#overdramatic angst

The air in Spencer’s apartment always felt thin, like there wasn't enough oxygen to support two people. Since he’d come home from Millburn, the silence wasn't the academic, thoughtful kind you’d fallen in love with. It was heavy. It was jagged.

You didn't mind, or at least, you told yourself you didn't. You were just happy he was back.

For three weeks, you had been his tether. You brought the groceries he forgot to buy; you sat on the edge of his bed while he stared at the wall, rubbing the phantom aches in his wrists. When he finally reached for you, it wasn't with the hesitant, poetic tenderness of the old Spencer. It was desperate. It was almost clinical.

He used your warmth to drown out the cold of a concrete cell. He used your voice to stop the ringing in his ears. You thought you were healing him. In reality, you were just a bandage he was pressing against a wound that refused to close.

The shift happened on a Tuesday. The light in the apartment was gray, filtering through the grime on the windows. Spencer was standing by the bookshelf, his fingers hovering over a spine but never pulling it out.

"I think you should go," he said. His voice was flat, devoid of the tremors that usually signaled he was struggling.

"Oh, okay," you reached for your sweater, smiling softly. "I can come back after your meeting with Prentiss. I was thinking of making—"

"No." He turned then. His eyes, usually so full of data and wonder, looked like hollowed-out craters. "I mean you should stop coming by. Altogether."

The air left your lungs. "Spencer? If I did something, or if you need space for your recovery, I get it, but—"

"I was using you," he interrupted, his voice terrifyingly calm. He didn't look away. He didn't offer the mercy of a blink. "I needed a constant to re-calibrate my sensory input. You were familiar, you were available, and you were quiet. But the association is becoming... counterproductive to my processing of the trauma. You're a reminder of the transition period. I’m finished with the transition."

It wasn't just the words; it was the way he delivered them—like he was profiling a stranger. There was no "us" in his equation anymore. You were a variable he had solved and discarded.

The walk home was a blur of cold wind and the sound of your own heartbeat drumming in your ears. Available. Counterproductive. Finished.

You waited for the anger to come, but it was eclipsed by a terrifying, hollowed-out vertigo. You had poured every ounce of your emotional reserve into a man who had viewed you as a therapeutic exercise.

Back in your apartment, the silence was different than his. His was heavy; yours was hungry. It started small—forgetting to eat, staring at your phone until the blue light burned your retinas, waiting for a text that your logical brain knew wasn't coming.

Then came the obsession. You started re-reading his old letters from before the prison sentence, looking for the man who loved you, trying to find the exact moment he had died and been replaced by this analytical ghost. You stayed up until 4:00 AM researching post-incarceration syndrome, convinced if you just understood the why, the pain would stop.

But the more you read, the more you realized he knew all of this already. He was a genius. He knew exactly what he was doing when he reached for you in the dark, and he knew exactly what would happen to you when he let go.

You weren't his partner. You were his morphine. And now that the pain had dulled, he didn't care about the withdrawal you were left to face alone.

The BAU was trained to spot the smallest deviations in human behavior—micro-expressions, changes in gait, the subtle scent of stress. But they were all so busy watching Spencer "recover" that they didn't see you disintegrating until the edges of your life had already frayed to nothing.

It was Derek Morgan who finally showed up at your door. He had that "big brother" look on his face, the one that usually meant he was about to give a lecture on self-care. But when you opened the door, his expression shifted from concern to genuine alarm.

The apartment smelled of stale air and unwashed dishes. You were wearing the same oversized hoodie you’d had on for three days—one that still faintly smelled of Spencer’s coffee.

"Hey, kid," Derek said softly, stepping inside without waiting for an invitation. "You haven't been answering your texts. JJ's worried. I'm worried."

"I'm just tired, Derek," you said, your voice sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a well. "Work's been... a lot."

"You haven't been to work in four days," he countered gently. He walked over to the coffee table, which was covered in printed journals about PTSD and prison psychology. His eyes darkened as he realized what you were doing. "He did this, didn't he? Reid."

