Summary: Reader gets her answer, and shares it with family.
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It had been a week since that fateful midday conversation. That day, however simple in scope, felt like it had changed everything. No longer could I pretend that the problem didn't exist, no matter how badly I wanted to. Each night, I would clench my eyes shut tight enough to see stars and I wished on every single one to let me rest.
It had been a week, and it was time for me to face the music. Or, more accurately, the phlebotomist. She had been kind and warm, but I was in no place to receive either mercy. The lab felt just as cold and dreary as everywhere else as of late.
I thought, or at least hoped, that I would be able to accept the possibility of being pregnant if I'd given myself enough time. But honestly, I'd just become more confused. Because there was no right answer. If it was positive, I had to figure out how to raise a child without their father. A child that would forever remind me of what I lost. A child I might not ever understand the way he would have.
If it was negative... then I would have to accept the death of everything that was left of Spencer Reid.
I tried not to hope for a result either way because I was dreadfully aware of how painful it is for things to not end up the way you expect them to. But it was hard. I found myself cradling my own stomach, still the same size as a few weeks before, and trying to delude myself into believing I could feel something different.
The wait for the phone call was driving me insane. So, I followed the example of famous romance protagonists and I took a walk. At first, I chose simple, neutral places. But as the day drew on, I found myself drawn to the places he used to frequent.
I got a drink from the cafe he would visit on his days off, but I didn't loiter. Sipping the much too sweet beverage, I passed by the book shop where he would pester the poor high school student workers just trying to make a little extra money. He was still their favorite customer.
Spencer had a way about him, after all. Even if you wanted to hate him, he was just so... Soft. Charming. Silly. Cute. I could come up with a million words to describe the way he'd made me feel, but it would never be enough. He would always know more. Not that he was ever against sharing that knowledge if anyone had been kind enough to listen.
My wandering thoughts and feet could only lead me to one place; a quaint little park filled with kids and adults alike crowded around a couple of chess boards.
I used to make fun of Spencer when he came here. I would tease him relentlessly for being the president of the chess club even decades after he'd left public school. He would feign offense, but I saw something proud among his bashful blushing. He'd always asked me to tag along, but the truth was that I was petrified of him realizing that I wouldn't belong among his things.
I made fun of him for coming, and now I paid the price. I would've given anything to find him there.
And that was why it was there that I would wait until I learned the truth. I would find out whether or not Spencer had given me one more gift before he departed, there, in one of his favorite places.
Of course, after a few moments of being there I was forced to confront the memory of how much he loved being around children. I could almost hear him gushing about how badly he had wanted some of his own one day. I could imagine the way his face would light up and his voice would soften into something brand new.
What a cruel twist of fate it would be, for me to have his child just for him to not be able to see it.
Would that be better than none at all?
I wouldn't know. I never asked him.
An excited cheer brought me out of my reverie. I turned to see the two boys trying to shake hands with grace, despite the tension that came from losing. I smiled at the innocence, but the joy didn't last long.
Because from my position on the other side of the park, I saw someone sitting across from an empty space. From context clues alone, I figured that the empty seat must've been reserved for a man who was no longer able to appear for chess dates.
I wasn't expecting to see him. I hadn't anticipated how badly it would hurt.
My feet started to move, faster and faster until I could make out his features enough to know with a relative certainty. Still, I called out the name to confirm my theory.
"Jason Gideon?"
He didn't turn around. The odd, stoic man just continued to stare at the pieces in front of him as he returned much softer, "(Y/n)."
I was only a little surprised to find that he'd learned my name. While I'd never met him personally, he had kept tabs on Spencer's life the same way I'd kept tabs on his past. Unfortunately for the both of us, that task much easier, now that his life was over. Everything that would happen, had, and everything that would have been was equally impossible now.
Cautiously, I took the seat across from Gideon and I tried to feel like I'd deserved to sit in his spot. I shifted uncomfortably and I watched the man who still refused to meet my eyes. The guilt and self-hatred felt like staring in a mirror. Looking at him, I recognized so many parts of Spencer that had been mimicked.
