Doppelgänger

Under my bowels, yellow with smoke,
it waits.
Under my eyes, those milk bunnies,
it waits.
It is waiting.
It is waiting.
Mr. Doppelgänger. My brother. My spouse.
Mr. Doppelgänger. My enemy. My lover.

– from The Other by Anne Sexton

The night Nathan Harris doesn't die, Spencer washes the blood off of his hands in a D.C. precinct and provides a written statement for their file. He goes through three sheets of paper, crumpling them up and tossing them into the trash, before he turns out something legible. The signature looks like a third grader's.

Garcia sits next to him, her elbow touching his in the solidarity of a shared horror. He can feel the tremors in her body, feel the prickling of her bare skin against his, but her face is professional and composed, and for this he will always be grateful to her.

They argue, but in the end he lets her take him home. She gets as far as his front door before he stops her.

I want to be alone, he says. Please.

Garcia lays one warm palm against the side of his face and looks at him like she wants to say something. She doesn't. Instead, she leans up and kisses his cheek and watches him close the blinds.

______________


The letters start three months later. They come to Quantico and are addressed in a close, neat hand that reminds Spencer of his own.


______________


Dear Dr. Reid,

Thank you.

I'm sorry for causing you trouble. I didn't know what else to do. I know you were just doing your job, but it meant a lot.

Sincerely,
Nathan Harris

_______________


Spencer reads it six times, although he only needs one and it's locked inside of his memory forever.

He intends to throw it away, to crush it into something unrecognizable and toss it into the garbage can the way he did with his own words ninety days ago, but he can't. He goes through the motions once, then fishes it out when no one's looking.

The collection starts that day in the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk, all the way in the back, behind his spare toothbrush and underwear and a stick of deodorant.

They come every four weeks, on a Wednesday. If there is a postal holiday, they are mailed one day early so that they arrive on time.

He doesn't write back. Not at first.

_______________


One night, he arrives at a dump site in South Dakota with Gideon and Hotch. The victim is a woman his own age, slit from her navel to her neck. The wound is deep; it's clean and clinical; it divides her body in half in perfect symmetry. He could fold her right along its line like a paper doll.

Spencer stares at her longer than is appropriate; so long that it draws Gideon's attention. Who did she remind you of? he asks later when they are alone in a borrowed car. Who did you see when you looked at her?

Spencer just shakes his head and lets the questions bounce off of him like hail. No one. No one. No one.

He writes his first letter to Nathan the next morning at 3:30am on the very last page of his case notebook.

_______________


Nathan –

I'm glad to hear that you're doing well. I know how difficult it must be for you there.

Dear Nathan –

Thank you for your letters. I think about you often, and I

Nathan –

I don't know what to say to you, and that's why I have been putting off saying anything at all. I feel like I've failed, somehow

Dear Nathan –

You told me once that you walk, sometimes, and you don't know why. That you always end up in the same place, and you don't know how you got there. That it's just where you go; just where you end up.

We all have those places, those alleys we are compelled towards. We all

Nathan –

Thanks for all of your letters. I would have responded sooner, but the BAU has been swamped.

What are you reading these days?

– Spencer (No "Dr." necessary.)

______________


It's almost six in the morning and he has gone through half of his notebook's empty pages when he's through. All of that for three sentences.

He wanders down to the lobby in his bare feet and slips it through the mail slot before he loses what little nerve he's got left. The clerk gives him a strange look and offers him coffee. Spencer takes it. All of it. He carries the pot back to his room and sets it atop a folded pillowcase on the bathroom sink. He drinks it black while he showers, using the white plastic cup.

It tastes soapy and bitter. It's hot in his belly like need, and he presses his forehead into the mildewy tile, takes his cock in his hand, and makes a sound somewhere between choking and begging when he comes.

_______________


There is a room at the BAU called the Dead File Room.

Nathan Harris is a Dead File as far as the BAU is concerned. He takes up only a couple of inches of space in the margins of the H drawer. There's a tape of his interview with Gideon in there. Some photos. A copy of Spencer's statement. A copy of Garcia's.

Dr. Reid applied pressure to the victim's wounds to stop the bleeding. He did so until paramedics arrived.

Garcia called Nathan a victim. She called Spencer Dr. Reid. She sat in the dingy folding chair and pressed her arm against his and drove him home and kissed his face. She waited until the lock clicked and the blinds came down before she drove away.

