Someone's Kitchen

In their own unique ways — and if it were done correctly, it would be (in my opinion, you can disagree of course) one of the first possible representations of two neurodivergent-coded characters together (and I would be chugging that down like a pelican, I won’t lie, because representation like this does not exist in mainstream media).

But the point is… they have so much more to offer than the fact that they are different from average people — it’s not just “quirky cinnamon bun + quirky cinnamon bun = bakery.”

They are young and already have a ton on their plates.

Both caretakers since a young age, both with parents out of the picture because of something (honestly, here it’s hard to say why Mel is taking care of her twin sister, but my guess is that the father is out of the picture in a similar way as in Spencer’s case — her dad died sooner than her mom, to give him the benefit of the doubt). Both highly empathic individuals who are also highly competent, but also clueless in some other departments of their lives.

They struggle but they are also fighters.

That's why It’s not about a "meet-cute and happily ever after".

Mel lives on constant waves of stress and subtle trauma in the ER. Her day is packed as hell, and on top of it all there is most likely student debt from med school hanging over her head, as well as her situation with her sister.

Reid, on the other hand, has his own problems: being dragged into the Bureau system too young, a lot of trauma not just from his job, and no stable place to come back to because of constant traveling.

A lot of time outside conventional reach, things complicated in questions of coordination of a relationship.

(I was thinking more about the younger version of him, because I want to stick to the characters we know and not forcefully create an older version of Mel to balance the development of the characters. The age gap would be manageable, but I feel like neither older Reid nor current Mel would ever cross into a romantic relationship — although the chance of a platonic one in the shape of “pen-pal” buddies could be sweet and at least somewhat possible, if not fully plausible.)

I know that this all is playing against the original idea.

HOWEVER...

That’s the point.

They are not your average John and Jane from the suburbs. They are highly functional people with demanding jobs and complicated personal lives.

If they were to meet, it would definitely be in Pittsburgh, at the hospital. Maybe a case, or a medical emergency on a case — but Reid wouldn’t be the patient.

They don’t meet cute; they exist in the same time-space of the Pitt ER.

Maybe Dana or Robbie taking the main focus on the situation (either in the case of a possible patient, or because the BAU team needs to know something for their case).

They pass each other through the hallway, maybe run into each other in a room because Mel needs to inform Robbie, Dana, or anyone in general about something happening outside the room at that moment.

First meeting could be in the way... Spencer being the typical “knows too much for a normal person,” but neither of them knowing that the other person is highly capable — him being an agent, her being a resident and not just a med student.

That’s all. That could be the first meeting. Both of them just sharing space.

The second run-in could be several hours or a few days later, when they learn about each other. The ER is busy; Mel is the only one free to speak with them.

An “oh, oh shit… you are a resident / agent” moment.

A moment of gently nudging and kicking each other’s ankles to figure out who the other person is — not in terms of power balance, but in terms of who they are as people. Their position by their work is second in line; they want to know the person first.

We have seen how Mel is nervous about the court thing, but seeing that Spencer is polite and patient with her, and Spencer can recognise that she is a highly empathic person who notices even the smallest things.

That can be the first real point of connection.

Getting to know the person.

After that, they exchange contacts for professional reasons (for example, Robbie leaving for sabbatical), and Mel could work as the piece in the middle between Spencer’s team and the hospital.

Emails exchanged over weeks while the team is closing the case fully, questions asked about practical things. Maybe Spencer asks about something extremely specific because Mel has experience from the VA.

The first step outside work contact, but still professional.

A slow build-up, switching emails for letters because it’s closer to both of them. Building up to deserve getting to know each other.

Mel mentioning that she’s busy because of her sister, Spencer mentioning, between the lines, his mother.

But it wouldn't be the 'Maeve situation'. Because they both would know that if there is something they want to pursue together they need to be honest.

Face the things straight ahead else they would drown each other.

It all would need to work in a line of: alignment, permission and right timing.

Maybe something could happen (nothing too serious) but one of them would deliberately choose the other person.

Not a big romantic gesture, but a practical, brutal rearrangement of their schedule, for example.

Maybe Becca has a very difficult episode and Spencer comes to help Mel because she’s already exhausted from a line of shitty days at the hospital. Or maybe Mel steps in when Spencer is struggling to find new doctors or a facility for his mom. They choose to take the time and give it to the other person. They choose each other.

After that, it would be about planned visits instead of vague hope, no expectation of daily contact, explicit permission to pause if life overwhelms one of them, and supporting each other in the ways they need. Not what is expected from them by the idea of a “normal relationship.”

I haven’t decided whether they would cross the line of finding a way to be together in one place.

It’s hard to say if either of them would be ready to move or relocate to a different position and accommodate the other (speaking in the time frame of... I don't know first year or two together when things are still fresh but also settled at least a bit to think about the big things).

This would remain open anyway, because I think neither character would make that decision out of the blue, and they would be tentative about even asking about this possibility.

HOWEVER... (take this as a sweet treat for reading this whole mess of mine)

They would be breathing for the other's person interests.

They would breathe for the other person’s interests. Because for Mel, it would be a chance to have her own personal interests — something that would be just hers. He could teach her how to play chess, they could share book recommendations, maybe even enjoy cooking or watching movies or whatever interests they may have that would be based fully on the current mood or need.

(I do believe that Mel really and truly loves her sister, but anyone who has been in the role of caretaker understands how it slowly nibbles at the person providing care, especially in terms of their own personal life and sense of self. I think that these times with Spencer would be her recharging station so she could be there for Becca for 100% again)

And you can bet your pretty butts that Doctor Spencer Reid would be down and sold the moment Mel asks him if he would be interested in taking part in a medieval fair with her (she would definitely be nervous to ask, remembering the words of a patient she once mentioned it to, who told her it was cringe) — but gods bless that man, because he would whip out five whole-ass books about the materials and styles used during that time and be ready to commit to the bit to the last detail.

And I do believe it wouldn’t take too long for Mel to agree to go with Spencer to Comic Con in full-on cosplay. Literally two doctors cosplaying two Doctors.

The phone clanged in her hand, chest rising up and down with every dull breath, becoming shallower as the hemothorax was slowly collapsing the right lung. Pearls of ruby red gathered on bluing lips, and vision danced with black dots.

Luck in the disaster.

Still alive enough to crawl across the room to try to call for help, dead enough to make the intruder believe in death. But in this case, death may have been more merciful than this waiting.

When every second was an hour. Every breath was torture, every movement like molten iron instead of bones holding the fragile meat on it.

Tick, tack, tick, tack.

Blue and red bounced from the glass of the clock, and boots almost slipped on the pond of blood gathered right at the side kitchen door of the house. Hands shot out with profanity to catch against the marble countertop before another pair of boots appeared right behind them.

“Jesus Christ.”

Sound bounced like in a tunnel. Lights morphing into a kaleidoscope that stabbed with whirlwinds right to the stem core of the brain.

“Ma’am, can you hear us?” The light moved with movement.

Back and forth, back and forth.

“We are here to help you. Everything is okay. Help is here.”

Hands moved aside the cardigan to push on the wound. Paper in the breast pocket unknowingly rumpling under the pressure.

Seven of spades.

“Kid.”

Her head moved, which sent out a sharp stab through her arm, and she needed to school down the grimace of pain. The clicking of her keyboard stopped for a moment, waiting for which shoe would drop this time.

“Yes?”

“I still owe you the chat.”

The air stiffened, and the chair underneath her creaked too loudly — like it mocked her subconscious movement back, snitching on her, that her reaction was to move away the moment confrontation was hanging above her head.

As usual.

“I know.” Her eyes moved to the empty desk at her right side for a short moment, stopping at the small blue telephone box on its side.

How easy it would be to disappear if she had something similar to that.

“We have a briefing today, but after the lunch break we can sit down and chat finally. If… you are still up to tell me the thing… whatever it was.”

She only managed to force herself to nod and move on the chair again, adjusting her awkward sitting position. Her own practitioner told her that she shouldn’t be surprised that her body hurt so often with the posture she usually held.

After all, today was the average day when pulsing pain and rotting dampness in the air were following her around since the moment she left her studio — like a trusted mutt would stick to her after petting it once, even when she would have been warned from doing it.

It all was filling her lungs to the brim, and imaginary puffs of smoke were leaving them like curls. Like after a deep drag from the old Cuban cigars her grandfather used to smoke.

Secretly behind his work hutch, hiding from his daughter and wife who would scold him for yet another unhealthy habit he brought from abroad.

He would complain about arthritis, weather, and politics.

She would be sitting next to him, her fingers sticky from molasses on the small wooden carved spoon he would always shove her with a wink, mouth filled with words about vitamins and the need for sweetness in life, and adding a fact not to tell her mother and grandmother.

It was their secret deal.

She got sweets, he got peace to smoke.

Because life was about all that.

About questionable skills, peaceful moments, the forgotten art of sewing buttons with red string that created a flower when done right, and that eggs needed to be mixed with cream to give them the right kick — and cigars.

But she felt like she only learned three things as she got older.

That pain always came with the change of the weather.

That people are as stupid as they sounded to her when she was eight.

And that throwing a punch and running right after is easier than hoping someone will be there and catch her before the fall.

All she was really missing most of the time was a Cuban cigar.

Because she mastered avoidant tendencies years ago, and pain from the scar lingering on her skin let itself be known like old joints before every rain.

In a way, it felt like she was back in school, being called to the principal’s office because of some transgression. Only this time, there was no anxiety twisting in her stomach, or the sinking feeling of oh God, what did I do this time?

Because damn right she knew what she did.

And yet, her heart still skipped in her chest when she looked to the side, like for once she didn’t know. Or at least tried to pretend not to know.

His desk stayed empty for almost an hour.

Not like she was keeping count…

Habit, she decided. You’re just getting restless again.

It was like a nasty itch and a burning rush that was slowly spreading around her insides with painful burn. That feeling she couldn’t let go of since the past week after the whole mess with Garcia.

Even when she was forgiven on Thursday the same week.

She still avoided Garcia out of good measure, of course.

Her eyes skimmed the same paragraph for the third time, the words blending together into an incoherent blur that made her head pound.

She inhaled deeply and leaned back in her chair, eyes closing.

She wanted to work, to focus, wanted the usual comfort that came along with it that could numb any other ache, but her mind kept wandering.

“You have the same look as Spencer has.”

Words that pulled her out of her head so violently that she, for a moment, thought she was slapped.

“What?”

“Your eyes… are doing the… skimming.” JJ gestured with her finger in the air, repeating the skimming in place. “Like you are reading just for the sake of reading.”

She bristled softly, already opening her mouth to protest.

She knew that just the small breath she took in made her guilty in the eyes of the other woman.

“And he did the same when Emily came back,” she added quietly with a soft sigh as she looked to the empty desk. “He didn’t speak with me for several days, avoided me, and handed me passive-aggressive remarks wrapped in case speech.”

“Very… mature.”

“We all have our ways. And you are not doing any better than him.”

Okay, that one landed a bit more harshly than the previous one.

Her fingers moved to tug on the fraying mouse pad she managed to almost rip into pieces through the past few months. Eyes slipping back to his desk, where the empty mug with the name tag sat on the edge of it.

She was honestly surprised that he wasn’t carrying around a thermo-cup and risked sharing a mug from the office cabinet.

“What, did Hotch—” Snap came out as it was her most natural instinct. “Sorry.”

JJ tilted her head, studying her with that unnervingly gentle precision — the kind only a mother and a profiler in one person could weaponise so well.

“No,” she said softly. “Hotch didn’t say anything. But I saw you.”

She didn’t need to answer. The tightening around her jaw said it all.

“He does that too,” JJ continued, voice low and careful now. “When he feels like he failed someone… or thinks they’re better off without him in the picture.” A beat. “Sounds familiar?”

She exhaled sharply through her nose, fingers still curled around the frayed edge, and for a moment an idea of fire entertained her mind.

Before she could respond — could deflect, could deny — the shrill ring of a phone split the air.

Not hers.

His desk.

Both women froze as the sound echoed across the bullpen, too loud for comfort.

It rang once… twice…

Then stopped just before going to voicemail — no one had moved to answer it.

JJ let out a slow breath. “But eventually, he always comes back.”

She stood quietly after that — no pressure — and touched her shoulder once on her way out.

“I’m not here to push you to speak with anyone. Just… maybe try to think about it. As an option, how it could help you to feel better. If you are going to do this alone, you will go crazy,” she murmured over her shoulder.

She chuckled weakly, hands slowly rubbing her face. “Emily… told me the same thing last week.”

“Because she is right.” A nod of acknowledgement before she gestured towards the sticky note she put on her desk. “And this is from Garcia. She is asking if you are going to drop by for tea. She bought a plastic cup just for you.”

She winced softly. “Ouch.”

“Yeah, she knows how to bite back… but in her ‘Garcia way’.”

“Thank you, JJ.”

Her fingers wrapped around the baby-blue sticky note as she skimmed over the few words written on it in curly handwriting.

You are lucky that you are good listener to speak to. And I bought a cup for you, plastic one. In case you would be interested in throwing a cup of tea again. I’m still angry, but that haircut of Kelly from accounting is worse than that. — P.G.

Her lips wobbled a bit before she quickly hid the note in the desk.

The bullpen was slowly filling with people — voices and footsteps and the low hum of the lights in the ceiling. Her own work was going nowhere at the same time, while the rest of the room looked like a perfect picture of productivity.

Words and numbers blurred together into one long stream she couldn’t hold onto, and Spencer’s sudden appearance and disappearance in the bullpen didn’t really help her.

The exchange was filled with awkward good mornings from her side and his quick acknowledgement. For once she was ready to try to even participate in the office small talk, show that she was trying, but he quickly babbled out something about needing to be somewhere soon and disappeared before she even knew which way he went.

She didn’t even have time to tell him that someone had called him twice already that morning.

One hand went to her forehead, fingers rubbing against the headache pulsing right behind her eyebrows. Fingers then moved for a moment from her face to rub her arm with a wince.

She needed coffee — strong coffee. The sort that could kick-start her pulse and make everything make sense again.

Or send her off to the fields of reeds, pits of hell, abysses of nothingness, or whatever was waiting for her.

Her mind was still entertaining the last idea of nothingness after death when her hand blindly reached for the phone ringing on her desk.

Old muscle memory activated like a sleeping agent’s reflexes. She reached for it with the same ease her body moved that day for the gun. Her finger pushed the accept button the same way she pulled the trigger.

The cold black plastic between her ear and shoulder didn’t wake her up from the automatic gesture. “Doctor Y/N speaking.”

“Finally,” the voice on the other end huffed out a sigh that crackled through the bad signal of the call. “Thank God someone picked up the phone.”

A beat, before a sharp stab of impatience — like a woman used to immediate answers, used to being listened to without question. “Are you one of the people who does the… psychological profiling? Can I speak to one of those?”

“I…” Her mouth opened and closed a few times. “Yes, but how did you get this number?”

“Thank God.” The other person on the line sounded almost relieved — a hint of exhaustion threading into her voice, but she pushed it back with a brusqueness that had been honed to an art through years of practice.

“I need to speak to one of your… criminal profilers. Am I saying it correctly? Or are there more of you in there?”

There was something about the way she said criminal profiler, like the words had teeth and bit in all the wrong places.

“Why? May I please know who is calling and from what place?” she asked one more time, while gripping the edge of her desk.

The voice sounded sharp, but not in a narcissistic way — tired, like they had seen too much and weren’t paid enough for that. Funny how that lecture from Gideon about over-the-phone profiling was still carved in her prefrontal cortex like the number of her mother’s phone.

The woman on the other end inhaled deeply — and for a moment, she was half-convinced she was going to call her a landing profanity for wasting her time with such a mandatory question.

“Rachel Sydney, the head nurse in one of New York’s hospitals, the one at the outskirts of the Bronx. And no, I didn’t get your number from a patient or some random bulletin board.” Her voice dropped slightly, like she was turning away from someone nearby before continuing.

“I got it off a business card taped to the back of my predecessor’s desk. Belonged to that Doctor Reid, with all those letters after his name. Looked like he left it here during some consult.” A dry chuckle. “Honestly? I Googled him just to make sure he wasn’t making it up.”

The woman paused again — long enough for her to hear distant footsteps echoing in what sounded like an empty hallway.

“Ms. Sydney, why are you calling? Did something happen, did you contact the police? I would be glad to help you, but it may not be in our jurisdiction and—” she asked as she was already scrambling for the closest piece of paper and pencil.

“The police?” Rachel let out a short, brittle laugh — the kind that came from someone who had already run out of faith in systems.

“They came last night. Spoke to two of the night nurses, looked at the file, asked if there were signs of foul play.” Her voice dipped into sarcasm on the last three words. “No signs, they said later. Just a burglary gone wrong.”

A pause.

Then, softer: “But I know better.”

Her pencil hovered over the paper, heart kicking up behind her ribs. “Go on,” she said quietly.

“It’s Patient #4327,” Rachel continued. “Woman, mid-thirties, found in her house an hour outside Manhattan when the neighbours heard smashing from it. Brought in fifteen hours ago — survived heavy bleeding and a cardiac arrest by some miracle and a very fast EMT team.” Another breath. “She coded three times since arrival. Central hospitals were packed that night, so they dragged her all the way to us.”

Josephine wrote it down mechanically — patient number, location — but her mind was already shifting gears.

“So why call us?”

Because then Rachel lowered her voice even further — like she was afraid to be heard through walls.

“…we went through her things in search of anything that would tell us who to call to inform the relatives.”

A beat.

“…I found a… card. You know, the one you play cards with, and… and I thought that what if it’s connected to those murders they speak about in the news for a few months now.”

“Is there anyone with the woman right now?” she asked quickly when the word card registered in her brain, her hands already fishing for her own phone, eyes flying to the clock on the wall that was almost tauntingly announcing that both Hotch and Rossi were currently suffering through the routine higher-up meeting.

“Rachel, listen to me. If you can, get the hospital security to the door. No one can come in or out of that room. Call the police, tell them that you need them to contact the New York FBI headquarters. That you have a patient who needs federal protection service, okay?”

The line was silent for a moment, only the faint hum of static in it.

“I—I can try,” she said finally in a small voice, something strained about it now. “But I don’t know how much help the security personnel will be. They’re all old enough to be my father and… not the ones I would pick for a high-pressure situation.”

“Hey, it’s okay…” She herself took in a deep breath. “We are on our way. Thank you for calling us. Sorry that you needed to wait on the hold line for this. But I promise, we are moving. We will help that woman and—” She was ready to hang up, but she froze for a moment. “How… how is she? Is there… is there a chance she will make it?”

The pause was longer this time.

“Honestly?” Her voice was hushed now, almost a whisper.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve seen some bad cases before, but this… it’s a nightmare.”

The world was starting to spin with her. “Okay… okay.” She breathed out weakly, her eyes falling to her coat. “We will do our best to get there as quickly as possible. You did a good job, Ms. Sydney. Thank you for your service.”

“Just…” Rachel paused again. “Just be careful.”

Another beat, another sharp breath. “And… and hurry, okay?”

