𝑆𝑖𝑥𝑡𝑒𝑒𝑛.

    Cotton sheets were all Melanie could feel as she pulled her weak fingers into her palm, a muffled groan of pain sounding out loud as she released the fabric.

     Her bruised eyes opened slowly, her vision was soon flooded with the colorless world that surrounded her. She blinked three times to focus, her awareness surging back to her at the same time. Melanie inhaled sharply as she sat up to rest on her forearms, the breath serving as an immediate reaction to the throbbing pain in her lower abdomen.

     She was in a hospital bed. The constant beeping of her heartbeat on the monitor to her right was the only sound in the room aside from the light snores of sleeping agents. Morgan and Penelope leaned against each other on two neighboring chairs to her left. JJ, Rossi, and Emily sat beside each other on a wide couch; all of their heads were slumped in an unnatural direction after they'd accidentally fallen asleep. Hotch sat alone in the corner of the room, the weight of his head resting on his fist that was supported by the arm of the chair.

     Panic set in as she noticed Spencer's absence. This alarm didn't last very long, however. Her left hand was moved ever so slightly by an outward force, her eyes darting towards it only to find that Spencer's hand was behind the action. He sat in an uncomfortable chair that was pulled up beside her bed, his weight hunched over the mattress as he rested his head on top of his folded arms. Even in his sleep, Spencer still managed to find a way to hold onto Melanie.

     Melanie noticed his sunken eyes and the scruffiness of his hair, a sign that he hadn't been taking much care of himself. She ran her free hand through his silky brown locks, her eyes filling with tears as she silently thanked the world for giving her the chance to see him again. To see the people she cared about. Then in one second, it dawned on her. Her serene state quickly left her system just as fast as it had entered, her body erupting in pain as she sat upright.

     "Louise," she breathed through a weak voice. Hotch shook himself awake and rushed to her side, his eyes were bloodshot and tired. Melanie pinched her eyebrows together, confused as to why the entire team looked so drained. "What happened?" she quickly asked.

     "You've been out for three days," he replied, his ringed hand gripping slightly onto the bed frame that surrounded her. Melanie blinked a single time, her gaze was unwavering. Hotch knew that his answer didn't suffice, so he continued. "When we found you, the floor that you were left on was already engulfed in flames. It was a risk to even enter the building, but we went against the orders of the bureau and did it anyway."

     Melanie shook her head, her lower lip trembling as she looked up at Hotch. In all honesty, she couldn't give a single shit about what had happened to her. She only cared about a single thing at that moment, and the man standing beside her knew that. "Where is she, Aaron?" she sniveled, not caring about the worried tears that already spilled from her eyes.

     Hotch held her gaze for a moment before it fell to the floor, his jaw tensing slightly. "The rooms surrounding you had already been burned to ash and rubble," he said through a staggering breath. "Firefighters on the scene discovered a body... and there was nothing we could do."

     Melanie clasped her hand over her mouth, her head involuntarily shaking back and forth. "No," she cried, her eyes squeezing shut as she slumped over.

     Hotch looked down at her through tearful eyes, his hand placing comforting strokes along her back as she sobbed into his arms. "I'm sorry," he whispered. His chest muffled the horrific wails that left Melanie's lips.

     She had no regard for the other agents in the room who had forced themselves awake, their own sorrow already appearing on their faces. Melanie kept her eyes squeezed shut, fearing that if she opened them again that this wicked situation would become her unfortunate reality.

     "It should've been me," Melanie cried almost silently. Her hand grasped a fistful of Hotch's button up shirt that was already coated with her tears. She shook ferociously in his arms, unsure of how she was ever going to make it stop. "It should've been me," she repeated.

     By the way she said it, every agent in the room was entirely sure that she meant it. Melanie truly did believe that she should be dead, and that feeling was going to be incredibly hard to shake. She had lost all concept of space and time, her only way of noticing the passing seconds was by counting the tears that poured down her face.