Mercy.

_______________


One afternoon, when the rest of them are out for lunch, Spencer goes into the Dead Files and takes out the tape. His auditory memory is not as good as his visual one. Not as precise. There are things he hears and can't remember. Maybe that is a mercy, also.

He turns off the lights, shades the windows, and watches anyway.

Nathan has a voice like a little boy's, uncertain and small. It drips with disgust and shame and sourness. His eyes are everywhere but on Gideon.

I imagine their blood flowing through my fingers.

Spencer doesn't have to imagine. He didn't wear gloves. Nathan's pulse beat itself from a shriek into a whisper underneath his bare hands. Blood is warm and wet, like a mouth. Like a kiss. It's stickier than you might think, slightly viscous. It smells like metal because of the iron.

Spencer wonders if Nathan remembers; if his own blood was enough to sate that curiosity, to alleviate that need. If it's lost its glamour, its appeal, its slow and sensual seep between the lines of his fantasies.

He doubts it.

I want to cut them open. I want to see inside.

Nathan would have made a good profiler, Spencer thinks. After all, that's what they get paid to do, isn't it? To open people up? To see what's inside?

He rewinds the tape and puts it back and locks the drawer before he leaves.


_______________


Garcia hasn't stopped watching him since that day he shut the blinds on her. Nineteen months later, she's still peering at him when she thinks he isn’t looking. She ought to know that he's always looking. Maybe she does and just doesn't care.

When she walks behind him, she cups his shoulder for a beat longer than necessary. She brings him Starbucks in the morning so he doesn't have to drink the sludge in the break room when he runs out of his own. She makes origami dinosaurs and leaves them on his desk, two-dimensional speech bubbles taped to their mouths with RAWR! written in purple ink.

They play cards sometimes, and sometimes she wins, but mostly she loses. She huffs playfully and blows strands of his hair out of his eyes, and her breath smells like gum.

One day, he asks her flat out. Why are you always looking at me like that?

I'm in love with you, she answers with a red-lipped grin and an eyebrow raise. Isn't it obvious?

She ruffles his hair and disappears behind her door, and this time, he watches her.


_______________


Dear Spencer –

I'm allowed to use the phone. Would it be okay if I called you sometime? Or maybe you could call me?

– Nathan

______________


Nathan writes a number at the bottom and says that it's a direct line to his room.

Carrying it around in his memory feels like carrying around an empty holster. Helpless. Spencer recites Pi trying to forget, but his brain with its swept floor and hospital corners won't let him. Everything is in its place, Dead File or Alive.


______________


When Spencer was a child, he had night terrors. The kind where he would scream and thrash and piss himself; the kind that would draw his mother in from her bedroom with a bucket of water that she would throw across his small body to wake him up; the kind that would leave him trembling, alone and soaked, for hours afterwards.

Now that he is an adult, they've developed into other problems. Nightmares. Sleepwalking. Insomnia.

Sometimes he wakes up somewhere strange and is so disoriented that he gets dizzy and panics, turning in circles until he finds a wall to slump against, his heart pounding in his ears. Other times, he wakes up sweating so hard that he to check to make sure that he hasn't started the bedwetting again.

The worst is when he can't sleep at all and has to walk.

He tucks his gun into the waist of his pajamas and zips a sweatshirt over it, and he walks. Sometimes he ends up in the all-night diner with a cup of coffee. Sometimes he's lucky and there's a late movie he can duck into.

Sometimes he ends up in places he shouldn't.

When that happens, he sees Nathan in every undulating shadow, around every dubious corner. Spencer imagines him leaning his dark head against the brick and closing his eyes, hands curled into fists against his thighs, chest rising and falling too fast to be healthy. He imagines the crease between his brows, his tight-lipped mouth.

Moonlight falls across his path, cold and clear, and sometimes it's like some sort of cosmic mirror: himself on one side, Nathan on the other. All of the could-bes, the might-have-beens, the why-nots. All of the things that live in the cracks.

_______________


The connection is never a good one.

Or maybe it is, and Spencer is just surprised at the quality of Nathan's voice, the way it's changed: it's thin as a ghost, but deeper. There is something anchoring it now. It's tethered.

Conversation is awkward at first. It's chess between two inexperienced players, neither of them wanting to take their fingers off their piece. Words slide back and forth; they stutter and don’t settle.

