Chapter One: Tips for the care and handling of Spencer Reid
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Elle's replacement was tall, dark haired, dark eyed and most importantly, not Elle. Spencer Reid avoided her gaze, unsure of himself around this new, confident stranger.
"Hi. Emily Prentiss," she introduced herself casually, stepping in front of him and thrusting a hand out to be shaken. Reid stared at it for a moment, nonplussed, eyeing the heavily bitten nails and the slender fingers before trailing his regard up to her face.
Concerned eyes met his. He forced a smile, knowing that it sat oddly on his face. "Spencer Reid. Err… Doctor. Doctor Spencer Reid. It's good to meet you."
Well done, Spencer. Now she thinks you're pretentious.
Her return smile was genuine. "Well, Dr. Spencer Reid, I need someone to show me around this place, it's like a labyrinth! Do you think you could? I really, really hope they've got some decent coffee."
He knew his face had lit up at the mention of coffee. Emily's eyes flickered past his shoulder, no doubt sharing a triumphant glance with Morgan or JJ.
So they'd already trained the new recruit on how to deal with their 'pet' genius then. Reid wasn't quite sure if he was charmed by their concern, or hurt that they felt the need to coach her.
"Of course," he stuttered out, wondering if the slight sickly sense of shame at being the odd one out of the group showed in his voice. No one else had needed 'tips for care and handling of.' "There's a kitchenette over here, it usually has coffee."
She followed him chattering pleasantly about mundanities, and if her eyes lingered overlong on his slender form when he reached up to get her a mug, he didn't notice.
It'd been such a long time since Emily Prentiss had meshed so well with a group of people that she'd almost forgotten how good it felt to belong. She was spending her days with people she really liked, doing work that changed lives, and it was the most settled she'd been in years.
It was certainly a long cry from the oiliness that her work with Doyle had left her with.
In the end, the choice to accompany her new team out for post-case drinks at a local bar the FBI favoured was a quick one. Prentiss took any chance to unwind, and she really wanted an opportunity to pick the brain of one Spencer Reid.
The man was fascinating. His encyclopaedic mind and eidetic memory, combined with his natural quickness of mind, made him an intriguing person to be around. She sorely wanted to know what made a man like that tick.
She'd watched him read a book one time on a flight home once, watching his eyes and fingers skim over the page, positively devouring the words. It made her oddly jealous, and overly conscious of her own slower reading pace and reduced comprehension. She could see how a mind like that could make others feel mundane in comparison.
She'd also seen the almost protective way the rest of the team gathered around him, how Gideon would introduce him as 'Doctor' to make him seem older, and how Morgan would hover watchfully in his vicinity if they were in the field.
Her first day there, each one of them had 'subtlety' approached her with tips and veiled warnings on how to talk to him. It wasn't that they thought he was fragile, they just expected the worst of others. It hurt to wonder why they would react like that.
He was slightly drunk when she slid onto the bar stool next to him, gazing at his glass as though it was endlessly fascinating. "So Doctor Reid," she begun, adopting a light teasing tone. "In deep thought about the contents of your beer I see?"
He looked up at her with a lopsided grin and eyes that glittered with the alcohol he'd consumed, and something low in her belly gave a hard jolt that had her mouth turning dry. She became suddenly aware of the way his top lip glittered with leftover moisture from his drink, averting her eyes quickly before he realized she was staring.
Christ. She had not expected that.
"Calculating the rate of condensation actually," Reid replied cheerily, hair flopping puppy-dog like into his eyes. His tongue darted out and flicked over the droplets on his lip, turning the jolt into a concerning heat that had her reaching for her own drink to gulp down.
"Really?" she asked, raising an eyebrow and hoping to hell she wasn't blushing.
She really needed to get laid if all it took was a smile from a colleague in his mid-twenties to have her vividly imagining his agile hands having their filthy way with her.
There was laughter in his eyes, and something darker that had her suspecting that he knew why she was suddenly breaking out in a fine sweat. What was she thinking? Of course he knew. It was his job to read body language, he did it daily.
"Not really. I was actually using the reflection of the glass to watch Morgan trying to chat up that lady over there. I'm wondering when he's going to notice she's not interested."
Emily turned her head slightly to see the woman, glad of the chance to face away from that all knowing gaze. "Why wouldn't she be interested?" she asked, spotting them both and barely holding back a giggle at the hang-dog expression on Morgan's face. "Morgan's gorgeous, what woman wouldn't want him?"
Reid seemed to have become newly refocused on his drink when she turned back, mouth downcast. She wondered idly how many women had broken past his defences and kissed away that moroseness before.
"A woman interested in other women?" he pointed out with a slight shake of his shoulders, and her eyes widened at the implication.
Oh, poor Morgan. He'd never live down missing that.
Her drink spilled slightly over her hand, sticky and warmed by the muggy air of the crowded bar. Reid reached out with a napkin and brushed it over her hand, mopping up the liquid and leaving her skin tingling with the memory of his touch.
She really needed to get laid.
It was his job to read body language, to know what people were thinking and feeling without them needing to enunciate the emotions. But Emily Prentiss was an enigma to him.
He was no stranger to physical intimacy, no matter what the others might think, but emotional intimacy had always left him cold. Negotiating the pitfalls and perils of social interactions long enough to embark upon a healthy and long term relationship?
