His shadow still floated as dandelion seeds across her windshield, as sugar-swirls in her coffee, the way the light fell on a book... J-J leaned against the table, crisp case files swishing beneath her fingers, to the rhythm of the words he was not here to say. She could feel his chatter in her heartbeat. That was the strangest part of grief. When it elicits from you only smiles. She was smiling and her face felt like porcelain with hairline fissures rolling over it. Little breaks that let his light in. That kept his chatter drumming in her heart.

Morgan entered the room. For J-J grief brought smiles. J-J wasn't the one who was with him in the end. That was Derek Morgan, and his grief was different. He moved like Atlas across the room, the globe on his back, rolling about between his shoulders. Oh, God, his eyes. His eyes rolling with their thunder, bubbling with the blood that spilled between them, dark as the coffee they'd shared together many a morning on this job. God help Derek Morgan's eyes. Another strange stroke of grief. That his ghost would live in Derek's eyes.

His laughter haunted Penelope's own giggle fits, as if she with her latte came skipping in possessed with his spirit. She hovered around them as he once did, wrapping his halo around them. He wrapped his light in the bows of Penelope's smile, in the arched brows of Emily's pensive case review, in the concrete frown on Hotch's lips. Set in stone, he was everywhere but his picture in the hallway. That was somewhere they didn't visit. Rossi had even covered it with paper once. To excuse it, to dismiss the idea that he could possibly be as they say.

"He lives in you!" Penelope teased. She sang Lion King songs to hide her tears_but she had been crying more into her tea. Oh, how much tea she drank, because he would drink it with her, many a night when he offered to help her file paperwork and both had elected to ignore they were hanging out together because they were the loneliest.

He was alive in every way that he was dead. It didn't hit them too hard, at first. Yet weeks turned into months and months turned into years. Four solid years.

Then came the terrible day when Erin called them all to the table. They thought pensions were about to be cut, or some cruel punishment for some obscure protocol they missed in their bloody daily business.

"I don't know how to bring this up...I know that, of all the members of this team, he was historically the youngest...It is a tender topic..."She lay a photograph of Spencer Reid on the table. Spencer, tragic Spencer, famous now in the BAU for his sacrificial death at the ripe old age of 27.

"Why bring this up now? Why ever bring him up again? He's been gone for a long time now..." Derek's voice was harsh, a little power drill in J-J's aching head. She had taken the photograph that glared at her from the table with the pearly gates of his teeth that shone from his smile.

Erin nodded.

"You remember what he looked like then...You were led to believe, based on our cross-examination evidence, that he was dead." Erin began.

'He is dead!" Emily blurted. It was the first time anyone in this room had ever dared to utter those three words.

Erin swallowed hard.

"He...He's not, is he?" Hotch choked out, the first to find his voice.

"Oh, Christ..."Rossi bowed his head into his hands. Erin drew a breath.

"He wasn't...two years ago. When...When this image was created." Erin laid down a photo. Penelope was the one who flinched. J-J's eyes crossed.

Because that wasn't her Spence standing there in the desert. That wasn't her Spence with the haggard looking wild hair, rail tie thin, bearded, carrying a long tactical rifle and wearing an army jacket. That wasn't her Spencer on the run and God knows where photographed by a drone.

"Why are we just now getting this?" Rossi snapped. Derek got up. His face told them he was leaving the room to be sick. His hands reached for the picture as if he didn't know when to go, he just had to be sick.

Erin sighed a heavy sigh.

"The case was handed over to Homeland Security after we finished. It's...It's been sent back to the BAU because...Oddly enough Spencer Reid...He left notes. Case logs. Things that would help with the solving of his own murder..."

Derek bolted from the room.