That was how I knew he wasn't going to talk. It would have to be me.
"You didn't come to the funeral."
He finally looked up at me, with dark eyes piercing straight into my soul. It only took me a matter of seconds to understand why he was such a powerful profiler. Although I'd heard that sensation described so many times, I'd never experienced it quite like that.
But despite the chill the look gave, his voice was still soft and warm. It was a honeyed sound not suited to the words.
"Been to a few too many for one lifetime," he drawled while absently tapping his hand against the table. "Not really my scene."
My foot bounced as the emotions built up in my chest. I wanted to scream at him, to tell him that he shouldn't be so comfortable missing Spencer when he'd left him the way he did. But I didn't. I didn't have to. Like before, he knew my thoughts before I ever spoke them.
With shark's eyes still focused on me, he arched his eyebrows as if asking me if I'd really been so willfully ignorant of the pain written over his features. But of course I hadn't missed them. Of course I'd seen how much he blamed himself for the fate of his protege. It was just that the anger was growing larger than the grief, and I so badly craved a freedom from the crushing weight.
"He would have wanted you to be there," I struggled through oncoming tears, "He really looked up to you."
Gideon smiled. For a moment, I almost thought he might laugh. But his lungs were emptied with a shaky sigh, instead. I could see his jaw tense as he bit down on his tongue to prevent himself from uttering something I wouldn't understand. Instead of answering, he chose to lift a piece and move it a couple of spaces before setting it down.
I glanced down at my phone's still empty call log. I stared at it with a bit too much care, trying to manifest a call before I lost my only distraction. It had been several hours now. They would be calling me soon.
"I don't know why he looked up to me," Gideon announced when he saw me drifting. "I kept telling him he shouldn't..."
I could hear the pain in each syllable. I heard the way his voice continued to shaky along with his breath, and I wondered how long it had been since he'd been able to feel that grief without trying to convince everyone else he was fine. I looked at him, I heard his quiet rambling, and I saw something of myself in him. But more than anything, I saw Spencer. Good and bad.
"Maybe things would have been different if he'd listened," he whispered.
Lifting his eyes from the chessboard, Gideon continued to tap on the painted table until I was able to figure out what he'd been implicitly asking.
"I can't play chess," I admitted with a laugh, "and definitely not like Spencer could."
Clutching my phone in my lap, I leaned back and gave him the best smile I could muster. That was what had earned me his first chuckle. I could tell that he'd wanted to tell me that he knew it was a long shot, but he'd also learned that was a rude thing to say. So, instead, I opted to comfort him the same way others had tried to do for me.
After all, he was alone. By his own making, sure. But alone, nonetheless.
"But, I hope you know these games mattered to him. I'm sorry I can't continue them for him."
Gideon just shrugged, like he'd already known that it would be an impossible task.
"I've never found another mind quite like his," he muttered with a painful nostalgia.
I felt it, too. My hand had crept to my stomach, laying flat against the fabric of my dress and trying to feel something. I closed my eyes at first, tilting my head to the sky and hoping that the sun might impart some kind of wisdom on tired, puffy eyelids. But all I found was a blinding brightness and no answers.
I looked down at my phone again, then back up at Gideon.
"He was one a kind," I agreed. I swallowed hard to avoid digging my nails into my stomach. As if slightest amount of roughness would shift the odds out of my favor. As if I hadn't already taken the test.
The man across from me had abandoned the chess board and my eyes. I could feel him analyzing every part of me, and for once I allowed myself the freedom of not trying to hide anymore. Everyone already knew about my situation. He might as well, too.
"You waiting on a phone call?" he asked.
I nodded. Then, with a spark of confidence and a little bit of excitement, I answered, "Yeah, I am."
"And you're waiting here?"
It was a question meant to ask something else.
You're waiting with him?
"Felt right," I confirmed.
