Chapter One: From Our Outside, In

Six moments that shaped him

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He'd read the letter (more like an essay, with the length and complexity) the student had sent him and had been sorely impressed. On his next recruitment circuit of the colleges, he'd made a point to visit Caltech to see the author in person.

He'd expected many things. A brilliant but socially reclusive young man; withdrawn from his peers and immersed in his studies. The student introduced himself as a sophomore. The deep research he'd obviously put into his many queries said otherwise. He would have placed him at a graduate level, at least.

He expected a student with the forwardness to approach a 'famed' profiler with his thoughts, and to present them in such a way that he clearly didn't expect disagreement. He was correct, in all of his statements, and made connections that Gideon himself wouldn't have made in his college years, but it showed a level of confidence that was startling.

They were taught not to assume, but he found himself with a firm assumption held in mind anyway. The student's daemon would be one of the traditionally 'clever' species. A corvid, or perhaps an anole. Something smart and fierce, but small. Solitary. Driven. Ambitious.

He'd expected a younger version of himself.

When he walked into the office he'd been given for his interviews with prospective candidates, he almost walked back out again. A boy sat in the chair, scuffing the carpet idly with his battered shoe, arm draped loosely over the side of the chair for his fingers to trail along the back of a leporid daemon.

The hare turned his head and saw Gideon standing in the doorway and the boy bolted upright, almost tripping in his haste. Wide eyes behind thick glasses stared at him, half-obscuring the kind of face that Gideon would have termed 'pretty' if he was asked to describe it later. "Jason Gideon?" the boy squeaked, before flushing red and appearing to choke on his words.

"Is there something I can help you with?" Gideon had asked politely, resisting the urge to lean back and see if the student he was expecting was sitting outside the office waiting for him.

Because surely this kid, this teenager, couldn't possibly...

"Spencer Reid," the kid's daemon said, standing on his hind legs and staring at Gideon with disarming confidence, a startling juxtaposition to his blushing human. Gideon almost glanced around to see if there was another daemon there, a mouse or sparrow, one that actually belonged to the kid. "We sent you a letter requesting a meeting to discuss our work?"

Which was how Jason Gideon found himself giving the strangest interview of his life, speaking instead to the hare as though the boy was his daemon, silent and watchful. Gideon met his eyes throughout the meeting and found his gaze scrutinizing, clearly taking note of everything that was being said and committing it to memory.

"What do you think?" he had asked Houlihan after the boy and his odd talkative daemon had left.

His hawk shuffled, tilting her beak towards the seat that Spencer Reid had vacated, looking thoughtful. "I think as soon as that kid hits twenty, there's going to be an alphabet bidding war for his services that we'd do well to get a head start on."

Five years later and Gideon looks up to find Spencer Reid, taller and slightly more confident in his own skin, standing in his doorway with a nervous smile. His hare is at his side, holding himself with the same self-assured bearing he'd worn all those years ago and watching Gideon with sharp brown eyes. "You asked to see us?" Reid says quietly.

Gideon settles back in his chair and smiles, their correspondence over the years spread out in front of him. He'd kept a close eye indeed on the now Doctor Spencer Reid. He wasn't the only one. "Yes. Have a seat… we have a job vacancy. How does Behavioural Analysis sound to you?"

A satisfied expression flickers over the younger man's face, and Gideon once again reconsiders his opinion.

Perhaps he is like him after all.

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The nightmare begins with three simple words and they burn themselves into Garcia's mind. If this is what it's like to have an eidetic memory, Reid can keep it.

Morgan's voice, usually so calm and focused, except as he said those words. "Hankel has Reid."

It was everything that kept her awake at night. Six of her family walking out that door, and only five returning. Garcia can't think for the fear of that moment.

Then she gets over it and gets to work. Reid needs her to get to work. He needs her to be brilliant, more brilliant than ever before, because she's going to bring him home and never let him go again.