Then the line fell silent, leaving her with the sound of a dull beeping tone.

She sat frozen for half a breath, phone still pressed to her ear, the silence suddenly too loud.

Then she was moving — shoving papers into her bag, grabbing her coat with hands that didn’t quite want to obey — heart hammering like she’d been hooked on an adrenaline IV.

One name echoed in her head as she hit the dial-back speed key with shaking fingers.

Reid.

The line was ringing.

No answer.

She swore, fingers curling tighter around the phone pressed to her ear.

Once, twice…

Please, pick up. Please… pick up.

She tried to call twice more in the meantime as she rushed through the sixth floor, looking around all the places he could normally be. Nothing.

“At least one ‘What do you want?’ or ‘Fuck you.’ Anything, you overachieving prick,” she murmured as she closed the door of the small storage room — where he usually hid to work in peace when the bullpen was too busy — more harshly than she needed.

The cards in her coat started to feel like they were burning her more than usual. She got used to the backhand guilt, but this guilt right now was spreading like an overfed fungus.

This is your fault. The girl will die because of you. Because you never said anything. Because you thought you could do it yourself. Because you thought the unsub gave up, finished his goal, and let you off his hook.

First she felt her shoes slip around the corner, then her phone slipping out of her fingers, falling on the ground and most likely the screen finally cracking into a million pieces.

Secondly, a body collided with her own, arms around her, a few steps back, trying to withstand the kinetic energy that pushed against it and tried to send it to the ground.

“Hey, hey, hey…”

The first sound that reached her ears was a familiar voice, higher-pitched than usual and slightly out of breath.

Third, the hands — firm where they gripped her elbows, holding her steady.

“Careful,” the tone was gentle, even though his fingers were gripping so tightly she could feel how the scar on her arm was whining in white-hot pain. “You okay?”

She was not falling apart. She was ripped and shredded into pieces right in front of him.

By him — those months of bottled-up… everything being let out like a Jester from a box. “I—I called you. Three times. Not—not even a single… go to hell,” she choked out.

Spencer froze, his hands going still, fingers easing when she let out a sharp exhale of pain. His jaw twitched — once, twice — before he moved, releasing her arms gently before taking hold of her sleeve.

“Walk.”

He was almost half-pulling her as he stepped away, moving out of the hallway into a nearby office that glowed softly with the fluorescent lights he quickly switched on as they stepped in.

“No, no…” She shook her head, a pathetic gesture of trying to force her body to listen to her because she knew that she should go to Rossi with this.

She doesn't even understand why she chose him first to call him about the whole thing.

“I—I need to go to Rossi. I promised to meet with him. I needed to speak with him for almost a month now, but we never managed to… if I don’t show up, he will think that I—that I ran again and that…”

Words were an uncoordinated string of sounds echoing in her mind like in a cave.

“No, you don’t,” Reid replied quickly, with something in his voice that shut her up just as fast. “It can wait. I will let Rossi know that you are with me. Deal?”

He gently pushed against her, a silent cue to sit down on the office chair in the far corner of the room. When he was sure that she sat down, he grabbed a second chair and scooted it right in front of hers before plopping down as well, so close their knees almost touched.

He didn’t say anything for a few moments — just sat there, silently watching her, as he waited for her breathing to even out, for her heart to stop slamming against her ribcage and for her to get some control over herself again.

Finally, he spoke, the tone carefully even, as if he was trying to avoid stepping on a landmine.

“What’s going on?”

Brain was screaming at her to abort, feed him some easy answer that would release her so she could... she doesn't even know what her next step would be.

“New…” She swallowed down the tremor of her voice, trying to at least pretend that she knew how to keep things professional. “New card appeared. Victim — she… she survived. New York. The nurse tried to call you because you left a business card at the hospital, but you were not in the bullpen, and they reconnected her to me, and I… I wanted to tell you that someone called you early this morning, but—”

Her words broke on her, with her whole reason, when it all snapped.

“Fuck, that woman will die because of me!”

His eyes widened, something sharp and almost painful flickering through them as he straightened in his seat, body leaning closer to her like on command.

“Hey. No. You can’t think like that.” His voice was firm, brokering no argument. “It isn’t your fault, do you understand? None of the blame is on you.”

“No, no…” She threw her head from side to side, harshly biting her lips as she tried to tackle everything down before it could erupt outside.

“You tried to tell me and I was busy with a report from last week. You tried. It’s not your fault that I—”

“Spencer, shut up!” she screamed.

“You don’t know! You don’t know, okay?!” Her hands moved to her coat so quickly that she almost ripped the fine material of the inside pocket as she yanked out the two cards.

Two jokers.

Something cold and sharp twisted through his chest at the sight of the cards in her trembling hands — the implications started to sink in.

He stayed silent, eyes fixed on the cards.

“Where…” He swallowed. “Where did you get those?”

“I stole the one from the package we used.” Her hand was trembling so much that she couldn’t even properly read the card — if the tears in her eyes hadn’t been there in the first place.

“When… when I got the joker, I thought that if I took it from the deck, you wouldn’t focus on it. Wisconsin, when… when I ran into that unsub, before he left, he dropped an envelope. I—I don’t know if it was for me, or if it was for a victim we didn’t find yet… I just… I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t know. I just knew that I was too scared to tell anyone.”

The first ugly sob wracked through her body.

“How long have you kept this?” he asked quietly.

He didn’t sound angry.

But for some reason, it was worse than if he yelled.

She bit her tongue harshly, but her lip parted moments later to drag in a broken breath because her body was wracking too much with the stopped sob.

“Too long. And someone is dead because of it.”

The words hit him like a blow to the stomach, but he held it inside, swallowing back every thought that came to his mind, every question that was beginning to burn at the tip of his tongue.

“You should have told someone.” His tone stayed even, almost calm, as he still studied the cards he now took from her hand. “You withheld a lead. For weeks. You nearly shot a man. And you still think this is about guilt?”

Her body had never coiled itself so tightly. She could only move her hands against her face, trying to smear the tears away and muffle the sobs.

“You know what this means. You know what I should do.”

A beat of silence as he moved on the chair, leaning not farther, but closer.

“But I won’t. Not yet.” His eyes moved from the cards to her. “Because I think I know what he does. How he works.”

A breath.

“And if you break now — if they take you off this — he wins.”

She looked up in confusion, chest still heavy with ragged breath.

“What?”

“That joker…” He pointed at the card. “Is the same as the ace we found in Wisconsin. Made around 2000 to 2001. Same deck, pattern, and the mistake at the back — but you already knew this, didn’t you? When I told you that night when I took you home. You checked.”

She didn’t deny that.

Instead, she exhaled quietly and nodded her head. “I did.”

“I won’t turn you in. Because I think that I know where this is heading.” He added as he moved to sit on the edge of the chair, his arms resting against his knees.

“But you… are going to tell me everything. What really happened in Michigan. Back when you were the golden girl.”

Her throat went dry, suddenly feeling like someone had shoved a rock down it.

“But I don’t know if I can.”

“You will have to. Because right now, one of the consequences is hospitalised in New York.”

They were underground and yet the air was warm and stiff, as the heater was broken for the third week in a row and no one really knew how to push it lower again to reach the knife-tip balance of dry cold air that was kept in rooms like these on purpose. To make a person squirm in subconscious discomfort and let their bones be slowly eaten by the prickling freeze of their own sweat.

Her fingers slowly wrapped around the watch on her wrist to muffle down the quick ticking that was reminding her of her heartbeat too much, because just one glance at the man in front of her was enough to make it race. She just didn't know if it was the time or her heart on the start line.

They knew they had only a few hours before they would need to let him go — they didn't have anything on him, but just the way the space warped around him was enough to make the pit in her stomach slowly open.

And it did a small flutter when she felt a quick soft brush of a hand against the small of her back, her fingers quickly unwrapped as she finally stepped in the room. She knew it was most likely an accident, a catch of the door as the mechanical leverage on top of it was starting to close it and he was keeping it open a bit more so he could have slipped inside right behind her.

Or maybe it wasn't an accident. She just didn't learn how to read him yet. To recognise what was a touch of practicality, tactical comfort or... something that felt for both of them like the ground underneath their feet changed to a wobbly tightrope which they were balancing on with their hands tied together.

One wrong move and they both would fall. Like she felt when she sat down behind the table, the ticking of her watch not stopping in her ears, half a beat off.

The man in front of them slowly straightened in the chair — it looked a little too close to the table when he sat down properly. Or maybe the table had moved.

Her eyes didn't catch the movement when he managed to pull closer because she was instinctively pulling away from where he was leaning in. But for a short moment she felt like she was slipping away fully, like on a tilted ground. Her hands slipped on the desk to pull herself back — the metal chair underneath her cracked softly against the pull, dragged back.

"Mr...." her eyes finally snapped back to him as his fingers slowly moved through the manila folder he kept in front of him like a shield, with the bald eagle glaring back at all three of them and the turned pages sounded like the flapper of dusty wings. "Gooseberry."

She saw the slow frown that crept between his brows as his eyes skimmed the file yet again like he somehow forgot the name he had just read. She tilted her head softly to skim the file too as she herself was a bit surprised by the surname, and her eyes blinked a few times as the letters scrambled themselves together underneath the weight of her eyes before they spit out the answer her brain was demanding from them to deliver.

To ease the nibbling twitch in her diaphragm, one that felt like trying to regain balance after someone had already pushed her off the tightrope — the body going through the motions of free fall before the mind could catch up.

"Doctor Reid, and agent..." her body hit the ground when the words glided from his mouth and landed on her chest like a footprint, eyes snapping on the man, quickly skimming over, assessing the level of danger he could impose even when his hands were still cuffed together and his clothes were patted down several times since he was brought in.

Yet, she already felt the dagger stabbing in between her ribs and her eyes snapped back to Spencer when she heard the shallow breath in, like he himself was in an aching type of pain for a moment.

"Yes, that..." He swallowed dryly, lips dried up from the winter air that was surrounding the shore town for the past days since they arrived. "...that would be correct." He swallowed yet again to push down the knot that formed in his throat. "Mr. Gooseberry, are you aware why you were brought in?"

The question felt almost inadequate in that moment because neither of them really knew why they kept the man around — no protocol was ever written about the situation when you know that you ran into something that you know should have been contained but they never really knew what they were containing. Just the remains of the ancient brain were howling in warning gasps that whatever it was, you should have pretended that you didn't see it and just kept going with the motions.

"That man was killed with a knife, like the girls before. Like... a deer on a hunt." She shivered over these words — the temperature dropping a degree with his every dragged-out word in that smooth velvety voice. "-or that's what I heard... on TV."

Her hand underneath the table balled into a tight fist and she forcefully unwrapped it when she felt a soft tap against the back of it with his pinky before he moved them to keep them resting on the table.

She still felt the stones weighing down in her stomach when she remembered the look in his eyes when he saw her palm after the last case.

Where pain was the only thing that helped to make it through the motions of the last case, where mercy disappeared from the face of the earth for a moment. And in a way still didn't come back even with that one. Like it was a twisted spiral that just changed the length of the fall every single time — sometimes giving time to give them the fake feeling of safety first.

"That would be right, but..." she finally brought herself to open her mouth but something in her made her almost recoil back when the man's eyes moved towards her and for a flash of a moment she saw a flicker in the charcoal irises. Like a dangerous spark above a pile of gunpowder.

"I'm a left-handed man, agent." Fingers moved in the demonstration, softly tapping against the grey metal table, the elegance of them feeling almost grotesque when mixed with the clinking of the cuffs. "The killer is right-handed."

"And you know that... how?" She flinched a bit when the charcoal moved from her back to the man at her side. It was like a whip cracked right above her head and her first instinct was to duck — instead her shoe softly moved to him to nudge his ankle when he straightened too quickly under the gaze.

"Oh... you didn't shield your notes properly. I think it was on the third page, right corner. Right next to the glaring eagle." Her hands were already moving towards the case file, slipping it from underneath Spencer's fingers as they were wrapping around the papers too tightly, and truly — the handwritten note in the margin, right next to the Bureau's emblem, the eagle truly glaring back at them in disappointment... or silent warning.

"Why so nervous, agents? I just watch some TV on a regular basis like an aware citizen should, and I have a tendency to read things that are lying right in front of me."

"You two are not too used to working together, are you? You still have that..." the man's fingers slowly moved in the air with a lazy gesture of twisted fingers to symbolise the knotted mess that was between them and she felt the prickling feeling that ran down her back and she bristled inwards because these types were the worst to deal with. They were like a flame to a moth, the type that would bend the words and world to get what they want, get even a flicker of attention the world would bother to give them. "...unresolved shadow."

"Are you aware that the things you told us until now are not playing in your favour, Mr. Gooseberry? You heard your rights, you have a right to remain silent because otherwise you may tangle yourself into something that won't be pleasant for you." She frowned over these words.

She had never heard Spencer speak like this so openly, normally he listened and connected the dots for himself, trying to pry the person in front of him open to learn more — but this sounded like he was doing the exact opposite, like he was scared what he may find out if he dug for too long.

She felt her legs wobble the first second when she stood up from the desk as she needed to sort her thoughts out. Her steps were quiet as she made it towards the one-way mirror and stood in front of it for a moment. It was one of the things she used to do at the questionings, to take a few steps back and wait what she could learn from the unwatched reflection of the room as it sometimes showed more than the plain eyes could have caught.

"And what happened to the presumption of innocence, Doctor Reid?" The eyes of the man were stabbing into the agent in front of him, she could see in the reflection how the charcoals were burning a tad bit more than before and she pushed her hands in her pockets to stop them from twitching again in displeasure of the whole thing and she took in a small breath through her nose to get better footing and she slowly turned her head to look at the pair at the table.

In any other setting she would believe that the two men were the agents who came to question her. Suits and ties, both looking polite enough to fly under the radar of imminent threat and yet not close enough to not make something twitch and pull as warning smoke signals. Not clear enough to be understood, but clear enough to be seen. The same way how her peripheral vision caught how the eyes met hers through the mirror.

She tugged on her sleeves softly and turned to face the men fully again, charcoal fully focused on Spencer. Like they never even looked at her before. "We are not saying that you are guilty, Mr. Gooseberry. We are just asking you questions to understand if you embody a possible threat to our investigation. Nothing more, nothing less."

The cuffs clicked against the table again, fingers softly playing with the material of them as the man visibly thought for a moment. "And what are you scared of, agent? Me, little old Gooseberry, who is currently cuffed and left at the mercy of two agents in a concrete room? I would say that even the state of the building we are currently in imposes a bigger threat than me..." The lightbulb above their heads flickered weakly like it was signalling its last journey of light for the day before it plunged the room into a semi-darkness for a few seconds.

Her feet moved before her brain could have ordered her to stay put, fingers wrapping at the back of Spencer's chair like she needed to know that the darkness didn't plunge her into her own isolated corner. The movement took only two longer steps but it was enough to light up the embers of shame in her stomach.

Because she knew that both of them were never the bravest in the dark, and she knew it when one of his hands shortly brushed against her thigh — his own check that she was still there.

The light came back moments later, the man in front of them looking back at them, the cuffs hanging looser on his wrists than before. "Fascinating."

"What... is fascinating to you?" She finally asked as her fingers slowly unwrapped from the chair, letting it hang loose next to her body but she was still gravitating too close in Spencer's orbit, like expecting the light to give out yet again in any moment.

"The closeness. I never expected to run into two agents so openly..."

"That is enough." Her head turned quickly to Spencer and her breath caught. She didn't know why but the tone — even when it was as calm and equal as it was usual for him in moments like these — put pressure on her like someone put their hands on her sternum and between her shoulder blades and pushed together. "Mr. Gooseberry, I'm reminding you one more time that there is a procedure we are following in this room and these questions are irrelevant and not making you look good in our eyes."

"Two agents so openly what?" She heard the sound of a trap snapping in her head, and she knew she had made a mistake, she felt it and she knew it the moment she asked it, but something in her needed an answer. To know that she herself wasn't fabricating the feelings, that there was something in the air proving that this one was... real. Even in a moment where control was out of her reach she craved to know.

"Agent." She openly flinched over the word — he didn't say anything really but she already knew that she had stepped too far. "This is not the time for this." The recoil came quicker than she expected, quicker than the first time she reached out for his hand in the archives.

"No, no..." the man in front of them brought them back in towards him, towards their original focus they stepped a foot into that room. "That is not my plan. I just noticed that both of you are scared of... missing light. Or... should I have read it any differently?" And a small breath left her lungs as she slowly slumped in the free chair again, the sound of ticking coming back to the original rhythm in her ears even when her watch had stopped with her heart at the same time only moments ago.

"Then back to the-" she knew saying interrogation was stupid. They didn't get out of that man more than his name and that he had a thing to jump on the anchor rumours from the TV broadcasts and snoop around into things he shouldn't really care about. "Back to the start." She cleared her throat as her hands moved back to the file on the desk, angry red crescents glowing at her pale palms and just one look at them made Spencer's heart clench.

These hands should be smooth and warm — not red in pain and freezing cold from the adrenaline that was running through her veins.

"Can you tell us where you were on Tuesday night between seven and midnight?" Her voice pulled him back to look at the man in front of them again and he tugged at his sleeve shortly, eyes quickly moving to check his watch to see how much time they had left before they would be forced to let the man go again. Time didn't stop and they were running out of it, every second a bit quicker than the last one.

"Tuesday, you are saying..." The man hummed, a hand moving to softly scratch the side of his nose for a moment before the hands moved back to rest on the table. "At home. But unfortunately my only witnesses are Sinatra and a bottle of good brandy. And the neighbours' hellhounds that are constantly barking under my windows."

"Not a big fan of dogs?" She hums back softly as the pencil glides over the papers in front of her, adding in few of the details the man just gave them — she will need to check out on that dog detail later, maybe some of the neighbours heard it too that night.

"I don't mind them, they are more trustworthy than an average person when you know how to read them. But after all we all are feral dogs pretending to be domesticated enough to not to go after each other's throat. Some just know how to pretend better." Man shrugs and his fingers softly tap against the table, nails hitting the material with a strong click every time. If she could she would have already smash her hand on top of his to force him to stop.

Every click was echoing through the cold empty room like he was playing on invisible strings and everything around him resonated in the way he wanted to. She was definitely not a fan of that type of music.

"But most fascinating for me is the Pavlovian reflex. How easily you can train..." another tap and she needed to check her watch quickly as the ticking started to sound too dangerously like the man's rhythm for a moment. "...anything to do exactly what you want. Like that killer you are after, you know, with all the things he did to the victims, it's almost fascinating how easily he could have manipulated them to carve that sign in them. A mark really, remarkable work in twisting the mind, if I may add."

Her hands balled into fists again, stinging in them worse than in the morning and she forced herself to blink a few times. Because she too was starting to feel like a dog.

"And how do you know about the carvings? That's not anything that was ever said to the public, at least not in the way you are speaking about it." Spencer's voice was neutral but not so far from tipping over to his biting one because nothing was making sense to him. All the defence and logic was pulled apart like a fried-up ragdoll in the hands of a child.

