Chapter Text
Spencer Reid needed coffee the way certain stars needed gravity: compulsively, inescapably, and with a tired ache that said he’d slept about four hours less than advisable because someone had insisted on staying until the birds started. He didn’t blame them. He’d been the one to say yes when they’d leaned in at one in the morning and murmured stay. He’d been the one who’d laughed when they tried to apologize for the time. He’d been the one to say, still breathless, “Statistically, I function fine on minimal sleep.”
So now, gravity. Coffee. Whatever.
He pushed into the Quantico breakroom, blinking against the fluorescent lights, and reached for the chipped white mug that everybody pretended wasn’t his but somehow always migrated to the same shelf. The pot had been sitting long enough to become a moral failing. He poured anyway. The surface gleamed like motor oil. He added sugar without measuring. He always added sugar without measuring; he preferred math to live in his head, not his coffee.
“Face it,” Garcia was saying, the words bright as sequins. “Reid doesn’t even know what Tinder is.”
The spoon paused midair. Tiny sugar crystals tapped ceramic like hail.
JJ made a sympathetic noise into her cup. “He probably still thinks ‘swipe left’ is a gesture you make to turn a page.”
Reid blinked, then glanced toward the corner table. JJ and Garcia leaned together over coffee and pastry, a conspirators’ tableau. He should clear his throat. Step into their field of vision. Announce his presence with the same gentleness he used in interrogations.
He sipped instead. The coffee was an affront. He kept drinking it anyway.
“Not that I blame him,” JJ added, voice warm. “The apps are a mess. People are a mess.”
Garcia, hand to heart: “Protect his little bookish soul at all costs.”
Reid’s mouth tugged sideways. “I’m standing right here,” he offered mildly.
Two heads snapped up. Garcia’s face split into a sunshine grin. “Angel! We were just talking about you.”
“So I gathered.” He set the mug down, angled his body as if heat alone might resuscitate the coffee, and said, because he couldn’t help it, “And for the record, Tinder’s daily active user base peaked around 2018, and there’s a whole migration trend toward niche apps with smaller markets but higher perceived compatibility.”
JJ blinked. “So you… read about it?”
“I read a lot of things,” he said.
The door swung again. Morgan breezed in with a grin already cocked, kinetic energy in a Henley. “Morning, ladies. Morning, Pretty Boy.”
Reid lifted his mug in salute. “Morning.”
“Perfect timing,” Garcia said, wicked delight sparking. “We’re discussing how our baby genius belongs in a library, not in the swamp of dating apps.”
Morgan’s grin sharpened. “That ain’t a discussion, that’s a fact. Reid here’d bring a bibliography to a first date.”
“I did that once,” Reid said before his filter could catch up. “It was adorable.” He took a steadying sip. The coffee continued to be objectively terrible.
Morgan’s laugh filled the room, affectionate and enormous. He clapped Reid’s shoulder, a thump that sloshed liquid dangerously close to the rim. “Don’t worry, kid. Some of us take hits for the team. We’ll handle the field research.”
“Field research?” Reid repeated, and had the odd sensation of being a scientist trapped inside his own lab notes.
Garcia sighed theatrically. “Let him be pure, Derek.”
“Pure,” JJ echoed, gentle and amused. “He’s got enough trauma from the bad parts of humanity. He doesn’t need the messy parts too.”
Reid looked down at his coffee and saw—ridiculously, vividly—the indigo smear of last night’s lipstick fading from the inside of his wrist. He’d scrubbed it once this morning, not twice. He could have buttoned his shirt higher, adjusted his collar. He hadn’t. He wasn’t trying to flaunt anything, but neither had he gone out of his way to erase every trace.
Maybe that was what being tired got him: less energy for pretense.
He could say any number of true things. He could say, I slept four hours because someone stole my blanket and also my sanity, and it would be accurate and unhelpful. He could say, statistically, I am not pure, and that would only invite questions. He could say, I’m twenty-five, because they sometimes forgot. He could say, stop calling me kid, because they never would.
Instead, he turned the mug between his hands. “You know purity is a construct with roots in very specific sociohistorical frameworks that—”
“See?” Morgan crowed. “Bibliography.”
Garcia clapped. “We love you. Please never change.”
JJ squeezed his arm as she passed. “Briefing in ten, okay?”
He nodded. “Okay.”
They swept out together, still laughing softly. Their affection was a warm blanket and a blindfold. He didn’t resent it. Not… exactly. He could study it, though. He could hold it up to the light, rotate the angles, measure what it obscured, and feel the pleasure of a tidy hypothesis forming.
Reid took another drink. The coffee had cooled into something grim and decisive. He poured the rest down the sink, rinsed the mug, and set it gently to dry.
On his way to the bullpen he scrolled his phone with a thumb that still ached faintly where a tooth had grazed it. A new message blinked on his screen.
[1:07 PM] Unknown: you made me late for work and i’m not even mad
[1:07 PM] Unknown: also your cat is a menace
He smiled. I don’t have a cat, he typed, and then deleted it. No need to feed the bit. He replied instead: I hope the coffee helped.