The first video is horrific. She wants to pull Reid close and hold him tight until that numb, shell-shocked expression leaves his face, because he's their baby and he shouldn't ever look like that, not ever.

Gideon says something behind her and for a long irrational moment she wants to turn and slap him. To strike out at him because she needs to blame someone for this, and why not the guy who'd thought it would be a good idea to bring the sweetest and most harmless man in the world into the field?

Then Hotch leans closer to the screen and speaks in a low voice only she can hear, and his words shatter every last bit of anger she feels and leave her hollow.

"Come back to me," he says, and suddenly it all makes horrifying sense. Aureilo and Hal's closeness, the way Hotch sometimes softens slightly when Reid smiles, the desperation in Hal's voice when she told them to find him. Oh, Hotch. "Please come back to me."

Not like this. They can't lose him like this. Either of them.

But they do.

The hare buckles in Hal's paws and Garcia is standing, torn between reaching out for someone and crumpling to the floor as it sways under her feet. Everything slows except for Reid falling to the ground on the screen, and Aureilo being dragged after him.

"He's killing him," someone sobs in a broken voice, and she distantly recognises herself. Tupelo's claws are cutting into her shoulder, the magpie adding to her cries with his own panicked warbling.

Hotch steps forward and he looks calm. Garcia clings to that.

She pictures Reid and she pictures Hotch and all their daemons and her team and her family and she draws a circle around them in her mind that will keep them safe. Keep them safe because it's her love and everything she has, and it can't fail.

Then Reid goes still and Hotch breaks and her circles shatter. Garcia is never going to have to imagine what their victims' families go through anymore, because she sees it in that moment on Hotch's face and she's never going to forget it.

He staggers as though pole-axed, turning away from the screen, towards Aureilo.

The hare is still there.

They watch in silence as he buckles and scoops Spencer's daemon up in shaking hands.

Move, baby, Garcia pleads, as Hotch stares at the hare like they're the only creatures left in the room. As though he's memorizing him. Get up, Spencer. Please, please, we'll do anything, anything at all, just please get up we can't do this without you… We love you we love you so much you don't even know and if you don't come home we can't ever tell you.

Aureilo says something she doesn't catch because everything has turned muffled and distant through the sound of her wordless pleading.

Then he's gone. The air glitters. She watches the Dust cascade from Hotch's slack fingers and pool around his feet.

It doesn't make sense because she loves Spencer too much for him to possibly be dead. The amount she loves him, they amount they all love him, he should have had forever.

Garcia could learn to hate the colour gold.

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When he'd first met Hotshot, Rossi had instantly pegged him as the kind of man who would push away anyone who came too close. Everything from the disturbingly blank expression he could effortlessly slip on like a mask, to the bristling fur of his obnoxiously large wolf daemon screamed, "Commitment issues."

And if there was one thing David Rossi understood, it was commitment issues.

He hadn't really expected him to last. But he did.

He hadn't expected to go back to the BAU after retiring. But old cases picked at his mind and left him restless, pacing his house with the clawing knowledge of work left undone. And he went back.

He hadn't ever expected Hotshot to fall in love.

But one look at the expression on Aaron Hotchner's face when they walk into the squad-room and the tall stranger stands to greet them, and Rossi realizes that since he'd met Hotch, he'd spent an awful lot of time being wrong.

The man's daemon says something but Rossi is staring at Hotch's face so the only thing he takes in is the stupid, soppy smile that his old friend is wearing.

Hotch turns his head slightly and spots him, and the smile vanishes like it was never there at all, but Rossi can still see the ghost of it in his eyes and the corner of his mouth.

He doesn't think he's ever smiled like that before and damnit, he is not jealous of Aaron fucking Hotchner, thank you very much.

"So this is Doctor Reid," his traitorous mouth says even though his head is screaming, really, Hotch? This guy? I've written books bigger than him! "He's very…" He reaches for the word. Scrawny. Gawky. Pretty. Male. "Young."