Brutal in nature and yet... almost subconsciously innocent, like the other person didn't know they were causing such a type of destruction.

"You didn't read the notes you have on me? I used to work as a forensic consultant in Maine. Cold rivers and wild forests teach you a thing or two. I expected better preparation." The man almost snorted out in a taunting way, like he knew more and yet was not even telling them anything they didn't know already. Her eyes moved back towards the file and fingers turned pages in it and truly the last one had a backside she most likely hadn't noticed, or maybe someone printed it out previously and forgot to mention it before they went in?

"It wasn't there. I checked it twice before we went in." Spencer finally broke the silence and her fist slowly loosened itself.

"What?"

"It happens sometimes. You don't have the living office down South?" The only thing they both could do was stare back at the man in front of them, Spencer's hand fully moving to open her own, letting it lie flat against the table as the only thing they could do was watch the man and the too-loose cuffs around his wrists. It was like they were just a peculiar decoration, not a thing holding him back. "We had a few in Maine, did a lot of things if I may add. And definitely helped to hide what someone was trying so desperately to hide from others."

"Cuffs...." She whispered quietly and he only brought himself to nod.

"I know."

"Tell me, agents? Did you check the clock? Because we are running out of time much quicker than you thought. And if I may add... you two are too. So much touching and not really stable ground." They both flinched over the click of the tongue and they could only bring themselves to stare at the flickering lightbulb above their heads before the room darkened.

She saw the hand before she felt it, even when her eyes were wrapped in the black veil that was thrown over their heads by the room itself and she automatically turned towards the buzz.

"Time is out, we need to let him go." Hotch's voice reached them before they could even see him — even when the light was back in the room. It never went dark. "The prosecutor called that the alibi was delivered for the night the murder happened."

When she looked at the man from the corner of her eyes the cuffs were gone, like they were never there, like he was never held in that room as a possible suspect but more like the interrogator himself. And she could only stare as he sent her a small wink through the one-way mirror without even facing her. She moved mechanically after that, stepping outside the room that was now freezing cold and she needed to take a small breath in as she felt her feet slip a bit on the floor — like they were defrosting from the room itself.

"Hotch, we... we are sorry, we wanted to come clean sooner and we understand that if..." She started to speak when she finally managed to somehow glue herself to the unit chief that was standing on the opposite side of the hallway, Spencer hovering right behind her, fingers digging into the back of her jacket like he himself was scared that one slip and he would fall over the Earth's edge.

"What are you talking about?" A frown made her hesitate as she watched the man back in shock. "You spent almost three hours there and you didn't get out of that man a single word, it sometimes happens and most likely he isn't our killer... Garcia managed to find an airport register from the night."

"Three... hours." Spencer breathed out as his face tilted to look at her face for a short second, making sure that he was not the only one that heard it the exact way how the words left Hotch's mouth.

They both could only watch the chief leave and her eyes lingered on the end of the hallway even when the door clicked shut. The only thing that brought her back were the cold shaky hands that slowly moved from her shoulders to cradle her cheeks.

For the first time the touch was sure, like they were touching the only stable thing in the world and they needed to hold onto anything that kept them from slipping away.

"You are real."

"So... so are you." She whispered weakly as her palm slowly turned up and the red crescents were gone, in the same shape they were this morning when he checked on them when her hands were freezing as she had forgotten her gloves in her hotel room.

"I didn't know how to deflect when he hint towards the..."

"We will tell them." She only brought herself to swallow dryly as her eyes looked back at him. "Rossi wants to host a Christmas brunch next weekend. I think we can come clean there."

"Sounds good."

And he didn't let go of her hand, only managing to exchange a weak nod with a man in the dark suit that passed them in the hallway — a look of approval shining in the charcoal beads.

He looked... familiar.

"Come on, we promised one more time."

His lips trembled as he read the letter, fingers were digging into the material of the paper. Crumpling it, warping and morphing the loops he knew and originally hated so much.

He called it chicken scratch. If that chicken was a pompous duchess in Baroque France.

That was before study nights and cheap ramen cooked to perfection, before the thermos filled with tea with four teaspoons of honey and dry crackers, and early mornings at the study rooms and the sleepiness of evening and poorly hung Christmas lights above Boston streets.

Before her.

When the notes landed on his table for the first time in an unceremonious way from Professor Hearthback with the words that he needed to look into the essays and that some student dropped by and asked about the math equations she did for the class and something about not being sure if she chose the right methodology, he didn't even have time to ask a single question.

The professor added something under his breath about a humanities student most likely signing up by accident for a statistic class meant for STEM before he headed out.

First few lines were... completely unreadable, because she was writing zeroes and nines in a similar motion and he was not even sure if that letter was "d" or "c" and "l" clamped together in a too fancy and curly way.

And on top of it all... she was jumping loops with the data, starting with general data sorting, then jumping to derivation then spinning it all around.

And her regression model was wrong.

Label, subject and on top of it all time data — which was not even a linear variable, and he was ready to pull his hair out when he looked at the numbers she managed to stumble together and they... somehow worked.

Methodologically tricky to interpret, but they were still not far off enough to be called straight away wrong.

Which meant he would need to meet her face to face. His eyes fell on the name written on the first paper lying in front of him and he sighed.

There was no way she would survive even one lecture about analytics with him, he knew the 'effect' he had on people, and on top of it all she studied humanities... which statistically meant her score in maths was average or below average in high school math classes.

Yet, he still reached for the keyboard on his left and slowly typed in the university system her name and started to write an email that would be worthy of five PDF files or three ninety-minutes lectures.

To be honest with himself, maybe he was trying to scare her off and somehow make her sing out of the class while she had enough time.

Maybe he should have added a few box plots on top when he later thought about that email...

But that was before.

Soft knock pulled him out of his head as he was correcting the latest pile of essays from the chemistry labs he taught on Monday, and he looked up to meet an unknown face in the doorway.

"You... you are Spencer Reid? TA of the professor Hearthback?" Voice was careful, but mouth was already running with the cadence of a woman that had a tendency to ask the right and wrong questions at the same time, flipping a coin with the universe and betting if the person in front of her would be offended by her words or not.

"Yes?" He was already slipping into the defensive mode because it was always the same.

Aren't you too young, do you even have life, who did you bribe to land this place, are you aware that the professor is kinda difficult to work with, and so many more.

"And you are?"

"You sent me an email over my data analysis. About 6 pages, when I printed it out." She answered back with a soft shrug and her hand tugged out of her bag the handful of rumpled papers in question.

She had dedication for things she set her mind to.

"Oh, the duchess chicken scratch." Words slipped out before he could stop himself, his hand flying to his mouth to clap it shut, but it was already too late. His eyes went wide, already imagining how his life would end in that moment.

How she will drag him to the ethic board of the university, or she will spread even more things about him around the campus and his non-existing social life will be officially and utterly over.

A chuckle was the answer instead.

And that made his train of thoughts crash completely and utterly, and his eyes snapped to the woman that could have been similar in age to him, trying to hide her own smile.

She always knew how to take a good insult. She liked the creativity in them.

"Oh, I like your style. My sister calls it 'like clouds with a seizure'." She finally got out and took one small step into the office. "So, how am I doing on my analysis?"

She was... a coward. As much as Courage the cowardly dog was. Her friend even told her once that she was as brave as the most scared idiot who still comes for the second round.

"Awfully." He finally got out, still halfway in shock, but he still gestured to the chair so she can sit down. "It's a complete chaos that is methodologically questionable and barely works."

"But it works." She said with a smile that looks like he just gave her the solution to the life's meaning.

"Yes..." He sighed, his eyes looking at the papers he pulled out of his desk drawer for a moment. "Yes, it works."

Originally, he was planning to get rid of her in less than a week.

Show her how things are done, maybe softly hint towards the fact that she should consider a different class — maybe analytics meant for the humanities, for both her and his good.

Because in a way he felt sorry for her.

Woman who wrote quirky notes to every line of the analytic program she worked with like she was having a future conversation with him through those line.

'I know you will roll your eyes over this, but debugging works. And I have no idea if the results are correct?'

'Huh, why is it throwing an error when it was working just yesterday?'

'Do you have time on Wednesday? I have homemade tea and dry crackers. Is it enough to bribe you to help me with this mess, ’cause I feel bad for sending you version 7.05 at this point...'

He should have said no.

He didn't — and showed up in that study room with nothing that his notes and hope that this all wasn't a stupid plot to asking on a date or make an idiot out of him for even thinking about this whole thing as a friendly thing.

Both cases at the same time in the worst possible option.

A small porcelain cup clicked on the desk in front of him — it had little jellyfish on it — and he knew she had definitely brought it from her dorm room, because there was no way something like this would have been in the kitchen down the hallway, where the most random things had gathered through the years and generations of college students and sleepless nights.

Forgotten cups held random logos of the most random companies from all around the States, not jellyfishes and shark whales.

"Don’t worry. I washed it before I brought it here, and it was wrapped in a handkerchief. I felt like I was carrying a pair of Fabergé eggs on my way here." She added it with a small smile as the thermos’s closing system clicked and she poured out the golden liquid.

"Mom’s mix. I have no idea what she puts inside, but she always said that tea never killed anyone. That the heavy lifting was done by the kyanide in it."

He didn’t know which tangent to jump on first — if he should decline the tea with awkward babbling about his preference for green tea and the fact that tea is a proper tea only when it has tea leaves in it, and that she should call the liquid a herb-spice brew instead… or correct her about kyanide in tea poisoning throughout history.

Instead of it all he sucked in a small breath, fingers automatically wrapped around the mug and he took a sip to stuff him mouth with something so he he wouldn’t ramble himself into having the brew poured behind his neck for some stupid comment he’d get out this time.

His brows frowned when the liquid hit is tongue, and he looked into the cup for a moment.

"What?" she asked as she set her mug aside, the realisation crashing over her that she’d given him tea without even asking if he wanted any — panic creeping in that maybe he was allergic to some of the ingredients, or that her joke about kyanide wasn’t the best idea in front of someone you’re offering the thing to.

"I swear it shouldn’t taste like bitter almonds."

She was starting to imagine that somehow she managed to poison the TA who was supposed to help her to survive the analytic class.

That was not a good score.

"It's awfully sweet." he finally said, still looking in the cup in his hands, eyes studying the jellyfishes on it, doing everything possible to avoid her eyes. "O-oh..." she breathed out softly and warmth slowly started to creep up her neck and her fingers gingerly reached for the thermos, the coldness of the metal being a temperature shock compared to the warmth of the porcelain. "I must have miscalculated how much honey I put inside. If you want I can—"

"I like it." He blurted it out before she could continue. "The sweetness, I mean. I… I like my coffee really sweet, so this is fine."

"You… like it?" She couldn’t believe it. Because his expression looked like he had been calculating his chances of surviving the meeting today instead the whole time.

"Yeah..." A small smile appeared on his lips — a shy one, but the first real one she saw in person. Maybe he had smiled a few times at her notes without even admitting it to himself, but now... he was smiling with her in the room.

"I like it."

She had a sweet tooth too.

And that was how the homemade tea and questionable crackers became their main bribery, and how study rooms around the campus became their meeting points — until, over time, it was no longer just about correct statistic models or how to feel less lonely in the stacks of reading summaries and the work they needed to do.

She looked at him like he grew a second head when he finished with his current tangent. "So, you are telling me that your ideal social interaction is when it doesn't exist?"

He choked softly on the breath he’d just taken in to continue his rambling, and looked at her like she had just offended his own mother. "Excuse you? I did not say that!"

"Uh-uh, sure thing, Doctor." She chuckled softly as she flicked a peanut from the snack mix sitting between them, while they worked on their respective assignments.

She had made the mistake of asking what he thought about the current trend of omitting the Oxford comma in writing. And she immediately regretted her question.

Because from a debate about English grammar, they landed themselves in an argument about why reading a book about neuroscience and sorting your clothes methodically by their materials is ten times better than visiting a pretentious underground music bar with an artist who plays on a poor man’s banjo and sings a little too feelingly a pretentious version of 'I’m on Fire' by Bruce Springsteen.

"Don't call me that."

She had to chuckle at the pout and scrunched nose he made every time she used that title, because she knew the long string of thoughts behind it.

"Oh, come on, you overachieving smartass — you already have one PhD! That qualifies you to be called one, no matter what." Her finger rose in the meantime to silence him just as he inhaled to interrupt her.

"Na-ah, don’t even start with the whole ‘I haven’t finished the current ones, so I don’t deserve to be called doctor’ thing. Do you even hear what I’m saying? Current ones. Plural. Because you can’t be an average John who sells the soul of their future firstborn to the gods to get the first one. No. You needed two others. Studied at the same time."

She always knew how to call the bluff out.

"Fine." He grumbles out as his fingers hastily moved through the plastic bowl between them and fished out one of the last chocolate lentils that were left inside. "But still, listening to Vivaldi and doing crossword puzzles is not that bad! Better than expensive undrinkable beer and questionable music — from whoever that song was. Bruceston Springman or whatever."

Her head moved from side to side, and her eyes fell to the cassette player on the desk — the one she’d put there when she came into the study room. It had a hard plastic cover with several star stickers on it, and currently had her favorite mixtape stuffed inside. Her friend had given it to her last Christmas — properly pirated from the music store she worked at, giving her access to any and all music she wanted.

Which led to the creation of one of the best mixtapes that had ever seen the daylight of the world.

Bowie, Springsteen, Metallica, Cranberries and Radiohead all mixed with Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel ABBA and Cher. She used to call that mixtape 'One made in heavens.'

"Bruce Springsteen," she chimed back. "And you have an awfully obvious gap in cultural trivia, my friend."

"I do not!" He snapped back immediately, even though he knew he had just landed himself in deep trouble. His hand moved to push his hair behind his ear — an avoiding gesture, trying to find the quickest and least painful way out of the pit he had thrown himself into voluntarily.

“And I prefer Bach and Brahms in general. Contemporary music is… loud.”

“You’ve never heard ‘Dancing in the Dark’?”

“I have! Of course. It’s the one with… the dancing. In… darkness.”

“Oh God.”

“I know culture!”

“You learned that phrase ten seconds ago, didn’t you?”

She also used to be determined. Like the rider on a stubborn mule when an unstoppable force met an unmovable object.

She scooped closer to him, pushing the papers on the table aside as she set the tape player in the middle with a soft click of the plastic shell against the wooden table, fingers quickly untangling the mess of her headphones offering him one. "Don't look at me like that, I'm doing you a service, grandpa."

"That song just about..."

"Silence. You say word 'hook up' once and I'm not speaking with you till the end of the day. Just... listen."

And somewhere on the way in between the chorus and one of the verses he started to understand.

That maybe Chopin wasn't the only way how to listen to it all.

"It's still... too pop-ish."

"Jesus, you will get aneurysm from 'Enter the Sandman'." She chuckled softly and her fingers pushed the forward button with a soft click.

"The what...?"

"You will find out."

Because she was always fucking right.

Like when she told him that the carol sing along was coming and if they want to avoid it and keep their dignity they needed to abort as quickly as possible that night.

They climbed up to the campus rooftop in the late December evening after sneaking out of the university’s Christmas party — bad Christmas songs blasting from a prehistorical acoustic system, professors and administrators mingling around in hideous sweaters, the thick warm air of a poorly ventilated room mixed with the smell of cheap warmed up wine.

Cold wind blew up from the river, gathering clumps of snowflakes swirling through the air like someone repeatedly shook a very large snow globe.

"Don't laugh!" She gasped out through her own giggles, her shoulders shaking up and down with every shallow breath. "It's not my fault!"

“No?” he shot back, laughing under his breath as his hands wrapped around the metal railing, the cold biting his fingers even though the rest of his body felt like a well-fed furnace. “You just said Professor Brunel looks like an over-capitalised version of the Grinch.”

“And am I wrong?” she chuckled, leaning against the railing right beside him, their shoulders brushing. Her fingers reached up to brush the snowflakes from his hair where they were melting into soft curls that were escaping the stiffly slicked back hairstyle he always wore.

She liked the unruly things. All the things that were unperfected and off center. She used to say that life should be about wabi-sabi not an idea of unreachable idea of perfectum. That's why she liked when his hair started to curl at the end of a long day.

“No…” He shook his head softly, eyes catching the yellow glow of the streetlamps as he looked at her fully, a soft smile still sitting on his lips. “For once, you’re not.”

“Oh, come on. Give me a slice,” she bristled playfully, flicking his forehead with her fingers and making his head dip softly. “I’m correct at least once every even Thursday in a quarter of a month.”

That made him laugh more.

And through the soft laughs he didn't notice the look in her eyes — because at that time he never assumed anyone could look at him that way.

How her gaze dropped to his lips for a moment before lifting back to his eyes. How her body leaned closer, how her fingers slowly unwrapped from the rooftop railing.

“Well, if I’m going to be generous with you…” A soft grin, and for a moment his face caught the warm lights from the Christmas decorations wrapped around the nearby lamps.

"Spence?" She didn't give him much time to finish the original thought.

Her lips parted, fingers twitched, and then her body moved.

Because she always knew how to live life.

Their noses brushed softly; ice-cold fingers glided up his cheeks, framing his face with the care of priceless artefacts of time. One breath mingled with the next as the final piece slipped into place.

His eyes went wide as hers closed for the briefest second — letting herself feel it fully, wire to wire. The taste of spices and gingerbread they’d been chewing on all evening, the faint sweetness of the hot chocolate they’d finished right before escaping the party.

She pulled away shortly after, her hands dropping to her sides, but the sheepish smile stayed on her lips while his brain was still visibly stuck in reboot.

"Keep smile like that, please. It suits you."

Because she also knew how to love.

The aftertaste in his mouth that night was bitter — like almonds. Like the coffee he’d drunk only minutes before opening the envelope had turned into poison, burning itself into his tongue and settling in his stomach like nausea.

Because he should have been there. He should have shown up, should have found a way to carve out at least two days from the Academy to visit her.

They’d talked about their plans — how, once she finished her winter semester, she’d finally find a way to visit him in Virginia. He’d promised to show her around. He told her he’d found a surprisingly decent coffee shop in Quantico, one he was escaping to when Ethan was a ball of nerves when he was drowning in the extreme amount of notes they had for the jurisdiction courses.

"Spencer, she spoke about you." The first time he read the past tense, he didn’t pay much attention to it.

He should have.

“I’m so sorry that I’m letting you know this way, but this is the only contact we found. She didn’t have any email or phone number written anywhere, and I’m hoping the Academy won’t send this back to us. But you deserve to know.”

Seizure. Prognosis unsure, but from the rest of what her sister wrote... he knew too much to hope.

“She’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look good. We thought you should know.” He reread that sentence again and again as his body crumpled into the corner of the room he shared with Ethan, his jaw clenched as he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

He felt the ground shifting under him. Every crack from the heater sounded like the universe taunting him, reminding him the world was still turning, that time was still moving, that Earth hadn’t halted the way his own world had.

It meant that nothing came to halt the same way his own world came to the moment he read the first sentence on that piece of paper.

