Chapter Text
When Benjamin Cyrus stepped out of the ranch, there was a blissful moment when the team thought they had succeeded at ending this peacefully.
Emily had stumbled out with the women and children, scratched up but otherwise unhurt, the only words in her mouth being “where’s Reid?”
Derek was just promising her that he would go get Spencer when Cyrus himself appeared, that looming presence that you felt before you saw, and pressed a button.
The next thing the team knew, the building was exploding and Spencer was nowhere to be found.
The blast was enough to knock Derek and Emily off their feet: Derek hit the ground, buried under just enough rubble to struggle to stand, and through the haze he saw the smirking face of Benjamin Cyrus, not even bothering to run, full of confidence that they wouldn’t catch up to him. And with him, slung over his shoulder, was an unconscious Spencer Reid.
Relief at Spencer being alive faded into panic as Derek watched helplessly while Cyrus took him away, disappearing into the Colorado woods. He used all his energy to try and crawl in their direction, even knowing Cyrus had miles on him, but he was trapped.
Emily had managed to get up, and she was digging Derek out from under the rubble as she alternated calling for Hotch and Rossi.
“He has Reid!” Emily was yelling when they came over, “Cyrus, he has him!”
The blast made it so she couldn’t hear how loud she was being, but it wasn’t as if it mattered. Derek having gotten up, he was attempting to run into the woods.
Hotch grabbed Derek by the arm, holding him back even as Derek was ranting, yelling about how Reid might not have that much time left.
“Morgan, they’re already gone. We’re sending a team to start combing the woods, but we found tire tracks. He’s no longer on foot, he could be halfway across the state."
“So what, we just don’t look?!” Derek was wriggling in Hotch’s hold, trying fruitlessly to run away.
“He wouldn’t go through the trouble of taking Spencer if he intended to kill him,” Rossi piped up, “we’ll find him alive, Derek. He’ll be okay.”
As a seasoned agent, Rossi knew you never promise the friends and family that you would find a victim alive, or solve the case. That didn’t stop him: he couldn’t conceive of a world where Spencer Reid was dead.
“How?” Derek snapped, “if we aren’t even *looking for him*—“
“We have a team—“
“*I* want to be out there looking!“
“We need to stay and profile Cyrus,” Emily rested a hand on his shoulder, “we can figure out where he’s taking Reid, and be much more useful than forming a search party."
“Guys—“ JJ’s voice broke through the strained silence, and when he turned to face her, Derek was horrified to see her clutching her stomach, dress stained with blood. “I think I need to go to the hospital.”
“Derek, go with her,” Hotch ordered, “you need to be seen too, after the explosion.”
“I’m not going to *any* hospital until we have Reid!”
“It’s not a question. I will put you in the car myself, Morgan. You can’t help Spencer if you’re hurt.”
“*I’m* hurt? A psychopath has Spencer!"
"And we are going to get him back. But *you* very likely have a concussion, and you need stitches, and Spencer won’t be helped in any way by you forgoing care.”
Spencer would want him to accompany JJ to the hospital, Derek reasoned, be there with her while he couldn’t.
Seeing her continue to bleed, he realized there wasn’t time to waste, and he took one last longing look in the direction he’d seen Spencer go before jumping in the car.
-
JJ safely in the maternity ward, Derek checked his phone every five minutes, waiting for the text that they’d found Spencer. Even when the doctor tried to tell him that he needed time away from a screen.
His wounds bandaged, he went upstairs to wait in the maternity lobby. When the rest of the team got there, after they found Spencer, they were going to want an update.
An hour, then two passed with no news of Spencer *or* JJ. Finally, a woman in pink scrubs came out of a hospital room.
“Jennifer Jareau?"
“Over here.”
“Incredible stress put an immense amount of strain on her fetus. It was touch and go for a while, and we did have to deliver the baby early. We had to put him in the NICU, he’s incredibly tiny, but he’s still breathing. She lost a lot of blood, and she’s resting now."
They were alive, was all Derek heard.
When Derek peeked in her room, JJ was startlingly pale and covered in sweat, but awake and breathing.
“Where’s Spence?" she breathed out, feverish and not fully present, “I…I want to ask him….I want him to meet his godson…”
His godson. Spencer’s godson had just been born, and he wasn’t here to see it.
