Agents with Kids (Spencer Reid x reader)

Part 34

The room is dark by the time you wake to hear him. His breathing sounds ragged and he's groaning in pain when you wake up. You can hear the sheets shuffle slightly.

"No, no, don't move, I'll get a nurse." You get up and head to the door.

"No!" He shouts and you cringe from how much pain he sounds like he's in. You smack the wall until you hit a light switch. You both wince from the sterile light flooding the room.

"You need pain meds." you huff and reach from the door handle.

"I don't. I'm fine and I don't want to take any narcotics." His voice is hard as he says it. You flip around to look at him.

"It's not good for you to be in pain like this." you argue back.

"It's not good for me to relapse either." And there's a point you're not prepared to argue with. His face softens after that. "You should probably tell one of the nurses I'm up, though." He gives you an easy way out. As you leave, he calls out your name.

"Would you grab that clipboard for me?" he points at one hanging near the door.

"You want to read your own medical chart?"

"I'm one of the only people to be successfully treated for a new strain of anthrax. This is a primary research document. Absolutely I'm going to read it." His voice goes up in pitch just a little, in that defensive reflex of his.

You shrug and hand it over before stepping out to find a nurse. You wait outside of the room and take the time to check your phone. It's nearly six in the morning. You send updates to Hotch and JJ first, because they are the only two you know for a fact would be up that early on an off-day. JJ because of Henry and Hotch because he's just Hotch. The nurse is gone just before you've finished the last text.

"How are ya?" You ask gently as you drag your chair closer to him (purely for conversational purposes. Nothing else at all). You know him well enough to see the slight scowl on his face.

"He wasn't helpful at all. Couldn't tell me anything about the respiratory treatment."

"Your chart isn't a primary research document until after it's done being a living document." you tease. "It's been 11 hours since the treatment, so he must be from the night shift. In a couple hours, I'm sure the day shift nurses will be back and you can bother them all you want. So, how are you? Physically?"

"Good. How's my girl?" He says casually.

You didn't realize you'd frozen up until you hear the sound of your phone slipping from your hand and landing on the tile floor. You duck down to grab it immediately.

"Sorry! Sorry, I, uh, zoned out for a moment there." You hope you don't sound as lame as you think you do.

"You alright? You had a pretty long day too. You should really go home and-"

"No, no, I'm good. I'm good." The words come out quickly. "I'm gonna stick around for a while. Unless," you raise an eyebrow "you're planning on kicking me out?"

"I'd never do that." God, he shouldn't sound so earnest when he's joking. And he has to be joking, right? In the past twenty four hours, you thought multiple times he was going to die. You can't take any more emotions today.

A beat goes by. "I was asking, a minute ago, how the baby is." If the health of your daughter didn't depend on you, you would have liked to smack your head against a wall right then. Of course. Of course he was talking about the kid. It was just your hormone addled brain interpreting things weirdly.

"She's good. It'd be a little early for a first time pregnancy, but I felt a little bit of a weird feeling in my stomach last night and it might have been a little kick." "Quickening" is what the internet insisted those little kicks would be called when you tried to look it up earlier in the week during your lunch break. It also told you it'd be weeks before you could feel the kicks from the outside of your body, shattering the tiny daydream you already had forming of getting Spencer's hands on you as soon as possible.

You buried yourself in work as fast as you could after lunch that day.

His face is lit up. "Really?" he prompts with a hint of awe.

You realize you're already smiling as you start to explain. "I thought I was just feeling weird because of the stress, but 18 weeks is a pretty common time to feel them."

His smile fades a bit. "I'm sorry you had to go through that."

"I'm sorry you almost died." you counter. "You know what I never expected from this job?"

"New kinds of anthrax?"

"Well, yeah, but in general- I figured I'd have a near death experience or two, but the weirdest thing about almost dying in the BAU is that every case is so unique, there will probably never be another like it. We can't learn any lessons from this. There's nothing more our team could do to prevent an attack like that again. We just have to go back to work and hope nothing like this ever happens again, because we aren't any safer."

"At least we can talk to each other about it. Most people aren't close with their units and you know we can't talk about it outside of work." And you think of Hotch and JJ, going home to their children that they might have lost today.

They've both pinged you back when you check your texts, JJ's tells you that Henry and her both tell Reid to feel better, and Hotch's just says "Good.".

"You really shouldn't sleep in a chair like that. Go home." He remarks when you lean your head back.

"I don't feel like driving." It's a lie and you both know it, but he lets it go. You fall back asleep as the sunrise just begins to peak into the room.

a/n:

fun fact- I've had the name picked out for ages but if anybody ever wants to start guessing, I'd love to read them :)

next ch is on 1/7/21