Handwriting that wasn't the one he had learned to love.

Her turned the paper in his hand again and again.

No address to reach out to, to reply to, no email, neither a phone number written anywhere on it.

Her sister was most likely in shock when she wrote that letter anyway— maybe that's why nothing else was included

He wasn't even sure if they would let him go for the funeral, she wasn't a relative.

He was already the protectionist golden boy, he... didn't deserve that privilege to avoid yet another line of protocols like with anything else.

It wouldn't be... fair.

His throat tightened as he inspected the envelope again, a tear hitting the white surface and causing the ink to bleed.

September 30th.

The letter had been delayed. Lost somewhere on the way, probably held up because the postal office was strict about the way letters had to be formatted to reach trainees and staff for safety reasons.

Even if he wanted to... he couldn't go. Because it was already too late.

It was there in black and white. Too many overwhelming pieces of evidence stacked into a simple truth: this didn’t have a good ending. If she had gotten better… they would have sent another letter.

He knew her. She would have called herself, wrote him an email, ... something.

Anything.

He remembered the last night before he left Boston — the half-joking promise they made, the kind you only make when you’re young enough to believe you’ll live forever.

If anything ever happens, she had said, we owe each other one more time. One last chance to show up.

And he hadn’t fought her on it. Because she always said things like that — half dare, half truth — and she was always right.

It was the third pack of tissues he was throwing away. In a way he was surprised how many tears such a small body could hold inside, but when he remembered the long nights in his own childhood bedroom when his skin was playing with colours like kaleidoscopes…

Fingers twitched softly as they opened the fourth package and moved the freshest tissue to catch yet another snot dangerously close to falling from the little nose.

"Hey…" Soft voice got even quieter as he crumpled his frame into something even smaller than before as he was sitting right opposite the small ball of tears and marching nerves. "It's okay. Everything is okay, you are not in any trouble, I promise."

"I kicked a policeman! You will put me in jail." Words that would sound comical if that poor girl wasn't shaking on the ground like her world was ending.

"Self-defence." A wobbly twitch of the corner of his lips in a ghost of a smile, like he was trying to use every micro-expression he knew to help the girl calm down. "And agent Alvez himself said that you should get a gold star for your fighting skills." He knew that the ten-year-old wasn't in shape to appreciate those words but he was partly hoping that it would at least come through as an absurd idea that a man who got a pink sneaker jabbed in his ribs would even praise the aim.

His hand moved to softly dry the new set of tears with yet another tissue, careful with the bruise that was blooming at the girl's left cheek from the fall as she tried to escape the team when they got in the house.

Guns ready, glass cracking underneath their shoes as they slowly moved through the house, drops of blood leading them to the overthrown living room where the unfinished drawing was sitting on the coffee table right next to the tipped over glass of water and slices of apple and oranges. Markers bleeding across the paper, coloured drops dyeing the white carpet from one side while the blood already soaked into the other side.

They thought they came too late in those first few moments when the silence was filled only with the ticking of the clock, high-pitched beeping of the house alarm every few seconds, and the distant voice of the police unit in front of the property.

Before they heard the sound and muffled sob when Emily nudged the kitchen door open to check the rest of the house.

That poor thing was smart enough to hide when the unsub broke in and took her nanny when he didn't find the girl. They found out later that she stuffed herself in the supply closet on the highest shelf behind the boxes with laundry detergents and threw at them anything she could reach as they opened the door before she jumped down and was ready to bolt out.

Luke was the one who caught her and was left with bruised ribs and one bite.

When he thought about it, that girl showed more fight than he ever managed to muster when he was her age. In a way he almost envied her for it, but he stopped that thought right after. Because no one deserved to go through the experience she did.

And neither did he deserve that hell he lived through.

At one point he even stopped wearing his glasses to school because he couldn't risk getting them broken. They were already tight on money as the social support that was coming every month was barely enough for one warm meal a day for both him and his mom, and people he tutored gave him barely 20 cents for each session.

That's why he hid the girl's glasses in his pocket when she was throwing herself in the police car. Just from one look knowing that the glasses had frames too thick for her to function properly without them when the first shock would wear down.

"I thought that you would appreciate them." He said quietly as his hand reached to his pocket and offered the frames back to the girl when the hiccups slowed down in frequency after some time. "Your glasses." He added as he noticed that the girl was squinting at the thing in his hand for too long.

Eyes moved to his face, tears forgotten for a second as she reached with her hand towards him, small fingers wrapping around the frames and bringing them close to her face to inspect them.

"Don't worry. I kept them safe." One of the few things he was confident enough to say that word.

Safe.

He believed that he would manage to keep his mom safe through her life, by sending her away to a place that should be capable of helping her with her condition. He also believed that if he studied enough he would… what really? Pry open the universe and somehow figure out a way to rewrite space and time to cure the mind of his ill mother? Or that he would manage to keep safe and save other people when he accepted Gideon's offer barely being 21? That he would be capable of saving others when he couldn't save his own mother? Or when it blew up in his face again and again? With victims, unsubs, Maeve, Gideon, … himself?

"You look like a chort." Words that pull him out of his mind and his eyes focus on the girl in front of him.

"W-what?"

"Your hair." The girl mumbles and gestures to her hair to mimic the wild mop of curls on his head. "You have similar hair to the chorts in the fairytales my aunt watches with me every Christmas."

"That's… a slavic meaning for a devil. Well, technically not a devil like we see it here in the US because the slavic nations have more specific…" he stops himself when he catches the rambling. "Hierarchy in hell. It's more like a demon." He finishes as his voice drops at the end.

How many demons does a person really need, to be considered one himself?

One was a sweet, burning, itch that was woken up after almost a decade and his mind sometimes asked how easy it would be to let the needle burn again.

Or how easy it would be to just… slip.

One mistake, one… pull of a trigger he feared that he wouldn't regret one day.

Even after the years the gun felt heavy in his hands as he was slowly sneaking through the warehouse. The only difference now was that he wasn't scared to pull the trigger. Because something in him was almost gleaming over the idea of killing that bastard that dared to touch her. Who dared to try to take away from him even the last remains of the stable past he had, to burn the last bridge between before and after in his life.

"No…" the girl shakes her head again as she slowly wipes her nose with her sleeve and his hand automatically moves to offer her a tissue instead. "Chorts are not evil. They are… funny, or mischievous but… they are not evil. They sometimes even help the heroes!"

He blinks slowly. Many questions wake up in his mind that is still dancing around the idea of the Devil. But maybe he was more like Woland? A Devil among sinners that are greater than the evil itself?

"I'm not sure that…" his lips move to a thin line as his fingers wrap more tightly around the package of tissues. "You think that I look evil?"

The girl shakes her head vehemently — looking almost offended by his words. "No!" Her nose scrunches as she moved to her knees and almost tipped over when she pinned one of the ends of the blanket she was wrapped in. His hand shoots out to catch her, hand gentle as he fixes the blanket around her frame while waiting for the scolding that was definitely coming.

"Careful, it would be a shame to lose those front teeth. The second pair is a one time thing." He murmurs with a small, rueful smile.

He was shot, beaten, tortured, drugged up, manipulated, resuscitated, incarcerated, and violated over the years in so many ways but… he never lost his teeth.

One useless detail that was now clinging to his mind like a taunting beacon of the past.

One of the many fears he used to have when he was a child. Fear of darkness, dogs, inheriting his mother's disease, becoming like his father, and… losing his front teeth.

Later through the years came new fears. A new list of things he feared every waking hour when his mind wasn't preoccupied enough to bring him peace in the chaos of data and cases.

"So what?" The girl shrugged as she looked at him like it was something that didn't bother her in the slightest. "I would wear the fake teeth like my private home teacher." She wiggles her hands out of the blanket to grab his arms so she could untangle the blanket from around her. "She can't eat whole apples because the teeth fall out." That child’s bluntness makes his lips twitch in surprise. "But I hate apples anyway, and you are wrong about being evil."

"You sound sure of that… well, about both of the things." He adds, as he slowly stands up to finally guide the girl back to the sofa of the waiting room where they were stationed since the team arrived from the crime scene.

Room boringly beige and bureaucratically sterile while also pretending that this should be a place where witnesses and relatives should feel safe while they are waiting out the time between before and after.

"Since when do evil people help other people?" A question he could overthrow in so many ways that it felt almost acidic in the way he thought about it. Data, analyses, and behavioural patterns flashing behind his eyes. But… he purposefully chooses to shield her from the darkness of the world.

Darkness she can't escape, darkness which is, in a way, already reaching after her with its ugly claws as the unsub is targeting intelligent home-schooled kids and individuals pretending to be one of the new teachers for the kids. "Yeah, you are right. Evil people usually don't help… people."

Hand with band-aided fingers moved to rub the red-rimmed eyes as grey eyes blinked tiredly at him from behind the soft red hair with crooked bangs.

Something was telling him that the hairstyle happened with borrowed scissors and too much creative energy.

"Tired?" A nod that made him sigh softly and before he could reach for the other blanket thrown on the armrest of the sofa — the small head softly moved to rest against his shoulder and an exhausted sigh followed right behind it.

Fingers curled into the material of his slacks and his body stiffened for a short moment.

Would it feel the same way if that girl was his? If there would be a tired little mind with a soul too heavy after a bad day which would seek him out the same way?

No... he can't go down that path. That one hurts too much.

And yet for a short moment he sees it. It was December 15th 2013, a biting cold morning when the team was sent out on an emergency search for a little boy — most likely abducted by a local religious cult in North Wisconsin. He still remembers how that small body felt in his arms when they got to him after two days, barely 8 days old. Grumpy and hungry, yet he volunteered to assist the whole time to the child support before the parents arrived.

At that time he still believed that maybe one day…

"Your hand is injured." A murmur that makes him almost flinch and his eyes follow the small hand with mismatched blue and yellow nails as it reaches for his. His protest died on his lips when the girl reached into the pocket of her jacket where she was hiding the colourful bandages she got from the EMTs when they checked her.

He even tilted his hand closer to her so she could wrap that teddy bear band aid around his scraped finger and the back of his hand.

"Even serious agents can wear these. Or… that's what my aunt told me." She adds as she is focused on the act, the tip of her tongue peeking out softly as she is focused on putting it on correctly on the first try.

That made him smile, genuinely. His hand moved to carefully rub her arm in a soothing gesture when her head came back to his shoulder when the job was done, putting her hand next to his to compare the bandages. "Thanks, bud."

His stomach was twisting over the sight in front of him. An innocent little hand right next to his that…

"Big hands can hold a lot of things. Dad has big hands and he holds my baby sister in them safely." The girl mumbles quietly, just by the sound almost asleep again. "And you held tissues and my glasses in them. That's also a lot of things. Because I don't see without my glasses, and mom says that tissues hold the tears for us when they are too heavy."

He never expected to be this disarmed by one child in less than 3 hours since he met her. But in a way he was back in his childhood house.

He remembered his mother’s breath in the small light above their bed: a paper rustle, a failing lamp, the way her fingers had trembled when she reached for the old poetry book to read him before bed. Just these small things always meant safety for him and he was questioning himself if he became his own mother in that moment.

If his own slowing breathing, from 18 to 14 rhythm, helped her to calm down too, ruffling of the tissues signalling that he was ready to catch any new tears that may come again, milky light from the table lamps next to the sofa they were sitting on. "You think that a Devil would do this?" He asks absentmindedly, almost musing aloud and cringing inwards when he catches that he is searching answers in that small child that was already living through too much in the last few hours.

"Chort." The girl protested quietly as she turned her head to shoot him a disappointed look for his mistake, like scolding him for not remembering the difference she told him.

"Right. Chort… sorry." He smiles as an apology before his fingers fidget with the tissues again.

“Chorts hide lost things,” She answers after a moment. "Like you. But… they also help the heroes find things. And catch the bad people. So… yeah, you are definitely a chort."

It didn't take too long for her to fall asleep after that. He knew that the questioning can wait because sometimes time needs to be bent a bit differently. And if he really was Woland… he would demand time to stop. At least for a few moments so she can get a few more minutes of that dreamless sleep that separated her from the real realm of bad people and nightmares she didn't know about yet.

The door of the room slowly opened and the face of a woman appeared in the small space. Carefully peeking in like she was scared of disturbing the space itself just by one unmeasured movement.

"Ms. Y/N?" He asked quietly as he looked up from the girl that was still soundly asleep against him. She just nodded softly and eyes, so full of so many emotions, fell on the sleeping girl.

"She is okay. She was in shock when we found her but… with all things considered, she should be okay. At least as far as she can be in this moment."

Something twisted in him again when he saw how the weight lifted from the woman's shoulders.

"Auntie?"

"Hey, ladybug." The woman smiled back when she heard the sleepy voice of the slowly waking up girl, her steps silent as she moved closer to the sofa.

"I met a chort." The girl mumbles as she rubs her eyes.

"You did?"

"Yeah, he is a chort." The girl nods as she turns her head to look at him.

"Chort." The woman held his eyes when she said that new word.

"Chort." He echoes back after few beats with a soft nod.

Maybe… maybe sometimes being a devil didn't mean to be evil. And maybe some people saw more shades in others than most.

She was staring at the glowing screen like it has all the answers of the universe and maybe half. Her fingers hovered over the button for a moment before they retreated again.

Incoming call: accept/decline

Small sigh escaped her lips when the display changed again and the call fell into the voicemail with the three other ones. She was starting to collect them like a child might collect bugs in a matchbox.

Remains of something that used to be alive but had now left behind just a hard shell.

Her body jerked to the side when the train came to a screeching halt and her shoulder collided with the other person on her left, and someone stepped on her foot. Or... was it even her foot? Because she was quite sure that she was standing the whole time on one foot... which wasn't even hers at that point.

She hid the phone in her pocket like contraband when the metallic voice - so drained it might have been announcing its own death- right above her head announced the arrival to the next station, and the doors of the train opened with a tired hiss. Her fingers twitched the moment she got out, and they subconsciously moved to her pocket where she had hidden her phone.

Partly praying that some dipshit managed to steal it as she made her way out of the cramped metal box that pretended to be a space of functional public transport.

For her misfortune, the phone was still there. The display was cracked in the right corner, and she sometimes felt how the cracks bite softly into the skin of her thumb when she scrolled up and down. A small screen that was barely hanging there but... better than nothing. The cracks even made the crime scene photos so unrecognizable that they were almost bearable to look at.

But she was starting to be sure that looking at active crime scene photos until they burned into her retina would be more bearable than the notification that was currently glaring back at her.

Spencer Reid - 3 missed calls

"Can I call you later?" was the only thing she managed to force herself to text back.

She didn’t hit send immediately. She let the words linger, like they might rearrange themselves into something less pathetic, less final. But they didn’t. They just sat there, daring her. Her finger tapped the arrow icon to send it anyway.

She couldn’t be this close, not again. He’d seen too much already — seen her crumbling, seen her trembling finger on a trigger. Seen her wreckage. If she stayed near him, she would drag him down into her ruin. He had survived too much already. He didn’t need her added to the tally of things that broke him.

Better she remain a shadow. A warning sign on the edge of his vision.

This is what happens when you lean too far into the dark, Spencer. 

She could bear being a lesson. She couldn’t bear being his undoing.

She shook her head sharply, as though she could rattle the thoughts loose. Her shoes tapped against the concrete platform, a steady rhythm, carrying her out into the stale early morning air.

She was late anyway, and what was another delay? A stop at the gas station wouldn’t kill anyone at this point.

The neon lights buzzed ahead like a cheap halo, making her yet another saint of the 24/7 place that had been closed only twice since it was built at the edge of the town back when the world was still decided by iron and people still cared about the moon and stars.

Once, for old cousin Charlie’s funeral, and once when his cat fell sick after that gluttonous feline feasted on the overweight rat behind the shop.

The last one happened three days before her last case, and she brought the owner activated charcoal to try to get the cat running again.

She never found out if the cat had made it. But she sometimes thought about that brown cat and fat rat.

But all she wanted in that moment was a flimsy paper cup filled with scorched coffee that smelled like methylated spirits - safer to clean windows with than drink - and regret - no place in that plan for the cat or rat.

She wanted something bitter enough to scrape her throat raw, something that cost less than the paper cup but could keep her hands occupied — just something that was similar to a run out motor oil and burned common sense — to drink something that cost less than 3 bucks per cup.

Maybe -if she would felt daring enough to demand more - a chat with a god...

Maybe the cashier would talk to her about the weather.

Or maybe she’d run into the homeless man who lingered by the freezer aisle, who once muttered something about frozen pizza rolls and the end of the world.

She imagined asking him for answers and hearing the same ones god might give her: cryptic, useless, and slightly absurd.

Because she was damn sure that both god and that man would give her the exactly same answers. Word for word.

At least then she wouldn’t have to think about her phone buzzing, or the man whose name still lit up her cracked screen like an unanswered prayer.

But in that moment... she never really found out if the cat lived, and she was starting to think that she might be exactly like it — poisoned by something she couldn’t spit out, waiting to see if she’d make it.

Her phone buzzed again.

Black SUV cruised around the gas station, heading towards the buildings in the distance with a pretentious bureaucratic purpose; fifteen case files per a mile.

And when she managed to finally dig out the phone, the cup almost hit the floor - the liquid inside would have fizzled against the worn down cool tiles on the ground. But she already paid those 3 dollars, and she was not planning to share it with anyone, so her fingers wrapped around the cup tightly.

"Tac, get to the bullpen, ASAP. We have a new card. In the building. - JJ"

Maybe she should have had to pick up that phone at the train station.

The bell over her head rang above her head before any polite chatter about the weather could have started. Before the homeless man noticed her and told her that she was running from something, that the something was living in her like she lost her soul for a broken compass that constantly pointed to one point which wasn't North.

And he would have also asked her if she would pay for his crackers and box of cigarettes. If she had stayed long enough, she would have given him hers. And never would have bought new ones for herself.

The golden paw of the cat was lazily moving up and down, up and down of a rhythm of batteries that were in their last day of being alive. Or maybe it was because of the sticky note plastered right across the little solar panel that kept the cat pushing in the endless circle of greetings and despair.

The screens of the computers flickered to life as fingers danced across the keyboard like any other day, and the same fingers moved to take away the sticky note to free the plastic cat from its own low battery misery. "Oh, you poor thing. I'm sorry, but... heh, as you can see there isn’t much free place left around to..."

The voice died down when her eyes focused on the top centre screen that was announcing a new message from the system which was not supposed to be there.

"Who is trying to prey around this time?" She murmured underneath her breath as she moved on the office chair closer to the table, and nails started to click against the plastic keys with the energy of someone who was ready to pry the secrets of the data open like an oyster.

"Nothing for Python... same for Java?" A puff of breath escaped her lips as she stopped for a short moment, the terminal window glaring right back at her from the left side monitor while her brain jumped around all the ways that thing could have been sealed.

"You know what? Let's try... this."

The clicking of keys halted to a stop when the message flickered on the screen for a short moment. Cards exploded around the whole screen like she had just successfully finished a game of Solitaire, and her mouth hung agape a bit, her hand reaching for her phone blindly. Clicking on the first number she had on a speed dial.

