Your phone is eerily silent on your drive. Normally, Garcia would ping you with a slightly ridiculous amount of updates when a member of the team steps out. She's either too busy, or she's in the dark too. The thought makes you grip the steering wheel harder. You can't begin to predict how this case is going to go. Two train lines he might attack, and you don't have the first clue which he'd pick. Morgan is a better choice to help right now.

You just have to hope that Hotch thinks so too. If he thinks you abandoned the case...

It's not a train of thought you want to follow.

To get to the ward the victims are at, you have to flash your badge at three different desks. The last one gives you a hard way to go about clearance, until, thankfully, Dr. Kimura spots you through the little glass windows on the doors.

"She's with me." Kimura nods at the nurse manning the desk. He looks put out, but waves you through anyways.

She burst into an explanation as soon as the door clicks behind you.

"Your team found a sample of the cure in Dr. Nichols' home laboratory. I had it sent to the CDC's NMR spectroscopy team- they've got the composition figured out. Once they know the proportions of the compounds, I've got a team of some of our biomolecular engineers and pharmaceutical technicians ready to reproduce it. If there's any controlled substances in the cure, it should help you narrow down suspects. Even if it doesn't, the Detrick NMR team has a sample of the anthrax strain used-"

"Dr. Kimura-" you stop her as politely as you can. "We've identified the unsub. I'm here to see my team member that was admitted. Sorry- I should have been more clear."

She looks at you blankly for a moment, then snaps out of "Chief of Special Pathogens" mode. With a renewed sense of urgency, she waves you along with her as she walks to Reid's room.

He looks horrible.

The bags under his eyes look darker than you've ever seen them. His breathing looks shallow and his heart monitor is beeping a bit too fast for comfort.

Even with how horrible he looks, he's still Spencer Reid. You almost expect him to open his eyes and immediately start his enthusiastic rambling. He doesn't move at all, not even when you call his name.

"He's stable for now, but I don't expect any improvement until we get the doses of the cure." Dr. Kimura says softly.

"Do you-" your voice shakes "-expect him to, um, get any worse before then?"

A beat of silence goes by.

"It all depends on how long it takes to get it here."

You nod, because the tight feeling in your throat doesn't let you speak. She steps out after telling you to come find her if you have any questions.

You stand and stare until you can't bear it anymore, collapsing in the chair near the foot of the bed. You want to drag it over beside him. You want to hold his hand. You want to stay there until he opens his eyes again.

A good coworker would do that. A best friend would do that. A girlfriend would do that.

You're none of those exactly. Stuck somewhere in the middle of the three, it feels like a conflict of interest to get too close to him. If you get too close, you might find yourself tipping into something more with him or being rejected and stuck as a coworker to him forever. You can't take a chance like that.

You leave the chair where it is. You grip your phone in case it buzzes with new information while you keep your eyes on him. After a miserable half hour, you get the update.

"Brown is in custody."

It doesn't change your mood at all. A victory like that is never guaranteed, but today you let yourself take it for granted. Just this once.

"Any update on the cure?" you shoot back to Garcia.

"Nothing yet."

He's stable, you remind yourself. There's nothing you can do but sit tight. Another forty five minutes go by and it's nearly seven in the evening when Dr. Kimura waves you into the hallway with a neutral expression.

"I just got a call-we'll have enough to treat our whole unit in the next half hour." A genuine smile breaks out on her face and she puts her hands on your shoulders.

"I'll come get you the minute it's here." She promises. "Before you go back in- There's somebody out in the lobby for you."

She reminds you of the directions to the front desk. On the way, you try to subtly look at the other room's tiny glass windows on each door. You're the only visitor in the place.

When you step out into the ward's waiting area, Prentiss is the one person in the room. She's in her work clothes still, but she's lost the blazer. The only sign of how hard the day was is the slight frizz to her hair.

"Hey, kid." She stands up as soon as you make eye contact. She's got you wrapped up in a hug as soon as she could. "How is he?"

"Dr. Kimura thinks the treatment will be here in the next half hour." you offer.

"He's that bad, huh?" You nod and tuck your face into her shoulder briefly.

When you eventually break apart, she's got a small duffle bag in her hand.

"I didn't know if you were going to stay the whole night, so I packed you a bag just in case." She hands it off to you. "We've got the weekend off. The whole weekend." She teases.

You bury her in another hug.

"Thank you." You tell her earnestly. "If things are going well here, d'wanna get brunch on sunday?" She gives you a slightly wild grin as she agrees to it.

"Don't give me that look. It's brunch with a pregnant woman."

"We don't need alcohol to get into trouble." She winks and kisses you on the cheek to say goodbye.

You plant yourself back into the chair opposite from Reid as you scrunge through the bag. When she'd started to foster that kitten, she'd given you a key for emergencies. You pointed out to her that somebody closer to her brownstone would probably be a better choice. She assured you that her neighbor had one for emergencies, but you had one for Emergencies. You still haven't found out what exactly that means.

You got an extra copy of your key later that week for her.

"For emergencies." you teased when you handed it over. And thank god you did. There's an extra set of clothes, a sweatshirt, a phone charger, and an excellent variety of snacks. You toss the sweatshirt over your work clothes and slide the bag under your chair for the time being. You're too stressed to eat, despite the awkward feeling in your stomach.

You fight the urge to pace around for the entire twenty five minutes it takes for Kimura to reappear. She lets you stay while her team administers the respiratory treatment as long as you promised to stay out of the team's way. (It was, in fact, a pinky-promise, so you didn't dare get up from your seat the entire time.) Kimura is the last one to leave the room after the team gets Reid to breathe it in. She leans in the doorway and watches you for a moment.

"Any questions?"

"I don't want to take up your time." you answer honestly.

"All of the treatments have been administered. There's only five patients in this ward." She pauses before divulging "Your man was the most stable, so we did him last. Took ten minutes from the first patient to the last."

You both watch Reid's breathing for another moment.

"I'm going to call Agent Hotchner to update him. I'll check on you two in a little bit." She slips out of the room.

Over the next hour, he improves steadily. His heart rate slows to normal, his oxygen saturation returns to normal, and he starts to take deep breaths. You lean your head back against the wall to try and get a little rest.

a/n: next ch is 1/4/21!

NMR is Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy. in essence you put a sample into a machine and it gives you a weird graph and then you slave over it to figure out what is in the sample. Covid meant most of my organic chemistry lab was online, so I spent a hell of a lot of time reading the graphs instead of making them. 5/10 experience would rather make compounds to put in the machine than read the output. i hope you enjoyed this nontechnical chemistry review
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/nmr/whatisnmr/whatisnmr.html