"He's brilliant," Hotch snaps, and Rossi sees it again.

Hotch is in love.

He bets the man hasn't even realized it himself yet.

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There's something brittle about the man and his hare sitting in their kitchen with their shoulders slumped, lost in their own heads as usual. Morgan hesitates, glancing back into the living room where their teammates chatter, before slowly walking over there. The soft pad of Naemaria's paws follows him, almost inaudible, but he knows she's there as definitely as he knows his own reflection. She's a constant.

Reid's a constant too, his too-smart-for-his-own-good friend and his mouthy hare. He's a constant whether he's throwing himself head first into a case with all the passion for knowledge and investigation that led him through a fistful of degrees, or whether he's pensively tracing the tip of his nail around the rim of his glass and pulling all the weight of the world down onto himself.

Emily had once declared that when given space Reid has a tendency to drown in it, and as Morgan draws closer and notes the distance between the morose profiler and his husband in the other room with his back to them, he's inclined to believe her.

"Pretty Boy," Morgan says, slapping him on the shoulder and sliding onto the stool next to him with one smooth movement. It's not a nickname that really fits anymore. He hasn't been a boy in a long time.

He is still very pretty though.

"Morgan." Reid says it flat, deadpan, no attempt to hide his misery. He doesn't so much anymore. He used to, when he was younger and frailer and with so much less to lose. Now with a family?

Yeah well, Morgan's damn glad the kid has finally learned to value something other than others. If it means he wears his vest more often and doesn't take as many stupid risks… yeah, he's damn glad.

"Right, spill." Morgan nabs the glass out from under Reid's hands and drains it, clinking it back down and smirking at the disconcerted expression on the other man's face. "You look like you did that time Aureilo fell down the storm drain chasing a perp."

There's an irritated huff from under Reid's stool. Judging from the way Reid's mouth twitches upwards, the hare is the only one who doesn't find that recollection amusing.

It's the work of a moment to pour two fresh drinks, and they sit in silence. It's not an awkward kind of silence. It's a heavy kind of waiting silence, a sad silence, and Morgan feels his shoulders tensing because it's the kind of silence that precedes a 'I'm not okay' confession.

"Charlie is," Reid begins, and the alcohol burns as Morgan's mouth immediately dries, "Struggling."

"Struggling?" he queries, because Charlie is two and her father all over, and that comes with a whole host of positives and negatives, and some of those negatives can't be fixed simply with the addition of a doting family. "With what?"

He casts over his mind for the last time he'd seen the reserved kid. There was a half-remembered idea of a sticky hand sneaking onto Reid's plate while his back was turned last Christmas at Rossi's, taking the last cracker Reid had resting there. A quick flash of two faces peering down the stairs when Morgan had picked Reid up for work one day after his car had broken down and Hotch was caught up. Both times, the kid looked happy enough.

But Morgan knew better than anyone that outward appearances could be deceiving.

There's an angry yowl from the backdoor that cuts off their conversation, and Henry flies through the door with Filimay on his shoulder, pelting for his mom. Jack follows seconds later, not even seeing them in his haste to profess his innocence for whatever he'd just done. Morgan chuckles, then stops as the door sways and Charlie toddles through after her brother, mouth open in a gappy smile and eyes scanning her surroundings keenly. Her daemon is on her shoulder, a green scaled lizard with a flickering tongue, and unlike her brother, Charlie sees her Papa instantly.

"Hey kiddo," Morgan says, glancing at Reid for permission before sliding down onto his knees and smiling at the kid. Reid is silent. "What are you up to, huh? Playing with the boys?"

Charlie looks at him, then looks away. She doesn't answer, but he's used to that. Kid is shy.

When he leans forward and tickles her chin to bring her eyes up, they settle on a point to the left of his face and her mouth scrunches up angrily at the intrusion.

Oh.

"Spencer…" he says, crossing his legs and sitting flat on his ass on the cold tiles. "Have you…?"

