Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cat isn’t a fan of therapy.

Unfortunately for her, attending weekly sessions is a part of Cooper’s deal. She works as a part of his team helping them take down human traffickers and assassins, she lives somewhere she can easily be checked in on, she keeps her phone on her and answers every text, call, or other notification, and she deals with her shit. In exchange she stays out of prison, and if she is good enough for long enough then maybe someday she can negotiate the leash she is on.

The first thing she plans on negotiating is therapy.

Dr. Hunter is patient with her, Cat will credit the woman that. For the most part, Cat has been sidestepping her questions ever since their first meeting. She rehashed plenty of her old wounds during her prison meetings with Spencer, and she has had no desire to open them up again to a stranger.

“You’re quiet today.” Hunter observes sixteen minutes into their session.

Cat cuts her eyes away from the stain on the carpet she has been staring at, and up to the woman.

“I’m usually quiet.” She reminds Hunter, who smirks in that little, half-amused way, the one which screams to Cat that she can very clearly see how little effort she is actually putting into hiding her turmoil today.

How she wants to talk today.

She just has no fucking idea what to say.

“I did hear about your eventful weekend.” Hunter broaches, and Cat scoffs.

It’s part of the deal. She doesn’t ever have to talk about the team’s cases or anything else which happens on the clock, but Cooper does send Hunter all of their debriefing reports in the name of transparency.

Personally, Cat thinks it’s a thinly veiled excuse for making it that much harder for her to have any secrets.

Whatever the official reason, she is usually able to ignore that particular stipulation of her contract. Hunter almost never brings up anything which is detailed in the reports, and on the rare occasions when Cat decides to share just for the sake of filling the silence, she reacts to things as though they are new information.

“I hear it was quite a… quite a personal, case.”

Cat huffs.

“It was.” She admits, nothing more, nothing less.

Even if “personal” is the understatement of the century.

Truth be told, she’s known since the day she signed on to Cooper’s “reformation” deal that, sooner or later, she would come across her own past. She assumed it would be in hunting down an old contact of hers, or an old client. The worst-case scenario she envisioned was hunting down someone she worked with more than once, and then having to process that, and potentially have to face a test of how far beyond her old ways she really has come.

She never predicted they would have to rescue the only decent foster parent she ever had, and from the hands of Lindsey Vaughn.

She should have.

She should have known better than to tell Juliette all the things she and Spencer talked about. She should have realized it was dangerous to mock his persistence to her cellmate. At the time, she was confident it was going to play to her own benefit. She knew Juliette would be getting out of prison sooner rather than later, and when she did, Cat’s intentions were to send her on her way with some sort of instructions to show Spencer Reid just what he was dealing with in her; how wrong he was about her.

She never thought things would turn out so different.

“Have you spoken to Spencer at all?” Hunter asks, pulling her from her reverie. “Since the case?”

Cat frowns. Images flash through her mind of her last few days, and Spencer. She plays back kissing him outside of the hospital, and then again in his kitchen. She’d left his apartment after that, and while she did see him last night they didn’t talk about much of what happened.

Not after Saturday, and not with the promise of today looming over them. It was an unspoken agreement; they wanted one night to just talk about normal things.

Well… As normal as the two of them can manage anyway. Things like her team, and his team, and the family of geese he and Addie saw occupying a parking space when the two of them went out shopping for some clothes and toiletries for her.

“He’s meeting with the social worker today.” She sighs, deciding this is probably the easiest way to begin discussing the situation. “In an hour.”

Hunter nods, and makes a note in her booklet.

“To discuss Addison?”

Cat nods, her eyes downcast. She didn’t ask Spencer what exactly the meeting is going to entail; she is already well aware. It’s supposed to be the end of his emergency custody of the poor little girl who got mixed up in all this. It’s supposed to be her social worker from New Jersey coming simply to take her back.

But… Cat knows Spencer.

“He’s going to fight to keep her.” She says aloud, and Hunter raises her eyebrow.

“He told you that?”

Cat shakes her head, and it’s quiet, until Hunter sighs.

“Then how can you be sure?”

Cat frowns, and Hunter purses her lips, waiting for an argument Cat has no intentions of wasting her breath on.

“Ask him.” Hunter eventually advises, “You might plan for everything, Cat, but I think even you would be surprised to learn just how capable your mind is at playing tricks on you.”

It’s been a long day.

Ever since he was released from prison, Spencer has been acutely aware of the silence of his apartment. That silence didn’t exactly go away having Addie here the past two days – he never was able to fully draw her out of her shell – but it seemed to be less. Addie may not have spoken much, and she watched less TV than he would have expected a ten-year-old in a strange place to, but she seemed to bring a liveliness to his apartment which Spencer feels has been missing since his mom moved into the facility.

Existing by himself in the quiet, Spencer stirs around his leftover Lo Mein from last night. Sitting alone at the breakfast bar of his kitchen, he begins to wonder for the first time in a long time about his future and if maybe he lied down and accepted his fate too early.

If maybe he still has a chance.

A knock on his door pulls him from his trance, which is likely for the best.

He quashes down the fantasy which jumps into his mind as he crosses the apartment.

The rest of the team left on a case this morning. So, his imagination conjures a daydream for him where he opens the door and finds Robin – the social worker from New Jersey - and Addie standing on the other side. Addie would now have her backpack of belongings from Jim Murphy’s house, and Robin would have exhausted bags under her eyes, and tell him the group home changed their minds at the last minute. They didn’t have room, or they weren’t as well equipped for trauma as they had led her to believe. It isn’t going to work, and Addie’s school can be worked out, so the best thing for her would be to come back to him if he is still willing to take her.

He would take her in a heartbeat.

But when he opens the front door he knows that isn’t the scene he will be greeted by. He’s grateful, then, that it’s Cat standing there instead.

For five seconds, the two of them simply look at each other. They haven’t exactly talked about whatever it is they are now. Only that it’s something.

He sighs.

“They took Addie back to New Jersey.”

Cat’s shoulders deflate in time with his confession, in time with his own shoulders as well.

He ushers her inside, and he doesn’t so much direct her to the leftover Chinese food as she spots it on the counter and when he nods to the fridge she goes and finds her own.

Literally her own; she ate with him and Addie last night and then left the remaining half of her General Tso’s chicken in his fridge because it was somehow unspoken that - despite them not having seen one another in months – she would be back for it before it went bad.

After she’s microwaved her leftovers the two of them move from the kitchen to his couch. They settle close to one another, though still with half a cushion between them. Cat it’s sideways with her knees curled up and her bowl hugged in her lap.

“It wasn’t a long meeting.” He begins explaining this morning, digging around at his Lo Mein. “I don’t know why I expected it would be.”

“How long was it?”

He shrugs, “Half an hour?”

She raises her brows, her lips pausing around a piece of chicken, and he twirls his fork around his noodles again; losing most of them in the process.

“The social worker came, and she told Addie to pack anything she had while she sat down with me.”
“She didn’t even give you a chance?”

Spencer shakes his head, “Why would she?”

It’s a question he’s asked himself all weekend in preparation for the visit, and beforehand, he supposes he had convinced himself there was an answer. He would be given a chance because Addie doesn’t have anyone else. Reunification with her biological family isn’t the goal of her care and it hasn’t been in a long time, if it everwas. He would be given a chance because he is willing to say he wants one, for her, and he will do whatever he has to to prove that he is worthy of it.

“She has school in New Jersey.” He says as if he is telling Cat this fact, when really, he is reminding himself. “She has friends.”

“She’s ten.” Cat deadpans, “She can use a phone.”

At that, Spencer glances up at her, ready to tell her that might not be as simple nowadays as it was when they were young.

“Course.” She self-corrects with a smirk. “Your landline is a lost art.”

He rolls his eyes, and for another minute the two of them are quiet, simply eating their dinners.

“She could make new friends.” Cat suggests, and Spencer frowns, and then Cat gives a sigh. “Or, you could go to her.”

He frowns deeper.

He’d thought of that, if he’s being honest. On and off his mind has been entertaining the possibility. He could put in for a transfer to a field office in New Jersey, and rent a little house with two bedrooms and a yard. Somewhere close enough to Addie’s school district that even if she did have to transfer, it would still be easier to keep in touch with her friends.

He thinks this through again, though with Cat watching him it’s easier to push the images away.

“It wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”
He sighs, “My mom is here.” He says, and with a final conviction he leans forward and sets his bowl onto the coffee table.

He stares at it. His eyes are locked light brown noodles which Addie had very plainly informed him looked too much like worms for her to have any interest in eating them.

“I can’t move my mom again.” He says, “And besides… I did…. ask, but the social worker told me that without a proper support system my chances of being approved even as a foster parent are slim; and adoption would be even harder.”

Internally, Cat is cataloging this moment.

Not that she came here hoping to hear that Addie is gone and Spencer put zero effort into fighting to keep her; of course she didn’t. But, she did come here with the possibility in her head, and she will be making very certain to share all of this information with her therapist the next time the woman suggests she isn’t as good at reading people as she thinks she is.

“So your chances are better here.” She observes for now, putting what’s left of her chicken on the coffee table alongside his bowl.

He doesn’t look at her. He gives this very minute nod, but not much else. She frowns, and nudges his knee with her foot until he looks up.

“If Addie isn’t an option, what do you want to do?”

He sighs, leaning back with his arms crossed over himself.

“I don’t know.”

Cat frowns, “Spencie.”

He blinks, and scrunches his nose. Surprise and annoyance wash over his face ever so briefly before he adjusts his position so that he is facing her properly.

He doesn’t answer her right away. Half-curled into himself on the couch, he props his chin against his hand and stares down at his lap. Cat wants nothing more than to reach out, to run her hand along his shoulder and pull him into her. It isn’t a new feeling for her, exactly, but for the first time in her life she doesn’t think such an action would be rejected, or have him wondering what it is she is trying to get out of him. He would just… accept it.

She’s not sure what she’s supposed to do after that, if she could be any good at that part. So, instead, she ignores the urge and waits him out.

“What I want to do and what I can do are too different things.”

She frowns, though she’d expected an answer along those lines.

It occurs to her that any normal “girlfriend” would probably encourage him to take the leap. A normal girlfriend would promise she will help him in any way that she can. A normal girlfriend would be on the same page as him and tell him that if staying in D.C. is really what’s best, then they will take the leap here together.

Cat can’t bring herself to form any words like that.

She sighs, running a hand through her hair before she winds up using it to hold her own head up, her elbow balanced against the couch.

“Don’t sell yourself short.” She settles for telling him. “If you’re ready for this, at least put in the paperwork.”

He looks at her, a silent question in his eyes, and she sighs again.

“I have a lot of shit to work through.” She reminds him, “Legally and personally.”

He chuckles, for a fraction of a second, and it’s enough that she is able to settle her mind just long enough to see a path forward where – maybe – everything works out.

“But I don’t live here.” She says, “And I’m sure you wouldn’t be the first foster parent in history to date somebody. Maybe the first to date a psychopath.”

He chuckles, and it’s enough to make her smile softly, just enough

“So fill out the paperwork.” She instructs again, “If someone needs something from me, call me, and we can go from there. Sound good?”

It sounds good to her, which is a surprise even to herself. Still, she is well aware of this nagging feeling in her chest telling her it won’t be so simple, and they will both be better off if she just cuts and runs now.

Thankfully, Spencer smiles, and she is able to shove that feeling into a dark crevice where hopefully she will never see it again.

She would much rather focus on the warm feeling his smile brings her.

“Yeah.” He agrees, “That sounds good.”

Chapter Text

First thing Tuesday morning Cat wakes up to a text saying her team has a case, which, aside from what that means for other people, she will view as a Godsent.

She needs to take her mind off the last few days.

They’re sent to a town Massachusetts to investigate a series of runaway teenagers who have been found dead along various riverbanks. Three of them appeared to have died from drug overdoses, one from drowning, and one shot in the back of the head. Apparently there are more missing kids than there are bodies, and local police are starting to worry the number will even out sooner rather than later.

“There are five dead kids here and at least seven more still missing.” Gina points out while they’re sitting on the jet and looking over the files. “Why are we just now being called in?”

“The short answer is there’s a trafficking ring in the area.” Cooper answers her with a sigh. “State police have been trying to close in on some of the big players, and they assumed they were responsible for the kids going missing.”

