Chapter Text
Charlie had a list, well it wasn’t a particularly impressive list, but she still liked it.
There were no five year plans, no carefully color-coded career goals, no inspirational quotes printed in expensive fonts and taped above her desk.
It was written in the back of an old notebook she’d bought for two dollars at a thrift store, beneath a grocery list from six months earlier.
The first page said:
THINGS I NEED TO DO BEFORE I DIE
She had crossed out ‘learn French’ because she tried and discovered that French pronunciation was not something she was capable of.
She had crossed out ‘run a marathon’ because honestly she hated running and had no intention of spending six hours voluntarily suffering.
She had crossed out ‘get a tattoo’ because she spent three months deciding what she wanted and then realized she was terrified of needles.
There were only three things left.
Visit London.
Live in London.
Own an extremely big amount of books.
The third one was already going surprisingly well.
Charlie sat cross legged on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by books she bought secondhand, borrowed and never returned, or found in random places of the city.
Her laptop was open on the bed, a map of London filled the screen.
She had been looking at the same apartment listing for twenty minutes.
It was tiny.
The bedroom looked barely large enough for a bed, the kitchen consisted of a cupboard and a refrigerator that appeared to have been installed sometime during the reign of Queen Victoria, and the bathroom had a shower so narrow that Charlie suspected she’d have to turn sideways to use it.
It was also approximately five times more expensive than anything she could currently afford.
She stared at the price.
“Yeah, no.”
She clicked away. Three seconds later, she opened it again, because the neighborhood looked nice and that was important.
At least, that was what she told herself.
She had been saving for London for two years.
Every spare dollar went into an envelope hidden inside the back of her closet.
She had named it London, because giving a pile of money a name made it more real. She added another twenty dollars every Friday.
Sometimes more, other times it was only five.
It didn’t really matter as long as the amount was growing.
Slowly, but it was growing.
Charlie closed the apartment listing and opened another tab.
Flights.
She wasn’t going to book one, obviously.
She was just checking for the third time that week.
She typed in the dates, then stared at the prices.
“You’re kidding me.”
She closed that tab too.
Her phone buzzed beside her.
It was message from Maya: Are you working Tuesday?
Charlie typed back: Unfortunately.
You say that every week and then complain when they don’t schedule you.
That’s because I contain multitudes.
Maya responded with a laughing emoji.
Charlie put the phone down.
She picked up the book lying beside her and opened it to the page she’d marked that morning.
A true crime book. There was something about murder cases that fascinated her: the questions.
Why?
How?
What did everyone miss?
What tiny detail had been sitting in plain sight while everyone looked somewhere else?
She liked mysteries because they promised that there was an answer. Even when the answer was horrible.
Charlie had always been good at noticing things.
She noticed when people lied, when someone changed the way they spoke depending on who was in the room. when Maya was upset even when Maya insisted she wasn’t.
She noticed when customers were about to ask for something complicated, when someone had been standing in line long enough to start getting impatient.
It was probably why she liked working at the theater.
There were people, stories and the movies.
Charlie loved movies almost as much as she loved books.
She especially loved the ones that made her argue afterward, the ones with endings that could be dissected for hours.
She checked the time, she should have been asleep twenty minutes ago. Instead, she was reading about a murder committed in a small English village in 1987.
She turned another page.
Her alarm was set for seven.
She ignored that fact.
On her laptop, London was still open in another tab.
Charlie looked at it again.
One day she would go there.
Maybe sooner than she thought. Maybe not.
But one day she’d walk down those streets without having to worry about how much the plane ticket had cost. She’d sit in a little café with a book, complain about the weather, get lost.
She’d find a bookstore and spend money she absolutely should not spend, have an apartment with terrible plumbing and a tiny kitchen.
Charlie smiled faintly at the thought, then she turned off the laptop and put the book on her nightstand.
She climbed into bed.
Tomorrow would be work. The day after that would be work.
There would be popcorn, customers, movies, arguments with Steve.
It was a small life.
Sometimes, she even worried it was too small.
Charlie closed her eyes.