The two of us smiled again, brighter then. Bright enough that the sun felt a little less blinding, and my hand on my stomach felt warm instead of scorching. I watched the relief wash over him, each muscle gently relaxing until he sighed again - this time without shaking.
"Well, good luck, (y/n)," he offered.
As he got up and began sliding his jacket on in silence, I once again looked down at my phone. But Gideon hadn't left; not immediately. He stayed there, looking me over like he was running a million calculations in his head and trying to find the right combinations of words.
I held onto my hope that he would have some sort of wise insight for me the way Spencer always claimed he did.
He did.
"If it's positive... it's a good thing," he stated matter-of-factly, "He would've wanted you to have that."
The words burst into a legion of butterflies that robbed my lungs of air. Even still, their wings lifted my spirits from the bottom of the ocean back to the surface. At the surface, they fell down my cheek in the form of a single stray tear.
"I know," I decided. I'd always known.
As I watched his mentor walk away from his memory, I expect for the last time, I found myself almost having forgotten about the device in my hand. It began to buzz in my hand, pulling me back to the present now that I was ready. Immediately, my hands began to tremble with it.
I took a deep breath, closing my eyes and breathing in the air that he would have felt against his face.
"Hello?" I answered.
"Is this (Y/n)(Y/l/n)?"
"This is she."
My heart beat faster than I ever thought possible, and with one hand on my stomach and the other holding onto the phone with a white knuckled grip, the world began to spin slower.
"Hi! This is Nurse Myers from Doctor Laura's office. I'm calling to let you know we got your test results back."
"And?"
"Congratulations!"
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You might think that a cemetery would smell badly, but you would be wrong. In fact, there is something oddly comforting about the scent of moss and recently upturned soil. The soft scent of flowers as they dry and the petals take to the wind remind you that as we return to the earth, new things come back in our place.
Sometimes they come in the form of flowers. Other times they come in the form of microscopic cells proliferating until they form an entire person.
Spencer would have liked me describing a baby that way.
Normally I would tell myself not to think about him so much, to let myself enjoy things without having to link them to him. But under my strange and ironic circumstances, I was giving myself space for forgiveness.
It was the first time I'd visited his grave since the funeral, and it was harder than I'd anticipated. Someone else had come, but it was hard to tell who. The flowers they left behind were rather generic. He would've liked them, though.
I took my seat in front of them and began gently arranging slightly wilted petals so they could feel the sun that filtered through rustling trees. I fiddled with everything until there was nothing left. Then, I took my time trying to find words, any words, to say to the stone.
"I had a dream about you last night." I started. My voice was small and awkward, but it was there. So, I continued, "I know you're not big on dream analysis. I promise it wasn't anything extravagant. It was just the two of us at home. Well, I thought it was two of us."
I twisted a strand of grass between my fingers to occupy myself from how ridiculous I felt. I couldn't understand how it was so easy for others to speak to a ghost. I was never good at playing pretend, and this felt so much like that.
But I knew it was important. It felt that way, too.
"I was sitting on the couch watching terrible television with you like you always wanted me to. And it would've been so normal, but... your hands were on my stomach. When I asked you what you were doing, you just kissed my belly button like it was an answer."
I choked on a sob that I tried to suppress. But the longer I held it in, the longer I let the words sit like rocks on my lungs, the harder it was for me to breathe. My fingers had abandoned the grass and turned instead to my stomach, where I held on for dear life.
"And you told me..." My voice caught in my throat to remind me to correct my language, "You told us that everything was going to be okay."
The tears that fell down my face dripped onto my arm. They reminded me of the last time I was there, with saline mixing with rainwater to create something new among the upturned soil. Somehow I felt like the sunny disposition of the weather that day was intentional; the universe's way of saying I should feel happier now than I had at his funeral.
"I want to think that my dream was your way of saying you already know. Because it feels weird to tell a gravestone I'm pregnant, but..."
If I talked enough, I convinced myself that it would make up for the fact that he couldn't answer back.
"You know, I looked it up since you weren't here to tell me. Our baby is the size of an apple seed. Can you believe that? It feels so much heavier than that. Next week it'll double to the size of a sweet pea."
