4.4
( bomb disposal. )
☆ ★ ☆
spencer
It is approximately ten minutes after Garcia calls Spencer claiming that Iris is alive and safe after speaking with her on the phone, that Spencer is able to confirm it for himself.
The first five were spent hurriedly talking, no longer worrying about their teammates now that they knew they were all alive, and now pondering theories and trying to locate the other six unsubs. The last five were spent in relative silence, the only person speaking being JJ as she conversed with the head of Homeland Security on the phone, so that Rossi and Spencer could think. But nobody speaks to each other, almost like it's a time for silence and mourning.
Until.
"Spence," JJ whispers, and, from where he stands side by side with Rossi at their board of evidence, he turns around to look at where she sits at the long table. She has her back to him, eyes directed out through the window of the room that looks into the main office, and he follows her stare.
Speaking frantically to Emily, gesticulating with her hands quite wildly, Iris is limping through the maze of desks. She looks like death: her once immaculate clothes are singed; her face is cut jaggedly across her left eyebrow, and her skin, pale with shock and fear, is dirtied with soot and ash. Spencer, followed by Rossi, JJ, and Preston, are out of the room in a split second.
Spencer, his eyes watering as soon as they make eye-contact, hardly notices Iris' lips forming his name, too busy racing forward, crashing against her, wrapping his arms around her neck and feeling her warm body burying into his chest, searching for comfort. He's overcome with a sudden feels of calm.
"Spencer —" Iris says, and a few murmurs of his name echo through the ground, too. Spencer Reid? Hugging someone?
"I thought you were dead," he whispers as an explanation, and as she understands Iris' hold tightens around his ribs.His nerves crackle with anxiety at her touch; he can feel each of her individual fingers spreading out across the expanse of his back, and then fisting in his shirt. "Are you okay?" he sniffs, pulling back and looking her up and down.
He can see no injuries aside from the wicked cut on her eyebrow and a few scrapes along her hands and legs, where her pants are ripped in places, and Iris seems to have come to the same conclusion that she's relatively unharmed, because she's nodding. She just looks exhausted, pale and limping and a little hazy, like she's just coming out of a state of shock. Considering she's been in a bomb blast, he's not surprised.
Still, the fear that has been squeezing his heart for the past half-an-hour finally releases at the sight of her. He feels a little more at ease as he asks, "Are you sure? I've not seen the footage which would help with deducing possible injuries, but you could have a concussion, or even a broken rib."
Iris has the audacity to roll her eyes and tell him to shut up.
"Either way, we don't have many hospitals at our disposal," Preston says. "There's about to be — how many? Sixteen, suicide bombers across the state. They're gonna be blocked up."
Iris nods, giving Spencer a look that says, see, dumbass, raising a hand to wipe the blood from her eyebrow.
"Well, you at least need to clean that up," JJ says, gesturing to it.
Closing her eyes, Iris goes to shake her head, but when Preston says, "There's some stuff you could use to clean it in the first aid room at the back," Spencer is already guiding her in the direction he stated, and she doesn't have much choice in the matter.
"What happened?" he asks her as a hand on her back guides her between the desks.
"I chased him into the subway tunnel, and he went to shoot me, but I got him first," she answers simply.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. A little shaken, yeah," she admits, running a hand up her arm, "but more-or-less okay."
A pause. He swallows back his anxiety about the answer, or about it being too personal of a question, and asks, "Was it your first time?" But he, of course, can read her behaviour well enough to already know the answer.
"Huh?"
"Killing someone," he elaborates quickly, realising how strange the question had sounded. "Was it your first?"
"Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, it was."
Her tone of voice is uncharacteristically heavy. His heart aches for her. Hearing it from her in person is in a whole differing ball-game of heartache to just knowing it from her behaviour.
They make it into the first aid room, just the two of them now, and Spencer pushes Iris down into the chair as he looks in the cupboards and along shelves until he finds what he needs. The room is small, just four tiled grey walls around a sink and a table and a chair and few chairs; it's very dim, too, lit only by a multicoloured glass lamp hanging above their heads, and it's hard to see the labels for everything on the shelves.