London could wait. For now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Spencer Reid had never understood the appeal of doing nothing.
People talked about relaxation as though it were an activity, they usually recommended baths and taking long walks. Even meditation, or vacations.
Spencer had tried most of them at least once, but he had never been particularly good at any of them.
A bath was inefficient, meditation required him to stop thinking, which was both considerably harder than people made it sound and, in Spencer’s opinion, somewhat unrealistic.
Vacations were useful, but only when they involved museums, historical sites, or enough reading material to occupy the flight.
And walks were only relaxing if he had somewhere to go.
So, technically, Spencer was very good at keeping busy.
He was less good at stopping.
His apartment reflected that.
There were books everywhere. On the shelves, obviously, the coffee table, beside the couch, on the floor next to his bed.
There were even several stacked neatly on top of one another beside the kitchen counter because he’d run out of places where they could reasonably be stored.
Spencer had stopped pretending this was temporary.
He knew where everything was.
He could tell someone the approximate location of any book in his apartment without looking. He could also tell them which ones he read, which ones he started, which ones he intended to reread, and which ones he had purchased because he’d been unable to resist the possibility that he might someday need them.
He had six unread books on his nightstand and that bothered him.
He bought another one that afternoon and that bothered him even more.
Spencer sat on the edge of his bed and looked at it.
He had been home for almost an hour, he changed into more comfortable clothes, he ate, reviewed a case file he wasn’t technically required to review until the following morning, he even re-read The Great Gatsby just because.
And yet there was still a strange sense that he hadn’t accomplished enough.
He looked at the clock, it was only 8:17 p.m, and there was nothing he needed to do. That was the problem.
He picked up a book but didn’t even open it because his mind wandered back to work.
Not even a specific case, just work in general.
The people. The questions. The feeling of being surrounded by information at all times.
It was exhausting, he liked it, but still that didn’t mean it wasn’t exhausting.
Spencer leaned back against the headboard.
He had spent most of his life being told that he thought too much.
Teachers.
Doctors.
Colleagues.
People who didn’t know what to do with him.
Sometimes he wondered if they were right, then he remembered that thinking was how he understood things and how he understood the world.
He wasn’t sure what he would do if he ever learned how to turn it off.
Probably nothing.
He picked up his phone.
There were several messages.
One from Morgan.
One from Garcia.
He answered the important ones first. Garcia had sent him a photograph of something she had apparently found amusing.
Spencer smiled.
He sent back a response.
Then he opened the weather forecast for the following week for no particular reason.
He closed it.
He looked at the book again. Maybe he should go out.
Just somewhere.
He had been spending too much time inside.
That wasn’t necessarily bad, but there was something about his apartment after eight in the evening that made it feel smaller.
Spencer stood.
He put on his coat.
Then stopped.
He didn’t actually have anywhere to go. He stood in the middle of the living room, waiting for an idea to appear.
Nothing did so he sat down again and opened his book. Ten minutes later, he was reading.
This was normal.
This was fine.
Outside, the city continued without him.
Spencer looked toward the window, he always liked cities at night. There was something reassuring about all those people moving through their own lives without knowing anything about one another.
Everyone had somewhere to be. Everyone had something they were carrying.
Either a thought, a memory, a book, a secret, a plan.
Spencer wondered what they were all doing, then he realized he has been staring through the window for almost five minutes.
His phone buzzed again.
Morgan.
You alive, pretty boy?
Spencer smiled.
Yes.
Doing anything tonight?
Spencer looked around his apartment.
Reading.
Of course you are.
Spencer didn’t answer, because he really didn’t need to. Morgan already knew.
That was the thing about routines.
Once people knew them, they stopped asking questions.
Spencer went back to reading and the evening passed by quietly.
He made tea. Made another one.
Read until nearly midnight.
Eventually, he closed the book and placed it on the nightstand.
Tomorrow would be work.
There would be reports and interviews, questions, informations to process.
And Spencer would do what he always did: show up, listen, notice, think, then he would come home.
Maybe that was enough.
For now, it was.
Spencer turned off the light.
His books waited in the darkness, hundreds of stories surrounding him.