Chapter 55 of human Bill Cipher finally having a little fun for the first time in over a month of captivity in the Mystery Shack:
Bill does his level best to teach Mabel everything he knows about everything as fast as possible (while Ford eavesdrops). In the process, he finally reveals something about his home dimension!
But not everything about his dimension.
"Did you have rainbows in Flatworld?" Mabel had started drawing her shapesona again at the bottom of a fresh piece of paper. The heart was holding out one hand with several strips of glue shooting in a beam out from the palm; Mabel started shaking glitter onto the glue strips to make them rainbow.
"Not natural ones."
"Awww!"
"We could make them with flashlights and prisms, though."
"That's something." Still, it wasn't as cool as a real rainbow. She started carefully drawing Bill floating above her shapesona. (She probably should have drawn him before she put down glitter. She had to push up her sleeve and lift her wrist to avoid smearing the glue.) "When's the first time you saw a real rainbow?"
Bill didn't answer.
Mabel glanced at him. He had a hard look in his eyes. "Bill?"
####
For the first time in his life, the triangle was up—up but not north—in space, in the third dimension, looking down but not south at the plane where he'd spent his entire existence. It shuddered and rippled and cracked, contracting, as the entire universe crunched together around him.
Great walls of pale blue flame half a googol light years wide erupted into third dimensional space, where stars were caught and crushed between the quickly collapsing cosmic tectonic plates. He hadn't known his flat universe had stars of its own.
His home world shattered and crumbled, shrapnel and rubble spraying out, stone instantly pulverized into dust. Distant oceans rode the waves of the convulsing universe, flinging billions of gallons of water into space in a fine thin spray, glittering in the sunlight.
As the triangle watched, a great flickering rainbow ring formed in front of the ejected ocean, like the hollow eye of a hostile god staring at him in judgment.
He stared back.
And he felt himself fill with more and more and more power.
####
"Bill?"
"Sorry, I was trying to remember!" Bill sat back, laced his hands behind his head, and shrugged, "It's not coming to me. But I'm sure it was after I took charge of Dimension Zero. From time to time planets with weather systems would fall in through a wormhole, I must've seen a rainbow on one of them!"
"Oh." The answer disappointed her, but she couldn't quite put her finger on why. She puzzled over it as she drew a fireball shape around Bill's hands in glue and shook on pale blue glitter.
Bill nodded at the page, "So what are we up to?"
"Fighting evil! With rainbow lasers and... whatever that magic fire thing you do is!"
"Hey, superheroes! Sounds fun. Who are we killing?"
"Superheroes don't kill people!"
"Fine. Who are we sending to the hospital with third degree burns?"
"I don't know, I haven't made up a villain yet." She almost asked Bill what kind of monsters existed in his world; but the question died in her throat. That might be too depressing a question. She added a heart-shaped glue outline around her shapesona and shook on a glitter rainbow, and set the picture aside to dry. She grabbed a fresh paper and tried to imagine what a two-dimensional butterfly would look like. Would it just have flat little stick wings since that was more aerodynamic? That sounded boring. She started drawing a two-dimensional squid instead.
Bill studied Mabel's latest finished work—the glitter-outlined heart, the glitter rainbow laser, the glitter fire, and the plain him. After a moment, he casually mentioned, "I used to wear body glitter."
She blinked at him. "What?"
"Earlier you asked me about glitter in my dimension," Bill said. "Body paint was makeup to us. I wore it when I went dancing."
"WHAT!"
"And I'd cut open glow sticks to paint my arms and legs!"
"What color glitter did you wear?!"
"Usually gold."
"What?! Bill!" Mabel laughed. "You're already yellow!"
"But I didn't glitter. That's important!"
"You're boring."