"Here. Wet this cloth and clean the blood off your face," Spencer instructs, pacing a small, blue cloth to Iris from where it hangs on a rack beside a couple of other small towels.
She does so without speaking, using the sink built into the wall behind Spencer's back, and then sits back down again once she's done.
"Don't you have a thing about germs?" Iris asks quietly, suddenly.
He looks down at her with a frown. "You remember me telling you that?"
"Vaguely. Emily reminded me," she says, dabbing at her cut with her fingers, and he smacks her hand away in a very strict-mother-esque movement. He turns back to looking for what he needs as she speaks, finding a kit for stitching up wounds and some tweezers at the back of a shelf. "She thought it was weird that you and I are so close, and that you don't have a problem touching me. Said it was uncharacteristic."
He runs the tweezers under a hot tap, cleaning them, and then wipes them dry before he bends down in front of her, placing the sewing kit on the floor. "This might hurt," he says, raising the tweezers.
She pulls her head back, away from him. "Oh, no, no, no. Unless you're plucking my eyebrows, those tweezers aren't coming any closer, buddy."
He rolls his eyes. "It was a bomb, Iris. It's a small cut, but who knows what you might have in there that could get infected," he reminds.
She narrows her eyes, but slowly, very slowly, moves her face closer to his so he can reach.
He can feel her breath on his face, very distantly and very softly, and it takes a lot for him not to get distracted by it. Gently, his hand raises to her shoulder, and slides around to hold the side of her neck as his thumb prods around her jaw, tilting her face downward so he can look directly at the wound.
"You sure you know what you're doing?" Iris asks, skeptically.
"I have three PhDs, Iris."
"And you're a genius — totally get that. But can't we go to a hospital?"
"There's about to be sixteen suicide bombers across the city. You and your little cut on your eyebrow isn't gonna get stitched up for at least a day. It'll be a waste of time — time we don't have right now."
She swallows. "Okay." A sharp exhale from her nose. "No need to be so brutally honest about it, but okay."
"It'll be fine, trust me."
"I do. I just have a very low capacity for pain, which I don't think you're yet aware of."
With a small smile, he raises the tweezers and, gently, presses them into the gash. She hisses, a hand flying out and grasping at his knee, and he apologies under his breath as he digs them deeper. A second later, they brush something: metal.
He pulls them out, and Iris breaths in relief as she raises her head. Her eyes are watering and her forehead is bleeding again, crimson liquid trickling out with only a little at first, but now more is coming. "You got it?" she asks.
"No," he says. "But there's something in there. Just a couple more seconds, alright?"
She takes a moment, then nods, bowing her head forward and leaning into the hand on the side of her neck again. Her hand grasps the arm that he isn't using, squeezing so tight it hurts, but he doesn't complain vocally. Instead, he merely silently hesitates, and then repeats his process, this time clasping the tweezers around the little bit of metal he found and pulling. She lets out a strangled cry as it comes free, eyes squeezing shut.
Spencer stands, dropping the bloody bit of shrapnel, about the size of the nail on his thumb, into the sink.
"What was it?" Iris asks.
"Not sure."
She stands and comes to his side, peering down into the sink. "Jesus, that's pretty big."
Spencer freezes, and then breaks into a laugh. It feels wrong to do such a thing, especially with what's going in outside of that little, dimly lit room, but he just can't help himself.
Iris rolls her eyes, giggling too, as she elbows him in the side. "Oh, shut up. Don't be so dirty."
His laughter dies down, but the smile is still clear in his voice when he lets the tweezers drop into the sink too and gestures for her to sit down again as he says, "Come on. Let me stitch it up."
She flops into the chair again, head leaning forward as he crouches again in front of her. He's done this before, for both himself and Morgan one time, so he knows what he's doing when he opens up the kit and prepares the needle and thin, white thread.
"You're wearing odd socks," Iris notes suddenly.
