Tarot of the Pomegranate
A Criminal Minds Story
The man sat in the dark at his drawing desk, surrounded by his palette of paints. Mozart's Requiem playing in the background…the song for the dead; he smiled tightly as he thought of how appropriate that song was. A small bright light lit his work area, leaving everything around him in darkness, the music filling the shadows and his mind. Early on, he had established his palette and using that palette he painted each card with excruciating detail. He had chosen a stunning and bright gold leaf to accent each card. There were deep indigos, intense purples, bright yellows and oranges and the reds…the reds were each a slightly different shade of red, dark, disturbing, and richly colored reds. He smiled as he received his inspiration for his newest card, The Tower.
The young man sat at his desk in the bullpen, writing notes up from the last case closed. Absent mindedly, his long fingers tucked his curled locks behind his ears. He needed a haircut, but never seemed to have the time or cared enough to do it in what little time he had to himself. The BAU team was tired after returning from their latest crime scene, the sound of a mother's sobs and a child's body still resonating in their hearts and souls. As he idly turned his pen in his fingers, staring at the computer screen, he thought of an article he had read once by a professor at Oxford who wrote of Holocaust survivors. "A curious fact about language, which Tolstoy and then Hemingway used to advantage, is that to write about terrible things in a neutral tone or with descriptions barren of subjective response tends to generate an irony so virulent as to end in either cynicism or despair. On the other hand, to allow feeling much play when speaking of atrocity is to border on hysteria and reduce the agony of millions to a moment of self-indulgence." * While the team, of course, were only dealing this time with a few related cases of a child predator and murderer, they had seen so much in their lives as profilers it was easy to adapt the neutral tone that ended their reports, and damaged their souls with despair. His life, perhaps all of their lives, were lived in suspended animation until the next crime scene, the next unsub, the next chunk of their souls being eaten away. It had become too much for Gideon and too much for Elle. He wondered how much longer he could continue to see the bodies and the violence before he too would have to surrender himself as well.
His phone rang over the subdued noise of the bullpen, startling him out of his depressing reverie. He listlessly picked up the phone, trying to put a glimmer of hope into his young but hopeless voice, "Dr. Spencer Reid."
A voice on the other end seemed startled to have actually had a real person answer the phone, and then responded, her voice one he would remember for all of his days. "Hey Spence. You sound tired and down."
"Sophie…wow!" He stumbled over what he should say next, where to even start. Other than the occasional letters, they hadn't spoken since he had left for CalTech and she for Oxford.
"You remember. That is nice, Spence." Her voice was soft and deep, and held a promise of things a man could only hope for but never actually have.
Spencer stumbled uncomfortably over all the questions he had and couldn't seem to arrive at a single articulate question to ask her. He heard her laugh softly over the phone. He knew she wasn't laughing at him, but wasn't sure what she was laughing at. "Spence, take a deep breath and I'll start, ok?"
He cleared his throat, "Ok." He was exceptionally aware of Morgan and Prentiss watching him over the bullpen walls, smirking at his rare loss of words.
Sophie started to talk, quietly as was her way. But her voice held something else that he hadn't heard before, self-confidence, self-awareness that hadn't been there when they attended Yale together. It had been both of their "safety school" and once they had found each other, they were inseparable. They knew each other's secrets, each other's passions, and together they had initially explored sex together. He stopped thinking back on their time together and returned his attention to what she was saying.
"…anyway, long story short, I'm at William and Mary now, living here in Virginia, a small town called Bowling Green actually. I was hoping that now that we were in the same country, much less the same state, perhaps we could get together. I know you are really busy being the super profiler, but maybe…"
Spencer interrupted her, "Yes, absolutely. I'm off this weekend. I could drive up there. Bowling Green isn't so far. We could have dinner."
He could hear her smile even if he couldn't see it. "That sounds perfect Spence. Why don't we start earlier so we have more time for catching up? Say around 4ish?"
"I'll be there. I just need your address…"
Spencer Reid hung up the phone feeling much more hopeful and eager than he had for a very long time.
"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9
* THE SURVIVOR:AN ANATOMY OF LIFE IN THE DEATH CAMPS, by TERRENCE DES PRES, Oxford Press, pg. iii