“That’s their excuse?” Prophet scoffs, “They thought the kids had been abducted and sold, so therefore they’re accounted for?”

“I know.” Cooper says, glowering at the notion. “But they thought they knew who they were dealing with.”

“And the victim who was shot changed their minds?” Cat asks, and of course the gazes of her team linger on her just a fraction of a second longer than they ever do each other.

Eventually, Cooper gives a sullen nod as he swipes through his tablet to the final set of files.

“Our latest victim is Holly Sturgis. Fifteen. She was found on the bank of the Connecticut River three days after she was reported missing. Unlike the others she had a bullet hole in the back of her head.”

Initially, that is a solid argument that Holly isn’t one of their victims at all. But, her file details that she disappeared from the same area, and in very much the same way their previous victims did; after she ran away from a home with a half dozen calls to CPS in its history.

Once they land they are set up in an unused office in a local police station. It’s cramped, which Cat is never a fan of, and she is finding that especially true on this case. There is a saying around The B.A.U. – all of its factions – that she’s learned in the time she has been here; the hardest cases are the ones where kids are involved.

She has never not agreed with this notion, but as this case drags on, she is starting to think she hasn’t felt how true it is until now.

The profile they draw up concludes that their three drug victims were – unfortunately – just that, but their drowning victim just had a routine too similar to Holly’s. The two of them even went to the same high school, and the kids they interview paint the picture that they hung out with a lot of the same people. Despite the difference in M.O., it’s likely the two of them were killed by the same person. At the very least – if trafficking is involved - they might have been killed by two different unsubs working for the same kingpin. If that’s the case, then it’s more likely that the seven other missing kids they’ve been given the files of are going to turn up in the Connecticut River in some way, shape, or form; if they turn up at all.

With each file she reads, Cat feels this numbness creeping along inside of her. She reads file after file. Dead kid, after missing kid, after missing and then dead kid, all of whom were running from something that they absolutely should have been running from.

She can’t say she doesn’t see the similarities. Afterall, she ran away once. She killed her foster father, and then she ran off into the night, and she hid out and got fake IDs, and she did things to survive that eventually stopped haunting her at night. A year ago she thinks she would have been able to look at these files and, sure, she would have been pissed that someone is out here killing kids for no good reason. But, that’s the way of the world, and these kids should have been smarter than to run to places they weren’t strong enough to survive.

They should have made themselves strong enough to survive. That is the only thing you can do when you have nowhere else to go.

That thought, at least, actually leads her somewhere. Of all the missing and dead kids here, six of them have done time in Juvie, and the rest of long lists of troubles in school and misdemeanors. Even if they weren’t in direct contact with each other, they had to have been running in similar social circles.

Cat takes that theory to Cooper, and after three long days and one more dead body – Cara Jones, sixteen, shot in the back of the head just like Holly – they nail down the local drug ring the last three victims had contact with and from there, they’re able to find their unsub.

Lucas Holt, age twenty-two, and a low-ranking member of a local gang.

The story they drag out of him is that the murders have nothing to do with his gang. He claims he was friends with the seventeen-year-old drowning victim – Anne - and met her at the riverbank to try out some new mushrooms. The two of them got high, and then they swam out into the river. At some point Anne either got caught in a current or was possibly just so high she forgot she needed to tread water. Either way she drowned, and Lucas is tearfully adamant he doesn’t have much recollection of it, which is why Holly and Cara ended up dead. They were surrogates. The whole thing was one royally fucked up psychotic break in response to the trauma of his friend’s death. The guilt was the driving force; of not only not having been able to save her, but also having been too fucked up to even remember her drowning. Holly and Cara are both girls he would sell to, and so he brought them to the riverbank after they reached out looking for their usual scores. He swears it was all premeditated that they wouldn’t get out alive. The only problem is once he got them to the riverbank he found he couldn’t bear to look at the water, never mind lure either girl into it and drown her. That’s why they ended up shot instead.

It's all plausible, and Cat isn’t skeptical about whether or not Lucas is really their unsub, nor his story about Anne having been his friend or even the fact that he snapped after her drowning and set his sights on Holly and Cara as a way of trying to recreate the circumstances of his newfound regrets. That said, it all seems a little too… easy.

And there are still six kids missing.

It’s enough for the team, though, as well as the local police. As they leave Cooper makes sure to hand the Captain of their organized crime unit his card, and that is going to have to be enough.

Ordinarily, Cat doesn’t have the easiest time with “enough”. She’s run into a lot of it since she’s been with this team, but even still, most days it is a very hard notion for her to accept. She often spends the flight back to D.C. twirling a pen around her fingers with a scowl on her face, and the stupid journal Hunter has tried getting her to keep discarded next to her so that she can at least make the case that she is making an effort.

Not tonight.

Tonight she has been staring out the window since takeoff, the black sky outside of the jet seeming to match the numbness inside of her. Her mind is restless, but she swears she doesn’t move one muscle. She just… Thinks.

Eventually, Gina slides into the seat across from her.

Cat blinks herself from her reverie. She cracks her neck and rolls her shoulders, and Gina watches her patiently all the while.

Just as she told Spencer, she never has been good at getting along with other girls. She can fake it for months, probably years if she had to. But all of that is her act. When it comes to the actual vulnerability that female friendships require, she would rather endure actual torture.

Fortunately for her, Gina is of a similar opinion, and that makes this doable.

“Spencer wants a kid.”

Gina’s jaw drops, but to her credit she picks it back up before anyone notices.

“Shit.” She gasps, “Talk about fast. You’ve been back with the guy, what? Three days? Four days?”

Despite herself, Cat manages to chuckle as she shakes her head. “Not like that.” She explains, though she’s certain Gina does, in fact, realize that already. “He wants to adopt a kid.”

A look of realization dawns over Gina’s face, “He wants Addie.”

“He made his case for her.” She confirms, “Social workers told him no. Personally I think he’ll push it one more time, but when that doesn’t work out…” She trails off, and pulls a hair tie from her wrist and begins to twist it between her fingers.

Gina seems to get her meaning; that just because he is turned down as Addie’s potential parent, it doesn’t mean he is going to stop going down the road of adoption.

“Where do you fit into something like that?”

Her hair tie makes a snapping sound as she releases the tension one finger his keeping on it, so that now it is strung along the fingers of only her left hand.

“I told him to call me when we have to figure that out.”

“And… What then?”

It’s like she knows how dangerously far she’s pushing, and the fact that she is choosing to do it… anyone else Cat would shut down, but Gina… if their roles were reversed, Gina would shut her down too.

Using her right thumb, Cat pulls her hair tie taunt again. She directs her attention back to the deep black of the night sky outside the window, her eyes searching for stars she won’t find.

“I don’t want to lose him.” Her words crack, and she clears her throat. She can still feel Gina’s sad, sympathetic eyes on her. So, she keeps watching the night sky.

She wishes more than anything that when the time comes – when a placement for him becomes more than just an idea – that she could provide any paperwork she is asked for and she could gather as many testimonies as she can find that she is no longer the person she used to be. She wishes she were meant to be a mother. She that she could think of the potential of a family and not immediately want to run in the opposite direction.

But she thinks of Jim Murphy, and how she hasn’t called him yet, because never mind a mother, she has no fucking idea how to be a daughter.

As the weeks go on and he looks into the idea of fostering, Spencer does think that maybe there is a reason he hasn’t done this before.

It isn’t that it looks easy on paper – because it doesn’t – but at least the papers don’t look him up and down and try and convince him he is wasting his time.

Every form he fills out has a check-box for applicants as a single parent. He finds books targeted specifically at those taking on the foster system alone, and even some articles dedicated to navigating maintaining ones other relationships while also committing to adopting a child alone. Everything piece of research he finds boasts that while single-parenting is a stressful undertaking, it is most certainly a valid decision and accepted.

That has not been Spencer’s lived experience so far.

He decides to sign up for an upcoming session of foster parent training classes. The advertisement says it’s open to anyone interested, but when he goes to register the social worker in charge sends him a rather passive aggressive email in return forewarning him that he might find himself struggling to keep up in the program without the “proper support system.”

“Have you tried a different agency?” J.J. asks, plopping down next to Henry on the loveseat after putting Michael to bed.

Spencer frowns from where he’s lain out on her couch in defeat.

“I don’t think that’s going to matter.” He says, and he pushes himself up. “Addie’s social worker told me the same thing.”

“Because you would be moving four and a half hours away from the rest of your family.” J.J. reminds him. “Here, you still have people.”

Spencer raises an eyebrow at her.

People, but not her.

She was the one who invited him over for dinner tonight. She swears she plans on telling the rest of the team soon, but she and Will felt he should know first that she was offered the position of heading up the F.B.I. field office in New Orleans. There are still details to work out, she hasn’t officially accepted the job yet but… well, it’s serious enough they felt he should know.

He appreciates that, even if he doesn’t agree it was necessary.

“It’s not like I expected this to be easy.” He says, “But it seems like every time I even I try to start the process I’m being told it’s impossible.”

“Well,” J.J. hums, “Last time I checked, you are an expert on accomplishing the impossible.”

Spencer tries to smile, but it’s lost under how utterly dejected he’s been feeling with all this.

Then, Henry looks up from his phone.

“What about your girlfriend?” He asks, innocently enough, and more than unexpected.

J.J.’s whole complexion turns beat red at the question proposed by her twelve-year-old, though for Spencer it encourages the smile he was going for and he even manages a chuckle.

Henry knows next to nothing about Cat. He only learned of her existence tonight, and after that J.J. was quick to steer the conversation onto her and Will’s planned topic for the evening.

“She’ll help me where she can.” He answers Henry’s question, “But we just started dating. It’s a little soon to ask her if she would adopt a child with me.”

At that, Henry scrunches up his brow and discards his phone completely.

“But she’d have to be the mom eventually, right?”

“Henry.” J.J. scolds him through a sigh. “Go upstairs and get ready for bed.”

“But-”

“Please Henry.”

Henry scowls, but he slinks off the loveseat and up the stairs.

Spencer chuckles again as he watches him go, ruffling his hair on his way out and bidding him goodnight.

There is an urge inside of him to stop Henry. To call him back, even as he disappears up the stairs, and to try and explain to him how delicate some adult relationships can be.

“He is right, you know?” J.J. asks before he can act on his impulses, which is probably for the best.

It’s strange, if he’s being honest with himself, what he and Cat are now. It isn’t something he ever would have predicted, even in the aftermath of her initial game and reminder to him that she was – once upon a time – a far less complicated person.

“If…” J.J. trails off, leaning her elbows on her knees and speaking through her folded hands.

She hasn’t seen Cat since the case with Jim Murphy and Addie, and even that was brief. Spencer knows she really is following his lead on blind faith that he knows what he is doing and he is with her for reasons which are entirely his own.

“If you do stay with Cat.” She continues, the words coming slowly through her teeth. “And things do work out with adoption. Eventually, you will have to ask yourself if she is capable of being a mother.”

“You can’t be a mother, Cat.”

His own words are seared into his memory. A taunt which was never meant for him, and yet, it now looms over his future like a storm cloud.

“I know.” He answers J.J., his voice steady, but a whisper.

She raises her eyebrow, waiting him out to see if he has an answer to that question in this moment.

Much as he wishes he did, he doesn’t.

Chapter Text

Cat furrows her brow and pulls her legs up to sit cross-legged on Spencer’s counter.

“You’re telling me that in fifteen years, you have never once had your team over here?”

He frowns at the bluntness of her question, though the twinkle of amusement in his eye lets her know she hasn’t offended him.

He sets the last of their dishes in his sink and turns on the water. This has become their routine, in recent weeks. Between his team and hers the two of them only get an average of one night per week in which they are both in D.C. and thus able to actually see each other. He’s been to her place – Mick’s place, she isn’t letting herself forget that – once, but his is closer to a train station coming from Quantico. So they come here. They order take-out and they catch one another up on what’s gone on in their lives and with their work during the past week, and then Cat clears her place first and sits on the counter while Spencer starts clearing his place and any other dishes they might have used. He washes the dishes, and they keep talking, and eventually Cat grabs a towel and slides off the counter so that she can put the dishes away.

