#like was ANYONE convinced that she was just a regular fbi agent? no! she was so sus right off the bat!

[resizura]

i was playing dmc 3 for the first time and i love how ridiculously over the top it is and i wish capcom did the same for resi like obviously not as outlandish as dmc but again the whole like “dark serious tone” of resi remakes just feels weird as a capcom game and it kinda feels like it insists upon itself

[reids-rendering-reality]

Criminal Collar

Summary: Spencer meets Y/N’s ex-boyfriend and renowned criminal consultant for the White Collar Crime Unit of the FBI, Neal Caffrey.

(A/N: this is a cross-over between White Collar and Criminal Minds. There are no spoilers for WC and you don’t need to have watched it to read this. Also, I know I made Neal a little meaner than he is, but it fits better with my storyline oops)

Type: angst, with the end being fluffy and a little smutty

Warnings: mentions of criminal activity, insecurity, jealousy, making out

Word Count: 2.4K

Reader’s POV

I joined the BAU about one and a half years ago, after leaving the White Collar Crime Unit of the FBI. Honestly, I was kind of glad when Strauss requested my transfer and my new team suits me way better. Especially because I’ve started dating Dr. Spencer Reid 6 months ago and he makes me really happy. However, I guess luck wasn’t on my side this week.

Like it always is when things like this happen, it was a regular day at the FBI. I was working on some paperwork at my desk before JJ would brief us on the new case in half an hour. That was when Hotch appeared from his office.

“Y/L/N, can you come into my office?” he said looking down at me into the bullpen. When I just looked up at him confused for a moment, he continued “now, please.”

I got up slowly, exchanging a few worried glances with Spencer before walking into his office.

“Agent Burke from the White Collar unit has requested you to go downstairs and consult on a case,” Hotch said in his typical ultra-serious voice.

“Do you know what case this is? I am working on this team now,” I said, a little worried that I would have to return to the WCU.

“I don’t know. But don’t worry, you won’t be transferred again. Head down now, we’re leaving in an hour. Spencer will brief the case to you on the jet,” he said while mustering my anxious stance.

When I returned to the bullpen, I quickly organised my desk so that I could leave for the jet right away.

“What did he want?” Spencer asked, suddenly standing next to me which made me jump a little.

“WCU needs a consult on a case, but I’ll be back in time for take-off,” I said, avoiding his eyes and getting ready to leave for the elevator.

I walked past Spencer and didn’t turn around once, but I could feel his eyes on the back of my head. Not only his though, I felt the entire team stare me down as I disappeared into the hall.

 The rest of the week was relatively eventless – for the BAU at least. I gave Burke his consult on the case and headed to Texas with the others. The case was not too difficult or straining.

When we returned to the office, it wasn’t even late. It was midday, and everyone was chattering about happily in the elevator. But when the elevator doors opened, the mood shifted completely. Right there, in the bullpen, sitting at my desk, I saw a figure in a black fedora. My breath hitched and I could feel Spencer look over at me. When we exited the elevator, the figure turned around and revealed his face.

“Is that-“ Morgan began baffled.

“Neal Caffrey,” I finished a clear sour undertone to my voice. Both Morgan and Spencer looked at me weirdly. It was unusual for me to talk in this way, I don’t think they have ever heard it before.

I pushed open the glass doors and hurried away from the others towards the man sitting at my desk.

“Y/N/N! So nice to see you again,” he grinned up at me as I approached him. I could still feel the four pairs of eyes burning into the back of my head.

“Neal, what are you doing here?” I said, my voice even more furious than before. At the same time, my mind was racing about how I would explain all of this to Spencer and the others later.

“Can’t we just talk like we used to? I saw you in Burke’s office on Monday,” he said, still grinning and making no move to get out of the chair.

“Fine, come with me,” I walked away towards the conference room, hearing him following behind me in his typically slow and casual stride.

 Spencer’s POV

I felt my jaw being open during their entire interaction and quickly shut it as they entered the conference room.

“What was that all about?” Prentiss asked curiously.

“That’s Neal Caffrey, the criminal consultant down at the-“ I began to explain almost automatically.

“I know who he is, but how does he know Y/N and why is he here?” Prentiss interrupted me.

“Well, Y/N worked down at the WCU before she was transferred here. I heard a rumour from a friend that works there. Apparently, Y/N was dating him during her time there and when a case ended badly for them, they suspected that she couldn’t work there with him anymore. He did some scandalous things that not only endangered the reputation of their entire team, but also the entire FBI. Some say, Y/N was in on it and didn’t tell anyone. But after a couple of examinations, she was transferred here instead because Strauss thinks she’s invaluable to the FBI,” JJ explained to all of us.

“She dated a criminal? Damn, I never would’ve expected that from her,” Derek said and looked up to the conference room and then said a little more quietly, “quite a change in her type since she came here.”

I looked at him incredulously, before looking at my hands and fidgeting with them.

“Did you know about this, Reid?” Prentiss asked me.

“Me?” I looked up again, “What- uh- no, of course not!”

“How did you not know that your girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend is one of the most famous white-collar criminals?” Morgan asked.

“We haven’t really talked about that stuff,” I said quietly, “it’s not like I would’ve had anything to share.”

“So you’re telling me, you’ve never had the uncomfortable talk about exes with her? For a genius, you do not have a lot of experience with relationships,” Prentiss said, her tone almost joking.

“What do you think they’re talking about in there?” I tried to deflect the topic of conversation away from me while looking up at the conference room, where Neal was just closing the blinds.

 Reader’s POV

“So, why did you come here?” I asked, closing the door to the conference room behind me as Neal looked around.

“Surely you miss the WCU. This place is dark and gloomy. The cases are grim and the undercover operations aren’t nearly as glamorous. Plus, I’m not there,” he grinned at me. I couldn’t help but chuckle at his attempt at flirting with me.

“Cut the crap, I left the WCU for a reason. Don’t make me ask again: why are you here?” I could feel my annoyance rise.