"Aaron wants to," Reid replies stiffly. "But…" He trails off, then calls softly to his daughter. "Charlie, love. Come here."

She ignores him, turning her attention to the lizard on her shoulder and giggling softly as it races around the line of her throat eagerly. Reid raps on the counter with his knuckles, calls again. Her attention snaps to him.

"Papa," she says solemnly, then wobbles her way over to him, still unsteady on her feet. "Up, please."

Morgan watches as his best friend and brother scoops up his daughter and cuddles her close, grimy hands wrapping around his neck as she burrows her face against his chest. Reid's looking over her head, down at Morgan himself, and his expression is miserable.

Sometimes their fears aren't so easily faced.

"She's reached every verbal milestone and surpassed many of them," Reid says finally, ignoring Charlie when she wriggles to be let down and tugging her closer, clinging almost. "Any repetitive behaviours she shows are mild, nothing disruptive… she's developing fine. She's fine. It's just the… she's not responsive, sometimes. Just sometimes. Not all the time."

Morgan stands and his knees creak in complaint. "Spence," he cuts him off, stepped over and running his hand across Charlie's curly hair. "There's nothing wrong with her. No matter what the doctors say when you take her to see them… this isn't your failing, or hers, or Hotch's. She's still fantastic, and nothing will change that. I promise you."

Reid lets her down slowly and she scampers away, her papa's arms already forgotten. He watches her go, and Aureilo watches him, and Morgan watches the both and waits to see where they take this. They're too smart not to face it head on, he knows.

"Thanks," Reid says, standing and hesitantly brushing his hand against Morgan's arm. Morgan rolls his eyes, wraps his own arm around his friend's shoulders, and drags him protesting into a one-armed hug. "Morgan… mppfh!"

When they walk back into the living room, Hotch has Charlie on his knee and he's bouncing her while simultaneously discussing politics with Will. Reid walks over and settles his hand onto his husband's shoulder, smiling uncertainly. He says something Morgan doesn't catch, but Hotch does.

Hotch nods once, his own mouth turning upwards, and the tension in Morgan's shoulders leeches away, just a little.

Yeah. They'll be fine.

He's sure of it.

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There are many reasons why Emily knows that people mutter behind their hands about her skills as a mother.

No father, you know. How can she expect to raise her girl by herself when she works so much?

Puts her job first.

Lets the girl run wild, no boundaries.

Yeah, she knows. She knows that the old bitch up the hall thinks she's loose, and that the man downstairs hates that woman and to spite her always saves sweets from his shop just for Margo. She knows her mother scolds and worries—god does she know—and she sometimes wonders herself if this is the life she'd have picked for her kid.

But Margo seems fine. She's Emily all over, although there's a softness to her that Emily knows comes more from her dad than Emily herself. She's grateful for many things that Mark's given her, and one of those is the gentleness that Margo personifies, so much like JJ, and something that Emily knows she's far too rough to have ever passed on.

But this? This is probably going to get her on the shitlist with every busybody on the street who thinks they're entitled to an opinion. Also with Mark.

Especially with Mark.

She tells him. How can she not? She doesn't ask him, because Spencer is her friend and he needs her help, and he's the last thing in the world from dangerous. She won't leave him in the rehab clinic Hotch had him tucked away in, out of sight out of mind.

She's fucking pissed at Aaron, and maybe that's partly why she brings the recovering addict into her home with her five-year-old daughter. A silent if I trust him with my child, why won't you trust him with yours? With his?

She takes Margo to the park to see Mark, and leaves Reid slinking around her house like the Ghost of Spencers Past. He's not the same as he was and that hurts so much sometimes she lays awake at night and focuses on the point of her wall where she knows he is, just wishing she could fix everything for him.