     "He's, uh— He's in custody," Emily spoke from across the room, her hands folded across her stomach. Her intentions were well, but the mention of that man's existence set Melanie off ten times worse than before.

     The memories of her own torture began to fill her mind. Melanie pulled out of Hotch's grasp and laid against the pillows on the bed, her aching heart continued to beat slowly inside of her chest. She wished that the man was dead. She wished that they were all dead, herself included.

     "What's his name?" she managed to ask.

     "Samael Cadell."

     Melanie quickly discovered that there was no proper word to describe the immense emotion that surged through her veins. It was stronger than sadness, grief, as well as anything and everything in between. It rendered her still. Incapable of possessing the energy to do absolutely anything. Her vision remained forward, her gaze didn't move for a single second.

     "I want to be alone right now," was all she managed to say, the brittleness of her voice scratched in her throat. "Please."

     Spencer looked at each team member respectively, communicating that it was probably in their best interest to abide by her wishes. He understood how she felt to some extent, just as the rest of the team did. With a kiss placed on top of her head, Spencer began to follow his teammates out of the hospital room.

     "I'll tell Dr. Bates that you're awake," he said. Spencer hung onto the doorframe, turning around to look back at Melanie. She still hadn't moved a single inch, and her gaze remained just as still as it had been for the last minute. "I'll be in the waiting room if you need me," he added shortly. "I'll see you later, okay?" he continued, a frown pressing downwards on his lips after his words didn't receive a reply.

     Spencer watched with tear filled eyes as Melanie rolled over onto her side that faced away from him and pulled the blanket over her shoulders. Dr. Bates appeared at the doorway, and Spencer disappeared into the hallway as the older woman entered.

     "How are you feeling, Melanie?" she asked, examining the medical charts on the wall that had been updated the previous hour.

     Melanie thought. Was there a single word in the universe that could describe what it was that she felt? Still, unsaturated, depressed? All three words would never amount to the sunken feeling that possessed her, and the one that she managed to respond with didn't either.

     "Tired," she whispered in response.

     Dr. Bates frowned, the tan–skinned woman moving to hover over the woman who continued to lay still in the hospital bed. "Well, that's understandable. It's a miracle that your team found you when they had. You truly have an incredible amount of luck," she responded.

     Melanie craned her neck to look back at the woman, her jaw trembling and her eyes wide. "My sister is dead and I have scars covering my body that will remind me of it every single day that I live," she fumed, her teeth gritting before she continued. "Where is the luck in that? Because I certainly don't see it."

     Dr. Bates dropped her head, the regret on her face prospered as a result of her poor word choice. The red–haired woman cleared her throat before continuing: "You'll only have to stay here for another week at best."

     Melanie turned away from the woman and eased into the harness of the hospital mattress beneath her. She ignored the ringing in her ears for a few seconds, a shaky breath channeling through her nose. "I don't want to have any visitors," she said slowly.

     The doctor pinched her eyebrows together, her head turning to look at the door that her numerous friends had just flooded out of. "But—"

     "I won't have any visitors," Melanie said again, the rewording making her wishes even clearer. A tear fell down the bridge of her nose and fell onto the white pillow beneath her bead. "Tell them that I'm sorry about it."

     Dr. Bates nodded understandingly, though Melanie couldn't see it for herself. With that, the woman left the room.

     Six full days had passed, and it was finally time for Melanie to leave the silence of her hospital room.

     She hadn't moved much in that time span aside from using the restroom and eating very little food from the full meals that Dr. Bates or one of her nurses brought Melanie each day. She picked at her plates, unable to force even the littlest of food down her throat. Melanie couldn't even feel how hungry she was, or how much her limbs ached for some sort of physical activity. Either she couldn't feel it, or she simply didn't care enough to respond to it.

     The only thing that Melanie could feel was the prominent ache of both her heart and her head. It was almost as if the world was forcing her to pick between them; begging the question of which should she listen to: her head or her heart?