“They’ve been here.” He defends himself. “J.J. would stop in when my mom was living here, though that was mostly while I was in prison.”

She rolls her eyes, even if there isn’t any snark to his reminder of that time.

“They all came over after Maeve died.” He tells her, “But, that was more to help me clean the place up.”

Cat blinks, avoiding his eyes as she starts drying a glass. They haven’t… She knows who Maeve is, was, obviously, and it makes her gut twist that it is obvious.

“I told her to pretend to be Maeve.”

“Spencer, Spencer. It’s me. It’s Maeve.”

He’s silent as he passes her a plate directly rather than setting it in the drying rack.

“But no.” He answers her original question, “In fifteen years, I’ve never had the whole team over to just hang out.”

Cat moves to put the plate in the cabinet it belongs in, and when she returns to the drying rack she picks up one of the forks. She is trying to come up with a way of telling him that if this really is his first venture with his team coming over here just for fun, then it will be best if she stays away.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to come.” He says, placing the last knife in the rack and turning off the water.

“Do you want me to come?” She asks with a nod, putting the fork away and then grabbing the next one.

He nods, seeming so sure, if not a little stunned she would ask such a question.

“Yes.”

“Spencer.”

“Cat.”

She flits her eyes up from the fork and to him, just in time to see him lick his lips and step half a pace into her personal space.

Slowly, giving her plenty of chance to push him away, he reaches and grabs the fork from her grasp. He puts it away in the drawer where it belongs, but he keeps one hand in hers and thus halts her from reaching for anything else.

A knife in the drying rack, specifically, but that is a detail which doesn’t matter nearly as much as maybe it should.

As much as it could.

“Cat, I want you to come.” He tells her just as he had before they’d started cleaning up. “But I also know that we agreed to go slow.”

“Actually you offered to go slow.” She reminds him as he closes his silverware drawer. “And now you’re asking me to come to game night with your family. Seems like you’re sending mixed signals.”

“You don’t have to come.”

She sighs, she hadn’t meant to actually come off as though she is frustrated with him.

“I know that.”

With a smirk pulling at his lips, Spencer sets his free hand on her waist and moves the other from her hand, up to her face, where he gently brushes a few strands of hair from her eyes.

“In my defense.” He says, his smirk growing. “I offered, and you never did give me an answer.”

She swallows, though she manages a smile herself; her ears hearing the words for the challenge that they are. She has had weeks of them being whatever it is they are. Sort of dating; even if they barely see each other and haven’t talked at all about how they got to this point, or the fact that this is doomed to end in flames. She is damn well aware that Spencer knows what he wants, where he’s going, and how completely unsuited for it she is.

And yet… She desperately wants to try.

Spencer leans in and kisses Cat. He can see a whirlwind of uncertainty shimmering in her eyes before she closes them, leaning up and into his kiss. It’s perhaps the most surprising – and yet entirely unsurprising – thing he has found in getting to know her like this. Just how much self-doubt she really has in her. He never would have guessed it before, back when she was on the other side. There was no room in her life back then for anxieties, or for failure. So, she didn’t allow it. One night, when she was fifteen, she simply grabbed her inner demons by the horns and she hasn’t let go since.

Until now.

She’s trying, and it’s clear she has never before considered what that might look like.

Spencer wishes he knew better how to help her. He wishes he could just take the reins from her and bring her easily back into the world of friends and families. At the very least, he knows she is counting all the miles she still has left to go, to heal, and he wishes more than anything that he could show her how far she has already come.

He doesn’t think he will ever stop doing his best to try.

He lets his other hand fall to her waist. She kisses him deeper, and at some point she hops back up to her previous seat on his countertop. Spencer hums in approval at her actions; stepping now between her legs and reveling in the feeling of her pulling herself closer to him. He moves his hands again; his fingers gentling pushing aside the edges of her open blouse and his thumbs skimming underneath the riding fabric of her camisole.

She grins against his mouth, and giggles; a half-taunt that is just sharp enough to remind him for a split second that there was a time when he would have thought this very moment to be a nightmare.

Now, it’s a dream from which he hopes he never wakes up.

He can’t fathom that he once shook his head at this. He can’t believe there was ever a time in which told her Lindsey to pretending to be her never would have gotten him into any sort of mood. Whether or not he knew he was lying back then, he could never say now. Too much has happened, has changed, is changing.

Cat wraps her legs around his waist, her arms around his shoulders, and finally pulls her lips away from his just when he thinks he is about to run out of air.

“So much for going slow.” She gasps, and he huffs.

“I’ll stop.”

“Hm, I’ll kill you.”

He has no idea whether that is a threat or a joke, but he laughs all the same.

So much for going slow.

That seems to be the entire theme of their relationship thus far.

To be fair, Spencer does have a point; she never did answer him when he offered her that. It was for good reason; she felt like laughing in his face when he was only trying to make her life easier would have been rude.

As terrifying as it is now moving from trying to be a part of her own team to trying to prove her best intentions to Spencer’s team, slow isn’t exactly a pace which Cat enjoys moving at. She would rather face them all head on, and so on Friday night when she is somehow still in town and even out of the office with all of her paperwork done, Cat heads over to Spencer’s apartment and gladly accepts the beer Tara Lewis offers her as though it is the only way the other woman can think of responding to the situation.

At first, it is very, very quiet.

She’s sat over at the edge of the group, cross-legged on the floor and her back against an armchair she won’t venture to make herself comfortable in yet a few feet from the coffee table. Matt Simmons and Tara are also on the floor, just in front of the coffee table, while Luke Alvez and Garcia are sat on opposite ends of Spencer’s couch and yet somehow they manage to sprawl across the whole thing. The four of them keep stealing unsubtle glances at her, and have spoken a total of four sentences of small talk ever since Spencer left the room to check on some pizza bagels he’d put in the oven, as well as to call the other members of the team who haven’t arrived yet.

Finally, Cat sets her beer down with an audible clack on the wood floor.

“Ok.” She says, “I get that I’m the pariah here, but I’ve gotten this far by being an open book. So who wants to play twenty questions?”

Where they were all stealing glances at her before, now they are openly gawking at her. Cat swallows the urge to get up and join Spencer in the kitchen, and instead squares her shoulders and waits them out.

Finally, Alvez sits up straighter so that he can look at her without leaning over the arm of the couch.

“Ok… Um, I’ll go. Do you know if Gina is seeing anyone?”

“Luke!” Garcia practically shrieks, kicking Alvez forcefully enough in the chest that he hunches in on himself.

“Ow! What?” He asks, clutching at where she’d kicked him. “I just got dumped.”

“So you’re planning to rebound with a coworker?” Tara asks him, a teasing smirk on her lips. “I can’t picture that going wrong at all.”

“She isn’t my coworker.”

“Different team.” Simmons starts to chide, “Same department. Waters are murky at best.”

“Hey,” Luke starts to laugh a defense, gesturing now towards Cat. “She is dating Reid; I think it’s allowed.”

Tara and Simmons snort and laugh at him, meanwhile Garcia is still giving Cat this apprehensive glance, and so far that is the only normal thing about this branch of conversation.

“Ok, whatever.” Tara says with a roll of her eyes as she takes a sip of her beer, and then it falls quiet again, and before any form of tension can properly set back in Spencer’s footsteps come echoing from the kitchen.

“So unfortunately Rossi can’t make it tonight.” He announces, “But J.J. just texted to say that she and Emily are on their way over right now.”

He’s smiling as he speaks, and he glances to her as Tara thanks him for hosting.

They shuffle around a bit, in the next few minutes. Spencer directs Tara’s attention to a nearby ottoman if she would prefer to sit on that, while Matt insists that he is perfectly content where he is on the floor for now. Spencer does come over to the chair Cat is sitting against. She shifts to allow him to sit with his legs straddled over her shoulders, and then she decides to hell with it and invites herself up in his lap.

All while they are shuffling about Garcia only gives her one – slightly heavy – glance, and then she starts to confess that she has been offered a job with non-profit in Silicon Valley, and she is seriously considering taking it.

Cat feels Spencer’s arms tighten around her waist when he hears the news. It probably passes off just fine as him still getting comfortable and adjusting to her weight in his lap. But she knows him better than that. She leans back, her eyes firm on Garcia, but her hands coming to rest over his at her front.

She bites her lip, not wanting to push too far, to claim to know too much about him and what he is feeling about Penelope Garcia – a rare solid presence in his life for fifteen years – leaving.

But she knows it is not a small thing.

“That sounds perfect for you.” Luke says with a soft smile and a glimmer in his eyes that makes Cat realize Gina definitely isn’t the only agent at the bureau whom has caught his eye. “You get to do all the good work you do at the B.A.U. but without the gore.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Garcia asks, and Luke snorts.

“No.” He swears, “No, I don’t want anybody going anywhere.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere.” Garcia agrees, her voice wet with unshed tears. “I… This is my home. Not this room,” she specifies, her hand rubbing against the leather of the couch. “But the B.A.U. is and… Come on, we’re family.”

“Yeah, we’re family.” Luke agrees, “And our relationship to each other is not bound by where we show up to go to work.”

The only warning Cat has that Spencer is going to add his two cents into the conversation is the way he shifts behind her, moving so that he can look past her shoulder to Garcia.

“Besides,” He says, “Families change. You know, they grow, they adapt. People come and go, and sometimes they come back again. We’ve adapted before, and we’ll adapt again. Whatever you want to do, we’ll always be here.”

Garcia is incredibly, incredibly grateful for that, and Cat thinks – as she bends down for her beer and then settles back against Spencer’s chest – so is she.

Chapter Text

After the team hangout the other night, after everything, Penelope honestly isn’t sure what to make of Cat Adams anymore.

On the one hand, Cat Adams is Cat Adams. One could argue that she is evil incarnate. However, on the other hand - as terrifying as it is – lately Penelope has been starting to think she can understand why Spencer went to help her in the first place.

Sure, one could argue that she is evil incarnate. But Penelope was working that case with Prophet and Kevin Lynch. She got to watch the two of them display a firm trust in Cat, as well as a distain for needing to dig into her past. Prophet tried to keep Penelope from seeing as many aspects of it as he could; clearly wanting to minimize the number of hackers poking around in his friend’s business and keep it within their own team where possible.

Really, one could argue that Cat Adams is a living glimpse into all the terrible things any one of them could have become.

Penelope knows that isn’t entirely true. Every one of them – Cat Adams included – are all responsible for their own choices, and plenty of them went through a good amount of hell in their lives before ending up at The B.A.U.. They didn’t choose to kill. Well, no one on Penelope’s team chose to kill anyway, not before the B.A.U. anyway. She knows Prophet killed once before he was recruited by Sam Cooper. But those circumstances were… well, not much more extenuating than Cat’s.

Which brings Penelope back to her point, frankly. She isn’t sure what to make of Cat Adams these days, but she is starting to understand Spencer’s “better late than never” logic when it comes to offering her a chance to turn herself around.

And… Weird as it is, she is trying. Even weirder, she and Spencer are a thing. Spencer calls her when the team is away on cases, and she calls him when she is away, and the other night they sat in Spencer’s armchair together like it was the most normal thing in the world.

So, Penelope feels like it would be a mistake not to call Cat Adam’s now.

Cat frowns when her phone rings. She pulls it from her back pocket, letting her book fall to the side for now, frowning deeper at the unfamiliar but definitely F.B.I. affiliated number on her screen.

“Hello?” She answers, and there’s a hitch of breath, and suddenly her previous task of trying to reinterest herself in reading a novel is forgotten.

“Hi, Cat, this is Penelope Garcia.”

“Hi…” Cat drawls, and she uncurls her legs from under herself and leans forward on her couch, ready to get up and – at the very least – start pacing the length of the apartment.

“Are you… Um, are you in D.C. right now?”

“Yeah.” Cat answers, “We got back from a case in Michigan this morning. Cooper sent us all home to get some rest.”

“Ok.” Garcia stammers on the other end of the phone, “Ok, um, do you, do you have a way of getting to St. Anthony’s hospital?” She asks, “There was an explosion yesterday, and Spencer…. We thought he was ok. But J.J. and I just went to his apartment and we found him unconscious…”

Garcia is still talking, still explaining how Spencer started seizing while they were on the phone with 911, and J.J. is now heading back to the Bureau because the team made a breakthrough in this hunt for one of the most elusive serial killers they’re ever faced, and so Garcia told her to go, and that she would handle things like talking to doctors and getting ahold of Spencer’s mother.

