Disclaimer: Criminal Minds is not mine. The poem quoted is Your Catfish Friend by Richard Brautigan. There really was a Star Trek episode like the one Reid describes.
Wrote this almost three years ago, so Reid was a bit of a younger character. Nothing really sets this earlier in the series, but it was an earlier Reid that inspired me to write this. Posting this is part of a posting frenzy. I'm uploading all the stuff that's been chillin' on my harddrive collecting dust.
Aquiel
He sits on the edge of the bed and feels her waking behind him.
"You have to leave," he tells her.
"Why?"
"Because you're not real."
"If the pattern continues," Hotch was saying, "her body should turn up within the next seventy-two hours."
A picture of the latest victim appeared, smiling, onscreen, and J.J. voiced what everyone else was thinking: "pretty girl."
Reid tapped his pencil and stared at the projection.
He sits on the edge of the bed and presses his bare heels against the metal frame.
"You have to leave," he tells her.
"Why?"
"Because you're not real."
"That's not a fair answer," she argues, pushing the blankets away from herself and settling down next to him. "You've never cared before."
"Please," he whispers. "I don't want to be crazy."
She was found with a poem crumpled in her pocket that they analyzed and re-analyzed before deciding that it had nothing to do with her death.
"We've got the information we need on her," Hotch was saying, without understanding, and to tell the truth Reid didn't exactly understand it himself.
"I have… a hunch," he offered lamely, his eyes on the laptop in front of him. With a sigh from his superior, he received consent. Victimology, he said to himself, and thought of her fingers touching the same keys that he was now.
If I were to live my life/ in catfish forms/ in scaffolds of skin and whiskers/ at the bottom of a pond/ and you were to come by/ one evening/ when the moon was shining
down into my dark home/ and stand there at the edge/ of my affection…
"Why do you call me 'Aquiel'?" She asked one day. "You know that wasn't my name, and you haven't changed anything else about me."
Reid smiled, cocked his head, and said, "As a figment and therefore an extension of my own mind, you know whatever I know and therefore you know the answer."
Aquiel laughed. "Yeah, but I felt like asking."
He sits on the edge of the bed and thinks about her lying near him.
"You have to leave," he tells her.
Her voice is quiet and curious and everything he wants it to be: "why?"
"Because," he sighs. "You're not real."
"That's not a fair answer. You've never cared before."
"Please. I don't want to be crazy."
"It's not crazy if you can still tell the difference, right?"
He shakes his head. "But I'm starting to forget."
"There's an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation," Reid said slowly, choosing his words with care and ignoring Garcia's bemused expression. "Worf and some of the other officers are investigating the disappearance and possible murder of a young crewmember named Aquiel. And Geordi LaForge… is employing victimology… and in studying her life he sort of─"
(Garcia's face was cold sober now, because she knew what was coming.)
"─falls in love with her."
"And think, 'It's beautiful/ here by this pond. I wish/ somebody loved me,'/ I'd love you and be your catfish/ friend and drive such lonely/ thoughts from your mind/ and suddenly you would be/ at peace…"
Things got hard and he was crying─ bawling, more accurately─ with his face pressed into his pillow and his lungs screaming for oxygen while his brain screamed for control. Distantly he felt the mattress dip as she climbed in beside him and laid down, her stomach to his back, and pulled him close.
As an extension of his own mind, she never had to ask what was wrong.
"Please," he whimpers, begging her to listen. "I don't want to be crazy."
"It's not crazy if you can still tell the difference. Right?"
"But I'm starting to… forget." He shakes his head. "Please."
"When I was young," Reid began, half-smiling, lying spread-eagled on the floor of his apartment with Aquiel at his side. "I had a friend. She was a little girl, always my age, and she would come along with me everywhere─ school, church, out. And when my parents would fight, or my mom would get really bad, or school would really suck"─ he laughed─ "she'd sit next to me and squeeze my hand."
Aquiel took his hand in both of hers, lightly, and ran her fingers across his palm. "And here I thought I was special," she teased, smiling, and Reid pushed himself up on one arm.
"You are," he promised, and she squeezed.
"Please. I don't want you here," he tells her, and when she's gone he pushes his palms against his eyes and his teeth clench.
"And ask yourself, 'I wonder/ if there are any catfish/ in this pond? It seems like/ a perfect place for them.'"
And when she's gone he pushes his palms against his eyes for a moment before reaching instinctively at his side for a hand to hold, and there isn't one there.