“I’m here because of you. I just want to talk to you. We haven’t seen each other in so long, I wanted to catch up a little,” he paused, walking around the table, “you can’t tell me you haven’t missed me.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

Before I could continue to speak, Neal continued, “right. Like I would believe that,” he looked out the window into the bullpen where the team was standing, trying not to stare too obviously, “but then again, here’s that lanky boy. He keeps looking at you in a certain way. Is he your boyfriend?”

Neal glanced at me for a moment, before turning his attention back to the window and closing the blinds with a bright grin.

“That’s none of your business. My life is none of your business anymore. You put me in so much danger without even caring about the consequences. That’s why I transferred here. So please, just leave me alone.”

He now walked over me in casual strides. I mustered him, the memories resurfacing at the sight of him in that typical classy Italian suit, with a pin on his tie. He was always dressed so properly. But the way he behaved was just the opposite. Yet, a tiny little part of me looked at him and saw that attractive man that I had fallen in love with over the years working with him.

He stopped when he was standing right in front of me, brushing a strand of hair out of my face.

“Y/N, don’t you think it’s time to let that go? That was such a long time ago.. I’ve changed, you know?” he looked into my eyes with a sincerity that I would’ve believed one and a half years ago. But working at the BAU taught me a lot about reading people, seeing typical communication and manipulation strategies. I wasn’t falling for his lies anymore.

“Is that all you came here for, Neal? Trying to get me back? Because I won’t ever go back to you. I’ve moved on and I realised that dating you, to begin with, was a huge mistake,” I said with the most confident tone I could muster.

That last part wasn’t entirely true. While he did hurt me, my reputation, and everything I stood for repeatedly, he still was a part of me. We had been in a relationship for years. There were so many good times that I had to let go for my well-being.

To be convincing with my words, I walked past him, towards the door, “it’s time for you to leave.”

After a little bickering back and forth, he finally walked out of the BAU. I could see that the team had left, only Spencer was still sitting at his desk, working on some paperwork. He was waiting for me to go home together, just like always. The sight warmed my heart; Spencer was so good to me.

But of course, Neal wouldn’t just leave without a bang. Walking past Spencer’s desk, he stopped for a second and said, “take care of her. She obviously needs you to get over me.”

Spencer looked up at him with wide eyes as he spoke and didn’t even respond before Neal had left into the elevator. Spencer turned his head and looked up at me.

 We were on the way home to my apartment, just like always when we returned from a case. We sat there in silence, Spencer’s eyes focused intensely on the road as he was driving.

“Spencer?” I asked softly looking over at him. He just gave a tight-lipped hum in response.

“Can we talk? I assume you have questions, but you haven’t said anything yet.”

He cleared his voice before responding calmly and quietly, “I just didn’t want to discuss it at the office. There isn’t anything to talk about. I know about one of your exes now.”

“But what he said to you. And everything. It must-“ I huffed, “you look like it bothers you. Don’t you want to share what you’re feeling? Maybe I can help you process.”

Spencer gave me a quick glance, seemingly ignoring my concerned face with a cold expression.

“What do you want to hear? Do you want to hear how I keep thinking I’m not good enough for you, regardless of what happened today? How that just made me feel worse? Do you want to hear about how embarrassed I was when JJ told us that he is your ex-boyfriend and I, your current boyfriend, didn’t even know about it? Do you want to know about all the other things I’m imagining you hiding from me? How my mind is racing with all my insecurities that you already know about because I tell you things that bother me while you don’t?” he said, his voice getting louder and louder with each question while his grip on the steering wheel tightened.

“Do you want to know about how Morgan even commented on the fact that he is so different from me and your type has changed a lot? How do you think all that makes me feel? When it isn’t coming from you?” he continued angrily.

I didn’t know what to say. To be honest, I was a little speechless. I thought it would bother him, but not like this.

“See? That’s why I didn’t want to open up. It’s not like you have anything to say about it anyway,” he said, his tone ice-cold.

The rest of the car ride was silent. My mind was racing with things I could respond to him, but nothing came to mind. When we arrived at my apartment, I was surprised that he parked the car. I had assumed that after that speech he would just drop me off and go home alone.

Before I could move, Spencer had turned towards me and taken my hand into his gently.

“Can I come inside?” he asked softly, his demeanour completely different from before.

“Yes, of course, Spence,” I replied gently.

Upstairs in my apartment, we sat on the couch together.

“I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier. I’m just really bothered by it. He is everything I’m not. He is attractive, charming, has a good style, and even just muscles. He is-“ Spencer began, but I cut him off.

“and he is a criminal. Listen, Spence, I completely understand how you feel. But, behind his attractive mask, there is so much more, that just isn’t attractive. To me, his personality wasn’t attractive. He didn’t treat me well and only cared about himself. He only cared about the lifestyle he wanted to lead and he could never let go of his criminal past.”

Spencer just looked up at me from his hunched position with his big brown puppy eyes.

“Plus, just because he is attractive doesn’t mean you’re not. God, I think you’re so hot. Your face, your hair, those sweater vests. You’re completely different from him, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t attractive. And when you use that big brain of yours to solve cases and explain things, that no one else knows and that most people don’t even understand. I think you’re incredibly attractive. And your intelligence is very charming, and-,” I began to ramble about all the things I loved about him.

But before I could continue speaking he had grabbed my face and kissed me on the lips passionately. His lips moved against mine, as his hands entangled in my hair. I almost moaned into his mouth as his tongue found mine and my hands reached for the back of his neck.

When we pulled apart, he was breathless and said with a slight pant, “so you think I’m really hot, huh?”

And I didn’t know how to respond to that in any other way than to just slip onto his lap and kiss him again.

