Archive of Our Own

She knocks him off his feet. It’s fairly literal and conspicuous as far as first meetings go. One minute Spencer is standing next to Morgan, interrogating a potential subject in connection with serial rapes and murders of three high school students; the next minute he is on the ground straddled by a girl in a black mini skirt and vest.

“Sorry,” she says, and Spencer flips through the audio clips stored in his mind before finally locating: Scottish (Highlands, Inverness). She has red hair (chromosome 16, MC1R gene variant) and a nice face, but that doesn't explain why she is here. Or why he is on the ground.

“Did you know that female police officers in America were first recorded in 1905, and that there is no discernible difference in male and female officers’ use of force on the job?” Spencer informs her, instead of asking question like why? and how? and who?

She blinks at him, confused, and then looks down at herself. “Dammit. It’s always the kiss-o-gram outfit. I was going to a party. It’s not—I’m not—Oh, hell.”

“Can I get up?” Spencer asks, hoisting himself up onto his elbows.  He is trying not to panic, except there is a young woman on his lap, and there are germs on the sidewalk, and Spencer can already feel his back starting to itch in revulsion. He is going to have to boil these clothes when he gets home. Or maybe just burn them.

“Sorry,” she says, swinging one leg over and moving off him, and reaching over to help him up. Her hands are smooth, with tiny calluses at the tip of each finger.  “You just looked like someone I used to know. A friend. And I just reacted. He used to need looking after, too.”

Over her shoulder Morgan is handcuffing the suspect, shoving him roughly into the car. He keeps one eye on the door, and another on Spencer. It’s an archly amused look and Spencer ignores it.

“I’m with the BAU. The Behavioral Analysis Unit.  It’s part of the FBI,” he says, instead. “I can take care of myself.”

She looks him up and down, disbelieving. “Sure you can.”

Spencer knows he looks too young and seems too naive for people to take him seriously. Usually it makes him try harder, sprout off more figures and longer words and fumbling passages. He doesn’t feel like that now—just stares at her dumbly.

“We could use reflexes like that in the FBI.” Morgan’s leaning against the SUV. Sunglasses hide the amusement in his eyes, but Spencer recognizes the twist to his lips, and can only imagine what the ride back will be like.  “Hey, Reid? Ready?”

Somehow Spencer leaves with her name, Amy, and a phone number.

---

He calls her. He nearly doesn’t because he needs to stop using the BAU as his own personal dating service, but when Spencer says something to that effect, Morgan just laughs. “Kid,” he says, “Where else are you going to find ladies who will put up with you?”

He has a point.

They meet downtown in a Starbucks close enough to the Capitol, but far enough away from the Metro.

They grab a corner table, and there is a moment of awkward positioning because neither of them want their back to the door. They settle for sitting side by side, knees touching.

“So you're a doctor?” Amy asks, grin showing some teeth. “I have a thing for doctors, you know. My best friend was a doctor, and my ex was a nurse.”

“I'm not that kind of doctor,” Spencer hastens to clarify.

“Oh, neither were they,” she dismisses his words, a far off look in her eyes.

Amy is divorced or widowed. “It's complicated,” she tells him, coffee mug in front of her mouth like a shield. It trembles a little in her grasp, and the nonchalant words don't match the hardened look in her eyes. Spencer notices, but he doesn't ask any questions.

---

They fall into a second date, and then a third, and then a fifth, and then it is long enough and often enough that JJ and Emily and Morgan stop teasing him, and Penelope stops offering to do background checks, and Hotch quits with the long looks of ‘is everything okay?’ whenever Spencer steps off the elevator.  And one time Rossi invites them to his place, and cooks them dinner, and they get tipsy on red wine, standing in his kitchen debating Cold War politics. Watching Amy punctuate a statement on Nixon—and how does she even have opinions on this?—Spencer feels a warmth in his chest that he can't quantify or dissect.

Amy is never phased by his quirks; laughs at his explanations and understands that the job takes him to places he can’t tell her about, and things he can’t discuss.

“It’s fine,” she says when he calls her to cancel dinner. Up in his office, across the wall of glass, Hotch is doing the same. There is a possible serial murder in Montana, and Reid is already running stats in his head.  David Merirhofer, four murders in rural Montana between 1967-1974, white male who killed for sexual gratification and kept body parts of his victims. The first serial killer to be caught using profiling, and the only known case of serial killing in Montana. Until now.  

“Seriously, Spencer, it’s fine,” she says again. He had almost forgotten that he is holding the phone in his hand.  “Just come back safe. Just make sure you come back.”

---

Spencer doesn’t talk about his job much; she doesn’t ask.

Amy doesn’t talk about her past much; he doesn’t ask.  

Spencer has had to fight his own demons. His mother’s. Gideon’s. Elle’s. He doesn’t want to fight hers too, and she seems content not to let him. She seems content not to fight anything. It’s more like a slow acceptance of fate.

They spend a day wandering around the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art. It’s a weekday, so there are more school groups than tourists, and Spencer tries not to flinch whenever he hears a teacher or a tour guide butchering information. Sometimes he opens his mouth to correct, because some things are unforgivable, and Amy hits him in the arm and tells him to stop acting like he swallowed a guide book.

