Spencer has had his words since he was eight years old.

They're written in a heavy, dark script, without the loops and curls of Spencer's own handwriting, and perch delicately along the edge of his collarbone. He remembers waking up to them; remembers opening his eyes in the morning and having to put on his glasses in order to decipher the black smudge that had appeared on his chest. He remembers the huge swell of something that had awoken inside of him, a feeling which only grew stronger as Spencer grew older, and hasn't yet gone away.

Ever since he was eight years old, Spencer has wracked his brains as to what he can say in order to make his soulmate respond the way they will. But no matter how he twists his words, no matter who he chooses to initiate conversation with, nothing remotely romantic sparks within him for the first twenty-seven years of his life.

Until, of course, the day that is does.

Spencer is currently running on three cups of red-eye coffee in as many hours, and very little sleep. By which he means no sleep at all. He knew when he signed up for this job he'd be in for a hard time, but no-one ever told him that it'd be this bad. Well, maybe they had, but Spencer hadn't listened. He had a habit of tuning out inconsequential conversations.

The op he's on at the moment is so secret even he's not sure it exists. Spencer has been deep, deep undercover for a little over a year now, and hasn't yet turned up anything of import. Until today, that is, which is the reason he's currently on a caffeine high.

"187, you copy?" crackles Agent Cook's voice through the com. Spencer pulls himself out of his haze of illegal documents and ersatz tax returns, covertly looking around to check he's alone before responding.

"This is 187. You have any new intel?"

"This is a code red, Agent, I repeat, a code red," comes the response, and Spencer's blood runs cold. "Drop everything and run, 187, you hear me? Operatives are four minutes away. Find a safe place and do not give yourself away. 187, do you copy?" After Spencer answers in the affirmative, trying to regulate his heartbeat like he's been told to do dozens of times by his superiors, the com goes dead. Spencer pulls it from his ear and crushes it with the heel of his boot.

Footsteps sound in the hallway. Spencer moves, as silently as he can, to crouch in the furthest corner of the room, away from the light of the sun that is streaming in through the windows. There's only one exit to this place, so right now, all he can do is pray.

The door swings wide with a loud bang. It's been kicked open. Plain-clothed men and women, armed with military-grade weapons, stream inside. Spencer's prayers must go unheard, because he is spotted in an instant and hauled to his feet.

"I knew you were the mole," Hank snarls into his face, and Spencer has time to register the gold Rolex on his wrist before the fist swings down like a pendulum and pushes him into darkness.

"Forty-seven minutes ago, a CIA op went bad and three of their undercover agents were abducted," Garcia says, bringing the images of the victims up on the screen. "Stephanie Taylor, Nicholas Katsaros and Spencer Reid. All agents have been undercover on the same op for over a year, and all three were kidnapped within the last fifty minutes."

Derek leans forward on his elbows to examine the images of the agents. Stephanie is dark-haired and wide-eyed, Nicholas has a Greek complexion and a crooked smile, and Spencer's glasses magnify his pupils by at least a factor of 10. All three of them look like ordinary people; out of a room of one hundred, Derek wouldn't pick any of them as CIA.

Of course, that's probably why they were chosen to go undercover.

"Why have we been assigned to this?" Prentiss asks, jolting Derek out of his thoughts. "Surely the CIA would prefer to handle their own agents."

"They would," Hotch says, looking at the screen, "But this has gone over their heads. The operation the agents were working on is extremely delicate, and if any one of them were to break under interrogation, it could lead to a major breach in national security. The President himself wants as many people as possible working the case. These agents need to be found." Hotch gets to his feet and looks at the team with a deadly serious expression. "Wheels up in twenty," he says, and sweeps from the room.

As the others pack up and start to follow Hotch's lead, Derek's gaze is drawn, almost magnetically, to Spencer Reid's photograph that dominates almost a third of the television screen. He just looks so goddamn young; he couldn't be more than thirty. Derek's soulmate tattoo, written in curling cursive handwriting on his chest over his heart, pulses uncomfortably at the thought. He pushes the sensation away, and goes to get ready for a flight to Vegas.

"Who do you work for? Who?"

Spencer wakes up to those words being yelled into his ear, and a dousing of ice cold water over his shackled body. He opens his eyes groggily, the darkened room he's in coming slowly into focus, but largely obscured by the face which takes up most of his field of vision.

"Who do you work for?" Hank repeats, grabbing Spencer's hair by the roots and pulling. Spencer stifles a whimper, trying to ignore the tears that spring to his eyes at the sensation.

"I don't…know what you're…talking about…" he manages to spit out through his dry throat and cracked lips. "My name is…Matthew Gray…I'm an accountant…from Reno…please…I have a family…"

"Shut up." Hank releases Spencer's hair suddenly and his head rocks forward, teeth clinking together painfully. "Don't waste your breath on those lies. It'll be easier for all of us if you just talk now."

Spencer looks around. He and Hank are alone in the room, and there is a singular swinging lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Its dim light as it swings to the left reveals a wall where various instruments of torture seem to be hung: pliers, knuckledusters, even a whip that looks like a cat o' nine tails. Spencer swallows, grits his teeth, and turns to face Hank again.

