⋆. four eyed fairy princess ⋆

The projector lens has a small crack. It makes the light disperse in small rainbows. 

It’s physics. A prism made of glass. And yet, across the corner of your notebook, it seems beautiful in the simplest of ways. 

A trace of violet settles in the hollow of a handwritten O — disorganized — blooming in the white spaces of your notes. 

You slowly slide your finger across the page. Beyond the sequence of color, the page is being bombarded by light your eyes cannot see. 

Ultraviolet light breaks down the fibers of the paper while the surface stays perfectly still.

The projector clicks.  A new slide cuts through the air, masking the blankness of the wall with the translucent, static reality of a life reduced to evidence. 

You think about the man in the picture. You wonder if he has an ultraviolet side too. A frequency of existence that sits just outside the lines of the profile. 

Agent Gideon dissects him with absolute certainty. Retraces the path of violence as if it were but an inevitability. Collapses the vastness of a human life into the rigid lines of a unique behavioral descriptor. Disorganized, sexual sadist, socially reclusive. 

It feels like dishonest geometry. An attempt to rebuild the glass from the way it fragments the light. 

Another slide. 

This time it’s a photograph of an abandoned ranch in Montana. 

Agent Gideon raises a hand to point at it. The image distorts, straight lines of the wooden panels molding into his hand. Forcing the crime scene to take the contours of his fingers. 

“This,” he says, “is where David Meirhofer dumped his victim’s remains.”

You watch his mouth as he speaks. You’ve begun to collect his words like specimens. Noting the ones he chooses, the ones he discards. 

This. Dumped. Remains. 

You wonder if this stress on the final syllable is the rhythm of a lecture, or the rhythm of his own revulsion. 

His face is a strangely still landscape. Yet his eyes hold a depth of nuance that his words seem to betray. A slow, drowning recognition. 

Or perhaps you are simply searching for a reflection of yourself in the vast brown of his gaze.

“Meirhofer worked there,” he adds. “He knew the ranch. But he also knew it could be tied back to him.” 

He looks at the room but his eyes find no purchase. As if the rows of trainees diligently listening to him are merely one unsubstantial object in his path. 

You can’t help but think about Boston. The rumors of a man who looked into the sun and went blind for a while. It feels as though his focus is fixed on a point far behind you. 

“Why take the chance ?” he asks.         

The silence is broken by a trainee a few rows ahead of you. 

“Because he’s disorganized,” the trainee answers confidently. “He likely didn't have a pre-planned disposal site. He chose somewhere familiar because it was the path of least resistance.”

Agent Gideon doesn’t nod. He just stands there, the warped image of the ranch still bleeding across his blue shirt. 

“A man who spent his life hiding in plain sight… why choose a place that calls attention to him ?” he asks again.

He waits.  “Don’t tell me what he is. Tell me what he felt standing there… in the dirt.”

Fact : The ranch was isolated and abandoned. 

Fact : Meirhofer was familiar with the ranch. 

Fact : Employment records tied him directly to the site.

Meirhofer would have known that. Yet he chose to dispose of the remains at the ranch anyway. Why ? 

“He felt it was worth the risk,” you say. 

Agent Gideon stops. He looks at you with subtle curiosity and opens his palm toward you, his lips pursed in a thin, contemplative line.

“Why take the risk at all ?” he pushes. 

“His knowledge of the ranch made him believe the likelihood of it getting found was low enough to risk it,” you explain. “He miscalculated the variables.” 

He holds your gaze for a moment, and you force yourself to meet it. 

He raises a hand and taps his lower lip once, twice, and a third time, with his finger. 

“Because he’s arrogant ? Or because he’s driven by something stronger than logic ?” 

You feel the answer getting pulled at your throat. He watches the flicker of hesitation in your eyes, a faint, knowing shadow passing over his face. He doesn’t wait for you to find your footing. 

He turns back to the room, the moment of private interrogation dissolving as quickly as it began.

A click. 

“Meirhofer is a loner, terrified of any social contact he can't control. For him, the unknown is a threat,” he begins.

Somehow, his voice sounds devoid of any judgment. It sounds like he understands him. 

He moves his hand and the light catches the ring on his finger. 

“He needed a place where he felt in control. Safe. Comfortable.” 

He steps closer to the projector, moving into the direct path of the beam. The lens refracts the light across his skin. 

“If you want to find him, you have to understand it. You have to stand where he stood and know what relief felt like there,” he declares quietly. 

You try to imagine yourself in Montana. 

The scorched yellow of the grass bleeding into the deep, stubborn green of the scrub, and you can almost feel the dry heat rising off the dirt. 

You imagine the silence — unnaturally solemn, like the waning of a scream. 

You stop. 

Agent Gideon moves out of the light. The spectrum vanishes from his skin, replaced by the drab, fluorescent reality of the Quantico classroom.

He returns to his desk. His fingers trail over the mahogany as if checking the grain. 

The violet has withered on the page of your notebook. The O in disorganized has gone pale. It looks like a mouth, frozen in the middle of a word you can't finish. 

It’s brutally restrictive. 

He is organized. Or he is disorganized. 

He’s killing for pleasure. 

Looking for lust. For thrill. For comfort. Or control.

It’s a simple switch of this or that. One or two.

And yet, it’s dangerously boundless; the largesse of a mind layering motive upon motive until the act itself is buried under the sheer weight of what we imagine it to be. He felt safe, he felt anxious, he felt in control, he felt … who fucking knows how he felt.

Agent Gideon’s wearing a blue button down shirt, the sleeves messily rolled up to reveal his forearms. A sliver of a navy undershirt and a few chest hairs peek through at the collar, where he left the top buttons undone. 

Your eyes drop to his waist, catching on the black leather of his belt. It’s worn and creased, pulling at the loops of his trousers.

He lifts his hand to adjust his glasses, and you notice his watch. The face is turned inward, resting against the skin of his inner wrist. Anything of his is quietly guarded. 

The glasses slide onto the bridge of his nose. He frowns softly as his gaze quickly scans through the manila folder on the desk. His thumb rests against the pages. 

He picks up a red pen and circles something in the file. Everything becomes a category once you decide how to look at it.

We call an apple an apple so we don’t have to describe the crunch, the acid, the red every time we speak. The word is a cage, but people keep stuffing meanings into it anyway — sin, knowledge, health, gravity itself.

How does he reconcile the two ? Is he understanding the unsub or is he writing him ? 

He closes the folder. 

 “Meirhofer didn’t stop at the ranch,” he adds. “He called the family. Multiple times. And he demanded ransom money he never intended to collect.” 

Agent Gideon takes his glasses off, metal frame pinched between his fingers as he gestures with them. 

“I want a profile. Not the textbook definition. Why the phone ? Why the family ? Why the money ?” 

From where you’re sitting, his face seems to be drawn in a permanent frown of fatigue that he has long since stopped trying to fight.

He looks at his watch then back at the room. 

“You have 10 minutes.”

Pencil scratches against paper. 

To your eyes, the room feels like a prism splitting around Agent Gideon. One side still sees a legend. The other sees Boston and what it may have taken from him.

You aren’t sure where you sit. Perhaps somewhere between the two. A point of stationary observation. Or perhaps something else entirely.

 You look down at your page. 

1.Geographic proximity : lack of toll record suggests that the calls originated within a local calling area, though limitations in 1970s records-keeping of long distance calls should be considered. If local, this would be consistent with some degree of familiarity with the victim’s environment.

2.Behavioral redundancy : frequent contact suggests the calls may serve a function other than instrumental. The offender relies on telephone communication rather than direct contact, which would allow for personal interaction while maintaining control.

3.Functional interpretation: ransom demands may operate as a way of eliciting reactions from the family and observing said reactions over repeated interactions. This could provide psychological reinforcement to the offer and potentially offer informal insight into law enforcement activity. Uncertain whether this reflects true objective or byproduct of repeated contact. 

Agent Gideon walks slowly through the rows. The sound of his footsteps quietly reverberates against the tiles. 

“Too much theory,” he says to a trainee three rows up. 

He pauses at a desk near the window. “Good instincts on the escalation but the timeline is wrong.” 

The sound of his shoes resumes. Each step is a measured punctuation mark. 

You feel him stop by your desk more than you see him. He leans in, looking over your shoulder. 

It smells like cedar and a hint of coffee. You can see the shadow of his head fall across your notebook. 

You find yourself reading your notes through his eyes, suddenly critical of your bent Os and the smudge of graphite in the shape of your finger. 

You hold your breath—not out of fear, but because you don't want to disturb the moment he’s giving you. You want to be still. You want to be right.

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Honestly, it might have only been twenty seconds. 

“You’ve got the structure right,” he tells you quietly. “Now follow it through.”

He moves on to the next row. 

You can feel a droplet of sweat trailing down your temple. It falls down onto the paper you’re holding. The edges are already beginning to curl in the humidity. 

The sun shines harshly on the asphalt of the Academy’s parking lot. The shadows from the trees blend into the black of the tar. 

The cicadas' singing matches the sound of your steps. 

As you walk, you’re half convinced you’re leaving black foot imprints behind you—but then again, the black wouldn’t show anyway. The rubber of your shoes melting into the ground, eroded by the path you’re taking to find Agent Gideon.

You look down at the margin of your paper. It’s blank. No grade, no percentage, no nothing. Just Agent Gideon’s cramped, heavy ink trailing your observations. This time, he hasn’t even written his usual ‘Choose !’. He just underlined two of your hypotheses and drew a question mark. But both interpretations are supported by the evidence. Choosing one over the other would be a guess. It wouldn't be accurate.

At first, it seemed fitting. That he didn’t grade profiles. 

Then you saw the other trainees’ papers. 34. 55. 89…

And yet he won’t tell you where you stand. Are your shoes even made of rubber ?

Sunglasses cover his eyes. 

He’s by his car, at the far end of the lot. From this distance, he feels less like a man and more like a fault line in the heat. Maybe it’s just the cicadas making the air warp around him. 

“Agent Gideon,” you call. 

His hand pauses on the door handle. You wonder if the metal doesn’t burn his skin. 

It’s difficult talking to him when you can’t see his eyes. Not that talking to him without sunglasses is ever easy. You focus on the way the sun lights the silver in his hair.

“Sir. I — I was wondering…,” you start. “I’ve noticed my last few profiles don’t have a grade. I checked with the others and I realized I’m the only one… without one.” 

You’re phrasing this carefully. A simple student seeking an explanation rather than a critic pointing out an inconsistency. Surely it’s not that he keeps running out of ink when he gets to your paper. 

“I wanted to ask you if there’s something specific that I’m missing.” 

His lips part slowly. He takes a slow breath, the sound of it almost lost beneath the cicadas. 

“If you want your grades, you’re free to go to the administration and ask for your transcript,” he says, his voice a low, even rasp. “I submit them on time. I just decided not to give them to you personally.”

“Why ?” you ask. It seems why is the only word that suits him. 

He lets go of the car handle. Steps closer to you. You can see your reflection in his glasses. 

“Profiling is a science that’s still being written. We’re still figuring out the laws. But you’re treating it like it’s already been solved,” he begins. 

He doesn't point at the paper. Instead, he opens his hands towards you again. You see a faint trace of red on the inside of his knuckles. 

“You’re staying behind the glass,” he continues. “You’re bright—you’re probably the brightest in the class—but you’re playing it safe.”

The glass of his watch catches the sun. Your vision swims with white spots whenever he emphasizes a word.

“The hard part isn’t seeing options. It’s accepting you’re responsible for the one you pick.”

“How do I do that ?” 

He looks down at his own hand, his thumb rubbing against his ring as if trying to erase a stain. 

“You think I’m asking you to be right,” he says after a moment. “I’m not. I’ve been right, and people died. I’ve been wrong, and people died.”

He finally lifts his head back towards you. “You have to trust your instincts.”

He lets out a short, dry breath. As he says it, you think he looks like a man who doesn’t trust much of anything.

“If you want to do this work, you have to be willing to be the one who makes the call. Even if you spend the rest of your life wondering if you were wrong.” His tone drops into something flat, cutting you off with a coldness that feels entirely unprovoked. 

You shift on your feet. Your soles still look the same. They feel a bit softer. 

He leans forward and slowly takes the paper out of your hand. Your fingers almost meet on the page. They don’t touch and yet it feels strangely intimate. 

“I’ll keep this one,” he tells you. 

As he folds it to put it in his pocket, you notice the droplet of sweat from earlier. It had slid down the page in a tilted, salt-stained gully.

Even the Academy eventually wilts into the mundane reality of a three-hour lecture.

Your thumb absentmindedly clicks your pen. It has a little picture of rocky mountains freckled with green. The peaks rise up, brown and rugged. Traces of orange. A waterfall tumbles over the ridge. 

You feel a bit like a prisoner staring longingly out a window—except this classroom doesn't have any.

You let go of the pen. 

“The original profile’s primary assessment was that the unsub was a highly intelligent blue collar worker,” Agent Anthony says. 

Your eyes drift to the laminated plastic ID badge clipped to his suit pocket. In the tiny, high-contrast photo, he’s the Bureau’s platonic ideal : jaw set with optimistic certainty, eyes clear and untroubled. 

A plastic version of a man who hasn't yet been interrupted by the erosive reality of Agent Gideon.

Agent Gideon invited him here specifically. And for the last hour, Agent Anthony has been lecturing with the bloodless precision of a field manual. 

You just don't understand the point of the invitation. 

“The unsub brought his own kit, which denotes an organized offender. But the use of a .25 caliber—a budget-tier firearm—paired with witness sightings of an unrestored late-70s corvette, pointed the profile towards significant financial constraints,” he continues, his tone clipped. 

Agent Anthony offers a sharp, certain nod. “At the time, the conclusion was considered strictly in line with Bureau standards. He was categorized as an intelligent, under-employed blue-collar worker. It was the gold standard of profiling for that era.”

Your hand quietly drifts into your bag, fingers tracing the silver foil of a gum packet. 

Agent Gideon’s sitting in a chair identical to yours, tucked into the corner, finding fault in everything Agent Anthony says.

His glasses are perched on top of his head, pushing back fine strands of his hair.

He’s wearing a white button-down, but it’s cross-hatched with thin, brownish lines that turn his torso into a pale grid. The top two buttons of the shirt are undone, revealing the fine, brown hairs of his chest that smooth down into the cotton.

The pattern is too structured for him. It looks like a graph waiting for data points that won't come.

“Five bucks says he doesn't let him finish his next sentence,” a whisper cuts through the hum of the air conditioning.

“No way,” a second voice murmurs from the row behind you. “Gideon’s going to let him dig himself into a hole again and then he’s going to say that the profile’s too clean.”

You lean back slowly, pulling your hand to cover your mouth. 

“He glanced at Doctor Reid,” you whisper. “He’s going to cut in right now.”

Agent Gideon made sure to introduce him as Doctor Reid. Lines of his lips tensing pointedly. Doc-tor-Reid. 

And yet, after resolutely pinning the title to Doc-tor-Reid’s badge, the fondness of Spencer keeps slipping past his lips.   

“Agent Anthony’s right,” Agent Gideon begins. 

You hear a barely muffled laugh behind you. A satisfied smile tugs at your lips.

Agent Gideon’s attention doesn’t fully follow the words to their destination. As if the agreement is something he’s already arrived at before speaking.

“Single shots. Clean kills. Almost no evidence left behind. That kind of control… that comes from discipline. From training.”

He doesn’t look at Agent Anthony. It’s peculiar. It feels less like a conversation and more like something being written over in real time.

He leans forward in his chair. The brownish grid of his shirt bunches around his middle, the lines distorting. 

“But someone like that doesn’t hold on to the weapon. A high-end firearm leaves a signature. He knows better than to keep it,” he continues confidently. 

“A .25 gives you nothing,” Agent Anthony finishes the thought for him.

Agent Gideon briefly turns his head towards him. He looks at him, just long enough to acknowledge the interruption. 

“The gun isn’t about money. Neither is the car. It disappears in plain sight,” he says. 

Doctor Reid keeps tapping with his fingers against his thigh. Like dots. He’s wordlessly mouthing along to Agent Gideon’s words.

“It’s not about what he can’t afford. It’s about not being seen.”

Agent Anthony doesn’t flinch. His face settles into the same federal amber from his badge picture. He gives Agent Gideon a tight and fascinatingly professional smile. 

“That’s a valid retrospective,” he says. “And I’ll be the first to admit that the Bureau’s data pool at the time wasn’t the most objective.” 

He gestures measuredly towards the rows. 

“But a blue collar offender wasn’t a complete shot in the dark. The unsub fit. He didn’t seem out of place. Whether that was a product of his actual background or a deliberate camouflage, the result remained the same.”

He offers a sharp, knowing nod. 

“It’s a reminder that as profilers we’re constantly learning. But in the 90s, the standard held because the standard worked.” 

The thrumming on Doctor Reid’s knee abruptly stops. He lifts his fingers close to his face. He seems to light up from within. 

“Actually,” he explains. “The standard only appeared to work because of a lack of comparative data regarding high-functioning offenders with tactical training.” 

His words feel like a chromatic blur. A rapid-fire staccato of pure enthusiasm. Doc-tor-Reid.

“Statistically, the assumption that an offender must belong to the class they are mimicking results in a 30% delay in apprehension.”

As he talks, Agent Gideon looks at him softly. You think you almost see something warm in his gaze. Traces of orange. The corners of his mouth move, just the slightest bit, into a tiny smile. 

You look down at your pen. 

It’s like Agent Gideon names the world for Doc-tor-Reid. For him ? With him ? 

You wonder if you’re a fruit he’s interested in naming, or just part of the rocks.  

You take the gum out of your bag.  

Wind softly slips through the grass, shifting the blades with a shushing kiss. Combing through the stems like fingers through hair to reveal pools of chicory.

A bright, purple blue. Like a flame burning in the grass. 

The field stretches too far to hold in one glance, scattered with small suns and soft blushes.

Your hand caresses the grass. You inhale, like the deep, gentle breath you take into the shoulder of someone you cherish.  

It smells sweet, like crushed honey. 

You feel the tiny needle-steps of something climbing on your skin. A small orange beetle walks with a delicate, mechanical precision along your fingers. It pauses on your knuckle, as if curious about the vast landscape of your hand. 

You close your eyes, letting the light press against your eyelids until everything turns a warm, translucent crimson. 

It’s beautiful because it just is. 

The wind brushes your cheeks. A sharp, sudden pinch pricks your finger.

You flinch and pull your hand back reflexively, and the beetle takes flight, a blurred orange spark vanishing into the chicory. 

A small, acrid yellow smudge remains on the curve of your knuckle. 

You lean forward and brush your finger against the blades of grass, trying to wipe the color away, but the stain is stubborn. 

You sigh quietly and turn your wrist inward.

The watch face catches the light. The glass is a cold flat circle against your pulse. The hands move with a precise click click click.

You had left the Academy early this morning, slipping away for a day trip that promised to be endless. Back then, the return felt impossibly far away.

As you leave the field, you reach for a black-eyed Susan. You find yourself staring into its center. It feels like a dark unblinking pupil. Watching you leave as if it’s memorizing your face. 

You pull the stem between your fingers and gently snap it. 

The vivid, honeyed warmth of the meadow begins to cool as the tires hum against the asphalt, the sound vibrating through the steering wheel. 

An old gas station sits at the edge of the road. White walls yellowed by decades of Virginia sun. 

You find yourself standing before a wire postcard rack. It’s slightly rusted in the joints, protesting with a thin, metallic whisper as you give it a tentative nudge. It spins slowly in a blur of colors and serrated edges. 

At first, it’s exactly what you’d expect. 

Greetings from Richmond. Coastal lighthouses. Oak trees and blue mountains. 

But then the rack settles. 

A snowy plain with no trees to cradle the wind. Pale sun bleached stones swimming in turquoise water. Sunny California it says. Eroded badlands in tightly packed ridges and gullies.

Cards haphazardly jammed into slots where they clearly don’t belong. 

You look around the small, cramped station. 

The linoleum is cracked, and the air smells of tanned leather and burnt coffee. 

Your eyes travel down the wire of the rack, following the line of mismatched colors to the very bottom.

A clear plastic-wrapped block of cardstock, far too thick for this shelf, still cinched tight in its packaging. Across the USA : 50-Card Value Pack printed in a dull, functional font across the front. 

The plastic crinkles as you set it on the counter. 

“That’ll be five fifty,” the worker says plainly. 

As you hold out the money, his eyes drop to your hand. 

"Oh, one of those orange beetles get you ?" he asks, his voice scraping through the silence. "They’re all over the place this year."

The register clicks. 

"Those things aren't even real ladybugs. The government brought them in to eat the soybean aphids, and now they’re everywhere."

"I didn’t know that," you say softly.

"That's how they get you. Look just right until they bite."

You hook your thumb under the edge of the plastic. You slide the stack out and go through it. 

One by one, the familiar strangers reappear : the snowy plain, the sunny coast, the tan desert. 

You also find a few Virginia postcards. 

You figure someone else must have bought a similar pack, picked through it to keep the Virginia ones, and left the rest in the rack. 

It’s a simple enough answer. A mundane bit of logic that should be enough to satisfy you. 

And yet, the silence of the gas station suddenly feels like a classroom. 

The worker wordlessly leans over the counter to read through a tattered crossword puzzle. He doesn't look up, the scratch of his pen the only sound against the spinning of the ceiling fan. 

You look down at the tan brown of a desert postcard. Narrow crests and deep grooves. Sort of like a labyrinth. You can almost feel Agent Gideon’s eyes on you. Heavy. Expectant. Sharp. The way his lips move as he leans forward. Why ?

Why go through all this trouble—why not just buy Virginia postcards directly ?

You imagine his brows furrowing in thought. Lines at the corners of his eyes mapping each possibility. How his finger taps his lips quietly. 

The answer tastes like him. 

A perfectionist or a completionist. 

Who didn’t buy the pack because it was convenient.

Who bought it because it gives something to resolve.

A contained disorder.

You wonder if he’d give you a small, proud smile. 

You slide the mismatched postcards back into the wrapper and tuck it inside your bag. 

On the board : three victims, a three-mile radius and one consistent lack of struggle.

The question is already in the room.

Victim selection ?

Agent Gideon didn’t technically ask the question out loud. He simply twisted the projector’s lens for a moment. A slow, methodical rotation of his wrist that coaxed the blurred shapes on the wall into a sudden, agonizing focus. 

So. 

Proximity first. Because proximity is always first. 

Unless it isn’t. 

Unless this is controlled, unless control implies prior knowledge—

He’s leaning against his desk, the dark wood a sharp line behind him. His arms are braced against the edge to support his weight, sleeves rolled back to reveal the tension in his forearms.

No.

Knowledge requires familiarity.

Familiarity implies repeated exposure.

But repeated exposure would mean opportunity already existed, so proximity is still—

Still primary.

Veins blend in with the fine dark hairs on his skin, leading down to his hands. His fingers, blunt and strong, grip the edge of the wood. 

His legs are crossed at the ankles. His brown trousers bunch up a tiny bit where his shins overlap, the fabric pulled taut. He's wearing sneakers of all things.

It’s your own mind doing the running, leaving you feeling winded and out of breath as your thoughts race to keep up with the silence.

Where were you ? 

Proximity. But that removes intent too quickly.