He looks down at the green sock on his left foot and the red on his right, poking out from beneath his trousers before they disappear into his shoes. "Oh, yeah. I always do."
Iris smiles. "Why?"
"My grandma told me it brings good luck," Spencer says, and Iris' smile widens.
Her eyes shine with warmth, and he can tell she adores that little bit of information about him. "You don't strike me as the superstitious type, Dr Reid."
He grins at the old nickname. Iris winks playfully, and he thinks, for the second time in her company, that he could live like this — in this feeling, with her — forever. Everything outside of this room, of their little bubble, feels far away. His job, and the responsibilities that come with it, are far from his mind.
"Mm," he hums out eventually. "I make the odd exception."
Swallowing, Spencer begins his work on stitching up her cut. She winces as he does so, and clings at the edge of his open jacket as a way to cope with the pain, but makes no vocal complaint, allowing him to work in relative silence for a few minutes until he finishes and ties the thread off.
"Are we done?" Iris asks.
"We're done," he says, pushing against his thighs and standing upright. "Unlucky they messed up your face. It's pretty much your only good asset."
She stands, staring at him blankly rather than breaking out in one of her familiar smiles, the sort that could make flowers grow, or cracking a joke in return. Two, three, four seconds pass of dead silence.
"You creep me out every time you crack a joke," she says eventually, voice monotone. "Seriously. It's just strange."
He snorts, turning away with a roll of his eyes, and only then does she smile. "Oh, shut up."
She helps him clear up, placing everything back where it had been, and then they head back across the office to where all the others sit in the room assigned for them, gathered around the table. They all look up when the two of them enter, but not before Emily and JJ both spot Spencer and Iris together and share an amused, knowing look.
"You okay, Remy?" Emily asks when they enter, starting to stand. Spencer wonders if he's the only one who's noticed how quickly Emily's taken Iris under her wing.
Iris nods. "I'm fine. What's happened since the first blast?"
"Morgan and Hotch are at St Berkley's hospital with Kate," Rossi answers.
"Finally. Morgan and I couldn't get any ambulances down there at first. How are they?" she asks, pulling out a seat beside Preston and collapsing eagerly into it. Spencer paces behind her, heading for the map against the far wall.
"Hotch is in ER, Kate's in surgery," JJ answers.
"The media's reporting this as a failed attack on the Federal Plaza," Emily states. "Even though it very clearly isn't."
"What are we missing, then? What is this? Because this can't be it — this can't be the end of their plan," Rossi states.
"How'd you know that?" Preston questions.
"Because . . . " Rossi goes to answer, but trails off, unable to think of anything he could say to explain his thoughts. But then his eyes drift over the photo of the Twin Towers before 9/11, which is positioned on the far wall. "Because that," he says, "was memorable. This isn't." Standing from his chair, he looks back at the others, eyes darting between each member of the team. "Think about it. Everything they've done is a diversion. Hell, even this was a diversion for the second wave of responders. Everything they've done, is just a diversion. Ramping up to someone bigger — better."
"So what the hell is it?" Iris thinks out loud.
JJ's phone goes off and she pulls it from her pocket, reading the text illuminating her screen. "It's Morgan. He wants us at the hospital now."
☆ ★ ☆
iris
"Are you okay?" Emily is the first to ask when Hotch emerges from his hospital room, buttoning the sleeves of his fresh, clean suit.
"Yeah," he says. "I just wanna understand why I'm still alive." His eyes find Iris', and she forces a smile as he gives her a nod, but that's the end of the length of his compassion toward her.
"We think the idea was to maim, not to kill," Spencer answers.
"Did you identify Sam, the bomber?" Hotch asks.
"Iris shot him, and he died. Garcia put him into every known database," Spencer explains. "Nothing."
"We know how terror cells evolve," Rossi adds in, his voice simultaneously grave, but thoughtful. "They learn with every attack. These have stayed off radar."
"Then what's the point in targeting a lone SUV with three federal agents?" Iris questions. She genuinely doesn't see the correlation; why try to stay off the radar, and then attack three Federal agents in an act that will get you on every news channel in the state?