"He’ll be here,” Derek assured, squeezing her hand, “the team’s gonna find him, and he’ll be here, I promise you that.”
Two or three hours later, JJ was still asleep, and Hotch and Emily came through the hospital doors.
“Where is he?” Derek flew out of his seat and ran to them, almost manically looking around for Spencer.
Hotch and Emily shared a look, matching faces of discomfort at the question.
“Morgan—“ Hotch started, “Cyrus is in the wind. He had transportation ready, planned this from the start. He ditched the first car we saw him in, no one’s seen him—"
“So we have nothing?"
“We won’t stop looking, Derek,” Emily put a hand on his arm, “but…it doesn’t look like we’ll find him today, or tomorrow.
Letting his tears fall, Derek paced the room a few times before turning back to Hotch. “How has *no one* seen anything? Cyrus kidnapped a federal agent!”
“He’s organized, he planned this. We’ve got SWAT on every highway from Colorado to Florida, but he had a head start. The best thing we can do is try and figure out what Cyrus might want with him, where he’d take him.”
Right. Profiling. What did a profile matter when Spencer was *gone*, and now Derek was being told that he might be gone for *good*.
What must Spencer be going through right now? Derek almost hoped he was still unconscious, so that he wouldn’t feel any of the torture Cyrus was doubtless inflicting on him. On the other hand, if he had his wits back, he could be planning an escape. And Spencer could definitely outsmart a pedestrian, mid-level unsub like Cyrus. He’d done it before, with a kidnapper who was far savvier.
But this wasn’t that shed in Georgia, there were no cameras, no way for Spencer to communicate with them. Derek never thought he’d see the day when he missed Tobias Hankel, but here he was.
That was the moment when he lost his footing, collapsing into Emily’s arms before he hit the floor.
—
He woke up in a hospital bed of his own, and his phone told him he’d been out for almost a day. That concussion was more serious than Derek had given it credit for.
“Thank God,” a warm squeeze of his hand, and Penelope’s chirpy voice from the chair next to his bed, “you’re awake! We were *so scared*!”
“Just a concussion,” he mumbled, frowning when the words came out a bit slurred.
“JJ’s still in ICU, Reid is…wherever he is, you *cannot* play fast and loose with your health, Derek!”
He expected it, but Derek still frowned. A part of him had hoped they would have found Spencer in the interim, that he’d wake up to Spencer at his bedside, eating his jello.
There wasn’t a moment in the last five years when Derek had been injured and Spencer wasn’t the first one there, next to him all the way.
If he wasn’t here, he was really gone.
—
Loss of an agent didn’t mean they got to stop working cases.
It had been a month, and while Strauss extended her sincerest sympathies (which Derek, personally, thought was *crap*) and would continue to offer the BAU the full force of the FBI in finding Spencer, it could no longer be their sole focus.
Their first case without Reid being in Las Vegas was salt in the wound. Hotch wouldn’t have even taken it, putting the mental health of his team first, but a child was missing. Reid would be disappointed in them if they didn’t help a kid in trouble because of him.
The plane was uncharacteristically silent, until Emily broke it. “Should…should someone tell Diana what’s going on?”
“No,” Derek answered quickly, he and Spencer having had this conversation, “he wouldn’t want to trigger her. He told me once…unless he was dead, not to tell her anything. She still doesn’t know about Georgia."
Hotch might have been planning to argue, but one look from Rossi had him nodding instead. “Alright, if that’s what you think is best."
They reached Vegas, and everyone shared the same pinched looks—every sight, every sound from a casino, it all reminded them of Reid.
Mrs. Bridges told Hotch he didn’t understand what they were going through, and he fought the urge to tell her that he *did*, he really did, he’d known for a month now.
When she asked if he thought she was involved, he had to go sit down. Because *she* wasn’t, but it brought up his own guilt. He’d been the agent in command, and now Spencer was gone. Surely, there was something he could’ve done differently, something he could’ve given Cyrus or a call he could’ve made, that would have saved the situation.
Rossi took the parents into the kitchen while Hotch recuperated. “Sorry about that. We have to ask these questions, get a sense of Michael’s routine."
The man they picked up at the funeral wasn’t their unsub, and time was running out when the killer called again, talking about lime green oxfords and navy pants.