Three dots pulsed. it did. you did.
He slid the phone into his pocket as Hotch’s voice carried over the low hum of the bullpen. “Conference room in five.”
“Copy,” Reid said automatically, folding into his chair. Case files layered across his desk like sedimentary rock: a cross-section of human ugliness and the tools they used to survive it. He tugged open a drawer for a pen and found, pressed into the corner, a small square of black silk.
He stared at it for one beat too long. Memory did the thing again—developed, crisped, projected.
A laugh in the dark. Fingers at his collar. The breathless, delighted you when he’d rattled off an etymology between kisses—because he couldn’t help himself, because meaning soothed him even when everything else was messy.
He slid the silk back into the drawer with something like reverence and an expression like impassivity. The two could coexist; he had data.
“Reid?” Emily’s voice, right behind him, amused as she hooked a hip against the side of his desk. “You good?”
He glanced up. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
She tipped her head. “You’re smiling at a pen like it told you a joke.”
He capped the pen with a soft click. “It did.” He paused. “It was a weak joke.”
“Poor thing.” She patted his shoulder, light and quick, then leaned closer, conspiratorial. “What did I miss in the breakroom? Garcia was giggling like a Bond villain.”
“Morgan accused me of bringing bibliographies to dates.”
Emily’s eyebrows climbed. “And?”
He blinked. “I don’t.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That was a very specific denial.”
“Conference room,” Hotch called again, and Emily shot him a to be continued look as they moved.
He tugged absently at his collar. He could have worn a sweater vest. He could have chosen a scarf. He could have hidden the faint bruising still blooming low along his throat. Instead, he’d picked the regular button-down, nothing extra. Enough to cover, not enough to erase.
And maybe, he thought, that was fine.
They thought he was innocent, untouchable. Maybe he didn’t have to work so hard to keep them comfortable in their delusion.
In the glass box of their briefing space, Rossi perched like a man who’d learned comfort and made it an art. He set down a folder, steepled his fingers, and regarded the team with a half-smile that usually meant sarcasm was loading. “Everyone awake?”
“Define awake,” JJ said, taking her seat.
Reid slid into his, the room sharpening around him. Work was focus; focus was a kindness. He could put everything else in a tidy, labeled box and retrieve it later, like a magician restoring a scarf to a pocket.
Hotch started the briefing. Photos of a crime scene, bullet points of behavior, a timeline that needed stretching and stitching. Reid’s heartbeat changed gears. His mouth shaped statistics and geography; his mind spun the map of a person they hadn’t met yet. It was alarming, sometimes, how easily the machine turned on. It was comforting, too.
Halfway through, Morgan nudged his foot under the table, a friendly tap. Reid looked over, questioning. Morgan mouthed coffee? with a grimace.
Reid nodded, and the smallest smile curled his mouth. He was, in fact, vibrating on the edge of a caffeine crash. A yawn tried to escape, and he pinned it under a cough.
His phone buzzed silently in his pocket. He ignored it until Hotch wrapped the briefing with a clipped, “JJ, notify local. Wheels up in two hours.”
Chairs scraped. The team splintered: Garcia to her lair, JJ to her calls, Morgan to pester him in exactly seven minutes and thirty seconds (Reid knew his rhythms like he knew muscle memory). Emily lingered.
“You look like you swallowed a secret,” she said lightly.
“I think contemplated the ingestion of would be more accurate,” he said, and she laughed, surprised and delighted.
“God, you’re weird,” she said fondly, and moved on.
Reid sat alone for a minute with the dossier in front of him and the secret sitting neatly on his tongue. He tried to examine it without touching, like a specimen under glass. He had learned long ago that he could feel things and also manage them. That he could love the team fiercely and still catalog the places they failed to see him. That both could be true.
Which, of course, was when Morgan reappeared, balancing two coffees and a grin. “Doctor Genius. I brought bribes.”
“I already had a cup.”
“Then this is your penance for making me listen to Rossi argue about which Sinatra album is best.” He set the cup down. “Drink. You look like string theory had a baby with insomnia.”
Reid tasted. The coffee was marginally less terrible. He grimaced anyway, for the pleasure of making Morgan roll his eyes.
“So,” Morgan said, propping his hip against the table. “Tinder, huh?”
Reid sipped. “Adopting the abbreviation ‘huh’ is a rhetorical weakness.”
“Deflection. Cute.”
“Observation. Accurate.”
Morgan’s smile deepened, but there was kindness in it. Always kindness. “We tease because we care.”
“I know.”
“And because it’s funny.”
“Also true.” Reid turned the cup in his hands. He could say it now—drop the stone into the still water and watch the ripples go. I know exactly what Tinder is, Derek. I also know the bouncer at Vesper on K Street by his first name, and I have a favorite secluded corner in a bar in Columbia Heights, and last night I— He stopped the thought before it said too much even to himself.
Morgan must have read something on his face, because he sobered for a second, head tilted. “You good?”
“Fine,” Reid said, honest in the way that meant not perfect, but intact. “Just tired.”