"Something bigger," says Rossi.
"The bomb that hit you was likely made of a number of oxidising agents, cramped into a metal box that was no larger than a cellphone," Spencer explains, using his usual hand gestures as he speaks. She's noticed that habit over time: whenever he speaks, he always moves his hands. "Some was in Iris' forehead, and we've sent it off to be identified. It could be part of the car, though."
"Imagine the damage with a bigger bomb," Morgan says gravely.
"Sam was young," Iris recalls, looking around at the others. "Twenty, twenty-two at the most. He couldn't have been the demolitions expert. Someone else must be."
"Stop the bomber," Emily breathes, "stop the bomb."
"Then we need to know how they'd deploy something that big," Morgan says.
The group fall silent, thinking and listening to the rowdy hospital atmosphere wrecking havoc around them. They stand out in the main corridor by the reception, so Iris can smell a mixture of food from the canteen down the hall, and bleach from keeping everything clean, and human sweat from those in the waiting area. It's a disgusting smell, a mixture of scents not meant to mix, and she's reminded of how much she hates hospitals.
"Did you ever find Sam's cellphone?" Hotch asks.
Iris looks up, nodding. "Yeah."
"Did he call the police?"
"No," she answers. After she'd killed him, she'd grabbed his cell and his wallet, and had looked through them on her way back to the Federal Building. Neither had any identification, but on the phone she had noticed something peculiar . . . "But he dialled one number six times, every few minutes."
"I saw that when you handed the cell to me," Emily speaks up. "Garcia tracked the number, but it was a disposable cell and went dead minutes after Sam died. Whoever had it destroyed it."
"Well, if he didn't have a secondary device to detonate, there's only one reason he stayed with us," Hotch says, looking between them all. "To make sure the ambulance got there."
Morgan's eyes widen in realisation. "With the city on lockdown, only an ambulance will get through all that traffic."
"Even into a hospital guarded by the Secret Service," Hotch says.
"Secret Service?" Iris repeats, eyes widening.
"They were here when Morgan and I drove in," Hotch says. "We were at the crime scene, stuck with Kate, and a single ambulance came and rescued us. I was up front — that was the only reason we got in. They wouldn't have let us in if we weren't FBI."
"Why would they be here?" Spencer asks.
"Why else would they be? They're guarding something," Iris retorts. Spencer might be a genius, but he sure lacked in some common sense.
Hotch looks at Rossi. "You said they wanted something bigger, didn't you? This hospital is their target. Let's go."
They race up the hall as a group and spin the corner, arriving at the desk labelled by the white sign hanging above as RECEPTION. Like Hotch said, men in black suits stand beside the nurse working behind the desk, very obviously from the Secret Service.
"Hey!" Morgan shouts, the first to reach them, closely followed by Iris and then the others. "Who you got in here?"
"What?" cries the man closest to them, probably the leader, with closely cropped dark hair and blue eyes. "That's classified information."
"The ambulance I drove in here — where is it now?" Hotch demands.
"The basement — why? "
"There's a bomb in it," Morgan states simply. No beating around the bush with Derek, huh? Iris thinks.
"It's rigged to assassinate whoever it is you're protecting," Emily continues. "You need to get them and everyone else out of here right now." Her eyes dart down to the nurse working at the desk, who quickly gets up and scurries off.
The leader turns, yelling at his men to go, so they do just that, disappearing behind their leader to head down the nearest corridor in a blur of black movement and shouting.
Iris watches them go, but her attention is quickly pulled away by Morgan, who tugs her wrist and brings her away from the group as his other hand works his gun out of his back pocket. "I'm going down to the basement. Come on."