Eyes wide, face glowing with the pale blue light illuminated from the screens on the wall as that thing—this was definitely not the first thing she imagined to see first thing in the morning, before she had time to enjoy that pastry Spencer got her as he lost the bet about the last internet history profile on their last unsub.

She wanted peace, pains au chocolat, and maybe a cute cat video to kick off the day in a more positive way before someone shoved on her screen the next crime scene which would look like it was taken from an over-the-top-budget slasher horror, full of blood and viscera. "Sir... is everyone already in the bullpen? I... I have something you all need to see."

Chair rolled back as she was reaching for her tablet, hastily gathering some papers, and heels were already clicking against the floor while she held the phone against her shoulder haphazardly while she listened to Hotch's words. "No, Sir. It's a new card. We... got a new card." With that, the phone call ended and heels started to click against the floor even quicker.

"Baby girl, what do you mean a new card?" Words spread very quickly around the bullpen.

She didn't even have time to reach the group of agents scattered around the small number of desks at the far corner of the room.

"I got the message this morning. I think the unsub must have got inside the systems unnoticed and leave this here." She answered back as she was already reaching for the photo. Spencer's stomach lurched as he yet again tried to get a hold of her.

He tried to call her twice in the past week as he was out on a case. And she only picked up when he specified he needed to consult something about their current case.

"Can I call you later?" pinged a few moments later when the call went unanswered, and his rubbed his face tiredly. Maybe she will really call later.

Right now, he knew that she was... okay. So, he forced his mind to focus on the display and not the woman that almost trespassed into his place about a week and a half ago.

"There needs to be a body. We never found a card without a body," Morgan murmured as he looked at the display.

"But where? Around Quantico? The state of Virginia? This building? The radius in which we found the bodies previously is big enough to reach the outskirts of D.C. too, and God knows where else if his M.O. completely changed. Because this is no longer a deviation, this is a completely new style of behaviour." They all knew that Prentiss was right.

Everything they knew, everything they had learned about the unsub was falling apart like a.... house of cards. Because of a push that came in a shape of a single photo.

Photo of a Joker with frayed corners, bent in many places, the paper yellow and dirty, with the Joker's face halfway scratched down from the card. And bold wobbly letters scratched on top of it. "You have forgotten something.".

Card they didn't meet till that morning. They all thought that the unsub wouldn’t use it. They dreaded the use of it because the Joker... doesn't have a clear role, a clear purpose.

It can be anything and anyone.

The card itself was a thing, physical, touchable, imaginable.

But the person behind it, the victim, was escaping them.

They couldn't even catch the smoke lines of the person in their minds because there was nothing to hold onto. Because even smoke was at least partly physical.

"Where is Tac? Maybe she will read in this her... unorthodox way?" Garcia added as she looked around the room, noticing that the woman was not part of the group. "I called her. She is busy." Answer that felt like sour milk in the air when Reid answered after a moment. "But... she should be here in approximately 15 minutes. She is visiting the nearby gas station at this time, ritualistic behaviour caused by not tight enough schedule as she is benched for several weeks at this point."

Words were clinical, like he was analysing and profiling a suspect. Not a woman that almost broke into his place and dragged him out of the dark corner of his mind and set him onto that fragile tightrope he had been balancing on since. “Did you two fight over something?” JJ words were careful because she knew him too well. And she already knew the answer to her question before she even said it aloud. No.

"No." His voice was cold, sharp, focused on the problem in front of him so his mind wouldn’t have any chance to linger. "No, we didn't. We didn't speak much throughout the week."

"I will text her." Something in his stomach moved, twisted. It wasn't jealousy.

It was the dread of an answer.

Because it meant that he would be the one out of reach. That she was yet another person who he had let haphazardly in and who had left yet again.

"Garcia, look in the meantime through the lists of reported missing persons in the area around us. We need to cross out as many options as we possibly can." Words that were like a gunshot to scare away the crows in the pumpkin field.

Team divided as they headed to the main case room, preparing a place for a new body and card. But was there even a body?

Because no body meant no crime. Only the card left behind.

Maybe they are already late? Maybe they are not? Maybe for once there is someone waiting for them, hoping to be saved? Or maybe there is no body and this whole thing is a...

"Reid?" Emily’s voice snapped through the fog just as he stood up too fast, nearly toppling the chair behind him.

"I'm going," he said sharply—not to her, but to no one and everyone at once—as if explaining why breath came quicker now when silence had only grown heavier since she stayed silent again.

“It’s not a deviation. It’s escalation. He’s telling us he doesn’t need the body anymore to control the narrative.” Hotch’s voice cut the dry air of the conference room; his shoes made a soft scrape as he walked between the tables. Garcia’s fingers kept a steady tattoo on the keyboard behind him, a nervous white noise that threaded through the silence.

"But what's the point? Because it was never about us, or at least not until this morning. There was a reason the unsub had to pick his victims by something. We didn't manage to crack it completely but we knew that neither police or us were part of it." Rossi leaned forward on the table, his tone blunt enough to sting. The counterargument landed like a slap, reminding them how little solid ground they had left. They’d all seen cases where the killer turned his fixation onto investigators—but this wasn’t that. It didn’t sit cleanly with any typical profile.

"And what if this is the narrative of the whole story? The unsub isn’t saying we missed something in a case. He’s saying we erased someone from it.” Spencer pushed himself up, drifting toward the evidence board. His gaze tracked across the pinned photographs of faces.

Different ages, different backgrounds, different states, different genders. Not a single person was the same. It was like he spun a wheel and let destiny choose.

"Who? Did we miss a body? And he is nice enough to send us the card back to us?" Emily added as she shook her head softly. Her arms folded tight across her chest, jaw locked, eyes shadowed by the exhaustion she carried in her bones. She smoothed her bangs with one hand, the other brushing against her jacket pocket to feel the box inside.

She loved her job, but after everything that happened in the close circle of the past year and half she was starting to get tired. She’d need to fetch a smoke soon. Otherwise, she thought grimly, she might scrawl a resignation on a napkin and stick it to Hotch’s door sooner rather than later. "Joker is the ambivalent card, right? Which means that the possible victim could be still alive or not know that they will become one. An omen." JJ spoke as she sifted through the team’s makeshift deck, flipping over card after card until she confirmed what they all knew—the Joker was still missing since the last month from the deck. She tore a scrap of paper from a notepad, scrawled the symbol in marker, and pressed it into Morgan’s hand.

"Well, it depends what game and how dirty you play?" Morgan shrugged, sliding the paper into place on the board. "Because I don't know how did you play back in your house but we used to play kinda dirty..."

"That's the reason you never want to play with us?" Emily tried to chuckle, but it sounded hollow. Like a half empty barrel of dead fish that gave back only a wobbly wet splash as an answer. And they were the rotting fish in that moment.

"Learned my lesson a long time ago." Morgan’s smile was small, fleeting. Even the attempt at humor couldn’t cut through the stiffness hanging in the room.

"I think there is a narrative behind it all." Spencer spoke again after a long pause. His voice had the clipped intensity it always carried when his mind was circling an idea.

"Those people are connected with something by someone because if we are now part of this whole thing it means that we are part of that story now." He looked at each face as if they might confess a secret under his gaze. "You mean like a narrative kill list? But those cases usually have specific victimology. We have both women, men, social class is different, so are the states they are from. Closed victimology—a coherent selection mechanism. Not this." Emily offered back with a nod towards the board as she leans against the table to look at the opened case files all over the surface. Sigh that left her lips was heavy. "We have... a philanthropist, bus driver, airport worker, doctor, university student and others. That doesn't sound like your big killer plot with storytelling." The array felt random, and that randomness, in itself, felt like a clue that refused to be read.

Silence fell over the conference room as the profilers closed themselves off in their heads as they tried to find at least some sense in the whole situation they had landed in. Clock ticked on the office wall, chairs creaked as they move around, and pages shuffled with every page turned around for one hundredth time. Morgan leaned back and let out a breath as he snapped another file shut. “People you meet every day. The bus driver who gets you where you need to go, the student you pass in the library. The victims are ordinary—too ordinary to be a classic serial killer map.”

"And what if it's not a professor but a student?"

The words made the whole room glance toward Reid, whose eyes were already darting across connections no one else could see.

"Like... the killer is a university student? That would take..."

"No. No, I was thinking more about a situation you can fit the person in. These are all places and people you would meet regularly, I could even try to estimate a plausible geographical profile."

"But that means that we are searching for one person, maybe a small group if we are luck, in a group of..."

"15.12 million students in public universities and approximately 5.89 million in the case of private ones." Of course he knew the exact numbers. He rose from his chair and faced the board again, the glow from the case photos reflecting in his eyes.

"I think that there is a story in it. Murakami with Norwegian wood, Ogawa with The Housekeeper and The Professor, Stoner by Williams. These books aren’t about dramatic lives; they’re about the quiet, everyday people who move the plot along. The victims are the background cast of someone else’s story. They all would be at least barely mentioned in a normal book focused on a day-to-day life of a person. You can't get anywhere without a bus driver, you study with your fellow classmates, if you are gifted you can be reached by a philanthropist to support your studies or research."

He was starting to see the puzzle, the story those people were most likely telling just by existing.

His voice quickened. The puzzle was forming in his mind. “We just need to find the main character of the story. And I don't think it's the unsub.” His eyes flicked to the Joker card JJ made and Morgan had taped onto the board. "He could be annotating the life of someone who mattered to him—the people that main character met over a lifetime when they were still alive.” "You think they are dead?" Rossi asked as he leans forward, studying him closely. "Maybe it's a revenge plot." JJ’s voice came sharp, cutting in before Reid could answer. "That the unsub blames all those people for the death of the... 'main character' of his story." "Stalker whose obsession was taken away from him?" Emily asked, skepticism softening the words. "No, I don't think so..." Hotch's brows are frowned as he turns the ideas Spencer offered in his mind. "I think it can be a case of revenge kill."

"Butterfly effect." Spencer shook his head softly. "There is a general misconception about chaos theory, and partly the butterfly effect, as it was wrongfully popularised by science fiction in the last century and a half. The systems in that model could only be predicted up to a specific point in the future, and beyond that, reducing the error in the initial conditions would not increase the predictability..." Just by the look of his teammates, he knows that he lost them the moment he said aloud word systems. "In shortcut... butterfly effect is not about a deterministic universe. People imagine one wingbeat causing a hurricane, deterministic and dramatic. That’s not accurate. But what if our unsub sees causality differently? I think that our unsub sees the determinism in it, that all those people have blood on their hands because they were part of the system that led to the death. Not random chance, but a chain. A student plagiarized a paper; a professor lost a job; a donor withdrew funding. Those small failures stack. In his mind, each person we see here played a role." For a beat, the math of it—links instead of likenesses—felt like a new lens. Garcia’s tapping slowed; Morgan’s smirk faded into concentration. “We’re not looking for someone who fits all these victims,” Spencer said. “We’re looking for the one who connected them. The hub. The person whose life intersected with all these others. Once we find that, the rest might start to make sense.” The room both accepted and resisted the idea at once: a narrative that wasn’t obvious because it was built from ordinary interactions. The clock ticked, pages shuffled, and someone coughed. “Let's try to run the associations one more time,” Hotch ordered finally. “Cross-reference education, employment, family ties, funding—everything. Garcia, I want any links you can pull, but focus on the broader circles, try to find any possible meeting points. Morgan, canvass the known locations. JJ, check mutual acquaintances deeper than two acquaintances. Reid—map it visually. If he’s leaving a story for us, we need to read it before he writes the next chapter.”

The door opened slowly into the room.

“You’re late.” The words were said with neutral emotion that worked like a wrench in the delicate clockwork of the profiling machine.

Carefully sheltered and boxed in his mind in that specific cabinet with shining neon sign screaming and flashing “Analytics, no place for emotions.”

Her lips twitched, coldly. Her hand moved the almost empty cup to her mouth— like she planned to give the words to the lukewarm liquid which would swallow them before they could reach the group around the table.

“Even Death is late sometimes. So, I would argue, that I have a pass.”

"Someone is pleasant today as a bag of fleas, as I can see." Rossi murmured with a sigh, and she only took off the plastic top from the cup and set it aside on the table where the empty spot was waiting for her.

"Fleabag." She huffed back before she finished the rest of the coffee. "At least... call me by the right definition."

Her eyes fell to the panels filled with photos and cards, and her stomach twisted. Because that card was no longer just burned in her coat pocket but was staring right at her from the safety of the conference room. Place in which she foolishly hoped that was out of the reach of the unsub.

"What is the new card?" Voice even, almost too aloof.

"Joker."

"Body?"

"None. Or at least... not yet."

"... interesting."

"You don't look surprised." His voice distant, hollow with neutrality but one which felt like ice biting into her raw meat and bone, tearing every piece that was still whole.

"I was curious when it would show up. After all... you can't play a proper game without bending the rules. You can't predict everything. Not everyone is playing by the game rules even if you would really like that."

She knew that she was already breaking them. Maybe even more than the unsub that got inside their systems and left behind that Joker. Because she already knew what they forgot about...

"You woke up and chose violence out on a whim?" Morgan's voice cut through the building pressure like when you swat after a hand that tries to reach for the flames of a candle.

Quick, precise, scolding and yet downplaying the pressure.

"You sound like you think that I wanted to wake up." Room now felt like it was covered down with a wet heavy blanket. Too heavy to move away, too heavy to even breathe.

"Everyone, 20 minutes off. Then start to work on your assignments. Doctor Y/N, ..." Hotch for once didn't know whether to send her home — where none of them would know what she may do —, call Strauss and demand answers as to why she was here yet again, or send her to sit in the silent corner and pray that she wouldn't dig her heels even deeper, "you will be assisting Garcia on the data analysis of the breach."

She was already opening her mouth to protest that she was not a data analyst nor an IT expert.

"That's an order."

She shut her mouth with a soft click of teeth meeting.

Fingers wrapped around the metallic coldness of the railing, and her arms slowly crumbled down. Her body slowly hunched forward; she rocked unsteadily on her feet before her forehead softly touched the place between her hands.

She took two shaky breaths as the gusts of wind howled around her and seethed through the thin material of her jacket. Her fingers started to drum a phonaesthetic rhythm, like she was tapping out a silent code to the grey sky hanging above her head.

She shivered at the sourness and coldness of the words that were still hanging in the back of her throat when her mind played her the line on a loop.

"You think that everything can be solved with pink stationery and stickers? Bad news, the real world sucks, and no matter how hard you try, it will always cave in!" She shook her head harshly, and her hand moved to her pocket. Fingers wrapped around the worn-down box, and she slowly pulled it out.

"When this case is done, I'm gone. I have not a single reason to give a single fuck about anything or anyone. So, just... stop. There is no freaking reason to even pretend to care. I'm already a grenade you throw around, waiting to see where it will explode first!"

The top of the paper box was tilted back, and she studied the orange tips for a moment. Fingers of her left hand twitched a bit at the unraveling part of the band-aid stuck to the paper for a moment as her thumb pressed against the side like she wanted to squeeze the whole box in her fist.

"No, just... stop it. Garcia, I don't care, you don't get it?! I don't fucking care! Just look at me! You see this? That's what this job does to you. That's what will be left behind... a rotting bag of flesh and wasted bones they drag out every time they need the useful idiot to clean after the idiots they don't know how to do their fucking job!"

She winced when the bang of the door echoed through her mind and her lips wrapped around the orange tip between her lips and she bit hard. Harder than she needs to. Her hands patted alongside her pockets in search of the other smaller box.

"Need some light?"

She flinched so hard that the other cigarette box fell out of her hand, and a few of the cigarettes rolled to the edge of the rooftop and down to the ground.

"Careful... I wouldn't want to file that report." A pair of hands appeared at her eye level as she bent down to pick up the box, and she moved her hand gingerly to offer the box to the other person.

Only four cigarettes left now.

"Thanks... but I have my..." Her hands moved to the pocket, but a small swear followed right after when the spot was empty. "Okay, I came unprepared."

A small sigh, heavier than it should be over the irritation of forgotten cigarettes, escaped the lips of the other woman.

"It's the least I can do," she murmured back as she offered the box again. Emily hesitated for a short moment, but she accepted after a moment with a soft nod.

The itch was too strong and her head too heavy to not try soothing the thought with a hit of nicotine.

Almost abnormally so today.

She finally dug out of the jacket the smaller matchbox and lit the small wood with the satisfying hiss and smell of burning sulfur. She moved the fire carefully to the end of the cigarette and held it there till the black-haired woman took the first drag. "Bit pretentious, don't you think? I heard that cigars taste better this way, but I’d peg you as someone who’s not into that." Words were a bit choked with the smoke in her lungs before she breathed out deeply.

"It's more about the... act." She murmurs as she blows down the remains of the fire and pushes the burned match back to the box. "Witness of things I burned."

Dark eyes study her for a moment as the cigarette comes back to her lips to take another drag. Held between the second knuckles of her ring and middle finger, lazily bent, wrist loose. "Secret arsonist tendencies?"

She chuckles weakly and shakes her head. "Nah, just a shitty coping mechanism."

Silence wrapped around them like the cold wind that ran along the rooftop, and once in a while it swept their hair from side to side. She was still holding the cigarette between her fingers, still not lit.

"I heard what happened with Garcia."

She cringes inward but she can't stop the shiver running down her back. She hopes that Emily will blame it on the coldness of the air.

Her eyes move to the side, stabbing themselves into the moving black SUV in the distance that just got out of the underground parking lot and was making its way towards the horizon like a quick black bug.

"Listen..." This time the smoke was picked up by the wind, and it whiffed right into her face. "Sorry," the other woman murmured with a sigh as she turned to rest her back against the railing, letting her stare into the distance on her own. "I know that you think right now that you are doing a service to all of us. That biting will keep us away. That hurting us now will save us from being hurt later. But..."

She sighed softly when she heard that cursed "but," although she stayed quiet and let the other woman speak, because she had behaved like a bastard once today; she didn't need to make the score grow even more.

"That's not how this work works. I know that you are the 'oldest' around here. But no matter who is the senior agent here, we all are making the same mistake." Emily's head tills softly as she is trying to catch her eyes at least for a moment even tho she knows that it's useless, at least for now. "Being alone on things can be the worst and most fucked up thing you can ever do with this thing. And trust me... I know what I'm talking about."

SThe sound of shoes moving on the gravel caught her attention, but she didn't turn her head again. She waited; she didn't want to scare her away. "Garcia is the glue that holds this together. She will be angry at you for blowing up at her like that, but... she will also be the first one to let you back in. Spencer... will be worse."

Words that land like a properly measured slap.

Her eyes moved away when she finally met Emily's, but she forced herself to meet her gaze again after a moment. "I don't know how... what else to do."

Emily sighs as she turns her hand to stubbed out the remains of the cigarette against the railing behind her. "Start with staying still. You are already around, and we need to be around you no matter if we want to or not. And try to bite a bit less, if possible. But the second one is just a recommendation."

