damage || [continuation of heather]

unconsciousness -xxxvi -

*

Heather tried closing her eyes but she felt quite uneasy.

She could in no way manage to sleep, not before she got to know that Spencer was fine, not before being able to hug him and cry into his shoulder and not before kissing him and having him tell her that everything was to be okay, that he was there to protect her, not before hearing him call her name again or before seeing him smile again.

In this very moment he was supposed to place his hands on her belly, and everything was supposed to be normal.

Heather still didn't process everything. She was too tired, so tired that she dreamed with her eyes open, but her mind and body found no rest.

She saw pictures of Spencer with both of their babies grown into toddlers, Spencer had to be there, he had to watch them learn to walk, speak their first words, read their first books. There were a lot of things Spencer could not miss for anything in the world. Heather could not manage this.

She was drenched, physically and psychologically.

She had never felt so exhausted before in her entire life.

Her eyes felt heavy and droopy but she just couldn't sleep, even though she felt like slipping into unconsciousness every second.

Instead of closing her eyes, she fixated them on her slightly rounded belly. A little over three months had passed now, the first trimester.

She began singing a lullaby for her two babies,- even though in the deepest corner of her head she was crouching and crying, mourning the death of one of her loved, unborn children- but at the same time she was trying to pretend that there was no pain, and in Heather's unprotected mind everything was to turn out like the images she had dreamed of.

She was left alone to paint her own pretty, colourful picture in the white, sterile hospital room.

She couldn't be disappointed, could she?

If so, how would she react?

-

Hotch, JJ and Morgan were on their way to find Spencer.

They passed room after room and asked nurse after nurse, doctor after doctor, surgeon after surgeon, just everyone they could find on their unpredictable way through the unpredictable hospital.

It seemed like this very day was the worst day in human history. The hospital was packed, there were countless bodies on gurneys, coughing, sneezing, sweating, whining, crying, bleeding, dying.

Everything that happened, happened as quick as possible.

The three members of the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI were being pushed around by hospital staff and visitors, by everyone, as they stood in the way. They were lost, totally out of it.

They were in some place of the hospital were everything seemed to come to an end and every single one of the three comrades wanted to fight their way out of this place if they had to.

But the stormy weather outside promised nothing good either. There were puddles building on the concrete, and the clouds were of a very dark grayish- nearly black colour.

-

Sleep was the colour that Heather was longing for now, it was the darkest kind of gray, but not yet black, in which we stare after the eyes roll back and disappear behind closed lids to admire the head from the inside.

She also longed for the smell of sleepiness, the smell of wood-chip wallpaper, a little bit of one's own parting of the hair, quite a bit of dust, heated light bulbs, old book pages and darkness.

When this scent reaches and fills the lungs, then the head,belly and arms, legs, finally the tips of our fingers and toes, we are rejuvenated by our own age, back in the crib, we curve our own hands into one another, clutch our own rips, angle our legs or stretch them as far out as we possibly can, trying to find the one right position, amniotic friendly, suitable for levitation, though not necessarily practical or healthy.

Her longing could not be fulfilled, though. She observed how the door of 437 creaked as someone opened it. And before she got a chance to see who this someone was, Prentiss, Garcia and Rossi tiptoed in.

They mustered her weak self, and came nearer step by step, as if they were the lions and she was an antelope. The white hospital room morphed into a desert and began smelling of burnt grass.

Heather clumped the thin blanket with her feet, so that it pooled into a small hill, like a minuscule shield to protect her. It somehow seemed to work as the triplet came to a halt when they reached the end of the uncomfortable metal bed.

"Hey Heather", Penelope greeted quietly, managing a tight lipped smile to comfort her good friend.

"Hi.", Heather spoke frailly, not able to recognise her own voice.

"JJ told us what happened, and we're so sorry. Can we do anything for you?", David asked in his usual calm manner.

Heather sighed heavily, having them here made everything so real. She had to confront the situation now, which she couldn't bear.

She wished to be alone again, though she didn't want to be lonely, she just wanted Spencer to be by her side, to rub comforting circles on her back as he always did when she was feeling really bad.

But when Spencer could not be there right now, she preferred her own company,so she could suppress everything and dream of things that she had wished for so badly, which were to become true and then shattered in front of everyone like a big fat bomb.

Her bottom lip began to tremble again and she hated herself so, so, so much in this very moment.

She believed this all to be her fault.

"Just please," she cried, "don't leave me alone."

-

After having managed to walk back to the waiting room they had met each other in, Aaron, Derek and Jennifer went into the other direction, hope and worry sparkling in their eyes.

They coincidentally bumped into an old man in medical smocks who would convey what had happened to Spencer Reid.