Chapter Text
She’s the new kid on the block. Freshly graduated. So painfully green that she narrowly missed the chance to earn the distinction of being the first—and only—cadet to die during a case due to her sheer incompetence. Good academic scores be damned.
She’s not a genius either, by any stretch.
Her observational skill is lacking at best. Abysmal at worst. No one is born a profiler, Rossi tells her, patting her shoulder with paternal regard. Prentiss reminds her that profiling is a skill that needs to be honed, and in time, profiling ceased to be an effort, merely a muscle reflex.
Even so, she picks up little oddities.
Firstly, the increasing frequency that she and Spencer Reid—boy genius, statistic extraordinaire, and the extolling nicknames keeps on growing—ended up in the same shift. Keep the kids at home, Morgan snidely mouths to Emily Prentiss. Garcia hightails immediately back to her sanctuary, when Seaver brings up the startling coincidences. She doesn’t mind it. Reid is a lot of things that she isn’t. Smart, brilliant, and appallingly unathletic. He isn’t that bad to look at too.
Then came the nomination of BAU agents to be on the recruitment posters.
Strauss reassured that the Bureau aims to appeal to bright-eyed college kids and overly motivated young adults with clear directions for their future. The resulting poster—of Reid in sleek black tight-fitting suit and her dressed in low-cut navy silk blouse and tailored grey pantsuit—was not reprinted after it was deemed too “Abercrombie & Fitch” material. Garcia proudly hung the poster in her office. The words, “The Bold and Beautiful”, photoshopped into its left corner margin.
Lastly, the premediated movie double dates now have dwindled to an impromptu movie date.
Garcia is armed with a plethora of excuses, ranging from technological disasters to a weekly occurrence of malfunctioned plumbing that requires Morgan’s immediate action, when she calls to confirm the ticket booking. Morgan’s smile is apologetic and cheeky. He has a messed-up schedule with double-booked appointments. Based on the state of Garcia’s persistent plumbing issues, he always seemed to botch a simple handyman task.
Reid’s punctuality to the cinema is strikingly endearing, as his enthusiasm for horror films.
“Where’s Penelope and Derek?” she asks, even though she practically could guess their absences are guaranteed. And yet she’s still casting a panoramic gaze across the mildly crowded lobby.
“Penelope has a Level 2 Grey Alert Emergency. She’s waiting for Derek to take a look at Esther,” he says, in a solemn tone, brown eyes cast downwards.
“Is she okay? Should we go,” she pauses, one hand digging into her pockets for her phone, and waves at the door absentmindedly, “I know a doctor who does house calls.”
“They don’t need a doctor,” he replies, earnestly chirper. “What they need is a mechanic, because Esther is a car. Derek’s also handy with a car, which surprisingly boost a certain sexual appeal for some women.”
“Right,” she sighs, already feeling stupid for jumping headlong into conclusions.
It’s too late to cancel now that they’re both are standing in front of the ticket counter, newly-torn tickets in hand and eight dollars poorer than yesterday.
“So, William Butler Yeats was an amateur folklorist who first classified leprechauns as a solitary fairy, and he based this classification on D. R. McAnally’s Irish Wonders, written in 1888, which was derived from an older work by John O’Hanlon—”
She resists rolling her eyes. “Did a little homework before movie night, Reid?”
“Not homework, and I would not categorise this as light reading. I was listening to a podcast on the history of the slasher genre, and they had the writer for Loghermans as a guest and he laid the foundation of the trilogy based on a semester on Irish mythology and folklore,” he rushes in a single breath, and it’s a marvel when he does that, she’s in awe and overwhelmed by its velocity.
“Hold that thought off until we get the popcorn,” Seaver retorts, unable to shake off the grin splitting her lips wide, and hurriedly to slap money on the counter, adding, “My treat.”
He has always been the youngest. Even when JJ was brought in to act as the media liaison, being only three years older, it was a unanimous—unspoken—rule everyone obeyed to a fault that he is the undisputed baby of the bunch.
Ashley Seaver is a contender to his crown.
Her height, first and foremost, is what he notices. Pretty, in the way that reminds him of flaxen-haired Shakespearean beauty, haloed by a coronet fashioned out from tragedy. Elegant shoulders that are taut with a legacy of death and misery. Sorrow-lined lips. Her eyes are startlingly steel-blue that creases into half-moons when she smiles.
Huh. She has Lila’s smile too.
The commonalities between them are staggeringly abnormal.
Complicated relationships with their biological fathers. Both remediated in the academy. She’s brought into the Drew Jacobs case because Rossi had asked. He’s a part of The Seattle Stranger case because Gideon believed in his intelligence, he thinks.
This is what no one tells him: being the youngest opens a distance between him and the others. Perceived expectations chiselled their dynamics in granite. It’s overwhelming. Nauseating. Sometimes, silence is golden in the time of crisis.
He does his best to make them less intimidating.
Later, when they both are thanked for their contribution to the future of the Bureau by the media communications team, he’s wrapping his scarf around his neck and Seaver meets his gaze, smiling, and his palms are a little sweaty when he asks her to join him for dinner.
His intention is purely platonic.
The diner is mostly barren and dimly-lit with spotted chandeliers hung lowly from the ligneous ceiling. Its ornately calligraphed menu is laminated. The wooden panelled floorboards creaked when the chairs scraped against it. Rossi raved about this place as authentic as it can get to the real ristorante italiano, based solely on the authority of his Italian heritage.
There’s a bottle of chilled red wine resting inside a dented brass bucket on their table.
“So, how exclusively is this daddy issues club? Is it only you and me? Are there other members?” Seaver asks, arching her brow at him. “Anyone below twenty-nine, maybe?”
“Believe it or not, ‘daddy issues’ isn’t an official medical term or recognised disorder in the recent edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Freud used the term ‘father complex’ in his 1910 paper titled ‘The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy’, where he wrote about male patients and their resistance to treatment derived from the father complex. Modern times, some consider the phrase as a way to minimise female’s attachment needs—”
Oh. She is teasing him.
He grins. “Ah, at the present moment, it’s you and me, if your parameters only included the youngest in the team.”
“Technically, you’re still the youngest, because I’m older than you by a mere six months,” she retorts, then concedes, “but I supposed I’m relatively new in the BAU. So, with your age and my status, that kinda cancels each other out and,” she drags the syllable into a lilting octave, “I don’t mind sharing the spot as the youngest.”
“The youngest position is big enough for the both of us,” he agrees, nodding sagely.
She raises her glass in the air, tipping it at his direction, and her lips curve into a mischievous bend, “To the BAU and daddy issues.”
“To the BAU and daddy issues,” he echoes, sipping his wine with a smirk.