The Ghost of Princeton ||Spencer Reid||

nightmare

CRESSIDA

a few months later

I heard a gunshot, and it woke me from sleep.

Immediately I jumped out of bed, getting my own gun out of the locked cabinet before I ran into the hallway wearing only an oversized sweater and pyjama shorts. I scanned the doors down the hallway and saw one was open...

Fuck.

Spencer.

I stalked down the hallway, keeping myself tucked against the wall. My heart hammered in my chest as I reached the open doorway, footsteps echoed from in the apartment, but they weren't Spencer's. I'd learnt what his footsteps sounded like, and these... no. I knew who they sounded like too.

With one last, calming breath I brought up my gun and looked through the door before walking into Spencer's apartment. Books were strewn over the floor, furniture was knocked over and around...

And then there was the hand reaching from inside of the bedroom, palm up and unmoving as the arm lay on the ground.

"No..." I whispered to myself, recognising the fingers and the relaxed shape they had curled into.

The footsteps were coming from the kitchen, and all I could do was turn to face the intruder as he walked into the lounge room. I recognised him before I even saw his face in the light.

"Cooper..." I trailed off, my gun pointed at his head as the light hit his blonde hair.

"Did you think I would let you get away with what you did?" He asked, his blue eyes as cold as ice as he stalked towards me. A gun was in his hands, also pointed at me. "You took everything from me, so I took everything from you."

I didn't think twice before I squeezed the trigger, the bullet shot through the air and through his skull. Why didn't I feel safe as his body hit the ground?

There was no time to question it as I ran over to the hand, to the body that was attached to it and my heart shattered into a thousand pieces.

"Spencer..." I trailed off, kneeling next to his body, lacking any care for the fact I was in the puddle of blood that was growing beside him. No, my care was on reaching up to his face and pushing the loose strands of hair away from his open eyes.

The calming brown had lost all depth, as if they weren't real.

"No..." I whispered as the realisation he was gone hit me like a freight train. Immediately I backpedalled, slipping in his blood and cowering by the foot of his bed, staring at his body and trying to figure out what to do next.

But then I heard footsteps again, the same footsteps from before.

I fumbled for my gun, but it had simply vanished into thin air, and I was at the mercy of Harrison Cooper once again as his silhouette blocked the doorway.

***

My body jolted awake, my chest hurt and I was struggling to suck in air. The beside lamp was already on, just as there was already a calming hand on my shoulder.

"Are you okay?" Spencer asked as I lay still for a few seconds and told myself it was just another nightmare. It hadn't been real.

"Yeah..." I whispered, slowly sitting up before reaching for my water bottle and taking a sip of water.

"Same dream or different?" He asked, his comforting eyes focused entirely on me and filled with worry.

"Same." I answered, and I heard his sigh of concern.

In the six years since I had been freed from the Horsemen, I hadn't felt a single ounce of fear regarding the fact Cooper was still at large. No, I knew he wouldn't attack me without backup, and that we would find him before he would get to me. But then, since Spencer and I had started our relationship, this nightmare had come out of literally nowhere. What made it worse was the fact that no matter what I did, the ending never changed.

And this wasn't the only thing we had faced these last few months.

Between simply doing our jobs, having the team torn apart by the Assistant Director and then getting the team back together, it was a miracle that we had all kept sane. In fact, maybe a bit too sane since we had decided to make it even more interesting.

Spence and I had managed to play a game with the team. It wasn't that we didn't want to tell them we had finally decided to take the jump together, it was just the fact that once they knew they wouldn't let us live it down.

So we decided that we would instead see how long we could keep it to ourselves, and see if the team would be able to pick up on what was different between us. We were somehow still winning, and we hadn't planned on giving up.

But maybe it was time to. If they didn't already know, they would easily be able to figure it out soon enough.

"Okay. Well, we're doing everything we can to track him down, you know that." He told me, I nodded as his hand held my cheek. "We'll get him."

"I know we will."

"You're probably just worried about what you're going to do today and that's what sparked the nightmare." He was probably right, and he knew that as he kissed my forehead.

"Yeah, that's probably it."