genre: angst
pairing: season thirteen spencer reid x oc
warnings: drugging, hallucinations, extreme character distress, psychological torture, some injuries, murder (including murder of family members and friends), guns, strangulation, one sentence of suicidal ideation
word count: 2.7k
summary: amelia continues to exist at the hand of scratch and damian kelsey.
today is my first day of school! day one of my second semester of junior year. i'm posting this when i should be heading off to school but wish me luck :)
this is just a little bit of a heavy one, just an fyi. so please be careful while reading and take care of yourself.
if you are confused with anything, please message me or leave a comment and i'll be happy to explain <3 i hope you all enjoy the chapter!! remember to vote and comment!
AMELIA
"Come on, babe, let's go."
The tears pour down my cheeks uncontrollably as familiar voices echo in my ears, words jumbled and distorted. I feel the hands on my body. I always feel the hands. I always feel them tugging at my restraints and pulling at my clothes and twirling my hair. Even when they're gone, I feel their ghostly touches on my freezing skin, as if they're there. They never really leave. No matter how many tears collect in my eyes, no matter how blurry my vision gets, they never leave. I just want them to leave. I just want to sleep. I just want my brain to be quiet.
"We've got you, Amelia. We're here for you." JJ's echoing voice makes my head pound harder, and when Luke's voice follows with similar words, I squeeze my eyes shut. The tears on my cheeks drip down my jaw and my neck. The cold air clings to the trail of wetness and cuts me down to the bone.
"Please," I plead hopelessly, trying to twist my hands around to hold onto the handcuffs around my wrists. "Stop! Leave me alone." I hold the sharp metal as tight as I can, but my hands are pried away and the cuffs are unlatched.
"No!" I scream as I'm dragged off the metal slab and onto the concrete, blood pouring from the countless cuts and gashes on my legs splattering onto the floor. I resist with the tiny bit of strength I have, kicking and screaming and trying to pull away from whoever has a hold on me this time. But they keep dragging me along the rough concrete despite my protests and cries, despite my wailing and tears.
I'm dropped to the ground harshly, the aching in my muscles amplifying as my body folds in half. I grip my hair in my hands and pull at the strands, dropping my jaw in a silent, desperate scream. And my ears fill with a new sound. A new, worse, horrible sound. The sounds of gagging and choking and bodies dropping to the floor.
I shield my face from seeing the faces of my dead friends, trying to bury my face in my lap, clasping my hands over my ears. But it doesn't help. I can still hear gasps and gags and cries of my name and shouting for help.
"Stop!" I rock myself back and forth, clawing at my ears with my broken nails. "Leave me alone! Please stop!"
"Amelia." Spencer's warped voice begs, his words hitting my chest with a power I've never felt before. I shake my head, pressing my forehead against the floor, repeating no as many times as my tongue will allow me to. I try to drown out the voice of my boyfriend with my own voice but Spencer's grows every time mine does. "Amelia! Help me!"
"Stop it! Fucking stop it!" I scream at the top of my lungs, as loud as I can, ignoring the way my throat burns.
And then the choking starts again. The gagging and the sputtering ricochets off the walls and into my ears. Spencer's cries of my name are stuck in my head, even when he's not able to breathe enough to formulate the syllables. My name in his voice hasn't stopped repeating in my head, not for forever.
"Look at him." My father's voice suddenly growls. "Look at him!"
There's suddenly a hand on my head, forcing me to look up at the sight in front of me. Scratch grips my hair with an iron fist, his other hand coming around to the front of my neck and squeezing, immediately making my face feel hot. It makes my chest feel tight and my stomach turn and I start squirming in his hold.
When I look up, I find the bodies of the BAU on the floor, red marks around their necks and their eyes rolled back. I cry out for them, trying to reach towards their bodies. But then I pull myself back, squeezing my eyes shut. "It's not real," I whisper to myself, trying to push Scratch's hands off of me. "It's not real. It can't be real. It's not real."
"You know what," I hear my dad's voice over my mantra, "you're right. It's not real." I hear Spencer's body hit the floor, joining the rest of his team on the ground.
Scratch leans in close to my ear, his hand clutching my neck tighter. "Open your eyes or I'll open them for you."