"Shut up! I was gorgeous and I knew it! Why mess with perfection?!" He gestured down at himself, perfection, as though he'd momentarily forgotten what body he was in. "Listen, club fashion gets repetitive. If you've seen one equilateral in cutesy primary color gradients, you've see 'em all. There's beauty in simplicity—not a lot of shapes can pull off a solid color with a little light highlighting and still look flashy!" He'd sat up straighter, chest puffed out proudly, as he talked about how pretty he thought he'd been. "Buuut sure, sometimes I highlighted my points for fun. And to keep from stabbing people—it's hard for other people to judge distances with strobe lights on."
"What colors."
"Usually red, blue, or purple. You know—nice contrasts with gold."
Mabel grabbed another paper and started drawing Bill dancing. He leaned closer, elbows on the table, watching with more interest now. Mabel asked, "You had clubs with strobe lights?"
"Of course we did, we aren't barbarians." Bill picked up yellow and black markers out of Mabel's supplies, leaned over to her drawing in progress, and started adding a decorative border around the nearest edge of the paper in dots and dashes.
"What kind of music did you listen to?"
"It was... It's closest to the music in— You've never been to that dimension. Well, it kind of sounds like... I'll never hit those notes with human vocal cords." He drummed his fingers on the table. "Hold on. Let me get Questiony's piano."
####
It turned out that Flatworld club music sounded kind of like a broken tornado siren.
"It doesn't sound very good on a human piano," Bill said, giving the electric piano balanced on his knees a disapproving look. "The intervals between notes are tuned wrong, it's about four octaves short, and it's missing that tympanic membrane shredding tremolo when the treble jumps."
Mabel regarded the piano with some dismay. "Do you know how to play anything else?"
Bill sighed.
He played "Don't Start Un-Believing" for her. He even did that cool thing where you drag a finger up half the keyboard at once.
####
By now, Bill seemed a lot happier to answer Mabel's questions about his world; but she quickly worked out which ones he'd actually give a direct answer. He was the most free with science-y questions, hit or miss on the fun cultural questions, and instantly evasive when asked about his own life or uncomfortable political issues.
When she asked if shapes and their houses just kinda floated unattached to anything because they didn't have a home planet, Bill said they did have a home planet—hundreds of miles below, marking south by its gravitational pull—and they lived in the sky in between their planet and its rings. When she asked what kind of clothing they wore, Bill said they usually didn't wear anything, unless it was for practical purposes (gloves for gardening; goggles for chemistry; elbow-, knee-, and corner-pads for spelunking), and when she asked about his top hat he said slyly, "You mean my telescope?" and gleefully refused to explain further.
But when she asked if it was true that equilateral triangles were the lowest rung you could stand on before getting knocked off the social ladder altogether, Bill said that was a pretty rude question to ask a triangle. And then he said his world didn't have ladders.
When he casually let slip that he'd been able to see the third dimension when nobody else could, she asked how that was possible. He'd paused, looked up from his seventh completely incomprehensible drawing of an animal (she'd asked him whether Flatworlders had pets), and, with an eager gleam in his eye, he asked, "How much time do you have?"
####
Ford heard Bill's voice the moment he opened the door—"All right, star girl, pop quiz, let's see how much of that you kept in your noggin."
"Oh, I'm so ready!"
Baffled, Ford leaned in the living room doorway. The room was absolutely plastered in crayon-covered papers—illustrations, lists, mathematical and scientific diagrams—stars, cells, planets, vehicles. At the moment Bill was pointing at six papers taped together with a diagram on them that Ford thought was a Punnett square that had been expanded into a four-dimensional tessaract. "A polygon's sides are determined by...?"
"Genetic inheritance!" Mabel announced, the proud student who knew all the answers. "You have however many sides your parents have genes for!"
"And the idea that polygons increase by one side each generation...?"
"Is propaganda! Because if everybody hides their kids without enough sides, and they only talk about the kids that did go up a side, it makes everyone think that's what always happens and their family is the only one that's failing!"
"Perfect! And the highest natural amount of sides a shape can have?"
"Twelve! Decadoggins!"