If intent is absent, then the act becomes random, but randomness doesn’t match the spacing of the scenes, the spacing is too deliberate, too clean—

You notice the way his belly juts out the tiniest bit over his belt as he leans back. A posture of relaxed intensity that only makes the air feel sparser around your lungs. 

Too clean means structure.

Structure means planning.

Planning means—

No.

His eyes feel like a physical weight you have to push against to keep your thoughts moving.

That contradicts proximity again.

Unless proximity is chosen, not incidental—

Unless he selected the environment first and then the victim within it—

But that assumes staging, and staging requires time, and time conflicts with the witness window—

“Don’t overthink it. You already know.”

They all still fit. In different ways. In incomplete ways. If you adjust one variable, the others shift. If you stabilize one, two collapse.

But the longer you hold them, the less distinct they become—just overlapping noise, just—

The fluorescent lamps flicker. 

The light seems to fracture in your pupils. 

This or this or this.

Fuck.

“Proximity,” you decide. 

“Why ?” he pushes.

Why why why. Why anything. Why everything. Why not. 

“It’s not about the victims,” you say. “It’s about the location.”

A pause. 

“What makes you say that ?” 

His fingers tap on the desk. 

In a steady, hypnotic loop that feels like it’s setting a pace you can’t quite maintain.

“If it was about the victims, he’d prioritize access to them,” you answer. “But he’s taking on unnecessary risk by staying tied to a specific place. That only makes sense if the place matters more than the person.”

You can see the deep, weathered crinkles at the corners of his eyes. The light shines on his glasses and you feel like you’re under some sort of magnifying lens. 

Index.

Middle.

Ring.

He tilts his head faintly. 

“What does that give him ?” he asks.

“Control,” you say, the word coming out on a short, sharp exhale. 

You find yourself taking a shallow breath, trying to pull enough air in to finish the thought before he moves again. 

“He starts with the environment. Somewhere he already understands. Every entrance, every blind spot, how long he can stay without being noticed—”

“What are you discarding ?” he cuts in.

You blink, and the glare hits wrong —like looking straight into the sun. 

“Random selection,” you tell him. “If it were random, the locations would vary. They don’t.” Another blink. “And impulse. This requires waiting.”

The tapping stops. 

He pushes himself off of the desk and walks towards you.

He looks at you like he isn’t waiting for an answer so much as watching how you arrive at one.

There’s something off in it. Too intent, too immediate. Like your thinking itself isn’t what he’s paying attention to but where it moves, and what it avoids.

Like he’s trying to keep you from stepping out of the reasoning before it finishes forming.

You don’t know. You can’t tell. 

“Keep going,” he instructs. 

You take a small breath. It smells like coffee. And ink. Maybe that wasn’t the best idea. Your heart thumps in your chest. 

“He’s not finding victims and then figuring out where to take them,” you say. “He’s setting the conditions first… and waiting until someone fits.”

“Why wait ?” he challenges. 

The light still lingers, like something burned into your vision.

“Because it reduces uncertainty,” you start—then stop.

No. That’s not it.

“Because out there, he has to adjust,” you correct, more quietly. “He has to react. Here… he doesn’t.”

Agent Gideon’s voice cuts in again, softer.  

“What does that feel like to him ?”

You swallow. Your throat feels dry. 

“It doesn’t feel like a risk,” you say. “Or—it does. But it’s the kind he knows he can win.”

His lips twitch. A smile that’s barely there. Gone almost as soon as it blooms.

It reminds you, inexplicably, of Doctor Reid. Of the way something gentler slips through before he can stop it.

“And if he wins ?” 

You hesitate. 

Your fingers pull at your lips. You taste something acrid. 

“Then he feels like he’s right about himself. That he’s smarter than everyone else,” you begin. 

Your fingers press harder against your mouth. Blunt pressure to steady the nausea and force the words out at the same time. 

You drag the conclusion past your teeth, raw and unproven.

“That people don’t overlook him because something’s wrong with him. They’re just not paying attention.” 

He gives you a small smile. 

Just for a moment. 

It softens the lines of his face. And at the same time, it reveals ones you don’t usually see. Like a band spectrum that only appears at a certain angle.

The lecture has run seven minutes over. 

By any astronomical metric, seven minutes isn’t a long time. 

Seven times sixty. Four hundred and twenty seconds.

Times a thousand that’s four hundred and twenty thousand milliseconds. 

Times a thousand that’s… 

The more you dissect it, the bigger the number gets. It stops being a mere seven minutes and turns into a massive 420 x 10^15 femtoseconds. See now you have to use exponents instead of just writing it out. 

Seven minutes starts to sound like a staggering amount of life to account for.

Beside you, someone is performing a slow-motion ritual of clearing their desk. Moving their highlighter an inch to the left, then the right, eyes darting to the clock every few seconds. 

Two rows down, a trainee is staring at the wall with a glazed, thousand-yard stare. Perhaps they’ve gotten to the point where seven minutes sounds like existential paralysis.

Planck time. The universe’s most elementary unit. You can’t slice reality any thinner than this.

In seven minutes, that’s roughly 7.7 quattuordecillion units. At this point, the number has so many zeros it loses its impact on a human brain. Or at least on yours. 

You wonder what is the smallest possible measurement of Agent Gideon. The single, indivisible moment that makes the rest of him inevitable. Past the point where the universe says the scale has to end.

The gold band on his ring finger maybe.  You’ve spent an absurd amount of Planck units wondering why he still wears it. 

To remind himself of what was. A marriage that didn’t survive the gravity of his work. 

Or a penance for the people he thinks he’s disappointed. 

Or what if it’s not even about disappointment at all. Maybe it’s a tether to the people he loves even if they’ve drifted out of his reach. 

Or maybe it’s just because he’d feel weird taking it off.

You want to know him with a precision that defies the way the world is built. Reach a point where you aren't just watching him, but vibrating at the exact same wavelength. Why do your hands want to circle the ultraviolet ? why—

“That will be all for today,” he says finally. 

You glance at the clock. 

Nine minutes. 

A trainee beside you slings their bag over their shoulder.

“You going to the dining hall ?” 

You nod. “Yeah.”

“Great,” another trainee says, falling into step as they gather their things. “If we get there before the line turns into a disaster.”

“I’m not doing another sandwich run from the vending machines,” someone adds from behind them.

“You say that every time.”

“And I mean it every time.”

You move towards the door. A small current of voices discussing caffeine and the cafeteria’s overly sticky pastries. 

Your shoulder brushes along a passing jacket. You think about getting peaches, but they’re the kind where the flesh still clings to the pit. It’s annoying. 

You hear Agent Gideon call your name. 

“A moment,” he says. 

The trainees glance at you as you stop in the doorway. Something like pity, something like relief. The look of someone being spared a sticky situation they don’t want to peel apart. 

“Save me a seat ?” you whisper. 

A few nods.

Footsteps clack against the vinyl of the corridor. 

“Sir ?” 

Honestly, you were already imagining yourself in the dining hall. Or at least in the sweet mercy of being a student who doesn’t have to solve the man at the front of the room.

He gathers a few stray papers. Makes sure the projector is off. Pushes the desk’s chair back into place. 

He gives the room one last look before he finally turns to you. 

“My office.” 

He doesn’t wait for you to agree. 

He walks ahead of you with a very slight forward-leaning tilt. His shoulders rounded as if he’s perpetually bracing against a headwind only he can feel. 

Seeing the back of his head feels strange. The salt and pepper hair thins at the crown to reveal the skin underneath. It sort of looks like a crater where the sun hits too hard. Oddly enough, you think that the hollowed out space makes him seem more human. 

His office looks more like the frantic cell of a college professor than a federal agent’s workspace. It smells like wood and old coffee and eucalyptus and that very specific smell aging paper has. 

File cabinets and drawers that serve as pedestals for ridged mountains of books and manila folders. 

A corkboard hangs on a wall, disappearing beneath layers of messily pinned pages. Memos and maps and handwritten notes that flutter slightly when he closes the door. 

Directly beneath it sits a black cabinet that is strikingly, almost unnervingly neat. It clashes with the rest of the room. Mismatched frames carefully placed. Portraits of families and people you don’t recognize. A lamp casts a warm light, as if keeping a vigil over the faces. 

He reaches for one of the two brownish-red leather chairs in front of his desk. And with a low, muffled scrape against the floor, he pulls it to face a lone red chair tucked away near a cardboard file box. 

You're stuffing all you can into your mind, like an overfilled bell jar, the glass vibrating and ready to shatter.

Your eyes stop on a chess board. Wooden squares mellowed out into a warmer hue. Countless afternoon suns bleaching the grain. A few pieces already in play. You wonder who he’s playing with. 

You look up at Agent Gideon. A silent, lingering expectation in your gaze. He looks at the board and merely gestures for you to sit. It stings. 

You simply obey. Turning your back to the board and the man alike. Because what else can you do ? 

You settle into the chair he’s pulled out for you. You’re facing the corner of the room. You feel like a child somehow. 

In front of you sits the red leather chair. Beside it, a small cabinet holds a telephone, a Rubik’s cube and a shallow bowl filled with tiny colorful dice. 

The scrape of drawers quietly fills the room behind you.

You can picture him without looking. Slightly hunched over his desk. Glasses pushed up into his hair or balanced low on his nose. One hand rifling through folders while the other steadies the mess from collapsing entirely.

The office settles into a strange kind of silence.

Your fingers drift toward the bowl. The dice are colder than you expected. They make a light, hollow clicking sound. Like teeth of porcelain touching together.

You pick one up between your fingers. Roll it into your palm.

One.

One again.

Then two.

Then three.

The drawers stop moving.

For a moment, all you can hear is the ceiling fan and the faint hum of fluorescent lights. 

The next throw catches briefly against your thumb before settling again. Five.

Then footsteps, measured and unhurried.

You straighten slightly as Agent Gideon moves into view. He lowers himself into the red leather chair across from you with a tired exhale. The leather creases softly beneath his weight.

Up close, you can see the fine creases gathered at the sleeves of his t-shirt. Where the fabric twists from being pushed up and tugged back down over time. The cotton clings to the curve of his biceps.

His forearms rest heavily against the arms of the chair. Thighs straining against the fabric of his pants.

He doesn’t say anything at first. He just watches your hand, his gaze following the tiny movement of your fingers against the die.

Then, he slowly holds his own hand out in the narrow gap between your knees. 

Your fingers briefly rest against his palm when you give him back the die. His skin feels warm. It looks impossibly small in his palm—a tiny, orange dot. 

He drops the die back into the bowl. It clicks. 

He reaches for the manila folder he brought from the desk. The edges are softened with wear. Corners bent white from too many hands opening it the same way. 

He opens it. 

The first photograph is of a white farmhouse. Modest. Wooden porch. A line of fencing cutting a tidy path through grass. Broom sedge field in soft green waves. 

It looks like the sort of place someone teaches themselves to miss. It feels out of place in the folder. 

“The Clutter family,” Agent Gideon says quietly. 

Another photograph. A dining table covered with floral vinyl. A half-empty glass of milk still sitting near the edge. One chair knocked slightly askew. 

His voice sounds different. Lower. Less instructional.

“Holcomb Rock, Virginia. Eight years ago.”

He turns one of the photographs toward you.

A man lies in a field, hands bound in front of him. His body is rigid, stiffly angled toward the distant shape of the house behind him.

“The father was found outside,” Agent Gideon continues. “Shot once. Facing the home.”

The grass stands tall and parched around the body, framing it in a grim, vertical outline. 

He flips to another page.

“The wife. Son. Daughter.” A slight pause between each word. “Found inside the house. Bound and shot.”

The lace curtains hang heavy and still in the crime scene photographs. Family portraits remain mounted neatly on the walls. Their smiles feel coldly intact. 

“No signs of forced entry,” he says. “No fingerprints worth anything. Phone lines cut before the murders.” His thumb presses briefly against the edge of the file. “No neighbors saw anyone. No one heard the shots.”

He falls silent for a moment.

“I want you to work on this.”

He gives you a small nod.

Your thumb catches at the skin of your finger. You tug at the flesh, but it’s stubborn. 

You glance toward the clock on his wall. You don’t really see the time. Only its accumulation.

Twenty-two minutes.

And what is so rare as a day in June ?

The air outside the Academy feels softer by late afternoon. The Virginia sun still clings to the concrete paths and brick walls. But shadows stretch longer across the lawns. 

You’re halfway down the building’s front steps when you hear the door open behind you. 

Someone laughs too loudly near the vending machines. A car alarm chirps in a jarring tune. The sound doesn’t carry far before it gets absorbed by the heat.

Agent Gideon comes out a second later.

He pauses at the top of the steps.

The sun catches in his hair first. Tenderly caressing the strands. Glimmers of silver.

You like how his eyes look in the sun.

You find yourself holding the shape of his gaze. 

It isn’t directed anywhere specific. Still, it feels like it could be.

Like if you could find a way to stand in the right place, in the right way, it might settle on you in a way that feels… warm. Almost familiar.

He looks down toward you, squinting faintly. 

The wind rustles the fabric of his shirt in uneven folds. A small breath leaves him as if he’s replacing the air in his lungs with the softness of summer.

He closes his eyes for a fraction of a second. Just enough to blink away the version of him you were just beginning to imagine. 

Then he steps down.

You stop at the bottom of the steps without realizing you’ve done it.

He notices. Of course he does.

You expect him to ask about the Clutter case. 

The farm house is still warm in your mind. An invasive, sickly heat. 

It dries your mouth, narrows your focus to what can survive being looked at. It feels slightly harsh in your throat. Like the air itself wasn’t meant to be held for long.

It lingers in a way you don’t know how to explain without sounding wrong. 

You don’t want to disappoint him.

Instead of the question you’re bracing for, he says :

“Come walk with me for a bit.”

Gravel crunches under your feet. His keys clink in his pocket every few steps. Your hand brushes his once. 

He doesn’t say anything. 

You don’t mind the silence. You watch the way the shadows of the leaves lace across the shoulders of his shirt. The unhurried movement of his thighs beneath his pants. The fabric strains across his quad with every step, pulling tight before slackening as his foot meets the gravel.

His arms swing in a loose, casual arc at his sides. It keeps brushing the air just millimeters from your own arm. You can’t find a way to adjust your pace for his arm to brush you again. 

You give up on trying to match his stride. Let your eyes trace the slope of his nose, the curve of his neck, the crest of his chest.

The trees rustle with the wind. Leaves fluttering over and around you, thinning the sunlight into soft and gentle rays. 

The light reaches him altered. Filtered through layers of green until the resoluteness of it fades against his skin. 

He looks easier. Less burdened by the act of being observed. 

The corners of his mouth lift slowly into a small, lingering smile, softening the lines around his mouth, then reaching his eyes.

He pauses.

“Listen.”

You stop beside him. 

You only hear the obvious things. 

Perhaps obvious isn’t the right word. 

Shallow water splashes over rocks and fallen logs. Twigs and branches crunch under a deer’s leisurely steps. Insects singing in the high canopy. 

A thousand small living sounds harmonized together without urgency. Nothing stands out because nothing is meant to. 

In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best ?

Somewhere in it, there is apparently a single sound he wants you to hear.

You aren’t sure which one. You could ask. 

His smile is still there. It’s like his face completely surrenders to warmth. It’s beautiful.

The wind shifts again through the trees. His eyes stay on whatever he’s listening to. Does he know ? 

His hand settles right between your shoulder blades, warm through the fabric of your shirt, a broad pressure that gently coaxes you a half-step forward.

He doesn't push you. He gently aligns your frame with his own.

He raises his other hand, a thick finger extending toward the lower fork of a hickory tree.

“There,” he murmurs. “Look past the split in the bark. A wood thrush.”

You squint. A small, mottled brown bird detaches itself from the shadow of the leaves. 

“Three distinct notes, then a thrill,” he tells you quietly. 

A soft, fluted call. One note folding delicately into the next.

“I don’t know much about birds,” you admit. 

His hand shifts slightly on your back. He doesn’t take it off, he just… nestles it. 

“That’s alright,” he says.

The answer comes easily. No pause to weigh your ignorance against you. 

You glance at him. His attention remains fixed on the branches.

You see the way the bird’s tiny body fluffs up completely with the effort. Its beak opens surprisingly wide. The white feathers of its throat vibrate along with the sound. 

You let the notes wash over you instead of trying to separate them.

The wood thrush sings once more.

Then it stops.

“They can sing two notes at once,” he says after a moment. 

His hand slowly drifts off of your back. The absence of it feels immediate. Cool air settling against the space his warmth occupied, as though he had briefly lent something of himself to you and taken it back.

“Two completely separate sounds.” A faint pause. “Most people only hear one.”

You listen for it when the thrush sings again.

At first, you can’t tell where one note ends and the other begins. Then slowly, almost strangely, the sound seems to come apart in your ears. One clear tone carrying beneath another.

You frown faintly.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” you say.

That finally pulls his gaze toward you.

“What isn’t ?”

You hesitate, then look back at the trees.

“That people only hear one note,” you explain. “I think it’s meant to be heard as one.” 

His eyebrows draw together slightly. His jaw goes just a fraction slack, leaving his mouth barely open. 

His breathing shifts. Measured in a way that feels almost interrupted. He holds it for a beat longer than necessary, then lets it out quietly, like someone trying not to let the sound of it become part of the air.

There’s something in his expression that you can’t name. You think it’s a kind of careful curiosity. But somehow he looks… sad. 

Almost immediately, you want him to look away. To blink. To reset it into something ordinary again. Something you don’t have to hold. 

The air carries the dry, sweet smell of crushed leaves warmed by sun and decay. 

He doesn’t. 

He doesn’t look away. 

His eyes stay on yours in a way that feels chosen. A glassy, unblinking hold.

“You take it in whole,” he says. 

His hand lifts.

You think, for a brief second, that he’s going to touch your face. 

Instead, his fingers pause in the air, then shift.

He brushes something from your shoulder. A small bug you hadn’t noticed. The kind of correction that almost feels like care. 

“We don’t hear it the same way,” he continues.

His jaw tightens for a moment, then releases, as if something had almost been said differently and wasn’t.

“You don’t need to separate it to understand it,” he adds.

Then, after a longer pause :

“I do.”

Faint blue ink underlines the sentence : “the disorganized offender leaves a chaotic crime scene, reflecting a sudden, impulsive escalation.”

Above the text, the bold header on the page reads Principles of Behavioral Criminal Profiling. The textbook lays wide open on the library’s table. 

The wood is scratched with decades of absentminded damage. Initials carved into corners. A cigarette burn someone tried unsuccessfully to sand down.

The Clutter murder case file hides the rest of the wood.

Crime scene photographs spill across the table in uneven layers. The white farmhouse. The dining room. The father —Herb Clutter—in the field, body stiff in the tall grass, facing the distant shape of the house.

Two paper cups of stale vending machine coffee sit perilously close to the edge of the manila folder. Dust lifts through the beams of light. Outside the tall windows, Quantico dissolves into black glass.

Agent Gideon leans back in his chair. His glasses sit low on the bridge of his nose. He watches the photographs with the stillness of someone waiting for an answer he already knows.

“You’re avoiding something,” he decides. 

His hand loosely cups the paper coffee cup beside him, thumb rubbing slowly against the seam of the lid.

You keep your eyes fixed on the grain of the photos.

They don’t change. They never change. 

Your pen shifts in your hand.

Avoiding what, exactly ?

The fact that Nancy, the daughter, was found upstairs shot at close range yet tucked in neatly under the covers. 

The fact that the mother, Bonnie, is left the same way. 

Your gaze moves on to the house’s basement diagram. 

The fact that Kenyon, the son, is bound to a couch in the cellar before he’s killed, a pillow placed under his head.

The fact that Herb Clutter is not inside the house at all.

The fact that he’s been moved outside, into the field, shot facing his own home, with a flattened cardboard box placed under his knees. 

Or is it just that you’re not saying what he wants you to say.

You look up at him again, but there’s nothing different in his posture than there was a moment ago.

Still leaning back. Still watching without moving.

“I don’t know,” you say.

It comes out flatter than you want it to.

Agent Gideon exhales through his nose. He leans forward.

The dark wood of the table creaks faintly as he presses his forearms against the edge. The lamp catches the thick, coarse hairs on his arms.

He reaches into the cluster of pages. His thumb clips the corner of a single photograph. The paper drags softly against the others.

He places it in front of your notebook.

“Look at the boy,” he tells you. 

You do.

The picture looks like film left too long in the bath — the scene bleeding together until dark and light erase each other.

Agent Gideon’s voice comes again, softer this time.

“Tell me what you see.”

He doesn’t lean in this time.

He just waits.

And then, after a second, his hand moves lightly toward yours. 

“I see someone trying to make it less violent,” you answer. “Or at least, trying to make it look like it was.”

Agent Gideon’s index finger twitches against the table. A small, absent, lift of his knuckle. 

“Why would someone do that ?” he asks. 

Your nail scratches the wood between your hand and his. It has shallow furrows in it. 

“To make it easier,” you continue, “To stay removed from it.”

“That’s cowardice,” he says.

The word lands with the blunt certainty of something erosion has already tested for weakness. Weathered into existence inside him. 

His brows furrow. His forearms stay braced against the table, heavy and unmoving.

Once you call it cowardice, all the contradictory details start getting absorbed into that interpretation.

You hesitate.

Not because you think he’s wrong. That would be easier somehow.

It’s that the truth of this thing behaves like light. It doesn’t settle into a shape until you look at it. 

“I can see that,” you admit. “The pillow, the blankets… Those feel avoidant. But moving Herb outside doesn’t.”

His hand suddenly leaves the table. He leans back and crosses his arms.

“Then what is it ?” 

“I just—” you start, then stop, as if the sentence isn’t solid enough to stand on. “I feel like a coward wouldn’t take the risk of going outside like that.”

His arms remain folded, but something in the set of them has tightened—less open than before. His hand shifts against his upper arm, fingers pressing in without seeming to notice.

“You’re looking at the field as an exhibition of power,” he says. “You think taking Herb Clutter outside means the unsub wanted a stage.”

His words hit you like a rapid, blinding bombardment of particles.

“It isn’t. It’s panic,” he says.

Each syllable is a tiny, individual grain of his certainty. Too charged to be seen directly, only inferred by what it burns into being.

“A dominant unsub kills him in the house because he owns it,” he continues. “He doesn’t need distance.”

His eyes flick once toward the file, then back.

“This isn’t that.”

Your focus scrambles down to the safety of the table, pinning itself to the faint blue line underlined in the textbook.

“Behavioral indicators may include disorganized spatial arrangement of the crime scene and inconsistent victim positioning”, your mind reads ahead, tracing the text silently while his voice continues to rain down on you. “Planning capacity is typically limited, with minimal effort directed toward concealment or post-offense reconstruction.”

“This unsub kneels a man in the dirt to execute him,” he says sharply. “And even then, he can’t let it be plain. He has to soften it.”

You feel stupid. The printed letters turn into a black blur.

“If you’re seeing this as strength,” he finishes, “then you’re not seeing it as it is.”

You take a small breath and finally look up. His mouth is a thin, bitter line. His chin tucked slightly into the collar of his shirt. 

He doesn’t say anything else. You consider twisting your own shape to fit the contours of his silence. 

“You’re not wrong to hesitate,” he says after a while. 