“No offense.” Cat huffs, tearing through the apartment in search of the easiest pair of shoes to jam onto her feet. “But are you sure calling his mom is a good idea?”

She growls at the tail end of her own words. She – unfortunately - only owns three pairs of shoes, and they all have laces. She settles for her sneakers and switches the phone to speaker as she starts tying them.

“I don’t have a choice.” Garcia blubbers on the other end. “If… If something happens to him, his mom is the only person who can make any medical decisions.”

Cat almost, almost exclaims that that is a terrible idea, but she gets the feeling that Garcia knows that.

“Then are you sure it’s a good idea for me to come?” She asks instead, because it isn’t a good idea. She shouldn’t go. Much as it kills her, she knows that she shouldn’t be anywhere near a delicate situation or Diana Reid.

And specifically not a delicate situation concerning Diana Reid.

She isn’t worried about Diana realizing that she was the one who orchestrated her kidnapping. She isn’t even worried about Diana remembering her kidnapping in the first place; last Spencer told her, she usually doesn’t. But Cat can see herself getting frustrated and impatient, and she can see herself taking it out on Diana, and that isn’t going to be good for anybody, least of all for Spencer.

“No.” Garcia’s voice comes over the other end after a long moment. “But when family is in trouble, you call family.” Garcia says, the words trembling as if not even she believes them. “Even when it’s a bad idea.”

Now that it sounds like she believes.

Seeing Maeve again… That isn’t something Spencer ever thought he would get to do.

He’s never believed in any sort of afterlife. But now…

This isn’t an afterlife, though it feels too real to be a dream. He’s too conscious, so to speak, but since he’s been here he has seen people he’s lost to more than just death. Yes, he’s seen Strauss and he’s seen Foyet, and he’d chased Gideon out the doors of the bullpen like he was chasing a memory. But he has also seen the faces of Hotch, and of Elle, and Morgan. He misses those three people every single day, but they are very much alive, so he doubts he would be seeing them in flashes of a memory if he were already dead.

Then there’s Maeve.

“What are you afraid of?” She asks, walking next to him through this cemetery they have found themselves in, dressed in matching black wool coats like they woke up this morning to attend a funeral.

His funeral, it’s seeming like, even if they are looking down at Gideon’s gravestone.

“If I die I’ll let down my mom.” He answers her bluntly, circling away from the headstone and slowly making his way to a nearby bench. “My team. Everybody who depends on me.”

Maeve’s smile is tense as the two of them sit, her eyes still lingering behind them at the headstone.

“Family is resilient.” She comments, moving her fingers through some stray strands of her blonde hair.

It’s lighter, Spencer thinks, than it was when she died. Longer too, and he can’t help but to wonder if that is a result of this place, whatever it is. If this is his subconscious imagining her lighter in every way that he can, or if maybe this is real and this is how she longed to be.

“As for Cat,” She says, flashing him a knowing smirk, “It’ll be tough on her, but, you’ve given her the tools that she needs.”

“You know about Cat?”

Maeve chuckles, “Of course I do.” She says, “I like her.”

Spencer can’t help but to laugh. “I think you are the only person to say that.”

Maeve chuckles again, her eyes soft and sparkling with sincerity.

“She’s good for you.” She says, “She knows you.”

Spencer can’t help beaming. He feels weightless, and he doesn’t feel a flush on his cheeks or a stutter in his heart but he believes that they are there.

“Sometimes it feels like she’s the only one who does.”

Maeve beams at him, and then she stands. “If you love someone, set them free.” She says, smiling at him as he joins her.

“If they return, they were always yours.” Spencer finishes, “That’s a romanticized adaptation of the original quote-”

“By Richard Bach, I know.” Maeve completes his thought; in just the way he often misses her doing. Loving, happy, cutting him off so that they can build from one thought to the next. “It’s ok, Spencer, to appreciate the romanticized versions of things.”

He smiles, chuckling, because she doesn’t need to convince him of that. Not when he fell in love with her without ever seeing her face. He fell in love with her through late night phone calls and hand written letters. His only regret is that he didn’t fight harder to be her knight in shining armor. If he had pushed her more to let him tell his team about her stalker, or if he had investigated more on his own, then maybe things could have been different.

Maybe their fairytale wouldn’t have ended in tragedy.

“What is it?”

Her words cut through his reverie. She’s frowning at him, he’s sure he’s doing the same, and he licks his lips as his worst fears suddenly come springing forward and reality crashes over him.

His brain is shutting down.

“If they return, they were always yours.”

Whether this place is a real afterlife, some other realm, or simply a product of his dying psyche, something about it is real.

“What if my brain is bleeding out because my story is over?” He asks, “What if there is nothing left for me to do?”

Maeve doesn’t so much as hesitate in her answer.

“The world needs you to do what you love.” She says, “Have you done that?”

She sounds so sure, like it’s a simple question, and yet Spencer swears an eternity passes in the time it takes him to think through his life and his career trying to come up with an answer.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.” She insists, “What do you love?”

Magic is the first thing to come to mind.

Magic, and stories. Ghost stories, to be specific, and fairy tales. He loves Jell-O and Kumquats, teaching and learning. He loves books, and his team. He loves people, and making connections, and he quickly finds himself crying with snot dripping out his nose as he tells Maeve all this and how desperately he wants to experience all of those things with someone else.

“I try not to get my hopes up too much.” He says as Maeve gently wipes a tear from his cheek. “But sometimes I can’t help it.”

“That’s good.” Maeve gently insists, and he snickers, wiping his nose. “You should get your hopes up. Even if it’s hard.”

He can’t help laughing despite himself, though he starts to sober as he finds his next set of words.

“Having a family of my own is something I haven’t let myself think about since you died.”

Maeve wipes another tear of his, and for half a second, Spencer closes his eyes and lets himself imagine something.

He can’t bring himself to define the details. It’s more like he closes his eyes and allows himself to feel this aura of light, and warmth, and in the distance he hears a laughter he could listen to for all of eternity.

Cat is certain she is going to be hearing this periodic, taunting, beeping of the heart monitor in her nightmares for the rest of her life.

She’s been here in the hospital for a little over an hour. It wasn’t easy to get back here, either. Both she and Garcia had to pull the Federal Agent card and even then Cat is pretty sure the nurses only allowed her to come in because Garcia looks like she desperately needs some emotional support.

Neither of them informed the nurses that she has zero qualifications in that department.

So far Spencer is running a slight fever, he evidently had another minor seizure right before Cat got here, and his blood pressure is way too high for anyone to be comfortable with it.

“Oh, Diana.”

Oh yeah, now there is that.

Cat looks up when she hears Penelope talking to Spencer’s mother as she arrives just outside the “room”; the curtain which serves as a door making it easy for Cat to watch Penelope’s shoulders drop as she realizes she is talking to someone who isn’t entirely in the present.

Fuck Alzheimer’s.

The next thing Cat knows Diana is marching into the room and to Spencer’s bedside.

“Spencer.” Diana calls, like she is fully expecting Spencer to just sit up and look at her, and Cat finds herself gritting her teeth in order to suppress a growl.

Then, Diana leans over him, she doesn’t even appear to have noticed Cat sitting in the chair on the opposite side of the bed. She just stands there, looming, squinting at Spencer like he is some kind of science experiment she doesn’t understand.

“It’s not him.” She says, “No.” She quietly, simply, insists. “No. No, this is not my son.”

Cat gets up, and she marches out, because she if she doesn’t then she is going to say something that will only cause problems.

She doesn’t go far. She stays just outside the curtain door, and this time she lets herself growl aloud as she tips her head back and paces a circle, thinking about how much she hates hospitals and especially their lack of actual doors in all departments.

“Hey.” She hears Garcia’s voice after a moment, and looks to see her having also stepped to the other side of the curtain in order to look at Cat with this manic concern in her eyes; an expression Cat hates so much that she wants grab Garcia by the shoulders and shake it off her face.

Not because it’s demeaning, and annoying, and pitying, but because Garcia’s being out here means she left Spencer alone with his Alzheimer’s riddled moron of a mother.

She sucks in a breath; the sound stuttering around a wall of unshed tears.

“I can’t be in there.”

“I-”

“Penelope I can’t.” She snaps, “I can’t watch Spencer’s mother – who might forget what is happening – be asked to make a life-or-death decision for him. She’s going to kill him.”

The words fall from her mouth like a slamming weight, leaving her and Garcia – Penelope - staring at one another in a tense silence.

“No,” Penelope firmly insists after a moment. “She isn’t. Because we aren’t going to let her.”

Cat rolls her eyes at the optimism, but Penelope is undeterred.

“Diana might be the only one who can legally make a decision for Spencer, and I know that her mind isn’t all there more often than it is, but she is a very smart woman and so she knows that too.”

Penelope pauses a moment to swallow a lump in her throat, and Cat keeps herself from interrupting.

“She knows that we love Spencer as much as she does. She knows we only want what’s best for him. So, if it comes down to it, and the three of us put our heads together then… Then he’ll be ok.”

It should be noted at the tears welling in Penelope’s eyes only convince Cat that she doesn’t believe a word she is saying, yet she is clinging to them anyway and offering them like a lifeline. Those tears are also the only reason Cat doesn’t ask if Penelope really just suggested the two of them manipulate Diana Reid. She knows the answer, and even if it seems like that is exactly what she’s said, it isn’t.

It's different, complicated, and Cat sighs; she had better be able to navigate complicated.

Chapter Text

“I thought it was Tuesday, and it’s not Tuesday. I can’t tell you.”

Well, if nothing else, at least Penelope was right that one of the few things Diana Reid is aware of – mostly - is that her brain is the equivalent to a pile of scrambled eggs.

They’re talking about surgery now, to relieve the pressure of the brain swelling from his skull. The doctor, Diana, Penelope… And all Cat can do is look at Spencer.

His skin is pale and tacky. His eyes are closed and his lips are parted ever so slightly while that ever-present beeping of the heart monitors keeps on announcing that he is still – in fact – alive.

His body, at least, but until he wakes up they can’t say the same for his brain.

“What would he want?” Diana asks, and isn’t that the question of the hour?

Cat runs her fingers gently through the loose curls of Spencer’s hair while Penelope talks to Diana about how much they all love Spencer, and something about hearts and guts having cells of consciousness and that is why gut feelings exist.

She learned that from Spencer, Cat doesn’t need to be told that, but Penelope mentions it anyway.

What would he want?
Cat rolls her lips tight to keep the tears at bay. There is so much Spencer is looking forward too, so much that he would want, that he does want-

When he starts seizing she jumps back with a shout.

Diana is shouting too, and Penelope, and then doctors are rushing in and at some point Cat is pushed into the back of the room and as Diana is shoved too she tries to lunge forward and Cat grabs her by the arm and keeps her held back before she can think much about it.

“Let them work.” She gasps when Diana looks to her, bewildered.

She remains holding Diana’s arm, her grip just firm enough to keep the both of them grounded in face of the sight of Spencer convulsing and two doctors hovering over him and checking every vital sign and pushing something in a syringe into one of Spencer’s IV lines.

When it’s over - after the longest forty-five seconds of Cat’s life – Spencer is somehow still breathing. One of the doctors clears out of the room along with a nurse, and only once they’re gone Cat finally lets go of Diana’s arm and she watches as Diana rushes his side, quashing down the immediate urge to pull her back once again.

Especially when Spencer opens his eyes.

It hardly counts as opening. In fact, while Diana is gushing over him and the remaining doctor is assuring them that it is, in fact, a very good sign, Cat thinks the movement looks more like his eyes rolling into the back of his head.

But, she’ll trust what the doctor says. She’ll trust what Penelope says about gut feelings, and that maybe his mom sees something she doesn’t.

So, when she notices Spencer’s phone ringing over on the seat of the plastic chair they’d piled his stuff on, and she spots the New Jersey area code which makes her heart sink… Fuck.