Finally, on their fourth phone call, it's Nathan who checks first.

No one understands me but you.

Spencer pauses, his hand cupped around his King like a shield, before he answers.

It's my job to understand. It's a skill I've learned.

I understand you, too. I bet a lot of people don't.

Checkmate.

_______________


Always think three moves ahead, Gideon said.

Spencer rarely loses now. He can anticipate his opponent's moves; he can outthink them, unravel them, slink around inside their logic like a cat.

When he does lose, it's because he can’t anticipate his own. Sometimes, his hands move without consulting him. Like his feet on those nights he can't sleep.


_______________


They're on the phone one night in February the first time it happens. Regular conversation. Book talk, easy and nonthreatening. Spencer is stretched out on his couch, the television on for light, his fingers tracing patterns across his stomach because he can't keep them still.

He's in the middle of some long ramble on Proust when he stops abruptly.

Nathan's breathing has changed. It's short, jagged.

Spencer stops mid-sentence.

I'm sorry, I… my phone. My work phone. It just went off. I have to go.

He doesn't wait for the goodbye, just hangs up, his hands shaking. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries desperately not to picture what was happening on the other end. He tries every trick he knows, and none of them work.

Afterwards, he falls asleep, spent and disgusted. He doesn't dream.


_______________

Spencer stops answering his phone for three weeks after that.

The letters, which stopped when the calls began, start again immediately.

Garcia drops one on his desk one Thursday – Thursday? – afternoon. She says that it was left in her box by accident, but she's lying. She hasn't read it, though; he can tell.

She stands beside him and watches him turn the envelope over and over in his hands. You've got a secret, loverboy, she says, trying to keep her voice light. I hope it's a dirty one. Her expression is carefully blithe, but she's worried.

Filthy, Garcia, he answers with a smile that doesn't touch his eyes. Depraved.

She says that's just the way she likes it and winks, but as she passes by, she drums her fingers nervously across the edge of his desk. Later, he walks as casually as he can to her office and knocks. He's the only one who knocks.

Oh, baby she says, over and over and over. Oh, baby, oh, honey, oh. No, no, no, no, no.

She holds his hands between her own and listens. Spencer makes her promise not to say a word.


_______________


Dear Spencer –

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that – you know. THAT.

I just like your voice. I like to listen to you. Do you think that means I'm getting better? My therapist says it's a positive sign. (I didn't tell him who you were.)

Can I call you? I promise it won't happen again.

I'm sorry.

Sincerely,
Nathan

_______________


Blood, by its very nature, is intimate. It's what's inside of us; it travels through our hearts and our brains; it's part of our sexual response.

We see each other's blood in sickness, in injury, in birth, in sex, in death: the moments that define us, change us, move us. When we bleed in front of someone, on someone, for someone, we show ourselves to them. We become vulnerable.

Maybe it makes sense, then. Maybe they've been looking at it all wrong.

Nathan laid himself bare for you, Spencer thinks. The least you can do for him is call him back.

_______________


It happens again.

Spencer pretends he doesn't notice.

He hears the exhale, the hiss behind the teeth, the almost-imperceptible slowdown of speech afterwards. He marks the exact moment when Nathan comes: nineteen minutes after eight plus forty-three seconds.

It took him seven minutes.

It takes Spencer six.

He mops his belly with his t-shirt, sticky circles, helices like DNA twisting together.

I have to go, he says. I'm exhausted.

He waits through a long pause for the goodbye, but he doesn't get it. Instead, he gets this: I heard you. Do you always sigh like that? Like you're sad?

Checkmate.

Click.

_______________


That night, in bed, he's loud, like he's shouting some blasphemous prayer to defy God or defy Nathan or defy his own disapproving reflection.

He arches his back; thrashes around like he's in the midst of a terror, like he's seizing; tilts his chin to the ceiling and moans with his mouth wide open; pants and writhes and hollers and says pleasepleasepleasepleasePLEASE until his hips are bucking on their own and he's sweating his hair down into his eyes and he's coming so hard that it hurts. Oh, God, it hurts, like his chest's cut open and his heart is trying to force its way out.

It hurts.

It's good.

(Oh, baby, oh, honey, oh. No, no, no, no, no.)

Oh, yes.


_______________


You look like your disappearing, Garcia says. She leans down and traces the angle of Spencer's cheekbone, which has become strangely prominent over the last few months. Eat a sandwich.