She smiled weakly over these words, and her hand moved to rub her face slowly. "I'm... not a feral dog," her eyes fell to the cigarette in her hand. "I don't know why I bite like this."

"Trauma." Emily sighed as she got rid of the butt of the cigarette with a flick of her fingers. "Thing that fucks you up before you even know which way is up and down. Trust me... the itch to sign my resignation on a greasy lunch wrapping and slide it underneath Hotch's door is... a strong one."

She finally took her time to look at the woman next to her, and her eyes ran across her tired features. Tired eyes, lines around her mouth that were invisible to most but there for people who... knew. Clothes that fit like a glove, and yet her body was angled like they didn’t quite belong to the person now wearing them.

"How did you..." she started as her eyes moved back to the cigarette in her own hand again.

"Survive?" Prentiss finished for her with a sigh. "Miracle. And knowing that if I make it out in the end, I have six people behind my back who may not ever understand, but they'll be there nonetheless."

She only managed to hum back.

"I got in too young."

Emily's lips twitched with a small, rueful smile. "Yeah, I can think of a person with a similar story."

She hadn’t planned to say anything. Maybe it was the smoke, or the way Prentiss didn’t look at her like she was about to break. Whatever it was, it loosened something.

"It feels... unfair." Words that slipped out before she could really stop them, but she also didn’t take them back. "That Gideon didn't learn after me. After all the things that went wrong with me. He dragged in another one..."

"Yeah, he didn't learn the main lesson, but... he didn't let him fall. Neither did Hotch or later Rossi." A soft nod of recognition. "You will always hold the spot of the 'Beware, this is what can happen to you.' And you also don't need to stay in the shadow of the lecture you became to everyone."

Her jaw stiffened, and her head moved to the side. "Easier said than done."

"I know. Most importantly, if you’re gonna keep trying to face it alone."

She didn't look up when she heard the sound of gravel underneath shoes and the steps that headed toward the entrance to the rooftop.

She looked at her hand for a moment before she slowly pocketed the untouched cigarette. She may have set off a bomb and let the phone ring for too long, but... maybe Emily was right after all.

Lips parted with a soft sigh before she headed back to the staircase too.

Cold air bit her hands; the box felt heavier than it was.

She stepped out of the elevator. Steps quiet and careful, as if she could slip through unnoticed.

It was early. For once, she was here before the others — earlier than even her chronic lateness could explain. It felt almost wrong, like walking into a church in muddy shoes. Like her being here at this hour poisoned the air.

What is that pest doing here?

Shouldn’t she show up late, sour, and bitter like always?

She shook her head quickly, as if she could dislodge the thought, and nudged open the glass door leading into the bullpen.

The space was mostly empty — mercifully — just the hum of computers and faint echo of distant chatter. Everyone was still orbiting the coffee machine or pretending to read emails, just being out of their work spaces as it still wasn't their official work hour, when their presence was demanded.

She slipped behind her desk, chair was pushed from behind the table with her foot, careful not to scrape the chair legs too loudly, and set down the box like it might explode. Every movement was jerky, half-mechanical, half-tremor.

Like one belonging to a scared mouse waiting for the shoe to finally drop.

"Spencer?"

Her mouth felt dry when she said his name aloud as he was passing behind her, a paper cup in hand, heading toward his desk.. "You think that Penelope is already in her office?"

Her eyes were still looking at him as his hands moved to put the cup on his desk and he started to slowly look through the papers on his desk.

She waited to not to interrupt him, but when he took into his hands the third case file and started to look through it something heavy moved through her stomach. Maybe... he just didn't hear her?

She had noticed few times that he could zone out and get stuck in his head when he is analyzing something...

"Spencer, you think–" This time her voice was more careful, like she feels the ice underneath her feet giving out more and more but she knew she needs to keep on moving.

"I heard you the first time."

She took in a small sharp breath and she felt her insides being squeezed like they were held by a burning iron fist that was slowly branding her from the inside out.

"I... I just wanted to gave her a... mug." Box that was laying on her desk, taunting her just with the fact that she went for a search for it yesterday.

Taunting her over the fact that she couldn't hold her emotions in and that she had thrown one of Penelope's mugs against the floor where it erupted into a rain of colorful ceramic shards and splashes of hibiscus tea.

She found out only hours later that one of the shards had managed to cut her shin in a place where her pants had ridden up when she stood up too quickly in that moment.

"I'm not sure that will fix it. Penelope has a tendency to hold grudges longer that people think. And the things you told her yesterday were not... really socially acceptable. No matter the reason which were behind them."

It hit colder than she thought it would. The silence that followed was worse.

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment before she stared at the box again. The mug looked so small inside it. So stupid.

Mug inside was in that typical vintage shape with smaller bottom and bigger top rim and little rainbow hearts all around the white outside of it. Suddenly, she was starting to feel stupid to even harbouring the idea that this mug might at least try to repair for the things she caused.

"I'm... I'm trying."

You don't even know how damn hard it was for me to find that stupid mug. You don't even know how many times I heard myself scream in my own ears those words. How many times I felt that echo of the doors being closed harshly. How detailedly I remember the look in Penelope's eyes... you... you don't know.

"Trying is not enough. Not every time."

He knew that this one was maybe too harsh. But it was difficult for him to clean his mind completely from those intrusive... emotions.

He was angry for Garcia, which was... logical, reasonable.

But he was also angry for himself. For her pulling away and away when he started to slowly let her in. For her running the first moment when he thought that he finally read her for the first time.

She looked at the clock on the wall and her head turned when she heard the clicking of heels against the hard floor of the outside hallway but she deflated the moment when the person who walked around the glass doors was not Garcia.

She blinked a few times. Too quickly for her own comfort and her hands balled into tight fists as she grabbed the edge of her desk. God, she felt so pathetic for even believing that she could...

"Garcia comes to her office around 8:56, depending if she did a morning routine check." The words tore her harshly out of her own mind and her head turned towards his direction with wide eyes.

Something in his chest twisted painfully when her head moved in a shaky nod and she quickly got up from her desk, her hip hitting the edge of it, but the box stayed in her hands with an iron grip, not wavering even a little from the pain that was now most likely pulsing in that area.

He winced inwardly.

He blinked in surprise and his fingers curled around the file tad bit tightly than before when she abruptly turned in the doorway of the bullpen.

Her mouth opened once and then twice before small quiet voice spoke into the silence of the room. "I... I'm--I'm sorry."

Before he could gather his thoughts to react to her words in any organized way she was already gone.

I'm... sorry too.

His hands finally let go of the file before he slowly moved across the bullpen. Towards her desk.

His hands wrapped around the edge of the wooden desk and he pushed softly before the furniture moved with a wooden whine against the floor before it was moved to its originally place it usually stood in.

The cleaning workers must have been vacuuming around on Wednesday, that's why her desk was out of place. That's why she hit herself...

It was all out of a reasonable reason. Nothing else, nothing more.

He just didn't want to fill out an injury report in case she or anyone else would accidentally trip over that out of the way desk and cracked their head open.

He hated to see people in pain.

I... still hate to see... you in pain, Tac.

His fingers carefully wrapped around the small ankylosaur to put it in its normal place on her desk, and with half-sour, half-defeated sigh he headed back to his desk like nothing happened.

Her knuckles hit the wooden door yet again. The hallway was cold as one of the windows at the end of it was cracked open and the wet afternoon air was slowly sneaking in. The building was one of the older ones, but it was definitely well kept.

It was exactly that type that would have been chosen by older couples, people who were searching for calm neighbourhoods to settle in or people who weren't much at home — and didn't need to be scared about a high chance of break-in while they we gone.

She knocked on the door for the third time at that point and she sighed quietly. Her hand slipped to the inside pocket of her coat like she was searching for something, even through she already knew that she had what she was looking for with her.

A good thief never goes out without their tools. Or... in her case the role used to be an agent.

Because there was that unwritten thrill and elegance in the knowledge of how to get into places without needing to cause too much noise.

"Open the door before I will make my way in." It was the first and only warning she would ever give. Because what is the point of negotiating when the other side is pretending that they are not there.

And she liked one more thing about the silent way of things. The other side always thought that she had left. Not that she was currently sliding a hook and picklock into their lock, listening to and feeling the springs moving around and slowly being pushed into place.

It was like a symphony of small movements and little clicks of approval with her every tiny move. Breaking into a lock was like artistry — a magic trick where even the magician doesn't know if it will work out on the first try or not.

But those horns on her shadow were pointing towards the deal she made years ago for those skill — like Faust did, and she was hoping that she will have the devilish luck again.

And a small satisfied smile slowly appeared on her lips when she felt the last click.

She was ready to turn the picklock halfway to the right when she felt the pull of the door away from her hands.

And her eyes only lingered on the little metal tools jammed in the lock before she tilted her head up to meet the annoyed, bloodshot eyes that were staring back at her.

"I could turn you in for attempted breaking in and entering."

She schooled her face into a neutral position as she stood up to her full height and fixed her sleeves like she was dusting them off. "You opened the door on your own. The lock wasn't turned open, yet."

"Because I'm not ready to search for a locksmith at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Do you even know how many locksmiths are around D.C. that would even bother to show up?"

She shrugged softly. "Seven?"

He blinked at her, then sighed through his nose—long-suffering, like a professor whose student just answered "seven" on a history exam when they were asked when the Battle of Little Bighorn happened.

"...Statistically? Closer to three. Four, if we consider that I would be okay with paying extra money for the trip across the whole city for the fourth one. Which is expensive. On average they take from $150-250 per hour in causes of off-hour emergency. But only two are licensed, bonded, and actually respond to emergency calls within two hours."

A pause.

"And their price is estimated by zip code."

"Expensive regret on my side then."

They kept staring at each other for a moment and she was surprised that he didn't close the door right in front of her face.

"Why are you here?"

Why the Devil sent out the woman, and not come for him himself?

"Team sent me."

"Since when are you part of it?" Okay, that one was a low blow. But she didn't give him the satisfaction of any reaction to his words. She was warned about this... bitterness of his from Morgan.

She noticed the way his jaw moved, how his arms were limply hanging at his sides and how they were curling and uncurling slowly in unsteady rhythm. He was ready to push and bite if she would push too much.

But it was a long time ago when she stopped being scared of rattlesnakes.

She took a deep gulp of her coffee like she was swallowing down all her regrets, hopes, dreams, and life expectancy in one go. Of course—if those things could take the shape of several-hours-old cold coffee left on a desk buried under mountains of files, which were definitely not something she was supposed to be digging through.

But Garcia turned a blind eye, and who is gonna ask, anyway?

As long she was off the field, no one could say a single word against her. And Strauss was somewhere in D.C., so even the 'spawn of Bureau' was out of the house. Even though she believed that woman may have sold her soul to know everything, something was telling her that until someone ended up dead or there wouldn't be a leak to the media, she was off the hook — even with Erin Strauss herself.

And she needed that — to be off the hook. Because something was not sitting right with her about the case the team was currently on —because Spencer Reid never slips up and those words he said about the unsub didn’t match what the case file was telling her about the killer.

Disorganised yet the murders deeply plotted.

Her hand moved to rub her eyes for a moment and small curse escaped her lips when she remembered that she had, for once, put on some make-up that was too easy to smear around for her own liking.

She sighed as she looked at the dark spots on her fingers and moved her thumb to wipe it off in repetitive motion.

But she only caused even bigger... mess.

Oh.

Oh no.

She moved the photos and files from side to side as she tried to dig out her phone and she blindly tapped on the display Penelope's number.

"Come on... come on. Pick up." She muffled out as her teeth nibbled on the skin around her thumb. "Garcia! I need you to check something, the current case, not the card one... and I know that I shouldn't be looking into it but I think that the profile is wrong. O-or at least that the team is looking at the whole thing from the wrong point of view." The words tumbled out in a long string, without even a break for breath. She just needed to get to the answers — and she prayed she was wrong about it all.

"O-okay? Smart girl, take a deep breath and repeat me again what you want from me? I think that I lost you..."

"The current unsub, is there anyone in the suspect list who fits at least a semi-narcissistic and high-intellect profile? Someone with a wounded ego, someone whose position points toward higher intellect? Because I think that the unsub is not disorganised. I think that the mess is a spiteful act. Because... because Spencer mentioned in to me, that they thought that the unsub might be disorganised — which is rare with that level of planning."

She could only hear the clicking on the other side of the phone, and she felt the sting of skin being picked too much. She drew blood at that point and she moved to pull out a tissue from her pocket and wrapped the thumb in it. "I think that it's all deliberate. That they know they will cause the mess but they chose to make it purposefully. Because they know what will happen when they do it and they still choose to do it anyway."

"That's... an interesting train of thought. I can see why you were the golden... oh, gosh."

Her stomach lurched and the small wound stings.

"What?"

"Cassie Lynch. Her dissertation was rejected by the committee, she visited the same faculty as one of our victims and... oh, gosh..."

"Garcia?"

"Her research partner later re-did the research properly, it passed the peer review board and got published. It went into the Journal of Behavioral Sciences. Mid-tier, respectable, a little niche, but still — enough to sting. Because it got published at all."

"Do you know why she was rejected?"

A few more clicks from the other side. "Biased research. Methodology unclear and chaotic and... that's weird..."

"What is it?"

"Disciplinary proceedings were started but later dropped. It looks like she argued with the board, said something that she would publish it on her own dime in the end."

"And did she...?"

"Yeah, I can see it right in front of me. She published it in some predatory journal right after she left the university."

Her eyes fall to the white tissue — the red spot slowly started to bleed through the last layer and small circle appeared on the material of the tissue.

"She can't be reasoned with."

He held her gaze a beat too long, then exhaled sharply through his nose—more static than breath. His fingers uncurled slowly, like he was reminding himself not to fight ghosts at his own doorstep.

"Right. Because my team thinks sending the one person who hasn’t even been here more than half a year is… what? Therapeutic? You think this is some experiment in exposure therapy? Well, newsflash, I’m not—" he broke off, mouth twisting, "—I’m not a broken clock you can just… wind back into order."

She blinked slowly and now it was her turn to sigh. "Are you done?"

He leaned his weight back, crossing his arms over his chest once more, like some sort of shield, and let his gaze flick over her with an almost disdainful glance. His eyes were narrowed and his mouth pressed into a tight line.

"Then close that door in my face and crawl back to that pit of yours. Who am I to care? After all, when this case is over I will be gone." She shrugged as her hands moved up. "Because I can break in as many times as I want to, but I can see that you are here to snap at me like a feral dog."

"Then don’t act like you care, Y/N."

He took in a shallow breath and his fists closed and opened again, the one of the hands already reaching for the doorknob.

"You’re not Gideon. You’re not Rossi, nor Hotch. And you are definitely not her."

She did not expect that he would closed that door shut. She underestimated him.

She took a small step to the side and rested her back against the wall right next to his front door. Her fingers were softly picking at the loose threads of the band-aid that were wrapped around her fingers as she slowly slid down to the cold hallway ground. Her eyes stared ahead as she listened to the buzzing of the lights above her head and the weak wind seeping through the old window at the end of the hallway.

She was benched for almost a month at that point. She became a master of waiting at that point. And she was definitely not ready to drop this, not yet.

Because she knew what it did to her.

Hotch's phone buzzed several times as the team was slowly making their way through the storage halls. They had the profile, they had the possible suspect, and they knew that there was a hostage present on the scene.

Spencer was the one who would lead the negotiations, as the unsub was hyperfixated on high intellect and saw herself as superior in many fields of expertise. They needed to stroke her ego enough to try to get the other woman to safety.

But they already hated every second of it when they watched Spencer leave behind the vest and gun. Those situations never meant anything good for them.

This always meant trouble and near-death brushes.

"If we’re careful, we can exploit her narcissism. The ego is always its own weakest point."

The phone buzzed again and Hotch finally managed to redirect it to his earpiece.

"Garcia? What is it?"

"Sir, we have a big problem. Tac and I — she noticed a small detail about the profile. Cassie Lynch is not chaotic, she chooses to be chaotic. She... she can't be reasoned with. We found an old report from the university, after her thesis was declined she threatened the board that she would publish it anyways. She knew that she shouldn't do that and yet she did it."

And Reid was blind with her in that storage cubicle.

Before anyone could say anything or do anything, gunshot rang through the air, and there was no time to ask questions or demand answers.

Shoes hit the ground in quick rhythm as the team swarmed inside the small room, guns and lights ready, pointing at the tragedy that was waiting to happen.

His ears were still ringing from the last gunshot he managed to steer away from himself and from Doctor Grace. He was sure that there was plaster dust in his hair, piled from the ceiling as the bullet bit into it.

His arm burned where the bullet grazed him, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t let it matter.

The same way he couldn't let the fact matter that his breath was shaky and his heartbeat elevated, which was causing the small tremor at the tip of his fingers— like that day in the junkyard when he managed to stop Tac from hitting the target.

And he was hoping he would manage to do it again.

At that time he was the last one who didn't know that sometimes you can't reason with Death.

All he could do was speak calmly, sweet measured lies leaving his lips as he held the eyes of both of the women. One half crazy and lusting for this all, and the other one... scared, hopeful, and trusting.

He had read about Doctor Mary-Beth Grace, a stellar cognitive scientist who even shared a stage with him once in the past at one of his first conferences he took part in. She was the same age as him, had been around MIT at a similar time to him, maybe... no, not maybe... they had met in a few of the classes.

He remembered the short chat they had together over the newest discovery at the time about neurotransmitters.

He remembered her, and if he had had a chance to think about it... maybe he would have let himself be curious if she too remembered him.

But that was a thought he wouldn’t get a chance to ever entertain.

At least not in this timeline.

Maybe in another iteration of the universe, when entropy resets everything, he’d get the chance to ask her. But not in this one.

In this one, his mouth slipped — and Doctor Grace said the words that undid everything, just as he brushed against the edge of her sweater.

"Yes, Spencer is telling the truth. Neurotransmitters are one of the most studied mechanisms in cognition — we already understand almost everything about them."

Hearing "Spencer" nearly broke his focus.

Then: "we already understand almost everything."

His stomach dropped. The air went sharp in his lungs like he already felt the sharp tip of the iron dig into his lungs — he almost tasted the iron and lead in his mouth.

He was the last one blind. But the eyes across from him — wild, certain — told him what the others already knew. There was no doorway left to reason with. Only the wall of Lynch’s will.

This wasn’t chaos born of madness. This was choice. And choice couldn’t be talked down.

He realised it a beat too late.

Right when he noticed the movement in the corner of his eye. When the sickening click echoed, and when the warmth spread around.

He could hear her move outside. Even with the door shut, it was too silent in the hallway. Because the only other real sound was the soft buzzing of his fridge.

He stood there for a moment, his chest moving with a deep, shaky sigh as his fingers were still constricted in their grip around the doorknob.

It took him a lot of energy to let go.

Then, he turned around and walked to his couch once more, the place he was staying in since the moment he came home yesterday and scrubbed himself down from his own skin.

But he didn't sit down, instead, he just leaned against the back as he stared at the front door. His shoulders were stiff and he was staring in the direction of the door. Maybe if he would ignore her hard enough...

