#phantasmagoria

Oh, well, maybe. If you like super depressing MCD. 😅

Spencer feels you go limp in his arms, and the world stops.

Not metaphorically. Not dramatically. It stops—the way a heart stops when the electricity cuts out. One second there's noise, chaos, the distant echo of Morgan's voice barking orders through the comms. The next, there's nothing but the terrifying, suffocating stillness of your body going slack against his chest.

"No," he breathes. Then louder, sharper, a sound he doesn't recognize as his own voice: "No—no, stay with me. Stay with me."

He shakes you gently, then harder, his fingers finding your pulse point like a lifeline. It's there. Faint, thready, but there. He almost sobs with relief.

"Help!" His voice tears out of him, raw and desperate. "I need help in here! Now!"

He can hear boots pounding against concrete somewhere in the distance. Hotch's voice, calm and clipped, coordinating. But none of it matters. None of it reaches him. All that exists is the space between your heartbeats and the terrifying weight of your head against his shoulder.

He presses two fingers to the side of your neck again, counting. Always counting. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand—

Your pulse stutters.

"Spencer—" someone says. Morgan. Hand on his shoulder. But Spencer can't look away from your face. Too pale. Too still.

"She's crashing," he hears himself say, and his voice sounds hollow, clinical, like he's reading an autopsy report for a stranger. "Her pulse is weak and irregular. She's lost too much blood. She needs a hospital now or she's going to—"

He can't finish the sentence. The word die lodges in his throat like broken glass.

"Ambulance is two minutes out," Hotch says, and Spencer nods, numb, pulling you closer even though he knows he shouldn't move you, even though he knows he could make it worse.

When you open your eyes, you see Spencer.

It’s the first thing that registers—before the cold seeping through your clothes, before the raw ache in your wrists, before the metallic tang of blood on your tongue. His face swims into focus above you, all sharp angles and anxious eyes, and for one crystalline second, you feel relief so profound it almost hurts more than your injuries.

He found me, you think. He came.

Then reality crashes back in.

You’re dying.

You must be. That’s the only explanation for this—your mind, in its final act of mercy, stitching together the person you want most out of the shadows and the pain. A goodbye gift from a brain that knows there’s no other way out. You’ve read about this: how the dying see their loved ones, how the brain gives you one last comfort before it lets go. Of course yours would choose him.

He’s saying something, his lips moving fast, the way they do when he’s spiralling—when he’s run three steps ahead of everyone else and can’t slow down long enough to explain. But the words are muffled, like you’re hearing him from underwater, or through a wall, or from the wrong side of a dream you’re already slipping out of. You watch his hand reach for your face, and you almost laugh. A hallucination that touches you? That’s new. Cruel, even. Your subconscious has never been this creative before.

Then his fingers brush your cheek—warm, calloused, impossibly real—and the sob you’ve been holding back cracks loose in your chest.

“No,” you whisper. Or maybe you just think it. Your throat feels shredded, raw from screaming hours ago or minutes ago or maybe still. Time stopped making sense the second they threw you into this room. “No, you’re not—you can’t be—”

He’s cutting through the ropes around your wrists. You feel the sawing motion—a blade, maybe his pocket knife—and the rough fibres biting deeper before they finally fall away. Your arms drop like dead weight, and he catches them, his touch steadier than his voice.

“I’m here.” His voice breaks through the static, clearer now. Desperate. The kind of desperate you’ve only ever heard in his voice when he’s talking about a case he couldn’t solve. “Look at me. I’m right here. I’ve got you.”

You want to believe him. God, you want to. Every fibre of your being is screaming at you to grab onto his voice, his warmth, his impossible presence and never let go.

But the darkness is pulling at the edges of your vision—not sudden, not violent, but patient. Insistent. The way a tide pulls at a drowning person who's finally stopped fighting. You've read enough case files to know that the brain plays tricks on the dying. It gives you a doorway, a face, a pair of familiar hands, and then it slams the door shut just as you reach for it.

This is how it ends, you think. Not with a bang, not with a scream, but with a lie. A beautiful, merciful lie wearing Spencer Reid's face.

You try to hold on. You try to keep your eyes on him—on the panic in his brows, the way his mouth keeps moving like he's reciting something, a prayer or a passage or maybe just your name over and over. But your eyelids are so heavy. Heavier than the ropes ever were.

A Russian rapper's character, drawn to the tune of Russian rap

Pride Month 2026 - 30 days, 30 LGBTQ+ video game characters.