He only gave them 3 minutes. If *Spencer* had that, he could covertly get them his location, Derek knew it.
They were able to put together that their unsub was a woman, even though the statistics skewed wildly towards women taking newborns. But, they supposed, if she lost a child around Michael’s age, it could make sense.
Garcia combed hospital records to no avail, and they were reduced to going door to door as their clock ticked down.
In the end, their worst fears were realized. They caught Clara while she was dumping Michael’s body on the seventh day, and it became clear that the statistics were *right*. She had lost a newborn, but her psychosis was strong enough to project him onto any child.
Derek started weeping when it was revealed she’d been institutionalized at Bennington. Just another reminder that Spencer would have figured it out, realized that the 3 minutes was a result of being in a mental hospital. He always knew Reid was a crucial part of the team, but this, the deep knowledge that they lost a child who would have been saved if Reid was still here—
Benjamin Cyrus better hope that someone killed him before Derek Morgan found him.
—
JJ was slowly healing from her near-miscarriage and emergency C-section, and after a touch and go few days, baby Henry was doing just fine in the NICU. JJ wanted to return to work as soon as possible, be with the team during this painful time, but Hotch insisted she take time off, be with her son.
So she’d phoned her friend Jordan in counterterrorism, apologizing for the short notice, but asking if she cover for her while she was on leave.
She’d never met him personally, but Jordan had heard what happened to the BAU’s resident genius. Everyone had, the story was national news for a time, until the leads all went cold and the press got bored.
When Derek took over her first solo consult with a local detective, she wanted to snap at him—she had some things to learn, but she was perfectly capable of doing this job! But one look at his face, a man who had lost his whole world but was trying with everything he had to hold it together and keep the same from happening to other people, and all the anger melted out of her body.
“Thanks for your help, Agent Morgan,” she said instead, smiling at him, “I won’t make that mistake again.”
“It’s a tough job,” he clapped her on the shoulder, seeming a world away as he often did these days, “but you’re doing great."
Then Rossi called from the recruitment session (which Derek had declined the invitation to go to—they’d always sent Spencer to those things, and going felt too much like taking his place and admitting he was lost forever), saying he had someone in custody who claimed to have killed seven women without a trace of evidence.
“Such a shame Dr. Reid couldn’t be with us today,” was the first thing Rothschild said when they had him in interoggation, “some games are just intended to be played by higher intellects.”
Derek didn’t get angry often, but he was ready to smash Rothschild’s head into the wall for having the nerve to bring up Spencer, thinking he was fit to say his name.
“It’s been, what, two months? You’ve had all this time and you couldn’t find *him*, what makes you think you can find them?”
Rage-inducingly, Rothschild was right. They eventually cracked his code, the golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers, but by the time the reached the house, it was too late. Rossi got his confession, but it was a hollow victory.
Once again, everyone was left feeling just how much Cyrus had taken from them.
Alone in his office, when everyone else had left, Rossi broke the bottle of booze out of his desk.
Rothschild told him he wasn’t of the “intellectual capacity” to understand what was going on, and the deep tug at his heart said that the killer had been right. Not just today, but at the ranch: he’d been the negotiator, and he’d failed. He’d misjudged what Cyrus would do, got outwitted by, frankly, a mid-level unsub, and now Spencer was gone.
“Hey,” Aaron said softly from the door—apparently not *everyone* had gone home, “what happened today, it’s not your fault—“
“*Today*, maybe,” Rossi scoffed, already on his second drink.
Hotch looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. “Reid…that’s on *me*. I was the agent in command, I failed.”
“Yea, by putting me in charge.”
"*You* had him talking, if I’d just given the order to go in earlier, then maybe we could’ve gotten him out! Or if I’d profiled that Cyrus might take a hostage—“
“Do you think Cyrus still has him?” Rossi took another sip from his whiskey. “What would he do with him, for three months?"
Aaron shuddered at the answers to that question.
“I don’t want to think about it. I just want to find him.” Aaron was uncharacteristically terrified, all traces of his inflappable unit chief persona gone as his eyes filled with tears, and he reached across the table.
Rossi squeezed his hand, trying to project a confidence he didn’t feel. “We will.”
