Time to sleep now;
Time to sink way into the blue, dear.
He hadn't seen Elle in over a week. They'd returned from Washington with decidedly mixed feelings about the case: they'd caught the UNSUB, but only five bodies had been recovered, and Elle Greenaway's wasn't one of them. They also didn't know for sure if seven were Novak's actual victim count, as the man still remained cagey about it. Of course they were all glad he was off the street (and out of the parks), but they couldn't shake a lingering sense of things left undone.
He still didn't understand what Elle had meant when she'd said she'd come to help him find himself. He tried to put it out of his mind; it was a cryptic, schmaltzy thing for her to have said, and he thought she'd done it only to annoy him. Spencer Reid knew perfectly well who he was: FBI agent, child prodigy, Star Trek fan, nerd incarnate—though the latter had never bothered him as much as it seemed to bother other people.
Reid, in an attempt to find a bit of closure for both Elle and the team, had planned a small memorial for their former colleague. It wasn't much, just the team together at their favorite bar knocking back drinks and swapping stories about the woman they'd known so briefly. Stories about Elle had segued into stories about Gideon, and those had segued into Rossi regaling them with tales of the BAU's earliest days, when they'd occupied the "dungeon" at Quantico, and everyone had regarded profilers as either quacks or snake oil salesmen.
She'd been there, he had noted, watching them in wistful silence. He had wished she could sit down at the table with them, but he'd known she wouldn't have even if she were actually there in the flesh. She'd looked wispy, he had thought, a bit more like he'd always imagined a ghost would look. He had seen her smile when Hotch told Rossi and Prentiss about how she'd sometimes called Gideon "Dad," and how Gideon had hated it. He had watched her brush her fingers across her cheek as JJ stood to make a toast; searching for tears, he'd thought, or wiping away the ones that should have been there.
That was the last time he saw her. He was a bit disappointed by the cliché of it all: she'd haunted him, they'd found her killer, held a memorial for her…and now she'd found closure and moved on. He shouldn't miss her; it was ridiculous to do so. How often had he missed her in the years since she'd left the BAU? Hardly at all, and it made him feel like a hypocrite.
These were the things he pondered as he sat alone in his dark apartment. Part of him wished for Dilaudid, but it was a dim, distant pulse of want, and not enough to prompt him to call his sponsor or seek out a meeting. What would he say, anyway? "My former colleague has been haunting me for the past six weeks, but now she seems to be gone. It's weird, but I kinda miss her. What step does that fall under?"
He opted instead to take a hit from the demitasse cup warming his hand. Garcia and Prentiss had given him a fancy espresso machine for his last birthday, and at first he'd found the thing confounding and frightening; he'd used it to store stacks of bills and other clutter. One night, after an especially long and grueling case, he'd unearthed it determined to decode its buttons, levers and switches. He still refused to steam milk (the first try had been a disaster he didn't care to repeat), but he did enjoy the dense, bittersweet shots of espresso it dispensed into the tiny cups JJ had given him as a companion gift.
"Why is it always so dark in here?"
Her sudden appearance, as though he'd conjured her, made him start in surprise and nearly spill his small cup of coffee. "Why do you insist on doing that? Does it give you some sort of ghostly thrill to scare the pants off me?"
She smirked, the expression barely perceptible in the faint light. "Next time I'll rattle my chains on the way in. But if I'm disturbing your quiet contemplations, Dr. Reid—"
"No," he interrupted hastily, "don't go. I thought you weren't coming back." He reached out and pulled the cord on a nearby lamp. Golden light illuminated chest high stacks of books, knee high stacks of VHS tapes (Morgan despaired of ever converting him to DVDs; he also had an aversion to both CDs and MP3s and kept his music on vinyl or cassette), and various scattered piles of papers, files and old mail.
The cracked vinyl sofa didn't creak as Elle shifted her weight, and he couldn't feel her movement the way he had been able to before. "I almost didn't. I figured we'd…said what we had to say, and I should just go."
"So what happened?"
She hitched a shoulder. "I changed my mind. You know, you should really think about hiring a maid."
"There's a system. A maid would just mess it up."
She rose with a slight sigh and began circling the room. No papers fluttered as she passed, and unlike with the pile of newspapers in his bedroom, none of the stacks of books seemed to be in danger of toppling. She stopped at a plant, a spider plant in a blue pot, and tugged at one of the brown leaves. "Poor thing. It's as dead as I am."
"I kept forgetting to water it," he admitted. "And then with all the traveling I do…." He trailed off with a guilty little quirk of his lips. "I should throw it out, I guess."
"That memorial thing was nice," she said after a few moments' silence.
"It was nothing."
"No, it wasn't. It was nice. I didn't realize any of you even thought about me anymore."
He opened his mouth but found nothing to say. Feeling foolish, he closed it again.
"Prentiss seems like a good agent. And Rossi; I've read his books. You guys are all really good together."
"I…Elle…why are you here?" It came out ruder than he intended, but he was growing weary of these meandering, non sequitur filled conversations.
She turned to him; she looked a little lost. "To say goodbye, I guess. But I don't really want to. I'd rather just go. We don't really need each other anymore, and…." Suddenly she smiled. "I'm glad you found him. He was already hunting someone else, and it was really pissing me off."
"Why do you say that?"
"Um? Because he's a killer, and I—"
"No," he said with a wave of his hand, "not that part. Why do you say we don't need each other anymore?"
"Oh…well. You found him. He's going to jail and all that good stuff."
"Right, OK, that's why you don't need me anymore, but…maybe I do still need you. Maybe…?" He turned the cup around and around in his hand, swirling the dark liquid inside and avoiding her steady gaze.
Her smile deepened to reveal the dimple in her cheek. "You never needed me, Reid. That's the point. Besides," she said, nodding toward the door, "you have them."