"Emily," Mark greets her, brushing his lips against her cheek, before crouching to draw Margo into his arms. Their daemons mingle, Qaises snuffling as he runs his narrow muzzle over Vetiver's wriggling puppy body. Sergio keeps back, wrapped around Emily's neck and watching the two canids carefully, the greyhound and the retriever puppy. Tivvy hasn't shown any inclination towards feline forms, and he's still sore about that. "How are you, my love?"

He's talking to Margo now, who babbles back happily, tugging him towards the swings, and Emily trails behind.

"Will you tell him?" Sergio asks, right as Margo's voice floats over to them from the swings happily declaring, "Mummy has a boyfriend!"

Oh boy.

"I think Margo just did," she replies, watching Mark's face flicker. She wonders, in that moment, if he still loves her. And for that moment, she wonders if she ever loved him.

She tells him everything, while they sit on a park bench under a rare London sun, and Margo chases Tivvy around the park, climbing trees and getting her knees dirty. Every time she turns to check on her parents, Emily has to bite back a thrill of pride. This is my daughter, she thinks every time. With the childhood I didn't get.

Which was the biggest fuck you to the busybodies and her mother she could possibly imagine, and Sergio purrs happily.

Mark says very little, but he walks them home and that's concerning. That smacks a little bit of 'checking up on you' and Emily Prentiss has never been one to need checking up on, and she doesn't like the implication that she'd start now with a daughter to think of. It's getting her back up, and she knows she's getting cranky and stubborn and it's only a short jump from that to her and Mark fighting again in full view of the neighbours, or Reid.

"Spence," she says, when Mark follows her into their flat without a word and they find her houseguest standing waiting for them in the kitchen. Dressed, thankfully, although he needs a shave and there's an emptiness to his eyes that sinks ice into her gut. Aureilo is nowhere to be seen. "This is Mark. Margo's dad. Mark, this is Spencer."

"Pleasure to meet you," Reid murmurs, and actually holds his hand out to shake. Emily stares. It looks… wrong, and her heart lurches at this minute difference. "Margo is delightful. She talks about you a lot."

"'Pence, play chess?" Margo demands, storming into the room with one pigtail coming lose and mud on her nose. There's a battered chess set in her hand that isn't theirs, and Emily has a sudden horrible feeling that the well-loved and worn pieces in her daughter's clumsy hands are Reid's, salvaged from the wreck of his mother's belongings.

"Of course," Reid replies quietly, nodding at them both, and sitting cross-legged by the couch so Margo can thrust the chessboard under his nose. Aureilo appears, shambling after Margo, and lays flat against his leg, watching the game. "White plays first, Margo. See the pawn? These little ones? They can move like this…"

Mark excuses himself and Emily sees him out. The silence between them is fraught with everything unsaid.

"He's no danger," she says finally, setting her jaw in a stubborn line. "He's depressed and ill, but he's not dangerous to her or me. And he's… my friend. I love him, Mark. I won't leave him to suffer alone."

He glances at her, the green eyes that had drawn her in the first time she'd seen him vivid against his brown skin. The beautiful eyes and complexion that Margo had inherited, and only added to the busybodies' muttering. "I can tell you love him," he said finally, mouth twisting into the smile that still set her heart thumping. They hadn't worked as a couple, but they were still a partnership. Margo tied them together. That was a kind of family too. "It's fine, Emily. I won't tell you what to do with your life, and I know you'd never endanger her. Where is his family?"

Emily thinks about that for a moment and tries not to let the complications of that question show on her face when she answers.

"They're waiting for him to come home."

She hopes.

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He reads the unsigned letter (more like an essay, he thinks, and that's familiar enough to stun him into giving it the time of day) she'd sent him, and is reluctantly impressed. But his life is simple now, no time for the world that had almost destroyed him, and he's inclined to put it down and move on. It's not the only fan mail he's gotten over the years. It probably won't be the last, when he bothers to stay still long enough to have a postal address.

But this one.

