If you’d have known that Spencer breaking your heart was a precursor to him disappearing from your life forever, you never would’ve let him walk out of that door.

It was years of longing and love suddenly thrown down the drain, and you had no idea why. But he’d left. The man who asked you to promise you’d never abandon him like everybody else had, the one you’d talked about your future together with. That Spencer Reid.

You had always told yourself that things would get better after a break up. But with him? You thought you would’ve spent the rest of your life with him, and losing him was like losing a piece of yourself. And you never really moved on.

But some part of you understood. Understood his need to get away from the life that’d traumatized him for so long, that gave him people to love just before tearing them away, that beat him down and left him wondering why he was even there at all anymore.

Which is why, standing in front of him now, you don’t know what to feel.

Anger? Anger for him leaving you behind while he found a life that could fix him, that could give him the happiness he tore from you when he left you. Or perhaps the pure love you’d known was always simmering beneath the surface after he left?

He looks older now. He still has that same purple scarf he wore like another limb all those years ago, the one you’d stolen from his closet numerous times. Back when things were easier, back when it all felt right.

And you still see the Spencer you knew in there. Beneath the newly formed wrinkles, the signs of ageing that you know you’d gone through too, you see him.

The way his fingers tap anxiously against his leg as he stands before you, the messiness of his hair that you’d always brushed out for him, the dark eye circles and look of longing. You could see the small limp in his leg from all those years ago when a case led to a bullet in his knee, certainly a product of older age, the stress on his body. That was your Spencer.

Things had changed, but they were still the same in some way. And that’s what hurt the most.

And obviously, neither of you knew what to say.

This was Will’s funeral. It wasn’t about you two — it was about JJ, about Will, about the love that they’d lost… or the love that was still there that made it hurt so badly.

Somehow it made the direness of seeing Spencer again more intense.

Standing outside of the cathedral, you know you have to speak first — he had never been one to start difficult conversations. And you’re sure that hadn’t changed.