#i hoep this doesnt flop

[boopiemadz]

Dear Owl, Love Sparrow.

Summary: Years ago, they were two students writing anonymous letters under the names "Sparrow" and "Owl." Through words alone, they fell for each other. Now, working side by side at the FBI, neither of them knows they’ve already loved each other once before. When fragments of their old letters turn up at crime scenes, everything comes back - and the truth changes everything.

In college, you were part of a psychology experiment - a correspondence study meant to test intimacy through anonymity. Each student was paired with a stranger from a different school. You, at Columbia University, were told you'd be paired with a student from Caltech. The project was funded by a cross-campus research grant on emotional intimacy through language. You signed your letters "Sparrow." Your partner signed his, "Owl."

The letters started formally - discussions of books, fears, dreams, and ideologies. The first letter you received was short, no more than two paragraphs. He introduced himself simply: Owl. He said he liked libraries, maps, silence, and things that made other people uncomfortable. You remember reading his letter in your dorm, beneath a lamp that barely lit the corners of your desk, and smiling for the first time in days.

You wrote back: brief at first, nervous. Told him you didn’t like the word "lonely" but often felt it. That you believed in ghosts - not supernatural ones, but emotional echoes. You talked about old poetry. About T.S. Eliot and grief. About your mom’s music collection and why you never slept with the door closed.

His reply was longer.

And from there, it took off. The letters became your ritual. Wednesday mornings were for envelopes tucked into the red campus mailbox. Saturdays were for hiding in your dorm to read his words alone. You never missed a week. It became real. It became sacred.

Owls handwriting was precise. He drew diagrams when he didn’t have the words, sketched out ideas in half-maps and graphs. His tone was painfully sincere. Sometimes fragmented. He confessed he hated the way people pitied him for being smart. That sometimes his thoughts moved too fast for his mouth. That he memorized everything and still felt like nothing stuck.

You wrote back that you felt unmoored, too. That the world often moved without your permission. That you didn’t know who you were supposed to be but felt safer telling him anyway.

You never met. Never spoke. The rules of the study forbade it. But there was something intoxicating in the not-knowing. You imagined Owl in pieces - his fingers ink-stained, maybe. His dorm filled with books. You pictured him sitting on the floor of a silent library, headphones in, scribbling thoughts he couldn't say aloud.

Then, with no warning, the letters stopped.

No goodbye. No explanation. You waited three months before you gave up.

You kept every one of his letters. Bundled by twine, in an old shoebox. You finished school. Took the FBI exam. Worked your way through the field, quiet and capable. You never forgot the mysterious stranger you found yourself falling for. You stopped waiting, but never forgot.

Years later, you’re at Quantico, sitting in a conference room across from Dr. Spencer Reid. You’ve worked with him for over a year. He’s strange. Brilliant. Guarded. But kind, in his own awkward way. You’ve always felt something around him - like you’ve known him longer than time allows.

The file on the table is grim. Three murders in Southern California. One victim posed with a cracked mirror. Another with a string of symbolic items: a chess piece, a pinecone, and a library card from Caltech’s main archives. All of them professors or scholars. All of them staged with purpose.

"There are notes," Hotch says. "Poetic phrases found written next to the bodies. None of them traceable to published work."

Garcia clicks through slides. The fourth reads: "To find truth, one must go alone into the dark." You freeze.

You wrote that. To Owl. In your sixth letter.

The room fades out for a second, the air too thin. You pull your attention back thinking, it must be a coincidence.

Later, after a long jet ride, you review the files alone in your hotel. You find another note photographed next to one of the victim’s: "Ghosts speak loudest to those who never stopped listening."

Letter twelve. Yours.

You don't sleep that night.

Over the following days, more letters appear in and around places the victims routinely visited - echoes from your past in the mouths of the dead. The phrases are too exact to be coincidental. Someone has copies of your letters. But how? And why?

At first, you try to convince yourself it’s an impossible coincidence. But when the third victim was positively identified to be one of the co-researchers on the original project, your stomach drops. Dr. Cho. Missing for two months. Presumed dead. Now confirmed.

"What kind of experiment was this again?" Morgan asks. You glance up from the screen.

"Cross-institutional letter exchange," you say. "Students were paired based on psych profiles. Asked to write for three months anonymously."

"What was the control?"

"There wasn't one. The goal was to study how anonymity affects vulnerability and connection."

Spencer tilts his head. "That sounds... familiar."

You look up sharply. "Did you do it?"