He wasn’t going to say it, but he’d lost hope that Spencer would be alive when they did.
—
Spencer’s picture was still circulating on the networks from time to time—one of him with a kitten, because Derek had protested that his FBI photo, taken when Gideon first recruited him, was too stiff and too awkward and not *him*—but it had been so long, that when people spoke about him at all, it was as a cold case. An oddity to be gawked at. They talked about what they could charge Cyrus with when they *recovered a corpse*.
Derek angrily shut the TV off, muttering something about how people didn’t know what they were talking about, and how the press should shut up or they might anger Cyrus.
Then Jordan came in, with a case taking them to Georgia for the first time since Hankel, and the day got even worse.
Emily caught Derek’s strange demeanor on the plane, and came over to sit next to him.
“It reminds me of him, too. Makes me wish we could put down all our open cases and keep looking for him. Because he’s out there, Derek, and we need to believe that.”
Emily was the only other person who had an unshakeable belief that Spencer was alive—over the months, everyone else had begun to waffle, to slip up and refer to him in the past tense, except Derek and Emily. And he loved her for it.
They sat there in companionable silence, and the rest of the team got the hint to leave them alone.
When they landed, they were greeted by the lead detective on the case—the same man who’d led the investigation into Hankel’s kills two years ago. And suddenly it was 2007 again, and all Derek could see was Spencer tied to a chair, being whipped, tortured, dying in front of him, and that’s was just what they had been shown.
Hankel did all that in two days. What could Cyrus be doing with complete privacy and *months*?
Agent Franks shook their hands, looking completely unsure of what to say—he remembered Reid, of course, and he’d seen the news coverage.
“Can I just say…I’m so sorry for your loss. I only worked with Dr. Reid briefly, but he was brilliant, and so sweet.”
“Thanks for saying that,” Hotch nodded, while Derek wanted to snap at Franks for acting like Spencer was *murdered*.
Emily’s hand on his arm stopped him. The man was out of his depth, and just trying to be kind.
—-
“We just found Missy Dewald’s body.”
“But we have William Harris in custody!” Derek protested.
“Do you think we have the wrong guy?”
“There’s no way,” Hotch said, and Derek agreed with him. They combed through the online journals Garcia found, but nothing jumped out to point to a partner.
With Missy turning up dead, the DA decided they didn’t have enough to hold William Harris, and he was released to his grateful wife and daughter.
A week later, Sarasota PD caught him and Steven Baleman dumping another girl’s corpse. Turned out, there were microscopic differences in the writing styles, something you would need to be a genius to pick up on.
—
“What are they *doing* with these girls?" Jordan whispered in shock.
Rossi figured out they took the girls to be wives, and suddenly Derek was hit with a revelation and a wave of nausea. His resolve that Spencer was alive had never been stronger, but neither had his absolute dread for what he might be going through.
He ran to find Emily, briefly asking her how Cate Hale was doing and then launching in. “What if Cyrus is trying to come back? Taking an FBI agent is high risk, when he could’ve just blown himself up with the ranch. What if he’s trying to…make Spencer into something?”
Finding Spencer dead was a horrific prospect, but the idea of finding him alive but no longer *Spencer*, just Cyrus’s puppet? For a man whose greatest treasure was his mind, there was no fate worse.
Emily met his eye, and they were both thinking the same thing. 7 months now, it would be nearly impossible for Spencer not to fold under conditioning. He’d be completely subservient to Cyrus.
They called Penelope from the jet, told her to keep an eye out for any unusual crimes in the area near where Cyrus was last seen, but they knew it was a likely dead end. Benjamin Cyrus was a man who knew how to operate in secret—if he had bigger plans for Spencer, he would stop at nothing to keep them hidden.
—
“If you stop hunting me, I’ll stop hunting them.”
Hotch wanted to refuse, to laugh down the phone line at a killer who thought he would lower himself to making a deal. That wasn’t who he was, he was the guy who hunted people like the Reaper.
But his mind was never far from the Separtarian ranch, these days. Wondering if he’d done anything different in his dealings with Cyrus, given him just one more concession, said one right thing, would Spencer still be here now?
It had been almost a year, and Hotch was sure of one thing: he had gotten Reid killed. He didn’t have the energy for the hunt, anymore, and he wasn’t about to let anyone else die if he could save them.
