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Spencer Reid hates looking at old photographs of himself. He doesn’t take them. He doesn’t look at them. It always seemed pointless.
He has exactly four pictures of himself as a child — two simple headshots, a class photo, and a clipping from a local newspaper from when he won the national spelling competition.
(There used to be more, but he destroyed most of them in a fit of rage when he was sixteen.)
A name that no longer belongs to him is inscribed on the back of one of the photos. “ Katherine, age 7.”
The words are written in his mothers careful script.
The neat slanted writing belongs to the brilliant Dr. Diana Reid — the genius — the woman once considered top in her field.
It’s not the hand writing that belongs to Diana Reid in Bennington’s sanitarium — who calls him her daughter some days and her son other days, and sometimes, forgets she has a child completely.
It’s her handwriting from before things got really bad.
It’s the handwriting of the woman Spencer likes to remember. She sings to him as they spin around their little kitchen, and they are happy. In that moment, they truly are happy.
That’s the last year that they are though.
Spencer once read that there was an inside and an outside of every relationship and people only knew what the inside looked like if they were in it.
The outside circle of Katherine Reid was an effortless facade she kept in place. She was a strange, but mild-mannered, little girl who preferred books to other children. These are the things in her file.
Brilliant. Prodigy. Oddity.
All of that was true, but there is also the inside circle of Katherine Reid. A storm brews inside her brilliant mind and another one builds inside her house.
She does her best to keep the storm bottled away where it cannot hurt anyone, but there is something wrong with her mother, and her father is so very, very angry.
She has seen it in the way that her mother pulls inside herself and her father yells himself hoarse trying to break her out of it. She has seen the way they both look at her like there is something wrong with her.
Katherine wishes that she could forget the way they look at her and each other, but she does not know how.
She is nine when the glass shatters. Her father entangles one hand in her hair and wraps the other around her neck. Her mother screams and she would too if she could afford the oxygen it would take.
The glass bottle shatters. Her father leaves.
Katherine wishes that the pages of her books will swallow her up whole - wishes that she could disappear.
(Next time, she will not choose such a fragile vessel for her storm.)
By the time she gets into high school, Katherine is self-sufficient, and more than that, she is her mothers sole caretaker.
She knows that if anyone finds out about her mother, they will take her away, and so, she learns to take care of them both.
When she finds her mother with a knife to her wrists, she talks her mother into handing it to her, and from then on, she learns to keep the house clear of all sharps.
When her mother lays in bed for months at a time, she learns how to pay bills, and when she runs out of money, she works enough odd jobs to keep them from going under.
When she realizes that for all her yard work and babysitting, they still don’t have enough to pay the mortgage, she learns that tourists are generous to poor little girls on Vegas street corners, and she learns to stay away from areas where cops patrol.
When she lies and tells her manager that she’s seventeen, she learns the wonders of plausible deniability, and another waitress, Rita, teaches her the right places to aim for, if said manager got too close for comfort.
She learns to be survive in a world of grown-ups that don’t care about strange little girls with fathers that leave and mothers that aren’t rooted in reality.
During Katherine’s first two years of high school, her mother goes through a phase of thinking that aliens are listening into their conversations. More than once, Katherine comes home to find the house utterly destroyed and her mother sitting catatonic in the middle of the wreckage.
She does her best to fix the damage. She scrubs the purple stains, left by the jar of jam her mother threw, until the skin of her knuckles are cracked and raw. She cleans away shards of glass and torn fabric.
Still, the carpet remains stained and there are holes left in the wall that Katherine does not have the time or energy or money to fix. Despite all of her efforts, her mothers damage still tarnishes their home.
(Later, when his name is no longer Katherine, he will think that he is like that house, covered in scars that only he knows the story behind. Scars his mother didn’t mean to cause, but did.)
Katherine Reid is a survivor.
She lets cruel words roll off her back. She keeps going in the face of adversity. She tries to be helpful to her mother, whose job as a professor keeps her busy at odd hours, but her daughter is a genius and a prodigy and absolutely fine.
Katherine Reid is a liar.
She forges Doctors notes so she can work another shift, because the mortgage is due, and she’s still short. She tells her favorite teacher that the reason she’s not paying attention in class is that she’s excited about her fathers upcoming visit, and definitely not because she spent the night trying to convince her mother that she wasn’t a government spy for the umpteenth time.