"My name is Matthew Gray," he says, as firmly as he can manage. "I'm an accountant from Reno. I have no idea what you want from me. Please, just let me go."

Hank tilts his head to the side, and for a single, bizarre moment, resembles a meerkat. The thought, absurdly, makes Spencer want to laugh. "Too bad," he finally says, turning towards the torture instruments and letting amusement drip its way into his voice. "I hate torturing someone on an empty stomach."

They meet with Agents Cook and Richards when they land. Derek shakes their hands after Hotch, feeling their clamminess and trying not to wrinkle his nose. He can't imagine what they must be going through; if something like this happened to one of the members of the BAU, Derek would be beside himself. And they haven't only lost one agent; they're down three.

Derek can't find the words to comfort them, so instead he says nothing at all.

"We can't give you the details of the op," Cook tells them on their way to the field office. "It's highly classified intel. Letting you in on it would be almost as bad as what'll happen if one of ours breaks." Her voice cracks on that final word, and she has to clear her throat before continuing. "What I can tell you is that we're dealing with domestic terrorism, on a scale like nothing we've ever seen before. Agents Taylor, Katsaros and Reid were each tasked with infiltrating the organisation in different ways. For a little over a year, they've been largely successful in assimilating with the terrorists and have managed to establish themselves as trusted allies. Unfortunately, this hasn't correlated with any major breakthrough of intel. That is, until today." Derek notices Cook's hands tighten around the steering wheel. "187—Agent Reid—turned up a major cache of documents which could very well lead us to the head of the group. Taylor was given access to the network's inner database, and Katsaros was set to meet up with a member of the inner circle tomorrow. It looked like the breakthrough we needed."

"All three agents got this intel on the same day?" Derek frowns. "Didn't that seem a little off to you?"

Cook sighs. "Looking back on it now, yeah, it does. But this morning, we were just so excited to actually be getting somewhere—none of us realised that that somewhere was probably a setup created to root out any moles in the network. And we fell for it."

"You can't blame yourself for this," Hotch says, his voice authoritative and comforting. "All three of your agents are highly trained. They'll be able to resist interrogation for at least forty-eight hours."

"And after?"

Hotch meets Derek's eyes in the rearview mirror. "Hopefully we'll have found them by then," he says finally, "And you won't have to worry about after."

They spend the rest of the car ride in silence.

Spencer tries to wriggle away from Hank's grip, but as he's shackled to the wall there's really nowhere he can go. Hank gets his fingers around Spencer's shirt collar and tugs, revealing the soulmate tattoo inked onto his collarbone beneath.

Hank mouths the words as he reads them, his lips twisting up into a cruel smile. "Now that's a first meeting I'd like to see," he says, hefting up the burning poker in his free hand. "Too bad neither of us will, now."

He presses the poker down onto Spencer's skin, down onto his tattoo, and the pain is so unbearable Spencer can't help but scream.

They're in the conference room provided for them when it happens. One minute Derek's standing with his hands on his hips, looking up at the noticeboard on which they've reduced the lives of Stephanie Taylor, Nicholas Katsaros and Spencer Reid down to several documents and photographs each, and the next he's writhing on the floor, shouting himself hoarse because the pain is so bad he'd rather be dead than feeling it.

Dimly, he can hear the shouts of his team members, but it's as if they're a long distance away. All that Derek can feel, hear, taste, smell and see is the pain: it lances all through his body, but seems to be concentrated on his tattoo, sending dangerous pulses through the valves and ventricles of his heart and threatening to send Derek into cardiac arrest.

And then, all of a sudden, it stops. As soon as it had come, the pain disappears, and Derek is left gasping on the floor, trying to compute what just happened.

"Morgan? Morgan! You okay?" Derek lets JJ and Hotch pull him to his feet and lead him over to a chair. "What happened?"

Derek shakes his head, just as puzzled as they are. "My tattoo…" he manages to say around the bile in his throat, and looks away as both JJ and Hotch visibly blanch. He knows what they're thinking. So the story goes, you're meant to be able to feel it when your soulmate dies. You're meant to be able to feel them die. Derek's never had the courage to ask Hotch—the only member of their team to have ever experienced that—if it's true.

His hand trembling, dreading what he will find, Derek's fingers find the hem of his henley and slowly begin to pull the fabric up, revealing his stomach, the outline of his lower ribs, until finally his chest can be seen and on it, his tattoo—

Which is just as vibrantly dark as always. Derek lets out a sigh of relief. When your soulmate dies, your tattoo turns white, into a scar. His tattoo is very much still a tattoo, and for that he is thankful, but it begs the question: what the hell happened to his soulmate? By the looks on their faces, JJ and Hotch are thinking the same thing, but none of them have any ideas as to the answer.

Spencer wakes, once again, after being doused in icy water. He breathes harshly and shakes the droplets from his hair, blinking rapidly to adjust his vision to the darkened room. It's not Hank with him this time, but Aimee—Aimee whom Spencer has laughed with, gotten drunk with, let cry on his shoulder not two weeks before.