[honeypiehotchner]

intelligence & issues (Hotch x Reader) -- chapter thirteen

Did anyone order more angst? Today’s chapter title is also from Taylor Swift’s song “False God” which is another song that really resembles Hotch x Reader’s relationship here, if you wanna listen and get a taste for what’s coming soon ;)) Oh and the gif is kinda unrelated, he just looks prettyyy

Chapter Warnings: Angst. So much angst. More case stuffs, so more talks of rape and all.

Previous chapter || Fic Masterlist

Chapter Thirteen: I can’t talk to you when you’re like this

It’s 6a.m. when you’re rudely woken up by a blaring alarm. JJ groans as she smacks the clock, stopping its incessant beeping.

Their room was the lucky one with two king sized beds. You didn’t mind sharing a bed with either of them -- you ended up next to Emily.

JJ is up and heading to get dressed far quicker than you want to move, but you know you have no choice. There’s a serial killer running rampant out there, so today is a 7a.m. start -- 6:30 if you can help it. You know Hotch will be sending texts any moment now about wanting to get an early start.

The thought of Hotch sends your mind spiraling again. The memories of your argument come flooding back and all you want to do is fall into a sinkhole.

But you refuse to let him have power over you like that. You’re a professional. You’re here to do a job, so you’re going to do it. Feelings be damned.

It’s not like you expected anything different, so you honestly don’t know why you’re so torn up over this. It must be the fact that the two of you were going to regular dinners, and that he would pay and drive. Sharing wine and listening to your favorite vinyls surely didn’t help matters, either.

But you misread it all. How hysterical of you. How typical of you.

Throwing the covers off your body, you sit up, your hand reaching over to shake Emily’s shoulder.

“I’m awake,” she says into her pillow. “I don’t wanna be, but I am.”

“You and me both,” you chuckle, swinging your legs over the side of the mattress.

Once your feet hit the floor, it’s like a bolt of electricity goes through you. Screw feelings, screw romance, screw love, screw it all. You’re an FBI profiler. You’re better than some idiot who thinks he can take you out to dinner and flirt up a storm, only to throw it back in your face.

You’re not going to let this get to you. Screw him.

So, you get dressed in your best outfit, and you take the time to do what makes you feel the most badass. Normally, you don’t put a ton of effort into your appearance because there isn’t much of a point. But on days like today when you need an extra boost of confidence, it’s almost required.

And boost your confidence, it does.

“Hell-o Agent L/N,” Emily teases when she emerges from the bathroom. “You look hot.”

“You sound like Morgan,” you say with a grin. “But thank you all the same. Is it bad that I feel hot when we’re supposed to be hunting down a serial killer?”

“Nope,” JJ shakes her head. “Sometimes it helps it feel more like a movie than real life.”

“God knows I need that right now,” you mutter, turning to grab your gun. As you’re busy strapping it on and grabbing your phone, you say, “Hey guys, if Hotch and I are acting weird...don’t mention it. Please?”

Emily’s head whips around. “Is he why you came in here crying last night?”

“Maybe,” you mumble, adjusting your belt. “But it’s fine, don’t worry about it. I’m over it.” You look up with a smile that you hope is more convincing than it feels. “Thanks for letting me crash your party.”

“Crash anytime,” JJ smiles back, all knowing. “And we want details later, just saying.”

“I knew you were going to ask,” you groan. “But it’s honestly nothing. I misread the entire situation, so it’s totally my bad.”

“Misread the situation?” Emily almost laughs at you. “The two of you were going on dates!”

Your eyes widen. “How did you--”

“I may or may not have seen you guys in a restaurant as I was walking by,” she confesses. “And I may or may not have gone back the next few nights to see if it was just a one-time deal.”

“You-- Oh my God,” you nearly smack your forehead in embarrassment. “Okay, well, yes, we were going to dinner, but it-- Look, I guess I got too caught up in my own feelings and worked it up in my head to think he felt the same.”

JJ shares a look with Emily. The kind that makes you want to claw your eyes out.

“Look,” Emily says, gently, but you know she’s serious. “You’re one of the best profilers on this team-- You wouldn’t be on the team if you weren’t good. So there’s no such thing as making it up in your head. You were following your instincts.”

“Maybe my instincts are shit.”

“The last few cases say otherwise,” Emily fires back, raising an eyebrow.

She’s right. Dammit.

“I don’t think you misread anything, I think Hotch is just...complicated, you know? Divorce can’t be easy, especially with a kid in the mix, but I’m not excusing him for taking you on dates and staying over at your place, he should’ve known better-- and don’t ask how I knew about him being at your place. JJ told me what you said on the phone, and I told her about the dinners, and we kind of just...figured.”

“Nothing happened,” you mumble, as if you need to tell them the details. “He slept on the couch. Passed out before me.”

“All I’m saying is you have a right to be mad,” Emily finishes.

JJ nods. “I would also be pissed. I’m a little pissed for you.”

“Me too,” Emily agrees.

“I feel stupid,” you admit. “Like I’m in high school or something.” You won’t lie. Hotch’s comment last night has hurt you more than you thought it would. You didn’t even act like you were a high schooler when you were in high school, but still.

“Oh, no,” Emily sighs, wrapping an arm around your shoulders. “It’s not high school. It’s just fucking annoying.”

“You got that right,” you snicker.

“So…” JJ raises an eyebrow. “Are we gonna talk about you dressing this hot to make him jealous or…?”

“It’s actually just for me,” you say firmly, meaning it. “But if he wants to look, he can.”

“Atta girl,” Emily laughs loudly, then stops. “We probably should head down to the lobby.”

“Right,” you chuckle. “Don’t wanna be late.”

+++

Hotch is the first one down to the lobby until Rossi joins him, looking the most well-rested. But upon seeing you’re not with Hotch, Rossi furrows his eyebrows.

It wasn’t exactly Rossi’s plan to stick the two of you together last night, but he did help it along. The two of you really need to work your issues out and he thought being forced into a hotel room would help. Unfortunately, now he’s seeing it might’ve done the opposite.

“Where’s Y/N?”

Hotch looks up at the sound of your name, cursing his own behavior, knowing Rossi is taking note of every little thing. “She’s with JJ and Emily.”

