Chapter Text
Reid was by no means a ‘special kid’ as much as the reports and the messages and the leads all said that he was, he really wasn’t. yeah he had a high IQ, yeah he could read fast. But his life hadn’t amounted to anything special. He worked a desk job in the FBI. He helped sort through files and dictate things that many thought were wrong. He had wanted to go into the behavioural analysis unit but had been denied due to a mark or two off of the physical portion of the exam, don’t get him wrong, he passed the exam. With a good mark too.
Just not good enough.
He had an excellent mental problem solving ability, along with former knowledge. It just wasn’t enough for the team.
Now Spencer was never one to act upon his emotions or his feelings, he essentially kept them in a little jar that he updated every once in a while. But he just couldn’t stop himself. It wasn’t a grand gesture where all of the FBI could see him solving a apparently ‘impossible’ case, but it was enough that there was an email released to any and all staff to come forwards to reveal anything they knew about the person.
Luckily for Reid, no one really talked to him, no one other than the tech genius who worked for the B.A.U. but Garcia was easy to get honest answers out of, and she had been just as shocked when she came in on a Tuesday morning to a text from hotch asking who had altered the map and boards after he had gone home the night before.
You see, the night before Reid had decided that it was just one of those nights that he would end up staying the whole night for. He had often stayed the night shift before, just wanting to help sort out files, or finish some work that had taken just those too minutes too long for it to be useful to go home. He waved to jerry, the most common night guard when he wandered through the area at 22:37 pm, then he had watched as Aaron Hotchner (the leader of the BAU) wandered out of his office and left the building, everyone else having left at an earlier timing (Reid doubted that Aaron had even seen him). spencer had a report due for the next morning about one of the local cases that the team he’s on was called in for, they were taken to a local-Ish police department and helped not only profile but catch the unsub.
It was the most action that spencer’s team had had for weeks, and whilst spencer may be used to a boring old desk job, his coworkers seemed to be expecting more.
The file was nearly done it was just that he had been forced to go and gather the last few bits of the evidence from the evidence locker so that the report could be completed with as much information as possible. He had gotten up to collect his coffee again from the counter, refilling it for the fourth time that afternoon, the first time he had gone out on his lunch break to get some of the coffee from a local coffee shop that he and Garcia liked quite a bit.
(earlier)
Reid’s keys had jingled in his hand as he gathered up his things, taking towards the elevator, his ears hearing the ear piercing laughter of David Rossi and Derek Morgan, both of whom were members of the BAU team. His skin prickled uncomfortably, his eyes fell towards the floor and he continued his journey towards the cars outside with more vigour than previously.
When he arrived back at Quantico, two coffees in hand, one iced pumpkin seasonal drink (Garcia’s) and the other was a small black coffee with three shots of espresso in it, along with 12 packets of sugar and a single cream (Reid). He very carefully brough the coffee’s towards what is known to many as the ‘dungeon of doom’, a nest almost of different pop figurines, computers, band posters and much much more.
Spencer wasn’t scared of it.
He entered in, the hand holding the coffees balancing them precariously.
“myyyy beautifulll babyyyyyyy” said the girl sitting in the chair in the middle of the room. It was quite a sight to see, Garcia in all her glory surrounded by what seemed like 50 different t.v. screens, all showing different valuable case facts that could probably put her in jeopardy. But it wasn’t like she cared, and if the agency was so pressed by it, they probably could have had her fired years ago. But they didn’t; she was good at what she did. Like no other, you could almost say.
“hello Garcia” Reid replied, an easy smile gracing his features.
“what wonderful blessing have you brought me today?”
“there was a seasonal special on at the café, so I brought you a pumpkin one.”
“ you know I love those sweet and heavily caffeinated concoctions.”
“did you know that it only takes 40 cups of coffee or the equivalent in caffeine to kill that average human.” Garcia gave Reid a deadpan look, honest to god just deadfaced.
“I love you babygirl but sometimes I wonder where you find your reading material” Reid smiled in reply, hoping that anything he said didn’t hinder the conversation too much.
“I was gifted a few extra files, so ill probably be leaving late tonight. Have a nice night Garcia.” He said as he stood up again.
“make sure to get your 8 hours k’ bud” Garcia replied narrowing her eyes whilst taking a sip of the coffee, “and thank you for my drink”
“any time Garcia,” he then left the room taking to the stairs with a much better mood than earlier, despite knowing that he was going to have to stay late again tonight with no help, it was nice to know he had at least one friend in the bureau.
He returned to his desk and started finishing the files, glancing up every now and then to see if anyone or anything took his interest.
Nothing did.
By the time it was night, he had been ‘gifted’ another 12 files, all having an average of 27 pages that he would have to approve and go through before he was finished. All of his coworkers essentially being illiterate compared to him. he didn’t really mind, his social life lacked any real outliers, it was all essentially the same cycle, go to work, get coffee, see Garcia, finish work, go home, sleep, repeat. Reid hated the cycle.
He wanted some sort of excitement in his life, everything felt so bland to him right now, like eating raw bread and butter.
And then he saw the outlier, not in his social life by any means, but his work one sure could get better. He watched as Aaron Hotchner left his office, and remembered a conversation that he had heard earlier that day.
“it’s like every time we profile him, he just goes and changes the goddamn profile himself”
“I doubt he works here, he’s have to be far to calculated to be able to manage a work environment such as this one, with all the noise and the bustle of papers he would most likely get bored”
“I still think that it’s the librarian, can I please go interview him again?”
