Hesitance

Chapter Five

The room is dark, the room is cold, the room is loud with the sound of breathing.

His head is thrown back, his throat exposed, his hair caught up in a tangle of fingers that pulls hard, yanking strands from his scalp.

There is a voice at his ear, hot and wet and harsh, "Who are you?"

And there is a knife at his throat, pressing close, so close.

A breath away from cutting.

"Jonathan?"

"Wrong answer."

"Reid?"

He stirred slightly, an ache in his back and a cramp in his leg.

"Reid, come on, pretty boy, wake up."

He rose slowly and asked groggily, "What?"

"Your phone's been ringing off the hook, and I didn't know if I should get it."

"Oh. Oh, sorry."

Reid peeled his face off his desk and rubbed at the dent in his cheek, ignoring Morgan's snort of laughter in favor of rooting around in his satchel for his cellphone. His hand closed around it just as it shrieked back to life, blaring the polyphonic beat of "The Hustle".

"Dear god, Reid," Morgan moaned, "Change your ringtone!"

"Shut up!" he hissed, recognizing Jonathan's name on his caller ID, and stuck his tongue out at Morgan, who flicked Reid's ear as he answered.

"Ow! Hello?"

"Jesus, Spencer, I've called you like ten times-"

"I know, I know...I-I knocked out for a second-"

"What? Are you hurt?"

"No, no, no; I'm just a bit tired. Morgan I swear to god, I'll make your gun disappear!" The last was spoken through clenched teeth, Reid's hand clamped over the mouthpiece of his voice as he tried to shoo away Morgan, who continued folding Reid's paper into an airplane regardless.

"...wondered what you were doing in the bathroom so long last night."

"Look, I don't mean to sound rude, but I really can't talk now. I'm at work."

There was a long pause, and Morgan's pen halted abruptly.

"Is he there?"

"I..." Reid was all too aware of Morgan's eyes on him. "I can't..."

"Goddamnit, Reid." Jonathan's voice was gruff on the other end and Reid swallowed hard against the apology in his throat. "We'll talk about this when you get home."

"Okay," but the line was dead, and Reid's hand shook slightly.

"Reid?"

"I'm fine."

"Reid..."

Reid stood up quickly and turned away, walking swiftly towards the bathroom and praying it was empty. His wish granted, Reid gripped the cold porcelain of the sink and panted shakily, his grip white as bone. Reid's eyes were shut tight against his own reflection, his breathing ragged an disjointed as he forced his thoughts away from memories and old wounds.

"Who are you?"

"No!" Reid slammed his fist into the sink, letting the lancing pain in his knuckles pull him away as he gasped and submerged in the bloom of pain. Slowly, though, the memories resufaced.

-.-.-.-

He met Jonathan Whit at Bennington's. Then and there he should have known something was wrong, but Jonathan's eyes where brown and his smile was crooked and the crazy ones never look it, do they?

Jonathan had been sitting with his mom the first time, he could tell. When Reid had rounded the corner to his mother's room, Jonathan had been standing at his mother's side, slinging on his jacket. It was winter, and there was a biting wind outside, but Reid had still come to visit his mother. Jonathan looked up as he entered and smiled crookedly, making Reid's heart squeeze just by saying, "You must be Spencer."

Then he'd left, throwing a 'goodbye' over his shoulder for Reid's mother, and Diana refused to say anything more on the matter.

He saw Jonathan many more times after that. The next had been just as Reid had left. Jonathan had brushed past him at the door, apparently not recognizing him as he muttered "sorry" and went on his way inside. Just as the door closed, though, Reid saw Jonathan turn, brows knit in confusion, toward him. His eyes lit up in recognition a moment later, and he smiled and waved and Reid saw clutched in his hand a battered copy of Faust. Reluctantly, Reid walked back to his car and sat inside grippinng the steering wheel and wondering why his heart was beating so fast. It isn't love, he thought, but maybe something like it?

Reid wasn't often wrong. But when he was, it seemed, he did it grandly, as if the world wasn't satisfied with a mere trip or stumble. Spencer Reid was destined to fall head over heel, flat on his face, wrong.

