Authors Note: This story takes place in the Criminal Minds universe with the occasional crossover into the Bones universe. As such, I only own my own original characters and everything else belongs to the writers and networks, blah, blah, blah.

Hope you enjoy.

P.S.: I am dyslexic. Any grammatical error is caused by such dyslexia, and after so many years of failing grammar, I could give less of a shit about how you feel about it or what I did wrong. If you want to correct my facts or translations, I welcome it. If something I wrote doesn't make sense, I welcome your opinion. Spelling and grammar errors? Not so much. If it bothers you, find something else to read.

Chapter 1: September 2005

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
-Lao Txu

Spencer walked through the Smithsonian Mall until he found the person he was looking for bundled up on the steps of the Jeffersonian Institute. It was the late afternoon in the middle of September so it wasn't too cold, yet still not hot enough to bother the woman. The woman was sitting on the steps with a large clip board in her lap with a sketch book and a skull balanced on it. Beside her was a large leather purse, and a pair of sleek heels. The skull on the clip board had multiple erasers laced on it as flesh markers, and the woman was fleshing it out on the sketchbook. Spencer took the two cups of coffees he'd brought with him and sat down next to her, handing the coffee with more cream in it to her. She smiled at him, taking a sip and going back to drawing her death mask. He adjusted his messenger bag next to him, before taking a sip of his coffee.

"How was your first case with Gideon back?" Dr. Harley Isley asked, as she drew the face of a young woman onto her sketchpad. Harley was almost Spencer's age, just a few months younger, a fact she enjoyed reminding Spencer of. They'd meet for the first time when he was 18, and saw each other sporadically for the next few years until they were both 21 and living in Virginia, but they'd been pen pals for years before that. Harley was one of the few people he'd meet who could match him in intellect. She had two PhD's already: one in Environmental Studies and one in Forensic Science. And she was working on two more in Anthropology, and Archaeology. Unlike Spencer, Harley had bounced around for college, starting out at Humboldt State, and bounced around universities that had the programs needed for her degrees, or some that just had classes she wanted to take, and even a few research programs abroad. Currently, she was interning (although her official title was assistant, of which she was one of a pair of) at the Jeffersonian, under the esteemed Dr. Brennan, and taking a few months a year to go to digs and research sights abroad. Spencer thought it was all a little over kill, and that she was just trying to accumulate more PhD's than him. But if he brought it up, Harley would just roll her eyes at him.

"We caught the killer," Spencer shrugged, before taking a gulp of his coffee. What more was there to say, really? It's not like he could say it was a good case, because people did die. And it does seem a little questionable to call that good in any capacity. But… "It felt good to be working with the whole team again."

"Good," Harley smiled, brushing a stray hair way from her face. Sitting down, Harley was a good half a foot shorter than him, if not more. In total she was a little over a foot shorter than Spencer in stature, standing at only five feet tall flat footed, and less than a hundred bounds to boot. She could joke about being younger but Spencer got to call her a midget in return. She had a heart shaped face with a button nose and a pair of dark brown eyes. Being brown, he couldn't compare them to swirling oceans, raging storms, or vast jungles. But the specific color of brown that her eyes were reminded him of molten chocolate or brownie batter. They had that type of warmth and familiarity that just reminded you of comforting things like a mother's hug or the comforts of a warm bed. Her hair was a similar color, rich, thick, and warm, with depth to it that people didn't usually associate with brown, but her hair's dark color actually mixed several colors together, and would get significantly lighter in the right light. She had a habit of growing her hair out to long lengths and cutting it all off and donating it to make wigs for little girls who needed then. She'd cut it into a short pixie right before going to Guatemala, and it was currently in the stage between a pixie and a bob with a long front bang that she liked styling. She'd cut it shorter than was likely necessary, but it looked adorable on her. She had on a pair of jeans, a hunter green long sleeve, one of those white padded vests with a fur lined hood, and a pair of thick socks she'd put on in place of wearing her usual heels as she sat on the steeps with him. Her skin which was usually extremely pale and alabaster in color had tanned just slightly from hours spent in the sun with SPF 50 sunblock. It was probably the most vitamin D she'd gotten in a while. He could tell she was wearing makeup, although aside from the flared eyeliner and the tinted Chap Stick she wore most days, it wasn't anything that really stuck out. Harley preferred a semi-natural look to her makeup. "Hey if you check my bag, there is a book in there I thought you might be interested in."

Spencer pulled the black leather purse she'd sat next to her towards him as she took a sip of her coffee without interrupting her drawing and pulled out a large novel from within it. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. It's the longest novel in the English language to be published in a single volume, with an almost 6oo thousand word word-count. Harley had taken it upon herself to find him extremely long books to read since they'd meet. Sometimes they came in multiple volumes (like In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, the third longest book, at nearly 1.25 million words) and sometimes they came in other languages (like Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus by Georges de Scudéry which is considered the longest novel ever published at almost 2 million words. It was in French, and Harley had refused to help him. So he knows French, now. Or at least how to read it.). But the books she brought him where always long, and Spencer spent more time reading them than he'd ever spent on any other book before.

"Thank you," Spencer told her, tucking it into his messenger bag and moving her purse back to her side. He watched her hand move with the pencil she was using, filling in the details of the girls face, the pair taking sips and gulps of coffee as the time passed. Her nails, which she kept long enough that they were likely just over the allowed length at the Jeffersonian, were freshly painted a navy blue. Like him she'd grown up on the West Coast, only she'd been in San Diego as opposed to Las Vegas. And she always had a wave stenciled into the design in recognition of that. Today that wave was silver. "How about you? It must be nice being back at the Jeffersonian after two months in Guatemala. Sorry about not picking you up from the airport, by the way."