Maybe she would give up like others usually did after some time with him. Maybe she would get up and leave through that long hallway and they would see each other again the next week when he pretended that everything was okay again, and she pretended that she didn't see him falling apart along the seams.

Maybe... if he ignored her hard enough... she too would leave.

But she didn't.

"And for your quip... That’s probably why I'm currently sitting on your dirty hallway floor as an unpaid and uninvited guest. Because I'm not them." Her fingers stopped playing with the band-aid, her hands falling into her lap as she spoke to the empty space of the hallway. "And I don't know how to fix this."

She didn't even know if he could hear her at that moment. He most likely had left completely — maybe closed himself in his bedroom and was ready to wait until she gave up. And part of her wanted to walk away and ignore her, let her freeze in the hallway and be done with the entire conversation.

But his mind was screaming at him that if he walked away now—this... whatever it was... it would be over.

The door creaked open again—just a sliver. A beat passed. Then two.

A pair of socked feet appeared in the gap, followed by long limbs and that familiar cardigan hanging off shoulders like it might slip right off.

His lips twitched into a tight frown and he leaned his head against his hand as he leaned it against the doorframe. It was like he was weighing his options. And then he sighed once more, before opening the door wider. "Get inside before I change my mind."

She didn't say a single word as she picked herself up from the hallway floor and slipped through the crack inside. The door closed when she leaned her back against it.

She didn't dare to take even a step further as he was staring at her from his place on the sofa. Like two beings in the dark forest, like it was again the first time they met and were trying to figure out who would attack the other first.

After all... there was something about the Dark Forest theory.

She moved to sit on the floor again, her legs tucked underneath her as she took her camping position in front of the door. A blockade and being close to the escape route at the same time.

His gaze stayed level as they continued to stare each other down, and his eyes narrowed a bit when he noticed the band-aids around her fingers and how she was yet again pulling the threads out of them around the edges.

He crouched down slowly, mirroring her against the back of the sofa, opposite to her, leaving enough space between them to pretend they weren’t sharing the same silence. "It's an anxiety thing, isn't it?"

She didn’t answer.

He exhaled through his nose, quiet this time—almost gentle. "Did you know stress ulcers can form on fingertips from repetitive microtrauma? Especially when someone picks at wounds instead of letting them heal."

He glanced sideways for a moment before accidentally looking back when he hears movement—hazel eyes being caught by those unescapable ones—and for once, there was no smartass edge, no defense in his tone when he spoke again. "I do that too."

"I know." A pause. Recognition. "I noticed. But you... don't usually pull things apart. Don't... draw blood."

His fingers twitched at his side, as if he could feel the phantom pain beneath his skin. He just didn't know what part of him was missing, what part was aching in that moment.

"...I used to," he admitted softly, voice barely above a whisper. "After... the years I’ve been in this. When the nights were longer than they should be." A dry, humorless chuckle. "I learned to redirect it. Reading. Puzzles. Knitting—don’t laugh."

"I don't laugh. Because... I know about that knitting."

He glanced at her, one eyebrow slightly raised.

"You’re not supposed to know that."

She shrugged weakly and her fingers pulled out yet another thread from the band-aid. "I know. But Rossi told me. Thesecond week after we properly started working together. When I pulled apart a mouse pad at my desk."

His eyes flickered to her fingers again, still picking, relentless. "You’re doing it right now," he murmurs. "Not knitting. Not redirecting."

A beat.

"...I have extra needles in the top drawer. And yarn. An ugly green one—reminds me of moldy peas." A ghost of a smile. "Serotonin and legumes again."

He doesn’t move toward her — but offers it anyway, like the words can somewhat steer her away from the real thing why she came.

"Wanna try?"

"Stop... hiding behind those facts." Words that landed like a good measured slap across his whole face, and he was ready to retreat.

Her eyes moved across the room — danced along the dark green walls, the heavy wood, and small decorations carefully chosen from the flea markets and antique shops. Books stacked next to the sofa in hazard piles with several papers sandwiched in between them. Old heater pipes cracked and the fridge turned on once in a while.

And right in the middle of it all was a man... she didn't even know his favourite colour and yet... she knew who he was in that given moment.

She knew that she had only one chance before he would disappear.

Incoming call: Rossi - pick up in emergency only

She changed that name two weeks ago, when for the moment it all slipped from her mind. When she thought she is safe and no one will poke in that whole thing again.

Because after all... it was David Rossi.

She may hate the whole Bureau, but she couldn't bring herself to hate him. He was part of the system but the pain didn’t come from him.  He tried his best those years ago to pull her out of that pain instead.

Garcia told her what happened, and that's why she — for once — picked up the phone right away and didn't wait for the call to fall into voicemail. "I'm listening."

"Bambina, it's bad."

Her stomach swung softly in that uncomfortable way and she leaned against the kitchen counter which had a few dirty plates and mugs around. Dishes would need to wait tonight — like the second day in line.

"Debriefing...?"

"Didn’t really happen. He was like tarpaulin, everything said slid down off him straight to the drain."

She closed her eyes for the moment and her hand moved to rub her eye as she was trying to find the way out of this. "And you want what from me? To pat his back and tell him that shit happens? You know that I am not the right..."

"He knows how to avoid us. You are an unknown equation for him. He will try to get rid of you but he won’t know how to do it logically, efficiently. And he hates that. He hates doing things emotionally. He won’t throw a fit to get rid of you because that's feelings... and that's too messy for him."

She peeled away from the counter and started to pace around the small flat for the moment, her eyes meeting themselves in the mirror opposite the door. Her tired face looked back at her, for once without the Jokers — she had finally got rid of them. They were now tucked in her inside coat pocket, finally out of sight but still held above her heart.

"David, I..."

"You are feeling inadequate to do it. You think you will only make things worse but let me tell you something kid. He is you. And... we failed you. And now I'm foolishly asking you not to let him end up like you."

She didn’t even know when her fingers wrapped around her shoes or how she ended up standing in the hallway, number 23 staring right back at her, hand up to knock against the wood.

“You pulled me out when I froze. So guess what—you don’t get to shut down either. You don’t get to leave me here holding this mess alone.”

"You don't even like me," he shot back, his voice low and bitter. "You're just here... out of pity."

She chuckled softly as she gently rocked in place and stretched her legs in front of her with a sigh, her hands falling into her lap as she continued to tug on the band-aids. "Come on now. You think that this is how pity looks like? Don't play that card on me, Doctor Reid. I know that you are smarter and more in control of yourself than that."

"Don't start with the whole 'I'm a profiler, I see through everyone' act, Doctor Y/N. You're not the only one in this room who knows how people work." He paused for a moment, his voice low and sharp. "I know you're using me to avoid dealing with your own issues."

"You always use my title when you are uncomfortable. Trying to build the professional distance?" She knew she was deflecting the last part but she was not ready to poke into that either.

"Stop it. And ...It's Dr. Reid to you too," he mutters, "A-and for your information, I use titles because they mean something. They're earned."

A beat.

"Unlike nicknames pulled from thin air just to get under someone’s skin." He glances at her—the frayed bandage still between her fingers—and forces himself to look to the side. "So, why-ever you are here for, it doesn't matter. We are not even friends, barely colleagues. You have no obligation to be here as you don't know a single thing about me."

She shut her mouth with a deep breath because this snake was ready to strike. But she won't let him have the last word, not today. "I know how it feels… when the world is just red. When it’s warm on your face, and you don’t even know which way is up. When you think if you blink, you’ll drown in it."

The room went still. The only sound that breaks the silence was the new ice cubes that hit the plastic box in the freezer. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Just stares at her like she’s spoken in a language he thought only lived inside his own skull.

"...You weren't in Michigan," he says softly, voice rough like it's climbing out of something deep. "You weren't with her in that room." He shakily got back up to his feet and started to pace slowly back and forth, like he was scared that the floor might crack under his own weight. "And... and on top of that you’re trying to be my therapist now? You're not exactly the picture of being well-adjusted yourself."

Crack underneath the weight of that one word.

Red.

Because red wasn’t just blood for him—it was the color that flooded his vision when the needle hit, when the gun pressed to his temple, when he screamed into silence no one could hear.

"No…" She chuckles sourly. "No, I'm not. But I'm the… thing. The beetle you can become if you don’t get out of the dark. And trust me, Kafka caught up on those pages only a quarter of the truth."

He stares at her, the list of a fun facts flickering behind his eyes—something about metamorphosis, survival, how beetles shed exoskeletons to grow, how it was possible for trauma survivors to think about themselves in dehumanising ways.

But he swallows it. For once, he lets the fact die on his tongue.

"Get up."

"What?" That sentence completely tugged the rug out from under her feet and she felt herself falling backwards. She suddenly lost the direction of her own movement. He... managed to get her off her course.

"I'm done watching you pull on that thing." He nods weakly to her hands. "You can't even imagine how irritating it is to watch."

Before she could open her mouth again he was already moving to the small kitchen, pulling a med kit out of one of the cupboards and sitting unceremoniously behind the table. It took her a moment to gather her guts to stand up but before she could make a step far enough from the entrance she froze. Her eyes fell to her shoes and then moved back to him.

They were technically new, as she got rid of the old ones when the mud was eaten too deep into the canvas and the shoelaces were ripped. And with an unsure, clumsy movement she toes out of them.

Because one thing was to dig into someone's head, but another was to march around their house with shoes still on.

"Good call," he mutters, already laying out antiseptic wipes and fresh bandages like a field medic preparing for triage. "I have hardwood, not a mud pit."

But there’s no bite in it. Just... Reid being Reid. Awkward system of order wrapped in criticism.

"Sit down." He pats the chair across from him at the small kitchen table, eyes flicking to her hands. "And for God’s sake, stop treating your fingers like crime scene evidence you’re trying to destroy. I read too many studies about impulsive behaviour and the chance of losing a finger or two... to be immune to this."

Her fingers twitched a bit when she felt his hand move alongside her skin, slowly peeling off the half-ripped band-aid and cleaning the skin again.

She could see the spots in his hairline. How he tried to scrub it away and most likely failed.

Her hand moved to the side of his head, a bit above his temple before she could stop herself. He flinched a bit from her touch, stopped with the rewrapping of her ring finger and turned to face her.

"Sorry, I just noticed the..." She looks at her hands, his still holding the antiseptic wipe as he just moments ago ran it along her skin. "Cold water works better than scrubbing. And a bit of olive oil after. It won’t erase it. But it stops your skin from burning like it’s still there."

"And you should start using the plastic band-aid. They don’t fray around the edges. Nothing for you to pull at."

It wasn’t perfect. Nothing was, not in that moment. But somewhere in the back of her mind she thought—maybe, just maybe—she would be the only one who stayed in the beetle’s shape.

"Thank you."

"And you should consider focusing on stress management in your therapy sessions."

"Reid."

"What?"

"It was your turn to thank me."

His lips pressed into a thin line, his nose scrunching. "Right..."

"...So?"

"Thank you, Tac."

"Just returning the favour, Spencer."

"You… you should also work on accepting gratitude. From what I’ve noticed, it isn’t exactly your strength."

And both of their lips twitched, just a bit.

There was really nothing left to say.

No one left to say it to.

Because she never noticed how the bullpen got empty when the team left for a case. Because you never really think about places you leave. You never really think about the emptiness and silence that falls over the rooms filled with sounds and life.

Until you don't stay behind.

Until you haunt the empty places not used to the presence of a living, breathing being, disturbing the long-ongoing ceremony of silence. Places no one should see, places where no one should really be.

It was just her and the room that was supposed to house several people at the same time, and the only thing left behind was their empty desks and shadows burned into the carpet like atomic shadows.

We were there but now we are gone.

The mug clicked against the desk and a sigh escaped her lips as she looked through the case file for the fifth time already. There was nothing that made sense to her mind in that moment.

Numbers and letters were mixing like tomato soup, and she was playing against time to fish out proper words like a small child would.

Well, she at least wasn't searching for words like bugger or butt.

Her eyes were searching for words that carried clinical detachment from the real pain that they held.

"Fracture of vertebrae C2 and fracture of the pterion caused by blunt force. Contusion of the wrists and throat, crushed lingual bone."

he current unsub was a post-mortem strangler. That was clear as day. And she kept asking herself if they already cracked it because she couldn't reach out to them.

Because this wasn't her case.

She shouldn't even be reading the case file that lay on Rossi's desk. But who was there to tell her to drop it? No one was around after all.

"Are you aware of the fact that something like a phone exists and you should pick it up the moment someone calls you more than once?" The sigh over those words was on the edge of her lips but she swallowed it back down, knowing that she should do better.

"I know, I know. I was driving, you don't want me to get a ticket for that, right?" She tries to dance around it but she already knows that the man knows her sorry butt better than she knows it herself.

Always dancing around problems, being aware of them but never really taking care of them.

Well, if she really didn't want to. Or she wasn't interested and curious about them. Or if it wasn't burning right behindher tail.

"Bambina, I know that you may see me as a fossil but even I know that hands-free exists."

Busted.

She scrunches up her face, lips in a thin line which pushes her nose a bit up in a soft scrunch. Her mother always told her that if she made faces it would get stuck like that.

"Old technology is cooler?" She tried with an awkward grin.

This earned her a long sigh from the other man. "You know, I'm questioning myself if I took you out of the Academy because of your skills or just because of the fact that you would be like a four-year-old toddler throwing a fit if we hadn'tchosen you."

She chuckles at that and fixes the strap of her bag. "Eh, I would say that both are correct. I'm self-aware enough to admit that."

"Self-awareness doesn't mean that you solve the problems right away." That leveled, lower voice from the side was like a small metaphorical swat over her head. She almost wanted to reach out and check that spot at the back of her head to see how real it felt. "And you are definitely self-aware agent. But being a functional adult? You have some work to do."

Oh, so today was the day when Gideon wasn't holding back the punches...

"In my defence, I got a badge sooner than I could have legally drunk." She shrugged softly.

"You mean the Boy Scout one? Yeah, I would believe that." She sent a pricking look to Rossi at those words.

She wasn't a Boy Scout. She was a pretentious academic who got swept into the FBI Academy. And she didn't mind a single bit.

"Do I look like Superman to you, to be called a Boy Scout?"

"No, but you should consider matching those shoes. You look like someone who runs a kindergarten for prodigies starting at 14."

She puffs out her cheeks again. "Shame, I had a badge prepared for you. You know, with glitters and all. Now I will keep it."

Where were those times when she was collecting badges and wearing mismatched colourful sneakers?

Everyone was gone. The bullpen only held ghosts of human presence.

But one of them was still flesh and blood. And kinder than this place deserved.

"You could have told me. I would have given you an under-table copy to read." Her hands automatically moved to close the manila folder the moment she heard the voice from the entrance to the bullpen.

There was no anger in it.

At that point she was seriously considering pulling out a play of serious cold and avoiding going to the office until the rest of the team was back, because... Pen was too good.

Too good for the woman she was. Or at least she felt like that.

"This way... feels more ceremonial." She quipped back as she sat behind Rossi's desk, and precisely put the folder back in its original place. Like it was never missing in the first place.

Her eyes turned to look at the woman at the entrance and followed the path from her face to the small pin on her dress.

Stars and a golden fish.

Penelope was doing her best to make her feel at least a bit normal.

"Nice pin," she murmured quietly as she moved to gather her things so she could move across the bullpen with her bag sluggishly hanging over her shoulder.

Like she wasn't a mine that everyone knew about and yet they didn't know how many steps they could take towards it before it was triggered.

"I got it from a woman with a killer taste." The words were already out of her mouth and she saw that scared flinch in Penelope's face the moment she registered that specific word.

That type of a nervous look that flashed on the face of a person who finds the hidden ground mine by stepping on it.

"I heard she got it from a local gas station." She answered quietly back — making sure to purposefully ignore that unfortunate word — as she moved to follow her out. She promised her a lunch; she could survive a lunch.

Like she has been surviving it all through the past few days since the team was called to a case.

Right after she sent that stupid message.

They didn't have time to have that chat, yet.

"Oh, really?" She smiled softly when she saw those eyes go wide with little sparks jumping behind the lenses of those colourful frames. "Which one? I definitely need to visit it if they have things like that around!"

"It's not... that far from here." She swung a bit on her feet, like gathering her thoughts and guts from the metaphorical ground.

Her mouth felt dry again and she felt that typical sting somewhere between the pit of her stomach and the cavity of her chest. Like someone put inside a small concrete elephant.

Or maybe a gnome. Because at this point she believed that her life was twisted enough not to even have an elephant sitting in her chest...

An angry one, with a crooked red hat who hissed at anything and everyone who stepped too close to its likeness.

It was a pest.

"I-I can take you there. After all, there’s not really much to do. Anderson just left with the rest of the group as they were called in to consult some federal case."

She didn't even know why she was doing this. This felt like someone else’s choice. Like someone held the strings attached to her limbs and made her mouth move like that of a puppet.

She... was going those extra miles out to meet with anyone in the middle when – at the same time – she would bedisposed by the system she was currently part of.

But the words had already left her mouth. The puppeteer already made the marionette dance.

You would?" A small gasp that was an indicator that hell had frozen and Earth had stopped spinning. "Oh, oh gosh... I finally found someone who is not ordering takeout every chance they get and doesn’t gravitate to one lunch spot over the years! Truly a woman of my taste."

“Let me guess,” she muttered, not quite a smile, more like a twitch of the mouth. “First one’s Prentiss. Second’s... Reid?”

Penelope lit up like she was just given a secret. “You’re starting to get used to us.” And you are unfortunately getting used to my mess.

Or you're just hard to ignore, she almost said.

“Some things are... too loud,” she offered, watching the doors close in front of them. "to not to notice them.

It was in and out.

Like all the killers and psychos of the States decided to synch their schedules and tried to make their lives more difficult than usual.

No sooner had they put the strangler down than they were pulled back to Quantico and handed a new case file to chew on as they were heading back – before even a ‘good evening, how have you been, nice to see you again.'’

Just shut up and read.

Most of the team was slumped against walls or chairs, their bodies barely willing to stay upright.

"You think they made any headway on the card case?" JJ mumbled, rubbing her face before shoving her phone back in her pocket — she'd just texted Will that she’d only be home long enough to change her go-bag.

Emily snorted. "With our luck? I wouldn’t be surprised if Garcia and the doc cracked it over tea and scones and we’re walking into a raid."

A line of weak hums was proof that no one really had energy to argue against that over-the-fence image.

"Twenty minutes to refresh. Conference room after that." Hotch’s voice cut through the haze. They all groaned.

They were like dead bodies dragged around by the sheer power of... will? Caffeine and bills to pay? Bureaucratic voodoo?

"I'm gonna check PG and Tac if they have something for us." Another line of hums was all that the group managed to muster at the time as they stepped out of the elevator.

They knew that there was still the ghost left behind, haunting the hallways when they were gone. But no one really knew how to speak to it, how to reach it and help it find peace.

And that was the thing that was making the profilers so uncomfortable. Because they knew that things were wrong, they could see them clear as day, but they didn't know how to fix them.

Not yet... at least.

