Piper sat in her office at home, the study she had commandeered from Reid long before a lot of things had happened. She was working on her book, watching Sophia sleep in the swing she had set up earlier. The little girl was now nearly four and a half months old, and had quickly come to love and be loved by the BAU team. "You know you should be getting some rest," Reid said, leaning on the doorframe. He was standing there with two coffee cups, one of which he handed to her as he came to sit on the corner of the desk. "She's been getting a whole lot of rest, but you haven't. I'm pretty sure the doctor said both of you need to rest."
"Dr. Stoilkova doesn't know what it's like being an FBI agent. We can get through a lot more with a lot less," she responded, finally looking away from her laptop. "Besides, it's been months, and it's only 11 o'clock."
"It's more like midnight. How's our girl doing?"
"She's been sleeping for a bit. Woke up half an hour ago, but I got her changed and back to bed. You know, I don't think I should be telling her stories about the cases we've worked and the serial killers I've talked to, but she's still too young to understand."
Reid smiled, getting up to give her a kiss. "I love you. But you need some rest. She's keeping you up a lot."
"You too," Piper argued. "I've got this."
"You look exhausted. Come on, you can finish editing in the morning," Reid argued, massaging her shoulders. "I'm going to head to bed, and I'd like to fall asleep next to you. You've been staying up later than I have for a while now. I know you just want to get the book over and done with and move on, but please, Piper, just this once."
"Okay," she sighed, shutting her computer off and picking Sophia up, carrying her to her room and laying her in the crib as gently as she could. Piper and Reid stood there for a few minutes, watching their daughter sleep. Piper went to kiss Nate goodnight, seeing that he was sleeping soundly, before going to bed herself. "Hey, Spence?"
"Yeah?" he asked, rolling over in bed to watch as she brushed her teeth and took off her makeup.
"Have you talked to your mom lately?"
"Not in a while, but we've been writing back and forth like we usually do," he answered. "Why?"
"I called the other day, and… well, it might have just been an off day, but she's been forgetting a few things that I would assume she would remember. And you know they changed her meds. I just wondered if you'd checked in lately."
"I'll talk to her tomorrow," Reid yawned as Piper got into bed. "I should give her a call anyway. I'm sure it was just a bad day." He was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Piper?"
"Hmm?" She turned to face him, giving her husband a kiss.
"I wish I could spend more time at home with you and the kids."
"I wish I could too. I'm always at the office, and I hate leaving them with Jessica all the time, but it's part of the job, isn't it? It'll be fine, though. Nate's old enough to understand what we do requires that we be away sometimes, and Sophia will come to understand it. Henry's done fine with it. I'm sure Sophia will do the same."
"I just don't want to miss holidays and birthdays like Hotch has to. You saw what it did to Haley."
"We won't let that happen, now will we?" Piper asked, giving him a kiss. "I'm just glad that I get to keep you here for a little while, anyway. I hate having you fly out so much. But you do come home with cool stories, and Garcia and I can watch you all anyway."
Reid flew out the next morning on a case in Salt Lake City. Piper drove him to the airstrip after dropping Nate off at school and leaving Sophia with Jessica. She stopped to wish the team good luck, telling them to call when they landed. She met Garcia for coffee, and the two of them took off for Quantico together, thinking they would get as much of a profile up and running as they could before the team landed. "You two are such an amazing couple," Garcia sighed, seeing the photo of their wedding on Piper's desk. "Seriously, you haven't had a fight in like… years. And you're always checking up on each other when you're apart, and you get each other gifts all the time, and… I wish I had a relationship like yours."
"Mmm, no you don't," Piper answered her from her desk as she logged into her computer. "We haven't had a fight in a long time because every time we disagree, we work it out, since he's still afraid that I'm mad about Maeve and that any little argument will get turned into a big one. He's not wrong, I'm still mad, and I'm still disappointed, but I'm not going to leave him over her if we have a tiny argument. We check up on each other because we're so afraid that something bad will happen, since we've already been shot and kidnapped and all sorts of thing so many times. And we give each other gifts randomly because - well, I find stuff online and think he'll like it, and I don't want to wait for a birthday or Christmas. Small presents like that make him happy. And he knows the same thing. He just wants to keep me happy, pretty much."
"Well that doesn't sound good. Never mind, then."
"We still love each other, it's just… when you've been with someone for that long, you learn about how they think and how to keep them happy. It's one of those things, I guess. You just learn to live with each other, forgive the small things, and either deal with or sublimate the bigger ones," Piper explained as her phone rang. "Speak of the devil. Hey, Spence. What's up?"
"We're going to need some information, and I figured I'd call you, since Garcia's got to be right there with you," Reid reasoned from the plane. "She usually spends the first ten or fifteen minutes in your office while you check your email and wait for the coffee maker."
Garcia laughed, thinking that he was right. "Well, you've got me, Boy Wonder. What do you need?"
"Any more information you can get on the security guard and the couple that were killed," Reid told her. "Travel records, anyone they had in common, traffic tickets, dig up whatever you can on these people."
"Baby girl, we're thinking it could turn into a spree. We need anything you can get us," Morgan said from in the background.
"You're on speaker, by the way," Reid added.
"Gotcha, Chocolate Thunder," she smiled, heading for the door, "I'll call you back in a bit."
