I don't own Criminal Minds or any characters. I own only the splatter of words and Haley. ALSO: I do not own the Canterbury Tales, and I got the Middle English version from the Project Gutenberg website. Also note-the excerpt is Middle English, which has no spelling rules (which is what makes it Middle English.) It's not misspelled. It's Middle English. Capische?

"What is it?" Haley asked. Prentiss had left in one of the BAU vans, and he'd been left alone with someone that, despite her estimated IQ of 140, had been heavily traumatized, needed socialization, and would raise Cain if she was ever in an uncomfortable situation and he wasn't right there to comfort her, maybe because, oh, she trusted him EXCLUSIVELY.

Oh, and he had to care for her at least till she was 18.

Reality was beginning to sink in just an eensy bit.

"What happened?" she asked again.

"It's not being released yet." Reid set his jaw determinedly, not willing to share the roost. No; she was under his care, and thus, the roost was his. It had always been his, and he would go to lengths to ensure that it remained his. Personal-or company-business had to remain as such; he simply had to draw the line early on so Haley would respect it.

"Well, at least, can you tell me why you came to the neighborhood tonight? From the way those two men yelled at you, they didn't seem too happy. Like they hadn't authorized any of it or something like that." Haley had picked up on the subtle "I'm-not-saying" cues and scrambled deperately to get a foot in the door.

"Can we just leave it at the 'something like that'?" Reid asked.

Haley hoped to take advantage of the distraction that driving posed. "Will you tell me later if I drop it now?"

"Of course", Reid replied, right hand sliding off the steering wheel to take the tense teen's left hand. He was struck by the ease he'd just exhibited in slipping into therapy mode with her, and that he'd also just given up the solitude of his roost, perhaps for a long time.

Maybe you couldn't be objective about everything. He moved his hand back to the wheel.

"Any interesting new papers you've been writing?" Thank God; she was changing the subject.

"Mostly mathematics papers. Now, I discovered an interesting behavior that triangles exhibit when the sine, cosine, and tangent are all moved one side to the right; it doesn't apply to the left; it's worked on all possible triangle proportions insofar…"

Reid rambled on, and Haley let him go, curling up and resting her head on the console, turning a few vents her way and turning the car's heat on. His rambling was the Reid trademark, and she felt safer when he rambled anyway. It was easiest to be with an innocent compulsive intellectual at a 47 IQ point advantage over her to learn from. It was either be with and learn from Reid, or be with a sadist and learn everything that way.

"…and so would be a valuable theorem for usage in nearly all practical applications." He looked at her, and she nodded, raising an eyebrow.

"I can't top that. I couldn't even follow half of it", she admitted simply, flicking her eyes up to note his facial expression, fearing disappointment would flash across. She always felt that her mind was too quick amongst the general populace and too slow around Reid.

"You'll learn", he said, gaze remaining ahead, any thoughts he had on her simplicity concealed safely inside his head. "You have an interesting way of learning; I would imagine it's how you're able to keep up with me sometimes. In fact, if you're comfortable with it, I'd like to perform some tests on you…brain scans, learning experiments, and memory work, those types of things. They wouldn't hurt unless you consent to the painful tests."

So he approves of me after all, she thought. "Sure; it's worth a try, right?" He was a profiler. Of course he would want to know how she learned. She would describe her learning style as "mixed", but wasn't sure if he'd accept the explanation without clear, measurable data.

"Then you just might be the subject of another paper." Reid was hoping that this would get her to ask and wonder, but by his figuring she'd either dismissed it or was falling asleep.

Haley said nothing in reply; she was beginning to drowse in the warm air.

"Come on, stay up." Reid ruffled her hair a little and gave her a few pats on her shoulder. "You got hit in the face. It's best for you to stay up. You might have head trauma, and you need to stay up so you can be monitored."

"Hnnn.." she moaned, not caring that a bump in the road upset the hair on half her head, moving it down across her face like a veil.

"Stay up." Clearly, talking would get him nowhere. He poked his hand into her side.

"EEEEE!" she squealed, drawing back and batting his hand away with an air of mild playfulness. She shook her head back and forth to resituate her errant hair and rested her head on the console again.

"Stay up or I'm going to have to poke you again." Reid took a moment to try and catch her eye, succeeding in the two seconds he had to make eye contact before he had to pay attention to the dark, rough road once more.

"Doctor Reid?"

"You don't have to call me Doctor Reid any more. You can call me Reid, or if you eventually get comfortable calling me Spencer, you can address me by that." He didn't mention "dad" as a title. He could only imagine how painful a thing that would be for her.

"Yessir." Her response was automatic, as though she literally had no control over it.

"I'm not 'sir' either. Please, call me Reid at least. It feels awkward not to be called Reid. But what were you trying to say earlier?"

Curiosity had bested Haley, and she'd decided to ask a question that might have a very emotional answer. "What brought you into this?"

"I, um…", Reid trailed off, trying not to reconnect with the pain, but only with the facts. "My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. She's where I got my intelligence from. My father left when I was young. I lived with my mother. She raised me, and when I was 18, I committed her involuntarily to…" he trailed off again, choking up.

"I'm sorry", Haley apologized. "Don't say anything else. I won't put you through that. At least now I understand. I get it, trust me."

"Would you mind telling me your story now?" he asked her, basing his decision to ask the question on the same calculation Haley had performed, except with the addition of the added pressure to reciprocate that he'd generated by opening up to her in the first place. "I know you were afraid to tell me before because you were vulnerable and you were sure I would leave you, which happened, but it won't happen again. Have you ever heard me to make a statement about my intentions that was untrue?"