"Close enough, dodecagons! But this isn't Greek class, I'll give you full points. So, any shapes with more sides than that got them through—?"
"Random mutation!"
"Correctamundo! Meaning the only way to get shapes with hundreds of sides is..."
"Crazy bonkers inbreeding! Because the same rich families just keep marrying each other!"
"With consequences including—?"
"Um..." Mabel puffed out her cheeks as she thought. "Skeletons getting all crackly, having a hard time making babies, and high—uh—infant morality!"
"Mortality."
"Lots of dead babies."
"Yes! And remember: when a mutation makes a body produce so much more of something than it needs that it starts harming the body, that's called...?"
"Cancer!"
"Meaning circles are...?"
"Tumors!"
"And what do we do with tumors?"
"EXECUTE THEM!"
"YES!" Bill ripped the Punnett tesseract off the wall. Behind it was a piece of paper that read, in blood red crayon, ANTI-MONARCHIST ANARCISM. "You're ready to man the guillotines! A+, star girl! Give yourself another sticker!"
"Yes!" Mabel peeled a sparkly purple star off a sticker sheet and stuck it on her cheek. Her face had over twenty star stickers.
Ford leaned against the living room doorframe, watching the scene inside with wonder. He was more than a little iffy about the political lesson—he, personally, was incredibly opposed to the idea that it was morally imperative to execute anybody with extra body parts, nobility or not—but the presentation of it was certainly captivating. It had been a long time since Ford had seen Bill like this. (It had been a long time since Ford would have trusted any lesson out of Bill's mouth.)
"Now let's get back to biangles." Bill picked up a fake crystal ball that he'd drawn various lines and shapes on with a marker.
"Awww, again?!"
"Hey. Listen," he said firmly. "I believe in you. You'll get it this time, I know it."
Ford looked around the room, taking in the scene more fully. The floor was scattered with drawings of aliens. A few of them were various polygons—regular and irregular, with the irregularities further broken down by whether they otherwise showed radial or lateral symmetry—each with thin limbs and an eye on a corner. Most were fantastical alien animals, a few that Ford had seen or been warned about on other worlds. Some had been scribbled out and redrawn when Bill's limited artistic capabilities didn't live up to his unknown standards; a few were in Mabel's art style, meaning Bill must have described them to her while she drew.
Twenty pieces of paper had been taped together on the wall behind the TV, with a drawing of a planet surrounded by a circular ring of small blobs—a planetary ring?—and a moon further out. The empty atmosphere between the planet and the ring was filled with squares and rectangles, which were grouped together in red blobby circles that were each labeled by letter: "Country △," "Country B," "Country C," "Country D (communists)," etc. A badly-drawn sea serpent slithered along the outside of the ring with the words "Here There Be Monsters" written over it.
A tall column of taped together papers was covered in examples of alien writing systems—some of them Ford recognized from his travels through other dimensions. From the ones he understood, it looked like the words were demonstrations of Mabel's name in dozens of alien writing systems. Sometimes Bill spelled her name Maybell or Mabelle.
And there were so many papers scattered around the room with little graphs and symbols and arrows Ford couldn't make sense of. And in the center of it all, Bill, alive, energetic, his full attention enthusiastically focused on his student.
Bill had to be up to something; but Ford couldn't imagine what, based on the bizarre assemblage of information in front of him. What nefarious purpose could be behind showing Mabel how to spell her name in alien languages? Unless his goal was to so enchant her with tales of other worlds that he could persuade her to help him open a new portal...? No, even for Bill that felt like a stretch.
He looked at the wall again. Surely, that wasn't Bill's homeworld. Ford had spent years of his life trying to find the world Bill was from; surely Bill hadn't just drawn it in the middle of Ford's living room. Had he?
