"A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth."
-Robert Frost, A Question
When Reid got off the plane, he hailed a cab and went straight home to his apartment. When he got to his apartment, he immediately took a shower to erase the exactly 68 hours, 42 minutes, and 13.23 seconds of exploring the apparent dark underbelly of Midwestern suburbia and the exactly 5 hours, 27 minutes, and 38.7 seconds of travel time from his body.
He put on a clean outfit; he had arrived home midday on a weekend and wasn't tired despite the grueling case they had just closed. Then he scavenged his tiny kitchen and scrounged up a can of Spaghetti-O's he nuked in the microwave, idly wondering at the irony that he ate more like a child now, as a grown man with a full-time job, than he ever had during his actual childhood. He quickly threw together a stack of books to skim through while he ate and put on the TV to provide some white noise.
He had been sitting, eating, and reading for a good twenty minutes when he leaned over to switch books and jostled his bowl, spilling some of the lukewarm runny Spaghetti-O sauce onto his hand. He had barely glanced at the dripping rust-red liquid before a torrent of images marched neatly through his mind like a PowerPoint on fast-forward, each more brutal and visceral than the last.
The bowl fell with a shockingly dull thump onto the nubby industrial beige carpet, sauce and noodles exploding in an abstract spray with a flat wet splat.
He stared at the mess, and all he could see was red.
In less than a minute, Spencer had shoved on his shoes, savagely yanked his bag off the bed, and was out the door.
He walked with purpose but not direction, clutching the strap of his bag tighter and tighter until he could feel the gentler flesh of his palm giving way under the bite of his quick-cut nails. He squinted into the sun as much as possible, subconsciously hoping it would sear away the images branded onto the backs of his eyelids. He cursed, not for the first time, his eidetic memory and heretofore unknown artistic eye for detail. It was no gift when art becomes the beautiful colors on the bruised neck of a strangled corpse or the thoughtful composition of a staged crime scene.
He cursed, also not for the first time, his former addiction to Dilaudid. Spencer had always, not very poetically but very cynically, thought that being an addict isn't so bad, but being a recovering addict is. Because you will always remember how your addiction helped with the pain. And there is always pain.
And though you may forget the taste of a food, or the details of a person's face, you never forget the feelings attached. That's all memories are, anyway; a bunch of random dots of information with feelings drawing the lines in between.
And that's just if you don't have an eidetic memory.
Spencer eventually looked away from the sun, blinking away the glare but masochistically welcoming the burn, and realized that the brain he had just been cursing had navigated him to his favorite park in the area. It was small and hidden away amongst the concrete and buildings, but lush and green and peaceful.
His harsh march slowed to a leisurely amble down the paved path following the river which was little more than a trickle of water. He came to a small cleared-away patch of land set up with some picnic tables, benches, and chess tables. He sat down at one of the chessboards, letting the familiar sight of checkered squares fill his eyes and mind, letting the serene non-silence of the outdoors wash his ears of ghosting screams and gunshots.
After awhile, he felt his heartbeat and breathing regulate and he slowly shifted his bag up onto the board, relieving his shoulder of the burden. He flipped back the canvas flap and paused when he saw what was inside. He hadn't opened this bag since they had left on the case and had shockingly, nearly forgot what had transpired before.
He pulled out the library books and set them neatly on the chessboard before cracking open the cover of the topmost book. He withdrew the bookmark, rereading the message he would not and could not forget:
My IQ is 188.
New images filled his mind, ones of chestnut curls and chocolate eyes and flashing smirks. New sounds filled his ears, ones of bittersweet laughter and British accents.
He was smiling before reminded himself rather brutally that he never called her and she had probably given up on him, if she had ever given him a second thought to give up on. No way, his scathing inner voice informed coldly. She's beautiful and smart and available, and you're just some guy with too much brains and not enough brawn… or flexible hours. It's never worked out with anyone before, why would you kid yourself into thinking it would have worked out with her?
Still, he could not rid himself of her teasing voice calling him 'doctor'.
"Dr. Reid?"
His field agent reflexes kicked in faster than they ever had in the actual field, his head snapping up almost painfully to see the very object of his contemplation standing before him, and for one wild delirious second he actually wondered if she had appeared out of thin air.
Then he noticed her outfit of choice (consisting of some criminally tight leggings and a too-small t-shirt, and no stop looking at her body, you pervert), the well-used cross trainers, and the iPod strapped into a mesh-and-spandex armband. She was breathing hard and bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet before settling into stillness. Graceful fingers were currently plucking earbuds out of her ears and draping them over her shoulder, and those bright dark eyes were staring out of a flushed, slightly sweaty face right at him.
To his eternal shock, his mouth moved and coherent words came out, not the least bit high-pitched or stammered. "Miss Granger?"
Her lips curled into a smirk. "You remember me?"
All of his immediate composure had vanished and he was back to his regular awkward self. He swallowed, quirked a grin and jerked up his arm to hold up the bookmark. "Of-of course I do."
Her eyes flickered to the bookmark and the smirk widened and sweetened into an almost bashful smile. "Ah yes. My know-it-all braggery disguised as wit."
"Is it true?"
She blinked at him, caught off guard. "Is what true?"
Spencer gestured with the bookmark. "Do you have an IQ of 188?"
She flushed a little and bashful shifted to embarrassed. "At last testing." She confessed like a child caught misbehaving.
He shrugged. "Then it's not bragging. It's just the truth." She smiled, surprised and pleased, and he smiled back, continuing this conversational momentum with a quick remark of, "I don't know if you remember, but my IQ is only 187 -" here she snorted at his use of the world 'only', and Spencer was baffled by how such an undignified sound could be so endearing. " - so that makes you smarter than me." He wondered how to put his next thought and decided to just be blunt. "I don't think I've ever met someone smarter than me. It's… intimidating."