Morgan peeled away toward the left while the rest went right. He didn't bother to make those three steps to turn on the lights.

And maybe, just maybe if he had turned on the lights, she would have noticed them. Like she usually noticed Spencer.

Maybe she would have had time to seal the cracks that were starting to appear more and more with every hour she stared at those whiteboards that were slowly overflowing with new notes, a few theories and mostly new names and photos of people for whom it was too late.

"You know, I don't want to underestimate you but I think that board won’t crack open and reveal its secrets to you, pretty girl." The sound of markers spilling out of the mug and hitting the floor with a plastic click was a clear answer that she was not counting on his presence.

"Woah, hey... not here to murder ya. I’ve seen a lot of that in the past few days. And trust me, I'm not planning to add myself to the statistics, as pretty boy would say." His chuckle was tired, and she looked up at him as she collected all the scattered markers.

"I heard that... there is a lot happening around."

Of course she knew it, Garcia let her snoop around the case files she was preparing for the team before she sent them out every time.

"I know, baby girl told me that you are around her most of the time." Yet again it wasn't anger that was present in his voice and it was confusing the hell out of her.

"I didn't mean to..."

"Snoop around?" That man should trademark that smirk of his. "I know. And I don't take it like that. PG needs someone at her side sometimes when she needs to go through the crime scene photos on her own. So, thanks for that."

She nodded her head weakly and put the markers finally back into the overturned mug. She avoided both his eyes and the boards that stood at her left side.

"And you should also get someone to help you with this one." She opened her mouth to... she was not even sure what she wanted to say. "Na-ah, pump the brakes, doc. You may be in the cooling out corner but you are still just a human — as much of a genius as you might be. The whole team is working on that thing, or we are at least trying to — but as you can see... life, the universe and the bureau have different plans for us. So, if you want to consult something, call someone, text someone before you run yourself to the ground."

Was this the feeling of having an older brother who scolds you like a five years old but with good intentions?

She would most likely never find out but... she would like to imagine it in a similar way.

"I'm fi..." she scrunches her nose and breathes out through her nose. "I know, I can hear it too." Her eyes fell to the board and she followed the blue strings on it for a moment. "I texted someone. But with all the mess happening around..."

"Then do it again. Same person, another person... doesn't matter."

"I don't want to bother. You already have a full plate."

"Look, you can either sit here and rot in silence or pick up the phone. You want back in? Start with the guy who is already involved in this more than in his own life."

The silent ticking of the clock and her fidgeting with a marker were the only sounds that filled the air. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and nodded weakly. "Okay..."

"Good."

Silence again fell on them like a heavy duvet. The kind with the weight that a small child uses to hide from the monsters that are waiting right outside the warm bubble and even though the air is too thick and too warm, they won't risk even the smallest crack to get the fresh air.

Because what if the monster got in?

"How is the team? I... saw that you have a new case already." She finally gathers the guts to let the air in.

"It's... hell. We even joked that this time of the month they all synced up. It has been a long time since this happened last." His arms were crossed over his chest and he was lazily resting his hip against the table like he was trying to use every moment to spend the smallest amount of energy possible.

"Yeah... I do remember one of those. Back... back in my days." She nodded her head weakly. "Good luck. That's all I can offer."

She knew that the words were in a way hollow, but she felt that even the flattest small-talk counted in that moment.

"Thanks, we will need that."

"We should go, Hotch is already in the conference room." They both turned when the door of the room opened and Derek nodded in agreement.

"You." He quickly turned to her before he left the room. "You can bet your pretty butt that I will find out if you called or not, copy that, Taciturn?" And she nodded with a small twitch of her lips.

"Good." Her eyes moved from the leaving man to the other one standing at the doorway.

“When we’re back, we’ll talk. Unless you need to now.” She hated how he used the word 'need' instead of 'want'. Because she didn't want to but she knew she needed to.

The gnome stirred in her chest again, twitching — warning, watching, weighing things she wasn’t ready to name.

“It can wait,” she said. “But thank you.” She knew those eyes had seen right through her. But his lips stayed sealed.

“And... be careful. You should be resting too. After that whole mess, you are... past your youngest years.”

He nodded once, and left.

Her hands felt clammy and her steps were unsure as she paced back and forth through the small studio flat. Once in a while kicking aside some papers that got in her way or any other mess that lay around.

It had been piling up more and more with every passing day.

The clock on the wall ticked with an unforgiving rhythm, taunting her for taking this much time to make that step — which she knew, deep down, that in the end she would need to do. If only she could push it a bit further into the future, stopping it from caving into the present.

Fifteen ticks. Then she tore the clock off the wall and ripped the batteries out like gutting something harmless that was just the carrier of the whole message..

The carrier of it was dead.

She didn't care. The frantic act of ruthlessness was done and she shot the messenger.

Silence was restored.

She looked at the batteries in her hands, the two small cold cylinders rolling back and forth in her palm before lettingthem slide to the table next to her with the rhythmic spin of metal against the wooden desk.

They were almost empty, you would need to change them anyway. You did the service both to you and the owner of this place, since they wouldn't need to throw out the whole clock when the batteries would leak.

Yeah, she was always good in trying to find loopholes in vindicating her on-spot decisions. She just never learned how to live with the consequences.

Her eyes moved back to the display of her phone, where the battery icon stared at her from the top right corner in green.

78%.

That phone would not die, even when she was begging the higher powers to fry up the battery to a crisp.

Small sigh, and her fingers shakily tapped on the glass screen the numbers she previously read on the small card she got. She needed to rewrite it three times as she pressed the number 3 and 7 two more times more than it was really needed.

She never seen the reason why to save any of the numbers of the team. After all she remembered them — mostly without a problem, and she would be gone the moment this case is over. So, why to bother?

Every ring of the phone was a painful reminder of the thing she was currently gonna do. She was hoping that she would hear the double beep instead.

Because that would mean her salvation, at least for tonight.

"Doctor Spencer Reid speaking." Of course he answered. And of course, it was the living voice she was afraid of hearing.

Not the beeps of hanging up.

"Good... good afternoon, Doctor Reid. It's Doctor... Y/N." She paused. Fighting the urge to hang up.

"Tac, it’s almost 11 there. Why are you still up?" That coaxed her back to reality and her eyes landed back on the gutted clock that was now laying on the table. Lean black arms forever frozen in position of ten and nine.

"I'm working on the card case." Was all she managed to say and she cringed inwards softly over the soft sigh that escaped him without him really noticing. "And--and I wanted to ask you about something. I'm still..." It's hard to name the problem aloud, and her fingers moved to the pitch the bridge of her nose. Like it would magically will away the pain slowly gathering behind her eyes. "I'm still running in circles with the latest victim. The two clubs and... well, everything."

“So, it’s about the case.” He chimed in.

But it never was.

She heard him move around, most likely finding some place where he would have peace and space to work on the case with her.

"But only if you have time. I know that you are currently on a case..." She added, willing him silently to push back and end everything before it could even start.

"The case is... a lot. But we still need to keep working that one too. What do you have so far?"

It was all... too formal. Too awkward. Too... much in general. But at the same time it holds.

"So, it is about the possible punishment. That the unsub sees the victim as not innocent enough to let... whatever they did... slide." She mused aloud, tiredly rubbing her eyes as she stared at the notes now laying in front of her.

She sighed softly and her eyes fell for a moment towards the mirror, where her face was staring back at her. Her eyes dull and heavy, mouth in a thin line skin looking almost clammy and lifeless.

Like she was a drowned body dragged out of the water after too long.

And the jokers were yet again mocking her back. She should take them off that stupid mirror frame before they officially drive her nuts more than she already was.

"...Tac?" His voice pulled her back to reality. She forgot that he is still on the line. She hums softly back to let him know that she is still there. Just a small sound to buy herself some time to gather her voice.

"Yeah? Sorry, I... I was thinking about something, did you say anything?" It wasn’t ideal, but her brain was too tired to stitch together anything better.

"I said that you must be tired. It's almost midnight on your end." Few beats of silence. "Call it a day, we won't figure out anything else over the phone like this."

She swallowed down the sandpaper stuck in her throat and nodded, even though he couldn't see her. "I know." Yet, she knew that she would be up till early morning to figure the things out.

And he knew it too.

"Did you know that many studies are pointing towards the fact that chronic sleep deprivation increases amyloid-beta proteins. Alzheimer’s risk goes up... You should sleep."

She almost smiled over those words. "Maybe it would be easier if I didn't remember... But okay, fine..." She sighs again.

Her fingers wrapped around the phone that was laying on the table through their whole chat and brought it back to her. "I will let it rest."

"Good. I'm... glad to hear that."

"But are you aware that you are scolding someone for things that you are doing yourself?" She was almost sure that she heard that small bristle he did over her words.

It was an unusual feeling to have his own words weaponised against him.

He hated it.

"I know."

"Good that you know." His name shone back at her from the screen as her finger moved to bring the phone off the speaker. "Thanks for the help."

She was always bad at ending the phone calls.

"You are welcome. We are working on this together as a unit in the end."

She knew. And yet she felt like he has not obligations towards her in that field.

“You didn't have to answer back.”

“I know.”

"And you don't... have to call back."

"... I know."

She took in a small breath and her hand gripped the edge of the desk she was leaning against. "Good night, ... Reid. And... good luck with the case."

"Thank you, we are... doing our best. And goodnight, Tac."

With that the line went dead.

She put the phone down on the desk and her hand moved to rub her eyes. Her fingers shaking.

"What do you mean another case?" She was holding one paper cup in her hand as she was following the blond woman through the hallways of the sixth floor in a brisk tempo.

Latte, oat milk and a splash of raspberry syrup when she needed to wrap up her nerves into something sweet. She learned over the weeks how the other woman liked her coffee.

"Don't ask me, pretty cheeks." Garcia sighed tiredly as she accepted the cup with a warm smile on her lips before they again fell into a groggy expression. "It's like all the crazy people decided to sync up their calendars. And... the higher-ups are pushing us to catch up with the cases we pushed to the sideline as we were actively chasing the cards."

"Wait, I thought that they were after your backs for not paying enough attention to the cards." She asked back, her eyebrows frowning together in an unsure expression.

She forgot how little the higher-ups cared about the reality and the real capabilities of the field agents. Orders were orders — if it they said run on water you should automatically ask how fast they want it.

"Now the priorities are sitting on a different high chair." The other woman shrugged softly. "And the case went cold, again. So maybe they are thinking that the unsub finished his goal and dropped the whole thing? You know, no more murders and stuff."

She bristled over those words as she matched her steps with the other woman finally. "That's bullshit, Garcia. And you know it."

She didn't even notice that they arrived at the conference room until she looked into the room they were standing in front of and she caught a glimpse of Emily's dark hair. "Can... can I help in any way? I-I know that I'm grounded but this... this is too much for anyone even a little bit sane."

Her words were unsure, she knew that she was tiptoeing on thin ice that was whining underneath her every step already. And yet she was risking it even more.

She was running on her own fumes and yet she was asking for more.

"Girl genius, I would want to say yes so much but... you know that I can't. It's not your case." The other woman sighed as she gently squeezed her shoulder before she moved into the conference room. She would read that case file anyway under the table like she had been doing for the past several weeks.

Her eyes lingered on the room for a moment, her eyes studying the tired faces that were behind the glass door. Rumpled clothes, eye bags deep like the darkest pits of sleepless nights and despair, still healing bruises and scratches from the last case.

Her stomach swung when Rossi looked up and met up her eyes for a moment. She noticed that his arm was finally out of the sling.

Nods of acknowledgment. That's all they could have done for each other in that moment.

But a moment is an undifferentiated point in time and sometimes... one moment is unchangeable but another is reachable.

Her fingers for once moved across the display as they had having purpose. At that point she remembered the phone number like she was still a kid that memorised her mother's phone number in case she got lost during her times outside.

But this wasn't her mother. And she was no longer a... small child. She may have been scared as one — may have been fragile as one — but time had sculptured her into something that was made out of Batavian tears. So strong and yet so explosive when shattered in the right place.

She was, after all, a big girl who could handle a few phone calls.

Those calls always started the same way. They were about cards, about the dead that were now cold as any clues for which way to go. Which way to chase. Late nights. Card notes, voices tired.

They didn't notice that their thoughts slipped for short moments once in a while and they admitted a deliberate thing or two to each other.

How the floor was hauntingly empty as the whole unit was out and it's only her and Garcia staying around.

How he sometimes slipped in some unrelated fun facts and notes that were not connected to the card case.

They never commented on those small slips. They usually pushed them into the dark corners but they didn't try to really hide them, nor stop them. Because it was about the act itself, to speak to someone who is on the line at ungodly hours.

Because she started to call.

And he always answered the phone.

Like those phone calls were their unofficial line to heaven. Ringing the heaven's landline or maybe sending faxes to the unknown, demanding answers from God.

Who never answered.

But instead of Them, they were getting answers from another mortal soul like them instead.

And maybe... just maybe, it was enough.

She bit the dry skin around her index finger as she was listening to the hypnotic ringing of the phone as the operator was connecting the calls. For once she wasn't huddled in her crappy place of staying but on the little balcony that managed to barely host a single wobbly chair that had definitely seen better days and too many cigarette breaks from the previous renters of the place.

What is taking him so long this time?

The line finally connected as her teeth were ready to pull at the dry skin. "Hey, have you looked at the card distribution pattern that I sent you?"

Nothing. Silence.

Not even 'What do you want? Good evening to you too...', just nothing.

"Reid?"

"Y-yeah, yeah.... I'm here." She heard him moving — most likely around the hotel room — and her hand at the same time moved for the paper box in her jacket. There were only four cigarettes left.

"You don't really sound like it." She murmurs as her lips held the cigarette as she searched for the box of matches at the same time. Phone haphazardly pressed between her shoulder and ear, she didn't notice the small sigh from his side.

"You are smoking again." She heard the scolding in it and her lips twitched a bit. The gnome stirred at the same time because it didn't like the possible meaning behind those words.

"Not... yet." She replied back as she brought the lit up match to the tip of the cigarette. She killed it and put it back in the box with the rest of burned down ones. Some rituals needed to be upheld even in times of decay and chaos.

"Did you know that smoking..."

"Benzene, formaldehyde, arsenic, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Just to name a few. I know..." She chimed in as she took a drag. It was almost an act of rebellion.

But for once she didn't know why she was doing it. Against what she was rebelling, what was the cause. What she was... burning and destroying.

"And yet you do it..." She could imagine his face when he said those words. His lips most likely pressed in a thin line, his nose wrinkled, and a disappointed look in his eyes. Something similar to when you blow on a dog's nose. "And about the card distribution pattern..."

He couldn't control the situation, but he could at least run to the patterns and numbers that couldn't betray him like human interaction. Because he knew that no matter he would do, he wouldn't steer her away from the whole... chat at that point.

Just tonight he stared at the phone for 15 seconds longer than usual. Those 15 seconds when he forced himself to pick up. Because his shield was too down to be ready to face her tonight.

"I think the unsub may be disorganized, which is rare for that level of planning." Those words made her stop, cigarette inches from her lips, and her brows frown together. This didn't sit right with her.

And he himself knew this. That misstep was like nails against the chalkboard for him. This shouldn't have happened.

"O-oh. Sorry, right, that’s not your case." And those words cracked open for her what was really happening. He never slipped like this. Never spoke with her about other cases the team was on while she was working on her own. Those worlds were separated, never crossed each other.

He never put any load on her shoulders from those cases. She didn't need to be a profiler to know he was bottling them up in himself.

"Doesn’t mean I’m not listening."

Pause settled between them again and her eyes are focused somewhere in the distance of the late evening city, watching the distant flickering lights and the line of the night drivers that are making their ways through the dark streets like glowing ants. She took another drag from the cigarette.

"Can... could you please stop?"

"Stop what?"

"Smoking. It's... it's distracting. I-I can't focus when I know that you are..."

"Burning the nails into my coffin?" She snorts softly.

"You are currently increasing your chance of getting type 2 diabetes and losing a limb from it. Or teeth, because of the increased risk of oral infections... but that's up to you. I can recite you all the data, and you will most likely ignore them anyway."

She sighed softly, letting the last remains of the smoke out of her lungs and she looked at the unfinished cigarette held between her fingers for a moment. She killed the orange burning coal against the metal railing in front of her. "Done."

"I... I-I didn't expect that you would do it. You--you didn't need to..."

"Nah, it's not because of you. Don't worry about that, it's more about my pettiness over my therapist being right. I just heard her in your voice." In the back of her mind she knew that this was at least partly a lie. That somewhere in one of those deep, deep corners, his worry played a role in her decision.

The silence that fell between them again surprised her. This was... unusual. Almost cliché in the way they were still slipping in the loop of silence and breaking it on repeat. “...You good, Reid?”

“Are you?” He cringed over those words and his hand moved to cover his eyes for a moment as he was slumped at the small table in the hotel room he was assigned.

It was easier for him to deflect than trying to stand up against his emotions. Because emotions weren't facts, and his brain was too tired to try to search for the ratio in them as he usually did.

He was feeling more than thinking at that moment. And he didn't know how to stop it.

“I asked first.” With those words knew that he couldn't escape from this one.

Hell, Tac... why do you need to dig and don't know how to let go. For a woman who hides and runs, you... dig around too much.

His hand moved away from his eyes and landed on the table that was filled with photos of crime scenes, all the notes, empty cups of coffee, and a plastic box with half-eaten noodles.

He hated the taste of warm plastic that clung to the food.

He hated that he wasn't in his kitchen, tiredly cooking some soup that he would have complete control over in terms of ingredients and the container he would put it in.

He missed his favourite soup bowl he got from Garcia. Brown one, with small chemical compounds around the outside of it. Costume-made for his fifth anniversary of being part of the unit.

“You asked if I was good. I'm not. But I’m better with you not being worse.” Her voice was like a slap that brought him back and for a short moment his face showed surprise at it. He tried to school it back to the neutral mask.

Even when he had nothing to hide from anyone. No one was around to see it, nor hear it.

It was just the two of them on the phone line after all.

"The case is tough... it's a lot. In the last few weeks. But we will manage."

She noticed how he yet again deflected. How he hid behind that little 'we'.

She wouldn't call him out, because something was telling her that he too knew how to avoid confrontation if someone pushed him too much.

"Okay. Just... maybe try to eat something. You are already pale and scrawny, Doctor Reid."

"So, you are now interested in my nutrition intake? But to ease your worries, I had dinner. In a plastic take-out box." His voice was flat, maybe too flat — and he knew that she didn't deserve that level of flatness from him. Because he could push her too much away from him.

And from a practical point of view, he wasn’t ready to wiggle his way back to the position they were in now. He was... irrationally scared of losing it.

She deliberately ignored the flatness. Instead, a chill slid down her back over that thought of the box, and said "Blah, I hate that warm plastic taste that wraps around the food."

That made him smile a bit. Like she was bit closer to him, like she peeking at him from behind the wall he had grown used to. "Y-yeah, me... me too."

Like he hadn't pushed her away, and that thought scared him maybe more than he liked.

Not having her close and having her too close at the same time.