"Okay, let's start with spherical geometry from the top," Bill said, polishing the crystal ball on his leggings to rub off the marker lines. "Don't tell anyone I can do this." He held up the ball, tapped it twice on the bottom, and it hovered in place when he let it go, freeing up both his hands to hold a ruler and marker. (How long had he been able to do that? Had he even noticed Ford was standing right outside?) He drew a line across the surface of the ball, "Pretend it's a planet. If you draw a line on a sphere, it's obviously curved, right?"
"Right," Mabel said.
"But now pretend you're on the planet. The surface of the world is a flat plane to you. From your perspective, you can walk in a straight line from point A to point B."
"But it's actually a curve. From space."
"Now you're catching on. That's what makes spherical geometry a little weird: when you're on the sphere you treat everything around you like it's 2D even though when you're off the sphere you can see it's 3D." Why in the world was Bill teaching Mabel about spherical geometry?
Bill drew two more lines to connect to the first. "So! You can draw a triangle on a sphere, no problem, right?"
"Right."
"And something you can only do in spherical geometry... is... pretend this is the North Pole and the South Pole..." Bill carefully rotated the ball under his marker as he drew a straight line from one "pole" to the other, and then drew a second straight line from pole to pole next to it. "Ta-da! If a tri-angle has three angles, a bi-angle has two angles. You've got yourself a two-sided polygon. Right?"
Mabel hesitated. "Right."
"You with me so far, Shooting Star?"
"So far," she said, with a tone that suggested she expected that to change very soon.
"But if you try to transfer that shape from spherical geometry to Euclidean geometry—" Bill turned to an expanse of still partially-uncovered white papers taped to the wall like a makeshift whiteboard, drew two points, and drew two straight lines, red and blue, between the points, "—it just doesn't work. You can't see a biangle in a flat world."
And now Mabel was squinting suspiciously at him.
Bill said, "I lost you."
"But where does it go!"
Bill shrugged. "You lost it when you lost the third dimension."
"But you said when you're on the sphere it's two dimensional!"
"From your perspective it's two dimensional, but there's still a third dimension enabling the sphere to exist."
"Then from my perspective when I'm on the planet shouldn't a biangle look like that?" Mabel pointed at the two straight lines on the piece of paper. "Since everything looks all 2D to me? But it doesn't! It's like flying from the North Pole to the South Pole through America and then flying back through China! China and America don't just squish together into the same place just because you're going in a straight line on a sphere!"
"I'd kill to hear you give a geography lesson to a Flat Earther convention."
Mabel gave him her best angry scowl.
"It was a compliment! I think you'd inspire some hilarious arguments, that's all!" Bill put two dots on the paper and offered Mabel the marker. "Look, try it for yourself! Draw a biangle."
Mabel took the marker and, after a moment of thought, drew two curved lines between the points, making a football shape.
"Those aren't straight lines, kid."
"Argh!" Mabel pulled the paper off the wallpaper, bent it into a curve, and shakily drew a straight line between the two points; but no matter how else she twisted or bent the paper, she couldn't find a path that would let her draw a second straight line between the points without overlapping the first line she'd drawn. She crumpled the paper, tossed it on the floor, and whispered, "It's witchcraft, Bill."
He burst out laughing. "I could name a few horror writers that felt the same way about non-Euclidean geometry."
"But whyyy does the biangle disappear when it goes from a sphere to normal flat paper."
"Because..." Bill groped for an explanation he hadn't already tried. He crossed an arm across his chest and tapped a knuckle just under the bow tied in his hoodie's draw strings the way some humans might tap a hand to their chin, his eyes narrowed in thought. How many times had Ford seen him make that exact same face in his true triangular form, whenever Ford was struggling to understand a lesson on portal physics and Bill was struggling to find a way to translate it into concepts Ford had encountered in his human education? "Let's try this another way."
The scene made Ford ache.
Look past the paper and the crayons, and the graph- and figure- and writing-covered walls looked so much like the advanced physics lessons and blueprints that Bill had coated Ford's starry blue dreamscape in during his sleep. Look past the flesh and bone, and Bill moved and gestured and spoke the way he had when he was teaching Ford how to build a bridge between worlds.