"He didn't do anything," you snapped, a spark of defensive fire hitting your veins. "He's traumatized. He needs time. I'm just... I'm figuring out how to help him."

"You can't fix someone who's decided you’re the problem," Derek said, grabbing your shoulders. "He's cold right now, and he's leaning into that because it's safer than feeling. But you’re letting him drown you too."

For a second, you leaned into his hold. You almost let the truth out—that you felt like you were disappearing. But then, the old Spencer, the one you’d invented to survive the heartbreak, whispered in your ear. He’s just misunderstood. He needs you to stay strong.

"I'm fine," you lied, pulling away. "Tell JJ I’ll call her tomorrow. I just need sleep."

Derek left, but the look of pity in his eyes was a fresh wound. He didn't understand. Nobody understood the "logic" Spencer had used to tear you apart.

Two weeks later, you found an excuse to go to the office. You told yourself you were returning a book, but your hands were shaking as you entered the bullpen. You needed to see him. You needed to see a flicker of the man who used to tuck your hair behind your ear.

You saw him by the coffee machine. He looked better—healthier, sharper. The "transition" he’d mentioned was clearly over for him.

"Spencer?"

He turned. His gaze swept over you, noting the dark circles under your eyes and the way your sleeves hid your trembling hands. He didn't offer a smile. He didn't even offer a greeting.

"I told you not to come here," he said, his voice loud enough for Prentiss to look up from her desk.

"I just wanted to give this back," you held out the book, your voice cracking. "And to see... to see if you were okay."

"I am functioning at eighty-five percent capacity, which is an improvement," he said, taking the book with the tips of his fingers, avoiding skin contact as if you were contagious. "Your presence here is a regression. For both of us. Please leave."

He turned his back on you to stir his sugar. It was a physical blow. You stumbled back, hitting a desk, the corner of the wood digging into your hip.

You didn't go home. You drove. You drove until you ended up at a bar three towns over where nobody knew your name or your history with a boy-wonder profiler.

You drank to numb the "logic." You drank until the memory of his cold voice became a dull hum. When a stranger at the bar offered to take you home, you didn't say no. You didn't want to be alone with the ghost of Spencer Reid anymore.

But the stranger wasn't kind. He was rough, and when you cried out a name that wasn't his in the middle of a blurry, regretful encounter, he pushed you out of his car on a side street. You fell, scraping your palms raw on the asphalt—the same kind of asphalt Spencer had stared at through prison bars.

You sat on the curb, blood oozing from your hands, looking at your reflection in a puddle. You were a shell. You had let Spencer use you as a bridge to get back to his life, and once he crossed it, he’d burned the bridge down while you were still standing on it.

You reached into your pocket and pulled out your phone. Your thumb hovered over his contact. You wanted to call him. You wanted to tell him you were hurt. You wanted him to profile the pain and tell you it was temporary.

But you knew what he’d say. He’d tell you that your choices were statistically likely for someone experiencing abandonment. He’d give you a fact about skin regeneration.

He wouldn't come get you.

You put the phone away and started walking into the dark, your knees buckling with every step, getting hurt again and again in the name of a man who had already forgotten your middle name.

The descent didn’t have a bottom. You kept waiting to hit a floor, some solid ground where you could finally stop falling, but Spencer’s absence was a vacuum—it just kept sucking the air out of the room.

A month later, you were a ghost of yourself. You had lost weight, your skin had taken on a translucent, sickly pallor, and the apartment was a tomb of unwashed clothes and the heavy scent of copper and cheap bourbon. Your phone had been dead for three days, but in a moment of delusional clarity, you plugged it in.

Maybe he realized, you thought. The thought was a fever dream, a jagged piece of hope that cut you as you held it. Maybe he felt the shift in the universe. Maybe he’s waiting.

When the screen flickered to life, there were sixty-two missed calls from JJ and Derek. There was nothing from Spencer.