She tells her boss that she is seventeen, because most places only hire sixteen and up. She is sure that he knows it’s a lie, but he gives her the job and the tips are good - too good to pass up.
She is fine. Everything is fine.
It’s only three weeks before she graduates, and leaves high school and cruel kids who don’t understand behind, when Alexa Lisbon tells her to meet her on the football field.
Alexa Lisbon is pretty and has never once shoved her or called her a dyke. Alexa Lisbon makes her feel warm inside, and Katherine is so very lonely and just childish enough to believe her.
The janitor gives her a pitying smile when he finds her and the principal calls her a liar with his eyes when she tells them “No, sir, I don’t know who did it. No sir, nothing else happened. Can I go home now?”
(Katherine Reid is a liar.)
No one calls her mother, which is just as well, since the number she gave the school was for a pizza place a few blocks away.
(Later — years later — she will think that someone should have bothered to call, even if then, she was only grateful that her secret was safe.)
She’s finished all her exams, and they don’t bother trying to make her come back for the last few weeks before graduation.
She picks up a few extra shifts, and she spends the rest of her time hoping to lose herself, wandering the streets of Las Vegas with a scream in the back of her throat, until it’s dark and her legs are too tired too continue.
She knows how reckless it is for a young girl to wander Vegas alone at night, and she doesn’t care, because she has nothing left for these people to take.
It’s a dare - an invitation.
Come on. Shoot me and take my bus pass and the tips in my back pocket. I’m right here.
She thinks that if anyone tries to attack her that she might laugh.
(She thinks that she might be insane. She thinks that she doesn’t really care anymore.)
No one shoots her.
She comes back home far later than any child her age had business being out and collapses into her mothers bed only to do it all again.
Her mother does not seem to realize that anything has changed. She does not know that her daughter died weeks ago on an empty football field with the echos of screams that were never heard. She does not see the way Katherine walks through the shady parts of town with hollow eyes and cash hanging out of her jean pocket.
Diana doesn’t notice that her daughter has become a corpse among the living.
Katherine is somehow both glad and disappointed at the same time.
She enters college, and she leaves behind little Katherine with her tears and fragile trust and mild disposition. Katherine Reid is the little girl on the football field. Katherine Reid has a gaping hole in her heart carved in her fathers cruelty and her mothers blindness. Katherine Reid begged for mercy from a God she doesn’t believe in with her knees digging into the rocks and dirt. Katherine Reid is empty.
Katherine Reid is broken.
She uses the pieces of Katherine Reid to form herself into someone new. She cuts her hair and tries to harden herself from the inside out. She doesn’t cry anymore. She hasn’t cried since that night on the football field.
She tells her new classmates to call her Kit. It’s sharp and hard. It cuts, and that feels fitting, because she wants to make them bleed if they dare to touch her.
They still call her odd and brilliant and all those other things, but the words are whispers instead of taunts. She is unsettling. They see the wildness that grew in the years of raising herself and protecting her mother and sprung forth behind a high school gymnasium. They see the madness under the surface that she no longer tries to keep hidden.
She embraces the feral look in her eyes and grows thorns.
She hides behind the new name like she does the cardigans and sweater vests she has wrapped herself in since that night.
She makes herself into Kit, and it feels better than Katherine, but it doesn’t feel right either.
She gets a boyfriend. His name is Steve and he is older, much older, than her. He has a motorcycle and a temper, but he promises not to leave, and she has never had that.
Kit thinks she loves him. Kit thinks she loves him, even when Steve grabs her wrist so tightly it leaves bruises. Kit thinks she loves him even when she’s lying on her own blood stained sheets and Steve’s hot breath on her neck is stifling.
She thinks she loves him, but maybe she wouldn’t have if she had not been so very alone. Maybe, she would not be so desperate to believe him if her father had not left and she had not been carrying the weight of her mothers illness her whole life. Maybe, in another world, there is someone to knock some sense into her and scream that he was too old and too cruel and that she deserved better.
(Maybe, in another world, she wouldn’t have listened and the outcome would be the same, but it’s nice to think otherwise.)
But it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t anyone to knock some sense into her. There is only Steve and her schizophrenic mother who is too caught up in her own demons to see what is happening right in front of her.
She scrubs blood out of sheets, and she absolutely does not cry even though it feels likes it’s the end of the world. She’s a woman now, and it feels earth altering, even if, from the outside, very little changes.
She covers up bruises with foundation and long sleeves. She works long hours and aces all her classes.
