Sorry I haven't written in ages, I have exams in a few weeks and a bunch of projects that are due soon.
Seaver sat across from Reid on the plane. They were coming back from a particularly creepy case that involved an unsub who tried to drown himself with a young woman who he believed to be his long dead step-daughter. Morgan was listening to music near the cockpit while Rossi and Hotch were playing a card game on the opposite end of the plane. Reid was fast asleep while Seaver was reading on her Kobo.
Or at least he appeared to be sleeping.
Seaver had broken her gaze away from the novel she was reading and looked up to see Reid with his eyes shut tight and a look on his face as if he were in some sort of pain. She leaned across the table between them and gently shook him awake. Reid's eyes fluttered open soon enough.
"What happened?" he asked and stifled a yawn.
"Sorry, it just looked like you weren't having the best of dreams I guess," Seaver replied as she leaned back into her seat and picked up her Kobo.
"Hmph," Reid sighed and was silent for a minute. "I've been feeling like that a lot lately, actually," he said, causing Seaver to look back up from her Kobo.
"Getting what?" she asked.
"Some…really odd dreams. I mean, they sort of come with the job, but these ones aren't nightmares, and they don't keep appearing over and over again. Instead, I just keep having a different one. Well, I haven't really had any recurring dreams for a couple of years. But the one I was having didn't even start after I got into the BAU. They had been going on before that even happened," he said. Seaver looked confused.
"Could you elaborate on that a little," she said.
Reid pondered for a few seconds, wondering where to begin.
"It all started when I was about four years old, I think. A boy named Riley Jenkins was murdered in the neighbourhood I grew up in. He wasn't even that much older than me. He was sexually abused and stabbed, and he was found behind a washing machine in the basement of his own home."
"Riley Jenkins. I think I remember studying that case. The unsub was killed by the boy's father, right?" Seaver said.
"Yup. But the story gets better. So afterwards, I start having these dreams. They come up again every once in a while. Then after I joined the BAU, they pop up more often. Then a few years went by and we had a case in Las Vegas, which is where I'm from, by the way," he added. Seaver simply nodded. She hadn't known this about Reid.
"Anyways," he continued. "So we had a case in Las Vegas that involved a boy who had been abducted and held for a week before he was found dead. A week after that, another boy had been taken. This seemed to trigger something in my memory, and I started having this same dream every night. It even happened when I fell asleep on the jet while we were on the way there. Luckily, we found the second boy alive within a couple of days. But then I had another dream the night after we found him while I was staying with my mom. This time there was a man holding Riley and putting him down behind that washing machine. Then he turned around…and it was my father."
Reid struggled with getting the last part out, not only because the Riley Jenkins case made him meet his father for the first time in seventeen years, but with Seaver's own history, he was afraid she might take it the wrong way.
"Oh," she said. "That sure adds a whole new dynamic to the story, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, it sure does," Reid replied.
"So, um, why was it so shocking that your father was in the dream if he didn't kill Riley? I mean, it's your father, that's one thing. But I see something else."
"Well…" Reid began slowly. "There's the fact that the day after I had that final dream, I saw my father for the first time in seventeen years."
"Seventeen years? You must have been…"
"Ten when he left my mom and me. Yeah," Reid said and stared into his lap.
There was then an awkward moment until Seaver nervously spoke up.
"That's almost how long it's been since my dad was arrested and I last saw him," she said. This was the first time she had told someone about this since she had spoken with Prentiss about it when she was consulting in that first case in New Mexico. Even then, she didn't get into specifics, except for the fact that she had kept the letters her father would occasionally write to her.
Reid looked up; there was sympathy and understanding in his eyes. God, of all the looks he could give me right now, he had to look like that, Seaver thought.
Of course, she had never seen him when he was at his most vulnerable.
"You never visited him?" he asked.
"No. He writes to me once in a while. I keep the letters, but I've never read them," Seaver replied. She was getting a whole lot of déjà vu signals from this, and she didn't like it a lot.
"Hmm," Reid said again and was silent for another minute. Seaver then turned back to her reading.
"What is that?" Reid then asked. Seaver already knew from the fact that he used folders while everyone else on the team had a tablet that he wasn't one to stay in tune with the latest technology.
"It's a Kobo. Basically, it's used to store a bunch of books onto so you don't have to carry the big hard copies everywhere."
"So what are you reading then?" Reid asked. He was feeling a little déjà vu as well, from back when he had asked Prentiss about the star puzzle she hadn't been able to put together after one case.
"Jane Austen," Seaver replied.
"I see. Pride and Prejudice?"
"Oh no, I had that one finished ages ago."
Reid pondered for a moment. This conversation was certainly turning out to be more comfortable than the previous one.
"Northanger Abbey?"
Seaver shook her head.
"Sense and Sensibility," Reid said defiantly.
"Nope."
"Hmm," Reid thought some more. "Emma?"
"Ding ding ding! You've just earned ten points!" Seaver joked.
"What's my prize?" Reid asked.
"To be decided," Seaver told him.
"Well, then I look forward to finding out," Reid chuckled, then got up to go and get some more sleep on the couch. "Good night Seaver, and don't wake me up until we've landed, will you?"
Seaver giggled.
"Have a nice sleep, Reid."