In a fit of trembling desperation, you did the one thing you promised you wouldn't. You called him.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Reid," he said. Not Spencer. Not Hey. Just the name of a man who was back to work, back to logic, back to life.

"Spencer," you whispered, your voice cracking like dry earth. "I’m not… I’m not doing well. I think I need to go to the hospital. Everything hurts. I just—I need you to come over. Just for ten minutes."

There was a pause. For a heartbeat, you thought you heard the old Spencer—the one who read you poetry when you had the flu—catch his breath. But then, the silence flattened.

"I’m in the middle of a briefing, Y/N," he said. His tone wasn't angry; it was worse. It was bored. "And we’ve already established that my physical presence acts as a trigger for your emotional dependency. If I come over, I am reinforcing a maladaptive coping mechanism."

"I’m bleeding, Spencer," you sobbed, looking down at the fresh, jagged cuts on your arms from a shattered glass you hadn't bothered to clean up. "I’m literally breaking."

"Then call an ambulance," he replied. You could hear the scratch of a pen against paper on his end—he was taking notes on a case. He wasn't even stopping his day for your slow-motion death. "I am no longer your primary caregiver. I was never your primary caregiver. I was a patient, and you were a temporary comfort. Please stop calling this line. It needs to remain open for official BAU business."

The line went dead.

You stared at the phone until the screen timed out, leaving you in total darkness. He hadn't just ended the relationship; he had rewritten the history of it. To him, the nights you spent holding him while he screamed himself awake weren't acts of love—they were "clinical data points." You weren't the woman who saved his soul; you were a bandage that had become too bloody to keep wearing.

You stood up, your legs shaking, and walked to the bathroom. You caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and didn't recognize the hollow-eyed creature staring back.

You realized then that Spencer Reid hadn't just left you—he had hollowed you out so he could use the space to store his own trauma, and then he’d walked away with the key.

You reached for the medicine cabinet, your fingers fumbling. You weren't even thinking about the pain anymore. You were thinking about his voice—how cold and perfect it was. How "healed" he sounded.

You had given him everything. You had let him consume your sanity, your health, and your joy so he could be whole again. And he was. He was brilliant, and capable, and moving on.

And you were just the wreckage he left on the side of the road to Millburn.

The BAU didn't arrive with sirens. They arrived with the heavy, rhythmic thud of a battering ram because you hadn't answered the door in three days, and the mail was piling up like a monument to your disappearance.

It was Rossi and JJ who broke through first.

The smell hit them before they saw you—the metallic tang of old blood, the sourness of neglect, and the suffocating scent of a life that had simply stopped moving. They found you in the bathtub, fully clothed, curled into a ball so tight it looked like you were trying to fold yourself back into the womb.

"Oh, god. Y/N!" JJ’s voice was a jagged scream. She was at the side of the tub in a second, her hands hovering over you, afraid that if she touched you, you might actually shatter into dust.

You didn't look up. You were staring at a crack in the tile, tracing the geometry of it. It looked like a map of nowhere.

They got you to the hospital. You were a "Jane Doe" of your own making, unresponsive and hollow.

Hotch stood in the hallway, his face a mask of controlled fury, while Derek paced the length of the linoleum floor like a caged predator. They knew. They had seen the phone logs. They had seen the final, one-minute call to Spencer’s government-issued cell.

"He's coming," Hotch said, his voice dropping an octave.

"He shouldn't be," Derek spat, his knuckles white as he gripped the back of a plastic chair. "If he walks through those doors, Hotch, I swear to God—"

The elevator dinged.

Spencer stepped out. He looked immaculate. His hair was pushed back, his satchel was slung over his shoulder, and he was looking at a file in his hand. He looked like the golden boy of the FBI. He looked like a man who hadn't spent the last month systematically erasing a human being.

"Is she stabilized?" Spencer asked as he approached. His voice was steady. It was professional. He didn't ask if you were okay. He asked for a status report.

Derek didn't even speak. He swung.