It takes weeks, but she is nothing if not persistent, and she finally wheedles him into dinner at her apartment. It looks exactly like he thought it would – cluttered, colorful, as warm as her hands. When he sinks down into her pink plaid couch, gratitude wraps itself around him so snugly that he falls asleep to her happy chatter from the kitchen and stays that way for over an hour. It's dreamless. Quiet.

He wakes up embarrassed, but she's got the lights off and the television on a low-level buzz, and she's kept his dinner warm for him. His feet are in her lap, his socks mismatched and sagging off his toes, but she doesn't really seem to notice.

She grins at him like she's beat him at Rummy. Morning, sunshine.

Three forkfuls in, both of their phones go off. She insists he finish before they leave – Even you can't be a genius on an empty stomach, Dr. Love – and promises not to breathe a word about their illicit affair.

When she hooks her arm through his outside on the sidewalk, Spencer smiles what might be his first genuine smile in a long, long time. It doesn't go unnoticed.

Oh, I could just eat you with a spoon.

_______________


Profilers have a predatory instinct at least as strong as the criminals they seek. They hunt. They stalk. They prey upon. They sniff out, analyze, anticipate, pounce. Sometimes they kill.

Two different sides of the same sharp-edged coin.

Garcia is her own brand of profiler, and she is just as astute as Spencer.

So is Nathan.

All of them, finely-tuned predators. All of them, teeth and claws and razorblades and guns. All of them, four-chambered hearts and slippery tongues.


_______________


I turn eighteen next week.

Spencer remembers. I remember, he starts.

Nathan pauses for the obligatory happy birthday, then he drops a match into a gas can, and the world begins to burn.

I'm getting out of here.


_______________


There is no cure for Nathan. There is nothing that will fix him; nothing that will rewire the faulty connections in his brilliant brain; nothing that will correct the deviance. When Spencer looked into his anxious eyes and said people change, he lied.

People don't change.

Behavior changes; chemistry changes; circumstances change; bodies change. Who we are – the undertow of our consciousness; our instincts; our primal, screaming Self – does not change.

And maybe it isn't his fault. Fifty-five percent of sexual sadists show neurological abnormalities, primarily in their temporal lobe. Maybe he was born that way; maybe he is a genetic aberration. A biological error. Maybe he didn't ask for this; maybe he didn't choose this, but this is.

Psychology can give him tools, insight, strategy. It can also make him more dangerous, more manipulative, more subversive. Pharmacology can render him impotent and harmless. It can also make him dull, dependent, and useless. Spencer, perhaps, knows this better than anyone else.

No. Nathan is not better. Nathan is not cured.

But Nathan is alive. Nathan breathes and speaks and walks; he reads and laughs and thinks; he is. Nathan is, as well: light and dark, yin and yang, all. Nathan is.

Nathan sliced open his wrists to bleed himself out; Nathan tried to obliterate himself rather than obliterating someone else; Nathan chose a path that some would label cowardice and others would call courage.

Then Spencer stood in his way.

Now he is all that stands between the wolf and the flock. Now he is the Pawn crouched in front of the King. That which we choose to save becomes our responsibility.


______________


You don't have to do this. You've already done more for that kid than…

Garcia – Penelope – has her fingers wrapped so tightly around Spencer's knuckles that the tips of his fingers are turning white. He barely notices.

I do have to. And he isn't a kid anymore, Garcia. He isn't a child. And I…

He pauses. Penelope relaxes her grip and begins tracing back and forth, moving the blood back into his digits. She pinches and pulls, like she's trying to coax the rest of the sentence from his skin. After a moment, she gives up and just asks. You what?

He's mine now, Garcia. He wanted me to let him die, and I didn't. So now he's mine. Spencer pauses another long, long, long moment before he continues. And I'm his.

Without missing a beat, Penelope says, Maybe. But you're ours, too, sugarlump. And you've been ours longer than you've been his. She waits another second, sliding Spencer's finger through a circle made of her thumb and index, and says Normally I don't mind sharing. But in this case?


_______________


Spencer stares at Nathan's hands.

They're in a diner under artificial light, two cups of coffee in front of them, the streams of steam twining around each other like vines. Nathan's got his fingers wrapped around his mug, and Spencer rests his eyes there, trying vainly to see inside the gapping sleeve of Nathan's black t-shirt. Trying to see the scars.