It was the first time since Bill's death that Ford had seen 100% of his personality shining—unhindered by grief, secrets, or a disdainful human audience. It was the first time in decades that Ford had seen Bill at his best.
In that moment, for a split second, Ford forgot how to hate Bill. He couldn't see Bill the traitor, Bill the invader, Bill the homicidal party animal. The only person in that room with Mabel was Bill Cipher the Teacher, Mentor, and Muse that Ford used to know so long ago. Like an ancient god who'd chosen to spend a day roleplaying as a giddy professor—Bill was holding back a tsunami's worth of vast, ancient, unintelligible alien knowledge so that he could drip out revelations at a faucet's pace, slow enough for his student to catch each drop in her hands.
Over thirty years ago, there had been moments when this Bill peeked out behind the above-it-all façade—and that had been the Bill that Ford was happiest to see, the Bill that Ford had thought of as a friend rather than a mere teacher... but each time, it hadn't been long before Bill seemly caught himself and turned off the faucet for the night.
Because he couldn't let Ford learn too much, or he would have seen through Bill's ruse.
Hatred tiredly crept back in.
"I've got it!" Mabel triumphantly flung her hands in the air. "It's like orange slices!"
"Orange slices?" Bill repeated.
"Be right back!" Mabel zoomed to the kitchen, shouting, "Hi Grunkle Ford!" as she passed.
Ford watched her go, then looked back at Bill; Bill had glanced at him for the first time. But all he did was frown and mutter, "I don't remember inviting you to audit this course."
Before Ford could decide whether to retort, Mabel charged back into the living room with an orange and a sharp knife. "Okay! If you draw a triangle on the orange," Mabel said, doing so with a marker, before cutting into it with the knife, "and then you—you cut it out all the way to the center..."
"Be careful with that," Ford said. Mabel was holding the orange in one palm and stabbing into it from the opposite side.
Bill said, "Lay off, Six Fingers. I'm keeping my eye on her, she's not gonna hurt herself."
"I'm being careful!" Mabel was struggling to get an even wedge cut all the way to the center of the orange; she eventually gave up and dug into the orange with her fingertips to tug out a messy mangled handful of fruit, attached to a roughly equilateral patch of orange peel about two inches to each side. She shook orange juice off her fingers. "Pretend I cut that out better."
"I dunno what you're talking about," Bill said. "It looks flawless."
She pointed at each corner of the peel triangle. "Okay so, these are the three corners of the spherical triangle, right?"
"Right."
"And if you want to make a regular flat triangle, you can... try to cut a straight line between the corners, like..." She squeezed the rest of the orange between her knees, held the edges of the triangular peel with her fingertips, and sawed off the orange pulp underneath, trying to cut a flat level plane as near to the triangle's corners as she could. Ford almost warned Mabel about the knife again, but glanced at Bill's face and his expression of unworried, keen curiosity, and kept quiet. Bill reached out and caught the sawed-off chunk of orange pulp before it hit the ground.
Mabel held out the peel slice. "There! Right? Spherical triangle on top and flat triangle on the bottom!"
Bill considered that, one hand on his hip. He popped the orange chunk in his mouth. "All right. So far so good."
"But if you make a biangle..." Mabel drew two lines between the top and bottom of the remaining orange, and cut a wedge free. "There isn't anything extra to cut off to let you make a flat shape. There's just a straight line between the two points!"
"Ha! Okay, all right, that works! Brilliant! What do you need me for? You just taught yourself the whole lesson!" Bill ruffled her hair so enthusiastically that he knocked her headband askew.
She shoved him away, laughing, and straightened out her headband. "Bill!"
"What did I say! Didn't I tell you you'd get it?" Bill was beaming at her, impressed, delighted, proud. "Congratulations, you've just mastered college-level geometry."
"Wh—What? Are you serious? This is college stuff?" She shook her head. "No way, you're lying."