Rossi hums. “I thought she would’ve been with you.”

“She was.”

“What happened?”

Hotch shrugs. And Rossi’s face softens. Hotch looks strangely like he did all those years ago, new to the BAU, when he and Haley had an argument about his taking the job. They worked through it, thankfully, because Rossi would’ve lost it if he saw Hotch walk around the office looking like a kicked puppy for another day.

But now, he looks worse than that. Forget kicked puppy, Hotch looks like he was run over.

“We had an argument,” Hotch explains when he sees that Rossi hasn’t stopped looking at him, expectantly waiting for more information.

Rossi nods slowly, having figured that. “Have you apologized?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“You could’ve texted her,” Rossi offers, a little surprised that Hotch didn’t.

Hotch stays silent. He could have texted you. He knows he probably should have. But his words had already done enough damage. He figured if he tried to say anything else, it would’ve only made things monumentally worse. So, he went to sleep early. And dreamt of you.

It’s getting out of hand, now that he’s dreaming about you. He doesn’t normally dream, and when he does, they’re nightmares. But even those are rare. He’s mastered the art of shoving everything so far down that nothing appears even in his dreams.

Except you.

About this time is when Hotch hears your laughter floating out of the elevator. His head instinctively turns toward the sound, finding you with JJ, Emily, Spencer, and Morgan.

Morgan must’ve said something to make you laugh so loud, especially for it to make you shove his face, causing him to wrap an arm around your shoulders, dragging you into his chest and daring to rub his knuckles into your head, but he doesn’t. Still, your smile lights up your entire face, and Hotch has to catch himself before he starts smiling, too.

“Alright, children,” JJ says, tugging you and Morgan off the elevator by Morgan’s shirt sleeve.

“He started it,” you whine, ready to smack Morgan for wrinkling your shirt, but he jumps out of the way before you can.

“I know he did,” JJ replies, still in her ‘mom’ voice, her hand on your arm to usher you forward.

“Ouch,” Morgan feigns hurt, sauntering away with a scrunched up face. “I see what sides we’re takin’.”

You roll your eyes. “So dramatic.”

Emily gives you a look as you slowly approach Rossi and Hotch. But you flash her a smile, letting her know you’re okay.

You’re a professional. You’re a damn FBI Agent. You can handle some unreciprocated feelings. Unrequited love has nothing on a psychopathic killer.

Thankfully, before you’re forced to greet Hotch so no one else questions things, his phone starts ringing. You all know what that means.

And Hotch confirms your suspicions when he hangs up. “There’s been another murder.”

+++

JJ and Reid headed to the police station to start connecting some more dots with this new murder -- Edward Richardson is his name. He’s about the same age as the other men, but so far that’s the only connection.

This left you with Morgan and Rossi to head to the crime scene. Hotch and Emily are coming too, but they’re going to speak to the ex-girlfriend who found Edward.

Yeah. His ex-girlfriend found him. Apparently she was coming over to pick up the rest of her stuff. He wasn’t answering the door, so she used the spare key under the mat and went inside, thinking he was either passed out or in someone else’s bed.

She found him in his bed. But he wasn’t alive.

Upon pulling up outside the house, you see it’s not a mansion, but not a trailer, either. Police are already milling about, but hopefully they haven’t touched anything.

You spot the ex-girlfriend when you get out of the car. Her long, dark hair is pulled back from her face, and there’s tear-stains all down her cheeks. You’re positive she’s not the unsub, though, because the unsub wouldn’t insert herself into the investigation like this, and if she did, she definitely wouldn’t show this much remorse.

Your heart aches for the ex all the same. And for that reason, you grab Emily and ask to switch with her.

“You sure?” She asks, knowing this means you’ll be with Hotch.

But you could care less about him right now. “Yeah. I got this. I also don’t think I should look at another body.” That part is true, even if you thought of it just a few seconds ago.

She understands completely, giving your shoulder a comforting squeeze before she sets off to join Morgan. Hotch watches her go and then looks back at you, eyebrows furrowed. But you don’t give him a second glance.

You both start toward the ex-girlfriend, but you see her tense up when she notices Hotch, which stops you right in your tracks. You hold out your hand to get his attention.

Turning, you say, “I think I need to do this alone.”

“Why?”

“She’s terrified, Hotch, look at her,” you whisper, watching him use his peripheral vision. “She tensed up when she saw you. I don’t know why, but...let me do this alone. Please.”

He nods. “Okay. I’ll be inside.”

“Thank you,” you breathe, glad he’s not going to put up a fight. The last thing you needed was for him to cause a scene here.

Once he’s gone, you turn back to the ex-girlfriend, putting on the best comforting expression you can muster.

“Hey,” you murmur as you’re close enough. “I’m Agent L/N, I’m with the FBI.”

“Jane,” she supplies. “Where’d your partner go?”

“Oh, he just went inside. I told him we could just talk, girl to girl, you know.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No, he’s just my boss,” you say slowly, not sure why she’d even need to ask that.

“Sorry,” Jane apologizes, explaining your previous confusion away. “I’m not-- I feel like I’m living in a nightmare right now, so my brain is kind of fried. I’m glad it’s just you.”

“Totally understandable,” you say. “So, you’re Edward’s ex-girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I um-- We just broke up last week and I hadn’t been over to get all my stuff yet. I was coming to pick the last of it up this morning. I texted him yesterday and he said it was fine, so I didn’t think to call before I came. I just walked in.”

“Why did you guys break up, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I...found out something he had done,” she says vaguely. “That he kept from me.”

You nod slowly. “I know it’s a lot, and I know you don’t know me, but...what did he do?”

She hesitates, closes her eyes. Her bottom lip starts to quiver, her eyes glassy when she opens them again. “He...he raped my best friend.”

“I’m so sorry,” you murmur, letting her cry. “When did this happen?”