He picks up his paper coffee cup. Runs his other hand back and forth over his thigh. “But I don’t want you to stay there.”

His eyes lower into a heavy-lidded softness. The fine lines at the corners of them settle, smoothing out as though something behind them has exhaled first.

“Think it through.”

He pushes himself up from the chair.  He stands over you. His large, warm hand comes down on your shoulder.

He lets it rest there for a second. You want to see it as you still being inside the room with him. That he hasn't abandoned you to the dark.

Then he turns away from the table.

The chair legs scrape softly against the floor.

Your eyes drop back to the open page of Principles of Behavioral Criminal Profiling.

You flip a page backward. Then three pages forward.

“Disorganized crime scenes reflect a subset of offender behavior characterized by low levels of planning, situational escalation, and impaired behavioral control. However, not all offenders exhibit such spontaneous or chaotic patterns.”

It’s almost funny. No matter the author, no matter the year or the institution stamped on the spine, they all end up sounding the same. You wonder if there’s a mandatory seminar everyone has to attend before they’re allowed to publish. 

You turn your pen between your fingers.

You flip the page and try it for yourself. ‘To better understand offender behavior, it is useful — maybe useful doesn’t sound textbook-y enough—… it is necessary —it should be something that uses up more ink — … it is heuristically relevant —whatever — to contrast disorganized patterns with those reflecting higher degrees of planning and behavioral organization.’

You flip back the page. 

“In some cases, crime scenes exhibit deliberate staging, evidence removal, and strategic victim selection, suggesting a more controlled and goal-directed behavioral pattern.” 

You pause.

The transition between those two sentences feels a little rude, actually. Like the author forgot they were supposed to sound like they cared.

“Hi.”

You look up. 

“I was looking for Gideon. His car is still in the lot so I thought—”

“You just missed him.”

The words leave your throat a little too fast. Or just… not spaced correctly. Like your mouth chose the end before your mind finished arranging the middle.

Doc-tor-Reid. Or Doct-or-Reid ? Doctor-Reid ?

You can’t find the meter for it.

His hair is neatly gelled back. Careful in a way that suggests effort. He’s wearing a crisp button-down shirt but his tie is distinctly crooked, pulled slightly to the right. 

One hand holds the leather strap of his bag. His fingers keep adjusting it absentmindedly. 

He looks kind.

He doesn’t speak right away. His eyes move over the table instead.

Left. Right. Diagonal. Across the uneven layers of crime scene photographs, the open textbook, your notebook half-covered in notes.

Absorbing the white farmhouse, the dining room, the basement diagram, all at once. So quickly it almost makes you feel dizzy just trying to follow him.

He adjusts the strap of his bag again, thumb dragging once along the worn leather.

“You’re working the Clutter case ?”

The question is soft. Almost careful.

You nod.

He’s still looking at your notes when he speaks.

“You’re leaning towards disorganized,” he says.

“I think so,” you say. 

Then, after a moment, “But it doesn’t fully explain the placement of the father.”

He finally looks up at you.

“Why not ?”

You’re not sure where the useful version of the answer begins. 

He looks at you through his glasses, his head tilted in patient, uncalibrated curiosity. Like he has all the time in the world to wait for you to find the right words.

“Moving him outside doesn’t feel consistent with disorganized behavior,” you answer finally.

His bag comes off his shoulder and lands softly on the table with a muted thud. He pulls out the chair next to yours and sits down. The metal legs make a brief, dull scrape against the floor.

“Consistency across multiple scenes is what gives you a working profile,” he says. “One detail that doesn’t fit doesn’t necessarily break the model. Not unless you see it repeat in a way that changes what the model is doing.”

“That assumes the model is already correct,” you argue. 

He exhales lightly through his nose. The corner of his mouth softens almost imperceptibly. 

“Models are predictive frameworks,” he explains. “They don’t have to account for every anomaly to be useful.”

His hand hovers near your pen. Not quite taking it.

“The unsub didn't become organized when he crossed the threshold into the yard,” he continues. “I’d say it’s more likely he’s transitioning between zones of behavioral constraint. Interior space limits certain actions. Exterior space removes those constraints.”

He taps his finger rhythmically against the edge of the table. It makes your pen rattle. Three quick taps. Then his hand flies up to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. 

“Which changes the expression of the behavior, not necessarily the behavior itself.”

You frown.

“Putting someone in a field and executing them facing their own house isn’t just running out of space,” you say.

His head tilts slightly.

“Gideon would say the same thing you’re saying,” he concedes. “That it looks assertive on the surface.”

For a second, you consider not mentioning it. The conversation would probably be easier if you didn't. It’s ridiculous. It’s just a word. 

It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.

“He called it cowardice.”

His tongue presses briefly against the inside of his cheek, then disappears again. He swallows then he reaches for your pen. He turns it once between his fingers, almost absentmindedly, then rests it against his palm.

Tap.

He wets his lips, once, as if preparing to speak, then doesn’t.

His thumb adjusts the pen’s position. Like he’s correcting a misalignment only he can see.

Tap.

He pauses for a moment. 

Tap. 

It’s a small, boringly ordinary ballpoint with a clear plastic barrel. 

Tap. Tap.

A tiny rolling ball transfers blue ink to paper. Functionally utilitarian. 

This pen is almost out of ink but it’s still writing just fine. Sometimes new ones refuse to work even if the reservoir is full. 

Tap.

Still nothing.

“What does he mean ?” you ask finally. 

He takes a small breath as if to steady himself into speaking. 

“It’s not a word Gideon would use light—”

His eyes drop to the table between you, like he’s re-reading something that isn’t written there yet.

“He doesn’t use it—,” he starts again. 

The pen turns in his palm. 

“I mean he does— actually that’s not…” 

He clears his throat. 

“He doesn’t use it the way you’re thinking.” 

For a second, he studies the pen in his hand. As though the answer might be hidden somewhere inside the transparent barrel.

“It’s not a moral judgment,” he continues carefully. “It’s more like… a shorthand for a pattern of behavior.”

It’s strange how he picks his words so cautiously. You'd assumed Doctor Reid belonged to the category of people who valued precision above almost everything else. 

“The pillow. The mattress. Those aren’t incidental. They’re consistent across scenes where the unsub has full control.”

You sort of pictured him using some textbook word that would need a three minute explanation because it’s the most accurate one. But it’s like he’s sorting through thousands and thousands of specimens and still somehow ends up choosing the simplest ones.

He starts tapping the pen again. A little less rhythmically.  

“So what Gideon’s asking,” he says, pausing briefly, “is why someone capable of escalation keeps reverting to containment behavior.”

You open your mouth slightly, but don’t interrupt.

Reid continues.

“And his answer is… that cowardice isn’t about avoiding violence,” he says, then hesitates like he’s checking the phrasing in his head.

A few quick taps. Then nothing. Then another.

The spacing keeps changing before your mind can settle into it.

Tap.          Tap. 

Tap.     Tap. Tap.

       Tap.

Tap.Tap.Tap.Tap.

“It’s more about not being able to sustain it. Without something to… offset it afterward.”

He taps your pen again, one last time, like he’s grounding the thought.

“The field shot doesn’t really override that pattern, because it’s isolated. It doesn’t repeat. It’s not reinforced across the rest of the behavior set.”

“Disregarding an outlier makes sense if you can justify it as noise,” you say. “But this isn’t a minor inconsistency in the pattern. It’s like—”

You pause. 

“Like…” you try again. “It’s not just deviating from the pattern. It’s…”

The facts click into place like a metronome.  

“Like a break in the most extreme direction.”

You stare at the photographs. 

They have to click. They have to. 

No, they do. That’s how it works. That’s how it works. Not the other way. The other way— that doesn’t make sense. It can’t be that. 

“It feels risky to just discard it,” you admit quietly. 

He sighs softly.

He looks at you. His brow furrows, just slightly. His lips press together.

“Gideon’s right about this one,” he confesses, “But I understand why you’re worried about the risk. He… hasn’t always been right when he’s named it that way.”

Oh. 

He doesn’t say Boston. He doesn’t have to. 

You keep your eyes on the table. 

One of his hands moves to the side of his neck, his fingers scratching lightly against the skin. 

“Okay,” he begins. “Let’s start there.” 

He glances briefly at your notes as if checking the idea against them.

“I think you might be treating it like a linear progression.”  

He sets the ballpoint pen down on the edge of the textbook. 

“Which actually makes sense. If you assume a linear system, then increased environmental risk—like moving into an open field—should correspond to a proportional shift in offender organization.”

He shifts his weight, the old wood of the chair giving a faint creak beneath him. “I just think there’s another way to look at it.”

“Behavioral systems under acute stress don’t really stay linear. It’s more like water. You add heat, it rises predictably… and then at one hundred degrees it changes state. Not because something new happens, but because it can’t sustain the same structure anymore.”

He pauses, his eyes finally flickering up to catch yours through the frames of his glasses. 

“The unsub’s main driver is avoidance. Cognitive denial. He’s maintaining distance between himself and the violence. But that kind of split is… really inefficient. Psychologically,” he continues.

He reaches out and uses the tip of his finger to slide the field’s photographs closer to the center of the table. “With each victim, the pressure builds until it can’t stay contained. Taking Herb outside isn’t planned escalation, it’s spillover. The system expands the environment just to maintain the same internal distance.”

He lets out a small laugh.

“It’s basically thermodynamics with… really bad boundary conditions.”

A tiny, involuntary laugh escapes you before you can catch it. He gives you a small smile. 

“The cardboard box under Herb’s knees,” he says more softly, pointing at the photo, “that’s the clearest sign. Even after the rupture, he’s still trying—badly—to insulate himself. The structure changes, but the math of it doesn’t.”

His eyes linger on the image.

“It’s this… insulation. The separation between the self and the act.” He hesitates, then adds, “That’s what Gideon was getting at when he called it cowardice.”

“And you agree with that label.”

Reid doesn’t answer immediately.

That delay is the point, you think. Awareness that agreeing or disagreeing would simplify something he’s trying to keep intact.

He pauses, then nods once.

“Yes,” he says. “I agree with Gideon’s reading of it.”

The reasoning is consistent, reproductible, traceable.

It sounds familiar in a way that is almost comforting. 

You nod. 

Things shift into casual conversation for a moment. Nothing in particular. You use a postcard from your bag to keep your place in the textbook.

“That’s Zabriskie Point,” Reid says quickly, a hint of sudden enthusiasm slipping through his tone. “It’s actually the remains of a prehistoric lake—Lake Furnace Creek. It’s been dry for five million years.”

Your eyes follow the postcard as he speaks. The pale ridges fan out in layered orange waves, almost like frozen movement, the colors muted into sand and ash tones.

“What you’re looking at in the postcard isn’t just dirt; they’re tilted strata of silt and volcanic ash.”

Your finger traces one of the sharper lines cutting through the formation.

“The most interesting thing is the porosity,” he continues.

Reid has a small smile on his face. He loosely gestures toward the image as he talks.

“Furnace Creek is mostly clay. It’s basically impermeable to water,” he says. “Because of that, nothing really gets absorbed into the ground. It all stays on the surface.”

You notice the faint lines in the skin of your finger. A small stain near your knuckle. 

You look up from the postcard.

“So when it rains, the water moves really quickly. That’s what creates those deep gullies. They call it efficient drainage.”

It’s nice, you think, that he knows so much.

“I think it’s beautiful,” you say. 

He gives you a smile. 

“Yeah.” 

One must imagine the new agent trainee happy.

Which is difficult, in practice, when you are once again eating a peach. And the flesh clings to the stone. Again.

You like peaches. Which is why you keep thinking “it might be different this time”.

And every time it is not.

It’s not quite consistent enough to justify abandoning peaches entirely, but frequent enough to make each new attempt feel personally naive.

Still, you keep getting them. Sisyphus had it simple.

“You’re getting juice everywhere.”

“Am I ?” you ask, glancing down.

Someone slides a napkin closer across the table while continuing their sentence about yesterday’s training run. You take it and wipe your forearm. 

“—and I swear Agent O’Hara was one second away from a total meltdown.”

“No, he was already there,” someone else argues immediately. “You just missed the first five minutes.”

“He literally cut me off mid-sentence just to correct a minor date.”

“It was insane.”

“Every single comment got completely shredded.”

“He was basically looking for a fight.”

You exhale a small laugh through your nose before you can stop it.

“Okay, but word is, his wife has been getting ‘consultations’ from that weird analyst in forensics and he’s just letting it happen,” someone adds

“So he takes it out on us because he can't face it at home ?,” you ask, still wiping peach juice off your wrist. 

“No way. That guy looks like a melted candle, I don't get what she's doing.”

A few people laugh, the conversation overlapping without pause as it shifts again. Someone talking about cafeteria coffee, someone else complaining about sleep schedules, someone interrupting to dispute both points at once.

You angle the peach again, trying to work around the pit, and take another wonky slice. What a fucking pain. 

Across the room, a chair scrapes back harder than necessary.

“Wait—” one of the trainees says suddenly, mid-bite, eyes shifting past your shoulder. “Is that Gideon ?”

A few heads turn at once. 

At first, your eyes go to the man sitting closest to Agent Gideon. Buttoned-down to the point of severity. Tie knotted so tightly you’re surprised his face isn’t turning blue. 

You remember Agent Hotchner from your first day of profiling class. Standing at the front of the room, speaking once, briefly, and leaving before anyone quite figured out whether he was meant to be teaching or supervising. 

There was a peculiar tiredness in his face — sort of like he’s been awake through several versions of the same day and is still trying to prove he belongs in the current one.

Across from him sits someone you don’t recognize.

Hair close-cropped and practical. Skin a warm, even brown that stands out under the cafeteria lights. His suit kind of doesn’t really sit naturally on him. Like it was chosen by someone else, or worn into obligation. 

The man with the shorter hair leans forward and ruffles Doctor Reid’s hair with a teasing laugh. 

Reid’s hand comes up to smooth his hair back into place. It’s clearly not the first time.

“Stop—” he says, sharper than intended. The word carries just enough volume to cut through the cafeteria noise for a second, earning a couple of glances from nearby tables.

Then he seems to register how loud it was. The man with the short hair leans back in his chair, clearly satisfied, mouth pulling into an easy grin. 

Agent Gideon doesn’t react immediately. 

He’s watching the exchange the way you might watch something familiar repeat itself with minor variation. His fork is halfway to his plate, then pauses.

Reid shoots him a quick look, half accusation, half appeal. Agent Gideon’s mouth quirks into a smile easily, and then says something. 

You can’t quite hear it but it makes the rest of his table laugh. 

“So that’s what he’s like with the BAU,” someone mutters, still half-facing the table across the room. “I thought he was, like… always intense.”

“Apparently that’s only for the classroom.”

A few quiet laughs ripple through the group.

Someone nudges their tray forward. “Do you think he’s ever going back to the field, though ?”

That pulls a brief pause. A couple of heads tilt slightly, attention shifting from casual observation into something more speculative.

“I heard he was technically cleared,” another trainee says. 

Agent Gideon, sets his fork down with deliberate care. The metal meets the plate without a sound you can quite isolate from the room.

He reaches for his napkin next. 

It’s a plain white square, already lightly creased from use. His hand closes around it. Broad fingers, slightly rough at the knuckles. 

He brings it to his mouth and wipes. His wrist turns slightly as he does it. 

“Yeah but now that Hotchner’s Unit Chief…,” someone adds, lowering their voice slightly as if the title itself carries weight.

That gets a few glances around the table—quick checks, like everyone is making sure they’re not saying too much too loudly.

“Do you think that changes anything for him ?” someone asks.

“For Gideon ?” another trainee says, skeptical. “He doesn’t seem like the type to care about who’s sitting in what chair.”

“Maybe not care,” someone else counters. “But still. That used to be his position, right ? Before Boston.”

Agent Gideon leans back just slightly in his chair, posture loose in a way that doesn’t quite match the authority people—you— keep assigning to him from a distance.

He takes another bite of his food. A proper bite. Not the restrained, distracted type of bite you might expect from someone being observed. 

A faint sheen of oil catches at the corner of his mouth when he lowers his fork again.

Reid continues speaking quickly, hands moving in small precise bursts. 

Your eyes meet.

For a second he hesitates, like he isn’t entirely sure he’s picked the right person, and then he lifts a hand in a small, slightly awkward wave.

You pause, then lift your own hand in return.

A matching wave, smaller and just as uncertain.

Reid’s mouth pulls into a brief, relieved-looking smile before he turns back toward his table. 

Agent Gideon doesn’t look your way. Not even briefly. 

It shouldn’t matter. He’s mid-conversation anyway. Fork already moving again. Attention split cleanly across the people in front of him. You were never part of the same line of sight. 

Still.

You look away first.

“Okay, but seriously,” one of the trainees says, leaning forward slightly, “what actually happened in Boston ?”

“I’ve only heard bits and pieces,” someone adds. “No one ever says it straight.”

You set the peach pit down on your tray. 

“Did Gideon ever tell you anything about it ?”

That gets a few looks in your direction. It feels like gravity shifting its pull towards you. Silent and inevitable in a way that feels suffocating. 

“You’re basically his favorite, right ?”

You don’t really know how to answer. 

Words disintegrate at the tip of your tongue. Useless and unnecessary and theoretically irrelevant. The question sits there and expands, filling more space than it should. 

All of a sudden you feel small. In the way a body would feel being pulled toward something that doesn’t negotiate with distance. 

A single particle in a black hole. 

You swallow.

“He hasn’t told me anything,” you say finally.

Silence feels like it might be misread. “I don’t know anything about Boston either,” you add. 

“So nobody actually knows what happened.”

“Guess not,” another voice says.

The conversation starts to rebuild itself around that absence, filling the gap with speculation again.

You look down at the tray again. The peach pit sits where you placed it. Pale and slick in places, though still streaked with stubborn bits of flesh clinging to its grooves.

A useless center not entirely returned to itself. 

The Virginia sun beats down upon the valley until the sap goes sour in the earth. Day after day the light drills into the broom sedge, bleaching the deep summer green down to a dry, hollow orange that presses tight against the foundations of the Clutter farmhouse. 

Nobody lives there now but the sun keeps at its work anyway, indifferent to what has been left behind. 

A man standing out in the middle of it could look for miles and see nothing but the crowded, upright lines of the grass, blocking the wind and holding the heat in a motionless pocket until the wide country feels as small and tight as a cage.

You find no solace in the growth, no shade in the specks of green that remain. The air tastes like dust. The blinding glare of the sun strikes the faded, peeling white of the house. 

Out of that glare, a silhouette breaks. Agent Gideon walks slow, his hands deep in his pockets, untroubled by the heat. 

His shoes make a rhythmic, grinding crunch as they dig into the dry dirt. He keeps that same idle pace until he pauses directly in front of you.

“I wanted you to see it for yourself,” he says. 

He stays silent for a moment, letting the words hang in the air. Then he turns toward the farmhouse.

“Start simple,” he says.

You look at the faded house and you look at the field, and the enormous stillness of it all settles hard upon your chest.

There is too much of it. A low wind stirs, and the broom sedge moves all at once, a myriad of orange stalks dry-hissing against one another like a wall of static.

The movement stirs a cold sickness in you. The land is too wide, too silent, and the thing that happened inside the house is too small for it.

A cheap radio. Some cash. All that ruin, just for a handful of small, miserably ordinary things. 

You shift your weight slightly in the dry grass.

“If it was a burglary, it’s inefficient. If it was opportunistic, it’s inconsistent with the level of force used inside the house,” you say. 

You can understand a hunger that makes a man steal. And you can understand a rage that makes a man strike out. But in the vast field of broom sedge, it feels like a machine with gears that do not mesh, turning endlessly toward something that only vaguely resembles humanity.

Your mind reaches out for a reason. For some small grain of sense to bridge the gap. But there is nothing there.

Nothing. 

Only a cold, hollow space where a reason ought to be.

You feel Agent Gideon move beside you. The air shifts, and then he turns his head to look at you. As he pivots, your arms brush briefly. 

Your mind catches on the absence of structure and, almost reflexively, reaches for something that has one.

Reid’s framework comes up before you can stop it. But his exact words keep slipping through your fingers. 

The violence in the house doesn’t have to match the theft. It can spike past it, overshoot, land somewhere the radio and the cash never explain. Right ? 

Something about state change ? Something breaking instead of bending.

And whatever's left after — the radio, the cash, all of it — either means nothing, or the only thing left of a motive that didn't survive contact with the scene.

The answer shapes itself in your mind, thin and brittle. A sickening shame rises up inside you because you know it is wrong. It makes you feel small and unclean, like a dog that has crawled through the mud.

But Agent Gideon is standing right there. His shoulder broad against the light, and a different kind of hunger takes hold of you — an ugly, driving need to make him look at you and be satisfied.

“So it wasn’t really about taking things,” you continue.

You can feel the weight of his face turning toward you, though you keep your own eyes fixed straight ahead on the house. 

“The ransacking comes after. After the violence inside the house I mean. Not before.”

You hear him draw a small breath through his nose. His hand comes up to rest on his waist, his thumb hooked into his trousers, and his fingers begin to tap a slow, rhythmic beat against the leather of his belt.

“It’s not theft as motive. It’s more like … theft as repair.”

You pause. The words have already committed you further than you intended.

You swallow once. “A burglary is survivable in a way a massacre isn’t. The unsub has to rewrite it— has to downgrade what he did, after the fact. So he can live with himself.”

The tapping stops for a second, then starts up again, lighter this time. He is listening to the mechanics of the thought, measuring the weight of it against the empty land.

Finally, you turn your head. Agent Gideon’s face is entirely calm. 

His brown eyes look soft, catching the warm, rusted orange of the broom sedge and the golden light of the late afternoon sun. There is no judgment in his features, only a placid, grounded patience.

His voice very mild, almost a murmur. 

“I see why you went there.”

There is a small pause. Long enough that you become aware of how still his hand is against his belt.

“But you’re explaining behavior that wants to be explained away,” he adds. “Those aren’t always the same thing.”

His tone is gentle. Almost careful. But your attention catches on the word explaining. 

Your throat tightens before you can stop it.

You feel that you are a tool that has gone dull in his hand. A rusted hinge that won't swing true. And it’s like the soft cadence of his words confirms the dishonesty of what you just did. Sealing you inside your own mistake like a dry well.

"He brought a shotgun," he says instead of correcting you. "Not a handgun. Not whatever was already in the house. He brought it with him."

You wait. 

"Smoothbore. No rifling. You can't match it to a barrel even if you find the gun in his closet next week."

The tall, brittle grass whips against the dark blue denim of his trousers, the fabric snapping faintly under the force of it. 

"He cut the phone lines before he ever knocked on the door," he continues. “Wiped down every surface he touched before he left the house.”

Then, more pensively : 

“And after all that he still took the time to arrange them. To tuck them in. To cover them.”

It’s like he's said two true things that shouldn't be able to stand in the same room.

"Those aren't the same person," you say slowly. "Sir, that's—" You stop yourself before that doesn't make sense finishes leaving your mouth.

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

He doesn’t say anything else. 

Everything refracts. 

Even understanding. 

Even you, standing in the light.

You try to hold both pieces at once. You turn it over. You try to find the seam where the two halves meet. It just doesn’t make any fucking sense. 

And then the anger goes out of it, and something in you goes very tired, all at once.

"You're wrong," you say finally.

The words seem to drop into the dirt and stay there. 