The pauses were still awkward. My brain was yelling at me to slow down, to leave room for his next spiel of fun facts and statistics, even though they wouldn't come. I wanted to make space for him the same way that I made space for my grief, not realizing that they were one in the same now.
"I wonder if you would know why they always base the comparisons on food. Is it because pregnant people are always hungry?"
He would know. He wasn't here to answer.
"They say I might be able to hear the heartbeat next week. Derek said he would come with me to my appointment."
I wanted to explain to him that his best friend was honestly one of the only reasons I was still sane at that point. I had assumed I would be leaning on JJ more, but after a few visits I just felt like I was drowning whenever I was with her. I couldn't exactly place it, and I know that probably made me a bad profiler. But something about her lately just made me feel like she was hiding something from me, and I didn't have the emotional energy to try and figure out what.
If she was in love with Spencer, I didn't want to know. I didn't want to try and argue over which of us had a better claim to his heart. I didn't want to think that he might have picked her if he were still here. I just wanted to be able to deal with what I had, and trust that we would come back together again with time.
"I hope you don't mind but I already told him he could be the godfather. I know the kid isn't even born yet, but... he's really stepped up," I explained to the stone that marked the last remaining space on this earth for the father of my child.
I knew he wouldn't have minded Derek being the godfather; he would have picked him regardless. Especially if he could see everything he's done for me so far. I knew he would be proud of the both of us, and he would be as grateful as we were that we had one another to navigate the wreckage left in his wake.
"He's not you," I felt the need to preface, "But he's here, and he's trying. So if heaven turned out to be real and you can hear me just... look out for us, please. We miss you."
Raising onto my knees, I leaned forward to readjust the bouquet once again to better fan the flowers across the dirt. I only paused for a moment to think about how Spencer would've felt about me sitting on the filthy ground in a cemetery while pregnant with his child.
The thought brought a smile to my face.
"I miss you, pretty boy," I whispered.
The breeze carried errant flower petals a little bit farther, making more space for him.
I stood up and brushed the dirt from my knees and once again held tightly to my stomach. I laughed because I could feel him again for the first time in a long time, and he still felt like home.
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It was my final stop on my current journey of visiting Spencer's life, and I had saved it for last for a reason. It wasn't a decision borne from guilt or obligation, but rather a deep-seated longing to be understood.
The Bennington Sanitarium was quiet that day. There were only a few visitors, and they each carried on their activities without much ruckus. I suspected that in a few minutes, I would be doing much of the same. If I'd been honest with myself, I spent each step forward trying to convince myself not to turn and run.
But I continued my approach toward the silent, contemplative Diana. I hadn't realized how tightly she'd been clutching the book until I got closer. It suddenly made sense why the pages hadn't moved. She remained still when I took a seat next to her, although for the briefest second she'd glanced up at me with red-rimmed eyes.
I smiled. She didn't.
She remained silent until I spoke.
"Hey Diana, it's been awhile."
It had only been a few weeks, but it never felt often enough. I suppose I hadn't come any less often than Spencer had when he was alive, but it felt even more necessary now.
With only quick, flickering looks, she began analyzing the nervous wreck of a woman sat in front of her. But each time, she would avert her eyes back to the book, like she was waiting for something else to appear on the page.
"You're Spencer's friend. You look different," she said with a small twitch of the neck, like my presence made her remember something painful.
"Yeah, that's me. And you're right, I-I haven't been sleeping well."
"Sleep is important," she briefly lectured, "You should sleep more."
I accepted her concern graciously because it was of a kind that was familiar to me. It was the very same sort of comfort I'd been seeking by coming there in the first place.
Spencer was always worried that he might turn out to be like his mother, but I also knew that he was proud to share so many of her characteristics. After all, they were both beautiful, brilliant, and kind.
Selfishly, I wanted to consume more of her time. I wanted to carve a place for myself in her life because I knew that she would remind me of him, even when it hurt. I could handle the hurt if it meant we could smile as we remembered things that the others were eager to forget.