Reluctant to go off with Morgan without direct orders from her superiors, Iris looks back at Hotch, muttering, "But — "
"No," Morgan interrupts, tugging her wrist again, and she twists back to face him. His eyes are dark and intense, staring into hers and piercing like needles. "This is the point where Hotch beats around the bush and spends too much time talking to actually do anything — "
"Look, Morgan, I get that you're mad at him for taking Kate's side over yours, but — "
"It's not about that!" His anger bleeds out of him suddenly, and he releases Iris' wrist, stepping back as he sighs and shakes his head. "Look, I'm going down there with or without you." And he turns and jogs off, looking back only once with eyes stony and set with determination, grey like steel.
Iris looks back at her team. None of them, not even Spencer, have noticed her and Morgan stepping away, and they're all discussing something in hurried, whispered tones. And she looks down the corridor at the shrinking figure of Morgan, the muscles in his broad back rippling beneath his shirt as he runs.
And she takes off after him.
Hadn't she thought, only a day earlier, that she had a hell of a lot of things to learn from Derek Morgan? And hadn't she told herself, less than an hour ago, that she would never abandon her friends? So who can blame her for making the — frankly stupid but admirably loyal — decision to follow him down to the basement?
"Derek!" she yells as she catches up, and he looks back, slowing. She falls into step with him, and they share a smile.
Together, side by side, they clatter down the flights of stairs as fast as their feet can carry them until Iris is panting so hard she can barely breathe and they've reached the lowest section of the hospital, where the ambulances pull up. It's a wide, freezing cold room, stretched out for a hundred yards or so IN either direction.
The ambulance closest to them still has its lights on.
"I'm gonna call Garcia," Morgan whispers from beside her as they cross the stone room toward it. "If she can jam the cellphone frequencies in the area, he can't trigger the bomb."
Iris nods and glances to her left as he does so; they share a look, and something silent but strong passes between them in their moment of terror and determination. Ignoring the faint ringing of his phone, followed by his pants through the device to Garcia, Iris reaches the ambulance and peers through its back windows.
Built into one of the benches, what Iris guess is the bomb, is perfectly visible. It's a mess of wires and metal, stretched in a box about five feet long and two feet wide, and occasional red lights flash along its service. Other then that, the ambulance is empty.
"Derek," she hisses, her hand feeling for the lock. Her heart races, and she thinks with horror of what Spencer had said, about the bomb that blew up a whole SUV only being the size of a mobile phone. "This is it. It's in here."
Together, they open the door, and Iris pulls herself up into the back of the vehicle.
"Oh my god!" Morgan breathes, still on the phone to Garcia, though he hardly cares about that now. He's very clearly thinking about the same thing she is: what can a bomb this big do? "Garcia, how long can you keep the cell phones jammed?"
He must have put the phone on speaker, because Iris can hear Garcia's voice when her answer comes. "A few minutes — why?"
"We need to get this ambulance out of here," Morgan decides, looking up at Iris. "You with me?"
"I — I — what?! You're insane, Morgan."
"Yeah, but are you with me?"
Iris doesn't hesitate, brushing past him to hop out the vehicle. "I'll drive," she instructs, moving around the back of the vehicle to the door beside the wheel. "I can jam cars and get it going without keys."
She slides into the driver's seat, which is white and made of cool leather, the luxury a stark contrast to the fear and horror ravaging her gut. There's crashing as Morgan shuts the doors, and a moment later he's frowning at her in confusion as he slides into the seat beside her. "What're you saying — you steal cars?"
She shrugs, looking forward and struggling to start the car. It's difficult when her hands are shaking so violently. "I had a weird childhood," she offers as an explanation, "and my dad was an engineer."
She fiddles for a few more seconds, and then the car lurches as it starts up with a rev from the engine. The two agents share a look of victory, before she starts the car and they lurch forward again. Her foot finds the gas pedal and she floors it, causing the car's engine to squeal and shriek as they speed out of the parking space and take off for the exit.
Iris whoops, even though she's so terrified she feels like she's about to straight up piss her pants.
"Garcia, I need you to find somewhere we can go — where the bomb can go off, and it won't hurt anyone?" Morgan rushes into the phone. It's off speaker, so Iris only hears Morgan shout the directions a second later. "Left here! Go, go, go!" She spins the wheel dangerously fast, feeling guilty for breaking the law despite the necessity of it in this situation, and cuts the curb as she turns. "Jesus Christ, Remy — you almost hit the fire-hydrant!"