“I think you’re wrong,” you repeat. “This is—” 

Your voice shakes a little, and you hate the sound of it.

“This is pure speculation. A man who somehow is… — is two impossible things at the same time.”

As you say it, you think of how it felt when he left the library. 

You imagine watching him get smaller and smaller against the green as he leaves again. The field goes on for miles under the flat sky, big and empty and detached, and if he turns his back, there is nowhere left to hide the unbearable loneliness of it.

“It just — It doesn’t make sense,” you finish. 

You wait for the blow to fall. You keep your eyes down, staring at the grass by your feet, just waiting for the sound of his footsteps walking away toward the road.

When you look up, his face is not hard at all. 

The deep lines around his eyes are crinkled and relaxed, and he is looking down at you with a smile.

He raises his hand, and sets his palm against your head. The heat of his skin goes right through your hair. He smoothes his hand down, gentle and firm. Like the gesture has its own rhythm independent of you.

The ring on his finger brushes cool against your skin each time his palm goes down and comes back up again.

"Good," he says gently. “It would’ve been easier to agree with me and move on. But you didn’t—”

He stops, his hand coming to rest on the crown of your head, just holding you there. 

“You did good.” 

Your mind spins. You don't know what to do with the warmth of it.

It makes a strange, mismatched picture in your head. You think of a man who reaches out to stroke a creature that just bared its teeth at him. It doesn't fit any rule you know. Some small, starved part of you doesn't care. 

His hand is still there, heavy and patient.

There and not there. Doing its work in a register you have no instrument for, except the dull, after-the-fact knowledge that something has changed and you weren't able to watch it happen.

You don't move. You don't want to be the one who decides when it ends.

Spencer doesn't know why he's here.

That's the lie. The one he tells himself every fortnight, when he gets that text.

Two words: come over. Sometimes followed by a coy question mark as a facile imitation of timidity, of care. More often than not, your words aren't caged by punctuation, leaving them to sit somewhere in the liminal space between open request and direct order, and Spencer has always treated it as though it's the latter.

His phone chimes, he glimpses your message, and he drops whatever pointless thing he's doing. He starts rummaging around for his best clothes, his favourite lucky socks; he even sprays the expensive cologne that he bought himself for his birthday years ago that has since sat, scarcely used, on his shelf. You pop back into his life by means of a single message, and everything outside of you loses its colour.

On the unfortunate instance where he's been out of town, he's crammed messages with apologies and stuffed his phone into the depths of his messenger bag, leaving it to burn holes into the leather as he's awaited your response in silence-clad agony. He's presented profiles whilst tearing itself to pieces over the prospect of you hating him for having to reschedule and forgetting, momentarily, that to be hated by you is a privilege which he is not, nor likely ever will be, afforded.

Hate is visceral. It seizes the body, the mind, with flames. Every thought is made kindling. Hatred burns; it requires fuel, feelings to ignite and add to the blaze. But what you feel toward Spencer is cold to the touch; there's no room for fire in your heart.

He isn't important enough to be hated by you, that's the conclusion he's arrived at following almost eight months of slow, clinical asperity. He takes up no space in your mind, not unless he's right in front of you, kneeling at your feet, offering parts of himself for you to take. Humiliating himself week after week for a fleeting glance, a chaste kiss, a premature orgasm.

At times, he finds himself wishing that you did hate him—that you cared enough to hate him. Wishing you felt anything that extended beyond cool indifference; maybe then there'd be some way of changing your mind.

His reality is a simple one: he's Astrophil, chasing his beloved star that hangs, out of reach, in the night sky. Doomed to want what he cannot have, to disdain the very disdain which you feel for him, to let himself be damned to misery by his own want.

He's read Sidney, he's aware of what a fool he is, yet he'll still answer your every beck and call. He'll still crumble under the gaze of his Stella, wondering when exactly he decided to forsake his own liberty.

—

He remembers meeting you in the art gallery, deep into the Winter of 2002. You, pen pressed to your lips as you stood scrutinising one of the older paintings, and him, across the room, too busy studying you to care for the rest of the art around him—both of you anointed with the remnants of melted snow. He remembers scouring his mind, thinking of a million ways to start a conversation and scrapping them all.

You were too peaceful. Too pretty. And he never learned how to talk to pretty girls. He always had it in his mind that they'd bite him. Not literally—hopefully not literally—but verbally. Sharp tones. Harsh words. Glossy lips twisted into mocking smiles.

He vowed to keep his distance. If not to save you the discomfort, then to save himself the humiliation; it was better to be safe than sorry.

You were so far out of his league it was laughable. The kind of girl who wouldn't look at him twice, if you looked at him at all. You were his North Star, Polaris, bright and beautiful and sacrosanct. It wouldn't have been right to approach you, not when you were so at ease and he was so…not.

Spencer Reid, freshly twenty-one and looking even younger, was not calm, or confident, or anything that would have typically classed as "desirable" to a girl like you. He wasn't what you wanted; he couldn't have been. He decided that the moment he laid eyes on you.

Which is why he almost burst into tears when you approached him. You asked for his name, his number—both of which he could no longer remember—with a smile that left him paralysed.

There was an acute kind of assertiveness about you; sharp and smug as all hell, but not mocking. You didn't bite him, verbally nor literally, but your teeth had an almost inviting quality to them, and he found himself, without rational explanation, imagining how it would feel to have them sink into his skin.

How he managed to go on a date with you is beyond him. He can't chalk it up to his totally-real-and-not-at-all-imagined charisma, or a sudden increase in his confidence, because it was you who decided the two of you were going out for dinner. All Spencer did was say yes and try not to collapse when you told him all he had to do was "sit there and look pretty".

You called all the shots, from where you'd go to what time you'd meet, and he let you. You could have ordered his food for him, told him what to eat and when to eat it, and he would have gone along with it. Licked the plate clean. It felt nice, not having to think for once.

He did however have the brains to at least give you his card and offer to pay, but even that gesture was a flimsy one, one that could have been easily dissuaded by a single wave of your pretty hand, or a single brush of your foot against his leg—an action he believed was innocent, if not accidental, until the third time you did it.

Conversation was a feat he could barely manage; his tongue felt too loose, too big, mouth too crowded with teeth to produce anything of sense, let alone substance. He wanted to speak with meaning, to impress you with words that he knew he possessed but could not find, so that you'd like him. He was (is) somewhat comparable to a lost puppy, in that sense; always begging for love, pawing at anything that so much as glances his way.

As pretty as it was, Spencer wasn't convinced that your smile was anything other than polite, cordial, forged to hide the regret that started seeping in as soon as you sat down. And there was something artful in the way you spoke to him, and in the way you acted in general. It wasn't exactly disingenuous, but it was…sharp, again.

He remembers the way you looked at him, how your eyes bore holes into his, engraving your initials into the squishy, impressionable part of his brain that hadn't yet solidified. He left that date certain of one thing: that his very molecular structure, in a fantastic defiance of natural law, had been rearranged to spell out your name.

Your foot touched his leg every time he stammered. It took him too long to notice that.

—

Agent Morgan thinks you're his girlfriend.

Spencer has been persistent in his avoidance of discussing his personal life at work, no matter how many times his coworkers probe him about the unexplained messages and the subsequent shifts in his behaviour, and apparently this means he simply must have a secret lover. He's never had the heart to deny it, nor the stomach to tell the truth; he's the BAU's freshest face, and Morgan had seemed genuinely impressed by the thought that he was (in his words) "getting some action".

He values honesty, of course he does, but if the shadow you've cast over his life can do a little bit of good, make him seem a little more normal, then he can live with the guilt of misleading the team. They'd only pity him—look down on him, as you probably do—if he were to come clean about your relationship.

They'd think him naive, so starved of affection that his self-awareness withered away, too, but that isn't the case.

Spencer's sense of self-respect has crumbled to dust, blown away in the wind, but his self-awareness has remained in tact. He often finds himself wishing, selfishly, that you had been cruel enough to crush them both under your pointed heel, maybe take a couple dozen IQ points with them; this would be easier if he were a complete idiot, rather than half of one. He'd be able to live in blissful ignorance, if he lacked the sense to feel his misery.

Self-awareness is no saviour. Simply knowing what a fool he is isn't enough. For all of his brains, and for all the years he spent pretending he isn't one, Spencer Reid is painfully, fatally human.

He comes here for the same reason you seek him out: pleasure. Quick, reliable catharsis. Because the BAU's genius, regardless of what people may think, has needs not unlike everyone else, gaps in his self that need filling—that you fill, even if it's just for one night. It's a viscerally human trait, something too ingrained in his biology for his brain to correct; that thick-rooted, innate desire for intimacy, for connection.

Spencer, like any other mammal, is driven by an intrinsic, insatiable hunger. And he's attracted, he supposes, to what he fears most: someone cold, someone not too dissimilar to the popular, pretty girls who stalked his high school hallways like predators. He's always had a habit of picking at scabs.

—

"You still don't drink, right?"

"No, um— no. I don't. Not really."

He's standing in your kitchen, looking like a cornered animal with his back pressed to the counter top, already feeling the heat in his cheeks, the perspiration collecting on his forehead.

You drum your fingers against the slim neck of the wine bottle, deliberating. The quick, rhythmic click of your nails on the glass has his hairs standing on end. Goosebumps. Philoerection. Often brought on by intense emotions like awe and excitement, or by a perceived threat triggering the sympathetic nervous system, activating the fight-or-flight response—it could be both; maybe attraction and terror are one in the same.

He wants to tell you that it's fine, that he doesn't not drink; he's willing to have a glass of wine, or two, maybe three (something to calm his fraught nerves before he becomes the first confirmed case of spontaneous human combustion), but his mouth has run dry, and you're already moving both wine glasses to the sink, filling them with water.

"Good." You offer him a glass, lips curled into a calm smile. "It's probably best for FBI agents to keep their wits about them." 

Spencer clears his throat. He cradles the glass with both hands, holding it close to his chest like he's afraid he's going to drop it. "I suppose," he says, "and—um—statistically speaking, federal agents are more likely to develop an alcohol dependency as they age."

You pause, glass pressed to your lower lip, and raise an eyebrow.

"Not that I think I'm—" he shakes his head. "I don't think I'm…at risk, or anything, I-I have my own ways of coping with—um—stress, and I—"

Both of your brows are raised now. Your smile has sharpened, morphed into a smirk.

"…I do prefer to keep my wits about me," he adds in a quieter voice before bringing his glass to his lips, ensuring he drowns whatever humiliating words may want to come spilling out next.

"Sure," you murmur, taking a small sip of your own water.

Your voice is honey. Thick and sweet, but laced with something tart; an addictive edge that Spencer has never been able to name, but something he's sure would be lethal if he were given too strong of a dose.

"I hope I'm not just your stress toy, agent."

Spencer almost chokes on his water. He spits it back into his glass and shakes his head like you've just accused him of murder. "No! No, that's— that's not what I'm saying at all, I was just…"

His voice trails off, defeated, and he stares down into his glass as you bite back a laugh. The sound makes his stomach churn, full of nauseous embarrassment and something…warm. A hoard of butterflies brought on by a single, stifled little chuckle.

You've taken to calling him agent since he joined the BAU. He's told you several times now that "doctor" (what you used to call him) technically outranks his special agent title, but you responded by informing him that "agent" was cuter, and that was all it took for him to drop the matter completely. It still twangs that obsessive, anal-retentive part of his brain, echoes like the strum of an out of tune guitar string, but he keeps his mouth shut.

He used to worry you'd forgotten his name completely, given how little you used it. He wouldn't have been surprised if you had; most people he knew at the time resorted to calling him "doctor" in lieu of the name they never cared to remember. To think that you were any different would be to cling to false hope.

Three dates in, he had brought you back to his apartment. It wasn't a choice made out of naivety (he was inexperienced, sure, but not stupid); he knew what to expect, what he was asking of you, even if he never voiced the exact request out loud. He was desperate, there's no sugar-coating it, and whether or not you remembered his name didn't matter to him—it never really had to begin with. Respect was something he had learned not to expect, not from anyone outside of his circle, and certainly not from anyone like you; it made no odds, what you thought of him, as long as you said yes.

To say he was nervous would be an understatement. He still is nervous whenever he's around you, drinking water in your kitchen, pretending not to know what will become of the evening. Even now, his veins still light with a burning electricity whenever you're together, like he's trapped in that permanent state of fight-or-flight, but nothing compares to that first time.

He thought he was going to die. He thought he was dying when you climbed into his lap, straddling him. You moved so slowly, so carefully, as though he were something fragile—and he was, he supposes.

Spencer, far too starved of the right kind of touch, had finished in his pants. He likely would have held on longer if it hadn't been for you murmuring his name in that soft, intoxicating tone, mouth so close to his ear he could feel your steady breath against his skin. 

You remembered his name when he had forgotten it, and you taught it back to him, repeating each syllable until they were so embedded in his debauched mind he'd never dare to forget them again.

Maybe that was what got him hooked. Maybe that was when you went from out of reach to right in front of him, when you became the drug he'd never be able to wean himself off of.

—

DC weather is never on his side. It always seems to rain whenever he's summoned to your apartment (that first rendezvous at his apartment ended up being the only one. From that point on, you decided that further hookups would be held at your place, exclusively. Spencer wasn't sure whether he should take this as an insult to his home or not—was his personal library not to your taste?).

Or maybe it's you. Maybe you sit by your window, waiting for the first droplets to his the glass before you send that text. It's possible you get some kind of enjoyment of making him walk in the rain (because yes, he does walk), be it minor sadism or the simple fact that you just like it when he shows up at your door looking like a wet dog.

"You know, your hair has a slight curl to it when it's wet."

"Wh-what?"

It is exceptionally difficult for Spencer to process what you're saying when your hand is where it is. It's hard for him to process anything, period, other than the feel of your palm against his crotch.

He sinks back into the couch cushions, blinking long and slow—but he isn't closing his eyes; you don't like it when he closes his eyes. You're kneeling beside him, sharp eyes studying his expression with one hand nestled between his thighs and the other reaching out to brush some hair from his face. East of Eden is playing on your TV, James Dean reduced to nothing more than background noise.

"Your hair," you repeat, softly, "do you straighten it?"

"Um—" he stammers, searching for the simplest words in the vast, barren expanse of his mind. "N-no."

"Blow dry?" you ask.

Spencer hisses softly, leaning his head back. "Yes."

You make quick work of his belt, nodding along thoughtfully to his answer (which, in truth, sounded more like a moan than anything) as you undo his fly. "You should try using products, or something," you say, keeping your voice light and casual as you dip your fingers under the waistband of his underwear, "you'd look cute with curly hair."

If you keep teasing him, he is going to die (can a person die from teasing? Will he be the first?). It's one thing to mess with him as you pretend to watch a movie older than both of you, but to make such mundane conversation whilst doing so is nothing short of cruel.

"You…you think so?" he asks. He tries not to react as your fingers graze his shaft, but his body is quick to give him away; his cock twitches, already uncomfortably hard, against your hand.

"Mhm." You nod. "I'm sure you'd get loads of girls."

Somewhere in the back of his rapidly melting mind, Spencer makes a note to keep his hair straight.

"Of course, I'd like it, too," you add, running your free hand through his hair. Your nails drag lightly along his scalp, sending shivers shooting down his spine. "I'm a sucker for a guy with curls."

And he's correcting that note, declaring that he'll stop and buy all the hair products in the world on his way home—if he survives this, that is.

He forgets how to breathe when you pull his cock from his pants. He shifts, trying to suppress the urge to whine and buck up into your hand, to show you just how badly he needs this as you stroke him, keeping your movements so purposefully slow it's almost painful.

"I thought you liked this movie," you say.

"I-I do." He chokes on a moan, forces himself to breathe. "Kazan is a brilliant…director, and— um…the cast are— they're all…good."

"Hm." Pressing your lips into a thoughtful pout, you let your thumb circle the head of his cock, smearing precum across the sensitive tip as you say, "It's just…you don't seem to be paying very much attention."

Biting his tongue, all Spencer can manage in response is a low hum. He knows you're asking— no, telling him to focus on the movie, but he doesn't. He can't. His gaze remains glued to your face, watching with poorly concealed desperation the way you narrow your eyes.

"Am I distracting you, Spencer?"

He nods.

"Do you want me to stop?"

He shakes his head.

He might cry if you stop. Epididymal hypertension, "blue balls" is real. Rarely serious, often overdramatised, but real—and uncomfortable. If you stop, he'll for sure have to pay a conspicuous visit to your bathroom, and there's no way you'd let him do that; no, you'd make him watch the rest of the movie, sit in the discomfort, and you'd enjoy every torturous minute of it.

"Please."

The word jumps from his tongue in a whisper, saturated with a need that mounts almost to genuine distress.

"Please what?" You tilt your head, smiling. "Tell me what you want, and I'll make it happen."

Your gentle, breathy tone does little to ease the unbearable heat raking through him, not when your hand continues to tease, focusing on his sensitive tip. A whine escapes him as his composure steadily crumbles away under your touch.

"Pretty little noises won't get you anything," you murmur. There's a mocking edge to your voice now, one that threatens to pierce his brain, deflate it like a balloon. "Be good, and use your words. You can do that for me, right?"

His head moves of its own accord, jerking up and down in a frantic nod as his words continue to fail him. When you raise an expectant brow, all he does is give a weak little whimper. You're killing him. 

"You— please…you know what I want," he eventually manages.

Disappointment washes over your expression, and your smile vanishes as you give a helpless shrug. "I can't read minds, agent. But…" You sigh, click your tongue before giving the flushed head of his cock a gentle, but nonetheless firm, squeeze. A warning. "I can always make you talk. Is that what you want, Spence? You want me to be mean?"

"Nonono—"

"Then what do you want?"

"I—" His throat closes around the words, breath stuttering as he teeters uncomfortably close to orgasm. Your hand stills, allowing him room to breathe, to recuperate, and to really hear his own voice as he whispers, "…wanna be inside you."

Your response is preceded by a gasp, over-dramatic and sarcastic, the kind that makes his stomach do somersaults, curdles nausea with arousal, burns him in the best possible way.

"Good boy. That wasn't that hard, was it?" Your lips curl into a grin he can only describe as sinister; one that may appear innocent out in the sun, but in the half-light of your living room is all pointed teeth and sharp edges. It acts as a counterweight to your praise, throws him off balance.

Spencer wilts in the absence of your touch as you lean back. Your hands are cold, they always are, yet they imbue him with a kind of paradoxical warmth; the embers continue to pulse in his core even after you've pulled away.

"I'll go grab a condom—"

"Wait."

He's already rummaging in his pockets, pulling out condoms—five of them—before you can get up. He gives them to you without thinking, like you have any use for them, and curses himself when you gently press them back into his hand.

"As prepared as always," you observe, biting back a smile as you watch him fumble with his collection of condoms, "and…optimistic."

—

"A girl gave me her number today."

He isn't sure why he says it. To fill the silence, maybe; to poke you with his flimsy, proverbial twig that he seems intent on using as a bridge, forever trying to broach conversations it cannot bear the weight of. He wonders whether he'll spend the rest of his life circling the elephant in the room, if he'll always be too scared to address it out of fear it'll trample him.

All his statement earns from you is a hum; a dull sound, void of any substance, produced only to confirm that you heard him.

Spencer never talks about other women, mostly because there aren't any. Even if there were, he wouldn't bring them up; neither of you discuss relationships outside of this one, sexual or otherwise. 

Keeping each other in the dark wasn't something you agreed upon; there was no conversation, no discussion—but when is there ever? Your life outside of him is none of his business, and his isn't any of yours, no matter how badly he wishes it were. The silence was never introduced; it was already there.

It's easier for him not to question it, it would only cause problems. He'd have to question this, you, himself, re-evaluate all the things he's been ignoring, all the factors that led him to you—his complexes, his insecurities, the things he tries to keep stowed away in their little boxes. He doesn't want to do that; he'd much rather just lay here.

And that's what he does, most of the time. In the lull between your moments of passion, Spencer's gaze is usually glued to your ceiling, counting the bumps in the popcorn texturing, re-spooling the parts of himself that unravelled in the heat.

You're lying on your stomach, face pressed into the pillow. He worries, sometimes, that you might suffocate like that. So, when he isn't studying your ceiling, he's watching the rise and fall of your naked shoulders as you breathe and counting the moles on your back, wishing you'd let him connect the dots, cover your body in constellations—and he chides himself for getting too carried away.

Thankfully, he's still staring at the ceiling when you raise your head. "Are you gonna call her?"

Being able to infer meaning from nonverbal elements of speech—pitch, pace, volume, inflection—is a key aspect of profiling, of communication in general, and it's something that Spencer should be good at by now. He can get by in most cases; reading people's emotions through speech patterns and word choices is something he's become quite proficient in since joining the BAU, though sarcasm can still throw him for a loop, especially when it's directed at him.

He is good at reading people, he just isn't any good at reading you.

Maybe it's your neutral tone, your blank slate of an expression, or the fact that his head is still foggy from sex—whatever it is, Spencer has no idea how to interpret your question. Is it intrigue? Jealousy? Do you want him to call her? Is this another social game he doesn't know the rules of?

"I, um— I don't know," he says quickly—too quickly—before adding, in a quieter voice, "…maybe."

He couldn't sound more unsure if he tried, and he really, really shouldn't be trying to talk about this when you're lying, naked, barely two a foot away from him. You're watching him with this unreadable expression, and he can almost feel you picking him apart piece by piece, dissecting him like a frog in a high school biology class. 

Something heavy settles in his stomach, and he recognises it as guilt. 

Guilt. What does he have to feel guilt over? You don't care if he talks to other women—do you?

You nod calmly. "Just let me know if you do."

"Okay." He's averting his gaze before your words register, and then he's turning back to you with a slight frown. "Why?"

"Well, if you're gonna start…dating her," you mutter, shrugging, "we won't be able to keep doing this."

"I know that," he says. He sounds almost defensive.

"Same goes for me, obviously," you add, "but, you know…"

He feels his chest tighten as your voice trails off. Heart muscles contracting, holding their breath.

"Are you looking to start dating?"

Damn it, now he sounds hopeful.

The dry chuckle that escapes you causes him to flinch, as though you've just spat in his face. "No," you say, shaking your head. With a sigh, you lower your gaze, and he thinks for a moment that you're about to bury your face in the pillow once more, putting an end to the conversation before he can derail this evening further, but then you raise an eyebrow. "Are you?"

It's the obvious question, yet it still catches him off guard. He stares at you, wide-eyed, like a computer stuck in a buffering loop; he isn't sure he's even asked himself that question.

"I don't know," he says, truthfully. "If the right person came around, then…maybe. I-I haven't really thought about it."

Well, it isn't entirely truthful; Spencer has put a lot of thought into the idea of dating, it's just that his list of potential partners begins and ends with you—and that, for obvious reasons, isn't a fact he wishes to share.

"'The right person'?" you repeat the phrase with a quizzical frown. "What are you, twelve?"

"You don't believe in finding the right person?" he asks.

"You do?"

"I don't mean—" He shakes his head, feeling heat rising in his cheeks. "I'm not talking about soulmates, or anything like that—it's a nice sentiment, but it isn't realistic. However, it is proven that— that some people are more compatible than others. It's science."

You don't look at all convinced. "Is there a metric for this? Do you have a spreadsheet?"