“Excuse me.” She mutters, and she snatches the phone, and before anyone can question her she is out in the hallway with the little device pressed to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Hi?” A female voice says on the other end, confusion obvious in her tone. “I’m looking for Dr. Spencer Reid?”

“This is his phone.” Cat confirms, glancing sideways towards the curtained roomed she just left. “He’s… This is Special Agent Cat Adams; Spencer’s team is in the middle of a case. I have his phone for right now.”

All true, if anyone ever asks.

“Ah, yes, you’re the other agent who was on the Lindsey Vaughn case?” The woman sounds, at least, a little more comfortable, though there is still a breathy edge to her voice that has Cat still manning her defenses.

“Yes.” Cat manages to answer, despite holding her breath.

“Ok.” The woman on the other end sighs. “My name is Robin Cooper, I’m Addie Roth’s caseworker. Do you… Is Spencer away at the moment?”

With weary eyes, Cat eyes the curtain from behind which she can still hear the faint echoes of the heart monitors.

“We’re still in D.C..” She answers, carefully. “Spencer… He was injured in the field.” She admits with a sigh. “He’s ok.” Stable, for now. “But he’s still being checked out in the emergency room. That’s why-”

“That’s why you have his phone.” Robin sighs, “Ok.”

“Is Addie ok?” Cat asks, because whatever this is, it can only be about Addie.

There’s a hesitation over the line, definitely Robin debating how much of whatever is going on she can share.

“Addie has been having some difficulties readjusting.” Robin admits, “Her group home has reported an uptick in self-destructive behavior in her. I can’t give you the specifics, but right now the next course of action is going to be to send her to a psychiatric hospital as an inpatient.”

Cat’s heart freefalls into her stomach. Images of Addie bound and gagged by Lindsay and Juliette flash through her mind, a snide voice in her head reminding her that this is all her fault.

“Spencer did express interest in fostering Addie.” Robin continues, “His background check is clear and up-to-date. It would still be considered an emergency placement but given the circumstances… Right now I really think it would be better if Addie were in a home rather than an institution, if possible. I think she that sense of normalcy right now just as much as she needs treatment.”

Cat would agree. Addie had still been quiet in the weekend she was in Spencer’s apartment, and true, the trauma was still so fresh back then. She was still processing it. She is undoubtedly worse now that she has had time and her mind has stewed in its trauma. By now she has likely relived it a thousand times in her nightmares, but still Cat remembers the little smirk Addie had given when she’d asked if Spencer was torturing her with the cereal. She still remembers how relaxed the kid had seemed as the three of them ate Chinese take-out, quiet but content, and frowning when the possibility of her leaving was brought up.

Cat is still getting acquainted with guilt, and she loathes it, but she feels it and she is willing to do just about anything to stop it.

She eyes the drawn curtain of Spencer’s room, a truly awful idea starting to form in her mind.

“But when family is in trouble, you call family. Even when it’s a bad idea.”

“What would he want?”

This.

More than anything, Spencer would want this.

“Can I come and get her?” She asks, swallowing her reservations down and surprised she doesn’t choke on them.

She knows what happens if she convinces Robin to let her come. Going to New Jersey, no matter the reason, breaks every rule of her quote-unquote “parole”. She’ll be miles away from her team, and from Spencer’s team, and not even to mention that she is going to have to break some rules just to find a way there.

It’s all fine, though. She can live with it. She can go back to prison for a little while and fight her way back into the B.A.U..

She would rather do that than let this chance slip away from Spencer.

He had damn well better wake up.

“It’ll take me four hours to get there.” She reasons, before Robin has a chance to say ‘no’. “Plenty of time for you to run your background checks, and I’ll make sure Spencer knows to call you as soon as he can to confirm that he’ll take Addie.”

She won’t check out. That is the understatement of the century. But, she’s talked her way in and out of trickier situations before. All she needs is an inch. The fact that Robin is calling and willing to entertain the idea of allowing Addie to be taken four hours away from the area which has always been her home is evidence enough that she’s willing to make some concessions, all Cat needs to do is hold her off from drawing the line.

“You might drive all the way out here for nothing.” Robin sighs, “But… So long as you understand that…”

Bingo.

Cat gives Robin her phone number, along with Cooper’s and Garcia’s for that matter. Then she hangs up and spins on her heel to march back into Spencer’s room.

“I need to borrow your car.” She bluntly informs Penelope, reaching for her purse which is sitting on the same chair as Spencer’s belongings, and she ignores it as Penelope splutters and half-heartedly reaches to stop her. “Tell Spencer to call New Jersey when he wakes up.”

He had better wake up.

“New Jersey?” Penelope stammers, a knowing gasp in her voice as Cat locates her keyring and snags it, “Why? What happened?”

“No idea.” Cat says, marching away, and as Penelope begins to chase her she looks over her shoulder.

“What do you mean no idea?” Penelope asks just as she turns, and Cat barely stops.

“Social worker couldn’t tell me.” She explains, “All I know is this is a bad idea.”

Finally, Penelope stops, a look of understanding falling over her face, and when Cat turns to march out of the hospital, Penelope lets her go.

The first time Spencer wakes up he’s fairly certain it’s a real experience. He catches a glimpse of his mom’s face, and he has just enough wherewithal about him to know that’s not something he would normally expect. Then, he passes back out.

At some point he wakes up again, and once again the first thing he sees is his mom smiling down at him.

“Mom?” He asks, or, he thinks he asks, at least. The word comes out as little more than a whisper, and when he tries for more he has no luck.

“Take it easy Spencer.” His mom instructs him, her arms moving, and vaguely Spencer realizes that her hand is on his forehead and combing through his bangs. “Take it easy.”

He clears his throat, his brow furrowing. The wall behind his mom is a pale yellow, with a rack of otoscopes, ophthalmoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, and thermometers bolted to it. He tries to move his head to the other side, and though her hand sits heavy on it she lets him. He sees a hard plastic chair with is clothes folded up on its seat, and ahead of him is a blush-colored curtain cutting them off from the rest of the world.

“I’m in a hospital.” He says, his voice hardly any stronger than before.

“Yes.” His mom confirms, and he turns his attention back to her.

This feels real. Far more real that the dream which still feels vivid enough if he closes his eyes. But this can’t be more of the same. That dream… vision… journey, whatever it was… he couldn’t feel things like the scratchy sheets tucked all around him, or the pulling of an I.V. in his hand.

Speaking of pulling, there is a swishing pull of the curtain, and Spencer hears the familiar voice before he sees the face.

“Oh thank God.”

He manages to smile for Garcia.

He tries to chuckle, and even he knows there won’t be any use in assuring her he’s fine. So he keeps on smiling as she wipes tears from her eyes whilst assessing him from head to toe, and explains to him how it was he came to be in a hospital bed.

After hearing the story, Spencer is much more inclined to believe that everything he’s just seen - Maeve – was more than a dream.

“There’s uh… There’s one more thing.” Garcia concludes her explanation, which has already covered the fact that the team is closing in on Everette Lynch as they speak, so Spencer is at a bit of a loss as to what this ‘one more thing’ could be.

Before she tells him, Garcia spins around on her heel and grabs his phone from atop the pile of his personal effects.

“You need to call a woman named Robin in New Jersey.”

Spencer furrows his brow, staring at her and not moving even as she holds the phone out to him.

“That’s Addie’s-”

“Addie Roth’s caseworker, I know.” Garcia interrupts, her head nodding with an urgency. “That’s all I know. Well, that, and Cat stole my car so that she could go get Addie.”

“Cat what?” Spencer asks, clearing his throat when the incredulousness of that statement manages to crack his voice.

“Oh, no, no.” Garcia hurriedly assures him, now dropping the phone into his lap. “Not like that. Well, actually, yes like that. Exactly like that. She took my keys from my purse and told me she was ‘borrowing’ my car.”

“Cat was here?” Spencer glances to his mom, who – for a change of pace – appears to be the least confused of the three of them and is merely watching this discussion with a calm, almost amused smile on her face, like she is just waiting for her chance to interject.

“All I know is Robin from New Jersey called your phone while you were unconscious.” Garcia explains, “Cat left saying she was about to carry out a bad idea, which sounds like she’s getting Addie, but I don’t think she’s kidnapping her because she said you need to call Robin back, and I am guessing that has something to do with the fact that Cat is involved. Which reminds me, now that you’re awake, I should probably call Sam Cooper and tell him all this.”

Maybe it’s whatever is in his IV, or maybe it has something to do with the brain swelling from the explosion. It could also be the lingering concussion from the fall in his living room. In any case, as Garcia rambles on now about Sam and protocols, Spencer is starting to consider he might not be as lucid right now as he’d thought.

Because if there is one thing he knows for sure, it’s that Cat has to know the chances of her walking out of this unscathed are slim to none.

Four hours in Penelope Garcia’s car is not something Cat is looking forward to doing again on the way back, and this time with a kid in the back.

At least Addie isn’t a bratty, obnoxious kid.

Well, she wasn’t the last time Cat saw her, but who knows what this underqualified “home” has done to her.

Something bad enough that even in four hours, the only time her phone pinged it was a text with the address she should drive to, not one telling her to turn around.

Cat locks the car before she starts up the mossy brick path to the house’s front door, though frankly, Garcia’s Cadillac is so old she doubts today’s amateur car thieves would even know how to steal it.

The house is a dated bungalow. A bit small for a group, in Cat’s opinion, but she supposes if it is meant for “problem children” it makes sense they would purposely limit the capacity. Off to the side in the driveway she spots a Subaru at least five years old, and a Chevy SUV that is even older.

The old concrete of the front steps to the house scuff under Cat’s feet as she approaches the door, some of the fading paint chipping away under her feet. Only allowing herself one shaking breath Cat approaches the door, and she wills her heart to stop pounding as she raises her hand and she knocks.

It’s only a moment that the door opens. The woman standing on the other side has short, greying, dark hair and minimal make-up on her face; though the light coat of mascara does a wonderful job of bringing out the resigned look of murder in her eyes.

“You’re Robin, I take it?” Cat asks, holding out her hand, and in response Robin simply crosses her arms and looks her up and down.

“You didn’t tell me you’re a red cell agent.”

Cat sighs, dropping her hand.

“Yeah, I figured over the phone that would make it too easy for you to tell me to go away.”

Robin rolls her eyes, and Cat considers inviting herself into the house, but she knows her best move right now is to play the game. So, she leans herself against the open doorframe, the outside of it specifically.

“You talk to my boss?”

Robin scrunches her nose and frowns deep.

“I did.” She says, an edge of consideration to the words which Cat marks. “He says you’re in a lot of trouble when you get back.”

At least that means he isn’t coming to drag her back in handcuffs.

“I figured.” She says, “Look, I know I’m not the perfect solution, but you did say you’d rather have Addie in a home.”

“I did.” Robin huffs, looking Cat up and down one more time, her eye much more critical this time, before she clicks her tongue. “I talked to Dr. Reid.”

The relief which floods through her system is something Cat is very careful not to let it make her stumble when she hears that. She’d known, logically, that he would likely be waking up stable but God she had been so afraid this would be the one time in her life she let herself hope too much.

“He told me he was waiting on discharge paperwork, and that he’s ok.” Robin continues, and she lets that hang there a minute, an almost smirk on her face; so she can definitely see the relief Cat is feeling.

Maybe she has lost her touch, but she supposes it can’t work against her right now.

“He also confirmed he would be thrilled to have Addie in his home again, and he made quite a compelling case for you.”

Cat can sense the “but” coming, still, she’s certain it will be one she can work with.

“You’re right, I would rather Addie be placed in a home with a sense of normalcy, so long as the parent of that home can handle her mental health needs.”

“Believe me, Spencer can handle her.” Cat insists, and Robin nods.

“Which is why I am going to let you take her to D.C..” Robin concludes, “But not alone.”

Cat’s lips part, but before she can make any kind of comment about anything, three very important details about this whole thing suddenly stand out to her.

First and foremost, there is the fact that Robin clearly isn’t suggesting she herself come along. If she had the time to drive all the way to D.C. either now or in the morning, then they wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.

The second is that there isn’t another agent here to babysit her, unless of course someone got ahold of the New Jersey field office, but there isn’t a third car in the driveway, and Cat doubts they would have bothered sending someone in one of those less conspicuous cars.