She continues to survive.
It turns out that cutting your hair and changing your name doesn’t change all that much.
And then, when she is fifteen and in her final year of college, she meets Alice.
Alice is a freshman with a husky voice and a kind of confidence that draws people to her like streams to fresh water. She is smart and funny and, for some reason, takes a liking to the scrawny genius in her African Literature class.
Alice takes her under her wing, and she teaches her how to dance and speak to professors without wanting to cry.
Most importantly, Alice helps her file a restraining order against Steve.
It’s not hard. Steve is twenty-two and everyone on campus has seen him all over the fourteen (later on fifteen) year old genius.
Alice holds her while she cries, and she is the first person Kit tells about her mothers illness. She is the first person — and the only person for a long time — that she tells about Steve and Alexa and her father.
Not that no one else knew. Anyone paying attention could see it, but nobody cared.
Nobody raised a concern about the definitely a minor girl and her definitely not a minor boyfriend.
Nobody cared — not until Alice.
Alice teaches her to live again. She teaches her to swim and ride a bike and to never leave a drink unattended at parties. Alice teaches her the lessons that nobody ever bothered to teach her.
Alice is like a breath of fresh air.
And by the end of the year, when Kit is getting ready for grad school and Alice is just finishing her first year of college, Alice teaches her the word transgender.
They are in Alice’s dorm —because for the next few months at least, Kit lives with her mother, who still calls her Katherine when she is lucid—when Alice tells Kit her secret.
“I’m trans.” Alice twists her hands nervously as she speaks.
But Kit is barely fifteen, and up until this year has had no friends beside her schizophrenic mother and controlling boyfriend, and her face twist in confusion.
“You’re what?”
Alice laughs at her confusion, reveling in knowing something Kit doesn’t.
“I’m transgender. I was born a man, but I feel like a girl on the inside.”
Kit considers this information carefully before responding. “I don’t think the presence of a Y chromosome makes you a man, Allie.”
It was the right thing to say too, because Alice holds her close and she can feel her tears against his neck.
“Thanks, Kit-Kat.”
He calls Alice two months later and comes out to her.
She is the first person he tells.
He has been going by he/him pronouns with his friends for six months, when his mother refuses to call him Spencer.
“You’ll always be my Katie-Cat.” She tells him and that’s the end of that conversation because she starts speaking about people who don’t exist.
He calls Alice, and she takes him to an ice cream shop, owned by some queer people, just off the college campus. He cries, and Alice whispers soothing words that neither of them believe.
She takes him shopping for his first binder that afternoon and makes him promise to be responsible about it. He says he will be, even though it’s probably a lie, but he’s so happy that Alice doesn’t call him on it.
It remains one of the best and worst days of his life.
When Spencer turns eighteen, he legally changes his name and puts his mom in the hospital.
He feels guilty for thinking that eighteen feels magical and he’s almost positive that he’s a horrible person for abandoning his mother. Even if it isn’t really abandoning and this is the best thing for her, the way his mom looks at him now makes his chest ache.
Nobody on the outside world will call him Kit or Katherine again, and there’s a strange sort of grief in that.
(He doesn’t know if it’s for that little girl or the mother that loved her.)
He is twenty when his mother finally calls him Spencer, but he knows that she hasn’t put the image of him and of her little girl together. She doesn’t know him, and maybe she hasn’t for a long time.
His mother calls him his name for the first time, and it should feel like a victory.
(It doesn’t though. It feels like she’s slipping farther away.)
The next time he visits, she calls him Katherine.
The name feels so very wrong. It belongs to a little girl buried under the weight of her father’s abandonment and her mother’s absence in every way that mattered. It belongs to a little girl who was never a little girl in any sense of the word.
“Katherine”
It sounds like bitterness.
It sounds like relief.
He is twenty three, and he is the youngest member of the BAU ever. They do not know about the secrets he keeps tucked away, and he plans to keep it that way.
He is not quiet any longer. He knows that silence can give away quite a lot about a person. The trick of it is hiding in plain sight.
He talks and talks, and he tells them nothing while letting them think he is telling them everything.
(All these years, and he is still a liar.)
He is brilliant. That is the only thing that matters about him — not his slowly decaying mother or Steve or Alexa or the scars that run deep inside of him. It doesn’t matter.
He is brilliant.