This one catches his eye. He doesn't respond. It's a simple letter, despite the length, and intriguingly in depth. She asks about his theories. She asks about his work. She introduces herself as fourteen, and he has trouble believing that, but he can't see why she would lie. It has a DC postal code, and that's enough to stop him from replying. He puts it aside.

She sends him another a year later. He still doesn't reply. In fact, he doesn't read it.

When he does, finally, because he goes to his cabin only two months later and there's another two with the same postcode, there's a kind of reservation to it. This time he absolutely believes that she's fifteen, because there's a painful emotion to the letter that speaks of things withheld.

The second he opens is much the same, but this time it ends with a query about his whereabouts. 'Will you be in DC anytime within the next five years?' it asks. I would love to discuss your theories with you.

He puts it aside and opens the third. This one is short.

Thank you for your time. Please disregard my last letters.

He feels almost bad. Houlihan shuffles around his desk, talons tapping on his writing paper, and he can hear the silent reply to her, you old bastard his daemon isn't saying.

He doesn't. He's in the habit of letting people down, and this nameless girl with her letters and her quiet queries is only another in the line of them.

When he gets another letter, it's two years later and she's seventeen. He doesn't immediately realize it's her because the postage is from London now and the writing has changed enough she's not immediately recognisable. But something about it wakes up the old profiler in him, and he finds her old letters (he'd kept them because he'd always been sentimental, always, and even this stranger felt precious to him now), dusts them off, and compares them.

It's her.

There's a focus to her letters that wasn't there before. She'd queried his theories, questioned his motivations, brought up past mistakes before—never cruelly, always with a point—but now there's an angle to her writing. She's looking for something, some guidance, something to direct her towards a decision she's already made.

"Jason…" says Houlihan, reading over his shoulder. "She writes like…"

He shuts his daemon up before she can say it, but they're both thinking it. It's a leap though.

It's a leap that finally inspires his reply.

When you return to DC, it would be my pleasure to answer your questions in person.

When she's nineteen, he meets her.

He hadn't expected anything, really. A young man many years ago had taught him the error of assuming, and this time he was ready. But maybe a part of him, a small, needy part, was assuming. Maybe that small part wanted him to be correct, because that would mean that the man Gideon had failed all those years ago hadn't been hurt so much by that damage that he'd never recovered.

He wonders if her daemon will be a hare as well.

He wonders who her mother is.

He wonders if he'll be there.

She agrees to meet him at a café in DC, and when he walks into the café he knows her immediately. She's tall and thin and her hair is wild and cropped short to try to keep it from her eyes. When she looks up, her glasses slip awkwardly down her nose and she shoves them up with a practised gesture that's so him it takes his breath away.

He'd call her pretty, but her father's hidden strength stares out at him from her eyes and there's an anger in them too that he deserves.

"Jason Gideon?" she asks, her voice soft and cautious, and her daemons uncurls from the seat next to her and eyes them both. An African Serval. Solitary. Ambitious. Driven. She's open about that strength her father hides. "My name is Charlie Reid. You knew my father."

Knew.

He closes his eyes and savours that grief.

Then he sits and answers every question she asks him, because he owes the boy he'd met and the man he'd abandoned that much.

Every question.

"Why didn't you ever come back?"

Even that one.

"I was running. I'll always regret that. I was running and I didn't know to stop until there was nothing left to stop for."

There's a satisfied flicker across her face, like he's answered some great mystery she'd inherited from her father along with his eyes and his intelligence. Gideon cements his opinion of her.

She's nothing like him at all. She's too much like Spencer Reid to ever remind Gideon of himself.

And she's going to be every bit as impressive as her father was.

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AN: Several events that are referenced in this chapter haven't yet taken place if you're direct from Reprise. They'll be covered in Encore, or later in Peroration (including Charlie's birth, Reid's relapse)

For more information, Chapter Sixteen is a complete timeline that I'll update as I go along in this world!

And a MASSIVE THANK YOU to my beta, Tafferling, for all her work with this piece!