“no Rossi”
They had no idea who the unsub was, but Reid had overheard one of the conference rooms being booked out for a profile in the next few days, how were they going to give a profile if the profile kept changing? Reid wasn’t having it, he stood up waving to jerry again, before striding towards the conference room that had all of the info gathered on the walls. the room was always left untouched during the nights, and often enough Reid would just wander past to see the case before he had to go home. Sometimes he would work out a key detail in the profile and wait for the BAU to work it out the next day or few days. it was always fun to see it finally click, like “what if it’s not two people but one? Who just happens to have split-personality disorder” that one had seemed like a fun case. Reid had mentioned a few points to Garcia when she complained about the case to Reid.
This time though, this time they had a time limit, Reid doubted that most of the team even knew there was one, better to leave them in the dark than to tell them that they only had about 18 hours until they had to present the profile.
So reid did something he vowed he would never do, he moved forwards taking a pin out of the map on the walls and moving it towards the correct location, moving to be around an art museum block, he then grabbed another one and moved it towards the local science centre, the next one was in near enough the right place, Reid just having to adjust the way the pin was facing to correct it.
Finally he moved the one on the far left towards the centre, making a sort of star shape, only if it was missing its final point. He then took a see-through sticky note and drew a bright red circle around the point that looked like the final point of the star, underneath he wrote.
“the final key is where the two were first made” a locksmith down three roads and to the left of the arts block and to the right of the science museum. To be honest Reid didn’t think that this would be that much of a difference, all that happened was a miscalculation in the maths. Yeah sure it would almost confirm the suspicion that someone in the bureau was the killer, but if they actually checked out the site then they would probably find the missing unsub.
“Mister Reid” there was a tap on the glass doors, Reid jumped and spun round to face the noise, jerry stood at the door.
“holy shit jerry.” Reid bent over himself almost as though he was catching his breath.
Jerry chuckled a little in retaliation, “sorry, you seemed focused. But they always put this room on lockdown overnight, trying to keep everyone out of the evidence.”
“no I understand” Reid smiled, « I just thought that I left something in here, but I hadn’t and then there were these pins and they were in the wrong place and I just snapped and, and…” spencer took a breath before he continued, “I'm sorry. Ill go back to my station, just don’t tell anyone?”
Jerry was smiling at Reid from behind his moustache, “yeah, yeah. I know that you would have found some sort of way to make sure that it was right. I wont tell no one about this don’t you worry. And just so you know I'm going down these corridors at-“
“ 2:57 am I know” jerry smiled again, Reid looked down, “I just lost track of time.” He looked sheepishly back up at jerry.
“I was gonna say 2:50 but it seems that you already knew that, get back to work you boy genius”
Reid blushed but headed back to his station to finish the files.
The next morning when the BAU eventually trailed into work, Aaron Hotchner was the first to realise that some of the evidence was tampered with, and he went straight to jerry about it.
“Mr Scott, I was wondering if anything happened to the evidence that was in conference room #3 last night?” Hotchner being paid to understand peoples behaviours and actions didn’t notice a damn thing to do with jerry, he just looked tired.
“no Mr ‘otchner, I can even pull up the camera footage from last night, but there wasn’t anything of a disturbance, nothing other than Mr Reid going to refill his coffee every few hours, but he never left the bullpen.”
“ I understand, thank you”
“anytime”
Reid’s desk was just below the office, and had heard the ending of the conversation, he was hoping to god that jerry would have changed the footage, but he didn’t know if he was intellectually skilled enough for it. To be honest jerry was like an open book, you didn’t need some fancy pancy skills to see what he was feeling.
“maybe it was a ghost” was the sentence that brought Reid out of his eavesdropping, ghosts aren’t real. Well, to a scientific mind anyway.
“Morgan” ahh so they had found his changes. That was probably what Hotchner had just gone to ask jerry about.
“I'm just saying! There no evidence a human was in this room! Nothing touched, no fingerprints, no cctv!”
“Morgan, ghosts aren’t real,”
“that’s your opinions, plus, this person only changed the map, and like 2 files. But other than that everything was left were it originally had been, so its not like they were in it to destroy our files, or the case”
“Morgan, I’ll look into it, we really should get back to the whereabouts of the unsub.”
“actually, hotch look at this,” that was Emily Prentiss, Reid recognised. “the problem we had before was that none of the details of the locations had any connection whatsoever, if the points were moved to here then they would all have one, look.”
“the social science buildings,”
"that would explain the way that all the victims had some chemical symbols on them, but they were all different, all metal yes, but nothing to properly link them"
"hang on guys" - JJ Reid recognised, she seemed nice enough in passing, had said hi in the hallways, and Reid thinks that she actually knows his name.
"yeah JJ,"
"there's a note, from the 'ghost' 'the final key is where the first two were made'"
"where the first two were made..." Rossi commented, meanwhile the footsteps of a few of the team members could be heard from the bullpen.
"there's a locksmith down the road from all of the science buildings, perfectly in the centre actually, and it would explain how he could always get into the building, there was no forced entry. there was no fighting back. because they would have seen the unsub before. maybe taking a mould for the lock or a door."
"Garcia,"
"yeah"
"can you pull up any reports of any of the local buildings getting new keys or locks?"
"yes, so the science building on main requested a new one on the 18th and then the creative arts building, just left to the socialist building requested one too... actually, it looks like most of them have, they were all followed up. apart from one, to the Westcounty medical science museum."
"then that's where he'll strike next. Morgan you take Prentiss and meet us there, we'll get a foot team."
“yes sir” and the door flew open, revealing Emily Prentiss, and Derek Morgan. Reid was relieved to see that neither of them were looking in his direction. Infact they seemed to be intently focused on getting out of the room.
how the fuck was Reid supposed to finish his files now.