     Melanie thought about listening to her heart. Her heart longed for the comfort of her friends — for the comfort of Spencer. Her heart begged her to tear down the walls that she had just spent six days building. Meanwhile, her head reminded her of all of the horrors that existed in the world. Her head reminded her that the tough walls she'd built were only a created as mean of her protection, both physically and emotionally. Her head reminded her that if she spoke long enough, the only words that could come out would be jumbled lines of incoherent cries about the loss of her sister.

     Perhaps it all boiled down to the fact that Melanie didn't want to be perceived as the vulnerable, fragile woman that she'd become. Her heart reminded her that the people she held close to her would never think of her in that way, but her mind told her that they'd be lying to themselves if they didn't. She picked at the hem of her hospital gown as her swollen eyes watched. Melanie was so detached from her current situation that she hadn't even noticed Spencer standing in the doorframe for the past thirty seconds.

     "Hey," he voiced, finally getting her attention. His nervous hand gripped the satchel that hung around his shoulders, his weight balancing on the heels of his feet.

     Melanie sat up, her puffy eyes remaining somewhat squinted as she looked back at him. Though she had convinced herself that he'd look at her with the utmost amount of pity, he didn't. It was almost as if he already knew what she needed at that moment, which only meant that he knew she didn't need or want anyone's pity.

     "You can come in," she said through a flat voice.

    Spencer nodded at the first words she had said to him in a week and approached her. He pulled a stack of folded clothes out of his bag and placed them beside her on the bed, flattening it out with the palm of his hand. "You're being discharged from the hospital," he said.

     Melanie's eyes widened. "It's been a week?"

     Spencer shook his head. "Six days and twelve hours," he corrected her, earning the crack of a small smile from Melanie.

     Melanie brought the clothes into her lap and paused, her eyes flicking up at Spencer. It was the first moment in the time that she'd known him that she felt insecure about herself — insecure about the way he'd see her. Her body wasn't something that he hadn't already seen before, but she wasn't sure how he'd react to seeing the various amounts of multicolored bruises and developing scars that covered her skin.

     She gulped, bringing her eyes back into her lap. "Can you, uh... turn around?"

     "Oh, yeah. Yeah—" Spencer stumbled over his words as he spun around to face the wall. "Sorry."

     Melanie stepped out of the bed and changed her clothes, her eyes unwillingly studying the scars that covered her abdomen. She changed as quickly as she could into the clothes that Spencer brought her. Considering that the sweatshirt hung to her mid–thigh and the sweats bunched at her ankles, she was entirely sure that the clothes belonged to him.

     "I hope they fit all right," he spoke in the direction of the wall, almost as if he was able to read her mind. "I tried my best to accommodate both comfort and size, but it was kind of difficult to do so..." Spencer cut his ramble off, his eyes squeezing together and he followed with a short: "Sorry."

     Melanie slowly crossed the room, her limbs still sore and her entire body continued to weigh her down. She found her way into Spencer's arms and wrapped her own around his waist, pulling him closer with the strength that she had left. He didn't waste a second before meeting her halfway and lacing her in his arms, one of his hands providing solacing strokes on her back while the other placed careful strides on the back of her head.

     She was hurting. He could feel it.

     "I'm sorry," he said again, only this time his voice was much more serious. Melanie cried into the comfort of his warmth, allowing herself to let her emotions free. "I know," he voiced, his hand continuing to run through her hair. "I know."

     Melanie pulled her head away from his chest and rested her forehead against his, Spencer's hand was still idling on the back of her head. Her eyes were red with tears, and the visual pulled roughly on his heart.

     "I can't go back there," she whispered.

     Spencer nodded understandingly, knowing that she was speaking in relation to her apartment. "You don't have to," he replied.