It wasn't a tactical move; it was pure, unadulterated rage. His fist caught Spencer across the jaw, sending the younger man staggering back against the vending machine. Spencer didn't fight back. He just straightened his glasses, his expression flickering with a brief, cold flash of annoyance.

"Derek, your emotional volatility is—"

"Shut up!" Derek roared, stepping into his space. "She is in that room because of you. She gave you everything when you were rotting in that cell, and you used her like a damn textbook. You bled her dry, Reid!"

Spencer wiped a bead of blood from his lip. He looked toward the door of your room. Through the small glass window, he saw you. You were sitting up, your arms wrapped in thick white gauze, staring at nothing.

You saw him.

For a split second, a spark of life returned to your eyes—that agonizing, pathetic hope. You reached out a hand toward the glass, a silent plea for him to come in, to say it was all a test, to tell you a fact about how the heart can’t actually break.

Spencer didn't move toward the door. He didn't even soften his gaze.

"I told her this would happen," Spencer said, turning back to Hotch and ignoring Derek entirely. "I provided the logic. I explained the necessity of the severance. Her inability to process that isn't a failure of my recovery; it’s a result of her own pre-existing emotional instability. I can't be held responsible for the variables I told her to avoid."

He looked back at you through the glass one last time. He didn't see the woman he’d loved. He saw a messy conclusion to a difficult chapter.

"I shouldn't be here," he said flatly. "It’s a distraction from the case."

He turned and walked back toward the elevator. He didn't look back. He didn't stay to hear your heart monitor flatline into a long, lonely hum as you watched his shadow disappear.

He was whole. And you were the price he paid for it.

The moment Spencer’s shadow vanished behind the closing elevator doors, something in you didn't just break—it curdled. The pathetic, reaching hand you had pressed against the hospital glass curled into a white-knuckled fist.

The grief was gone. In its place was a hot, oily tide of rage.

When JJ came back into the room, her eyes red from crying, you weren't staring at the wall anymore. You were sitting upright, your expression as terrifyingly blank as Spencer’s had been.

"I want to go home," you said. Your voice wasn't a whisper anymore. It was steel.

"Honey, the doctors said you need observation—"

"I’m fine, Jennifer." You used her full name, a cold distance in your tone that made her flinch. "I’m 'functioning at capacity,' isn't that what the genius said? Get me my clothes."

Against their better judgment, they let you go a day later. They thought you were recovering. They thought the "anger stage" was healthy. They didn't realize that you weren't healing; you were burning the house down to kill the ghosts inside.

You didn't go back to the woman you were before Spencer. That woman was a victim. That woman was "available."

You started with the apartment. You didn't pack his things; you threw them off the fourth-floor balcony into the alleyway dumpster. The books, the hand-written notes on physics, the sweater he’d left on your chair—all of it went into the trash like the refuse it was.

Then, you went for yourself.

The BAU started getting calls. First, it was a noise complaint—you’d been blasting music until 4:00 AM, the bass rattling the windows of the neighbors who used to think you were the "nice, quiet girl." Then, it was a call from a local bar about a fight.

Derek found you sitting on the curb outside a dive bar at 2:00 AM, your lip split and your knuckles bruised. You were laughing—a jagged, manic sound that didn't reach your eyes.

"Get in the car, Y/N," Derek pleaded, his heart breaking. "This isn't you."

"Isn't it?" You looked up at him, your eyes wild and bloodshot. "Spencer said I was unstable. I’m just living up to the profile, Derek! I’m being efficient!"

The spiral hit its peak when you showed up at the office. You weren't supposed to be there; your badge had been "temporarily suspended" for your own safety. But you knew the back entrance.

You walked into the bullpen smelling of cigarettes and bad decisions, wearing a leather jacket that looked like a suit of armor over your thin frame. You walked straight to Spencer’s desk.

He looked up, his brow furrowed as he took in your disheveled appearance—the messy hair, the dark eyeliner smeared under your eyes, the defiant tilt of your chin.