"Thanks. I'll try to sleep more. By the way, I see you're reading Chaucer... again?"
My gesturing to the book in her hands seemed to remind her of what she was doing. It wouldn't take much effort for her to read the book. She had read it to Spencer hundreds of times as he grew up. It was one of his favorites.
"Yeah," she said sadly, "Reminds me of my son."
Everyone knew that Diana had her good and bad days, and it was honestly difficult to tell which was which. The only way for me to know whether she remembered what had happened would be to ask her. But I would never do that to her or myself. It was better in purgatory, as far as I was concerned.
Instead of asking, I just nervously rubbed my arm in a half hug, unsure of what to do next. For a moment I almost asked her to read it to me, but the words didn't come out. My train of thought was interrupted shortly after the idea came to me by a tidal wave of nausea that hit me with full force and no warning.
"E-Excuse me," I called as I promptly stood up and bolted toward the bathroom.
I'd barely made it, but I was too tired and relieved to be embarrassed by my behavior. Now more than ever, I knew I had to be patient with both Diana and myself. There were so many decisions associated with being there that I had never actually taken the time to make.
Should I tell Diana I was pregnant? Should I tell her it's Spencer's child? When the child is born, should they meet her? It was too much all at once, and the harder I thought about it, the sicker I got.
The worst part was how selfish I felt in wanting to tell her. I wanted to hear her tell me that things were going to be okay. I wanted her to know so that I could come back when my baby was able to hear, because I wanted her to read to them. I wanted so badly to share this with someone who loved Spencer just as much, if not more than I do.
It was just our luck, then, that she was also too unstable to withstand that kind of thing. It wasn't her fault.
Deciding each of the identified questions were problems for another day, I managed to clean myself up to return to her. Unfortunately, Diana was an astute woman. So, when my hands were still shaking with the residual adrenaline associated with puking your guts out in a sanitarium bathroom, she quickly noticed.
"Sorry, I—" I started to explain, but she cut me off.
"You're not sick, are you? That'll happen if you don't sleep."
If only it were that simple.
"No, I'm not sick I'm..." I paused. Then, with a brief moment of absolute insanity, I blurted out, "I'm pregnant."
The second the word escaped my lips, I felt a weight lift from my chest. I know she wouldn't know the full context; that I had come here specifically because I was pregnant, but it still felt so much better to know that his mother knew.
It made it feel real. It made me feel real.
"Oh. Morning sickness," she muttered with a small, sympathetic smile. "I had it terrible when I was pregnant with Spencer. I don't know why I was surprised when he turned into such a handful."
I began to laugh, full-hearted and without reservation. I wondered what hers and Spencer's idea of a handful was.
Snarky? Sneaky? There I went again, trying to find words to describe the indescribable. In front of his mother, no less. If anyone had known just how unique Spencer Reid was, surely, it was Diana.
Deciding to be selfish once more, I leaned forward with a playful, challenging grin when I whispered, "He likes to cause trouble, huh?"
Diana closed her book with an equally pleased laughter. Still, her fingers traced the words on the cover, over and over again like there was something missing among the binding. She had that distant look in her eyes that told me there was a lot she was keeping to herself.
I let her keep it. She deserved to have it.
"Yeah, he does..." she shared, nonetheless, "he's a good kid, though."
She was speaking about him in the present tense, which caused a quiet, yet sharp inhale of breath on my part. Thankfully, she was too distracted by the embossed cover to notice.
"He was the best thing I ever had," she said.
I bit back the urge to say, 'Me too.' I felt the wetness on my cheek before I realized I was crying, and I cursed the pregnancy hormones for making me so obvious.
Diana didn't seem to mind though. In fact, she was quick to reach over and rest her hand on my knee with a small pat.
"Good luck, dear," she chuckled.
With one hand on my stomach and the other over hers, I gave one of those rare genuine smiles that didn't have an ounce of guilt in it.
"Thanks, Diana."
For everything.