#phantasmagoria

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.

Paul Rieth (1871–1925), Phantasmagorie

CW: angst • alcohol/drug mention • Sanemi x reader

He catches you between your second and third drink and before any purple pills make their way under your tongue. He’s had plenty of time to map this out; knows that you’ll shoulder your way to the furthest edge of the bar top, right next to the wall. It’s here he traps you, sliding a bill to the bartender to pay for your drink before you can pull your credit card out of your bra.

It’s here he’s going to get his answers.

As intended, he catches you off guard and slightly indignant, but you don’t immediately shove past him. You’re less brave without your vices, and the strobe lights don’t reach this dark corner of the club. Here, you’re stripped back, almost sober, and for the moment, his.

Sanemi casts his line. “You didn’t answer my question. Last time.”

What do you want from me?

Anxious eyes dart around the bar and Sanemi notes your hand - feeble as a dove’s and twice as shaky — smooth anxiously over your hair. Again and again, as you try and fish for an excuse.

Finally, you settle on one. “Mitsuri needs me.” You nod toward the dance floor where the beautiful, pink girl sways alone, face turned toward shifting lights of blue and purple, her eyes closed. “She’s gone too far.”

Sanemi’s fist tightens. “So have you.”

Your hand pauses midway down your head, and your eyes flick to him, sharper than glass. “Because you know everything, don’t you?”

Sanemi answers with a boldness he knows better than to feel. “When it comes to you? Yeah.”

A laugh, bitter and sharp, barks its way out of you. You snap your shot glass up from the bar and toss its contents back in a single, smooth gulp. You manage to hold out against the burn sliding down your throat, save for a single twitch at the corner of your mouth. “Fucking me isn’t the same as knowing me.”

Sanemi’s hand curls into a fist atop the bar. “Yeah? So what about all those years before? That just all disappeared, huh? Just like that?”

He snaps his fingers. The club lights shift and the shadows under your cheekbones darken, sharpening the planes of your too-hollow face.

“I don’t know, Sanemi,” you retort, mocking. “You tell me.”

Nope; he’s not going to rise to your bait. Not this time. “Says the one who always vanishes before the sun comes up.”

Your voice goes colder than the ice in his glass.“Guess I learned from the expert.”

Always quick to cut him down to size, to remind him that he is nothing, and certainly not anything to you. And like always, Sanemi flinches, and he loses the upper hand. Again.

You swipe an abandoned shot from down the bar and throw it back in one. Your lipgloss smears across the back of your hand when you wipe your mouth, but you’re gone before he can try to reel you back in, disappearing back out onto the crowded dance floor without so much as a look back.

And Sanemi loses you. Again.