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Insomnia was a bitch. Spencer knew this all too well as he stared at the wall of the hotel room he was currently staying in. They were on day three of this current case, with another body dropping every 12 hours nearly like clockwork at noon and midnight. What made it worse was the way the victims kept getting younger and younger. The first two, the day before the BAU had been called in, were both in their late 60s, a married couple, just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. He’d been killed in their home, left to be found by the couple’s adult children who’d spent the night for the festivities.
She’d been found on a park bench three miles from their home, mutilated nearly beyond all recognition, exactly 12 hours after the time of death of her husband, only three or so hours after he’d been found.
The third body had been discovered the night before the BAU arrived, a newly divorced man’s girlfriend got off work early and found him in bed, stabbed fifty times. The main suspect had been his ex-wife until she’d been found on a park bench not half a mile from the other female victim. The BAU had arrived in town that afternoon.
That hadn’t helped the next pair of victims, a pair of recent empty nesters. She’d been found first this time, he’d only been found when the local LEOs went to make a next-of-kin visit.
And so the pattern continued, over the next two days, the victims getting progressively younger. When Hotch had finally forced Spencer to go rest in the hotel the team had booked, not that they’d gotten much use out of it so far, they had just found both of the most recent pair, a couple of newlywed high school sweethearts, fresh back from their honeymoon.
Spencer hadn’t slept for a couple of days before coming out on this case, still working through all the permutations of a chess game and now, with the case taking him into day five of no sleep, Hotch had found him asleep standing up at the board and had sent Morgan to take him to the hotel.
But it had been hours, and Spencer couldn’t sleep, staring at the wall of the hotel room, a chess game playing out behind his eyes as a timer to the next victim ticked along beside it.
Gideon had barely been gone two weeks, and Spencer was already proving himself useless. More than useless, honestly, since he’d pulled both Hotch and Morgan away from the case to worry about him instead, and--
“It’s not your fault.”
Spencer startled up in his bed, surprised to see Morgan there, sitting on the bed opposite him. Spencer hadn’t even heard the man come in, and Morgan tended to move like a bull in a china shop.
“What?” Spencer croaked, throat dry from his hours of attempted sleep.
“That we haven’t caught this guy yet,” Morgan said. “It’s not your fault.”
“What’re you doing here?” Spencer asked, voice a bit stronger.
“Sick bastard got another pair,” Morgan said. “Fifteen years old. On their first date at Homecoming. Her parents called his when she never got home. He was DOA, in his own bed, no word on her yet.”
Spencer nodded, trying to get up but stumbling back onto his bed when he suddenly got light-headed.
“Woah.” Morgan lightly pushed him to lie down, pulling the discarded comforter back over the genius. “Where do you think you’re going, man?”
“Back to the station,” Spencer said, struggling to get up, but unable to fight the blanket covering him. “Need to--”
“You need to sleep,” Morgan cut him off. “You’re no use to anyone like this, Pretty Boy.”
Spencer grumbled an argument, but wasn’t able to fight back sleep any longer as the long sticky fingers of Morpheus pulled him under at long last, treating him to dreams and nightmares of everything this killer had done that he hadn’t been able to stop.