Phoenix | S.R.

Ch. 2 | Red Iron

Summary: Reader tries to find the courage to say goodbye before it's too late.

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I had been a member of the BAU for several years now. Before that, I spent even more years of my life dredging through painstaking torture in preparation for the day it would be real. I had studied relentlessly ever since the beginning of my adult life. I had been trained specifically on how to handle the most deplorable aspects of humanity.

I had planned my death in a million different ways. Even though it had been terrifying to see the end of my own life, to stare down the barrel of a gun and witness the endgame that would never come, I had been prepared for that. It was an inevitability if I worked my job long enough. If I'd been lucky enough to live long enough to see that end. It would be, in its own way, a righteous death.

I could grapple with my own mortality. But I wasn't prepared for what I had found on the floor of an abandoned warehouse on what should have been an ordinary day.

When you see the love of your life half-conscious on the ground, there are so many things that go through your mind. Every nasty word, every almost, every if, every should have, could have, would have - they all blare like sirens in your head. They overwhelm everything. The training, the hypotheticals, the preparation means nothing in the bleak cloud of iron-scented air.

He had found Spencer. But Spencer, being the selfishly idiotic hero he was, had wanted to find him alone. He had already seen what happened when he didn't; he had seen me caught in the crossfire. And despite how many times I told him that I would gladly take that place for him, he couldn't let it happen again.

This time, I wasn't the one in the cross hairs.

That pesky, insistent fate still slowed down time. It allowed me to take in every gruesome detail, each drop of blood splatter and the quickly growing pool beneath his stomach. I could feel the way my voice ripped through my vocal cords and threatened to silence me forever. Everything tasted, smelled, felt like impossibly dark, viscous blood. But even that wouldn't be enough to describe the pain and helplessness gnawing at my heart.

"Agent down!"

Spencer's eyes opened at the sound of my voice. He heard me call to him, and he answered. The simple response, the sight of sunshine hazel was enough to numb the pain enough for me to drop to my knees next to him. The muscle memory took over, and I tried to force my way through the agony. But when I brought him into my arms, his body was limp and the dead weight felt heavier than he'd ever been.

"Come on, Spencer, look at me."

He tried. God, did he try. His eyes were rolling back, but I could see he was trying to stay awake. Even as his skin paled and his lips lost their peach color, he tried with his everything to please me.

My heart sounded like controlled destruction in my ears, but I could still hear the sound of his strangled breath. He tried to answer, but all that came out was weak, thready gurgling of the same slippery blood taking him away from me.

"Hey, hey," I called. My hand pat his cheek as my other hand struggled to find the source of the quickly pooling blood.

His eyelids struggled to stay open as he tried to say something, anything to answer my call.

But he couldn't. Still, I begged.

"Come on pretty boy, talk to me. I know you... I know you've got lots to say."

Tears were slipping down my cheeks and onto him, and his muscles twitched at the way they felt when they hit him.

"Don't get quiet on me now," I said through a forced, delirious smile.