Ok. So. Here's my goal. I've wanted to do one of these "A is for..." Alphabety things for a long time, but never bothered with it. Now it's my goal to get one entirely done by the end of the year. I'll try to post one or two letters a day, not in order, and hopefully have the last one complete by December 31st, 2009. Reviews would be loved, and majorly appreciated, and I do take suggestions for letters, and if I have one planned out already, but get a really REALLY good suggestion, I might post that letter twice, with a different story for each. Ok. That's all. Enjoy!

Reid: Morgan! OrangDreams is playing with our lives again!
Morgan: It's ok, she's only borrowing us… right?
Me: … right …

^^^ That pointless little scene up there? Yeah… that means I don't own Criminal Minds… or Spence and Derek.

NOW, Enjoy:

A is for Addiction

Spencer Reid has always had troubles with Addiction.

Reading, although not counted by most, marks for him his first addiction. It gives him a place to escape to, a magical world where nothing can ever harm him, where no one can find him. He can hide in the spaces between the letters, the caves of meaning in between the lines of text. For him, reading is a way to stay the same, to go somewhere else where nothing will change. In this way, his speed-reading is really a curse. He can only hide for so long, things can only stay the same until the back cover of the book is turned. But he never has to stop reading. If he can keep reading, things will always stay the same.

Then comes he coffee. This addiction is not as bad, and is more common than the others. He needed it to stay awake, to begin with, and now it's something he needs to live, to function. The coffee keeps his mind moving, and as long as his mind moves, he can always find other places to hide. Without his mind moving, without his thoughts being processed properly, he is lost, and has trouble finding his way back.

The drugs come next. Dauldid is really a fluke. He would not have become addicted if he had not needed a way to forget. Before Tobias, he had never wanted to forget, only hide. Now, with flashbacks coming at him from every angle and spectrum of light, he doesn't want to forget, he needs to forget. So the drugs come naturally, and they make him ok for a little while, until they start affecting his job. He is irritable, incredibly tired, although he can't sleep for the life of him, and work is just not getting done. It is when he realizes the drugs' impacts on him and his work that he gets help, and gets clean.

Really, his addiction to work is what stops his addiction to Drugs. He needs something stable that he can rest his mind on, and work serves as just that. He feels needed by others to help, and more often than not, he can help dig into the mind of a psychopath, and that makes everything easier on him. He hides in other people's minds, nit picking and prodding at them, because when he's buried deep in someone else's thoughts, he can forget about some of his own.

His most recent addiction is the most powerful, and the one that scares him the most. You see, this addiction is different than all the others. He cannot hide in Derek Morgan. He cannot forget about everything bad in the world with Derek Morgan; quite the contrary, Morgan makes him question everything he had ever known. Had he always been gay? Is there even a line to draw between sexual preferences, and if so, was there a slim grey area between? Had he always had these feelings, or had they been suppressed? Did love really exist? Is this how it felt, or was this simply a mix match of hormones and barriers that have yet to be tested?

Derek made him confused, more than anything, and that was what Spencer hated. He hated not knowing something, being completely oblivious to come scrap of knowledge, some piece of information. But Derek was a whole vast land of this. This brings in the overall addiction to knowledge. Spencer feels that he needs to know everything about Morgan: His favorite food, his favorite movie, what he's scared of, if he remembers his dreams, what his nightmares are about, what it feels like to touch his skin, what makes his smile, what makes him laugh. And this is really what drives Spencer crazy. He does not know all of the answers, and there are some he knows that he can never. But he still wants to learn.

You see, it's all a repeating cycle for Spencer Reid. He needs knowledge, so he reads. He needs to stay awake to Read, so he drinks coffee. He hides in the knowledge and books and caffeine except for when he works. And when he works, he sees Derek Morgan, and he needs to know everything he can about this man of mystery. So he dives headfirst into Morgan, and it all repeats.

Yes, Spencer Reid has always, and always will, have a problem with Addictions.