Chapter Text
Prologue
Spencer sighed as he let himself in to his quiet peaceful apartment and looked around at the clean and organised space where everything was exactly where it should be, except perhaps for a book or three. If anyone from his team had been there to notice, they would have assumed he had sighed in relief at being home the way they all did that night, or because he was finally alone after a hectic eleven days trying to find their latest unsub before he could kill again, or even just relief at being in a space that he could control, the calm tidy apartment where he knew that every surface had been thoroughly cleaned since they’d last been touched by anyone except him, and when they’d last been cleaned. They’d have been wrong! Though even Spencer had to admit that that last reason did make him feel more relaxed in the space. Hotel rooms were a breeding ground of unidentified germs and biohazards and living in the cheap hotel rooms the Bureau were willing to fund for too long was enough to make Spencer’s skin itch. He wished that he had space in his go bag to take his own sheets, towels and pillows when they travelled on a case.
The isolated small town they’d been in, had limited accommodation and the budget cutbacks meant that the team had been forced to share rooms, something they all disliked, they spent too much time together as it was and the lack of time alone to decompress, and the privacy to practice their preferred stress relieving end of day routines grated on all of them.
The team would've been astounded to know that Spencer’s sigh on entering his apartment, was in resignation not relief, and that the usual silence and solitude of the apartment, instead of being welcome felt like it hit him like a wall of loneliness every time he entered it, sapping his energy and motivation to make a life for himself.
He had tomorrow and the day after off so he wasn’t due back at Quantico for 54 hours and 48 minutes but that wasn’t enough time to visit his family and get enough rest to be fit for work when he got back, even if the last plane of the night hadn’t left before the team arrived back in Washington. He began running through his upcoming calendar in his mind, trying to calculate when he would next have enough days off to visit his family and whether he could take a couple of days’ leave to go home for his daughter’s birthday next month, sighing again when he realised he probably wouldn’t be able to visit for more than the day and would spend more time travelling than actually with his family if he went. He probably would do it though. He’d already been told that Thanksgiving and Christmas leave would be out of the question this year, they were due to have leave over Christmas next year and Thanksgiving the year after as long as they weren’t already in the field in the middle of a case, the team were rostered to work right through both the holidays and would be off from December 30th until January 7th except in the case of a major terrorist threat all hands-on deck emergency. It was enough to make him almost hope for a case near his family, as long as it wouldn’t put them at risk, perhaps if he were already there he could’ve taken a couple of days to spend with his family and consulted via phone, and flown commercial to meet the team if they were called in again before he got back.
He wondered again whether he was doing the right thing. Was having a job that he felt used all of his gifts for the protection of other people worth the sacrifices he and his family were making? Would the visits he managed to make be enough or would the day come when his children only remembered him as a man they used to love, who wrote them letters and sent them gifts? Would he be able to fit into a regular team and find the work fulfilling, if he transferred to the LA field office? Or would he be content returning to academia and taking a position at Caltech if it meant being back with his family.
He'd had such high hopes when he entered the FBI Academy that his family would be there to see him graduate and they could make a home here together, but it hadn’t eventuated. Bree and Keith’s relationship was becoming serious and he was happy for her, but heartbroken that it meant his family were staying in Pasadena.
He looked at his watch, it was almost midnight, even with the time difference it was too late to talk to them all now, though he could talk to Bree and get an update on how things were going and warn her he’d be calling in the morning. Bree didn’t answer and he left her a message before setting an alarm to wake up early enough to call them before the elder children left for school.
He felt absolutely filthy having been in the field to take down the unsub, sweating into his bulletproof vest and not had time to clean up before the plane left to take them home and then slept on the plane in his clothes. He quickly stripped off and threw all the clothes from his go bag into the washing machine not being able to stand the thought of dirty clothes sitting around his apartment before taking a hot shower, completing his cleaning ritual and putting on clean warm pyjamas. Once he felt that he’d got rid of the germs and travel grime he moved his laundry to the dryer and repacked his go bag ready in case they got called in again in spite of being supposed to have time off.
Then finally feeling clean enough for the first time in days, he gave in to his stomach rumbling, reminding him that he still hadn’t had dinner so he got some bread out of the freezer and toasted it while heating up a can of baked beans, too tired and sad to bother to cook a proper meal, promising himself that he would go shopping and meal prep some more meals for his freezer tomorrow if they weren’t called away on a new case, pulling a book out of his satchel to read while eating to distract himself from the loneliness of eating alone.
After eating Spencer forced himself to put the book aside and go to sleep, luckily for him he was tired enough to fall asleep almost immediately and to sleep through until he was woken by his family telephoning him the next morning, before the alarm could go off.
Spencer grinned and happily answered, receiving from their excited chatter the best cure for loneliness he could imagine, followed by some amazing news he could barely believe.
He leapt from his bed and began getting ready to go out, he now had a lot he needed to do today. He was so elated that he didn’t even realise he’d left his apartment without drinking his usual sugared coffee. Not that that mattered, he didn’t need it to face the day today.