“Last year,” Jane mutters, anger taking over. “She never told me because she was scared and because he and I had been dating already when it happened and-- He asked me to marry him and I told her and she-- She told me what happened. She said she didn’t want him to do that to me, or worse.”

“So you broke up with him.”

“I confronted him about it and he denied it,” she says through more tears. “But my best friend wouldn’t lie. And he didn’t even seem sorry or even care that that happened to her, so I know he did it.” She pauses, shaking her head. “What does the FBI want with this, anyway?”

“There’s been a series of murders,” you explain. “And each victim has been a rapist that was acquitted or given a short sentence in jail, like two months, a vacation, basically.”

Jane’s eyebrows furrow. “Lily never took Edward to court.”

A break in the pattern. “What?”

“She never even told me until last week. I don’t even know if her mom knows, or her sister,” Jane says, still confused. “How did they even know to kill him?”

You’re asking yourself that question now, too. “Can you give me Lily’s full name and any contact information you have?”

“Yeah,” Jane nods. “You don’t think she did this, do you?”

To put her mind at ease, you ask, “What does she look like? And how tall is she?”

“She’s almost six feet tall, but wears heels to be taller,” Jane chuckles. “Blonde hair, naturally, not like some of these bleach blondes out here. She’s getting her master’s right now, if that means anything.”

“It does, actually,” you smile softly. “Just between you and me, I don’t think she’s the one that did this. We build a profile that’s a set of characteristics of who we’re looking for, and she doesn’t fit it.”

“Thank God,” Jane breathes. “I don’t think she would, but she’s-- You’re different, after that, you know?”

You nod solemnly. “I know.”

After taking down Lily’s contact information, you ask her if she knows anyone that might fit the profile.

“I can’t think of anyone, honestly,” Jane shrugs. “I mean, I know probably fifty girls that look like that, but that are capable of this? I don’t even want to think that anyone I know would kill someone -- even if they are a rapist.”

“I understand.”

After you grab Jane’s phone number as well, you head into the house to find Hotch. Or Rossi. You’d rather relay this information to Rossi and get away before Hotch spots you.

But you never get what you want because Hotch is the first one you see, and he’s just looking around idly, no gloves on his hands, clearly waiting for you to be finished.

Upon seeing you, his eyebrows raise, and he steps closer. “What did you find?”

“Well, for starters, Edward’s survivor didn’t take him to court,” you break that news first. “It was Jane’s best friend, so she gave me contact info and her address. But Jane said Lily is blonde, almost six feet, working on a master’s degree, so I don’t think she’s our unsub.”

“No, but we should still talk to her,” Hotch says.

“We?” You ask before you can stop yourself.

“If you want to take--”

“No, it’s fine, sorry,” you say, gesturing generally to the house. “They’re busy. We should talk to Lily as soon as we can.”

“Agreed. I’ll go let them know.”

“I’ll be in the car,” you say with a nod.

The professionalism is going to absolutely drive you insane.

To distract yourself, you dial Garcia. “Garcia?”

“What do you need, babe?”

“I need you to get everything you can on this new victim. Edward Richardson. Did he have any criminal records at all?” You pause. “His ex-girlfriend told me that he raped her best friend, Lily, but Lily never took him to court over it.”

“I will dig up everything I can on him.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep you posted. Hotch and I are about to go talk to Lily.”

Garcia is quiet for a moment. “You and Hotch?”

“Yes,” you mutter. “The ship has sailed, Garcia.”

“I didn’t even mention a ship.”

“No, but I knew you were going to,” you chuckle, jumping in the car. “It has sailed far, far away, never to be seen again.” You lean your head back on the headrest, glancing over to check and see if Hotch is coming yet.

“If you say so…”

“Goodbye, Garcia.”

“Goodbye, my love.”

Must everyone be in your business? Shaking your head, you pocket your phone, sticking the key in the ignition.

Hotch makes it to the car a few moments later, silently getting inside and buckling up. You expected at least a look since you’re driving, but there was nothing.

There never was anything.

You take a deep breath and pull out onto the main road, following the GPS toward Lily’s apartment. Jane said she should be in right now, so you’re hoping she is.

The car ride is fifteen minutes of dead silence. A few times, you nearly let your word vomit spill. Just questions. You have probably a thousand questions, maybe more.

If it was just dinner, then why did he keep paying? Why did he drive? Why did he check your apartment? Why did he say yes to wine? Why did he stay the night?

If it was just dinner, then why does he look at you like that? Why does he say those things?

If it was just dinner, that’s fine, but God, you need to know.

Lily’s apartment complex approaches before you foolishly start asking Hotch anything.

“I’m assuming I’m taking the lead again,” you say as you park the car.

Hotch nods. “Sure.”

“Okay,” you reply, hopping out.

Hotch keeps his distance as you walk up to Lily’s door. You knock a few times, not wanting to scream, “FBI!” because chances are, she didn’t report because she has issues with trusting authority. You understand.

Sure enough, after a moment or two, the door is opening, revealing Lily. Jane’s description was spot on.

She’s definitely six feet tall. She is a natural dirty blonde, and it’s pulled back in a ponytail. Glasses rest on the bridge of her nose, and she looks to be in her clothes for class -- a sweatshirt and jeans.

“Lily Hampton?” You ask.

She nods. “May I help you?”

“I’m Agent Y/N L/N, this is Agent Hotchner. We’re with the FBI. We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions.”

Her eyebrows furrow. “About what?”

“Well, we’ve been investigating a series of murders in the area,” you start, watching her eyes for anything. There’s nothing. “And this morning, Edward Richardson was found dead.”

You hate and love what you see in her eyes. It’s the same as Abby’s. Fear, sadness, relief, guilt, all at once.

“What happened?” She finally says. Then pauses, opening the door further, “Uh, come inside, sorry.”

“It’s alright,” you murmur, stepping inside. Hotch follows close behind, and you see he’s making a conscious effort to keep his expression softened.

“Please, sit,” Lily motions to the couch as she takes the chair by the window.