"No, you haven't", she admitted, nesting her forearms on the console and leaning her head on his shoulder. His had been the only shoulder she'd ever been offered to cry on, and she was glad to have it back. "My parents. I don't know who they are. They left me for dead outside a fire station. The truck stopped before it ran me over…" It was her turn to choke up.

"Shh, shh, quiet, relax", Reid soothed. "Don't get in over your head just because I ask. This can wait if it makes you uncomfortable-"

"No", she cut him off firmly. "You need to know." Her tone became more factual than emotional. It was stoic, staccato, and stubborn. "Anyhow, the firetruck stopped before it ran me over, and I grew up in the foster system. Every ten homes or so, I'd meet someone halfway decent to me, and I would push them away so they'd give me up. I guess the pain was the only constant thing I was used to, and I was-I still can be-cold and nasty. I used to use it as a defense all the time. A lot of the houses were all the same. It was one after another, and it didn't matter if there were five kids there or fifty; they treated us all the same.

"Things changed when I was in one of the state homes and they made me go to therapy." Her one of voice changed, becoming more emotional, more connected with reality, as if she had detached from the worst of her reality and was aware that she could re-connect; that the pain was over now. "At first, I hated you. I didn't know what you had to contribute and you seemed to have no practical experience with a good deal of what I'd been through. I was afraid of you, too. You scared me, because in my experience, it's always the wiry ones that are more vicious, like they have to make up for their lack of imposing qualities. But then something happened. Maybe it was just that you were willing to sit there and wait for me. It was nice. I wasn't being forced. In fact, I'm sure that's what did it. The fact that you were bullied so badly came out eventually, and that helped me trust you more, too. Then I got adopted out, got yanked away from you, and went back into the cycle for a while, and then here you are. It's like God's got a plan", she said.

"You believe?" he asked her, suddenly.

Haley nodded, silent and meek-looking. There wasn't much she could say; she was young yet and not very spiritually mature.

"So…um…we've both had pretty nasty childhoods", Reid said, scrambling desperately for something that wasn't so personal to talk about. "Anything you want to know…maybe about what a normal childhood should be? What yours should have been? I know you always asked about it. I had some answers, but I wasn't sure you wanted to hear them."

"Is it true about the young years, where the parent supposedly reads the child to sleep?" Haley was clearly wondering, and her deep sapphire eyes begged for an answer. Her angular complexion rounded more softly with her innocent expression, and Reid was struck with the innocence of inexperience, and also the sadness that a fourteen year old girl wouldn't know about something as simple as a bedtime story.

"Yes, it's true. My mother actually was one of the best at this. It's a bit extreme, and typically the behavior ceases between five and seven years of age, but my mother was reading me to sleep right up until the day I committed her."

"What's it like?" she asked, eyes now brimming with curiosity and wonder, face still set in that innocent expression.

The rules, though useful, need to be discarded just this once, he thought, noting that his logic was unsound but going with his impulses anyway. "Why don't you lay your head down on the console again? Relax."

"Is this one of those therapeutic trust exercises again?" She wasn't a fan, and her tone displayed that fact clearly, but this time, as the road smoothed out with a 90 degree right turn, she seemed willing to comply, even if only to satisfy her curiosity.

"It's similar. Trust me when I say you want to do this. You're curious to know what a bedtime story is like, right?"

She lay her head down and relaxed as suggested, eyes half-shut and legs folded on the passenger seat.

"What story do you want to hear?" It was a question his mother had asked him every night, and he unconsciously imitated her, softening his typically-academic tone and lowering his volume, producing what he hoped would be a soothing effect.

"I don't know", she replied, opening her eyes fully to gaze at the stars through the windshield. "Whatever you were hearing at this age, I guess."

"How does one of the Canterbury Tales sound? It's classic-"

"-fifteenth century literature", she finished for him. "How about the Knight's Tale? Is that a typical story? Lots of imagery, storybook ending and all that?"

"Except for the part where battle-winning knight dies, but I know what you're getting at. If you look at it in a classical sense, I suppose you could label it as storybook." With this, the topic shifted from a mere bedtime story to academia, and the tones of both speakers reflected that fact.

"That's the sense I look at a lot of things in", Haley replied, dropping the academia and drifting again to her emotions. "It helps me cope with a lot of the things I've been through, to know that people in history considered the events normal." Her sweet innocence, for a moment, was stripped away, but it returned in force, again lending a soft lilt to her voice, a slight childlike semblance to her movements and face. She looked at Reid through starry eyes again. "Can you start telling me the story now?"

Her head on the console, and his hand on the wheel, he began to recite line after line of Middle English poetry in the drowsily warm car, enunciating carefully, conveying emotion skillfully, and crafting a story in vivid detail, remaining true to Chaucer's original words, very much reminiscent of the way his mother had once read to him:

"Whylom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duk that highte Theseus;
Of Athenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour,
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne;
What with his wisdom and his chivalrye,
He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whylom was y-cleped Scithia;
And weddede the quene Ipolita,
And broghte hir hoom with him in his contree
With muchel glorie and greet solempnitee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
And thus with victorie and with melodye
Lete I this noble duk to Athenes ryde,
And al his hoost, in armes, him bisyde..."

By the time the crime scene had been reached an hour later, Haley was asleep, perhaps more relaxed than she'd ever been since she could remember. Reluctant to wake her, Reid locked her in the car, leaving a note explaining where he was and instructions to stay in the car. He requested that an officer keep a special eye on the vehicle, and as far as he saw, this was obeyed as he walked off to the backyard where the mass grave was.