"Well, seeing as I'm in a bit of a rush, Morgan!" she snaps back sarcastically. Then, more to herself, she mutters, "Plus, this ambulance is shit at drifting."
"This isn't Grand Theft Auto!" Morgan yells, having heard her, his eyes wide with fear and his voice trembling.
She can't believe he's doing this now — bickering with her like they're siblings — but she still isn't mature enough to not spit back, "Well, it fucking feels like it!"
"Right here!" Morgan orders, and she follows his directions.
"You two — you don't have much time," Garcia's voice, jagged and torn with sobs, comes through, and Iris' eyes water at the sound of her back on speaker. "Pl-please be smart about this." There's a pause. "Signals coming back online. One minute until full coverage."
Iris' heart races so fast she thinks she's going to throw up. "Are we close? Garcia — "
"Str — straight ahead! The field up ahead — do you see it?"
Iris squints, struggling to see in the darkness, but then she sees it: the gate leading to a stretch of open grass. Morgan points with a yell, and she pushes harder at the gas pedal, trying to speed up. It's futile — she hit top speed a long time ago.
"Iris, drive to the opening and then get the hell out. Both of you! Get the hell out!"
The vehicle lurches as they bump up a level, from concrete to grass, and at the speed they're going it's like her whole body is jolted apart and then crashed back together.
"Signals back in ten!" Garcia cries.
On top of the gear stick, Morgan's hand flings down, grasping around Iris' with a fumbling, sweaty, clinging grip. She looks across at him, mouth open and eyes wide, and he gives her a secure nod.
"Five seconds!" shrieks Garcia. "Derek!"
"Go!"
Abandoning the wheel, she kicks open her door and leaps out. She's mid-air when, so loud it makes her ears ring, there's a colossal BOOM! behind her, and a jet of heat and energy pummels into her back, flinging her ten extra feet.
A split second later, she hits the earth with a jolt that yanks her bones apart and then makes them scrape back together. She feels cold, damp grass beneath her hands and face as she rolls once, twice, three times before she comes to a stop. Grass, she thinks in a moment of dazed glee, and her eyes see the moon through blurred vision, hanging in a full white circle directly above her.
Her ears ring as she tilts her head, seeing flames and a curling, snaking mushroom cloud rising in a flurry of brown ash toward the black sky. She hardly hears the roaring flames over the ringing in her ears.
Morgan appears above her, hands grasping at her hips and then her shoulders, shaking her. She can't hear him, but her vision begins to focus so that, eventually, she can see the cuts and blotches of ash that decorate his face, and that his lips are curving around her name.
"Remy! Remy!" she hears very faintly, sound coming back to her, the ringing fading. And, oh God, her leg — there's something wrong with her leg! "Hey, come on, Iris! Look at me! Remington, come on."
She blinks, very slowly, and her head spins the moment she shuts her eyes. The same feeling you get when you stand up too fast.
"No, no, Remington! Look at me, Remy — open your eyes! Show me your eyes," Morgan begs, and she does so.
"I'm not dying, idiot," she slurs. Morgan smiles sadly, eyes watering, but it's so radiant it puts the sun to shame. "My head hurts. And my ears — my ears are, you know . . . What's it called? . . . " She spins her finger around close to her ear, wincing as she tries to think. "Ringing. My ears are ringing really badly."
"It's okay," Morgan breathes. "That's okay. There's people on their way and we can get you sorted out. We're gonna be fine."
"My leg," she breathes, dazed and in pain that's growing exponentially worse. Flames lick up from her left knee, burning her skin and scorching down to the bone. She grimaces, trying to raise her head, trying to look down. Morgan flinches. "Wh — what's wrong? What's wrong with my leg?"
"I — Iris, don't," Morgan whimpers.
Too late. Her eyes are already latched onto the bleeding mess where her left shin used to be.
☆ ★ ☆