The first time Jonathan touched him, just a brief brush past him as he held open the door, all smiles, Reid had jumped like he'd been electrocuted-and indeed it had felt like it. His breath hitched, his skin itched, and his blood pounded in his ears as he stumbled past, stuttering salutations and apologies in the same breath. It was a short fall after that, as Jonathan saw to it to invade Reid's personal space for even the briefest of moments at the every fleeting encounter, leaving Reid breathless and wanting. When one day Reid felt the warm brush of Jonathan's hand against his, and the crisp edge of a paper clasped in it, he didn't hesitate. He clung to that paper like a lifeline and dialed the number with shaking hands the moment he got home.

"Spencer,"

Reid may have gasped then, but he distinctly remember answering with a shaky 'hi?' and then a more bold, "Er, hello, I mean." Jonathan had chuckled warmly in his ear and then Reid was well and truly lost. It just took him three months to realize it.

"Reid,"

Reid spun around, saw Morgan standing in the doorway, and felt something twist in his gut.

"Before you say anything, I'm fine, and I don't need your help."

"See, you've been sayin' that a lot lately and I gotta tell you, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence." A quick glance around confirmed the room was, indeed, empty, and Morgan took a step closer a moment later, "We need to ta-"

"I don't feel well."

"What? Reid?" Morgan's voice rose in alarm as he watched the young doctor's eyes go glassy and unfocused.

"I d-don't," Reid's vision swam sickeningly, and his hand lashed out toward the sink to steady himself, "I dont...feel well. Morgan?" His vision graying, Reid felt Morgan's hands come under his elbows, fighting to hold him up. Then, there were many voices, and they weren't in his head but Reid couldn't quite feel grateful when he heard a voice say 'Dilaudid' and the hands were gone and there were bright lights in his eyes and a voice saying, 'Can you hear me, Dr. Reid?'. It took him a few tries, but Reid fought through the nausea and whispered hoarsely, "Yeah," before he allowed himself to black out.

The first thing Reid heard when he swam back to consciousness, after a great deal of groaning and mental 'oh god I feel like crap' was, "Reid, you freaking idiot!" and, "Chill, Garcia." It took all his willpower to open his eyes, because he knew Garcia would choose that exact moment to dive on him in a flurry of maternal anger/love, and he didn't know if he could handle that quite yet. But he blinked the drowsiness out of his eyes and focused his vision on a giant teddy bear with two pairs of arms. Garcia emerged from behind it and slapped him good-naturedly on the arm before planting a wet kiss on his forhead and hurrying out to go find Hotch and a doctor. Morgan stared at him from across the room, leaning forward in his chair with a red envelope in his hand.

"Morgan..."

The agent sighed and scrubbed his hand over his face, and it occured to Reid that his eyes were shadowed and Morgan had been worried.

"I'm sor-"

"Jack made this for you," Morgan tossed the envelope at the foot of Reid's bed and stood stiffly, exiting quickly afterward.

Reid pressed his lips together thinly, to stifle a scream he couldn't explain that was welling inside him. Swallowing the not rising in his throat, Reid turned onto his side and pressed his face into the soft brown fur of the teddy bear Garcia left him, wishing that it could defy the laws of nature just once and hug him back.

A/N

So. It's been a while. A long while.

*facepalm*

GAH. Okay, so this is actually a short chapter comparitively, and there's not much happening by way of action or relationships, but we do start to get a feel for how Reid and Jonathan met and their relationship developed. A bit. Erm.

Okay, so this chapter sucks, and believe me I'm sorry, especially since I promised this a lot earlier. I don't plan on abandoning this fic, because I have endless inspiration for it, unlike other sad, sad projects which are looking pretty pathetic right now. Ugh.

My suckiness aside, be gentle if you're going to review, 'cause I know there's someone out there who is totally gearing up for an anonymous rant right now. I can't give you a projected update date, because holy crap I'm busy, but I promise you this will be updated, I swear. I'm going to try and end this within the next 3-ish chapters, so that I can give you a satisfying resolution without trying to just push out more and more chapters that are actually really crappy. Hopefully they'll be rather padded and illuminating, but you might have to wait for it. I totally understand if you give up on this story, because no one likes to wait, right? Just know that I'm not, 'cause goddamnit, Morgan/Reid needs some love!

Okay, I'm done.

~Kay