“Thank you,” you say, taking a seat on the couch. Hotch sits next to you, but on the other end. You continue. “These murders have been of rapists who were either acquitted, dismissed, or given incredibly short sentences,” you pause. “I spoke with Jane earlier and she informed me that you never took Edward to court.”

Lily shakes her head, otherwise sitting dangerously still. “I was too scared. Didn’t think it was worth it, anyway. He was dating Jane, I didn’t wanna ruin both of their lives.”

“I understand,” you whisper. “Can you think of anyone besides Jane that you’ve told about this?”

Lily thinks for a moment. “My therapist and my mom.”

“Who is your therapist?” You ask.

“Her name is Dr. Harris, I can get you her phone number.”

“That would be perfect,” you smile gently.

Lily stands and excuses herself to find the number, leaving you alone with Hotch once more.

“What are you thinking?” You ask, wanting to know what’s going on in his head.

“Her mom doesn’t fit our profile, and unless her therapist broke confidentiality…” Hotch shrugs.

You nod. “We’re at another dead end.”

Lily returns with a small piece of paper, but there’s two numbers written down. Your eyebrows furrow as you stare at it, until she explains.

“The top is my therapist and the bottom is um--” She glances at Hotch. “There’s a group that I went to-- That I go to, um-- It’s kind of like alcoholics anonymous, but not for alcohol. It’s...for assault. The number is the woman who runs it. Lina.”

This could be it. “Thank you, Lily,” you smile, tucking the paper in your pocket. “I think that’s all we have.” You pause to stand, holding out your card. “But if you think of anything that might be useful, don’t hesitate to call.”

She takes the card with a small smile. “Thank you.”

You show yourselves out, both of you waiting until you’re in the car to say anything. Hotch is driving this time.

“I’m calling Morgan,” you tell him, dialing on your phone. Once it connects, you say, “Feel like going to an AA meeting?”

Next chapter

[sisterspooky1013]

Sound Conclusions

Rating:Explicit

Words: 3975

Author: SisterSpooky1013

Tagging @today-in-fic

Find it on AO3

*********************

2000

She hadn’t expected that her desire for him would only increase after she’d had him once. That first night, emboldened by loneliness and a little red wine, she’d found the courage to reach for him, to lean in to his desirous gaze, to walk them slowly to her bedroom between fervent kisses. It was an itch to be scratched, something that you could anticipate fading away once sated, but it hadn’t. Perhaps that was because it had exceeded even her most graphic fantasies about how it might be, the slip of his fingers inside her igniting nerve endings that her vibrator had never located when she had imagined his touch. The grip of his palms on her hips as she writhed, gasping, in his lap a detail she had never known to conjure. The depth of the growl in his throat when she told him she was going to come vibrating through her bones was a memory she couldn’t shake. The smell of his cum in her panties hours after he’d left her apartment had her breathless, wanting him again already, somehow more than she ever had before she knew the taste of his saliva and the scratch of his stubble against her nipples.

They’d arrived to work the following day and acted as though nothing had happened, pretending not to feel things being one of her specialties. She worked hard to mask the new way her pulse quickened when he touched her back, the visceral response she had to the smell of his breath when he leaned in to whisper a snarky comment during their weekly division briefing. She found herself getting lost staring at his hands while he took notes, remembering the way they stroked her insides, and then blushed when he asked her if she was okay. She knew, without a doubt, that she wanted him again. If he at any point had offered to take her right there on his desk, she wouldn’t have been able to say no. And yet, she was so careful to avoid giving him any indication of this, feeling embarrassed and guilty for such wanton desires, for objectifying her partner like this. The Catholic guilt a wet blanket on her newfound lust, suppressing her into the polished, poised, sexless FBI agent she had spent so much time working to be. Weeks passed, her need for him coursing through her veins like a drug, intoxicating her to the point she often forgot terms and concepts that she normally recalled easily, again prompting him to inquire as to whether she was feeling alright, noting that she didn’t seem like herself.

She wasn’t herself. She was a woman obsessed and fixated, aroused by the casual brush of a hand or the timbre of a laugh. She was sitting on the edge of a precipice, teetering between control and absolute abandon. Normally so securely in the driver’s seat of her own body, she was unnerved by the feeling that she barely had a grip on the wheel, that at any point she might let go and crash into him, revealing the truth that she needed human contact and sexual release just as much as anyone did. The vulnerability in that need made her feel unhinged.

She found herself trying to entice him, concurrently hating herself for stooping so low. She left an extra button on her blouse undone, put a switch in her hips when she walked ahead of him, brushed her own fingers across the skin of her neck in a way that would be unnoticeable in anyone else, but she caught him noticing from the corner of her eye. When she anticipated that he’d come by her apartment, she wore shorts or a low v neck shirt, forgetting a bra or sitting cross legged to reveal the milky insides of her thighs, inviting him, wordlessly, to taste them. Sometimes she thought she saw a flash of desire in his eyes, but he always composed himself quickly, sometimes making an excuse to leave. She didn’t know what to make of the fact that he hadn’t tried again, that even when she did something as overt as leave her bedroom door open when she changed, he chivalrously averted his eyes. She realized it was unfair to expect him to understand, to know, what she wanted. Even if he did pick up on her painfully subtle, and occasionally obvious, signals, that didn’t mean he returned her feelings. Perhaps that night had been a mistake in his eyes, a slip up never to be repeated. The possibility that he would reject her if she risked reaching out to him again was enough to hold her back from doing so. Though he had enthusiastically participated the last time, that did not preclude him from having regretted it once it was over.