(His mother was brilliant too, but they don’t know that. Because much like Katherine, that person doesn’t exist anymore, and Spencer’s not sure who died first — Katherine or Diana. Sometimes, he isn’t sure either of them existed at all.)
He is twenty four when he realizes that the team is his family. And he’s wanted a family all his life, but it still feels like a betrayal.
He has a mother who loves him. He knows she loves him.
He has a mother who brushed his long curls as a child.
He has a mother who did not protect him.
He has a mother who tried.
He has a mother who gave him a name that has not crossed his lips in years.
He has a mother who does not know him, and that’s the part that hurts most.
He has a mother who loves him so very much, but her love was still not enough.
He is twenty-five, and he comes out to his team. It really is as simple as that.
“I’m trans.” He says.
“Okay.” They say.
He loves them all the more for it.
He is twenty-five, and he takes them to visit his mother, when they’re in Vegas for a case. They ask to come, and against his better judgment, he says yes.
“Katherine, sweetheart, come here!”
The words both cut and soothe. His mother remembers who he is, and yet he is not that person anymore.
(The name does not shatter him. It feels wrong. It feels very wrong that he was once a little girl to so many people, because he’s a man now. He has been a man for a long time.)
“I’m so glad you’re letting your hair grow out Katie-Cat. You know I love your long hair.”
Spencer does know. He remembers how she had cried when he had hacked off his long curls. He had been fourteen, and he felt guilty about it, but not enough to regret it.
He sighs and ignores the worried looks from team. “Hi, Mom. I’m called Spencer now. Remember?”
“Nonsense, Katherine! Why must you always be so difficult?”
Spencer ignores her. He’s learned that it’s best not to argue with her at these times.
“This is my team, Mom. You might remember some of them. We were in town and I wanted you to meet them.” He gestures for them to come closer.
“Pleasure to meet you, ma’am. Aaron Hotchner.” Hotch sticks his hand out politely.
“Yes. Katherine talks about you all in her letters. J.J. Emily. Derek. Rossi. Hotch. Penelope.” She nods to each of them in turn. “You people are all Katherine talks about.” She glances at Spencer accusatorially. “Where’s Gideon? He was always such a nice man. You need a good guy to settle down with.”
Emily chokes on the air, and Hotch turns a very un-Hotch like shade of pink.
Spencer can only rub his temples. He had known this was a possibility, but this was going worse than he had imagined, and Spencer Reid has quite an imagination.
“Gideon was old enough to be my Dad.” Spencer tries to keep the vitriol from reaching his tongue. “I’m not interested in seeing anyone right now.”
“It’s too bad that you and Steve didn’t work out. He was such a nice young man.” Diana says wistfully. “You’ll need someone to protect you when I’m gone.”
And there it is, the anger that Spencer has kept subdued his whole life. He’s not sure what makes him angriest.
He is angry that she would insinuate he ever had her protection, because he did not. He survived despite her, not because of her.
His mother was supposed to protect him, and she did not. She watched a grown man tear her child to shreds, and Spencer hopes it’s the sickness in her head that kept her from intervening.
(He hopes. It is almost the same as believing.)
“I was fourteen when I dated Steve. I wish you’d stop bringing him up.” Spencer says as he shove the rage deep within him, and he is so busy with it that he does not see the worried looks of his colleagues. “I don’t want to talk about it any longer.”
“No need to get in tizzy! I’m doing my best, you know?”
He does know. It’s not her fault, but he still aches.
“Why don’t I read to you, Mom?”
Rossi only breaks the tense silence they’d fallen into since leaving Spencer’s mother once they are in the air.
“You good, kid? You’re mother dead-naming you must be hard.”
He hears the reassurance in Rossi’s words.
You don’t have to tell us. We just want to know if you’re okay.
“I-“ He stutters. “I don’t really know anymore.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” J.J asks gently.
“She hurt me - not on purpose. It wasn’t her fault - probably.” He doesn’t know how to explain it, and his thoughts come out in a strange mess. “She failed me, and I don’t know how to forgive her, but I love her, and I’m all she has left.”
“You can love someone even if they hurt you.” Emily’s voice is strangely quiet. “You can love someone and not forgive them.”
Spencer considers for a moment. They know each others stories. Carl Buford. Hotch’s father. JJ’s sister.
Spencer knows that Emily’s mother didn’t protect her either.
“I was fourteen. I was lonely, and I met a guy who said that he loved me. He was twenty, and I hadn’t started my period yet, but nobody saw a problem with it, until a friend of mine asked why I had so many bruises.”