He has elegant hands, thin-skinned and blue-veined with blunt, clean nails and soft-looking skin. They're graceful. They are meant for handling things, doing things. Things that require precision. Piano. Model-building. Surgery. He's nervous – of course he's nervous – but they don't shake. He has the steadiest hands Spencer has ever seen. Hands built for defusing bombs. Or building them. Hands designed for manipulating things that no one else will touch.

Everything about the way he eats is neat and institutional. He sweeps the crumbs from his butter-soaked toast into the crescent of his palm and empties them all into his napkin.

Thank you for meeting me, he says. I wasn't sure you would.

Nathan is watching, too. Spencer is paid to notice the behavior – the atypical eye contact, the sidelong gaze – and is paid, also, to deduce its source. Nathan is watching. He is waiting for something. He is reading Spencer's cues as surely as Spencer is reading his. He shifts around in the torn vinyl booth and grips the end of his sleeves, pressing them down against his body.

Spencer is looking. Nathan is hiding.

Nathan is looking.

Spencer is hiding.


_______________


Outside it's cold. Gunmetal grey. The bloodless sun washes out their skin to matching, sickly pales. It will be gone soon, swallowed by the dark.

They don't speak much, just walk. Their shoulders are nearly the same height now, and Nathan's are broader. Otherwise, they are even, really, in every way that counts. Long limbs, narrow hips, bony necks and tired, tired, tired eyes.

Spencer isn't armed. His service weapon is in the drawer of his nightstand. He stood, bare-chested and sopping wet from the shower, and stared at it for fifteen minutes before he locked it, pocketed the key, and left.


_______________


He is mine and I am his and he is mine and I am his and he is mine and I am his.

Over the past three years, Spencer has spent more nights than even he can recall lying awake, the cogs of his brain rolling over one another in an endless machination. He has come to the conclusion that, sometimes, there is no rescue.

He bound Nathan's bleeding wrists with his own hands, and in that act, shut him away.

Just like he shut his mother away.

Just like he rescued his mother.

Who is going to rescue him, he wonders. Who is going to shut him away?


_______________


In reality, it is nothing like in his fantasies. It never is. It isn't a frantic, heady, heedless rush. It isn't something that happens before he can stop it.

There are plenty of opportunities to say no; plenty of places to which he can beg off; plenty of reasons to do one, the other, or both.

But he doesn't.

_______________


They don't go to Spencer's apartment. Not after Garner. Not after Foyet. He might be reckless but he is never, ever stupid. Not. Ever.

He feels it, though.

He feels stupid up against a wall with Nathan Harris's hands all over him – under his buttons, under his undershirt, up against his skin, running up his belly in a nice, neat line – Nathan's cool, nervous-steady hands like exploratory surgery, pressing against his ribs, his sternum, his navel.

He's looking for something. The delicate places where the blood thrums close to the skin. The soft places between bone where organs hum.

Their faces are close. When Spencer finally speaks, his lower lip brushes Nathan's ear, and Nathan's arm jerks, sending his palm stuttering hard against Spencer's hip. Do you want to know what's inside?

Oxygen. Carbon. Hydrogen. Nitrogen.

Yes.


_______________


Our bodies are mostly air. We aren't vacuums, but we are empty space. Gas. We are mostly invisible.

You could slide your hand right through me, Spencer whispers. There's nothing there. We're mostly the space between atoms. We barely exist.

He's hard, but Nathan isn't. Not until he takes Spencer's buttons apart with his clever, methodical hands and presses two fingers into the hollow of his throat. Spencer can feel Nathan's body stir against his thigh then, vague and noncommittal.

I want to hurt you.

Nathan's voice is suddenly that otherworldly echo again, that faraway thing. Something scared and small in the alleyways of Spencer's mind. Something that will cower until it springs and bares its teeth.

I know.

You aren't afraid of me.

I'm FBI, Spencer starts, his heart pounding against the pads of Nathan's fingers, against the sharp line of Nathan's hipbone jutting between his legs, against the backs of his own half-closing eyes. I know eighteen different ways to kill you with my bare hands.

Teach me, Nathan says, his erection suddenly fierce and insistent, suddenly there all at once, just heat and yes and now. Teach me.

His hand is closing around Spencer's throat, pressure and need, and a bolt of lightning races up Spencer's spine and explodes like a warning shot at the base of his skull. He doesn't resist, just tilts his head back and grabs Nathan by the belt loops.

