Title: Castles In The Air
Author: Trista Groulx aka dustytiger
Rating: T (same as the show to be safe)
Disclaimer: I'm still an uber poor barista, I borrowed these characters from their creator, networks, writers, actors and actresses who make them come to life. I will return them unharmed and will remain just a skint a result.
Summary: Reid goes to London to surprise Prentiss, but it's him who's in for the surprise (the kind which grows for forty weeks).
Notes: It's been way too long since I've posted a CM fic. I found this on my hard drive a few weeks ago and it's been nagging me to be finished. After a rough ride with my last fic, I'm hoping for some fuzzies with this one. I'm super nervous about posting this as it was started before I took sick (a year and half ago now) and was complete well in the past month or so. I feel like the voice I write in has changed, so I'm super sorry if it's inconsistent. The title comes from a Don McLean song.
Spencer Reid was nervous and excited as he stood in the hallway, waiting to knock on the door. He had had to do a lot of planning to get to this moment, but he knew it would be worth it when he saw her face. It had been seven months since she had moved, and he missed her more than he thought he could miss anyone. He hadn't wanted her to leave, but he knew that trying to talk her into staying would only strain their relationship further. He had tried to stay away but he couldn't do it anymore. He finally talked to his co-worker, Penelope Garcia and together they'd hatched a plan. After weeks of planning he was where he knew he needed to be.
The door finally opened, and his face lit up when he saw her. He noticed right away that her face was rounder and his eyes began to wonder down her body to examine what else had swelled since he had last seen her. Her breasts seemed larger, and a moment later he discovered why. Her middle had an unmistakeable shape to it; Emily Prentiss was pregnant.
"Spencer," she whispered shocked, seeing Reid standing at her door with her favourite flowers in his hands.
"Emily?" he mumbled, uncertainly. "This may have been a mistake." He turned to leave.
"Please don't go. Come in."
Despite how he felt his feet complied with the invitation and he soon he was inside. He wasn't sure what to say or do next. He simply stared at her belly, wondering if what he believed was actual fact; had she left to hide her pregnancy? Reid was far from an expert on the subject of women nor how pregnancy evolved but he was sure that she was closer to the end of process. He did know exactly how babies were made and that he had been the man who had done that with her during the time she would have conceived.
"I'm sorry," she told him.
"You're sorry?" he asked. "You left because of… this?" he pointed to her swollen stomach. "Is it mine?"
"How dare you ask me that!?"
"I don't want to believe that you are a cheater Emily, but you told me multiple times you loved me and when you care for a person you don't run away when you find out you are pregnant."
"Spencer you made it quite clear you never wanted to be a father."
"Yes, I told you I had never thought I would become a father and that I didn't want to seek out becoming a parent because of my mother's condition, but that wasn't an invitation to force me to do to a child what my father did to me."
"Don't accuse me of that! Your father chose to leave when you were a child. This is different. This child's mother simply chose to go it alone."
"When she didn't have to!" he snapped. "You didn't give me a choice. You simply assumed I wouldn't want to be a parent."
"You told me that you didn't!"
"You asked me in the abstract. Had I known you were actually pregnant I never would have let you leave."
"Since when did you become so macho?"
"It has nothing to do with that Emily. I vowed that even though I would not seek out becoming a parent I would not run from it. If it ever happened I wouldn't be my father. I told you I would never want to try to start a family, but I know that nothing is foolproof. All forms of birth control short of abstinence have various statistical failures. Statistically speaking I knew that being in a relationship with you for any length of time could possibly end in pregnancy, I can show you the math, and when that happened I would find a way to overcome my fears, but you never gave me that opportunity. You discovered you were pregnant and you took the first offer you got to get as far away from me as possible. You never gave me the benefit of the doubt nor the chance to show you I could figure out how to navigate this new reality."
"Spencer I…" she tried to explain but couldn't find the words. "I should have told you, but I wanted this so much."
"You didn't have to do it alone."
"What do we do now?"
"I think we both have a lot to work through before we can decide," he told her with a sigh.
"For what it's worth I am sorry for how I treated you. I shouldn't have run away from you like that, but I was so scared."
"Of what?"
"That you would force me to do something I didn't want to do. I let someone talk me into doing what we thought was the right thing before," she explained, pain her voice.
"Are you talking about aborting a pregnancy? I'd never ask you to do that. There are many valid reasons to abort a pregnancy but none of those reasons would have been valid for us. I would never think that the possibility of a genetic disorder would be enough reason to ask a woman I loved to abort a pregnancy. It would have been a challenge but we would have made it work."
"Stop talking like it's not possible to make it happen now."
"Emily you have a life here now, and I can't be any further from my mom than I already am. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but no matter how much I may love you I am the only family my mother has. She needs me, at the very least, to be in the country. I want to be in my child's life but you've made it difficult for that to be in a traditional way. I can't ask you to come home and give up your career for me."
"It wouldn't be for you I'd be giving it up."
"Is that what you want?"
"I would like the baby to have a family."
"I want to be there for the baby Emily but that doesn't mean that I forgive you for not telling me. Had I not come to surprise you like this there's no telling how much of our child's life I would have missed and that's not easy for me to move past."
"I know it won't be, and none of my reasons seem like valid excuses any more. I know I should have told you, but I was scared."
"You had every right to be scared, a baby changes everything in a person's life. Did I do something to make you believe I wouldn't take responsibility? Did I mistreat you? I told you from the beginning that I was not experienced in relationships, was there something more I could have done to reassure you?"
She reached out and touched his cheek. "It wasn't you," she assured him. "I got scared. I know logically that I shouldn't have but I was. Then when I got here the longer I stayed the harder it became to find a way to tell you. I told you I wasn't good with relationships and commitment. Finding out about the baby made all those things come to a head and when I was offered the job I jumped on it and tried to ignore the truth. When my new coworkers called me out on it I told them that you told me you didn't want the baby and any time I would tell them I was going to tell you they talked me out of it. I guess I started to believe me own lie."
"I'm not sure if that helps matters," he sighed. "I should probably go I have a lot to think about right now."
"I'd like you to stay here you're welcome as long as you'd like. I have a spare room, and there's a library about three blocks away."
"Thank you, I have a lot of pregnancy and parenting research to do."
"Parenting isn't something you can learn from books."
"For my own peace of mind I need to do research. I don't have a lot of experience with children."
"I think you are more ready than you give yourself credit for, and I'm sorry I didn't see that sooner."
"I am too Emily. Do you mind showing me to my room? I would like to be alone."
She nodded and showed him to the guest bedroom. He went inside and sat down at the small desk, putting his head in his hands. Prentiss closed the door, her heart breaking seeing him like this knowing it was her fault. Reid sat there for several long minutes before he decided what he should do. He found some paper and a pen and began to write a letter to his mother hoping it would help him collect his thoughts.
Notes: Well that was the start. There will be a few cliffies of course, but I still update daily so that should help with that. Let me now what you're thinking heart. So happy to be writing these two again oh so much heart for them.