“You and me both, kid.” Morgan squeezed his shoulder. “Try to nap on the jet. And if you want me to set you up with someone non-app-based, I got you.”
Reid, deadpan: “Does the someone come with a bibliography?”
Morgan barked a laugh, delighted. “Now you’re just messing with me.” He knocked the table and left.
Reid watched him go, affection a steady warmth in his chest. He finished the coffee and considered his next move.
He was not, he admitted to himself, a naturally petty person. He kept most of his more human impulses labeled and stacked on shelves where they could do less harm. But there was a sliver of mischief in him—small, sharp, easily overlooked. It rose now, peeking over the lip of its jar, curious.
Let them think he was naïve. Let them tuck him in metaphoric blankets and tell themselves he didn’t know what the world felt like when it pressed close. Let them protect him from a fire he’d learned to cup in his palms.
He didn’t need to correct them. He could… observe. A controlled experiment. Minimal interference. High entertainment value.
His phone buzzed again. He glanced down.
[1:32 PM] Unknown: also three things: 1) the chamomile you left is terrible 2) call me when you land 3) you owe me a rematch
He typed, 1) you chose the chamomile, 2) we’ll see, 3) not statistically true, I’m undefeated, and hit send before he could overthink it.
Rossi passed the glass wall, caught his eye, and tapped his wrist in a universal time gesture. Wheels up in less than ninety. Reid collected the files, smoothed them into order, and stood.
On the way out of the conference room, he caught his reflection in the glass: hair tamed into submission, tie straight, collar closed. He thought of the faded constellation along his throat and the way he’d buttoned it out of sight this morning, breath catching at the faint protest of skin. He touched the top button now—an old, nervous habit—and then let his hand fall. Not here. Not yet.
The bullpen had become a river of purpose: people moving, voices threading, Garcia’s heels clicking past in a hurry that still somehow looked like a dance. She handed him a tablet as she went. “Teeny tiny treat for your enormous brain,” she chirped. “Suspect’s financials, location pings, and also a playlist to protect your delicate ears from the jet’s engine noise.”
“My ears aren’t delicate,” he said automatically, which made her grin widen.
“Your soul is,” she said, and then, softer, fond, “You’re our best person. Don’t let the world teach you otherwise.”
He looked at her. At the earnestness beneath the glitter. He loved her so much it sometimes made something in his ribs ache. He also wanted to laugh, because the world had been teaching him otherwise for years, and he had learned, stubbornly, what fit and what he could throw back.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try.”
She kissed his cheek and breezed away.
Emily fell into step beside him as they headed for the elevator. “You ever think about telling them?” she asked, as if picking up a conversation they hadn’t actually had.
He considered lying. He considered deflecting with a fact about elevator safety. He considered, briefly, inviting her to brunch on a Sunday at a cafe where the servers knew his order and the host sometimes slid him a knowing smile and a table with better privacy.
“Sometimes,” he said instead.
“And?” Emily pressed.
He hit the call button. The doors slid open with a hushed sigh. “And it’s more interesting not to.”
She laughed, delighted. “There he is. My chaos goblin.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You will,” she promised, and they stepped in.
On the jet, JJ briefed local, Rossi argued amiably with Hotch about the fastest route from the small airport to the outskirts of town, and Morgan sprawled with the entitled grace of a large cat who’d found sun. Reid buckled in and opened the file again, the shapes of the case rearranging in his mind until they made a story he could chase.
He could feel the fatigue trying to climb his body like ivy. He let it. He could sleep. He’d trained himself to sleep anywhere, on anything. He closed his eyes.
Behind them, faint through the hum of engines, Garcia’s playlist filtered through his headset—strings and soft synths, a melody impossible to hate. He let it carry him sideways, not into dreams exactly but into the place where last night rewound on a dimmer, quieter reel: laughter against his throat, a palm flattening on his chest, the trustworthy surprise of somebody who’d expected something else and found him instead.
He opened his eyes again before the movie could turn lurid. He did not need to be the guy dreaming about sex on a federal jet. He looked across the aisle instead. Morgan had one eye open, watching him with lazy curiosity.
“What?” Reid said.
“Nothing,” Morgan said. “Just thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.”
“About you.”
“Statistically more dangerous.”
Morgan grinned, slow and fond. “You’re gonna be fine, kid.”
Reid smiled back, small and real. “I know.”
He let the seat carry him the rest of the way down into a shallow sleep, the kind a body could climb out of quickly. He dreamed of white light and a smudge of lipstick he didn’t have to scrub away, of the team laughing and then stopping dead, of Hotch’s eyebrow doing the impossible physics it did when confronted with something obscene.
When he woke, twenty minutes later, the plane had leveled, the case still waited, and the hypothesis still hummed in his bones like an inside joke. He tugged his collar a fraction tighter, smoothed the page in front of him, and felt the exact right amount of bad.
Let them think what they liked. He wasn’t in a hurry. The truth had a way of wandering in at inconvenient angles. He didn’t have to hold the door open; he just had to be standing there when it happened.