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A/n thanks everyone for all your support of this story. Here's the next chapter.
Lessons Learned
Thanksgiving is next week and I got my yearly call from Aunt Gina begging me to come home. I once again told her that it depended on work. She really wants to meet Spence and mother him. I made the mistake of telling her about his mother and her disease. So now she wants to cook him a big meal and subject him to all my cousins. There's a part of me that would like to take him to see them, just to see how he would react to all of the attention. But, even if he was ready to meet the family, he can't go this year. He already has plans to go see his mother.
I asked him if I could go with him and he said no. He said that bringing new people into his mother's life wasn't a good thing for her. She needed things to be the same and as normal as possible. I sort of met her at work, but Spence said she still thinks of team as some sort of Knights of the Round Table. Spence says that introducing me as his girlfriend would be too much for her. I tried not to feel bad, but I couldn't help it. Not for me but for him, I can't imagine how it must hurt him to have her in the institution and not be able to share his life and the people he loves with her.
At least we have each other and he's been much happier in the last weeks we've been going out. I'm so happy to see him more at ease with life. He's much more comfortable with our relationship. In fact, he's a bit too comfortable in that he teases me all the time about this journal. He can laugh all he wants to, I don't care. He better watch out, one of these days I'll find blackmail material and then he'll be sorry.
We have a new agent on the team. Her name is Emily Prentiss. Her abilities turned out very useful with the case we got. The DEA raided a home and found a dispersal device for some kind of bio-chemical weapon. Homeland Security called me and I got the team together with a message we intercepted in Arabic. Emily surprised us all with her translation of the text. She said she'd grown up in several different middle-eastern countries. Her mother is an Ambassador.
We traced the note to a detainee in Guantanamo Bay named Jind Allah. Hotch sent Gideon, Spence and Prentiss down there to talk to him as the interrogators there hadn't been able to get anything out of him. I was surprised at how much I didn't want Spence going down there. We talked for a brief moment before they all left and he assured me that he would be okay. I reminded him that trouble always finds him. He argued that nothing really bad had ever happened to him on the job and it wasn't likely to anytime soon. So I put on a happy face and said goodbye. It turned out that Guantanamo Bay was safer than Virginia, but that's for later.
So Spence and Emily helped Gideon by watching for verbal and non verbal clues during the interview. Gideon was making some progress with Allah when Garcia got another message about "the wedding," which was code for whatever attack they had planned. It turned out to be anthrax. We found another safe house for the cell, but when the guys got there, there was nothing to find. Thank God for Spence noticing the change in his body language when Gideon told him they didn't find anything. It was a trap and the building exploded, but not before Hotch and Morgan got out of the building. Unfortunately, a friend of Morgan's on the DEA was killed. Garcia was very upset and crying till she got through to Morgan on his cell. I wish he could see how she cares for him and return her feelings, but I don't think it'll ever happen.
We finally tricked Allah into giving the location of the attack, the big new mall in Mclean Va. The guys were able to stop it and get the remainder of the cell but it was terrifying for awhile.
Spence told me all about the trip to Gitmo when he got back. I had to hear a play by play accounting which was both annoying and cute at the same time. I'm just glad he wasn't with the guys when that trailer exploded. It was funny how upset he was by the "Gitmo Twist." He whined about how he'd been playing chess with Gideon and how he was winning finally when the tilting of the plane wrecked the game. For a genius, he's so damn competitive. I wonder if he was winning. I doubt it, but I decided to keep my doubts to myself. Maybe I'll ask Emily, I bet she was paying attention.
He seems to be pretty impressed with Emily and her abilities. So I had to tease him about her by making the comment that she's very beautiful and really smart. He got very red in the face but he says I'm the only one he notices. Still… I think someone has a bit of a crush. I don't care as long as he looks but doesn't touch. I think she thinks he's a little strange, but then we all reacted that way to him when we first met him.
Strange is good… especially when it comes to Spence.