     Despite how much Melanie longed for him and her friends, she still wanted to be left alone to deal with her grief in the privacy of her own space. However, she couldn't fathom the idea of stepping into her apartment. In that second, her heart won the horrific battle that it was having with her mind.

     "Can I stay with you?" Melanie asked through a frail whisper. If there was a single person in the world that would be able to make her feel all right for even a second, it was going to be Spencer Reid.

     Spencer smiled, moving to place a kiss on her forehead. "Of course you can."

     "How is she?" Emily whispered while moving to peer around Spencer's shoulders, his frame guarding the bedroom that Melanie laid in.

     "She's eating a bit more," Spencer replied, turning his neck to look back at the closed bedroom door. "But other than that, all she wants to do is sleep... I can't blame her."

     JJ nodded her head. She, too, found herself attempting to look around Spencer. "Is she accepting any visitors?" she asked, a warm and hopeful smile on her face. Spencer pressed his lips together and thought for a moment, unsure of whether or not Melanie was in the right headspace for social interaction.

     Penelope stepped forward, her cherry red lips forced into a frown. "Maybe she just needs her girls," she offered her insight. "I mean... isn't it always easier for a woman to talk to women?"

     "Let them try, kid," Rossi spoke from the back of the group, earning a smile from Blake as she turned towards him. "There's no way they'll leave the premises otherwise." Spencer huffed and stepped out of their way.

     JJ, Emily, Penelope, and Blake rushed inside of the room, but the crippling silence of it immediately halted their movements. Melanie slept quietly and still, her soft breathing being the only thing that made her seem alive.

     "Oh my goodness," Garcia whisper–yelled, only to be shushed by the other three women in the room. "Hey! Don't shush me!"

     "Shhh!" Emily and JJ shushed in synchronization.

     Blake stepped in front of the women and held her hands up, attempting to end the quarrel between them before it had a chance to begin. "Why don't we come back another time, ladies? Let's let Melanie rest."

     The four women trailed out of the bedroom and shut it behind them, the looks on their faces were telling of how disappointed they were that they couldn't speak to Melanie. Spencer offered them a tight–lipped smile to let them know that he understood the feeling all too well.

     JJ's phone vibrated in her pocket, sighing as she read the contents of the message. "We just got assigned to a case," she informed.

     Morgan's head fell backwards with a disappointed sigh. "Can't they hand the case to somebody else?" he asked. "I mean, we're a man down. Our team isn't complete without her."

     Hotch shook his head. "You know that we have no power over the cases we are assigned to," he answered. He looked at Reid. "Are you going to come along?"

     Spencer turned around towards the closed bedroom door and shook his head. "No, it's better that I stay here," he confidently replied. "Just in case."

     Hotch nodded, and the team began to pile out of the cozy apartment. Morgan was the last to leave. He placed a hand on Spencer's shoulder. "We'll miss you out there, kid," he spoke, his eyes darting once again to the closed door. "Both of you." Spencer nodded, allowing Derek to leave the apartment with some form of satisfaction.

     Spencer locked the door behind them with a sigh and stumbled onto his couch. He hadn't gotten the chance to look through the mail that he'd collected from Melanie's apartment earlier that morning, so he figured it was a good time to do so.

     "Catalog... magazine... junk..." Spencer voiced out loud as he rapidly flicked through the collection of mail. His heart sank when a white envelope was the only thing left in his hand, a sleep envelope with a certain prison address labeled as the sender's.

     It just so happened to be the same exact prison that Samael Cadell was currently being held at.

Notes.
hey guys

sooo how are we feeling about this new era of the book?? the new cover?? 👀 please leave your thoughts!

also, i've been planning two other criminal minds fics that exist in the same universe as this one! one is an emily prentiss x female oc and the other is an aaron hotchner x unsub!female oc. i don't know which i should put more focus into </3

and a special thank you for those who read and interact with this book! i never had any idea how much a single vote or a comment could motivate an author until i started writing on this app ❤️