Spencer purses his lips. His gaze drops to the bedsheets, and he gives a vague shrug before muttering, "I don't have much data to work with."

He's fast realising that this conversation was a mistake. He never should have brought this up; not only has he essentially admitted that you're the only person he's sleeping with (least obvious fact of all time), he hasn't even been able to gauge your reaction at all—as always, all he sees when he looks at you is quiet indifference, tinged with a slight awkwardness (or amusement, he can never really tell) in the wake of his words.

"…well." You press your lips into a thin smile, and Spencer begins mapping his escape route, calculating the most efficient path out of here without leaving his lucky socks behind. "I wish you luck on your adventure: 'Spencer Reid and the search for the lost soulmate'."

He shoots upright, frowning. "I just said—"

"Are you gonna call her?" you ask.

His shoulders slump, deflating under the weight of an answer he's known from the start—an answer that you've likely known, too.

"…no," he says.

He was never going to call her. 

Words rise like lava in his throat; he wants so badly to tell you how he threw away the note with her number on it, how he never even glanced at it, because that's how serious he is about this, about you, but he doesn't. He bites his tongue, the last dregs of his self-respect saving him from complete humiliation.

That girl, as pretty as she had been, wasn't what he wanted—nor were any of the girls who have flirted with him over the eight months he's spent under this spell. None of them ever stood a chance, because they weren't you.

Loyalty is a virtue. It's praise-worthy, commendable. Everyone wants a loyal man.

Everyone but you.

You give another vague hum; an acknowledgement, nothing more. If he could stomach looking at you, he'd see that you're smirking, just barely.

Your fingertips skim along his arm, tracing his freckles and leaving goosebumps in their wake.

"Break's over," you murmur. "Come here."

To Spencer, loyalty feels a lot more like a vice. A metal rung that sits heavy around his neck.

You don't want a loyal man; a loyal man carries a suitcase of baggage, leaves his belongings in your apartment, promises commitment and expects it in return. A loyal man is a boyfriend, and you want a lapdog.

And that's exactly what Spencer has allowed himself to become. You didn't shackle him against his will, you didn't trick him into this; he threw himself at you, offered his neck for your collar whilst his tail wagged behind him.

His skin burns under your touch the way holy water scalds a sinner. He's forever torn, in still moments like these, between tearing himself away, before you can burn any more holes into him, and giving into the heat; he can nurse his wounds, his pride, upon his return home. Wake up to burn scars in the perfect shape of your hands.

In all the time he's spent with you, he's never once found the strength to pull away. He's sure he'd rather let his skin melt under your touch, have his body become a canvas for your scorching palms, than be without you—without this.

Maybe he's grown accustomed to the pain. Maybe he doesn't know how to accept anything else. 

He remembers high school, the sharp-tongued girls, the brutish boys. He was quick to learn what it meant to be weak, exploitable; a cheat sheet when he was needed, a punching bag when he wasn't.

He never told you about the bullying. He supposed it wasn't necessary; anyone with half a brain can see it, the lingering insecurities, the stench of a life-long lack of self worth, all of it too embedded in his bones to grow out of.

He figured, at the very least, that his experiences would make him stronger, wiser; he'd see the patterns, know the signs, learn to avoid situations that end with him hurt and missing pieces of himself he'd never recover. He wishes he could say he was right, but he wasn't, and you weren't the first person to prove him wrong.

Repeated exposure builds habit. Habit builds familiarity. You get hit too many times, you stop feeling the pain. You let yourself be used too many times, it starts to feel like your purpose. Eventually, you start to seek it out, gravitate towards people you know will find some use in you: failing classmates, pretty girls in art galleries, FBI agents who'll never be your fathers. 

He never learned how to form relationships that weren't inherently transactional, never learned to see himself as anything other than a tool. He wouldn't know where to start, if he tried.

So he's fine, really, with being a lapdog. It satiates his base desire for sexual pleasure, and it allows him to pretend, for a night, that this might be something more. That you might pull him back in and never let go. That you might one day want him, all of him.

But Spencer's heart is a black hole. He'd drain the life out of any meaningful relationship he tried to nurture; he's too anxious, too needy. All the love in the world wouldn't be enough to fill the cavities in his self. It would flow straight through him, he's sure of it.

It's probably for the best, then, that you don't want him; he'd only find a way to ruin it, if you did.

At least he gets something, this way. Closeness is closeness, however temporary. It may not be real, but it doesn't have to be; it's not like he knows the difference.

—

You always make a point to offer him a cigarette once you've had your fill of each other.

You curl up on your windowsill in a shirt two sizes too large, shoulder pressed against the glass, knees pulled to your chest, and you hold it out to him like he might take it—like he hasn't told you a dozen times that he doesn't smoke, and that he has no intention of starting. You assume the role of the devil, the snake hanging from the tree, lips twisted into a coy smile.

He lights it for you, encourages your bad habit without inheriting it. But he'll still breathe in the smoke, and he'll act as though he isn't choking on it as he tries to force into gear a conversation that won't start.

He'll spend a long time staring at your face, your reflection in the glass, the way the cigarette sits perfectly between your lips. They'll always be a little chapped. Kissed and bitten raw.

The cigarette will burn out, and you'll leave it abandoned in the ashtray before lighting another. On occasion, he'll try to chastise you for chain-smoking, read off the list of risk factors all while pondering what he feels most for the still-hot cigarette but: kinship or jealousy.

—

Your mouth is heaven, or the closest thing to it. 

Faith is something he's always found himself to be lacking. He'll idolise anything that's tangible, get on his knees for anyone that glances at him twice, but he's never had much of a relationship with God. He's read every version of the Bible, memorised the holy word in a dozen languages, but no amount of scripture could awaken any long-sleeping disciple within him—that's what he tells people, at least.

Reality isn't as black and white. It's human nature to look to something bigger than yourself, to find solace in divinity. It's a hell of a lot easier to believe “He's got the whole world in His hands” than it is to reconcile with the alternative. Spencer isn't immune to that kind of thinking, not entirely; his science-driven mind prevents him from any overt religious zeal, but nothing's truly impenetrable. Somewhere along the line, he managed to adopt the guilt without adopting the faith.

He's never felt any reverence for any god, never knelt at any altars. He's never understood latria as the Catholics do, but when you're on top of him like this, divine in your own right, he's sure there can't be much of a difference.

It's idolatry, plain and simple; you're his false god, and his worship of you will damn him to Hell, if such a place exists—if his soul wasn't already forsaken from the start.

If divine punishment is the price he pays for being with you, then so be it. The sight of you in just a shirt and underwear, and the feel of your bare thighs straddling him, is worth a hundred lifetimes in Hell.

His fingers curl into your sheets, white-knuckling the fabric without you needing to move; the weight of you against him, the thin layers of clothing between you, is already enough to flood his brain with dopamine, adrenaline, all the things that turn him to mush. He isn't even touching you, isn't sure he can; the feel of your skin under his palms might just kill him, or make him finish far too soon—he thinks he'd actually prefer the former.

And when you do move, he's fucked. There's no polite way of phrasing it. He jolts like he's been shocked, whines like he's been kicked, and he watches in awe the way your hips move against his, dimly aware of how the wet patch in his boxers has almost doubled in size since he took his pants off, and he considers saying a prayer.

What he says instead is please. Pleasepleaseplease. He hears his own voice break, and he concludes that he's going to come and die. 

"What is it?" You lean down, one hand braced against the mattress, the other trailing along his jaw. "What do you want?"

"Any— anything," he whispers. He's on fire. Hell is inside him already. "You could do anything, I-I don't care. I promise I don't…care—"

An awful little strangled noise escapes him as your hand moves to his neck. His throat bobs under your palm in anxious anticipation, but you don't put any weight on him.

"Please. Please you— you know I'm not very recept—" He shakes his head. "Well, no, I am very receptive to t-teasing…and that— that's the problem. I can't— oh God, I can't last—"

"Spencer."

"—with you…doing this, I-I'm sorry. Please, I'm begging— oh crap…shit, 'mgonna—"

Your hips stop moving the same moment you squeeze his throat, and Spencer swears he feels his soul leave his body. He stops breathing, not because you're preventing him from doing so (you aren't choking him, not yet), but because his brain has completely ceased function. He whimpers, and his hips buck up against yours in unconscious search of an orgasm he was so sure was about to wreck him.

You tilt your head to the side with a frown. "You can't handle it?"

"I'm sorry—"

"I don't think any of that babbling's doing you any good, Spence."

He twists his face into a tight, painfully self-conscious smile. "I-I talk a lot when I'm…nervous."

"Aww, poor baby. How about we put that mouth of yours to good use then, hm?"

You'd think you'd just offered him a million dollars by the way his eyes almost pop out of his head. He's nodding before you finish your question, quick and eager, and completely void of shame.

You lean down, levelling your face with his. He flinches when your breath hits his skin, and the contact turns to static, shooting sparks through his veins. Your lips ghost over his, and he tilts his head up, hoping—praying—for a kiss.

"You gonna make me come, Spence? Yeah?" you murmur. "You gonna take care of me?"

"Please."

His hands finally anchor themselves on your hips, something to keep him grounded as you press a kiss to his jaw, then another as you murmur "you're so fucking eager" before dismounting him.

Spencer, if he weren't missing so many brain cells, would argue you're both eager; you're shimmying out of your panties before he can sit up to help you, and you always let him help you. He doesn't think to complain—hell, he doesn't think at all—he just settles between your legs, and he moans louder than you do when his mouth finds your swollen clit.

For all his unending nervousness, there's nothing careful about the way Spencer handles you when you're like this. The self-consciousness that defines so much of his being vanishes, replaced by something free and uninhibited—something unapologetically animal.

He searches for God in your cunt, finds something better: soft gasps and intoxicating moans, and praises—God, the praises. He'd have each wholly depraved word tattooed onto his body if he thought it would preserve the feeling that racks through him every time you tell him how good he's being or, Heaven forbid, how pretty he looks with a mouth full of pussy.

At some point, he shifts so he's lying on his stomach, erection pressed flat against the bed. If past experience has taught him anything, it's that pleasing you is a sure-fire way to get him to finish hands-free (he's just that devoted), but he's horny and desperate and a little too drunk on the taste of you to think straight, so when his hips start grinding against the mattress, he doesn't try to stop them. 

He's pretty sure he blacks out, achieves nirvana, glimpses Heaven. Your voice turns hymnal as his tongue circles your clit, fingers working your cunt like he has something to prove, like if he fucks you good enough you might just let him stay. He'll sleep on your floor, if that's what you want; he isn't picky.

He knows you're close when your words lose their edge. Your thighs clench around his head, canting your lips like you're trying to pull him in, and his efforts are rewarded with a tumble of angelic curses and a gush of warmth that soaks his chin.

When he raises his head, he's crying. Red-faced and dizzy. The tears are barely distinguishable from the slick mix of sweat and arousal that coats his poor face.

"…fuckin' perfect," you breathe, reaching down to brush some hair from his face as you sit up. "Such a good boy for me, making me feel so good. Shh, come here, let me see how pretty you are."

As Spencer pulls himself up, your gaze trails down his body, admiring him with such hunger it makes him feel a little sick—the good kind of sick, if that's even a real feeling; he may just be losing his mind, at this rate. But your expression shifts, hardens, when you notice his lack of an erection. The new stains in his boxers. The matching ones on your sheets.

"You couldn't wait?"

It isn't a question.

He actually shrinks back, covers himself with his hands. Humiliation burns in his veins as he makes himself smaller, cowers like a frightened animal.

"Is that how desperate you are? Come here."

Your voice is soft. Soothing. Deceptive. It ignites that impulse to curl up in your arms, relax his body against yours as you run your fingers through his hair, whispering sweet nothings into his ear—but he knows that isn't what he's going to get.

"Spencer, come here."

He shuffles forward anyway, head hung in shame like a puppy waiting to be kicked. Your fingers are like ice against his cheek, but he leans into your touch all the same.

"And to think I was gonna reward you for being so good— shh, don't speak. You think I wanna hear your excuses?" You press your thumb to his lips, silencing him as you cradle his face with both hands, guiding him to look at you. When he sniffles, you pout. "Oh, I know. Poor baby. You're sorry, right? For being so dumb? I know, hon. I know it's hard when that big brain of yours stops working…"

"I-I didn't mean to—" He stumbles over his words like he's never spoken before in his life. His mouth feels foreign, tongue working against him as he tries to choke out an explanation. "This— this kind of…thing, it doesn't happen. Only…only with you. I can't help it, you've— …I don't know." He can't look you in the eye. "You've…done something to me. I can't—"

"Look at me." You're nodding along with his words, expression full of false sympathy. Your thumbs trace halos over his flushed skin as you pull him close. "Come on, princess. It's okay…there we go. So pretty…"

Whatever's been holding him together shatters when your lips meet his, and the pieces burst into flames when your hand trails down to his sodden crotch. He whines into your mouth, tries to drag you back in when you pull away.

"You wanna make it up to me? You wanna show me how sorry you are?" you murmur, breath hot on his face.

"Sorry…" he repeats the word under his breath, nodding like he's caught in some kind of trance. He's already getting hard again, or trying to; his cock presses weakly against your hand, his body responding to your touch even when it's spent. "Yes. Please."

"That's my boy."

Your boy. Your perfect, pretty, stupid boy. Your devoted Astrophil, bound to you by the chains of an unrequited ardour. It's what Sidney knew as courtly love, but the Romans had a different term for it: servitium amoris, slavery of love, and Spencer thinks that is far more fitting. 

The man pierced with Dunk’s iron says his mother’s name. It comes out thin and astonished, as though he had expected to die louder. Duncan hears it over the din. He watches the man’s eyes go queer in his face—film creeping over them, the pupils dulling, the whole wet look turning flat, the way dead fish do when they rise in poisoned water and the sun gets at their bellies.

An apology pushes up hard against Duncan’s teeth. He keeps it there. There is something mean in begging pardon of a man you have already run through. It makes him answer for your sorrow besides his own death. When the body sags and quits at last, Duncan braces a hand to the fellow’s shoulder, eases him off the blade, and lowers him onto his back with what care he can manage in a field full of screaming men. Then he pulls his sword free and breathes.

The stream is only a little way off. Sun has had all morning to work on his armour. The plates burn through his surcoat. The mail at his throat rubs raw and holds the heat there. Under it, the blood trapped in the quilted cloth has already begun to turn.

He knows he ought to go back. He knows the work is not done. His knees strike the bank before the thought is finished. He drags off one glove and then the other, drops them in the grass, and thrusts both hands into the current so fast the cold hurts. Water ropes round his fingers and under his nails and takes the blood by threads at first, then by clouds, until the stream runs pink, then weak as watered wine, then clear again as though the thing had never happened anywhere but inside his own skull.

He bows his head over it. His breath goes in rough through the nose and leaves slower. For a moment he can do nothing but look at his hands—broad things, nicked over the knuckles. Then he cups water to his face. The shock of it lifts the worst of the heat. He does it again. Lets it run from his brow and nose and mouth. Somewhere behind him men are still shouting. Steel still rings out, thin with distance now.

Duncan shuts his eyes. He has never been much for prayer, nor for finding the right words for it, but there are not many disbelievers in a foxhole. He opens his mouth.

“Mother, take him. He called your name. Forgive me for it. Mind his mother, too.” Breath shudders out of him. “Warrior, make me brave enough. Keep my hand true.”

Beyond the bank where the water deepens and the weeds grow long as hair, something has gone perfectly still to watch him.

When you see him kill your heart flutters strangely. Clean slice, straight for the heart. Merciful and cold in the same breath.

You know violence as the sharp white turn of a fish’s belly before your teeth close round it. The panic-kick of things that fit in your hands and things that do not, the times your own blood has gone stringing loose in the water because something bigger thought to make a meal of you first. Death below the surface is ugly, but it serves. Something eats. Something lives another day. Here, men spill one another open for reasons that do not end in hunger. The body falls in the grass and feeds no one. The waste of it catches at your mind.

Yet the great one uses his strength well. Joyless, he puts the blade where it must go and gets it done. Warrior, your thoughts supply at once, though he is younger than the word makes him sound.

Then, he stays. Only for a breath long enough to ease the dead man down from his sword and keep him from crumpling into the dirt like a sack split at the seams, but it is enough to draw you closer under the current. Almost as if he cannot bear for the man to go wholly alone. Almost as if being the hand that kills makes him answerable for that last small stretch between breath and none.

You slip nearer the bank, slow as weed-drift, and brace your fingers between the stones. The stream is clear here. It lets you see him drop to his knees. Lets you see him strip off his gloves with hands gone clumsy from heat. Blood clouds into the water when he thrusts his fingers in. He bends and sluices his face.

Your tail gives a hard, involuntary twitch. Until now he has been iron and leather and bright mail and the broad set of shoulders that belong to grown creatures who know their force. Then the water takes the blood and the grime from him and what rises from beneath it stills your breath clean out of you.

A boy. A beautiful boy. Young in the face despite the size of him. Wet lashes spiked dark. Mouth parted. Water running from brow to cheek to jaw, then slipping under the collar at his throat and down his neck. Your nails bite into the stones. Your gills flare wide and fast. You drag in more water through them without meaning to, as if the stream has suddenly thinned and left you short.

He opens his mouth and your eyes shut. The shouting from the field dulls. Stream keeps on at your shoulders. Wind moves somewhere high in the crowns of the trees. All of it goes faint around the shape of his voice. It reaches you blurred by distance, scant and earnest, with none of the grand sound men use when they want the world to think them holy. He asks for the dead man first. For the mother of the dead man. Forgiveness for what his own hand has done. Then he asks for bravery enough to return and do more of other men’s bidding before the sun goes down.

Nothing for himself. No glory. No protection. No rich spoil. Not even life.

Your grip slips and tightens again. Something deep in you, old as tide-pull, gives way. You have seen handsome things before. Fast things. Dangerous things. You have wanted and hunted and fed.

This is worse. This is a hurt that blooms sweet through the middle of you. By the time he lowers his head and the last of his prayer leaves his mouth and goes nowhere you can see, you love him so completely it feels less like being struck and more like sinking.

He rises and leaves, and the place he was at is empty as if it were bitten. The bank looks wrong without him on it. The water goes on over the stones as though nothing has happened. Your heart has no such manners. It follows him at once, crude and greedy, as though wanting were a hand with fingers on it. You part your lips with half a mind to call after him. Men can be called. Men can be coaxed to the water with the right note laid soft over the surface. You know how to turn the voice sweet enough to draw a neck forward, a foot wrong, a whole body into your keeping. The sound gathers under your tongue and dies there. To put a spell on him feels foul. It seems to you that a creature like that ought to come of his own will, or not at all.

You do not know by what rules men choose their maidens. You know only the old shapes from song and tale, the women with hair to their waists and wreaths at their throats, the ones led from halls by the hand, kissed before witnesses, warmed by fires built on dry land. Even the plainest of them has what you have not.

Legs.

By the time the sun tilts lower you are stern in the mind and weak in the heart, which is a poor way to go to a witch and the only way you have.

You gather what seems dear. Round pebbles from the streambed, the ones worn smooth as eggs. A white one with a milk-pale seam through the middle. A twist of yarrow and sage stolen from the bank where the roots drink deep. A handful of hazelnuts, though you have never eaten one and do not know if witches do. Three rowan berries bright as pinpricks of blood. One swan feather gone loose among the rushes.

Childish things, perhaps. Bride-things from the mind of a fool. You keep them all the same, tucked close in the fold of weed and river-grass you knot for carrying. Then you force yourself into one of the narrow runs that leaves the stream and threads the dark places inland. Mud slicks your sides. Roots comb your hair. The water grows warm and still and brown. It narrows to veins and then opens without warning into the bog pool, black at the middle, with a hut crouched on the shore as if it had grown there meanly from the peat.

You wait a long while with only your eyes above the weed. Nothing stirs but a gnat-cloud and the slow shake of sedge in the wind. At last you take one of the little stones from your hoard and throw it. It clicks against the wooden door. The sound is small; it still seems to carry everywhere. You sink lower, heart drumming hard, and hide among the pondweed with the offerings clutched to your breast, as if the right gifts and a brave face might yet make you into something a beautiful boy could love.

The door opens. The woman who steps out is bent nowhere and old everywhere. Her hair hangs in ropes the colour of drowned straw. Her shift is the grey of mushroom flesh. She peers toward the water as if she has smelt you already.

“Well,” she says. “What pretty thing noses at my threshold?”

You rise through the skin of water and push the bundle of gifts towards her. “I brought—”

“Did you.” She stoops and takes it between two fingers, as if it is something small and dead. “Then speak. A wish is no good to me till it has a mouth.”

You blink at her. Try to find the words for something prettier than a blunt girly whim, but they come out as they are. “I want legs.”

The witch looks at you for a moment. Then, she laughs. “That is not what you want.”

Mud stirs under your tail with the force of your annoyance. You dig the tip of it down into the black silt.

“Ah,” she coos, seeing it. “There is no shame in wanting, child. Only folly in pretending. You want a lad to love you.” You remain silent long enough for her eyes narrow with delight. “No. Not a lad.” She leans closer over the bank, and her smile turns terrible with it. “A knight.”

The scales along the back of your tail prickle. “Can you help me?”

“Likely.” She reaches down without warning, crooks one finger beneath your chin, and turns your face first one way, then the other. “You are fair enough for mortal work. Fairer than many that walk on two feet and think well of themselves besides. Why not sing to him? Why not call him into the water? Earth has given you gifts enough. Why do you not use them?”

You pull away from her hand. “I do not wish to lure him.”

Her mouth rounds. “Oh.” The sound is soft, but curdles your stomach all the same. “It is true love, then,” she says. “Pure as springwater. You would not stain your dear knight with a spell.” Her voice thins to a hiss. “What do you think you are doing here, if not spell-work?”

“The spell is not for him,” you say, and hear the weakness in it. “It is for me. I only need legs.”

“A spell is a spell all the same.”

She turns your bundle and lets the things fall. The pebbles, the berries, the herbs, the feather—all of it drops into the bog with a series of small, insulting plops. One hazelnut floats a moment before the water takes it.

“You may keep your trinkets,” she says. “I am not a hedge-wife to be bought with rowan and sage.”

Heat rises through you against the coldness of the bog. “Then why hear me?”

“Because I am curious.” She smiles again. “And because I can give you what you want. Under a condition,” she says.

Of course. Again, you keep still and say nothing. She seems to like that better than if you had begged.

“I will give you legs, and all that comes with them. You will wake with feet to stand on and knees to bend. You will go where he goes if you can keep pace. You will have three nights to win what you came for.”

The reeds whisper in the wind. Somewhere behind her hut a bird cries once and stops.

“If by the third night the knight loves you, the bargain is spent. If not, a soul is owed me.”

Your fingers tighten on the mud-bank. “Mine?”

“If you are dull enough.” The witch reaches into the fold of her garment and brings out a dagger. It is old and grisly, with a hilt of dark wood worn smooth by long handling. The blade is dark as well, but moonlight catches on it in a thin wet line. It looks hungry. “Or his.”

You stare at it.

“He may be given in your stead,” she says mildly. “A thrust under the rib. Upward, if you are weak in the arm. Bring him to me warm and I shall count us square.”

“Why would I do that?”