I can barely even force my eyes open, what with the lack of oxygen in my lungs, but I manage. I force my gaze up and I expect to see Spencer in my dad's hands for the millionth time, but what I find is an even worse sight. What I find is worse than the handprints around Tara and Emily's neck. What I find is worse than JJ's face turning blue. What I find is worse than Rossi and Luke clawing at my dad's hand as they struggle to breathe. Dad smirks at me, tightening the hand on the gun in his hand.
"Sunshine."
The breath I let out almost doesn't sound real. I reach my hands out but they're trembling beyond the point of control. My slacked jaw can't produce any type of coherent words, much less a sentence. Whatever energy I didn't have before is fully restored and I fight against Scratch's grip, digging my nails into his skin and screaming at the top of my lungs.
"Mom! Cody!"
They're kneeling in front of my father with their backs to his, hands behind them, eyes pleading for my help. I keep seeing that same look and I keep reaching for them. I keep trying to help. I keep trying and I keep trying. I do what I can to protect them and no matter what, they always get killed. They always did and there's nothing I can do.
Dad starts to wave the gun around in his hand, making Cody flinch. My eyes lock on him, quivering and trying to lean towards Mom for comfort. But her hands are tied and she's just as hysterical as him. Cody is too young for this, too young to be experiencing this for a second time. He's so little. He should be playing soccer with his hoodlum friends and staying out past his curfew and convincing me to drive him around to places he shouldn't be at. He shouldn't be kneeling at the hands of a killer, of his horrible father, of a man who is just going to take his life over and over and over.
"You're right," Dad repeats, bringing the gun up to his eye level to admire the inner workings of the barrel. "That wasn't real. The strangulation? The choking? Drawing out their deaths? It's not my thing. Well," he pauses only to cock the gun, "it didn't use to be."
He lowers the gun to the back of my mom's head, pressing it into her hair. "No! No!" I keep thrashing around, drawing blood on Scratch's hand from how hard I'm clawing at him. "Please stop! Don't!"
"This is how they died, isn't it?" Dad pushes the gun so hard into her head that she jerks forward, squeezing her eyes shut. "This is how you found their bodies. With bullets in their heads, right? Blood everywhere, on the walls and on the floor. And it was right here! Right in the greenhouse!"
"Let them go! Mom! Cody!"
With just a quirk of his lips, he presses the trigger. Cody and Mom go slumping to the floor, puddles of blood pooling around them and growing by the millisecond. I scream at the top of my lungs but it just gets swallowed up when Scratch squeezes my throat tighter, heating up my face.
Dad growls with satisfaction, tossing his neck side to side to crack his spine. "That was right, and that felt good. Really good."
Scratch finally lets go of me, letting me collapse to the floor in a heap of pathetic cries. I drag myself over to the dead bodies of the two people I miss the most in my life, trying desperately to revive them. But I'm kneeling in their blood puddles and it's not staining my skin or my clothes and that distracts me long enough for Dad to, somehow, tie up Scratch.
I grasp at my mothers' clothes, pulling Cody closer to the two of us and holding him close to me. Scratch is pulling at the ties around his arms and legs, shooting daggers at my dad as he fights to release himself. He's shouting at him but the words still don't resonate in my ears, and it makes it harder for me to tell if what is happening with them is reality.
Dad looms over me as I stroke my brother's hair, trying to arrange it as perfectly as possible. Then I move on to my mom's, twisting her curls between my fingers to make sure they look perfect, just the way I know she wore it. If I had a scarf, I would tie it around her head just the way she always did.
"Take it." My head snaps up to find my dad holding the grip of the gun down to me, his ugly smirk still on his face.
"No." I don't even ask why, I just keep holding my family close to me. "I don't want it. Please leave me alone."
"Take it!" He bellows, ripping my arms away from my mom and bringing them towards the gun. My vision is completely blurred and warped from my tears and I can barely even see the gun he thrusts into my hand. The machinery weighs me down to the floor, my body doubling over, my arms like jello.
Within a second, my dad is behind me with his hands on my arms, hoisting me back up on my knees. I sputter out nonsense protests, shaking my head as I try to escape from his grasp.
"I'm sure you know how to shoot a gun, what with a cop as a foster father and an FBI agent boyfriend," he positions my arms perfectly straight, holding them there with a firm grip. "Now just shoot. I don't even need to open your eyes, Amelia. Just shoot. Just press down on the trigger."