Spencer breaks the first rule of survival by exposing his throat.

Nathan bites it with his small, sharp teeth, just below the Adam's apple, above his own hand. He breaks the skin and draws blood. Spencer holds him in place, and they slide against each other, their bones rattling like skeletons, grinding together like mortar and pestle.

The French term translates to the little death.

They both come with their claws out, tearing at each other's bodies like beasts.

They can’t look one another in the eye afterwards.


______________


Spencer walks.

He buttons his shirt and pulls on his sweater. He zips his pants. He runs a sweaty hand through his sweaty hair, and he walks.

He walks and he walks and he walks and he walks and he walks and he walks and he walks.

_______________


It's after midnight – 12:02am – when he knocks on Penelope's door. The longer he stands there, the more humiliated he feels, and he is about to walk away when all of the lights come on in a blaze like fireworks.

Her face appears in the window, hair all around her head like a fuzzy halo, and he watches her squint turn into a wide-eyed gape as she rushes to the door to let him in.

He has his collar pulled up, but it doesn't hide everything. The marks are the first thing she notices. She says nothing, just reaches for them, and when Spencer flinches, she doesn't stop.

Her fingertips trace them over and over, and after the fifth time, Spencer starts to shake. She pulls him against her robe – purple, with a collar made of feathers and a satin tie – and then she opens it and wraps his body up with hers, fastening a knot at the small of his back.

She's warm. She smells like soap and sleep and fruit, and he can feel the softness of her lines beneath the oversized t-shirt she's got on underneath.

Shhhhhhhhh, she says. Shhhhhhhhhhh. It's all right. You're all right. All right. You're freezing, baby boy. How long have you been out there? Did you walk here? Okay. All right. Come on.

_______________


Penelope doesn't ask him questions. She puts the coffeepot on, and she gives him sweatpants that are too short and smell like her, and she wraps his shoulders in a blanket. She sits across from him at her tiny kitchen table and looks at him like she sees him. Like the wounds on his neck are portals, and she can see all the way into his soul.

Maybe he's got one. And maybe she can.

Everything is mercy.


_______________


She won't let him sleep on her couch. She wants him where she can see him. Where she can feel him.

He pretends to sleep at first, and she touches his pulse points until she is satisfied.

At four in the morning, she rolls over to stare into his face. They are both awake, bathed in the odd grey of the moon slanting in through her flimsy curtains. He reaches for her, and she lets him.

Beneath him, she is small and vulnerable: her face is bare; her glasses are gone; she is just white and naked and human. Spencer wants to put his body between her and the world; he wants to cover her; he wants to hide her. He looks down at her and sees his mother, sees the woman in South Dakota, sees little girls on their knees in the dirt, oblivious to the eyes raking over them like fingernails. He wants to protect her like she has protected him, like he could not protect Nathan and cannot protect the men and women Nathan will look at and dream of.

But here, he can. Here.

She opens for him, easy and slow. No glove, no love, baby boy she says, half-smiling at him, and he closes his eyes and lets her put the condom on.

Penelope kisses every bruise on his body, slides her tongue over them like she wants to swallow them, take them into herself, make them disappear. She can't.

But she knows what to do, how to angle herself, how to take what she wants and give what she can. When she shudders and gasps, she scratches down his back and makes him bleed. She apologizes over and over, I hurt you I'm sorry I hurt you, and Spencer shuts her up with his own mouth. Okay, okay, okay he mutters against her lips. It's okay.

In the end, she takes the condom off clumsily with her teeth and swallows for him, his fingers tangled in her hair.

_______________


Penelope's phone startles them awake at 7am. She leans across Spencer to answer it, her belly curling over his.

Of course, she says. Of course, give me half an hour.

They look into each other's bleary eyes. For a few moments, Spencer thinks he must be dreaming. Good morning, he says finally, when he realizes she isn’t going to speak first.

Any morning you wake up is a good one, she answers quietly. They need us. You can have the shower first. We'll swing by your place on the way.


_______________


The water slides down his body, gathers in his navel, drips from his fingers. Wet. Hot. He inhales the steam and presses his forehead to the wall.

Nathan Harris is a Dead File.

Spencer's back stings where the spray hits it like a thousand needles digging at his wounds, and he is very much alive.