She lifts one shoulder. “Because hearts turn vicious when they do not get their fill. Because death is easier than longing for some creatures. Because on the third night you may find you love yourself a little more than him. I make room for all outcomes.”

The dagger gleams in her hand. You cannot stop looking at it. At last you whisper, “How shall I know if he loves me?”

The witch’s brows rise. “Were you not certain of it a moment ago?”

A pout blooms on your face unbidden.

She crouches at the bank then, bringing her face close to yours. Her breath smells of peat and old roots.

“When mortal men love their maidens,” she says, almost kindly, “they do not keep their hands to themselves. They part those fine legs you hunger after. They open the flesh between and put themselves there.”

A cold shiver runs the length of you.

Her smile returns, pleased and wicked. “There. That is plain enough even for a love-addled little fish.” She straightens. “Well? Do you accept?”

The word catches in your mouth. You sweep the dagger, the dark bog, the hut with your eyes. Then, her face, which has no mercy in it and no patience either. Because you have already loved him enough to come here, you say, “Yes.”

“Of course you do.” She puts the dagger down on the bank within your reach, then slips her hand somewhere inside her sleeve, deeper than the cloth ought to allow. When she draws it out again there is an egg in her palm, black-speckled and oddly warm.

You frown at it.

“Eat.”

“What is it?”

“An egg,” she says. “Do not go witless on me now.”

You take it from her. The shell is warm indeed, almost hot. “And then?”

“Then you sleep. Then you wake altered. It need not trouble you beyond that.”

It turns in your hand. “Raw?”

The witch gives you a look of withering contempt. “No, child. Put it in a silver cup and take it with honey.” She bares her teeth. “Yes, raw.”

Your eyes lower, ashamed of the question. The shell cracks easily. The inside slides thick and strange over your tongue. You swallow twice to get it down. The witch watches every motion.

When it is done, you wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and say, “How shall I find him?”

At that, something shifts in her face. Too rotten to be kindness, but it is the brief look of someone hearing a tune they know well.

“His blood is in the water,” she says.

Then she steps back, pulls the door open, and goes inside. It shuts between one blink and the next, leaving you in the bog with the dagger on the bank and the taste of the egg still clinging at the back of your throat.

You swim the way you came slowly. Moonlight makes the water mean and every root below look like a hand with the shape of something waiting. Above, the moon itself has thinned to a sickle near fine enough to seem a cut laid across the sky. It tells you that on the night of your judgement it will be gone altogether. You will hear it in the dark. His blood is in the water, the witch had said, and the current takes you at her word, carrying you through the narrow runs and back toward the broader stream where you first saw him kneel.

By the time you reach it, the bank is empty. You keep to the deeper part and let yourself drift there, belly turned uneasy by the egg, heart sore with a want that has already learned absence.

Sleep comes badly. Even so, it comes. The river rocks you. In the first fold of dreaming he leans over the bank again, all shadow and wet lashes, and this time when he opens his mouth it is not prayer that leaves it but your name. He reaches for you with a careful hand and thumb wedging under your chin. He bends and kisses you as though he has been thinking on nothing else.

Then the dream turns. Above you, something vast opens. The eye of god, grey and pale and lidless, hanging in the dark where the moon had been. Its patience is so complete the age of it exceeds the feeling of pity. Below, a pair of shears glints, iron-black and long as oars. The water thickens around you into a fat-like jelly, holds you fiercely, as the blades close with a sound no louder than a crab-shell snapping, and fire races you clean through. 

Scale after scale dulls and loosens. Webbing parts. Bone groans as if gripped and wrung by unseen hands. Your tail splits where no living thing ought to split and your flesh draws apart. New joints wrench themselves into being with a wet internal crack that never seems to finish. You open your mouth to scream and swallow black water instead. Heat tears through you from spine to hip to the new-made lengths of you, all the way to ten small, useless ends where your body has never ended before. Hair roots burn. Teeth ache. Even your fingertips feel changed, as though the whole of you has been dragged through too narrow an opening and forced to come out other.

You wake choking while dawn creeps into the sky. Half on the bank, half in the wash of the stream, naked to the chill, with the dagger clutched to your breast. Air rasps into you thinly through mouth and nose, making panic strike at once. You paw at your ribs and find only smooth skin where your gills ought to flare. Sealed. Gone. You drag another breath and another, each one scant enough to frighten. The water at your side offers no help. It laps your hip stupidly, as if it does not know you.

When you look down, you see them. Legs.

Two of them, long and bare and wrong as peeled roots. Knees knuckled sharp. Feet splayed in the mud with their blunt little toes. They belong to you no more than the moon belongs to the bog. The sight turns your stomach. You put a hand to one thigh. The skin there is soft and strange, without scale or sheen or the strength of a tail built to drive through current. When you try to draw the limb in, the knee folds with a hideous ease and the whole thing jerks sideways. It feels loose. Breakable. Made badly.

Still, you have asked for them. You plant both palms in the earth and try to rise and pain bites through your middle. Your legs buckle, each seeming to choose a different direction. One foot slides out from under you. The other catches on nothing and twists. You go down hard on your hands, palms full of mud. For a while you can do nothing but crouch there trembling, hair hanging round your face, breath coming sharp and ugly through a body that no longer knows its own shape.

Morning hones itself as you kneel in it. The scent of his blood has thinned almost to nothing. In its place comes the rest: men everywhere, dead and living both. Sweat gone sour in gambesons. Split guts, horse piss, iron and smoke. The field beyond the trees breathes out ruin by the lungful.

You have three days. Three days to find the knight, make him love you, and keep your soul out of a witch’s hand. You cannot even stand. Water clouds your vision and you laugh bitterly at how it won’t let you go entirely.

On the morrow, Dunk sweeps through the edges of the battlefield after the worst of it, checking for men still breathing whose bodies might be saved or those who need a merciful hand to help them pass. His side aches badly where someone slashed him, one ear hears less than it did before the fight, and one of his sockets throbs with excess blood, but at least he’s not the one gasping his last. He keeps his eyes peeled for movement, yet when he notices a particular creature trembling at the very shore where his inept prayers were heard, he stills.

A girl. Mud-caked, naked, and—Gods—crying.

He hauls the reins on Sweetfoot at once, dulling an instinct to charge forward and holding her in a rushed trot instead. “M’lady!” he calls from horseback. “M’lady, be not afraid!”

Your eyes lift, but the rest of you dwindles immediately. Arms come to cover your head and Duncan notices you’re stricken with grime wrists to elbows as if you were trying to make your way uphill on all fours. He dismounts with a small grunt and hunches on instinct. His arms spread wide and gentle, and before he knows it he’s murmuring as he would to a skittish thing. “Easy now,” he whispers. “Easy. I vow this to you—I am no threat. My name is… Ser D-Duncan The Tall. I won't hurt you.”

The title sits oddly in his mouth when he’s half-shrunken and on bent legs. As he comes closer, his cheeks begin hoarding warmth despite him, for the shape of you is visible and evident even at this angle. Breasts plastered to your thighs billow with each frightened breath. Your belly creases in the middle and clay tears and crumbles off your knees when you shudder. He sees nothing else, but in his chest an unbearable instinct to cradle you almost overcomes him.

His head turns to the side, so he watches you only with his eye’s corner. When he’s close enough, he undoes his cape, spreads it gently over your back and lets it fall over you. He has a fleeting thought on what kind of smell it must carry and whether that matters.

Only then does he see the dagger. It is clutched in your fist, half-hidden by mud and the hunch of your body, but iron is iron. His hand stills on the edge of the wool. For a breath he says nothing. A crying maid with a blade is still a maid with a blade, and fear can make a body quicker than training.

“Easy,” he says again, lower. “You needn’t use that on me.”

You stop trembling enough to lift your face. The blade drops. Then all at once you are on him, hands closing round his waist with such force Dunk rocks back on his heels. Something reaches him through wool and shaking breath. Unintelligible mutter. Then—found me. And again, softer, urgent with respite. Knew you would. Knew you’d find me.

For a moment he does nothing but stand there with his own arms half-raised, startled clean through. Then they come round you, shy and boyish. One hand settles between your shoulders. He rubs once, then again, broad and slow, as though you are a frightened colt and his hand might smooth you into sense. “There now,” he says, because it is what comes. “There now.”

Beneath the mud and the cold reek of the stream there is a smell to you he cannot place. Something green. Something sweet. It cuts strangely through blood and horse and churned earth. 

He lets you cling till your breathing eases enough to stop catching. When it eases, he gives your shoulders one careful squeeze and tries to look at your face without looking full at your face.

“M’lady,” he says. “Have you been hurt?” You shake your head against him. He swallows. “And your clothes—were you robbed?” There is a pause to that. Then you nod.

“Ah.” Dunk shuts his mouth on all the things that might follow that and does not ask them. “Well. I’ll take you to the village,” he says. “We’ll find something to put on your back, and someone to look you over.”

You do not let go, and he finds he does not much mind that. By now he is holding most of your weight besides. He means to set you back a little then, only enough to walk you to Sweetfoot, but the moment he loosens his hold your legs betray you. They fold queerly with the loose, witless give of limbs that do not know their own business. Dunk catches you fast under the arms before your knees can strike earth. 

Some hurt in the low back, he thinks. Or the spine knocked wrong. He has seen men go slack in the limbs from less.

“Easy,” he says again, lower now. “I’ve you.”

Your head comes up. There is mud on your cheek, tears dried in bright tracks through it. Up close the sight of you lands worse on him than it did before. Such beauty in such a place. Such beauty at all. If someone asked him later, he would have no better answer than that.

“May I carry you?” he asks.

You nod.

He gathers the cape tight first, fingers making poor work of it. Then he crouches so you may put your arms round his neck. When you do, your face comes so near he feels the warmth of your breath on his mouth. His own has gone dry. “I will lift you now,” he says, for want of anything wiser.

One arm behind your back, the other under your knees. He brings you up. The pull in his side is vicious enough to whiten his sight for a blink, but he only grunts and holds you the tighter for it. You are light to him. Light should not be so difficult.

Sweetfoot turns her head and blows at the sight of you in Dunk’s arms. “Mind yourself,” Dunk mutters, and means the horse, and himself, and perhaps the day entire.

Getting you into the saddle proves ugly work. There is no good way to manage a naked maid wrapped in a cloak when one hand is wanted for decency, the other for balance, and his side seems set on parting company with him. He stands a moment with his jaw shut hard, then does it the only way such things ever get done—awkwardly.

“M’lady,” he says, hot-faced, “I must set you before me.” You only look at him with those wide, strange eyes and make no complaint.

He gets one boot to stirrup, hauls himself up enough to raise you after, and nearly fumbles you when the cloak slips and his forearm feels the bare warmth of your back through the wool. Heat runs through him so fast it feels wrong. He gets you right the second time by sheer stubbornness, settles you before the saddle-bow, then adjusts behind with a grunt he prays sounds like effort.

It does not improve matters.

There is no room worth speaking of. You sit before him with your hair damp and knees thrown to one side, and Dunk must put an arm round your middle the moment Sweetfoot moves or see you slide clean off. He has no notion what one does with a girl in such a fix. Horses, boys, wounds, armour, hard roads, those he understands. A maiden fair as vision and shaky in the limbs, is another matter. He finds himself hoping there is some widow in the village with a stern face and capable hands who might take one look at you and know everything he does not. Then he may ride on to Riverrun with peace in his mind.

The thought sits well enough till you lean back. A little more weight at each step, whether from weariness or trust he cannot tell. Soon your back is to his chest and your hair keeps straying under his chin. He has to look somewhere, so he looks at your hands on Sweetfoot’s neck.

Mud is dried in the lines of your palms and packed black beneath your nails. The nails themselves are pale in a way he mislikes. A drowned sort of blandness, as though the blood had only lately remembered to leave them. His hand closes harder on the reins.

What befell you? Robbed, you had said—no, nodded. Robbed of clothes and the strength in your legs. Robbed near of your wits, to be found bare and weeping on the skirts of slaughter. His mind offers up answers and every one of them is ugly.

“You are safe enough for now,” he says, because the words come and because he wants them said. “We’ll have you among decent folk directly.”

You say nothing. Perhaps doze. Perhaps you only listen. When Sweetfoot steps through a rut, your head tips back against him for an instant, and Dunk’s arm goes firmer round your waist.

Riverrun can wait an hour. Even a day, if it must. First the village. Clothes. Food. A woman to tend you. Then he will know what ought be done.

He keeps his eyes ahead and rides. When the road begins to thicken with huts and kitchen smoke he turns Sweetfoot toward the first cottage with a swept patch of yard and washing strung on a line. A hen darts from underhoof squawking. Dunk reins in, slides down, and reaches up for you.

The door opens before he can knock. A broad woman with red wrists and a face like a hatchet stands in the threshold, takes in Dunk, the horse, the cloak-wrapped girl in his arms, and narrows her eyes. “I can explain,” Dunk says, which is a poor beginning and sounds like one besides.

“Can you?” she says.

Heat climbs his neck. “I found her by the stream yonder. She’s been robbed, I think. She’s got no clothes, and her legs are none too steady. I thought—” He falters, then tries again. “I thought a woman might better see to her.”

The woman looks past him to your face. Something in hers shifts, not softer exactly, but less sharp. “Well, I am a woman,” she says. “Bring her in, then, you great oaf, and stand there bleeding on my threshold no longer.”

Dunk ducks his head and does as he’s bid. The cottage is low-ceilinged and close with the smell of onions and wool. He sets you down where the woman tells him, though not without trouble, for your legs go queer under you again and your hand catches in his sleeve with sudden force. “You are safe,” he says under his breath.

Your fingers tighten. “Please,” you whisper. “Do not leave.”

That near aches him more than the clinging had. “I’ll be just outside,” he says, for the woman is already flapping a hand at him to get out and because there is no fitting place for him in a room where a maid must be dressed. “Only outside. I vow it.”

A beat. Then, you let go. The door shuts on him. Dunk stands in the yard with a hand pressed to his side. Through the wall come the dim sounds of women’s voices, yours low and strange, the older one brisk and practical. Once there is a clatter. Once a silence long enough to make him straighten from the fence-post he had leaned on. He is thinking whether it would be madness to knock when the woman steps out at last, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Well?” Dunk asks.

“Well, nothing’s broke,” she says. “No fever that I can feel, no wound worth speaking of. She’s frightened half witless and weak in the legs, that’s all. Hungry, too, I’d say. May be she took some knock to the head. May be she was born a little moon-touched. Hard to say.”

Dunk blinks at her. “She knows her own name?” he asks.

The woman gives him a look. “She knows enough.”

That does not answer much, but before he can find a better question the door opens and you come out.

The clothes hang on you as they would on a child dressed from a dead woman’s chest: a coarse shift, a faded gown, sleeves a touch too short, hem uncertain, boots big enough to host toes twice as long as yours. Your hair has been pushed back from your face with damp hands. Your legs still look unsure of themselves. Dunk moves before thinking and takes you by the elbows when you waver on the step. “There now,” he murmurs. “Steady.”

You look up at him with such plain relief that his grip gentles.

The woman snorts softly behind you. “Take her home, then.”

Dunk clears his throat. “Aye. That is—” He looks down at you. “Where is your home, m’lady?”

Your hand comes up and closes over his forearm. “There is nothing for me there,” you say. Your fingers tighten. “Please.”

He opens his mouth, then shuts it. “I am bound for Riverrun,” he says at last. “I’ve business there. I cannot—”

“That is where I am going,” you say quickly. “The last place where I have anything. Please. Take me with you.”

Dunk stares. It may be nonsense. It may be the plain truth. It may be only the talk of a girl too frightened to be left among strangers. He cannot tell. What he can tell is the feel of your hand on his arm, the look of you trying not to sway where you stand, and the knowledge that if he leaves you here, he will think on it all the road to Riverrun and probably every road after.

The woman folds her arms and watches him make a misery of the choice. “Well?” she says.

Dunk lets out a breath. “I can take you as far as Riverrun,” he says, still looking at you. “No farther promised than that.”

Your smile is answer enough. Later, when doubt gets into him, it will be one of the things he reaches back for.

Soon after the village, Duncan finds himself about a number of tasks he had not meant to take on. He accepts the pity bundle of more garments from the woman, all of them light. He lifts you to the saddle, then goes back for Chestnut and Thunder. He loses the mark of his back, gathers his scant belongings, counts them, and thinks of the trouble of one bedroll. Riverrun lies four nights off, and his purse is too light for inns along the way. He shifts the saddle on Chestnut till it will hold you steady enough, then goes through the poor store of cloth he owns to see whether there is anything fit to spare you. At last he finds a blanket little better than rough army issue and ties it round your shoulders with a length of string.

When he is done, he steps back to look at you and nearly laughs for the misery of it. A strange girl with no place to go, less worldly goods than he has, a queer way of speaking, and legs that seem only half-convinced by land—and here he is, setting his road to her pace as though this were a sensible thing. Duncan knows well enough what sort of fool he is. Dunk the Lunk, thick as a castle wall, slow as an aurochs. Still, his mouth pulls into a shy half-smile.

“Ready?” he asks.

The world of men continues to bewilder. They kill each other relentlessly and let the bodies rot out in the fields until crows find them. They speak oddly. They wear clothes. Rough things that scratch the skin round armpits and knees, and make their beasts wear clothes too. They walk on two imbalanced legs that have less sense to them than you would ever think they have, which end with feeble little things that need the most woeful instrument imaginable to stay protected—shoes.

The pain comes on you late. At first everything is so strange that the cuts in your feet barely matter. Then, just as you get the first grasp on how to walk on those fleshy stilts, an old woman gives you a shift, a skirt that wedges itself between your thighs, stockings that roll beneath your knees, and a pair of disgusting animal-skin things that make the wound across your sole press and bleed, press and bleed. You could fit another set of those ugly little toes into them and still they’d knock your ankles raw. Duncan seems to think your wits were rumbled sideways by whatever befell you, and sighs through his nose each time you try a few wobbling steps before giving up and tossing you from one place to another. From doorstep to horseback. From horseback to ground. From ground back to horseback again. Then, the horse takes over the carrying.

None of this matters greatly. None of it rubs you wrong in any way, because your knight has found you and agreed to take you to Riverrun, of which you know only that it is overrun with rivers and mean spirits, and you want nothing to do with either. You want everything to do with him, though, so you let the beast called Chestnut carry you toward it and knock your newly acquired arse against the hard leather of her saddle.

You glance at him often, only to make certain you were right to choose him, but Duncan proves worth every bruise on your buttocks. He is prettier close by. Washed of blood, his face goes almost holy at moments—too open and clean in the look of it—then a shift of shade will catch under the brow and jaw and make a man of him again so suddenly it gives you pause. His arms are strong enough to carry a girl like you. His heart, plainly, is soft enough to help one and trust one within the space of a single hesitant breath.

That softness lives in him in sly places. Not only in the face, though the face does its share. In the stammer that catches him when he is too aware of himself. In the way he asks leave before he touches you, as though a thing may be both necessary and solemn. In how he handles even his own size like it might alarm somebody if set down too hard. You begin to see that the boyishness in him is not only a matter of smooth cheeks and dark lashes and that honest mouth. It lives deeper. Some tender piece of him has made it to his great age uncrushed.

You have no notion what he knows of love. His lips look unkissed, which strikes you at once as improbable and agreeable. Kissable all the same. So are his cheeks, if it comes to that, and the hollows under his eyes look made for the brushing of thumbs in acts of pity or fondness or whatever human girls do when they mean to soothe a man. You think, in the stupid way of girls, that it may be just as well if he knows nothing. You know very little yourself. The males of your kind are greedy, quarrelsome creatures who would bite the shine off a scale if they thought it theirs by right. The tenderest kiss you have ever given in all your life was to a trout, and that was mostly because it was dying.

Still, you know enough to know this: there is something dear in a creature so large keeping such a breakable heart inside him. Duncan feels safe to you in the way deep water once did. Not because he could not drown you if he wished, but because every part of him seems arranged against wishing it.

The road, of course, is another matter. It goes on and on, pale and hard beneath the horses, made by men for reasons men must have found clever. When there is no canopy the sun comes down bare and mean, scorching your face, your scalp, the tender tops of your hands. Dust lifts and settles in your throat. The saddle knocks under you with a steady, sour persistence, and after a while even wonder thins into boredom. You cannot understand why anyone would choose such a path. Roads have no give. They hold the day’s heat. They are full of stones and wheel-ruts and the old droppings of beasts. Water, at least, takes your shape when it carries you.

But then, toward evening, the land alters. Light begins to bleed richer colours over everything. It gathers in the grasses and tips the hedges. It slicks itself along the backs of flies until the air is full of brief, burning specks. The trunks of trees grow black on one side and warm on the other, and the far fields seem to have been brushed by something molten and low. From the height of Chestnut’s back, you see land from its own heart for the first time: furrow, ditch, thorn, moss, little stones shining in the road, the long back of the world lifting itself toward dark.

The dying sun finds Duncan too. It catches in his hair until the auburn of it wakes with red-gold hidden under it, banked fire stirred by a stick. All of him brightens: cheek, ear, the blunt line of his nose, the great slope of shoulder under travel-stained cloth. When the sun begins to go, his colours come alive. It seems unfair that a thing may grow more beautiful just when the light is going, as if it was never meant to be kept.

“M’lady?” His voice pulls you from the sky. You turn your head and find him watching you from Sweetfoot’s back. “Are you tired?”

You consider this. “Tired of what?”

He blinks.

“Sitting on a beast?” you ask.

A sound leaves him then, low and huffed through his nose. “Aye. Riding can weary a body. We should make camp soon. It will be dark before long.”

You look him over for signs of weariness, but he shows none that you can read. He sits tall enough, broad enough, with the reins easy in one hand and the dust on him as if it has been there all his life. “The road is hard,” you allow. “The beast is delightful.”

At that you lean forward and wrap both arms around Chestnut’s neck. Chestnut blows out a pleased breath and dips her head as if she agrees with you entirely.

Duncan stares for a moment. Then his mouth presses itself into a line and he looks back to the road.

“Do people always choose paths this hard?” you ask.

“This?” he says. “This is no hard road. It’s straight, and flat enough, and there’s no great wind to cut at us. There are harder paths than this.”

You frown. “Why would anyone take a harder path?”

“Sometimes they must.”

You consider that gravely. Men do seem fond of arranging misery into rules and then obeying them.

After another little while, Duncan says, “Keep your eyes peeled for a place to camp, if there is one you like.”

Your hand lifts before he has finished speaking. “There.”

He follows the line of your finger. There is only a thick tangle of trees and bramble ahead, with sun lying through the branches. “There?” he says.

“By the water.”

He looks again, slower this time, as if water may show itself out of courtesy. “There ain’t water there, m’lady.”

“There is.”

His gaze comes back to you. It is a look you dislike before you understand it. Careful. Mild. The look given to a creature who has said something foolish and might be frightened if the foolishness is named aloud. Pity sits in it, thinly covered.

Heat pinches under your ribs. “Beyond those trees,” you say. “Where the sun takes aim. There is water.”

Duncan shifts in the saddle. For a moment it seems he means to answer. Instead he only draws a breath and turns Sweetfoot’s head. “All right, then.”