"Be careful, all of you," Piper warned as she hung up. Looking to Garcia, she told her, "I'd look into the places they lived and worked. I'm sure there's got to be a connection. The couple liked expensive things, from what you've told me about their credit history. And the security guard's building was full of bankers and attorneys. There's got to be some sort of connection."
"I'm on it," Garcia nodded, moving across the hall to start working.
Piper went through her email, sorting things out as she went. She received dozens of requests every day that she had to go through and decide what to pass along to the team, and dozens of forwarded case files from other departments, asking if she could take a look at them. Most of the time, she would look at them herself and send back a rough profile, many of which helped. Besides, the ten minutes it took her to read through the file, do a bit of research, and reply to the other department saved a lot of the team's time and kept the rest of the Bureau happy. Then there were all the files on her desk to go through, which had been shipped in from lots of places. Sometimes she would even find files in her mailbox, things others had decided to pass on to the BAU that were too difficult or too strange for anyone else.
She worked through lunch, finally grabbing a bite to eat around 2 PM. She could hear Garcia's phone ringing from across the hall every hour or two, one of her snappy hellos and a flurry of information coming over the phone. It was almost dinner time when Garcia appeared in the doorway of Piper's office, asking, "Do you want to go to that Mexican place outside of the city? And what do you know about Amelia Porter?"
"Amelia Porter, that woman who helped her boyfriend rape and murder his sister while she was high? She disappeared into the woods. Her last known whereabouts are somewhere in Canada," Piper said, standing up and grabbing her purse as she logged out of her computer. "Does she have something to do with the case?"
"She has everything to do with the case," Garcia filled her in as they headed for the elevator. "Her old lover is the one who killed those people, and he's kidnapped his sister's kids. Well, he's still got one of them."
"He's planning on killing her?" They swiped their cards to get into the parking garage, looking around for Piper's car.
"That's what the team's thinking." Garcia climbed into the passenger's seat, Piper handing her her purse as she buckled her seatbelt. "They're trying to track them across the desert."
Reid called that night, while Piper was getting ready for bed. "Hey, you. When are oyu coming back home?"
"We're flying out in the morning. We managed to get our guy before he killed anyone else, even if one of the kids did get shot. You heard about that, right?"
"Yeah, Kate told me when she called earlier." Piper was checked that she had locked all of the doors, heading back upstairs to make sure Nate was sleeping. There was a light on in his room, Piper finding him poring over a book in his bed. "Excuse me, Mister, you need to put that book away."
"Moooom."
"Moooom nothing," she smiled, Reid laughing on the other end of the call. "You need to get to sleep, Nate. You've got to be up for school in the morning. I know it's a good book. I read it myself, when I was your age. But you need to rest. Want to say goodnight to your day while I check on Sophie?"
She let Nate talk to Reid while she went to look in on her daughter, seeing that she was sleeping soundly. When she came back, she took her phone, holding it to her chest for a moment while she said goodnight to Nate, telling him that he needed to get some rest. She turned off the lights, closing the door and talking to Reid as she went into their room. "Will invited us over for dinner," she told him, plugging in the strand of lights that they always kept on at night. "When you and JJ get back. I think he's trying to keep her distracted. It's almost the anniversary of her kidnapping, and he doesn't want her to think of it, or of anything she went through in Afghanistan."
"You know, I'm so thankful that… well, it sounds awful to say, but I'm thankful that you don't remember any of what happened to you. I mean, being shot is one thing, but being kidnapped and tortured is a completely different animal."
Piper looked around, seeing the soft glow of the string of lights that they had hung up, the furniture that they had bought together, the side of the bed that Reid occupied when he was home. The pile of books that was always on the nightstand. The baby monitor that had been set up on top of it, the spot Reid would always set his glasses when they went to bed. All of that, the entire life they had built together, based on half-truths. There were things she could never tell him - how she was so afraid that Hotch and Rossi would show up on her doorstep one day, shaking their heads. It would more realistically be a phone call, or another agent showing up at the door with a piece of paper for her to read, but it would kill her all the same. How she would wake up with her old scars burning, dreaming about being shot. How she remembered flashes of what it had been like in that cellar, how she remembered everything up to certain points, and then she would wake up in a different place. How the drug had slowly worn off the last time, how she had realized that she was about to try to kill the rest of the team. How she remembered Reid talking her down, bringing her back to reality as the hold of the drugs took off. Every time she thought of things like that, of every similar situation she had been in, all of the relative safety of her life crumbled in on itself, her world whirling out of control. But she could never tell him. He'd been through so much himself. "Piper?"
"Yeah, sorry. I - Chester just tried to jump up here," she said, "and you know he can't reach the bed, no matter how hard he tries."
"You sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine, Spence. Just tired."
"Okay. I should probably let you sleep, then. Goodnight, Pipes. I love you."
"I love you too, Spence." She hung up, plugging her phone in and pausing, smiling slightly at the thought of him coming home, setting his go-bag down by the door and giving her a hug. Nate and Chester running up, Reid picking his son up and asking how things had been. Or he'd take Sophia from Piper, carrying her around with him as he unpacked, putting things into the washing machine and grabbing a cup of coffee or something to eat. They'd spend forever talking about the case in bed, falling asleep together. Piper would always smile, pulling Reid closer to her and hoping that she wouldn't have to let go of him any time soon. But for now, all she could do was think of him, of having him back soon.