“Alright,” he forced the words from his throat, “deal.”
“The city thanks you.”
Aaron didn’t even have the energy for a “fuck you": Benjamin Cyrus had taken that from him 11 months, 2 weeks, and 4 days ago.
—
Another half a year passed with no news.
Then, there was a small fire at a church in Montana. A tiny disturbance, barely made the news, but nothing got past Penelope Garcia.
She came bursting in to the briefing room, interrupting the case presentation but not caring, to show them her screen.
“The footage is grainy, and he’s not looking at the camera, but…”
It was him, it was Cyrus. Derek had poured over that case every free minute of his life, he would recognize that man anywhere.
“And he’s got someone with him.”
The man on the footage was facing away from the camera, only showing long, dyed hair and his back, but Derek recognized him too. For very different reasons.
"We’re going to Montana.” he pronounced Spencer was there, and if the team wouldn’t join him, he’d steal the jet and go get him himself.
“Morgan—“ Hotch sighed, “the bureau wouldn’t look kindly on us abandoning a case to chase after a flimsy lead.”
Derek opened his mouth to speak, but Hotch continued. “So everyone keep it quiet, wheels up in 30.”
—
He was alive, he was alive.
Derek’s heart was beating through his chest, and he was grateful that he’d never lost hope. But it had been a year and a half, and if Cyrus both hadn’t killed Spencer and was willing to take him out in public, that meant he knew it wasn’t a risk. That Spencer wouldn’t run.
Even if they found him, he’d be a shell. Cyrus might even force Spencer to hurt them, as proof of his loyalty.
Derek knew he could get through to Spencer, make him remember who he was, and what he believed in, and *him*, but the rest of the team was less optimistic. All Hotch had thought of since they boarded was a scenario where he was forced to shoot something that walked and talked like Spencer Reid but *wasn’t* him, could maybe never be him again, but was also their only chance of getting him back.
“The police stopped Cyrus, attempting to flee into Wyoming,” JJ said, hanging up the phone, “but it looks like he let them catch him. He knows we’re coming, so I guess he…wants us to see what he did. He’s ready now.”
She had tears in her eyes, and Derek almost grabbed a parachute and jumped out of the plane. Anything to get his hands on that son of a bitch faster.
When they finally touched down and entered the police station, Benjamin Cyrus was sitting there: completely unbothered with being captured, smiling as if they were old friends.
Derek wasn’t focused on him—someone could kill Cyrus right there, and he wouldn’t notice. Because next to him, looking up at him with wide, waiting eyes, was Spencer Reid.
His hair was longer than it had been the last time Derek saw him, a bit past his shoulders, and Cyrus had dyed it a few shades darker. His face was sunken in and hollow, far more severe than the team had ever seen. And when Cyrus touched his arm, giving him tacit permission to look at the new arrivals, there was no recognition in those beautiful eyes. He regarded them coldly, looking back to Cyrus for further instructions.
Derek took all this in, but he couldn’t bring himself to register it, or care. Because *Spencer* was in front of him, alive, healthy, after a year and a half, and all he could do was run to him. "Baby—“ he gasped out, almost falling to his knees.
Spencer’s face was awash in confusion, and he looked at Cyrus again like a child to a parent. Cyrus smirked, pulling Spencer back by the arm, while Hotch and Rossi did the same to Derek, getting on either side of him and holding him back from lunging at Spencer.
“Morgan—“ Rossi sighed, voice broken. He knew Morgan was smart, could see what was going on, but getting him to *understand* that was another matter. The thing that sat in front of them was no longer the Spencer Reid they knew, who would ramble about medieval taxes and quantum physics, who liked Dr. Who and cuddling with Derek. Benjamin Cyrus had remade him in the image of a perfect soldier.
Emily was in tears behind them, an even further sign that the situation was serious: she never broke, unless there was an ironclad reason.
And Penelope, poor Penelope, who wasn’t used to seeing this kind of thing but who watched a lot of science fiction movies, was fishing through her purse and pulling out what looked to be an action figure. Something Spencer had given her before he was taken.
She thought it might remind him who he used to be, everyone realized at once, and tried not to scoff at the naive optimism.
Spencer, or a shell that looked like Spencer, not knowing what he was looking at when she passed him the Captain America figure was another blow to Derek’s heart. It was all *wrong*.