The gentleness of it makes the pinch in you flare hotter. The males of your own kind speak so when they wish to make you small. Little thing, pretty thing, witless thing. They forget how quickly a little thing can open a throat when she has teeth and a mind to use them. How a male may reach for you in the weeds, grinning, and only know himself dead when his fingers will no longer close because all the blood has run out of them.

You say nothing. Chestnut follows Sweetfoot off the road and into the green press, Thunder trots close behind with all of the belongings clinking at his sides.

Branches drag over your shoulders. Leaves brush your face and catch in your hair. The ground grows softer almost immediately, darkening underhoof. You hear it before he does, of course: the low, glassy talk of water over stone, hidden under bird-call and the rasp of insects. A moment later Duncan hears it too. His head lifts. Sweetfoot’s ears prick forward. He urges her on a little faster without looking back.

The trees thin, and beyond them lies a small bed of grass pressed close to a clear stream running lazy under evening light. A willow grows at the bank with its long hair fallen into the water, making a green chamber beneath it. The surface holds the last of the sun in broken pieces and lets them go again.

Duncan reins in. At first, he only looks. “Well,” he says at last, quiet and baffled. “Gods be good.” You sit straighter on Chestnut’s back when he turns to you. “How did you know?”

Your chin lifts, because even though he has no right to know, you are a proud creature. “I am not so witless as you think me, knight.”

At that his face changes. The bafflement stays, but something troubled comes into it too. “I never thought you witless,” he says.

Instead of dignifying that with a response, you begin getting off Chestnut. It seems simple enough. One leg must go somewhere, then the other after it, and the ground waits below with its usual bad intentions. You slide halfway down the saddle and there the business collapses. Your skirt catches, one foot finds nothing. Your hands clutch at leather and mane, and you are left hanging from the side of the beast in a deeply humiliating fashion, breathing hard through your nose.

Duncan is there before you make a fool of yourself entire. His hands span your waist through the shift, large and warm and terribly sure. He lifts you down as if the effort costs him nothing, though you have seen the way his side catches sometimes when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I only meant,” he says, setting you on the grass with more care than the world deserves, “you keep surprising me.”

You say nothing to that. Only look at him from close by, and shamelessly so. He is shy for a lad this big. It pleases and worries you in equal measure. It makes you wonder, briefly and without comfort, whether he will know what to do with you at all. Whether he knows how men put themselves between the legs of women who want them so dearly. Whether, third night from this one, the witch will have the soul she grinned for.

Before you can ask, Duncan looks away. “You may bathe, if you like,” he says. “Under the willow there. I’ll start a fire. See to some food. Water the horses after.” Then he turns from you with the haste of a sailor escaping a sinking ship.

The first thing you lose is the shoes. You wrench them off and drop them in the grass with hatred. The cut across your sole still presses when your foot meets earth, but at least it is no longer trapped against leather, forced to bleed and bleed in its own little prison. The stockings go next, or try to. They roll and cling beneath your knees like pale eels. Then, the blanket. You tug at the ties and laces and strings, cross with their stubbornness, then only angrier. Human clothes are full of tricks and no kindness. At last, with a tired grunt, you pull the shift up over your head.

Behind you, wood clatters. You look round.

Duncan stands a few feet away with firewood scattered at his boots. His mouth has parted. For one suspended moment he simply gapes. Then flush climbs fiercely round his ears, up his neck, into his face, and he drops into a crouch to gather the sticks as if they have become suddenly precious.

“M-m’lady,” he says, strangled. “You oughtn’t—Seven save me—you oughtn’t undress before a man you scarce know.”

You stare at him.

“I thought you meant to go beneath the willow,” he goes on, still looking hard at the twigs. “Out of sight. I thought—what are you doing? Have you never been on the road? Or near men? Or near folk at all?”

An instinct pinches you, strange and unwelcome, to cover your chest. You do, though slowly, and with no clear idea why. He looks as if you have done him some harm. “It is only flesh,” you say. “You have flesh too. What is so wicked about mine that you cannot look?”

He makes a small, suffering sound and bends lower over the firewood. “My flesh is—” He stops. Swallows. Tries again. “It is different.”

You glance down at yourself, then at him. “How?”

His hand closes on a stick so tightly the bark cracks. “M’lady, I beg you.”

“For what?”

“For pity,” he says, so miserably that your brows lift. “It is improper, is all. A maid shouldn’t—And I don’t mean to have you think I’m that sort of man. I am trying to do good by you.”

He sounds so nervous your annoyance falters. Only for a moment.

You pick up the shift and hold it to your chest, then begin toward the bank. Walking still feels like being made to argue with the earth. Each step must be planned, lowered, endured. Too much pressure and the pain flares white-hot. Too little and your knee goes soft. Your feet seem stupidly far away from the rest of you, little traitors sent ahead to ruin your dignity.

You stop beside him. Duncan bows his head even lower, as though your bare ankle might strike him blind.

“Do you dislike women’s bodies?” you ask.

The sound he makes then is very nearly a whine. “Please, m’lady. Spare me. I am only a hedge knight. I am trying—please.”

You huff at him. “Forgive me for tormenting you with some skin.” Then you limp on beneath the willow’s hanging hair.

There, hidden by the long green fall of it, you strip with more temper than grace and lower yourself toward the stream. This is going poorly. Your knight does not seem at all like the men you have watched from the shallows, those shore-men who seize their lovers round the waist and press them down laughing in the dark, bodies gleaming, mouths so sinful your tail once twitched hard enough to stir silt. Duncan behaves as though the sight of you is a trial set by cruel gods.

At least there is water.

The stream receives you kindly, though changed skin and sealed ribs make even kindness strange. You lie back over its cool sheet and drift where it is deep enough to hold you, looking up through the willow leaves as they sieve the last gold from the sky. The current slips beneath your new body, uncertain around the parts it no longer knows, and you let it carry what little of you it still can.

Duncan remains crouched over the scattered firewood long after you limp beneath the tree, ears burning as though someone has boxed them both. The stream talks quietly behind him. The horses crop at the grass.

He has no answer for what has just happened. None he likes, anyway.

You are strange. Stranger than any girl he has known, though known is too large a word for the few girls that ever had cause to look twice at him. Your face is strange too, in how open it is. He has not seen one so plain and easy to read since he was a boy looking down into still puddles and finding his own there. He can tell when you are baffled. When you are tired. When you are pleased. When you are angry.

Now you are angry. Likely under the willow still wearing that fierce little frown, cross with him because he turned his eyes away. That is the oddest part. Most maids, he thinks, would be angry with a man for gaping. You seem wounded that he did not gape longer.

He did gape. Only a heartbeat, maybe, before sense struck him like a thrown stone, but a heartbeat can be a mean long while when a girl stands bare in afternoon light. He saw the lift of your breasts before your arms came up, full where the borrowed shift had hidden them, and prickling with river-cool air. He saw the narrow give of your belly, the line where ribs fell into waist, the dark crease of shadow beneath. Enough. More than enough. Too much for a man meant to be gathering sticks and doing honourable things with his hands.

You asked how your flesh was different from his. The terrible thing is he would only need to stand up to show you.

That thought near makes him groan aloud. He jams another stick into the small pit he has scraped clear with his boot and starts arranging kindling with far more care than kindling deserves. Fire. Food. Horses. Bedroll. Those are proper troubles. Those can be solved with hands and a bit of sense.

The bedroll is the worst of them. Four nights to Riverrun. A purse too light for inns unless he means to arrive there hungry and horseless. He pokes at the kindling and gives himself over to a hard, practical anguish.

When the fire catches, he goes to see to the horses. Sweetfoot accepts his hand with her usual calm. Chestnut, traitor that she is, blows warm air straight into his face and tosses her head toward the willow.

“Oh, have you a new favourite?” Duncan mutters. Chestnut chews at nothing, looking pleased with herself. “Aye. Good. All of you against me, then.”

He returns to the fire with what food he has: one mangy rabbit still fit for roasting, a clutch of withered potatoes that have begun trying to become more potatoes, and bread gone hard enough to argue with a knife. He has had worse meals. Many worse. Still, he finds himself worrying whether it will be enough for a tender-mouthed creature like you, whether you are used to finer things, softer things, things served by hands that have never been black with battlefield mud.

The whole day sits oddly in his skull. Morning had found him still full of war. Blood from the day before. The sour stink of men opened for no good reason. Boys felled in the grass with their eyes gone milky and their mothers’ names drying on their tongues. He had been angry then, in a slow thick way, at killing and lords and banners and all the great heavy wheels that roll over little bodies until no one can tell what shape they had.

Then he found you by the stream, naked, half-wild with fear, concussed or close enough, begging him without quite begging to take you with him. Now you are angry because he would not stand there and leer at your tits.

Duncan understands horses better than people. Dogs too. Even mules, ugly-hearted beasts though they can be. A horse gives warning before it kicks. A dog shows teeth before it bites. People smile, weep, lie, ask strange questions, go hurt in places a man cannot see. You escape even the small customs he has managed to learn.

He lifts his eyes from the rabbit just as the wind moves the willow’s hanging hair aside. Through the green gaps, he sees you.

You are floating on your back where the stream broadens under the tree, arms spread loose on either side, legs moving slowly beneath the skin of the water. The last light scatters over you in pieces. A knee and a hip. The small rise of your belly. Water darkens and brightens as it crosses you, breaking your shape and making it whole again. Your hair fans out around your head. Your eyes are closed, mouth parted, and the stream slips between your lips as though you have invited it.

Duncan ought to look away, but the boy he is, he doesn't.

There is enough of you on display to shame a septa dead in her robes. Breasts, thighs, the place between them blurred and shown by water in turns. Yet your face holds him worst. The peace of it, the ease of it. Stripped of cloth and terror and all the hard rules that seem to trouble you, you look newly made and older than the earth together. Not human, he thinks. Then he feels wicked for it, because you are a girl, and hurt, and under his protection.

Still, you look like one of those goddesses men carved in old stones before the Seven came, the kind Duncan knows nothing about except that a wiser man would kneel or run. You look pleased to have the world off your skin. No wonder you shed clothing like a snare.

The willow falls back into place. Green covers you again. Duncan looks down at the rabbit, jaw tight, and turns it over the flame before it can make it to coal. He scolds himself too, keeps muttering Ser Arlan's little knightly preachings to tear his mind away from what boys think about, and back to what sworn swords should think about.

The stream sloshes and plops with the sound of a body being dragged out of it. There, Dunk wonders what exactly to do, because he knows well enough you are no good at walking yet, but finds himself in the grip of a strange preference. He would rather let the stumble happen and rush to help than prevent it outright, if prevention means enduring another comparison of flesh.

Soon enough, he catches you limping from the corner of his eye to the heart of his vision. You come to sit beside him much too close for his peace. The cold of the river comes off you plainly, running against the heat of his shoulder where yours nearly touches. Damp has darkened your hair and set loose drops along your neck. Before he can shift away without making it an insult, you arrange yourself with great importance and announce, “There. Modest.”

Dunk looks. Stupidly, but he does. He has never known cloth to be a thing worthy of praise. Cloth is only cloth. A courtesy. A barrier. A way for decent folk to go about the world without setting fire to one another’s ears. Yet in his want to tell you that you have done well, he stabs his own foot clean through.

The linen has clung to you everywhere it ought to have had the manners to hang loose. Breast, belly, the small inward draw of your waist—all made plainer by water and the thinness of the shift. The blanket lies in a heap too near the fire, abandoned as though wool has somehow offended you.

He holds the lump in his throat from becoming a sound. Then he reaches for the blanket, shakes the worst of the grass from it, and puts it over your shoulders with as much solemn care as if he were robing a queen. He draws it close beneath your throat and tucks one edge over the other.

“You’ve not dried yourself off,” he says. “Cold, aren’t ye?”

You look at him for a moment. Then, there's a nod, and, thank the Seven, your hands take over the keeping of the blanket at your breastbone. The lump in Dunk's throat loosens.

He busies himself with the food. The rabbit has given what it can to the pot, which is less than a rabbit ought to give and more than nothing. The potatoes have softened. The bread will have to be chewed with conviction. He ladles the thin pottage into one of his wooden bowls and passes it to you.

You take it in both hands and eye it with open suspicion. “What is this?”

“Supper,” he says.

You smell it.

“It ain’t much,” Dunk goes on, because the look on your face begins to trouble him. “Only rabbit and some potatoes, and the bread’s gone hard. Still, you ought to eat. There’s a day on the road ahead, and you’ve had naught in you since—” He stops, because he does not know since when. “A while, I’d wager.”

He expects disappointment, perhaps. Revulsion, if you are some lord’s daughter after all, though what lord’s daughter finds herself naked and half-drowned by a stream is beyond him.

Instead, you look bewildered. “You made this?”

Dunk blinks. “A-aye, m’lady.”

You dip your fingers in before he can offer a spoon. The first bite goes into your mouth carefully, as though supper may have sharp bits within it. Then your face changes.

It is a small thing, merely a lifting of brows and mouth pausing round the taste. Then you take another bit, and another, hotter than is wise, huffing through it and laughing once under your breath as though the whole notion of cooked rabbit has played some clever trick on you. Grease shines at the corner of your mouth. You lick it away with no shame at all.

“This is good,” you say, and sound surprised by your own gladness. “This is very good.”

Dunk is bewildered. It is one kind of cruelty to tease him and huff at him for trying his best at decency and failing, another to make a jest out of him and his hedge-ridden status. He looks down into his own bowl.

“Must you mock me?”

You stop chewing at once. The mouthful is too large to swallow cleanly, but you do it anyway and wince as it goes down. “Mock you?” you ask. “Why would I?”

“It’s only rabbit,” he mutters. “And mangled potatoes. You needn’t make a show of it.”

The hurt that comes into your face lands in him badly.

“I did not mean to hurt you,” you say. “Forgive me. I only meant—I would not be able to make this.” A pause. “Or start a fire, for that matter.”

Dunk lifts his head. “You do not know how to start a fire?”

You look at him a moment too long, then back into the bowl. “I’ve never needed it.”

That answer is another strange stone set on the growing pile of you. He gives a low hum and scrapes at his own supper with the spoon. “Well,” he says after a moment, rough with regret. “I beg your pardon, then. If you truly enjoy it, I am glad.”

Your eyes lift. “I do. Truly.”

Knowing it is true does something worse than the praise did. It catches him off guard and warms him under the breastbone, soft and dangerous. He leans back on one hand, taking you in. Half-smile, bare feet peeking from beneath the blanket, bowl clutched as though it contains some small wonder.

“So,” he says, because his mouth is safer when it is trying to crack an unresolvable riddle, “you’re a lady who cannot cook, cannot start a fire, and despises garments and shoes, but has some queer prescience when it comes to finding a body of water. Hm?”

Silence only, then a wide-eyed glance.

“Peculiar,” Dunk says.

“I do not understand why men wear so much cloth anyway,” you say, picking at the blanket where it sits under your chin. “What is peculiar is to have skin so feeble—”

There, your voice dies. Dunk has gone very still with his spoon halfway to his mouth. “Men?” he says.

You blink.

“You are people too,” he says, after a beat.

The words are gentle enough, but they come with a puzzled furrow between his brows, as though he is trying to set you in the proper place and cannot find the shelf. He takes another mouthful and chews it slowly. “Have you worn lighter cloth before, then? Before… all this?”

Before the stream, he means. Before the mud. Before the village woman and the borrowed gown. Before whatever thing he has decided happened to you.

Your fingers tighten round the bowl. “Lighter, yes.”

“How light?”

You give him a careful look.

Dunk seems to understand his mistake before you answer. Red returns to his ears with comic speed. “Never mind. You needn’t— That was no question to ask a maid.”

You consider him. “Do you not often see women naked?”

He chokes. It is only a little choke, but enough to make him turn his face and thump one fist against his chest. “Gods,” he says when he has breath again. “M’lady.”

“I am only asking.”

“Aye, well. Some questions ought to be asked with more care.”

“Why?”

“Because they—” He looks at you, then away, then helplessly down to his lap. “Because they put thoughts in a man’s head.”

“What thoughts?”

His mouth opens. Shuts. You lean closer, interested so plainly Dunk near suffocates on air that suddenly feels chewable in his mouth. “Do women’s bodies trouble all men so badly, or only hedge knights?” you ask.

He makes the suffering sound again. Quieter this time, but telling all the same. “I've seen women,” he says, with the grave misery of a fool walking barefoot over hot coals. “Some. A few. In bathhouses, once or twice by mistake. On the road, folk are not always private as they ought be. And, uh—” He clears his throat so hard it sounds painful. “And in places where women are paid to be looked at.”

You stare. “Paid?”

“Aye.”

“To be looked at?”

“Among other things.”

“What other things?”

Dunk puts his bowl down. You wait. He looks into the fire as if the flames might take pity on him and leap high enough to swallow his face. “Things between men and women.”

“What things?”

“Married things,” he says, too quickly.

“Only married people do them?”

His eyes close briefly. “No.”

“Then why call them married things?”

“Because I am trying to keep this talk decent,” Dunk huffs.

You frown into your supper. “Have you done them?” you ask.

It is such a rude and forthright question it strikes bone in him, though somehow it does not quite offend. His face pulls tight. The flush burns hotter, but something under it draws inward, shy and sore and young.

“N-no,” Duncan says, small.

You lean closer, as if trying to match him in secrecy lest his horses suddenly recognise human tongue. “Never?”

“No.”

“Why?”

He gives a small, helpless shrug. “I’ve had no wife.”

“But you said folk do these things without wives.”

“Aye, some do.” He groans then, low and exasperated, dragging one hand over his mouth. “Gods.”

“But you do not.”

“No.”

“Why?”

His thumb moves over the rim of his bowl. There is dirt under the nail, a split at the knuckle, the hand of a man who knows fire and reins and sword-hilts and very little of where to put himself when a girl asks him plain questions in the dusk.

“Seemed wrong, most times,” he says. “Or costly. Or I was too young. Or too big and stupid and slow to know what was wanted till the chance had gone.”

He goes quiet after that, hoping it is enough of a confession to satisfy you. Another part of him wonders what business he has entertaining the whim at all. A puzzle of a girl you are, that is for certain. Strange in your questions, in your frowns, in the careless tilt of your head when you hear a thing you cannot place.

Then a thought comes on him, tender and stupid enough to shame him: is this another chance he cannot recognise while it is being given? He lifts his face to check yours for some sign of what he imagines a lustful glance might be, though he has no real notion what he expects to find there. Heat? Mischief? Some womanly knowledge he would know when he saw it? Before he can make any proper fool’s study of you, you ask another question.

“Do you like kissing?”

You might as well have picked up a knife by the blade. “I—” His throat works. “I suppose I might.”

“You suppose?”

He breathes heavy. His skin surely can’t get any hotter, so he answers, “I have kissed.”

Your eyes brighten at that, keen enough to make him regret the disclosure at once. “How many times?”

Duncan laughs then, though there is little mirth in it. Nerves, mayhaps. Or the pure severity of you sitting there with rabbit grease on your mouth, asking after his kisses as if counting apples in a basket. He has admitted to being green and now sounds greener still. “Seven save me,” he whines.

“How many?”

“Enough to know a man should not count in front of a lady.”

“Was it good?”

The fire pops. Somewhere behind the pair of you one of the horses tears grass with its teeth. Dunk sits in deepening blushing silence.

You eat another bite. Hum, as if the flavours have managed to marry into something more delicious during the interrogation. “At the shore,” you say then, “men kiss women as if they are hungry.”

Dunk’s gaze snaps to you.

“I have seen it,” you add. “They hold them by the waist and put them down in the grass. Sometimes the women laugh. Sometimes they make sounds as if they are being bitten, but they keep their hands in the men’s hair, so I think they must like it.”

Duncan feels himself go past blushing into something worse. Stricken, feverish, and too aware of the place where his belly has kicked tight under your words. He cannot have you thinking him that sort of knight. Cannot sit here in the dark with you speaking of women pressed into grass and let his mind go where it has already begun to go.

“M’lady,” he says, and hears the plea in it himself. “I think we ought to try and get some sleep.”

“It is barely dark,” you say.

“It will be darker soon.”

“That happens whether we sleep or not.”

“Aye,” he says faintly. “So it does.”

You lick a bit of grease from your thumb. His eyes move there and away so fast he prays you miss it. “Do you want more supper?” he asks.

You smile into your bowl. “You are changing the subject.”

He smiles back, weakly. Hopes there is enough begging in it, though judging by your curiosity about every cursed thing under the moon, falling to his knees would only give you more to ask about. “I am… trying to save my soul.”

Your laugh comes out small and surprised, and it spills warm through his chest in a way that has no business being so pleasant.

“Eat,” he says. “Then sleep. There will be more road on the morrow, and you already hate the road.”

“I hate the shoes more,” you tell him.

“Aye. I had gathered.”

“And the stockings.”

“A terrible foe,” Dunk says, standing up.

“And the laces.”

“Cruel little beasts.”

You glance at him, something sharp and pleased on you. It is very difficult to keep thoughts from his head, foul thoughts, when you look like this. His heart softens a notch while the other parts of him harden, and before he is forced back to sitting, Dunk turns and tells you, “I’ll water the horses and prepare the bedroll for us.”

He does so. You follow him soon after, quiet-footed for once, and stop to eye the splay of oilcloth and old wool on the ground as if it is another human custom laid out for judgment.

Dunk clears his throat. “You should lie down. You’ve had a long day.”

That much, at least, you obey. You lower yourself carefully, one knee bending wrong at first, then righting with a frown that makes him look away before fondness can show too plainly on his face. He waits until you are settled, then pulls the blanket up over you and tucks it in at your shoulder. Only a little. Only enough to keep the night air off. His hand stills there for half a heartbeat before he draws it back.

Then he turns, draws his sword, and lays it down between the two sides of the bedroll.

It makes a good enough line. Honest steel. Cold steel. A better man than he is, perhaps, lying straight-backed where honour ought to be.

You watch him do it, and Dunk pretends not to notice.

Getting himself down beside you is less graceful than he would like. He lowers carefully, trying to favour the slash in his side, but the wound pulls anyway and a wince catches him regardless. He settles on his back at last with a breath through his teeth, one arm tucked behind his head, his body held a proper distance from the blade.

For a while there is only the fire. The horses. The soft working of water under the willow. But, of course, you must ask. “What is the sword for?”

Dunk shuts his eyes and opens them again. “For sleeping.”

You turn your face toward him. He can feel it without looking. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” he says quickly. “No, m’lady. It is only—” He searches for the words and finds only poor ones. “It is a boundary, like. For your honour.”

“My honour?”

“Aye.”

“Does it need steel?”

Dunk rubs a hand over his brow. “Mayhaps mine does.”

That comes out wrong enough to make him go still. He tries again before you can catch hold of it.

“I mean, it is proper. A man and a maid should not lie close without vows between them. Or kinship. Or—” He thinks of hedge knights, camp followers, drunk squires, road wives, all the world as it is rather than as septons pretend it to be. “Or some understanding.”

You hum. It is only a small sound, but it slips soft through the dark and goes straight into his groin. Pretty. Gods help him, even that is pretty. Your voice has no need of song to work on a man.

Dunk fixes his eyes on the sky. “I do not wish you to think ill of me,” he says, lower. “That is all.”

Another stretch of quiet. The fire clicks and collapses inward on itself.

“Do husbands and wives sleep like this too?”

Dunk's lids squeeze shut so hard they hurt.