Bill pointed at Ford without looking at him. "Tell her."
He felt a little like a dog being commanded to bark; but he said, "He's right. I didn't start studying spherical geometry until my second semester in college." He was sure he could have studied it sooner, if his high school had offered it; and he doubted Mabel had absorbed an entire semester's worth of spherical geometry; but he didn't see any reason to point any of that out when Mabel's face lit up in excitement.
Bill said, "There you have it! Way to go, star girl! Two big stickers."
"YES!" Mabel peeled off two jumbo-sized star stickers with smiley faces and stuck them onto her earrings. "So does that make a biangle a girl or a boy?"
And Ford was immediately lost again.
"No," Bill said.
Mabel sighed loudly and tried again. "Does that make a biangle a line or a polygon?"
"Still no, but for a different reason. Externally, they look like lines to anyone who isn't psychic. Internally, their anatomy usually functions like a polygon's. But socially, you've gotta ask. Some of 'em consider themselves lines, some polygons, some claim biangularity is neither linear nor polygonal. Personally, I say they're whatever they say they are. Because," he said grandly, "I'm just that open-minded and accepting."
Ford stifled a derisive snort. But Bill's self-aggrandizing aside, Ford's mind was reeling trying to keep up—spherical geometry, the (gendered?) socialization of shapes, Flatworlder anatomy—what did psychics have to do with anything? Ford's fingers itched for a pen. He wished he had his journal with him.
Bill grabbed several papers off the floor and the floating crystal ball and climbed on top of the wooden TV cabinet. He left the ball hovering behind him seven feet up in the air, tossed aside several papers he'd already used both sides of to let them flutter back to the floor, and taped the rest to the wall with their blank backsides turned out. "Now back to remote viewing." He drew a grid in blue lines on the papers, said, "Toss me that triangle wedge," used a marker to draw an eye on the triangular orange peel, tapped it twice like he had the crystal ball, and stuck it against the grid, where it sat unmoving.
And the entire time, Ford watched with his arms crossed tightly.
Almost a month ago, Bill had given Ford his manipulative trap of a birthday gift, a miniature grimoire, five pieces of paper, margins filled, two rows of text per line, packed with as diverse an array of magical spells and occult knowledge as Bill could fit. It wasn't a gift, it was a boast and a taunt: look at everything I know that you don't; look at what I could teach you if you let me live.
It was something Bill could have given him all along—effortlessly, with no cost to himself—but didn't, until Bill wanted something from him.
On his birthday, Ford had wondered, furiously: when this was what Bill could have been��gift-giver, wish-granter, teacher, guide, friend—why did he choose not to be?! It was an internal scream of rage, the howl of a wounded victim at the condemned criminal as he was marched to the gallows: you monster, you monster, you monster, when it would have been so easy for you to be something better, why instead are you a liar, manipulator, torturer, murderer, life-ruiner, world-ender? Answer for yourself: why are you this instead of someone better? How dare you?
It had made Ford want him dead even more.
This was the exact opposite of the grimoire.
The question in Ford's head wasn't a scream of rage anymore. It was grief. It was a plea. It was one last desperate attempt to understand:
Instead of being who he was, why couldn't Bill have been this person? This charismatic, energetic, ecstatic muse who ruled like a king over a classroom he'd constructed himself, eager to share a trillion years of collected wisdom with a fragile mortal mind, lighting up with joy whenever she grasped something that was trivially simple to him? This guide to the vast wonders beyond Earth, competent and encouraging and funny, delighting in the weirdness of the wide wide universe? The Bill that Ford had once liked so much—the Bill that he'd called his friend?
"Okay," Bill said, all sunshine and excitement, "Back to how to view the third dimension from the second dimension—"
Mabel said, "Can you view the fourth dimension from the third?"
Bill hesitated a split second, but said, "Sure! You can view any dimension from any dimension! You've just gotta bend your eye the right way to see higher ones!"
