One shot. Post-ep for 12X12, 'A Good Husband'.

Tangled

He was sitting at his kitchen table, chatting with his daughter, when he heard shouting coming from the bedroom.

"Spencer! Help me, Spencer!" The voice of his mother.

Reid rose immediately, tipping over his chair in the process. It frightened his daughter.

"Daddy? Daddy!"

"Stay here!" he'd commanded, rueful of abandoning her to her fright. But his mother's shouting was insistent, and now punctuated with screams, and he could do nothing else. He ran to the bedroom, nearly slipping on the wet floor.

"Spencer! They're coming for me, Spencer! Help me! Help me!"

"Where are you?"

"In the sea! Can't you see me? Why can't you see me?"

He followed her voice onto a sandy beach. He stood there, alone, still hearing his mother's cries. The beach was littered with seaweed, and shells, and something else. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of jellyfish…dead, desiccated, their centers shrinking, their tentacles tangled with one another.

"Speeennncceeerrrr!"

He turned. And there, on her knees, in the shallows, was his mother, covered in the same creatures that littered the sand. But the ones on his mother were still alive, the tentacles reaching around her, her torso, her arms, her head. He ran to her, and started trying to peel the slimy creatures from her skin.

"Take them off me, Spencer! Please! Take them away! I'm dying!"

He was frightened that he wouldn't be able to remove them all before they'd succeeded in killing her. But, suddenly, he was even more frightened to feel one cold, wet tentacle transfer itself from his mother's body to his own. He slapped at it, even as he continued to pull another away from his mother. As he did so, another tentacle detached from Diana, and attached itself to his temple. It began to steal his thoughts.

I'm losing my mind! It's taking my mind! Somebody help me! Help us!

His own shouts were still echoing in his mind when Reid startled awake to the sound of the flight attendant announcing that they were about to begin beverage service. Briefly disoriented, a throbbing in his knee reminded Reid that he was on a commercial flight, stuffed into an economy seat, headed in search of ….something.

He wasn't even awake enough to think about his quest, let alone to decide if it was foolhardy or wise. This past hour on the plane had been the most prolonged period of relative quiet that he'd had since the day he'd brought his mother back from Houston, to live with him.

No part of his life had gone undisrupted since he'd brought Diana home. He'd gotten almost no rest. The scarf that he used to tether himself to her each night, to be sure she didn't wander, seemed to rouse him every time she tossed or turned in her sleep. The emotional tether between them, and the strain it underwent each time her mood swung, kept him in a constant state of turmoil. He'd been unable to quiet his mind ever since he'd made the decision to pull his mother from the study she'd been in. He didn't think he'd even had enough consecutive minutes of slumber to get into REM sleep. Today, just now, he'd had the first dream he could remember since bringing his mother home.

It had been so vivid. But it had also been the kind of strange, nonsensical dream that he'd always found so easy to dismiss. And yet, this time, he felt compelled tease it apart. It felt like there was a message there. But what?

Reid sipped a cup of bad airplane coffee as he thought back, trying to recapture the images. He'd been in his kitchen…right? Eating a sandwich, and then his mother had called out, and he'd run to her.

But, wait, no…..I stopped. I spoke to someone…my daughter?!

A daughter. On the surface of it, it seemed obvious. He'd spent some time with the child of one of their victims, giving Prentiss an opportunity to interview the mother. The little girl had been a few years younger than Henry, and she'd charmed the pants off Reid. She'd compared his hair to that of the tangled mess of her doll, and gotten him to laugh, after days of him wondering if he'd ever laugh again. Their bond had been immediate, and so visible that her mother hadn't hesitated at all to send the little girl off with an FBI agent they'd just met.

He'd made his young charge laugh in turn by asking her something he'd asked Henry a hundred times.

"Have you ever had a peanut butter and jellyfish sandwich?"

Just as expected, just as Henry had done each of the hundred times he'd asked, the little girl had made a face and told him there was no such thing. Unlike Henry, she'd also burst into giggles, and he'd melted. A new smile came to his face at the memory of it.

Okay, so, that's where the jellyfish in my dream came from. Right?

The question remained unanswered as his mind went back to thoughts of the little girl. He knew, instinctively, that she'd appeared in his dream for another reason.

It was what that last victim said. The one we saved. He thought he'd found his one true love.

The victim's words had lanced into Reid, the moment he'd heard them. Brought him back, just like that.

It had already been four years, and their time in relationship had been but a fraction of that, their time in physical proximity just a matter of moments. But, like their victim, Reid, too, had met his one true love. Maeve hadn't betrayed him, but she'd been lost to him nonetheless. And with her had gone any hope of a future full of life, and love.

He'd been brought back to that moment of loss twice in the past 24 hours. The little girl had beguiled him. In doing so, she'd also rekindled a longing, one he hadn't felt in years. He'd thought that fire had burnt itself out, its embers scattered into the winds of lost opportunity.