“Not a guide book,” he says. “I have an eidetic memory.” They are strolling through the main hall, their hands clasped, and they look like a regular couple.

Amy separates from him in the ancient Roman statuary. She stays five steps behind him, like she is afraid to touch and pretend that they are together, and Spencer has to wait for her in the corridor. She doesn’t say anything when she appears, and presses against his side like the past four rooms had never happened. Spencer wants to ask, but doesn’t.

Instead he drags her to 13th century Italy and 15th century Germany because his mother had taught him about the healing power of medieval scholarship, and Reid likes exclaiming over the objects. Hours later, they amble into 18th century France, and Amy lingers in front of Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with tears in the corner of her eyes.

“He was such a wonderful man,” she says. The words don’t make sense, and Spencer doesn’t understand the sentimentality, but he lets her lean against his chest and doesn’t say anything when she snuffles into his shirt.  

They walk quickly through rooms of marble and bronze sculptures, shoes tapping loudly against the floor. “I can feel them watching me,” Amy says, huddling closer to Spencer, her eyes fixated on the statues. It’s like she can’t look away, and Spencer carefully steers them around a bust resting on a marble column. Spencer bites his lip, and hurries them along because the stone faces of the statutes all too closely resemble the stone faces of victims and unsubs and the unsettling feeling he does his best to ignore.

---

Spencer writes letters to his mother daily, long hand-written letters with specific conversations detailed to the very last pronoun. But every Wednesday he writes two letters. He doesn’t send the ones addressed to Gideon.

They stay in the side-table drawer. Just out of reach.

Amy stumbles across the envelopes, organized by date and never stamped, while searching for a pair of scissors. Spencer watches as she thumbs through them inquiringly, then says, “I lost a friend, too.”

She stares down at the envelopes in her hands, runs them between her fingers.

“I tried to send them letters,” she says. Reid notices the usage of them not him, but doesn’t know what to make of it. “I addressed them exactly like I was supposed to and everything, but he didn’t come back. They didn’t come back.”

Spencer watches her carefully, remembers Gideon’s final letter in the cabin. He knows all about wanting closure and wanting to hold on. All the chess games afterwards as he played against himself, trying to determine all the winning plays, the secret combination to best send a king into check and maybe—just maybe win Gideon back.

“Sometimes they are just gone. They don’t come back.” There’s a lump in his throat.

Amy nods, red hair covering her face. She gives the envelope a final caress before replacing it in the drawer.

“Does it help?” she asks. “Writing the letters?”

Spencer considers it. Chess games. Squares. Black. White. Doctor Reid. Letters. The youngest holds the key.

“I think it does,” he answers.

There is a letter resting on top of his leather satchel the next morning. There is a stamp of the Grand Canyon in the upper right corner, and it is simply addressed to THE DOCTOR in Amy’s looping letters. Spencer slips it into a post box on his way to work, and hopes it finds its way to the correct person. Statistically he knows that incorrectly labelled mail is thrown out, never reaching its destination and never seen again.

---

Spencer Reid is used to tall-tales and improbabilities rooted in truth. Amy asks, “do you believe me?”

And he says, “yes,” because he believes that in her mind the tales are real: of raggedy doctors, and blue boxes. Of boys who waited and daughters that grew old.

He says, “yes,” because everything has a logical and rational reason, except the mind. Even the mind.

---

He breaks the rules—and his own personal prejudice against technology—and uses the Bureau's database for his own personal gain. If he asked, Penelope would be more than willing to run a search; and in only a few quick keystrokes would have everything from Amy’s first after-school program to where she buys her underwear. But that seems to personal and invasive. It’s different when it is for an unsub; when feelings and emotions aren’t involved.

Spencer would feel bad about using BAU resources for his personal gain, but Erin is keeping a flask in her desk again, and Rossi may have overstepped his authority in Houston and this is really just one little thing. Just one little thing.

He enters the search perimeters and clicks.

There are no red flags, or even yellow ones, and a preliminary background report checks out. He digs further: her credit cards show normal activity, she hasn’t had any psychotic breaks; and her parents, Augustus and Tabetha Pond, are still alive and well and living in Leadsworth. There’s a small mention of several psychiatry appointments at seven years old, but whatever crisis existed seemed to have been chalked up to childhood imagination and the stress of relocating from Scotland to England.

The only mark on an otherwise pristine record. After six months of marriage, Amy’s husband, Rory, had just disappeared. No note, no body, no reason. Nothing. It was ruled a suicide, death by drowning, and Amy moved to America shortly afterwards. First to Utah, then to Washington D.C.

Something like that, Spencer figures, gives you the right to concoct imaginative stories. It’s a healthy form of coping, as long as that is where the images stay.

He clears his browser history because he knows Morgan.

---

Spencer rarely had trouble sleeping. It’s a side effect of the job—learning to sleep anytime and anywhere because you never know when you’ll have the chance again. There is also another, darker, side. Learn to fall asleep fast because if you stay awake, bordering on the edge of sleep and staring into the dark, the horrors you have seen come back to haunt you. The ones you couldn’t save.