"I'm okay. There's only so much time you can spend in a Guatemalan mass grave before you stop feeling okay about being there," Harley shrugged, finishing her drawing as Spencer downed the last of his coffee. "I have a lot I can learn from Dr. Brennan, and it's always interesting doing field work and getting to research the culture and habits of the people whose bones we're looking at. But now we're going to be working more with the FBI, working with bodies that haven't been dead as long as the ones we normally look at. And watching Dr. B and Agent Booth work together is entertaining. He picked us up from the airport. He put out an FBI hold-for-questioning on us."—cue eye roll—"Anyways… Have you passed your gun qualification yet?"

Spencer glared at Harley, and she smirked in return.

"So, I'll take that as a no. When you going to let me take you to the range?" Harley asked, her smile very shark like. While Spencer had been raised by a paranoid schizophrenic, Harley had been raised by family of… gun enthusiasts. She claimed to have a better shot with rifles than hand guns, but Spencer had never seen her shoot a gun, and, quite honestly, wasn't sure he ever wanted to. But that didn't dissuade Harley from wanting to take him to a shooting range. Seeming to read the expression on her face, Harley deflated a little. "Will you at least let me set you up with some lessons with a friend of mine?"

"If I don't pass this next one," Spencer reasoned, "I'll consider it."

She rolled her eyes, pulling her trusted Polaroid camera from the bowels of her purse and snapping a shot of the skull before sticking the picture to the top of the sketch paper, and writing the skulls identification number on the white part at the bottom of the Polaroid. Then, as was tradition, Harley passed the sketchbook back to him as she put back the camera and put the skull back in the box she transported it out here in. "Can we at least start a standing paintball date? It could be really beneficial for learning to shoot a moving target. Plus I miss playing paintball, and I know few people I'd even think to ask to go with me. Please, please, please, Spencer?"

"I'll think about it." Spencer flipped through the pages, staring at the faces she'd drawn in correspondence to the photo of the skull at the top of each page, as Harley rolled her eyes at his response. A few pages had sceneries instead of faces and could have just as easily been an illustration taken from the page of a children's book. Those few sceneries where the only pages where she'd used color. Some of the pages lacked the photo, meaning they were people she knew. Some he could identify because he knew them as well, such as the old woman who lived across from him, or the elderly couple that Harley lived next door to. Some of the people he could only identify due to the names at the top of the page. Those where the people she worked with.

Almost one hundred pages of back to back sketches and drawings.

Spencer handed it back to Harley when he was done and she packed it away into her purse, before she pulled the socks she was wearing off and replaced them with her heels. She tucked away her socks, and slung her bag over one shoulder as Spencer stood up from the steps. He helped her to stand on the step above him and then grabbed the box with the skull in it as she grabbed their coffees, and tucked her clip board under her arm. She then took the box from him, and adjusted it in her grasp. "Well, Dr. Isley. Where do you want to go?"

Harley smiled at him as she carefully looped her arm through his, careful of the coffee cup she held in that hand. "Well, Dr. Reid, I do believe you owe me a dinner date. Why don't we start there?"

Then before Spencer could respond Harley gave him a chaise kiss on the lips and ran back into the Jeffersonian to put the skull and clip board back in the lab, before slipping back out, sans the skull, the clip boards, and Spencer's empty coffee cup, and grabbing Spencer's hand, her purse, her own coffee cup, and a full-face covering helmet in hand. She reached up further onto her toes than she already was in her heels, and gave him a long, searing kiss to make up for all the ones they'd missed over her last few months in Guatemala.

Harley and Spencer weren't the type of people to make big deals of kissing each other, wither in public or otherwise. Mostly, it was just proximity to each other, snuggling and cuddling, that took place between them. They liked being close to one another, lap sitting, or wrapped in each other's arms. They kissed, as well as doing other things. They just didn't do it with lots of frequency. Partly because of his work with the BAU, partly because she always took a few months a year to do work outside of DC, and partly because it just wasn't in their nature to be so physically affectionate. Neither of them felt the desire to have sex constantly or even at a consistent time schedule. They had sex when they had sex, but their mutual desire to stop working or doing things to have sex happened very rarely.

Spencer smiled at her as they began to walk away from the Jeffersonian, arm in arm, off to where Spencer had parked. It didn't interrupt they're rhythm as they walked, and soon her own cup was thrown away in a trash can similar to the other. When they reached the motorcycle that he'd driven here in, he packed away Harley's purse and his messenger bag into the small compartment space in a cavity of the bike, taking out his own helmet first. He turned the bike around so that it face the street and then put on his helmet. He got on first with Harley climbing on afterwards, wrapping her arms around him the same way she had multiple times before. Harley had even painted his helmet with a Doctor Who theme, while hers red and gold for Iron Man.

As they took off from the parking lot, Spencer didn't even think of what Morgan's reaction would be if he could see him now.

"And he knew that at that moment, they understood each other perfectly, and when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say 'be careful' or 'don't do it', but she would accept his decision because she would not have expected anything less of him."
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Authors Note: Thank you so much for reading. I'd really appreciate any feedback you can offer. Wither you liked my story or not. If I should continue. Please review. And I hope you all have a nice day/night.