He ought to answer. He knows he ought. It is a simple question, mayhaps, though no question of yours has proved simple yet. But he has no answer fit to give without inviting ten more behind it, each worse than the last. His side aches. His head aches. His body is a foe beside a sword that suddenly seems no wider than a blade of grass.

So Dunk lies very still and does his worst pretending to be asleep. After a moment, you hum again, as if you know perfectly well he is awake and have decided to let him keep the lie.

The first time you ask to stay over happens six months and eleven days into your relationship.

Not that Spencer is counting.

Except he is. Because Spencer counts everything.

Birthdays. Train schedules. Statistical probabilities. The number of days since your first date. The number of times you've laughed so hard you snorted and immediately denied it happened. The number of mornings he's woken up smiling because he remembered you exist.

Six months and eleven days. One hundred ninety-four days. Four thousand six hundred fifty-six hours.

Not counting leap years. Not counting daylight savings. Not counting the fact that he should probably stop doing that.

The point is:

You've been together long enough that this shouldn't feel like a milestone anymore.

And yet, somehow, it does.

Dinner had ended two hours ago. Neither of you noticed.

The television glows softly across the living room, playing something neither of you are actually watching.

Your legs are draped over his lap. One of your hands rests absentmindedly against his arm.

The contact should be distracting. Usually it is. Tonight it just makes him aware of how much he has to lose.

Spencer glances down. Your fingers are tracing lazy patterns against his sleeve. Comfortable. Thoughtless.

The kind of touch that comes from feeling safe with someone.

His chest tightens. Because you trust him. And he isn't entirely sure you've been given all the information required to make that decision.

The thought has been growing louder for weeks. Months, maybe.

Every time he leaves your apartment at one in the morning. Every time you yawn and ask if he's sure he doesn't want to stay. Every time he invents another excuse.

Early meeting. Paperwork. Consultation. Jet lag. Laundry.

He once claimed he needed to reorganize his bookshelf. His bookshelf. As if that couldn't wait until morning.

The worst part is that you never question it. Never push. Never make him feel guilty.

You simply smile and kiss him goodbye.

And somehow that makes it worse. Because eventually you're going to realize something is wrong.

You aren't a profiler. But you're observant.

And six months is a long time to avoid sleeping beside someone.

Especially when you spend almost every other waking hour together.

Spencer has known this conversation was coming. He's just been hoping he'd find a way around it first.

A solution. An explanation. Some magical arrangement where you never discover the parts of him he keeps hidden.

Unfortunately, reality remains stubbornly opposed to that plan.

Beside him, you glance toward the clock. Then toward him. Then back toward the clock.

And Spencer immediately knows.

The realization hits with all the subtlety of a freight train.

His stomach drops. Not because he doesn't want you to stay.

That's the problem. He wants you to stay so much it hurts.

He wants to wake up beside you. He wants sleepy morning conversations and tangled blankets and your toothbrush next to his. He wants every ordinary thing.

Every stupid little domestic thing.

He wants you here.

Which means he wants you close enough to see what happens when the lights go out. And that thought makes ice slide down his spine.

"Could I stay tonight?"

There it is.

The question lands gently. Softly. Almost casually, like you're asking if he wants another cup of coffee.

Spencer's heart immediately attempts escape. His pulse stumbles. His thoughts scatter.

And for one horrifying second all he can think is:

Not yet. Please not yet.

The reaction lasts less than a second.

Unfortunately, less than a second is more than enough time for you to notice.

"Spence?"

His gaze snaps toward you. Too fast. "What?"

You squint.

"You looked terrified."

No. No, he didn't. Probably.

Maybe.

Statistically speaking, facial expressions can occur in as little as one-fifteenth of a second, and human beings are remarkably skilled at detecting emotional changes.

That is not helping.

"Did I?"

You smile. Gentle. Concerned. And suddenly Spencer realizes he is profiling you.

Searching for signs. 

Confusion. Hurt. Doubt.

The same way he profiles witnesses. The same way he profiles suspects. The same way he profiles everyone except himself.

Because if he profiles himself, he has to admit the truth.

He's scared.

Not of you.

Of what happens after.

Of waking up gasping for air.

Of shouting a dead woman's name.

Of flinching away from hands that aren't actually hurting him.

Of seeing concern in your eyes.

Or worse.

Pity.

The nightmares aren't as frequent as they used to be. Most nights are fine. But all it takes is one.

One bad dream. One glimpse behind the curtain. One moment where you stop seeing Spencer Reid, accomplished FBI profiler and professor, and start seeing all the fractures underneath.

And Spencer isn't sure he can survive watching your opinion of him change.

Because he's spent six months falling hopelessly in love with you.

And somehow that makes honesty feel more terrifying than it ever has before.

"Spence?" you ask again.

The concern in your voice pulls him back into the room. Back to the couch. Back to your hand resting against his arm.

Back to the fact that you're looking at him like you've noticed something is wrong.

Because you have. Of course you have. You always do.

Spencer blinks. "What?"

You study him for a second. The way only people who know you well can. Not looking. Studying.

"You went somewhere."

His stomach sinks. Fantastic.

He's been dating you long enough that you've started noticing the signs.

The distant look. The silence. The way his gaze unfocuses when he's trapped inside his own head.

He should probably be touched by that. Instead, he's mostly horrified.

Because if you've learned how to recognize that look, what else have you learned?

What else have you noticed?

How many excuses have sounded exactly like excuses?

How many times have you watched him leave at midnight and wondered why?

The thought makes something twist painfully in his chest.

You deserve an answer. You deserved one months ago.

The problem is that every possible version of this conversation feels catastrophic.

Tell her.

The thought arrives immediately. Simple. Direct.

Tell her the truth.

Spencer swallows.

The truth is complicated. The truth is ugly. The truth includes things he doesn't like thinking about, let alone saying out loud.

The truth includes memories he keeps carefully boxed away.

And once those boxes are opened, he can't guarantee he'll get them closed again.

His gaze drops to your hand. 

Your fingers have stopped their movements, but your touch stays. Patient. Waiting.

God. He loves you.

The realization crashes through him with enough force to steal his breath.

Not that it's new.

He's known for a while now. Maybe since month three. Maybe before that.

But sometimes it still sneaks up on him.

The sheer magnitude of it. The impossible fact that someone this kind exists. That someone this wonderful chose him.

Which makes the next thought infinitely worse.

Because if he loves you, then eventually he has to trust you.

And trust requires honesty.

He knows that. Intellectually, he understands it perfectly.

Trust requires vulnerability. Vulnerability creates intimacy. Intimacy strengthens relationships.

There are studies. Thousands of studies.

He could probably cite several.

Unfortunately, knowing something and doing it are entirely different things.

Especially when the vulnerability in question involves admitting that sometimes he wakes up convinced he's dying. 

Sometimes he wakes up hearing gunshots that aren't there.

Sometimes he dreams about prison.

About Maeve.

About Hankel.

About blood.

About loss.

About all the ghosts that still follow him around when he's asleep.

And maybe that's the part he hates most.

Not that those things happened. That they still have power. Years later. Decades later in some cases.

He's supposed to be smarter than this. He's supposed to be stronger than this.

A ridiculous thought. An irrational thought.

One he'd immediately challenge if it came from anyone else.

Trauma doesn't work that way. Healing doesn't work that way.

He knows that. He teaches that. He tells victims that.

And yet somehow he's still holding himself to a different standard.

Because hypocrisy is apparently one of the many gifts trauma leaves behind.

"Spencer." Your voice is softer this time. Closer.

He realizes you've shifted toward him. Your hand covering his now. Warm.

His throat tightens. Because this is what he's afraid of losing.

Not the relationship. Not technically.

You.

Your hand in his. Your smile. The way you say his name.

The way you've slowly become his favorite part of every day.

He can survive heartbreak. People survive heartbreak all the time.

What terrifies him is watching disappointment replace affection in your eyes. 

Watching you realize he's more damaged than you thought. 

Watching you decide loving him is harder than it's worth.

The fear settles heavy in his stomach. Familiar and old.

The same fear that kept him from telling Maeve things.

The same fear that kept him isolated for years.

The same fear that whispers if people see everything, they'll leave.

You squeeze his hand. Just once. "I'm not trying to pressure you."

The words immediately make him feel worse.

Because of course you're not. You've never pressured him.

You would leave right now if he asked.

Smile. Kiss him goodnight. Tell him you'll see him tomorrow. No questions asked.

The realization hurts. Because suddenly he sees this moment from the outside.

Six months.

Six months of you respecting every boundary he never actually explained.

Six months of patience.

Six months of trust.

And all you've done is ask if you can stay.

A completely normal question.

A question that shouldn't feel like standing at the edge of a cliff.

Spencer exhales slowly.

He can do this. He should do this.

No.

More than that.

He's tired.

Tired of calculating escape routes. Tired of leaving when he wants to stay. Tired of pretending there's nothing behind the curtain. 

Tired of carrying pieces of himself alone.

The thought surprises him.

Because somewhere beneath the fear is something else.

Something quieter.

A hope he doesn't quite know what to do with.

Maybe you're not going to leave.

Maybe you've spent six months proving exactly that.

Maybe every terrible scenario his brain keeps producing is wrong.

Maybe.

Your thumb brushes across his knuckles. The movement is small. Barely noticeable.

It feels enormous.

And for the first time all evening, Spencer realizes there might not be a version of tonight where he avoids it.

The thought should terrify him.

Instead it feels strangely inevitable.

Like reaching the last page of a chapter he's been putting off reading.

You tilt your head slightly. "What's wrong?"

“Nothing is wrong,” he admits quietly. “I'm just…”

The words trail off. Because he doesn't know how to finish that sentence.

I'm scared.

The truth is embarrassingly simple.

Not scared of you. Not scared of commitment. Not scared of sharing his space or waking up beside someone or any of the things people usually mean when they talk about relationships.

He's scared of sleeping. Scared of what sleep sometimes turns him into.

Scared of what you might see.

You wait. Patiently.

Never rushing him. Never filling the silence.

Spencer has spent enough time around people to know how rare that is.

Most people become uncomfortable with silence after four seconds.

You've been sitting in it for nearly thirty.

Just giving him room.

His chest aches. "I'm not very good at this."

A small smile touches your mouth. "Talking?"

"Being vulnerable."

The smile fades. Not because you've taken offense. Because you understand that's different.

Much different.

Your thumb brushes over his knuckles again. "I know."

The answer catches him off guard.

His brows draw together. "You do?"

You huff a quiet laugh. "Spencer." The fondness in your voice makes something twist painfully in his chest. "I adore you."

His heart immediately forgets how to function.

You continue before he can short-circuit entirely. "But you don't exactly make vulnerability easy."

Mortification arrives instantly.

Because you're right.

He's spent six months carefully revealing pieces of himself while hiding entire sections of the map.

You've told him stories about childhood embarrassments and college disasters and family arguments and insecurities.

Meanwhile he's been treating emotional intimacy like a classified government document.

The realization is uncomfortable.

Accurate. But uncomfortable.

You squeeze his hand. "That's okay." Your voice softens. "You don't have to tell me things before you're ready."

And there it is.

The escape route. The opening. The easy way out.

You aren't demanding answers. You aren't pushing. You aren't asking questions.

You are giving him permission to avoid this conversation.

And for a split second Spencer wants to take it.

Because leaving would be easy. Smiling would be easy. Changing the subject would be easy.

He could kiss you. Tell you he'd love for you to stay. Pretend everything is fine.

Hope for the best.

The problem is that hope isn't a strategy. And eventually the nightmare would come.

Eventually he'd wake up gasping for air. Or shouting. Or reaching for a gun that isn't there.

Eventually you'd see anyway. And then he'd have to explain it afterward.

The thought makes him feel sick.

No. You deserve better than that.

You deserve honesty.

Even if he's terrible at it.

Especially because he's terrible at it.

Spencer stares at your intertwined hands. At the way your fingers fit between his. At the simple, ordinary intimacy of it.

Then he takes a breath.

“Sometimes I have nightmares.”

The words settle into the space between you. Small. Simple.

Terrifying.

Because Spencer has spent months avoiding a conversation that begins with exactly those three words.

You blink. "Oh."

Not alarmed. Not frightened. Just surprised.

The reaction catches him off guard.

Because somehow he'd prepared for worse. Prepared for concern. Prepared for questions.

Prepared for that subtle shift people get when they realize someone is carrying more baggage than they expected.

Instead, you just look at him. Waiting. Listening.

Giving him room.

His chest tightens.

You squeeze his hand gently. “Okay."

The word is soft. Easy. As if he's told you he gets headaches. As if nightmares aren't the thing that's been haunting him for years.

As if this doesn't feel like peeling his ribs open and handing you his heart.

You tilt your head. "Can I ask about what?"

The question is careful. Not demanding or pushing for answers.

Spencer closes his eyes. Immediately regrets it.

Because the darkness behind his eyelids isn't empty.

It never is.

Maeve's face flashes first. Always Maeve. A ringing phone. A gun. Blood.

Then prison. Concrete walls. Heat. The smell. The feeling of never quite knowing whether he'd survive until morning.

Then Hankel. The cabin. The tape. The needle. The helpless certainty that he was going to die. The struggle that came with surviving.

His eyes remain closed. 

"A lot of things," he says quietly. The words come out rough and painfully inadequate.

Because how do you summarize twenty years of accumulated trauma in two words?

How do you condense grief and violence and fear into something another person can hold?

You don't respond immediately. And Spencer hates that he notices.

Three seconds. Four. Five.

Long enough for panic to start building. Long enough for his brain to begin filling the silence with possibilities.

Too much.

You shouldn't have said anything.

She's uncomfortable.

She's trying to figure out how to respond.

She's realizing this is more complicated than she thought.

The spiral gains momentum frighteningly fast.

Then your thumb brushes over his knuckles. Once. A simple touch physically. But the emotional equivalent of reaching through the fog and turning on a light.

Spencer opens his eyes.

You're still looking at him, eyes full of concern.

The genuine kind. The kind that somehow feels worse.

Because concern means you care. And caring means you can get hurt.

"I don't really know where to start," he admits.

That feels safer. More honest.

Because the truth is he doesn't.

Does he start with the first dead body he saw?

His father leaving?

His mother's illness?

Maeve?

Hankel?

Prison?

Addiction?

The list is so long it feels absurd.

Like reading a résumé nobody should have.

You offer him a small smile.

"Maybe you don't have to start with everything."

The suggestion lands gently. Like you're tossing him a rope. Not dragging him anywhere, just offering something to hold onto.

Spencer stares at you.

You're making this harder.

Not because you're asking questions. Because you're being kind.

If you'd judged him, he could have shut down. If you'd gotten uncomfortable, he could have changed the subject. If you'd pulled away, he would know what to do.

Rejection is familiar territory.

This?

This terrifying patience? This willingness to sit beside him while he figures out how to speak?

He has no defense against it.

His throat tightens. "You know I work violent crimes."

You nod.

"Yeah."

"Some of the nightmares are from cases."

That part is easy. Or… easier.

The socially acceptable trauma. The kind people expect from FBI agents. The kind that doesn't require explaining who he was before.

"The others?" Your voice is barely above a whisper.

Spencer looks away. Toward the television. Toward the darkened window.

Anywhere except your eyes.

Because your eyes make him want to tell the truth. And the truth is terrifying.

His pulse pounds. 

The room suddenly feels too warm. Too small.

Like he's standing on the edge of something.

You deserve honesty.

The thought returns, persistent and unavoidable.

You deserve honesty.

Spencer exhales slowly. Then says the first thing that comes to mind.

"The woman I was in love with was murdered."

The words leave the room silent.

No cushioning. No softening. No profiler language.

Just the truth.

For a moment Spencer can't bring himself to look at you. His pulse pounds against his ribs as the confession settles between you, heavy and permanent. There are some things that can't be taken back once they're spoken aloud. This is one of them.

He's waiting for questions. Waiting for shock. Waiting for that subtle shift he's been dreading for months.

Instead, your fingers tighten around his.

Not enough to hurt. Just enough to remind him you're there.

The gesture nearly undoes him.

Because somehow that's worse. Worse than judgment. Worse than discomfort.

Kindness always has been.

"Her name was Maeve," he says quietly.

The words come before he consciously decides to say them. And suddenly something inside him gives way.

Because for six months he's been carefully managing this. Carefully separating the man you've fallen in love with from the pieces of himself he keeps locked away. He's spent so long making sure the boxes stayed closed that he never considered what might happen if one of them opened.

Now the lid is off.

And once he starts talking, he can't seem to stop.

"We met because I was having migraines and she looked at my MRIs. She was being stalked," he says, staring at your joined hands. "She spent months hiding. We talked on the phone for a long time before we ever met in person."

His throat tightens.

"I spent months trying to keep her safe."

The memory rises immediately. The phone call. The warehouse. The gun.

"Then somebody kidnapped her."

His voice sounds distant. Detached. Like he's reporting a fact instead of reliving the worst day of his life.

"She died in front of me."

The room goes very quiet. Spencer swallows hard.

"Sometimes I still dream about that. I know she's dead. Intellectually, I know exactly what happened. I know there was nothing I could have done differently. I know grief doesn't work that way."

A humorless laugh slips out.

"But dreams don't really care what you know."

His gaze drifts toward the dark television screen.

"Sometimes she's alive. Sometimes we're talking. Sometimes we're finally getting the life we were supposed to have." His jaw tightens. "And then I wake up."

The silence stretches.

You don't interrupt him. You don't rush to reassure him.

You just listen. And maybe that's why the next words come so easily.

"I was kidnapped." The confession falls from his mouth before he can reconsider it. "I was tortured."

Another memory surfaces immediately. A cabin. Chains. A needle. The feeling of absolute certainty that he was going to die.

"It happened more than once. I developed an addiction afterward."

There it is. The one he hates saying out loud. 

Even now. Years later. Even after everything.

His stomach twists.

"I got clean," he says quickly. "I did. A long time ago."

As if you're accusing him. As if you're judging him. As if he needs to defend himself before you've even spoken.

The realization makes him feel ridiculous.

But the words keep coming anyway.

"Then I went to prison."

Your head lifts slightly. The first visible surprise all evening. And immediately Spencer feels panic flare in his chest.

"I was framed," he blurts. "I didn't actually kill anyone. I know that sounds terrible, but I was arrested in Mexico and spent almost three months there and..."

He stops.

Listen to yourself. You sound guilty.

You sound exactly like someone trying to convince another person they're innocent.

Heat floods his face.

"I didn't," he says quietly.

The words feel pathetic the second they leave his mouth.

"I know." The answer comes immediately. Softly. Without hesitation.

Spencer freezes. His gaze finally lifts to yours.

And for the first time all evening he realizes… You haven't pulled away. Not once.

Not when he mentioned Maeve.

Not when he mentioned addiction.

Not when he mentioned prison.

Not now.

Your hand is still wrapped around his. Your body is still angled toward him.

You're still here.

The realization should make him feel better. Instead, it makes his chest ache.

Because now he's painfully aware of how afraid he's been. How long he's carried that fear.

How many nights he's convinced himself that if you saw everything, you'd leave.

"I think I was afraid," he admits quietly.

The words are barely audible.

His gaze drops back to your hands.

"I think I was afraid you'd hear all of this and realize I'm more complicated than you signed up for."

A small, broken laugh escapes him.

"Which is probably the understatement of the century." 

His throat tightens. 

"I didn't want you to see me differently."

And there it is.

Not prison. Not the addiction. Not Maeve.

The real confession.

Spencer stares at the floor, waiting to find out if he was right.

The silence only lasts a few seconds, but it's enough. Enough for his brain to begin constructing worst-case scenarios with the efficiency of a machine built specifically for that purpose. Maybe you're choosing your words carefully. Maybe you're trying to figure out how to let him down gently. Maybe you're realizing this relationship comes with more complications than you expected.

Then your hand squeezes his.

Not hard. Just enough to pull him back into the room.

"Spence." His name sounds impossibly soft in your voice.

He forces himself to look up.

You're already watching him, and what he finds in your expression makes something in his chest ache.

Because it isn't fear.

It isn't pity.

It isn't regret.

It's sadness.

Not for yourself.

For him.

"You don't see me differently?" he asks before he can stop himself.

The question comes out quieter than he intended, vulnerable in a way that immediately makes him regret asking it.

Your brow furrows. "Spencer, you're still you."

The certainty in your voice catches him off guard.

"You're still the man who spent forty minutes explaining the history of fountain pens because I casually mentioned I liked mine. You're still the guy who remembers exactly how I take my coffee. You're still the person who drives across the city when I have a bad day and pretends it wasn't a big deal."

A small smile touches your mouth.

"You having a past doesn't change any of that."

Spencer swallows. "It feels like it should."

The admission slips out before he can stop it.

Your expression softens immediately. "Why?"

He laughs quietly, though there's very little humor in it. "Because most people don't have a list like that."

"Spencer." The fond exasperation in your voice is painfully familiar. "Most people don't spend their days hunting serial killers either."

Despite himself, a tiny huff of laughter escapes him.

You continue before he can argue. "What exactly do you think changed here? Because from where I'm sitting, you're still the same person you were an hour ago. You told me things that happened to you. Horrible things. Traumatic things. But they're things that happened to you."

Your thumb brushes over his knuckles.

"They aren't who you are."

The words hit harder than he expects.

Because that's the distinction he's never been very good at making.

Somewhere along the way, the things that happened and the person they happened to became tangled together.

You seem to notice the thought crossing his face.

"I don't hear prison and think criminal," you say softly. "I hear prison and think that must have been terrifying. I don't hear addiction and think less of you. I think about how hard it must have been to fight your way back from that. And Maeve..." Your voice gentles further. "I just think that's heartbreaking."

Spencer looks away.

The lump in his throat arrives so suddenly it catches him off guard.

Because you aren't dismissing it.

You aren't pretending those things don't matter.

You're acknowledging exactly how much they matter and somehow loving him anyway.

The realization leaves him feeling strangely unsteady. "I spent a few months worrying about telling you."

The confession escapes before he can stop it.

Your eyes widen slightly. "A few months?"

"Probably longer."

A laugh escapes you, soft and disbelieving. "Spencer."

The way you say his name makes his chest ache.

"You really thought I was going to leave because you've been through traumatic things?"

When you phrase it that way, it sounds absurd.

Embarrassingly absurd.

And yet.

"Maybe."

Your expression shifts then. Not disappointment. Not frustration.

Understanding. The kind that sees directly through every defense he's built.

His pulse stumbles. "I didn't want you to think I was broken."

The words come out barely above a whisper.

For a moment neither of you speak.

Then your free hand lifts and gently cups his cheek.

The touch is so unexpected that his breath catches.

"Spencer."

His eyes close briefly.

Just hearing his name spoken like that hurts in the best possible way.

When he opens them again, you're smiling. Small. Certain. Unshakably sincere.

"I don't think you're broken."

His chest tightens.

"Not even a little. I think you're human. I think you've survived things nobody should have to survive. I think you've spent a very long time carrying those things by yourself." Your thumb brushes lightly across his skin. "But when I look at you, I don't see prison. I don't see addiction. I don't see trauma."

Your smile softens.

"I just see Spencer."

Somehow those words hit harder than everything else.

Because you've heard some of the worst parts.

The pieces he's spent months trying to hide.

You've looked directly at them.

And you're still looking at him.