Amy has a toothbrush, and a hairbrush at his place. A bottle of her face-wash is in the medicine cabinet, and an extra pair of shoes by the door. And sometimes she even spends the night, curled up next to him in bed, head resting on his shoulder, listening to his heartbeat.

“Do you ever wonder,” she asks once, “what it would be like to have two hearts?”

Spencer can honestly say that he has not.

They fall asleep that way, counting heartbeats and breaths. But sometimes Spencer wakes up in the early morning hours, when the only light in the room is the blue glow of his alarm clock, and Amy is already awake and is staring at his bedroom wall as though it has all the answers. He drops a kiss on her shoulder and says, “go back to sleep.”

---

“You smell good.” Spencer buries his nose in Amy’s hair. It’s after midnight and he just got back from Searcy, Arkansas; he hasn’t even removed the scarf from around his neck. She’s at his place, on the couch, reading a book and sipping a glass of wine.

“That’s because I work at a parfumerie,” she informs him, tilting her head back for a kiss. He likes the lilt of her words, the dryness of her wine on her breath.

“Bergamot, Orange, Freesia,” he lists the smells as he parses them, and she lets him, watching fondly. “Lily, Sandalwood, musk—”

She shuts him up with a kiss.

---

They can’t save everyone. Spencer knows this; it is the only logical conclusion when the primary focus of your job involves dead bodies. They can’t save everybody, but the worst cases are the ones where nobody survives: Not the victims, and not the unsub.

There is a light on in the bedroom and Amy is lying on the bed, hair fanned out on the pillow. She looks up when he enters, setting his overnight bag on the floor.

“I can’t—” Spencer clears his throat. “Not tonight.”

She stares at him, and Spencer can’t read her face. It could be compassion or annoyance or understanding, or none of the above. She pats the mattress. “Come here.”

“I can’t. I need to shower.”  Spencer feels like he wants to step out of his skin. She watches him as he rummages through dresser drawers, and he can feel her eyes on his back as he walks into the bathroom.

It’s comforting he thinks as he suds himself down, warm steam from the shower wrapping around him, to have someone here watching out for him. He’s spent too long watching after himself, and walking the fine lines between personal and professional interactions.

She is still there when he gets out of the shower, wet hair dripping in his face.

“Come here,” she says again, pulling the bed sheet back. “We’re going to sleep, now.”

Spencer thinks about the chessboard in the living room all set up and ready to be played, the letters to Gideon in the drawer, the new translation of Arthurian myths on the coffee table.

“Actually,” he says, “I think I would rather—” Amy rolls her eyes and cuts him off, her hand encircling his wrist and pulling him onto the bed.

“We’re sleeping,” she says again, more firmly. She tucks an arm around his chest and swings her leg over his, tangling their feet together.

“I’m not that tired,” Spencer says, but his voice is already drowsy and the soft jersey pillowcase feels nice against his cheek. Amy tightens her arm around him and says, “Shut-up.”

He falls asleep with her voice in his ear, telling him adventures of doctors and companions and meaningful deaths that change the universe.

---

They don't see eye to eye because trying to explain the unexplainable is impossible. Amy slams doors and turns her back on Spencer’s never-ending reel of facts and statistics and knowledge. Sometimes she’ll leave for hours, and Spencer will worry that maybe this time he has pushed too far; that maybe all those kids in high school and college were correct and he can’t have a normal relationship.

Amy always comes back. She comes back and curls up in his lap, awkwardly tucking her feet underneath his thighs, and rests her head on her shoulder. She says, “I’m sorry.”

Spencer isn’t. How can he be sorry for simply telling the truth? But he puts an arm around her, and hands her the cup of tea he had made, waiting on the side table.

Spencer isn’t a storyteller. He can’t lie and invent false truths, and only believes in myths and legends in the purely academic sense. Still, he has done the research and knows the tales. When Amy is half-way through the cup of tea, Spencer gathers his courage, takes a deep breath and says, “Like King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot, The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history.”

Amy startles, sending droplets of lukewarm liquid flying, but doesn’t say anything.

“Some people say he is immortal, and others call him an alien or a wizard; and there is no scientific understanding for any of it, but everyone agrees that if you need The Doctor he comes.” Spencer leaves out the part about how tales like this are found in every culture, and the significance of wanting to believe in a higher power is indicative of less advanced societies; about how this imaginary man Amy is obsessed with doesn’t exist at all. It is just a psychological reaction to the stress of losing her husband.

Amy finishes the tea, cradling the cup close as she asks, “What if he never comes?”

She sounds lost, and Spencer shrugs hopelessly. He doesn't have an answer.

---

He wakes up suddenly. The alarm clock display reads 3:00 a.m., and Spencer blinks into his pillowcase, unsure of why he has woken up. Then he hears the soft hitch of breath, the watery sigh. He rolls over, and presses himself against Amy’s back. “Go to sleep,” he says, grasping her shoulder and pulling her toward him. “There is nothing there.”

“I know.” Amy allows herself to be maneuvered, her face smashing up against Spencer’s shoulder. And Spencer pretends not to hear when she whispers, “That’s part of the problem.”