"You're escalating," he said, his voice maddeningly calm. "This behavior is a textbook externalization of—"

"Shut. Up." You slammed your hands onto his desk, knocking over his cup of pens. The entire office went silent. Hotch stepped out of his office, but Prentiss held a hand up to stop him.

"You think you're the only one who can be cold, Spencer?" you hissed, leaning in until you were inches from his face. "You used me as a bridge? Fine. But look at what’s left of the bridge."

You pulled back your sleeves, showing the jagged, ugly scars—not from a cry for help, but from the raw, angry scratching of your own nails.

"I hope you're cured," you spat. "I hope every time you close your eyes, you see the version of me you killed. Because I’m done being your 'constant.' I’m going to be your regret."

You reached down, grabbed his favorite book from his desk—the one his mother had sent him—and you didn't just drop it. You ripped the cover off slowly, staring him dead in the eyes.

The look on his face finally cracked. A flash of genuine, human horror flickered in his hazel eyes.

"There," you whispered, tossing the ruined book into his lap. "Now we're both broken. Isn't the symmetry beautiful?"

You turned and walked out, leaving the bullpen in a suffocating silence. You didn't have a plan. You didn't have a home you wanted to go back to. You just had the burning high of the wreckage you'd made, walking away into a life that was louder, darker, and completely, utterly ruined.

The bullpen became a war zone where no blood was shed, but everyone felt the casualties. It turned into a sick, rhythmic dance: Spencer would offer a cold, intellectual jab to keep his distance, and you would return with a jagged, personal strike to prove he couldn't hurt you anymore.

A week later, you were back in the office under the guise of "returning equipment," but really, you were there for the fix. You were addicted to the friction.

Spencer was at the coffee station. He didn't look at you as you approached, but his back stiffened. "The human brain has a remarkable capacity for neuroplasticity," he said, his voice flat. "Eventually, your limbic system will stop seeking this conflict. You’re only delaying your own recovery by baiting me."

"My 'limbic system' is doing just fine, Spencer," you countered, leaning against the counter and looking him over with a mocking grin. "I'm just curious. When you were in Millburn, was it the loneliness that made you a coward, or were you always this terrified of someone actually knowing you?"

He flinched. It was subtle—a tightening of his jaw—but you caught it.

"I surrendered my vulnerability to survive a hostile environment," he snapped, finally turning to face you. "You’re just a secondary casualty of a primary trauma. You aren't special, Y/N. You were a convenience."

"And you were a mistake," you shot back, stepping into his personal space. "A pathetic, broken boy who needed a woman to hold his hand because he couldn't handle the real world. How does it feel to know that the only reason you're standing here right now is because I let you bleed all over me? You're a vampire, Spencer. You’re not a genius; you’re a parasite."

The team watched from the glass windows of the conference room, paralyzed. This wasn't a profile; it was a murder-suicide of the soul.

Spencer’s eyes darkened. He leaned down, his voice dropping to a whisper that only you could hear. "If I'm a parasite, then what does that make you? You saw me drowning and you thought you could play hero. You didn't stay because you loved me; you stayed because you’re so desperate to be needed that you’ll settle for being used. You’re pathetic."

The slap echoed through the entire floor.

Your palm stung, but the look of pure, unbridled shock on his face was worth it. For a second, the mask of the "logical profiler" shattered, and the boy from the cell—raw, angry, and drowning—looked out at you.

But you didn't stop there. "I’d rather be pathetic than a machine," you hissed, tears finally blurring your vision. "I hope you enjoy your perfect, logical life. I hope the silence in your apartment screams at you. I hope you realize that you didn't 'survive' prison. You just brought the walls home with you."

You turned to leave, but Spencer reached out, grabbing your arm. His grip wasn't tender. It was desperate, almost bruising.

"You're not going anywhere," he growled.

"Let go of me, Reid."