Now she stood before his closed apartment door on a Friday night, taking deep breaths to calm her nerves. Not because she was nervous, but because she was on fire. Her pelvis twitched and her spine arched at the idea of being near him in a private space, where the possibilities that ran through her mind all day seemed more plausible. He’d invited her over for dinner and a review of some possible cases they might take on, so they could plan how to spend their time the following week. Since he’d made the proposal that morning, she’d convinced and then talked herself out of his ulterior motives countless times. She knew that working herself up into thinking that something would happen made it even harder, and she heard her grad school professor’s voice in her head saying “expectations are premeditated resentments, Dana.” Gathering her composure, she took a moment to hike her breasts up in her push up bra and tug her jeans up over her hips so that they were snug against her ass. She’d finally settled on jeans and a green T shirt, which felt appropriately casual, but she’d selected a shirt that was a little too snug and a little too low cut, jeans that were half a size too small and slung low on her hips. If she were to bend over the flesh of her back would be exposed, which gave her a tiny thrill. Any stranger on the street would never give her outfit a second glance; it was painfully basic and unremarkable. But for buttoned-up, proper Dana Scully, it was reckless and suggestive. She may as well have been wearing lingerie for how sexy it made her feel.

Putting on her game face, she knocked. From inside the apartment he called “it’s open” and she let herself in, setting her purse on his cluttered dining room table and scanning the adjacent rooms to locate him. He wasn’t in the kitchen, nor the living room, and she found herself standing in the doorway of his bedroom, eyes roving over his naked chest and belly, a towel slung low on his hips and his hair spiked and wet from the shower. She smirked a little, wondering if this were intentional. Given her recent antics it seemed entirely possible, so she took a risk and didn’t look away, allowing him to see her rake her eyes over him appreciatively, finally reaching his face where a knowing smile played at the corner of his lips. Those lips. She sighed and smiled back at him, and he glanced down her body and back up before saying “hey.”

“Hi” she returned, suddenly feeling shy. She averted her eyes and tucked her hair behind her ear.

“I’ll be out in a minute, this isn’t what I was planning to wear.”

“That‘s too bad” she said in her head. “Okay” is what came out of her mouth before she turned and went to sit on the couch, tortured by the knowledge that he was naked on the other side of the wall. Was she supposed to take that as an invitation? Was he trying to send her signals just as much as she was him? She suddenly remembered why she didn’t bother with dating; all the guesswork was exhausting.

He emerged from the bedroom a few minutes later in a black T shirt and jeans, his feet bare. He looked freshly shaved. “I ordered Italian” he said, sitting down beside her, only a sliver of space between the sides of their thighs. “Should be here in about an hour, they were really busy.” He smelled like soap and his old spice deodorant, mint on his breath. She figured he had played basketball after work and that explained the shower, but did he normally shave and brush his teeth before dinner? Her expectations were weaseling their way into her thoughts again. Stop, she told herself.

“Do you want a beer?” He asked, and she said yes a little too quickly. He opened a beer for each of them and she sipped it steadily, welcoming the way it would smooth the edges of her thoughts but not wanting to appear as though she were planning to get drunk. Mulder was a gentleman beyond gentlemen and wouldn’t dream of touching her if he thought she were incapacitated in any respect. This was a fact she appreciated generally, and resented presently.

They dug into a thin stack of case files, each leaning forward with their elbows braced on their knees. She watched out of her periphery to see if he was looking down her shirt, and bit her cheek to keep from smiling when she saw that he was at regular intervals. Within about 20 minutes they narrowed it down to three cases they’d dig into on Monday, revealing the fact that an entire evening together wasn’t necessary for such a task, but they were both grateful to set the case files aside and just exist outside of suit jackets and basement offices. Scully was sitting sideways, cross legged, with her back against the arm rest, her toes grazing Mulder’s leg as he sat beside her, his torso twisted slightly to face her. She held her nearly empty beer bottle in her hands, picking at the corner of the label with her fingernail.

“So” he said. She felt the prick of anticipation and the hairs on her arms stood at attention, on guard for whatever might come next.

“So” she responded, because what else was she to say?

He studied her intently, his hazel eyes traversing the terrain of her face, darting from eyebrow to lip to nose, searching her for something. Finally the unbroken attention made her so uncomfortable that she was willing to speak.

“What?” She asked him, keeping her tone neither accusatory nor annoyed, simply curious. “What are you thinking about?” it conveyed, without saying as much.

He took a deep breath and exhaled it forcefully. “Was it a mistake, what happened? Do you think of it that way?”

His speaking of the unspeakable caught her off guard and she felt her face flush immediately. “No” she said, but she couldn’t meet his eye. “No, I don’t think of it that way.”

“What was it then? One time thing? Random fluke?”

How he was able to speak so directly about such fraught topics was always a marvel to her. She opened her mouth to speak once, twice, but closed it again each time. What she wanted to say was that she didn’t know what it was supposed to be when she initiated it, but the second it was over she wanted it to be part of her daily routine, like brushing her hair. Finally she gave him a tiny shrug and an “I don’t know.” She hated herself for making it seem like she didn’t care, but she didn’t know how to be honest without sounding like a teenager with a crush.

He studied her face again, and she self consciously fussed with her hair, looking at anything but him. She could feel him thinking, strategizing. She could only hope his strategy ended with her naked in his lap, but she also realized that if that were to happen, she would have to make more of an effort outside of simply not getting up and leaving.

“Do you want it to happen again?” He asked, and she laughed out of surprise, biting her lip but not answering. She lifted her eyes to meet his and her stomach clenched when she saw the stoic expression on his face, his eyes full of self-doubt. She was an asshole for making him think for a second that she didn’t want him. They lingered there, locked in an impromptu staring contest, until Mulder reached out and took the empty beer bottle from her hands and set it on the coffee table. He then lightly grasped her wrist in one hand and pressed the middle and forefinger of his other hand to her pulse point. She knew what he was doing. Her heart, which was already racing, sped up to something resembling the beat of hummingbird wings. After a moment, he removed his fingers and brought his lips to kiss the spot they had just vacated.

“I realize things like this are hard for you to talk about, and I know you well enough to know that if the answer were no, you would have told me as much and high-tailed it out of here. So I’m going to take the fact that you’re still sitting here, as well as the fact that your heart is working triple time, to mean that it would be acceptable if I were to kiss you right now. Is that a sound conclusion?”