"What does the fourth dimension look like?"
"Well—hm. Imagine the way that the third dimension looks different from the second, and that's the way the fourth dimension looks different from the third."
Mabel stared at Bill.
"Eddie wrote an entire book about a square meeting a sphere because that was the closest he could get to telling other humans what seeing the fourth dimension is like! If I could still visit dreams, I could just show you, but..."
"Isn't the fourth dimension time? Blendo showed us the time stream! Is that what it looks like?"
"Nnn—close! You're close. The fourth dimension isn't time, but time is in the fourth dimension."
"How's that different."
Bill pointed at the floor. "If the carpet's the second dimension and the lamp's shining on it, the third dimension isn't light, but light is in the third dimension."
"Ohhh." Mabel gasped. "That's why you called some weird thing flying around in a higher dimension an eclipse! Because eclipses were in a higher dimension in Flatworld!"
Bill's face lit up in surprised delight. "All right, skip three lessons ahead, why don't you! In a week's time you'll be teaching people how my dimension works." He turned back to his papers and started drawing a branching river. "So! That time stream you saw isn't time itself! It's a visual metaphor being generated so humans can see time too—sort of a hologram projecting from the fourth dimension into the third—have I explained that the universe is a hologram yet—"
Why weren't you this person, Ford wondered. Why did you choose not to be this person? When it was so easy for you to be this? When this made you happy, too?
Why couldn't you have been this person?
Why are you only like this now, when you're about to die?
####
(Hope y'all enjoyed Infodump: The Chapter. This is one of those chapters with something hidden in it that'll unravel the whole fic if you happen to find it, so have fun searching for that. Let me know what you thought of this week's chapter! And get excited—we've got Big Things coming up... soon.)
450 notes
·
View notes
law in pink | s.r
♡ previous part | next part ♡
summary: A case takes them to Massachusetts, where you are reunited with your past and the people who carry it.
warnings: a bit of jealousy on Spencer's part, though overall nothing so far in this part.
this story is spencer reid (season 7) x ssa elle woods!reader
words: 1,185 words.
a/n: after a while, I finally bring you the third part of law in pink, the truth is that I've been wandering a lot about what to write, but I finally found it. I want to point out that this "chapter" will be divided in two or three parts (I'm not sure yet), to reward you for your time.
Without anything else to add, thanks for reading.
Working in the FBI field always ended up surprising you.
Not because every day was a new adventure, with new cases that could border on the edge of human sanity, but because it could bring you face to face with people from your past.
A new case had dragged you to Massachusetts, where you saw old faces you recognized on your way to the police station.
The conversation with Emily was what was stealing your attention, and even more so when it was about one of the topics you dealt with the most, besides the criminal code, and that was hair care. You had recommended a new product to the woman and she was talking to you about how good her hair looked, it even looked shinier than usual from both perspectives.
"I know! Plus, it's not tested on animals and their products are 100% natural, it's like a little bit of paradise in your hands." You commented sipping from your coffee, placed your bag to the side as you watched Spencer walk in with a folder in his hands and well focused on it.
It was no secret that after his gift it had caused the two of you to connect a little more than usual, and everyone could tell with the little love language gestures you each had on each side, like how every morning you gave him his coffee the way he liked it because you had memorized them or how he took care to save you a spot next to him on the jet where the sunlight would hit so your skin would get the vitamin D it needed for the day.
You quickly pushed away the chair that was in front of the map the opposite had drawn up and watched him sit down, returning to your conversation with Emily. Spencer thanked you with a silent gesture, causing you to smile as you listened intently to Emily converse about the difference in her hair from week to week.
But, their conversation was interrupted as Derek and J.J were entering the room with a box of donuts.
"The breakfast express had just arrived, ladies... And Spencer." The smell of frying and sugar made you immediately turn to the table to see that they had found just the donuts you had been chatting about a couple of days ago.