Her expression pinballed between disbelief and disgust and settled on comical. "Intimidating? Me?" And her tone was such that Reid thought of the way he described himself, all the while picturing in his head his scrawny 12 year old self with a bad haircut, fashion sense, and truly horrifying spectacles. He wondered if she too projected an awkward stage of youth onto her current self-image.
(It would be awhile before he learned how accurate that profile was.)
She seemed about to protest his labeling her as 'intimidating' more thoroughly, before her expression changed midsentence. She frowned thoughtfully. "I said before that I think we're rather alike. So if you're anything like me… you're probably used to people finding your intellect intimidating and even off-putting, which can in turn cause you to be intimidated by perfectly normal social situations." Reid was struck by her candidness and accuracy.
He responded, "Maybe it's more that we become intimidated and even put off by ourselves, and therefore become uncomfortable in those normal situations because we've realized how abnormal we are."
Her frown was on its way to becoming a smile, pausing in a poignantly vulnerable moment between the two. "Now who's smarter, doctor?" She said softly.
Just like their first encounter, they found themselves in a moment of just looking at each other. Reid wondered if it was normal for two people to have such oddly intimate moments when they first met without finding it odd, before realizing he had just verbally accepted their abnormality. He decided that he had just never met anyone like Hermione Granger, even himself, and he wouldn't want her to be more normal for anything in the world.
The moment ended when the petite librarian strode forward and gracelessly dropped onto the seat opposite him. "So, doctor, what brings you to this neck of the woods?" She said, grinning at her pun referencing the scenery while he rolled his eyes playfully for the same reason. Then her question registered, and those images he had battled away came surging back to the surface, with claws and teeth. He visibly winced, and her eyes narrowed. Reid didn't know why that was unsettling until he realized he probably had never been profiled by someone outside the team. He was used to all of them reading him, but not this strange beautiful creature. He didn't want her to see inside him. He didn't want to pollute the breath of fresh air she was to him with his grisly existence.
He cleared his throat and looked away. "Just… a lot on my mind."
He glanced back at her. She looked almost… disappointed, which confused and enthralled him, but also understanding. He didn't remember the last time he had seen such real and true understanding that wasn't unbalanced by pity or sympathy or pain, and the preciousness of such a gift robbed him of his breath. He wondered why he wondered so much with her, but then, he supposed it was strange to be confronted everything you never knew you wanted existing in one person.
"I'll bet." She said. "I know what that's like." And he knew she did. They shared another time-suspending moment of equal empathy, before she broke the moment again with her resilient buoyancy. Her chin lifted and her shoulders straightened with resolve. "I also know that you can't rid your mind of what's on it, but you can distract it for a little while."
He lifted his eyebrows. "I don't think that's what most therapists would recommend."
She snorted again, and he found himself grinning at the sound. "Most therapists - not all, but most - are people who are trained to give advice to people going through things they could never fathom experiencing. A rather poor system I believe." She sniffed, before admitting. "Then again, sometimes you do need someone who can be reasonably objective, experience-wise." Reid acquiesced this with a nod. She wrinkled her nose. "And on the other side of it, support groups can be rather droll as well. Too many people going through the same thing together can have a tendency to wallow."
"'And when you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.'" Reid quoted.
"Friedrich Nietzsche." Hermione said immediately. "Appropriate, if a bit melodramatic for the point I was making." She smirked at him again. "Are you testing me, doctor?"
"I thought the point you were making was that therapy is pointless." Reid said, ignoring her - dare he say it, flirtatious question.
Hermione shook her head, curly ponytail bouncing. "Not at all. I believe therapy can be extremely beneficial and oftentimes needed, if you can find the right kind. and that is my point, that every person is going through individual combinations of experience and emotions and there are too few broad categories for such complexities such as the human mind. To generalize is to trivialize, which renders the therapy pointless at least and dangerous at most."
"And you think the therapy I need right now is distraction." Reid clarified.
She looked at him seriously but not unkindly. "Not even warriors fight battles every second of the day. The most tried and true healing has always been rest, and you cannot rest until you stop thinking about whatever is causing your torment."
"You never asked me what that was." Reid said, feeling the truth of the word 'torment' and hating it but resigning himself to it.
She pressed her lips together, taking on that look of contemplation that he was quickly growing attached to. There was someone undeniably attractive about watching her think. "The polite and correct answer to that is that it's none of my business, but to be brutally honest and maybe a bit insensitive, I've had enough torment in my life..."
Reid was briefly, overwhelmingly guilty in the face of the horrors he dealt with every day, then she continued:
"...that I believe that we should cherish the rare moments of peace and happiness we get. There will always be more torment to be had, and more therapy to be scheduled, but for now, on this beautiful day, in a beautiful park, with good company to boot..." she said with another one of those playful winks he never thought he'd see again, before grinning widely, "Let's play chess."
"Chess?" He repeated dumbly, looking at the very empty chessboard between them. "We don't have any pieces."
She looked positively mischievous, "We don't need them." She gazed at him steadily, a fiery spark far too intense for mere competition illuminating the depths of her eyes. "Pawn to E5."
Reid's brain immediately graphed the chessboard, a million strategies forming in his mind. He smirked at her. "You really think you can win against me?"
"We've both probably won enough chess games to have the opinion that the concept of winning is irrelevant and frankly boring in the face of a good challenge." She leaned forward, a fierce gleam in her eye stealing his breath and giving it back all at once. She grinned wickedly.
"Let's have fun."
"She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together." -J. D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew
Author's note: Okay, then, let's see where we can go with this…