“Separate them,” Hotch ordered the detective, and for a minute, a swell of hope filled the room. Spencer could just be acting, pretending to be under Cyrus’s control, waiting for the team to get him away from the man.
They just needed to get Spencer alone, Derek comforted himself.
—
The thing that was no longer Spencer Reid sat in an interrogation room, separated from Ben for the first time in a year.
Ben had warned him about this, how outside influences would try and turn them against each other. How they would come with official looking badges and claims of friendship, but they only wanted to destroy him. To steer him away from the true path.
“Spencer,” the man in front of him was looking at him with what looked like love, saying a name he was sure he’d heard before but didn’t recognize. What Ben had told him to avoid. “Are you hurt? What did that son of a bitch do to you?”
Hurt? Ben told him that earthly pain wasn’t truly being “hurt”, that the only real injury was sin. Was this man trying to tempt him?
The longer he didn’t respond, the more the man in front of him seemed to deflate.
“Spencer? Baby, come on, it’s me, it’s Derek, you’re safe now—“
Derek. The briefest flash of a memory that seemed like it happened to someone else, of laughter and love, and then his brain was empty again.
“I am safe. I am a soldier.” What Ben taught him to say, when someone tried to turn him. *He* was safe, their life was safe, it was the outside world that was dangerous, he needed to fight.
The man—Derek’s—face crumbled, eyes filling with tears. “Spencer, *please* remember, Cyrus lied to you, it’s *me*—“
“Who’s *Spencer*?”
Derek breaks at that, a terrifyingly depressing sound being ripped from his throat, and the not-Spencer thing in front of him doesn’t know why a buried part of his brain wants to go comfort the man. He shakes it off.
“Then what can we call you?” Another man speaks from the side of the room, and the sheer gravitas he exuded made even Cyrus’s soldier shudder a bit.
“He’s named me Solomon.” He remembered when Ben had decided he was ready for an official name, rather than a number. He’d been behaving so well, it was time to bring him completely into the fold. Ben had told him he was proud of him.
“Solomon, then,” the man approached, and he couldn’t help but cower—another buried memory, phantom pain in his stomach and ribs, “tell me about your relationship with Cyrus."
His *relationship* with Cyrus? Their bond transcended a *relationship*: he had no memories of what he was, before Ben found him. He was a creator, a father, and a brother all in one: as far as Solomon was concerned, he’d sprung from the ashes of the Separtarian ranch like Athena from the head of Zeus.
But that could hardly be explained to outsiders, so he chose words they would understand. “I’m his servant, he’s my leader.”
The older man’s face crumbled, and he seemed to sway on his feet, motioning for Derek, who was frozen in the corner, to come back outside with him.
Derek’s gaze stayed locked on Solomon for a moment, and for a fleeting minute he felt a rush of safety and warmth, as if something was trying to claw to the surface of his consciousness.
But Ben had warned him about these feelings, said that outsiders had their ways of getting in your head, and not to fall for it. Still, Solomon couldn’t help taking a moment to gaze at Derek. He wasn’t supposed to trust anyone but Ben, and he didn’t, but he just couldn’t believe that Derek was evil.
The other man, the one who had come in with him, on the other hand, rose Solomon’s hackles. There was nothing but pure, raw hate in his eyes, and his hand kept going to his gun as if he would unholster it and shoot at any moment. He couldn’t figure out the power dynamic between the two: Derek went when the older man called, but he didn’t seem reverent like Solomon was to Ben. It was unlike any hierarchy he’d seen before.
—
Stumbling out of the interrogation room, Hotch barely made it to the couch before he was sinking down, grabbing onto Rossi for support as he began to sob in earnest.
Emily heard from outside, and put her head in her hands: she had spent the last year and a half never wavering in her belief that they would find Spencer, and her wishing had come true in the most twisted way possible. Aaron Hotchner didn’t weep, and if he was breaking, the situation must be as bad as it could get.
He sobbed into Rossi’s shirt for almost ten minutes, both for Spencer, that sweet, brilliant kid who had so much going for him before it was cruelly taken away, and for himself. Spencer Reid was dead, but he knew Derek would never accept that as long as the ghost wearing his face walked the earth.