"I was at Caltech. Second year. They pulled some of us for a writing study. We had codenames. I was... Owl."

It’s like the floor disappears beneath you.

You nod, slowly, guarded. "What do you remember about your pen pal?"

He shrugs, thoughtful. "She was poetic. Sad, I think. But brilliant. We wrote about libraries and grief. The nature of memory. I burned the letters after Gideon left. Didn’t want to remember how much they meant to me, holding onto the hope we would find eachother was too painful."

He doesn't recognize you.

You excuse yourself. You go back to your hotel room and open the shoebox you had brought with you once you realized what the quotes were from.

You read them. All of them. Your own handwriting, responding to his. His quiet observations. His drawings. The dream about walking a spiraling staircase and ending in a mirror. His frustration at being told he was too much, too intense. The way you once signed a letter: "If you’re ever a ghost, haunt me gently."

Two days pass before you tell him.

Not until another body is found - with an origami bird in her hand.

You find Reid on the steps outside the precinct. He’s drinking coffee, flipping through his case-notes. "I need to tell you something," you say. He looks up. Blinks. "Okay."

You sit beside him. "I was Sparrow."

He doesn't speak for a long moment. Just stares at you. Then blinks again, slower.

"From the experiment?"

You nod.

"You're..."

"Yeah."

He sets his notebook down slowly. "Why didn’t you say anything before?"

"I didn’t know it was you at first. And then when I did, I didn’t know if you’d want to know."

He exhales, hand to his temple. "I burned them, the letters. I regret that now. But I remember some things, most things, eidetic memory..."

Your voice is smaller than you intend. "Someone’s using our letters. Just ours."

"The unsub must have accessed the electronic archive they entered every letter in, it was created to keep track of the results... he must have been one of the moderators for the project who got a little too attatched to you..." he says. "But that doesn’t explain the origami. That wasn’t in the letters."

"No," you whisper. "That was just us. I folded one into the last envelope. He- well I guess you, never responded."

He goes quiet again. "I didn’t get that one."

You look at him. "That’s why you stopped writing. He must've intercepted my last letter before it got to you."

The trap was set. You draft a new letter together. You write it by hand. He adds notes in the margins. It’s strange - working side by side with the person who once only existed as black ink on cream paper.

You sign it: "Yours, still, Sparrow."

The reply comes in a matter of hours. A bound volume of your letters, printed out, annotated in red. Obsessive. Worshipful. Violent.

Inside is a single line: "He never deserved you."

The unsub sets the stage in his response - a private library close to the precinct you were working out of. He wants you to come alone. One last letter. One final act.

You walk through the stacks like you’re underwater. Every wall echoes. Every breath feels borrowed. The unsub waits, hands gloved, holding your letters like scripture.

"You were Sparrow. You were mine."

"You never even knew me," you say.

"But I read everything. I saw you."

"You saw what I gave someone else."

"He wasted it. He burned it."

You stare him down. "I forgive him."

The signal is given. The team bursts in. Reid tackles the unsub himself.

Weeks had then passed since the chaos settled, since the unsub was caught and the shadows of your shared past briefly lifted.

Then, the package arrived.

It was unassuming, wrapped in brown paper, the edges frayed like an artifact from a forgotten time. No return address. You peeled it open with a slow reverence, your hands trembling just slightly, as if handling something sacred.

Inside lay a leather-bound notebook, worn at the edges, the supple cover faintly scented with old books and ink. You traced your fingers over its spine, a shiver rippling through your chest.

You opened the cover.

"For Sparrow, between the past and this moment."

The dedication was written in Spencer’s precise, looping handwriting. Ink slightly faded, but every word vivid as if whispered directly to you.

The notebook rested on your lap, its leather cover worn soft by time and countless nights spent open on Spencer’s desk or his favorite café table. This was no longer the stranger of distant letters - these were poems written for you, the woman he worked beside every day, the woman whose presence unsettled and inspired him in equal measure.

Each page felt like a secret unfolding.

“I watch you from the edges of crowded rooms, The way you tilt your head when lost in though., A careful quiet broken only by laughter. That slips like sunlight through autumn leaves.”

You traced the words, imagining the countless moments he observed you - unnoticed, unspoken, the way he pieced together fragments of you like clues in his case files.

The poems turned inward, revealing his fears - his worries that his feelings might break the fragile balance between you.

“I fear the chasm between us, wide and deep, Built from silences and things unsaid. Yet I find myself reaching across the void, Yearning for something I cannot name.”