"So you can go find another 'broken' man to fix?" he sneered, his voice trembling with a cocktail of rage and repressed grief. "So you can feel important again? You’re a masochist. You love this pain because it’s the only thing that makes you feel like you have a purpose."

"And you love being alone because it's the only way you can't fail!" you screamed, shoving him back.

He hit the desk, the sound of scattering files like a punctuation mark. You stood there, both of you breathing heavily, staring at each other across a chasm that had become an ocean. You were both covered in the verbal filth you’d thrown at each other, bruised and ugly and unrecognizable.

You realized, in that moment, that you were both getting exactly what you wanted. He wanted to push you away so he didn't have to feel, and you wanted to hurt him so you knew he was still alive.

You were both successful. And you were both destroyed.

The air in the bullpen didn’t just feel heavy; it felt toxic. The sound of your heavy breathing and Spencer’s ragged gasps was the only thing cutting through the deathly silence of the BAU.

"Enough."

The word didn't need to be shouted. Aaron Hotchner’s voice dropped like a guillotine blade from the top of the stairs. He descended slowly, his face a mask of cold, professional fury that made even the most seasoned agents turn back to their computers.

Hotch walked straight into the center of the debris—the torn book, the scattered files, and the two people who looked more like unsubs than federal employees.

"My office. Both of you. Now."

The walk up the stairs felt like a funeral procession. Once the door clicked shut, the soundproofing of the executive suite swallowed the noise of the bullpen, leaving only the suffocating pressure of Hotch’s gaze. He didn't sit down. He stood behind his desk, leaning forward on his knuckles.

"Reid, you are a Senior SAA with a genius-level IQ. Y/N, you are a highly trained professional," Hotch began, his voice dangerously low. "And yet, you are both behaving with a level of emotional immaturity that is compromising this entire unit."

"He started it," you snapped, the petty, childish defense jumping out before you could stop it. "He used me, Aaron. He treated me like a—"

"I provided a profile of our interaction!" Spencer interrupted, his voice high and strained. "I was maintaining boundaries that she refused to—"

"Silence!" Hotch slammed a hand on his desk. The jump you both gave was simultaneous. "I am not your father, and I am not your therapist. I am your Superior Officer. Spencer, your 'logic' is a transparent defense mechanism for PTSD that you are refusing to treat. And Y/N, your 'anger' is a self-destructive spiral that is becoming a liability to the Department of Justice."

He looked at Spencer. "Reid, if I hear one more 'clinical' observation directed at this woman, I will pull you from the field and put you on mandatory psychiatric leave for a year. You are not a machine, and you will stop treating people like components."

He turned his gaze to you. It was softer, but no less firm. "Y/N, if you set foot in this building again without a direct summons, or if I hear about one more bar fight, I will personally see to it that your security clearance is revoked. You are hurting yourself to spite him, and it’s pathetic. You’re better than this."

The room went quiet. The "war" felt suddenly small and dirty under the light of Hotch’s discipline.

"You will both leave this office. You will not speak to each other. You will not text each other. You will not even look at each other in the halls," Hotch commanded. "If you cannot work in the same zip code without tearing each other apart, then one of you will be transferred to the San Diego field office by the end of the week. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir," Spencer whispered, his head bowed, the shame finally eclipsing the rage.

"Clear," you muttered, looking at the floor.

You walked out first. Spencer followed a few paces behind, his shoulders hunched. In the hallway, far enough from Hotch’s door that you could have whispered one last insult, you both stopped.

You looked at him. His lip was still swollen where you’d slapped him. He looked at you, at the dark circles under your eyes and the bandages on your arms.

The anger was still there, simmering under the surface, but Hotch had stripped away the theater of it. You were just two broken people who had made a mess.

Spencer opened his mouth, perhaps to offer a statistic on recidivism or an apology, but he remembered Hotch’s ultimatum. He swallowed his words, gave a stiff, jerky nod, and walked toward the breakroom alone.