"No," I plead, "please don't make me do it. Please, don't. Please, no."
"It won't be hard," Dad whispers, his lips brushing against my ear. I squirm away from him but his hands are too tight and I'm sure I'll have bruises whenever it is he moves his hands. "You know how your boyfriend keeps popping up again after I've killed him? This will be just like that. You'll be able to see him again, very soon. So just pull the trigger. There's no blood right now, is there?" He gestures down to the floor where Cody and Mom lay, and sure enough, their blood is gone. Their bodies start to fade away. I realize that the bodies of the BAU re gone too. What is reality and what is sick fantasy? "There won't be any blood now. So just look forward and pull the trigger. Simple and easy,"
I bring my eyes up to Scratch in front of me, tugging at the ropes around him. It seems so real, and so genuine. But then again, every single touch from Spencer and Emily and Blake and JJ and Luke and Rossi and Tara and Morgan and Kate and Hotch and Matt and everyone on the team feels so real too. And every time they die looks so real. Every hand mark around their throats looks real. Every scream of my name sounds so horrifyingly real. But they always appear again, so that's what's going to happen now. Right? I'm not actually killing Scratch. Right?
I squeeze my eyes shut and tighten my hands around the grip, tears pouring out of my ducts as my fingers lay atop the trigger. In the smallest voice I can manage, I whisper, "It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real."
It's not real. It can't be real. It's been impossible to distinguish what has been real and what hasn't and I chalk that up to whatever gas they've been forcing me to breathe in. This has to be another one of those delusions. Why would Dad make me kill Scratch? It has to be an illusion. It has to be like all the times I watched my Dad and Scratch kill the various versions of the BAU team. He won't die. This is just another fucked up illusion. It's not real.
"It's not real." With one more repeat of my mantra, I put pressure on the trigger and release a bullet into the air, sending it flying in the direction of Mr. Scratch. "It's not real."
But it is real. This time, I know it's real. I know it's real from the moment his blood splatters all over my face and drips down my neck. My eyes snap open as the gun clatters to the floor, pupils landing on Scratch's body on the frozen ground, laying in a pool of his own blood. When I look down at my own arms, I see speckles of red and I start stuttering out absolute nonsense again.
"I– you– but– that– this– you said–"
"Oh, shut up," Dad growls, grabbing my hair by the handful and dragging me along, over my brother's disappearing body and back towards the metal slab. "He needed to die. It was about time." He throws me up and reaches for the restraints, shackling my ankles first. "And now, I've got you all to myself."
I stare up at the gray, cinderblock ceiling, my eyes wide and my jaw dropped. I can barely even breathe now. My chest feels so tight and I actually think that someone is sitting on it. Someone very heavy is sitting on my chest. Someone very, very heavy.
I just killed a man. I just held up a gun and pulled the trigger and ended the life of a human being. I killed a man in cold blood. How could I do that? I'm no better than either of them. I deserve to be here. I truly do.
I barely even notice it when my dad slips the mask over my face again and starts pumping the gas. I just breathe in the sweet bubblegum scent and let it lull me off to sleep, the way it always does. It has a cruel way of calming me, making me feel at peace with this horrible situation I'm in. The gas is the calm before the storm because the moment the mask comes off, I'm dragged off the table and I have to face the deaths of those I love.
It's constant. It's a constant pain of trying to fend off the ghosts of my loved ones. Every time this mask gets pulled off, they're standing in front of me, claiming they're here to help. They swear they're going to help me and they're going to get me out of here and they undo my handcuffs and yank me off this freezing metal slab and drag me across the concrete.
But, as sure as the sun rises and sets, Dad rips them away from me. They pry my hand away from the ghost's warm embraces and then he wraps his own hands around their necks, leaning them sputtering and choking and gasping and crying my name out for help.
I can never do anything. I'm always frozen in place. I'm always left to clasp my hands over my ears and hope that my screaming can overpower theirs. It never can and I can always hear my friends pleading and begging for their lives, for me to help them. All I can ever do is stare and feel my tears pour down my neck and my chest and wait until I'm dragged away again. All I can do is wait until the torture is ended. But every time it ends, it starts again. It's a vicious cycle that I can't take anymore. I can't handle this anymore. I should have turned that gun on myself.