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About this one shot, the title comes from a Snow Patrol song.

You Could Be Happy

Reid and Emily

Unhappy people want the whole world to be unhappy with them. Happy people just want to make everyone else smile.

He's been both. Today he is definitively more of one than the other. The category he falls into surprises him as much as how he got there.

Things can never go back to the way they were before Ian Doyle came into their lives, Dr. Spencer Reid knows this to be an undeniable fact as true as the laws of gravity and motion. Reid now knows just how much he can hate a person, even a dead person.

He can hate to a level so deep and demented that it scares him. To hate someone that much is powerful. To feel that deeply, changes a man at his core.

Everything in the last year has changed this man until he feels like he barely resemblances who he used to be. Not just Ian Doyle. Emily played a big part in changing Reid too. But he can't blame it all on her. It's everything- Hotch, JJ, Morgan, Garcia, his mother, all these secret keepers who do it for his own good, the headaches, the lies and betrayals, the constant stream of ever worsening unsubs, the people he have met, the lessons he has learned about himself and this world.

It's easy to break a heart, easy also to shatter any semblance of a peaceful life. In a blink of an eye it could happen. But it's exponentially harder to heal a heart or piece back together a shattered life- if it can be done at all.

Sometimes a person simply can not be salvaged. Sometimes when a man breaks, he breaks for good. When he shatters, he shatters forever. There have been times that Reid thought that would turn out to be his fate and the fate of their friendship.

Now he isn't so sure of anything anymore because he's here with her on a sunny day in a park surrounded by happy people, kicking a soccer ball around, laughing, trying...and he can almost forgot for a second that he ever hated her at all, ever was broken, ever was shattered.

He can think about the future and always feeling like this.

As he shows Declan how soccer uses science, Emily stares at him with that baffled stare of hers- like he isn't quite human. By now he's learned to be flattered by it instead of offended.

When it's time to take Declan home they walk him a couple blocks to his house and he hugs her as they say good bye. Considering his parents, the childhood he has had, the scars he carries, he comes across as a loving kid who wants most of all to know that Emily won't disappear on him another time. His mother, his father, his nanny, they all went away.

Emily even went away for months. Now that she is back home she has been trying for the last six months to reassure Declan that she won't do that to him ever again.

This is the first time that Emily has talked Reid into going to hang out with her when she sees Declan. Not that it took much talking into at all.

They have been spending a lot more time together in the last couple of months.

He's had his moments when he hasn't wanted to forgive her, trust her again, risk getting close but every day the pain slips further away and he starts to let himself feel his love for her again. The love he used to want to surgically remove from himself if only such a procedure existed.

As they get into her SUV she tells Reid "You're so good with him. You should have your own kids someday."

"You've told me that thirty one times in the five years, five months and nineteen days you have known me."

"What? No I haven't. You're exaggerating."

"Morgan is an exaggerator. I'm quite literal and my memory rarely fails me so I assure you that it has been thirty one times."

"I guess I just think you'd make a great dad."

Casting one last glance at the house, Emily starts the vehicle and pulls out of the driveway. After a few moments of driving Reid tells her "Thank you for today. It meant a lot to me."

"Aw, you don't have to thank me. It should be the other way around...It meant a lot to me too."

They drive in silence for several minutes until Reid decides that life is not meant to be lived being safe. It's meant to be lived being slightly nervous that you're going to lose everything wonderful you have but not letting that stop you from having and enjoying, as much as possible, those wonderful things, people, times that you share.

"You know," he tells her "there is one way that you could finally find out if I'd make a the kind of father you think that I would. Solve your hypothesis."

The look he gives her tells her what he is getting at and her eyes widen in shock before she warns "Don't make me crash this car."

They both know there is something there between them. But they skirt around it always. Reid is sick of being the kind of man who skirts around things.

"You would make a good mom, Emily."

Neither of them want something fleeting- just a fling to get the other one out of their systems. Neither of them can handling losing again. They need a win. They need something steady. Something that thrusts them into the happy category for good instead of just for a few hours in a park with an orphan boy who needs them as much as they need him.

Emily argues with Reid, in a kind of defeated tone, "It's too late for me now."

"You're asking the wrong question. You're asking Have I waited too long? That question means your attention is focused on your past. What you should be asking is What do I want for my future and how am I going to get it? Our pasts can eat us alive, metaphorically speaking, if we allow them too but our future...our future, Emily...it can be anything we want it to be. But we only get somewhere closer to there once we stop pretending that what is between us doesn't mean what we both know it means."

She is staring at him so much she is barely glancing back at the road and Reid thinks she just might get them both killed- or at least gravelly injured- in a car accident but he can't say that because if he changes the subject now, when they are right on the edge of getting somewhere, they may never get back to this again. They are both too good at staying in their own safe, small worlds day after lonely day, night after sleepless night.

He's sick of feeling so much for her but not saying it. Sick of her staring at him like he's everything she wants but not touching him. Sick of her comments about the future he should have when he knows he doesn't want a future with anyone else but her.

Suddenly she jerks the car over to the shoulder of the road, turns to him and says "You almost just got us killed!"

"You're driving so if anyone almost got us killed, then it was you," he says in his teasing, sensible tone.

"I'm not the one being distracting."

"Have you looked in the mirror lately?"

She stares at him for a moment and then a small smile curves her lips. "Geez, give a woman some warning next time you decide to pour your heart out."

"That wasn't pouring my heart out. If I pour my heart out, trust me, you'll be left in tears because my heart is filled with you, Emily."

When she raises her hands in front of her mouth, he knows that is a good sign for a woman, but then she starts to sob, in the most heart breaking way, and Dr. Spencer Reid sees his chances at happiness...and babies...and sharing lazy Sunday mornings barely dressed with Emily...all slipping away from him.

Moving close to her, he wraps her in his arms. "You think you can't have love but I think you can. Between the two of us who is right more often?"

She sniffles. By now her face is a mess, her eyes are red, her nose is running. Yet she's still beautiful to him and he can barely keep his eyes from her lips, barely stop himself from focusing on how good she feels in his arms.

"Its not that, you idiot-"

"Idiot. What idiot do you know with an 187 IQ?"

"You can still be an idiot and you are if you think these are anything but happy tears."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

Gently he cups her face and brushes his lips over hers, forgiving her that last little bit that he held back before...forgiving her for hurting his heart...thanking her for filling his heart...showing her that she was right to want him and their future would be happy, despite living so close to the ugly side of humanity each day.

They saw enough hate, death, pain and heartbreak at work.

At home they needed peace, serenity, love and as many dreams as possible coming true. They both have been alone way too long. As Reid kisses Emily he realizes that happiness is a choice and he is choosing happiness as he chooses her.

It is the easiest choice he ever made but it has been the hardest road to get there. And, he thinks, that makes this moment even sweeter because just a year ago he thought that the only way he could see Emily again was at a cemetery.

Now she's a step closer to being the mother of his child and that feels a lot more right than thinking Ian Doyle beat Dr. Spencer Reid. Not this time. Not ever.

Bullies are unhappy people who want to make others just as unhappy. Reid will never let a bully ruin his life, no matter how many come along and try. As long as Reid has Emily giving him her baffled looks that say "You amaze me so much," he knows he has everything he needs to be happy.

Everything he needs starts and ends with Emily.

THE END