You could feel the tension in his words, the battle between wanting to protect himself - and wanting to let himself fall. Between the poems, his handwriting sometimes faltered, lines scratched out, rewritten, almost as if he doubted his own courage.

One poem was followed by a small drawing - a park bench beneath two sprawling oak trees, their leaves sketched with delicate strokes. You paused, heart quickening.

“If ever you find yourself lost in the crowd, Or weighed down by shadows too dense to bear, Know there is a place where the world grows still, A bench beneath oaks that hold whispered prayers.”

The imagery was unmistakable: the quiet park near the city’s edge, where you sometimes went to escape the noise and the weight of everything. You remembered those afternoons alone, the feel of rough bark beneath your fingers, the way the setting sun painted the leaves gold.

The poems grew bolder as the pages turned, each one a step closer to confession.

“I’ve fallen in love with the way you move through light, With the quiet strength that anchors storms inside. If only you knew the weight of my hope, You’d let me in, no longer denied.”

You paused again, fingers trembling slightly, heart beating unevenly as if the poems themselves were alive, pulsing with something urgent and fragile.

“I write these words in the hope they might reach you, Across the distance we pretend to keep. If you ever tire of shadows and want to find me, Look for the bench where silence and daylight meet.”

Your breath caught. The final poem was folded carefully at the back, sealed with a faint imprint of a purple Sparrow and an illistration of a red Owl.

You read it over, letting the lines settle:

“When the dusk drapes the sky in amber hues, And the world softens into whispered truths, Come find me where the oaks embrace the breeze, Where two souls may speak beyond words and pleas. I am waiting, not as a shadow or name, But as a man who has loved you just the same.”

Your fingers closed the notebook gently, your heart pounding with anticipation.

You knew where he meant. The park. The bench. Tomorrow at dusk.

The next evening, as the sky softened from gold to rose and the breeze stirred the leaves with quiet whispers, you approached the park. Your steps slowed, breath catching as your eyes fell on the familiar figure seated beneath the spreading branches of the oak.

There he was - the man whose words had cradled your heart, whose silent love had shaped so many quiet moments.

You stood frozen, the world narrowing until it was only the two of you, breath mingling with the fading light.

And then your eyes met.

Spencer stood just a few feet away, eyes fixed on you, searching for words that had taken him years to find. His voice was low, steady, carrying the weight of everything he’d held inside.

“I loved her,” he began, voice a little rough, “Sparrow. Even when I didn’t know who she was, even when it was just letters on paper. I loved her words - the way she spoke of loneliness, hope, pain... how she saw the world. Somehow, through the distance and the silence, I felt connected to her, like she was the only person who really understood what it meant to feel broken but keep going.”

He swallowed, his eyes never leaving yours. “And then... I started noticing you. Not as Sparrow. Just you. The way you looked when you were thinking about something too complicated to say out loud, the way your laughter filled a room, the way you carried your quiet strength. I realized I was falling for you.”

You felt your chest tighten as his words settled over you. His vulnerability, so rare and precious, wrapped around you like a soft shield.

“And now,” he said, taking a hesitant step closer, “here you are. Both the writing I once knew and loved, and the girl I've found myself day to day captivated by. And I love you. I love you - more than I ever thought I could love someone.”

You swallowed hard, feeling tears prick at the corners of your eyes. Your voice was quiet but certain. “I loved him too. Owl. Even before I knew you were him. I loved the way he thought, the way he cared so deeply but hid it behind numbers and facts. I thought he was unreachable, and I was scared to fall for someone I didn’t know. But I did. I fell for you - without even knowing it was you.”

Your gaze softened, and you reached out, your fingers brushing his cheek. “And now you’re here. Real, in front of me. And I love you too.”

Spencer’s breath caught, his lips parting slightly. Slowly, with the gentleness of a whispered prayer, he leaned in. Your lips met - soft at first, tentative, savoring the moment as if making sure it was real.

Then the kiss deepened, passion blooming between you, years of longing and unanswered questions melting away in the warmth of shared breath.

When you finally parted, your foreheads rested together, breaths mingling in the cooling air.

You smiled, with a quiet confidence of someone who’d waited a long time. “I was hoping... you'd come home with me.”

His eyes widened in surprise and delight. “I’d like that. More than anything.”

You slipped your hand into his, fingers lacing tightly with his own.

He pulled you gently into his side as you walked away from the park, the night unfolding around you like the beginning of everything you both had waited for.

A/N-

Im SO insanely proud of this dude. I feel so creative when Im usually void of original ideas :/ anyways lmk how you like this!