Author's note: the dialogue belongs to season 8, episode 20, 'Alchemy', the ending belongs to me. You should watch the episode before reading this if you're not a fan of spoilers. Enjoy!
"I think he probably drank tea, you know, give his comment that the tea fields of Ceylon are as true a monument to courage as is the lion of Waterloo."
"Spencer…" she laughed.
"And this is Oxford. Didn't Sir Arthur Conan Doyle go to school at the University of Edinburgh?"
"Are you going to argue with everything I say?" Harmonic notes of laughter decorated her words and made her eyes sparkle in a way he could only imagine over the phone.
"No, of course not," he said through the widest smile.
"Yeah, there is such a thing as too much logic."
Their smiles became more sombre as they gazes mingled and a sudden sound of a music cut across the silence.
Maeve stood up and reached her hand forward invitingly. "Dance with me," she uttered.
Reid stared abstractedly at her hand, then looked up to meet her face. "Why?" he asked simply.
"I want to hold you once before I'm a ghost of a memory."
Another phrase of music played before he could gather himself enough to respond. His hesitant hand reached forward, and a fingertip caressed a fingertip, as if gauging the temperature of water; of blood. He was pulled up from his seat by nothing more than the tips of her fingers. She smiled warmly and they fell into one another's open arms, swaying side to side by the casually romantic song. His right hand stroked up and down her back, his left wrapped smoothly around her thin frame to join it and without conscious thought, she mirrored his movements. The two enveloped themselves tightly in the embrace. Reid buried his head in the crook of her neck, took in the scent of her hair that he could never quite separate from the metallic tang of blood: a ghost from the only time he had smelled her in the flesh. She held on to him with the same desperate longing as old men turned their pages, the coffee whispered its sweet, secret breath and the black curtains fell.
They danced in the darkness song after song.
When the sun rose, it peaked in through the curtains and shed light upon the living room stage where a tired body lay supine on the sofa, limbs haphazardly disarranged, a sad smile stretched across the tear-stained face. A clear vial and a needle sat on the coffee table, perched on the closed cover of a hardback book.