"Aimee…" he croaks out, licking his cracked and bleeding lips. "Aimee, please…"

Her face, which has always been soft and fragile in repose, hardens and turns resolute. "We're not friends," she enunciates clearly, setting down the water bucket and looking at him coldly. "Not anymore. I can't believe I trusted you."

"Aimee, please, you can still trust me, I'm not who Hank says I am—I'm Matt Gray, you know that, I'm your friend—"

"Shut up!"

Spencer falls silent and avoids Aimee's laser-like gaze. He doesn't say anything as she wanders over to the wall of torture instruments; doesn't say a word as she picks up the pliers and tests them in her grip; doesn't flinch as she walks back over, posture ramrod-straight, and grabs his hand in her own.

Spencer doesn't say a word, and doesn't move a muscle, but my God, does he scream when she grips his fingernails in the pliers, one by one, and pulls.

Hotch sent Derek back to the hotel after his episode, so when he comes in the next morning, coffee in hand, it is to a completely different atmosphere.

Prentiss meets him in the hallway outside the conference room. "They found Taylor's body last night," she says, her voice low. "Evidence of torture and sexual abuse. Cook's been on edge ever since. She thinks Taylor talked."

Derek frowns as he takes a sip of his coffee. "She can't know that," he says, but the words ring empty to the both of them. Prentiss grimaces and leads him inside to where the rest of the team is waiting. They all look up as he enters but don't say a word, engrossed in Garcia's voice coming from the speakerphone.

"—been trying to hack into that database you said Taylor got access to, but its firewalls are out of this world, it'll take me days to get through them and by then—"

"It'll be too late," Rossi finishes for her, and sighs. He meets the rest of the team's eyes one by one. "We've got to treat this like any other case. Forget that it's domestic terrorism—we need to think about it as an abduction."

"So how does that change our profile?" JJ asks, looking up at the pinboard. "Taking away the terrorism aspect, the unsub profiles like a sexual sadist, but we can't say that for sure because there's a high chance that they view the torture as a necessity, rather than a hobby."

"Hang on," Derek says, setting down his coffee and picking up the case file in front of him. "Maybe we've been looking at this wrong. You said that after Reid was taken, authorities spread out within a thirty-mile radius to look for their hideout." Derek looks up to meet Hotch's gaze. "But what if the network didn't move out, but in?"

Rossi shifts slightly in his position on the table. "So instead of running away," he says slowly, "Like a domestic terrorism organisation would, they consolidated inwards. Like a sex offender in their own home." His eyes light up excitedly. "Garcia, can you pull up the owners of the property where Agent Reid was taken from?"

There's a quick sound of keys being tapped. "Jacob Huntley and his wife, Lucy," Garcia says through the speakerphone, "Have owned the building for…almost three decades."

"Can you dig through their personal life?"

"Sure thing…hang on…Jacob is a primary school teacher and Lucy a nurse at the local GP office. They look…clean. Like, really clean." Derek can almost hear Garcia frown through the phone. "If I dig a little deeper, they're…nothing."

Hotch's eyebrows knit together. "What do you mean, Garcia?"

"I mean, sir, that Jacob and Lucy Huntley don't exist—on the surface, they do, sure, and I guess that's as far as the CIA went. But if you get through their tax returns, mortgage, birth certificates—it's all fake."

"Can you find the source of the falsified information?"

"I can…just a second…okay, so, the info seems to be coming from an IP address that leads to the local library, but if I dig a little into their login system I will find…Hank Farrar and Trevor Wilcox-Watson."

Derek leans forward in his seat, half-finished coffee now forgotten in its biodegradable cup. "Garcia—"

"Sending addresses now, my sweets. Q out."

The team gets to their feet. "Dave, Prentiss, you go with Cook to Wilcox-Watson's place," Hotch says. "The rest of us will head to Farrar's. Time is precious here, people. Let's get those agents out as soon as possible."

Spencer must be dreaming. He must be dreaming because when he opens his eyes, it's not Hank or Aimee he sees but an angel, an angel with dark skin and piercing eyes and a bulletproof vest that reads FBI. "You're so beautiful," Spencer says sluggishly, the drugs Aimee injected him with still coursing through his veins. "Are you an angel? You must be an angel. Only an angel would look like that."

And as the world darkens around him, as his wrists are slowly unshackled and he collapses into the arms of his saviour, Spencer sees naked surprise written across his angel's face. "I really hope you're not like this when you're sober," the mystery man says, and Spencer just has time to register the utmost importance of those words before he's drifting, drifting, drifting into unconsciousness.

Derek has had his words since he was twelve years old. He was always embarrassed by them, and glad they were inked on a part of his body that is easily hidden. He could never imagine the circumstances in which his soulmate would say that to him: yeah, Derek's always known he was good-looking, but to be compared to an angel is a whole new level of insanity.

Of course, Derek thinks, as he sits by Spencer's bedside in hospital and watches his soulmate sleep, maybe a little bit of insanity is exactly what he needs in his life.