You walked toward the exit. You weren't "healed," and the urge to break something was still humming in your fingertips, but for the first time in weeks, the air felt like it was actually reaching your lungs. The war was over—not because someone won, but because you’d both been told how ugly you looked fighting it.

The silence Hotch mandated wasn't a peace treaty; it was a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Without the screaming and the insults to vent the pressure, the toxicity turned inward.

Guilt is a slow-acting poison. It doesn't kill you all at once; it just makes everything you touch feel like ash.

For Spencer, the "logic" finally failed. It happened at 3:00 AM in the middle of a case file. He was looking at a crime scene photo of a victim left in a ditch, and suddenly, he didn't see the victim. He saw you—shivering on that curb Derek had mentioned, bleeding and alone because he had deemed you "counterproductive."

The genius brain he was so proud of became his greatest tormentor. It began to replay every moment of his coldness with high-definition clarity. He calculated the probability of your self-destruction and realized he hadn't just "moved on"—he had functionally dismantled a human life.

He stopped eating. He stopped sleeping. He would sit in the dark of his apartment, staring at the empty space on the sofa where you used to sit, his mind looping the sound of your slap and the look of pure, agonizing betrayal in your eyes. He had survived prison only to turn his own mind into a solitary confinement cell, haunted by the ghost of the woman he’d discarded.

You weren't doing any better. The anger that had fueled your "war" evaporated, leaving behind a cold, heavy sludge of shame. Every time you caught your reflection, you didn't see a survivor; you saw the woman who had ripped up a dead woman’s book to hurt a traumatized man.

You realized that in your race to hurt him back, you had become exactly what you hated. You had used his trauma as a weapon.

The "self-destruction" changed from loud to quiet. You stopped going out. You sat in your dark apartment, tracing the scars on your arms, the silence echoing with the things you’d said to him. Vampire. Parasite. Coward. The words tasted like bile in your throat. You had loved him, and you had ended that love by trying to incinerate him.

Two months into the "Cold Peace," you ran into him in the kitchenette. It was late. The rest of the team was gone.

The air didn't crackle with fire this time. It felt like a wake.

Spencer looked skeletal. His skin was gray, his eyes sunken and rimmed with red. He looked like he was vibrating at a frequency of pure, unadulterated regret. He was holding a mug, but his hand was shaking so violently the ceramic rattled against the counter.

You stood in the doorway, your own frame thin and brittle. You looked at his trembling hand—the hand you used to hold—and the guilt hit you like a physical blow to the stomach.

"Spencer," you whispered.

He flinched. He didn't look up. "I'm... I'm violating the mandate," he croaked. His voice sounded like it hadn't been used in weeks. "I'll leave."

"I ruined your book," you said, the words tumbling out, heavy and wet. "I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I knew it was from your mother and I—"

"I deserved it," he interrupted, finally looking at you. The expression in his eyes wasn't logic. It wasn't profiling. It was a raw, bleeding agony that made your breath hitch. "I used you as a life raft and then I pushed you back into the water so I wouldn't have to watch you be wet. I’ve calculated the damage I’ve done to you every day for sixty-four days. There is no equation where I am the good man in this story."

You took a step toward him, but the distance felt like a thousand miles of broken glass. The guilt was a physical barrier. You wanted to reach out, to touch his arm, to tell him it was okay—but it wasn't. You had both said things that couldn't be unsaid. You had both seen the worst versions of each other.

"We destroyed it, didn't we?" you asked, a single tear tracking through the makeup you’d put on to look "fine."

"We didn't just destroy it," Spencer said, his voice breaking. "We salted the earth."

He looked at you—really looked at you—with a soul-crushing mourning. He saw the scars on your arms; you saw the hollowed-out shell of his brilliance. You were both haunted by the people you used to be, and neither of you knew how to get back to them.

He didn't try to touch you. He knew he didn't have the right. Instead, he just stood there in the flickering fluorescent light, two ghosts of a love story that had turned into a tragedy, drowning in the silence of a guilt that would never, ever let them go.

✎﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