The third is the fact that the house behind Robin is quiet. Cat remembers group homes. Granted, her memories are faded and fuzzy, but she knows that houses full of kids are never quiet. Yet she hears no roughhousing, or blaring music, not even the sound of a movie on a television.

Robin must see that she is realizing these things, because she opens the front door the rest of the way and steps aside, enough so that Cat is able to see the clear path from the front hallway into the kitchen, and Jim Murphy – her first foster father – sitting at the table.

Chapter Text

“I want to be clear.” Robin begins, the exhaustion more than apparent in her. “You two are each one half of a whole compromise.”

Cat glances to Jim from the corner of her eye, only to find him doing exactly the same.

They’re sat at his kitchen table, discussing the next steps. It’s simple, really. Jim’s foster license is still in the process of being reinstated, and Cat’s background absolutely does not check out, but she is technically a federal agent. Jim’s thirty years of experience with the foster system combined with a sign off from Sam Cooper that he has complete faith Cat is someone who can be trusted with a child – and combined with the desperation of the situation - is just enough that Robin’s supervisor was willing to sign off an ok for the two of them to drive Addie to the one vetted person in this whole situation.

“You will call me two hours into your drive to check in.” Robin continues, “And I’ll need to speak with Addie to confirm that she is alright.”

“Yes Ma’am.” Jim answers dutifully, and Cat nods along.

She hasn’t said much during this little briefing. She’s sat here, her shoulders slouched slightly but otherwise attentive, absorbing all the information as Robin gives it to them.

“I want you to call me again the second that you get to D.C..” She continues, “And then again once Addie is safely in Dr. Reid’s care, and I’ll want to speak with him as well.”

Cat’s heart stutters at that, even though she knows Spencer is awake and alert by now, and if they’re lucky he will be home and waiting for them by the time they get back to D.C..

She manages a nod, and she ignores the way Jim is looking at her with worry. Robin seems to think, looking for more to say, and then she sighs and turns to Jim.

“Addie’s upstairs?” She asks, and he nods.

“Second door on the left.” He says, and Cat is well aware of the fact that he isn’t getting up himself. “She went up to bed about an hour after dinner.”

Robin nods, and then gets up from the table and makes her way over to the stairs.

When they’re left alone Cat is more than able to feel Jim watching her.

She should say something. She should apologize again, for everything she’s put him through. She should apologize for not going back to visit him in the hospital, or for not calling since he’s come home. She should ask how he is feeling, if his shoulder still hurts from being shot.

“Thank you.” She manages, her voice raspy enough that she clears her throat before continuing. “For agreeing to come.”

“Of course.” Jim says, “Got nothing better to do around here.”

It’s quite, the two of them sitting at the table unsure of what to say to each other. Thankfully, that doesn’t last too long, because they soon hear overhead footsteps getting closer and closer to the stairs.

Addie feels like she’s losing her mind.

She can’t help it. She’s tried. She has really, really tried to act like everything is normal and she is ok but she just can’t deal with this anymore. Her first mistake was probably not lying about where she was when she didn’t show up for school that Monday after the whole thing happened. She should have just told her friends she was sick, or her move to her new group home got held up for a day because of schedules and so she ended up missing school. But no, she decided it would be best to tell the truth, and so when asked where she had been on Monday she explained that on Friday after school both her and Jim had been kidnapped and brought all the way to Washington D.C., where they were kept in a house for a day, tied up, and forced to “play” Jumanji before they were rescued.

Yeah, that was definitely her first mistake.

She sucks in a deep breath now as she tries to push the last few weeks out of her head.

“Right, ok.” Nina – her best friend – had said with a roll of her eyes. Most of her friends just looked at her, and didn’t say anything. Addie still isn’t sure if they all think she’s lying, or if it’s just Nina.

If it was just her friends, Addie thinks that much she could handle without losing sleep, or breath, or her sanity. But it’s not just her friends. It’s that stupid game too. She knows it’s just a game. She knows that the movies aren’t real, and the game is just a game, and being kidnapped was real and it was horrible, but it’s over. It is. You can’t really get trapped in a board game and even if the rules come with a warning not to play unless you intend to finish, nothing bad really happens when you don’t finish.

She knows that… She knows that…

She coughs – chokes - and wipes more tears from her eyes.

She isn’t sure what the final straw was in the group home. Maybe she went into the mom’s room too many times at night, said too much of this out loud, begged too many times to go back to D.C. to finish the game because what is going to happen if the game isn’t finished?

“Addie?” She shutters when she hears her name, and the door to her bedroom here at Jim’s house opening.

It’s Robin, standing in the doorway with this sad look on her face. Addie hadn’t realized she was still here. Did she come back? She must have, because it’s so late, and Addie wants to scream for her to go away. Please just leave her here with Jim. She… Maybe the two of them can finish the game? Can two be enough? Cat and Spencer rolled for her and Jim, maybe she and Jim can roll for them?

“Addie, can you come downstairs?”

Addie sniffs, and starts to crawl off the bed, and when she goes for her backpack in the corner and Robin doesn’t stop her she hiccups one more time and has to clamp a hand over her mouth to keep it shut.

Maybe she could run? When Robin opens the door to bring her to the car, what if she just starting sprinting down the street? Does she have enough money for a train ticket? Do trains even run this late at night? Spencer would help her finish the game, wouldn’t he?

That idea is still working its way through her mind as she starts down the stairs. A quarter of the way down the overhang of the ceiling drops from her vision, and Addie can see that Jim isn’t alone at the bottom of the stairs.

Cat is standing with him.

She pauses, for a second. Cat isn’t Spencer, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the girls who kidnapped her and Jim did it because they had something against Cat. On the other hand, that isn’t Cat’s fault, and Cat is Spencer’s girlfriend. Cat can get her back to D.C..

Addie isn’t sure why Cat is here – if maybe taking her to D.C. is the reason – but she is sure of one thing; she needs to go with her. She needs to show Robin that that is what she wants; what she needs.

If Addie has learned anything from all the houses she’s been in over the years, it’s that there are two types of parents. One type is all in. They’re so excited to have kids and they can’t wait to get started on game nights and they want to be part of everything, and the first things out of their mouths is always something about love.

Cat is definitely the second type; the type that is more afraid of you than you are of them, and that type is a little bit harder when you really want to stay, because that means you have to be the one to do something about it.

Addie’s never been in a house before where she’s wanted to stay, let alone go back this badly, but she is notgoing to let this slip through her fingers.

So, she runs the rest of the way down the stairs and drops her bag at the corner, and she crashes herself right into Cat and she holds on tight.

The first thing Cat notes when she sees Addie on the stairs is that the kid looks like she hasn’t slept since she’s come back.

Her eyes look like they have sunken into her skull. Her little body slumps from one stair down to the next, her backpack seeming to be the only thing pushing her forward. That is, until she looks up and Cat could swear she looks like she is about to fall forward. In fact, Cat almost goes to meet her at the bottom, just in case she does fall. But then Addie drops her foot onto the next stair and then she picks up her pace tenfold. She all but runs down the rest of the stairs and she lets her bag drop from her shoulder at the bottom, and before Cat can process what is happening Addie is crashing into her.

Boney arms wrap tight around her waist. Addie’s head rests just below Cat’s chest and so the kid simply presses the side of her face into her. Let it be known that Cat had considered Addie might be happy to see her; if only because she would know there is only one place for Cat to take her. So – considering she’s only ten – Cat knew this was possibility for Addie’s reaction to her. Sometimes kids hug, and so Cat makes herself have the wherewithal to hug her back. One hand between her shoulder blades and the other carding lightly through her hair.

“Hey kid,” She murmurs to Addie, “You ready?”

Addie nods against her, still doesn’t let her go, and Cat tries her very best to keep herself from holding onto that.

Chapter Text

Jim drives them through the dark streets of the little town. It’s starting to rain just as the suburbs begin to turn to local storefronts, and Cat leans her head against the window as she watches the scattered drops land on the other side of the glass.

She feels like she’s seen this all before; albeit with a few key differences. Different towns, with different skylines. Different signs for different stores. She remembers the dry desert air still stale even after the fall of night had come to cool everything down. She was so much younger back when this was her norm; sitting in an unfamiliar car, watching a town she doesn’t know turn into a stretch of highway before her drooping eyes. Everything was so different, and yet now she wants to roll her eyes at how it is all so very much the same.

Eventually she chances a glance over her shoulder, and she finds Addie has long since succumbed to sleep there in the backseat. She’s using a wadded-up sweatshirt as a pillow, her whole body curled in on itself at an odd angle.

Cat frowns and turns herself forward again, her eyes trained on the dash in search of the climate controls.

“I suppose I owe you a thank you.” She says, deciding to make conversation as she reaches forward to adjust the heat. “For coming along.”

Jim actually chuckles, “Course I came along.” He snorts, “What else am I gonna do?”

Cat cocks an eyebrow, and crosses her arms tight around herself as she settles back in her seat. “Sleep?”

Again he chuckles, “Nah.” He says, and he leaves it at that.

It’s quiet, another few minutes, with the exception of late-night radio songs blending one into another uninterrupted.

“I gotta be honest.” Jim eventually says, a trace of laughter still in his voice. “This isn’t exactly the car I would’ve pegged you for.”

Cat hums, “It’s not mine.” She answers, nothing more, and her eyes drift back to the window just as they merge onto the highway.

Whatever he’s thinking, Jim doesn’t ask her to get more specific. In the reflection of the glass, Cat sees him nod, and it’s another few minutes before he broaches conversation again.

“Thank you for coming to get her.”

Cat frowns, and she shifts in her seat at Jim’s interruption of the silence.

“What else am I gonna do?”

Despite her parroting of his answer, he doesn’t give even a hint of a laugh this time around. Instead, he presses his mouth into a firm line. His eyes remain trained forward, and when he doesn’t say anything further Cat finds her heart sinking more and more by the minute.

There are words bubbling up at the base of her throat, though she has no idea what any of them are supposed to be. All she knows is they just might drive her over the edge. Even after this past year, she still isn’t good with feelings or her own past. She still isn’t quite sure what to do with the fact that Spencer may have had a point about her; in that somewhere deep, deep, deep down inside of herself, there might still be a trace of the person she was before she murdered Thomas Cochran.

It's a ridiculous notion, overall. She was a kid. Just another abused, fucked up, kid. You can’t go back in time, no matter how appealing the idea might sound. No matter how much Spencer pleads with her, or how much work she does for Sam Cooper and the F.B.I., no matter how hard she tries to fix things for Addie, there is just no going back in time and making it so she never crossed that line.

Once you cross that line, you can never go back.

Cat tips her head back and suppresses a huff when the words don’t sound as true in her mind as they used to.

“I should’ve called you.” She manages to say. She even manages to loll her head to one side and meet Jim’s eyes before he shifts his attention back to the road.

“You don’t have to call me.”

“Right.” She snorts. “You tried to hunt me down and get me back after your wife died.” She reminds him. “You spent years looking for me, and now you don’t want me to call and check in after I got you shot?”

“Course I want you to call.” Jim scoffs, “And you didn’t get me shot.”

Cat frowns, and rolls her eyes, but as the silence settles over them again she can’t help but feel like it’s easier to breathe.

“You can call me.” Jim finally says, after a minute. “If you want to.”

Finally, Cat lets herself smirk, and this time when she leans her head against the window she closes her eyes, even if she knows she won’t have luck sleeping because that is just who she is, she’ll let herself try.

It doesn’t work, of course, and soon she and Jim begin to pass the rest of the drive with simple, sporadic talk. He tells her he’s been looking for a hobby now that his foster license is in limbo, and he really isn’t stressing about getting it back. She also explains to him in deeper detail who exactly Spencer Reid is and how he came to be tangled up in the spiral that is her life.

“He seems like a good guy.” Jim comments, and Cat hums.

“That is the consensus.” She drawls.

“Why does that sound like there’s a ‘but’?” Jim laughs, and Cat finds herself chuckling along with him.

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘but’.” She concedes, and she glances over her shoulder to check that Addie is still deeply asleep before she goes on.

“He’s the best.” Cat quietly admits, satisfied by Addie’s still sleeping state. “He’s always the best, and he would rather die than not be the best.”

“And that worries you?”

