Chapter One: Rabbit or Hare?

AN: Part One of Three: Continued in The Way We Are

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There was a boy in her garden, a skinny, messy boy with sticky-up hair and a nose as twitchy as the rabbit he was holding. Emily Prentiss stopped under the shade of her favourite oak tree and examined this skinny, messy boy with his sticky-up hair and twitchy nose, wondering who he was and how he'd come to be here. A fanciful part of her mind thought he might be a faerie of some kind—he sure dressed like the faeries in her picture books, with his shirt buttoned up neat right to his thin neck and his pants made of forest-brown corduroy. He even wore a tie, which she was sure faeries didn't wear but knew little boys didn't wear either.

He was a puzzle. Emily didn't like puzzles. She liked answers that behaved, not ones that she had to chase around and around in order to get straight. And, thus, she decided that she did not like this boy.

"Who are you and what are you doing in my garden?" she demanded. That was a way to get a straight answer—demand it! The boy just looked a little puzzled. The rabbit in his hands just looked sleepy and limp. "And why do you have a rabbit?"

"It's a hare, actually," said the boy. "It's too young and precocial to be a rabbit, they're born… you don't actually care, do you?"

Emily didn't. "No," she said, because she was many things but rarely a liar. "Why would I care about a rabbit?"

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That was a very interesting thing that she'd just said. It aroused several questions in the boy's mind, which wasn't wholly unusual—many things raised a question in his mind, most things raised two or three in tandem.

The boy, Spencer Reid, thought that it was very important that people cared about things like whether a rabbit was a rabbit or actually a hare. It wasn't very kind, he'd found, to be called one thing when you were another, and he didn't like that this bossy girl in her torn stockings and dirty dress was trying to tell him otherwise.

The questions he thought of were these, in no particular order of importance:

What worth was a rabbit in the grand scheme of things, especially to a girl like this, who held inherent worth purely because she was alive and a human and dressed in clothes that were expensive, if a bit ruffled?

Who was to say that the girl was worth more than the rabbit?

Following that train of thought, who was to say that he was worth more or less than either the rabbit or the girl, seeing as he stood here in clothes that were not as expensive as the girl's but far more expensive than the rabbit's?

And the final question was: was it worth getting kicked in order to voice any of these questions, having been kicked many times before for much the same reason?

He decided it wasn't and instead:

"It's not nice to ignore what something is in favour of what you'd rather it be," he told her firmly. Being firm was new to him and he didn't quite feel comfortable with it, especially not as she scowled and something in his belly told him that he should probably run away. This kind of girl, all pointy and cross from her straight dark hair to her wide dark eyes, was the kind of girl that kicked first, asked later, and he'd had enough of being kicked in his life. "The kind of person who does that is the kind of person who ignores things they don't think are important… even if they are."

And he swallowed, because Spencer Reid didn't like being ignored, but he'd found it happening to him increasingly often lately.

He didn't really like her for reminding him of that.

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Emily just stared.

"You're weird," she announced. "You still haven't told me who you are, or why you're here, or what's with the rabbit." She chose her words very carefully there, as she often did, because the best way she'd found to test if a person was real or fake was to see if she could make them mad. No one could be mad and fake; no one except her mother. If he actually cared about the difference between rabbits and hares, he'd get mad and she'd know what kind of boy he was.

If a small part of her, even smaller than the part that didn't like this boy, hoped that he passed this test, she ignored it. She was good at ignoring things, like homework or tutors or her parents scolding her for making a mess, or how lonely it could be being an only child in a house too big for a family of three.

"I'm Spencer," said the boy finally. "Spencer Reid. I live here. And so does he." He lifted the hare, which didn't look very well. "Or, at least, I guess he does. He was eating those plants before he got sick."

Emily stared some more. Most of what this 'Spencer' had just said didn't make sense. Well, some of it did—she doubted he was lying about his name and supposed it wasn't so unlikely that a hare had come to live here too.

But a boy? Here?

"You don't live here, this is my house. I live here." That made sense to her. There'd never been a boy at this house before, why would one have come here now?

But Spencer didn't seem to see the logic in that, just shifting the hare around in his hands and looking down at it with his sunburned nose scrunching a little. "And now I live here too," he replied. "I think your mom was going to tell you tonight—we weren't supposed to get here for two days, but my mom—"

Emily cut him off: "Right," she said, thumping her foot once for good riddance and storming off. "We'll see about this!" See if she was sharing her house with any stupid boy and his equally stupid rabbit! If he was a faerie, he was definitely the worst kind—the kind that only brought bad luck.

And she was sure that she'd never ever like him.