He'd allowed himself to dream, once upon a time, of having a family. A wife, and children. Maybe even a dog. He'd begun to dream in earnest when he realized he was in love with Maeve, and she with him. And, just as he'd mourned Maeve, he'd also mourned the loss of that family, no matter that its members existed only in his unrealized future.

He'd reconnected with that family today. Had just the slightest taste of what it might have been like, had he been blessed with a daughter. And, before he could actively squelch it, the longing had once again established itself in his heart. Being reminded of Maeve had only made that longing more acute, at the same time that he knew it to be futile.

Futility was all he saw in his near future, and maybe the more distant one as well. His mother's illness was progressing, in spite of all conventional and non-conventional treatments. Alzheimer's was a formidable enemy, its tell-tale plaques and tangles, the remnants of once vibrant neurons, accumulating daily inside his mother's brain. As tragic as her original affliction with schizophrenia had been, at least she'd found some degree of equilibrium, at least she'd found a way to feel stable, and safe. But all of that was being stripped away from her now, along with her identity.

Just like it might strip me of my own identity, one day.

He let out a bitter laugh at that.

Maybe it's already begun to strip me of my identity. I certainly never thought I'd be the person to do some of the things I've done in trying to take care of her, let alone some of the things I've thought of doing. Maybe it's already changing me.

He relived the past days of his mother's paranoia and fear, her bouts of memory interspersed with memory loss, and he tried to picture the process going on within. And then he knew.

That's the real reason those jellyfish showed up in my dream. This goddamn disease is reaching tentacles in between the cells of Mom's brain. It's choking them off, and leaving them for dead, just a tangle of axons with nowhere to connect.

He shivered to remember the feel of those tentacles leeching onto his own skin, and the terror of sensing them robbing him of his mind. The dream had acted as a harbinger of things to come, and he resented it. His time with the little girl today had awakened something in him, something he would never allow himself to realize, because this vile disease might be lying in wait to attack it.

There are so many things I don't know. So many things I can't know. Except that I could never put a child of mine in this position.

As a much younger man, he'd thought the very same thought. He'd known schizophrenia could be inherited. He'd dreaded entering his twenties, knowing it might be lurking there, planning to seize his sanity, stripping away from him his love of learning, and knowledge.

In that time, and considering the state of his own, it had been easier to make the decision not to have a family. But his twenties had come and gone, and his social circle had widened, and he'd seen what it could be like. He'd even tasted it, in some of his relationships within the team, and especially when some of those team members had shared their own families with him. For the first time, he'd felt the security, the sense of worth, that came from knowing he could rely on someone, and not simply to be the one relied upon. And it had made him all the more determined to be, himself, reliable. He'd felt it most viscerally on the day he'd become a godfather.

From the very moment he'd first held the weight of the infant Henry in his hands, he'd felt protective of the boy, invested in his future, loyal, more deeply touched than he could ever remember having been in his life. Just four years later, it had been Henry's small, empathetic hand laid on his grieving godfather's arm that had begun the healing process in Reid. To be granted the privilege of such love was to become compelled to return it in kind.

Taking care of one another, being there for one another, becoming entangled in one another's lives, for good or for bad….that's what made a family. JJ had reminded him, just the other day, that he was a part of hers. She was willing to be in whatever mess he'd found himself, just because she cared about him. So why was he so caught up in wanting another family, a family of his own? Was it so very different?

The reverie he'd been thrust into by the dream had taken his mind from the task at hand. Reid could feel the change in altitude as the plane began its descent. They would be on the ground in a few minutes, and he would have some difficult decisions to make. Things like where, exactly, to go. Who, exactly, to meet. And what, exactly, he was willing to risk, and for whom, and why.

He turned on his phone as they taxied in from the tarmac, and found that he had four text messages, all of them from JJ. He'd left without saying goodbye to her this afternoon.

EMILY SAYS YOU'RE GOING TO HOUSTON? WILL YOUR MOM BE ALL RIGHT? DO YOU NEED ME TO HELP?

ARE YOU OKAY? YOU'D TELL ME IF YOU WEREN'T, RIGHT? REMEMBER, YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING BY YOURSELF. YOU HAVE FAMILY HERE.

CALL ME WHEN YOU LAND, OKAY? I'M WORRIED.

SPENCE?

Reid stared at the screen. That's what family looked like.

But it also looked like the woman he'd left behind in his apartment, features aged beyond her years in the rictus of schizophrenia.

Both women loved him, each in their own way and to their own ability. And he loved them. Which was why he had to protect them...both of them. That was also what family looked like.

So he fired off a quick text: LANDED. OKAY. DON'T WORRY.

If he'd been thinking more clearly, if he'd been using only his brain, he'd have realized that the brevity and lack of detail in the message would only worry her more. But it wasn't his brain that was driving things at the moment. It had taken a back seat to his heart, much less skilled at behaving rationally.

Walking up the jetway, he felt a plan falling into place. He couldn't know where it would lead, or even if it was the right thing to do, but he was no stranger to ambiguity.

The only thing he knew with certainty, the only thing he could control, was that love would have to guide him.

And it might have to save him.