Well, to put it simply, he didn't get four PHD's by spending all his time learning how to be a decent partner.
There was a moment, a single moment, when he was slightly drunk and ever so slightly more optimistic than usual, when her eyes had met his and he'd almost fallen into pupils that were suddenly wide and dark.
When he reached out a napkin to brush the beer from her hand, his fingers had skimmed over a warm wrist with a pulse that fluttered frantically against his skin.
It was basic physiology, the body's reaction to sexual arousal. He knew that. But for a single moment, his mind had stuttered over the possibility that this beautiful, clever women was interested in him. Scrawny, awkward Spencer Reid, with the hair that badly needed a cut and the oddly coloured shirts.
Then she'd leaned ever so slightly past him to squint across the smoggy bar to Morgan, and his confidence had plummeted. Of course it was Morgan, wasn't it always?
So he'd inclined back somewhat on his stool, avoided direct eye contact with her, and changed the subject to something less painful to contemplate.
The needs of the body were just transport, anyway.
She wasn't quite sure when it happened. One moment he was just her ever so marginally attractive co-worker, full of facts and figures and barely restrained social anxieties, and then he was so much more.
Maybe it was the first time she'd seen him slip into his 'agent' skin; turning coolly confident and ever so dangerous. Or maybe it was when she was dozing off on the couch one day on the flight home, and he'd leant over her to pull the blanket more squarely onto her shoulders, leaving behind the slight scent of coffee and sweat.
Maybe it was when she looked up from her book one day and saw him asleep on that same couch, long limbs sprawled clumsily in a space too small for them, mouth ever so slightly open. The most vulnerable she'd ever seen him, completely unguarded. She hadn't realized she'd been staring until JJ nudged her, having asked the same question three times without a response.
When Emily had turned to answer the media liaison, for a moment the woman's kind blue eyes had darted between Prentiss and the sleeping agent, creased with something like concern. Emily had carefully kept the subject away from Reid, not wanting to be put in the position where she felt obliged to quantify her feelings on the subject.
She wasn't even sure herself if she was half in love with the guy, or if she just really, really wanted to jump his bones.
Instead she went out alone and found a man, average height with black hair like silk in her fingers, and took him home.
He was brisk in bed, charming enough in his own way, and he brought her over the edge with a perfunctory movement of his fingers right as he himself shuddered against her.
It was quick and meaningless and exactly what she wanted.
But when she closed her eyes and put her mouth against his skin, it was hazel eyes and a quick smile she was visualizing.
Sometimes she had to fight the all-encompassing desire to open up that brain of his and see what made him tick, to see the gears and wheels in motions, especially when he stood in front of them half-demented with excitement and almost twitching out of his skin.
"You're especially manic today," she teased him one day, less than a week before it happened.
He shrugged, turning in his seat slightly and adjusting the seat belt, leg jiggling against the dash. "I'm always manic. It's my one setting."
He was rarely wrong, but she glanced at his face and could visualize every emotion he was capable of in a dizzying clarity. She wasn't aware when she'd created a mental encyclopaedia of his moods, but at some point she'd tuned into them and never tuned out.
That really didn't bode well for her 'it's just sexual frustration' theory. "That's not true," she settled for saying, watching his eyes dart onto her, questioning. "Sometimes you're just… happy."
One moment Reid was by their side like a constant presence, and she knew that no matter how bad her day had been, she could turn and smile at him and he'd light up and spare her an insight into his mind.
Then Tobias Hankel happened.
They were in Georgia and in one fell swoop, he was gone and she couldn't think for the absence of him.
The first video was horrifying in every possible way. Emily wasn't sure if she wanted to cry or vomit from seeing him blinking slowly at the camera, blood plastering his hair to his forehead and bound tightly to that chair.
She'd have nightmares about that chair in the future. Not with him; the dreams with him were always different, powerful in their own way, but with none of the horror. No, there were nightmares of that chair in a room and it was always empty. Sometimes it was tipped.
Sometimes it was broken.
The second video was worse.
Emily watched as Reid's lanky frame hit the floor and shuddered its way into a gasping seizure, his face obscured by lank hair. She didn't realize that she was holding her breath until he stopped breathing at all, letting it out in a pained gasp that tore out of her throat and left her raw.
She couldn't think, couldn't breathe, and he was dead. Dead in front of them with his skin cooling and his elegant hands silenced forever, lips turning blue and eyes vacant.
He was dead. The word danced through her brain like a cruel schoolyard chant. Dead, dead, dead, you've failed him, and now he'll never know.
He was dead until suddenly he wasn't and she was watching him steadfastly refusing to name a team member to condemn.
Pick me, she thought suddenly, realizing with a jolt just how much more important he was than her. A world without Spencer Reid couldn't exist, couldn't. She would never allow it.
It wasn't until later when they found him standing by a grave he'd dug himself, that she realized since that moment she'd watched him stop living on the floor of that shack, she hadn't felt anything.
She touched his arm, just once, just to make sure it was warm and alive, and she felt nothing.
The drugs didn't make it easier, but they made it bearable.
For some reason, every time Reid slipped a needle into his skin, he tumbled into oblivion imagining the disapproving gaze of familiar brown eyes.
But when he'd wake up, cold and shaking on his couch or the floor of his bathroom, he was always alone.