“You would think.” She huffs, propping her head in her hand and her elbow against the window. “It probably should.” She concedes, “But, I couldn’t break him.”

Jim furrows his brow at that, and for a moment Cat thinks she is going to have to go into deeper detail about how she came to reconnect with Spencer Reid.

“So… You think someone out there will break him?”

Cat frowns, her nose scrunching at the sound of hearing it laid out so bluntly.

“And you won’t know how to put him back together again?”

Well, so much for being able to tell Jim he doesn’t know a damn thing about her.

“I think he deserves me.” She huffs, her eyes downcast as she really thinks about it. “And I think that is really unfortunate for him.”

Much to her surprise, Jim outright laughs, and so Cat cuts him an irritated glance.

“Well, and I don’t know if this means anything,” Jim says, a warning that is next words will be nothing but hollow encouragement. “But, from what I’ve seen of the two of you, I think he’s pretty lucky.”

“Hmm.” She hums, scrunching her nose again. “Are you saying that because I stole a car to drive four hours in the middle of the night to pick up his kid?” She asks, and she squeezes her fingers tight into her own ribs as she shifts in her seat and forces her next question out. “Or because you’re the only dad I have and you have to say that?”

She watches the way his knuckles tighten over the steering wheel. The way his jaw sets, and he seems to stop breathing until he finally opens his mouth and take in just the slightest gasp of air.

“You seem to get him.” He finally answers, thankfully choosing to ignore the bridge she’s just crossed. “While you two were playing Lindsay’s game it looked like you knew what you were doing. Talking without words; not everybody finds that.”

Spencer is exhausted.

He is exhausted, but hell if he will be going to sleep.

It’s nearly two in morning by the time he and Garcia are trudging back into his apartment. They spent most of the train ride home fielding calls and texts from the team in regards both to the case and Everette Lynch, as well as Cat and Addie and whatever is happening there. He also received a call from Robin in New Jersey in which he did have to divulge to her exactly how he ended up in the emergency room, and that led to some follow up questions, but thankfully Robin still wished him luck with Addie by the end and told him she’ll be in touch sometime next week about what might happen going forward.

He's texted with Cat, too, but he doesn’t want to broach a deeper conversation with her until it can be in person.

“Ok.” Garcia sighs, closing the front door behind her and standing awkwardly in place in the living room, her eyes not seeming to be able to focus in any one direction. “Um… I can just come get my car in the morning.”

“You can stay.” Spencer tentatively offers, quickly because Garcia is already turning to leave, with one hand already on the door handle, and he doesn’t think she has ever been in a hurry like this to leave his home.

Awkwardly, he swallows a gulp of air as she turns back. “They won’t be long.” He tries to convince her, and she still hesitates, but eventually her hand falls away from the handle.

This time, her eyes drop to the floor, and Spencer watches the color slowly retreat from her cheeks.

Oh.

This has nothing to do with Cat.

He glances where her gaze is focused. It just looks like the floor to his eyes, with a vague notion that the bookshelf on the right is the last thing he remembers seeing through blurry vision before he’d woken up in the hospital.

He can’t imagine what it must have been like for Garcia and J.J.; to walk in and find him lying here.

He steps into the spot, putting himself close enough to her that her eyes flit up to his and she shakes herself out of the horrible reverie she is stuck in.

“Hey.” He says, for good measure in bringing her back. “I’m ok.”

She nods, though she still surges forward and pulls him into a hug. Spencer smiles against her shoulder, holding her tight and letting the heaviness of the last few hours begin to wash away from him.

When Garcia eventually pulls out of her hug there is a sheen of tears over each of her eyes, and she is quick to remove her glasses and wipe it all away.

“Ok.” She sniffs, “Happy tears, I promise.”

Spencer chuckles, and as he steps back to give her a moment he surveys his apartment with a more critical eye; specifically the ajar door to his spare bedroom.

The next couple minutes he and Garcia busy themselves with making the bed in that room and tidying up any odds and ends which he have found their way in there since Addie’s been gone. They also make a pot of coffee, because the last thing they need is either of them collapsing from all the exhaustion. Garcia is just pouring their second mugful each when there is a knock on the door.

They look at each other, then to the door, and then Spencer gets to his feet and as he makes his way through the apartment he has to remind himself that the way his heart is hammering in his chest is more likely due to the situation at hand rather than any more residual effects of the explosion.

It’s a greater effort than he would have expected; convincing himself he isn’t about to pass out again or have something else stop this from happening. In fact - even though he’s talked with both Robin and Cat in the time since he woke up – he is still expecting to open the door and find Cat there alone, telling him it didn’t work out after all.

He swallows as he wraps his fingers around the door handle, telling himself he should prepare for that turn in events. He pulls the door open, and when he sees Cat standing there with Addie and Jim Murphy behind her he doesn’t have time to try and remember to breathe before Addie has lunged forward and she is crashing her weight into him.

He manages a surprised “oof” as his arms fall around her and he holds his hands awkwardly on her backpack, his eyes racking her over while she presses her face deeper into his stomach.

“Yeah…” Cat drawls, stepping around the two of them and ushering Jim along behind her. “She does that now.”

He hears Cat go on to give Garcia her car keys, and he hears the two of them exchanging comments about keeping Cat out of prison after this. He knows he should be paying more attention to that, and worrying about it, but Spencer can’t drag his eyes away from the mess of frizzy hair presses against his shirt.

He can’t tear his focus from the feeling of Addie’s weight heavily sunken against him. Even when she finally pulls back from the embrace and he can see the just how hollow her eyes seem to have gotten and how much it pronounces her pale skin, Spencer can’t focus on a single thing happening behind him.

It’s just this little girl looking up at him, and he will be damned if he is letting her go again.

Chapter Text

The rest of the night is easy enough, at least, because even after two cups of coffee Spencer is still exhausted. Addie seems to share the feelings, and she politely asks if she can go sleep in “her” room after only two minutes and twenty seconds in the apartment.

Spencer offers for Jim to stay the night as well. He will happily give up his bed and sleep on the couch, but Jim won’t hear anything about it. He says that he booked a hotel room soon as he realized he was going to be driving to D.C. in the middle of the night, and the most he accepts is a ride when Garcia offers it.

Cat stays over. In part, because it’s far too late to catch a train back to her place, and they both know she isn’t about to ask Garcia to go out of her way and drop her off. In part, she stays because when Garcia does offer to drop her off, Addie is still in the room, and Addie looks as though she might burst into tears at the notion of Cat leaving.

Cat says it’s fine, and Spencer doesn’t buy that for a second, but they both are too tired to discuss it.

Despite his exhaustion, Spencer doesn’t sleep much. When he opens his eyes in the morning the clock at his nightstand has its hands pointing tauntingly to 5:47 a.m., and he knows he won’t be getting back to sleep. He frowns, and rolls his head to look at Cat on his other side; lying on her back with her eyes closed and her head pillowed on one arm; her fingers toying lazily with her hair.

Spencer shifts onto one side, not bothering to attempt and be quiet or discreet; he knows she’s awake. As predicted, Cat opens her eyes and watches him as he settles himself.

“Hey,” He whispers, his voice still thick with sleep. “How long have you been up?”

“About ten minutes.” She answers softly. “I tried to go back to sleep, but no luck.”

Spencer hums, understanding. He doesn’t think he’ll be getting back to sleep anytime soon.

“Thank you for going to get her.” He says, “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pay you back for everything you risked by doing that.”

“Well,” Cat sighs, clearly not thrilled with being reminded of everything she still stands to lose; namely this pseudo-freedom she’s had over the last few months. “You would’ve done the same for me. Which is incredibly stupid, by the way.”

Spencer chuckles, and frankly it is a stretch of the imagination that Cat would ever find herself in the scenario in which he has found himself, and yet it isn’t a stretch at all. It would need to be a last resort, the end of the perfect storm, and maybe that is exactly where they’ve found themselves… Because Spencer can see it.

He can see Cat fighting alongside him to make this work with Addie. He can see her making pancakes for breakfast and tensing a little less each time Addie hugs her.

“Just try and keep me out of prison.” She requests, interrupting his thoughts, and solemnly Spencer nods.

“I will.” He promises, “And, when that works, I want you to know you don’t have to stay.”

He needs to make sure that is clear. After all, just because he can see it, that doesn’t mean it’s what she wants.

Of course, he loves the sound of her snorting at him as she sits up.

“Right,” She scoffs, and without another word she crawls out of bed, and leaves him there listening to her footsteps pad their way farther and farther through his apartment, until he hears the click of the bathroom door.

Cat can admit it, she does appreciate Spencer giving her an out.

She would never in a million years take it, but she appreciates that he is at least asking her this time around if she actually wants to work towards this… this domestic shit.

The rest of the day is filled with phone calls and tying up all sorts of loose ends. Between the case Spencer’s team just closed – which apparently destroyed their jet beyond repair in the process of taking down Everett Lynch -, calling Addie’s school in New Jersey and convincing her teacher to email over a packet of work she is going to miss in at least the next week, and then fielding calls from both Cooper as well as Section Chief Cruz, Cat hardly has a minute to herself.

Jim stops over just after 12:30 in the afternoon with sandwiches from a deli he found near his hotel.

“I wasn’t sure what everybody likes.” He warns as he sets the bag onto the kitchen island. “So if you want me to go get something else, just say the word and give me a map.”

“Whatever you got is fine.” Spencer insists, opening the bag and pulling out four tightly wrapped sandwiches one by one.

There is one which is smaller than the other three, and like Cat, Addie immediately notices this and swipes it off the counter. She scurries off to the living room with it and a handful of napkins from the bag.

As she goes off, the three adults exchange looks among themselves in the kitchen. Sooner or later, they are going to have to actually talk to Addie; and not just about her current living situation. They’re going to have to talk about why they’ve ended up here in the first place.

“Has she always been quiet?” Cat directs her question to Jim with a flick of her eyes, her hands occupied by unwrapping one of the sandwiches.

It’s a standard turkey and cheese with mayo, which isn’t her favorite, but Spencer seems to have a same thing so she doubts the third sandwich will yield anything different.

“Not like this.” Jim answers, shaking his head. “She’s not much of a ramble on and on kid, unless you get her talking about those books all the kids are reading. But, she used to talk more than this.”

“What books is she reading?” Spencer asks, “My friend J.J.’s son, Henry, he’s twelve. He’s been reading the Percy Jackson series.”

“Hunger Games.” Jim says, “Guess some prequels are coming out and all the kids got back into them.”

Spencer nods, and while those two keep talking on and on about books Cat feels like there isn’t much she can contribute to the conversation; which must be what possesses her pick up her sandwich and her own pile of napkins, and bring it into the living room.

Addie looks up when she sees her coming. Her movements of biting her own sandwich and then depositing the remains back onto her napkin on the coffee table in front of her turn slow, but she doesn’t up and run away.

Cat sighs and takes a seat, one full cushion left between her and Addie. She sets down her lunch on the coffee table, and for a moment she sits back and watches the young girl next to her.

Addie is definitely aware she is being watched – studied – and she sits rigidly while eating her lunch as though it is her only safety.

Well, maybe not her only safety.

She is a far cry from relaxed. But, despite the grey bags still under her eyes, she seems more alive than she did last night at Jim’s house; slowly thumping one foot after the other down the stairs. Her hair has grown a little longer, and she is using every inch as a curtain to hide behind.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out what to do with you.” Cat says softly. There isn’t any point in beating around the bush, and pretending the plan is anything but in limbo isn’t going to do Addie any favors.

Addie who, for the record, freezes up completely at her words. Her whole body turns rigid and she sets her sandwich down in favor of laying one hand over her knee, her fingers raking back and forth over her purposely frayed jeans.

Cat frowns, “Do you have any thoughts on that?” She ventures to ask, “One thing you want to have happen?”

She knows better than to make promises she can’t keep; especially to someone like Addie. But she also knows from personal experience and missed opportunities that at ten-years-old, Addie is just beginning to broach an age where – if she remains calm – she might be able to convince a judge to take her desires for this situation into account.

Addie swallows, the sound loud enough for Cat to hear. She can practically see Addie dredging up the words, and when her voice comes it is little more than a whisper.