"Are those the gluten-free donuts? I haven't seen them in years, they look just as delicious as when I was here." Your voice let out a soft sound of joy, approaching the one glazed with pink and had a flower drawn on top. "These are the best donuts you'll ever taste, and it's also suitable for the gluten intolerant."
The sweet taste of the donut made you stir as you brought a hand to your mouth in surprise, it was as if the past had just slapped you in the face.
You turned in the direction of Spencer, who looked quite immersed in his work.
"Spencie." The man looked up at your call. You brought the doughnut close to his face and smiled, letting the scent of your 'Miss Dior' perfume permeate his nose. "Try it."
"Ah, no thank you. I am at the moment somewhat busy, Y/N..." His hand was trying to push yours away, plus you kept watching him with that look that caused Spencer to give you the whole world. "B-besides! I'm faithful to my chocolate donut with sprinkles-"
"With sprinkles on top... Come on, Spencer, I'm not asking you to eat it all, just taste it."
The tasting-not tasting fight they were carrying on was interrupted when Hotch walked in where his face showed quite a bit of annoyance.
"What's going on, Hotch?"
"The suspect's lawyer is in the interrogation room." Commented Rossi, who simply modulated 'he's a jerk'.
"He's coming to talk to us now." Finished Hotch, who was heading straight for a cup of coffee but didn't quite reach for it when a rather annoying voice interrupted him.
You didn't know if it was your imagination or the memories of that place that made you cough, the smell of expensive cologne and mint made you push the donut away from your hands. You set it down on a napkin, listening as it echoed back to that voice that once spoke honeyed words to you.
"Agents, a pleasure. I'm defense attorney, Warner Huntington III."
Where was the closest place to hide from that character? You thought, but you wouldn't let the man you used to call "teddy bear" get you down at that moment.
" Lawyer Huntington, this is the BAU team. Agent Rossi, Morgan, Jareau, Prentiss, Dr. Reid and Agent Woods."
Your gaze connected with Warner's, who let out a gasp of surprise at the sight of you.
"Y/N... Wow, it's been a while, darli-"
"It's good to see you, Attorney Huntington." You commented as you watched him from your position.
You watched him approach you, plus Spencer's body made it so he couldn't take any more steps than intended, well... Spencer's leg was the one that separated you, as he stretched his legs out, separating you both just enough so that nothing of your bodies would rub together in any way.
A safe distance for both of them, thanks to Spencer.
"You two know each other?" J.J. asked, who watched intrigued.
"We were coupl-"
"We were part of the same Harvard Law generation, actually. We both graduated, but we took different paths." You lied in front of them, and they could read it when Warner's face grimaced.
It was clear that the two of you had a bond that was more than close, but the way you didn't want them to find out was the answer to resolving that which the others had to find out until you decided to talk about it.
"Rather, both of us-"
"Counselor, what exactly is the reason you're here?" asked Spencer, who watched from his position, with that feigned smile you already knew how to distinguish.
"Ah, yes. I was coming to introduce myself as the defense attorney, as well as discuss the legal issues surrounding my client." He turned to look at Hotch, who was drinking from his cup with that face that the situation displeased him. "I'd like to discuss a few things with Agent Woods, since we both graduated from Harvard and have the same degree from-"
"Actually, Agent Prentiss is also a Criminal Justice graduate, you could discuss with her along with Dr. Reid in addition to Agent Woods."
The way Hotch had cut Warner off made you let out a small chuckle, thanking in the direction of the major, who was simply giving you a discreet wink.
"Yeah, right. Three's better than one, you're right." Warner's voice wavered a bit before he opened his mouth again. "Good, then I'll come by later to discuss these details, they're calling me from the firm, excuse me."
Silence immediately settled in the room, but before they could blurt anything out, you immediately turned in everyone's direction and blurted out.
"I have a good explanation for this, I promise."
♡ first part | previous part ♡
If you like it, don't forget to like and repost it.
a lot of love, alme. ❀
2K notes
·
View notes