsters that killed John's wife, the monsters he was now hunting for a living, were just products of her broken mind.

Apparently not.

It was all documented in her diaries. Reid found letters John wrote to her, explaining what happened to his wife, explaining that magic was real and monsters, too. Reid didn't know what he had shown Diana to convince her but his mother had believed John. She'd even helped him with research and such.

After reading through her diaries over and over again, after everything that Reid had seen , all the unsolved cases that just didn't make sense, after his own experiences with the supernatural... He wouldn't say that he believed it, but he was more open to the possibility of there being more... Or maybe he was just loosing his mind. Maybe both.

All he knew with certainty now was that he had to find John Winchester. He was the only one that could tell Reid the truth about everything, about where he came from, about how much of his mother's rambling had been true, about the state of the world.

He was the only one that could give Reid a purpose again.