“I want to finish the game.” Her small voice requests, and then she sniffs, the dam starting to burst. “I know it’s just a movie, but I keep having bad dreams, and I can’t sleep-”

She sniffs again, this time loud enough that Spencer and Jim clearly hear it all the way in the kitchen. Cat looks up, sees them both ready to come hurrying in, and she gives Spencer a look telling him to wait a few minutes; the last thing Addie needs is a whole crowd of adults asking her why she’s crying.

She looks back to Addie, and scoots herself a little closer.

“We can do that.” She promises as she moves, and when Addie looks up at her with hopeful eyes Cat does her best to flash her a smile. “I have to go back to my apartment at some point today and get some clean clothes. I’ll stop in at a store and pick up a copy of the game, ok?”

Addie sniffs again, this time much more quite, and nods.

“Ok.” She says, “Thank you.”

Spencer meets Cat’s gaze when he first hears Addie over on the couch. He isn’t sure what exactly is going on over there, but the look Cat shoots him tells him that she has it under control, and so he lets her.

Jim notices too, but when Spencer doesn’t move neither does he, and so the two of them continue with their lunch around the kitchen island.

“So, how much trouble is she in?” Jim asks, and they both know he isn’t referring to Addie.

“I don’t think much.” Spencer admits, “She might end up benched from field assignments, but her team really likes her, I don’t think they’ll let the director send her back to prison over this.”

“You think they can fight something like that?”

Spencer chuckles, if only Jim knew the half of the bureaucratic minefields the different branches of the B.A.U. have all had to fight through over the years.

“If anything, I think her supervisor will use this to make the case that his recruitment of red cell agents works.” He muses, “Recruiting out of prisons isn’t exactly the bureau’s favorite method, so the director is always looking for ways to tie his hands.”

“And you think her breaking all the rules of her deal and stealing a car is going to help?”

Spencer chuckles at the bluntness of that statement.

“I think her risking everything and stealing a car in order to comply with a ten-year-old girl’s best interest is going to help.”

It takes a moment, but eventually Jim smirks at him, and then he steals another glance over to the living area.

Cat is sitting closer to Addie now, who seems to have calmed down some.

“She called me her dad on the way down here.” Jim says, catching Spencer’s full attention and then some. Jim, obviously seeing his surprise, chuckles as he takes a sit of the water Spencer had offered him. “More or less.” He admits, “She said I’m the only one she’s got.”

Spencer nods, and lets himself sit with that revelation… That Cat actually managed to speak aloud some version of what she wants.

“Cat’s been on her own for a long time.” He says to Jim, “It isn’t your fault, and it isn’t mine. It’s just what happened.”

Jim sighs like he wants to argue, and Spencer isn’t surprised. He’s had plenty of experience for himself with the guilt of wishing you could have done more; wondering if there was something you missed. Cat isn’t always the subject of those sleepless nights for him, but that isn’t to say it’s never been over her.

He could have spoken up when they were kids. When the social worker came to take him out of that house, he should have told her what Thomas was doing to Cat.

But he didn’t; because he was fifteen and he was too worried that no one would believe him, and besides, he had his own problems to worry about; like his mom.

“Getting her to talk about her feelings can feel like pulling teeth.” He goes on, “Or, having them pulled, actually.”

He’s never much understood that analogy, to be honest. Pulling teeth in modern times is a fairly painless and quick procedure. Yes, the analogy is obviously meant in reference to the days prior to the invention of procaine in 1904, but even then the procedure was much more long and painful for the patient rather than whoever was preforming it; anyone from a dentist to a local blacksmith.

“But,” Spencer continues, more forcing himself to do so before he continues down this mental rabbit hole and is inevitably quiet for much too long. “Given her own time and space, slowly, I think she’s actually starting to like being part of a family again.”

Jim smiles, a real, proud looking smile, but before he can say anything Cat comes their way from the living room.

“Well,” She huffs, finding her usual spot sitting on the counter top. “She wants to finish the bored game.”

And just like that, any smiles are wiped from both their faces.

Chapter Text

Spencer isn’t sure if this whole idea of finishing the game is honestly a good plan or not, but he figures it might be better to go along with it for now and then stop if it gets to be too much, rather than to not allow it at all.

After a quick trip back to her sublet, Cat returns with her go-bag slug over one shoulder, a Jumanji box under her other arm, and a look in her eyes to mirror Spencer’s own uncertainty.

At least he has her on his side.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” He asks Addie anyway, and Cat pauses as she is crumpling up the plastic wrapping she’s cut from the outside of the box.

“Mm, hmm.” Addie hums a positive, nodding her head. She’s still been quiet, even since her talk with Cat earlier, but she seems sure and is eyeing the game as though it is a challenge which needs to be conquered.

Internally, Spencer makes a note to ask Robin – or any other social worker the state passes him along to – if Addie has any notable history of having been put through exposure therapy.

“We can take breaks whenever you want.” He says, and though she nods minutely, Addie scrunches her brows at the idea.

“Thank you, and you too.” She says, and with those words Spencer can practically see the uncertainty take ahold of her. Her previously determined – even if wide and slightly damp – eyes blink as though an insecurity she has been shoving aside has finally gained an inch and has seized her in a vice grip. “I’m sorry.” She starts to stammer, “Are you sure you’re ok with playing this?”

Honestly? No, he isn’t. Spencer would be happy to go the rest of his life with never playing this bored game, watching the movies, or reading the picture book ever again.

But if that isn’t the case for Addie, then he will be happy to adapt to that.

“Don’t worry about me.” He says, and he nods to Cat still hovering over the coffee table, “Cat and I were trained for the situations we deal with; we’ll be ok.”

It might not be the most comforting thing in the word which he could say, probably not even in the top twenty-five, and frankly he doesn’t think it’s even true to say Cat has any proper training. But, Cat resumes her task of unpacking the game and Addie doesn’t look like any more disturbed than she has all day.

“Yeah, well speak for yourselves.” Jim good-naturedly sighs as he takes a seat on the edge of the armchair. “I’ll play, but no promises it’ll be a cakewalk.”

Addie nods dutifully to Jim’s warning, eyes cast down, but she doesn’t try and let him off the hook of playing.

Spencer would assume that’s because she has known Jim for longer, and she is more comfortable asking him for things. So, with this in mind, as Cat finishes setting up the game bored for them to restart from the positions in which they had been in during Lindsey’s game, Spencer shuffles over to leave enough room for Jim to squeeze in next to Addie. Taking the hint that the seat is for Jim, Cat doesn’t move to sit on the couch once she has all the pieces set up. Rather, she sits on the floor by the coffee table, her back against Spencer’s legs much like she had that night when the team came by to hang out.

Spencer leans his back into the couch, trying his best to relax into the cushion. It isn’t the easiest with Cat sitting with her back to him; and he knows that with Addie and Jim present, she isn’t likely to invite herself into his lap this time.

He decides to comb the fingers of one hand lightly through the ends of her hair. Against his leg her body shifts, and so he freezes, but after a moment she leans her head against his knee, and so he resumes his previous distraction.

“Ok.” He says, daring to break the silence before it drags out any longer. “I believe Jim had just drawn a danger card.”

Playing out the game is, frankly, much more somber of an endeavor than Cat thinks playing a bored game is supposed to be. They move their pieces in silence, and while Jim does pull his chair closer to sit on the other side of the coffee table, he never does come and take the seat on the couch which Spencer had left for him. Fortunately, that just means that Addie scoots herself in.

Since they started in the midst of an already started game, it doesn’t take them long to finish. Addie is the winner, and when Cat chances a look over her shoulder she sees the young girl with a small, tired smile on her face.

“It’s still early.” Spencer’s tentatively says after a beat of them sitting in the tense silence of the completed – and most important, non-deadly – game. “If anyone wants to play something else. I have Monopoly.”

Across the coffee table, for seemingly the first time all night, Jim looks like he is actually beginning to breathe.

“I can play Monopoly.” He readily agrees.

Cat can’t help but to snicker to herself. She’s starting to get the feeling that while they’ve been worrying about Addie this whole time, Jim is secretly the most traumatized of them all from the kidnapping.

She starts packing up the Jumanji game, leaning forward to give Spencer space to get up so that he can go retrieve his Monopoly game. In the process of their shuffling, Cat’s thigh knocks against Addie’s foot, and Addie immediately pulls her leg up on the couch and tucks it under herself. Cat looks up at her, intent on apologizing, but when she sees the flit of embarrassment in Addie’s eyes she settles for stretching her own legs out under the table where at least they won’t get in anyone’s way if she has to move against when Spencer returns with the new game.

When he does return, before he sits down, the two of them trade boxes. He sets Monopoly down while she hands him Jumanji to be put away somewhere, and as she opens Monopoly to start setting it up Addie makes a move of her own and slides off the couch.

She sits next to Cat, her legs equally outstretched and only a hair’s width of space away from Cat’s own. Cat is well aware of Jim watching the interaction, or lack thereof. There is a mix of fondness and caution warring in his eyes, and the same can be said for Spencer when he returns to the coffee table.

Dr. Hunter is going to have a field day with this.

But, for now, Cat settles for handing Addie the game pieces and telling her to assign them to everyone.

“I want the battleship.” She adds to her instruction, not that it really matters, but still… She would at least like to make her request.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out what to do with you.”

Addie is very, very aware of that.

She always is; it comes with the territory of foster care. Nothing is ever permanent, and you have a file that people – social workers, teachers, foster parents, doctors, and who knows who else – are always reading; trying to figure out what to do with you.

“Do you have any thoughts on that?”

Cat isn’t the first person to ask her that, but this is the first time Addie has felt like her answer might actually make a difference. This isn’t as simple as her being asked if she likes a family enough to want to stay with them. She knows how close she is to being sent away.

She’s known a few kids before who were sent to a hospital. Sometimes they come back worse, sometimes they come back better. Back in the group home, it was something she was willing to resort to. Anything would be better than a house full of other kids she doesn’t know always fighting, and crying, and calling her a liar. Anything would be better than her friends calling her a liar. At least if she was away in one of those hospitals she wouldn’t be able to hear them calling her a liar. Maybe they would even start to believe her.

But she couldn’t stay there forever. Eventually they would send her back, into some other group home, because she is already getting too old for any parents to want her, and if she came fresh out of the psych hospital there would be no family willing to even give her a chance. She would be too broken, and her file would say so in big, bold letters.

But… maybe… Maybe she still has a chance.

Spencer is nice. She can’t tell if he’s done this before – the whole foster kid thing – and she’s afraid to ask. He had the spare room, even though it was set up more like a guest room than a foster room, but she’s heard Robin mention something about all his paperwork being in order.

Cat’s never done this before. At least, not from the side of being a parent. Addie has learned since she’s been here that Cat was one of Jim’s kids a long time ago. She would guess that’s why those girls kidnapped Jim and her in order to get back at Cat, and probably why Cat is so quiet and always looks like she’s scared, even though this is her boyfriend’s apartment.

As they play Monopoly Cat’s words keep haunting her, but not in a bad way. It’s like… Like a sign, maybe, if those are real. She keeps thinking about it over, and over, and over again.

“Do you have any thoughts on that?”

“There is something very wrong with this picture.” Spencer mutters after he picks up the Go To Jail card and puts his top hat piece in the jail, where Cat’s battleship piece just happens to be sitting outside in the visiting line from the last turn.

Cat snorts at him, “Not to me, Spencie.” She teases him. “It was about time.”

Spencer rolls his eyes, laughing at her, and Jim is laughing too while he reaches forward for the dice.

“Glad you’re in a good mood.” He says to Cat, “Because I’m coming for those yellow cards you’re hoarding.”

“I told you, give me Boardwalk and $200 and you can have them both.”

“And I told you you’re going to have to pry the Boardwalk from my cold, dead hands.”

He rolls the dice, lands on one of Cat’s yellow spaces instead of the unowned one he was aiming for, and is grumbling to himself while he counts out the money for rent.

“This could have been avoided.” Cat taunts him as he hands her his money, and Addie chuckles to herself.

“Do you have any thoughts on that?”

She does, in fact. She scoots a little closer to Cat, so that her leg is pushes right up against hers, and before anyone can make any kind of faces at her for it she takes the dice.

“My turn.” She announces simply, shaking the dice, and thinking very much about how much she wants to stay right here, with these people.