“Steve?” Hotch questions softly.
“Steve.” Spencer confirms. “My mother. She’s sick. It’s not her fault. I made some really stupid decisions. I should’ve known better. I did know better. I didn’t ever tell her. Someone, should have told her. But how could she not see it? How could no one see that something was wrong? But she’s sick, and I love her, and it isn’t her fault. I should’ve told someone. I knew better. I-“
“Woah, kiddo, slow down.” Rossi places a hand on his back. “You’re okay. Take a deep breath.”
Spencer hadn’t realized he’d been shaking.
“Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m fine.”
Like always, he pushes the horrible rotting thing beneath his skin down.
The thing that had been nurtured in his fathers abandonment and mothers ineptitude. With each thwarted suicide attempt. With each bill he had paid. With each shitty job he had worked. With the knowledge that his mother loved him and the knowledge that it wasn’t enough.
He locks away the anger and the hurt and the all-consuming grief for that little girl who was never a little girl at all.
“Don’t do that.” Morgan admonishes. “Don’t lie to us. Don’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault.”
“She loves me, and I tried so hard.” Spencer chokes out. “I do love her.”
“I know, kiddo.” Emily runs her hand through his thick curls, and it so gentle.
It is so very gentle, and yet it breaks him.
When he is finished crying, he tells them about Steve. He tells them that his mother tried, but it wasn’t good enough. He tells them about Alice and how there was no one who cared enough to do something before her. He tells them how guilty he feel for thinking that, because his mother was sick, but then, he was only a child.
He tells that it isn’t her fault, and he has no right to be this angry and broken, but he is. He tells them that he doesn’t understand how people could watch what was happening right in front of them and turn away like they didn’t see.
Because there were so many adults, who watched Steve and him, and never bothered to say anything. Because no one questioned the obvious lies or the forged permission slips or checked the phone number on file.
And they didn’t have the excuses Diana had.
“Why didn’t anyone protect me?” He asks no one in particular.
Emily strokes his hair, and JJ leans into his side, and Hotch pats his hand.
It’s the closest thing that he thinks he’ll get to an answer.
He doesn’t tell them about Alexa Lisbon and the football stadium. Not yet.
It’ll take him a long time, a trip to Vegas, and a slight mental breakdown for him to tell them the barest of details. But they are profilers, and it doesn’t take long for them to fill in the details.
Even now, over a decade later, it is still too raw.
He has never been able to tell anyone about how those boys had fanned out around Alexa — and he knew. He knew that he had made a horrible mistake.
He has never been able to tell anyone about laying on the grass and looking up at the sky and thinking that God must be especially cruel, because while he was never under the illusion that he was particularly good; he couldn’t deserve this.
But eventually, he will tell them about those weeks, where he sat on the edges of bridges and choked on swallowed screams as he tried to lose himself completely in the shittiest part of Vegas.
He will tell them about Katherine Reid, and becoming Kit because it was the only way he knew how to survive.
He’ll tell them about how he lied to that sleezy manager and forged signatures and manipulated people. He’ll tell them about the cynical little girl who knew that she would have to carve out a place for herself in the world.
He’ll tell them about a woman who braided his hair and loved him more than anyone else in the universe. He’ll tell them about the woman who sang cheesy love songs in their kitchen and gentle lullabies before bed and the world of books she introduced him to.
He’ll tell them about forcing his mother to vomit up the entire bottle of Tylenol that she downed and learning to install a lock on the meager medicine cabinet they kept. He’ll tell them about how he had curled up in his mothers bed with her after that and tried to keep his sobs quiet so that he didn’t wake her.
He’ll tell them that he was unsuccessful and how his mother had held him tightly and soothed him when he admitted how scared he had been.
He’ll tell them about her promising not to do it again.
He’ll tell them that it turns out, they are both a pair of sorry liars, because only a year later, he found her with a knife to her wrist.
He’ll tell them about the mother he loves. He’ll tell them about the good days, when she read poetry to him and smiled at him like he was the only thing that mattered.
He will bring out an old box and hand them a photograph of a little girl, that was never a little girl in any sense of the word, and he’ll tell them about that child who was a survivor and a liar and so very unhappy.
He’ll read careful slanted hand writing and remember a brilliant woman and the daughter who loved her and survived her; and Alexa Lisbon; and Steve; and he’ll realize that he doesn’t hate looking at old photographs anymore.