“It is” she said in a near whisper, every cell in her body reaching out for him like he was magnetized. They were still locked in eye contact, though with this new understanding it had shifted from awkward to intimate.

They both jumped at the sudden pounding on the door. “Marinos!” Someone called out from the other side, and Mulder stood and went to grab his wallet. While he was gone, Scully let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding since she got here, and stood to use the bathroom. She studied her face in the mirror, sniff-checked her armpits, freshened up to be sure there were no errant toilet paper shreds clinging to her anatomy. When she opened the door, she found Mulder standing on the other side, waiting. She gave him a confused but also amused look.

“Hi” she said around a shy smile.

“Welcome back” he replied with a cool bravado, then stepped forward and cupped her face in his hands, drawing her in to a sweet kiss. She sighed into his mouth, the relief after weeks of tension pooling at her feet. She brought her hands to his neck and used his weight as leverage as she leaned her body against his, wanting him closer. In return, he stooped to grab the backs of her thighs and hoisted her up into his arms, her legs wrapping around his waist as she slipped her tongue into his mouth. It was still light out, and without the cover of darkness or the clumsiness of a first time, she felt more powerful and in control. She knew he wanted her, and she knew what she wanted from him. He stepped the few feet towards his bed and gently lay her down, moving to plant kisses along her neck. Pushing the bottom hem of her shirt up to expose her belly, he asked “is this okay?” And she replied “you don’t have to ask, you can do whatever you want.”

“Fuck” he breathed. It was an expression of excitement, and nervousness, and amazement that she trusted him so perfectly, and wanted him so completely.

She sat up and he pulled her shirt off over her head, deftly un-hooking her bra before she slipped it down her arms and threw it over the side of the bed. He sucked a nipple between his teeth and she gasped, her hips bucking into him, her head falling back. He repeated it on the other breast and she whimpered, to which he pushed the bulge in his jeans against her thigh, seeking relief. She pulled at his shirt, signaling him to take it off, and he did in a split-second maneuver, not wanting to stray from his task for a moment longer than he had to. Kissing down her belly, he unbuttoned her jeans and tugged them forcefully off her hips and down her legs. His actions were desperate and hungry; he couldn’t wait to get at her, and she could not wait to be gotten. When he went to pull her panties off they ripped under his urgency and he tore them away, hooking his arms under her knees and pressing his face into her vulva as he drug her to the end of the bed.

“Jesus Christ” she called out, her hands threading into his hair as he lapped at her hungrily. She could not believe the speed with which she approached orgasm. She would never have described herself as someone who was easy to please in bed, and yet he seemed to locate every pleasure point on her body with admirable ease, slipping a finger inside her to massage her G spot as he sucked on her clit. She felt herself falling over the edge and she hung there deliciously long, the point of release laying across her like a blanket until it crashed against her like a wave.

“Oh, I’m gonna come” she pleaded, the sound more breath than words, as if he didn’t already know from his position on the seat of her orgasm that it was happening. She came for an eternity, unaware of her own sounds or movements, existing only within her body and beneath her pleasure. He stayed with her, teasing out every throb she had to give, running his rough hands over as much skin as he could reach, until she was sated, and lie still and quiet. He rested his head on the inside of her thigh and waited for a signal that she was ready to return to Earth. After a couple minutes, she spoke.

“Holy shit.”

He laughed, and crawled up to lie next to her, tucking his nose into her neck and placing tiny kisses all over her chest.

“I’m suddenly very aware of the fact that I am completely naked” she said, a mix of self-consciousness and humor in her voice.

He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down and then back up the length of her body. “You most certainly are” he said matter-of-factly, and she wrapped her arms across her chest in mock-modesty.

“You tore my underwear” she accused him, and he shrugged.

“Do you want to tear my underwear as payback?” He thrust his hips against her gently, and she was reminded that he had yet to be touched.

“Perhaps” she said against his lips, biting the lower one gently, signaling that they were not yet done. As she kissed him, she reached for the button of his jeans and flicked it open before easing down the zipper. He shifted up a bit to give her better access and breathed a low moan when she slipped her hand into his pants and grasped his erection.

“Mulder, I can’t help but notice that you’re not wearing underwear”

“Maybe if you’d had the same idea I wouldn’t have needed to rip them off” he teased breathlessly.

She pushed his jeans down and he stood to remove them before rejoining her, curling his naked body against her side as she resumed stroking him. “Come here” she directed, moving her leg aside to make space for his body. He hovered over her, their tongues dancing between their mouths as he thrust against her belly. She lifted her knees towards her chest and reached down to grasp him, brushing the head of his cock against her slick lips. He hummed and mumbled words she couldn’t understand, until she guided him inside her and he said “fuck.”

“Watch your language, Mulder” she chastised playfully, and he thrust into her suddenly, eliciting a gasp.

“I’m sorry, did that hurt? He stilled, searching her face.

She shook her head with a sly smile. “Even if it did, that’s not always a bad thing.”

His eyebrows went up in surprise “I’m learning so much about you today” he mused, resuming his thrusts slowly.

“Likewise” she replied, but her breathing was growing ragged, their playful banter becoming unsustainable.

He quickened his pace, kissing her neck and lips, burying his face in her hair when it became too intense for kissing. Suddenly he stopped and withdrew from her, and she looked at him incredulously. “Where are you going?” A question she’d asked him hundreds of times in an entirely new context.

“I’m interested in seeing you in every position imaginable, however I’ve been thinking so much about last time and I’d really like you to be on top again, if you don’t object to that.”

“No objections here” she replied, moving so that he could sit at the head of the bed against the wall. The sun was setting and she felt a little less exposed in the fading light of the bedroom. She climbed into his lap and kissed him for a couple minutes as she teased him at her opening, shifting her hips so he’d slide by, but not enter her. When she finally sunk down onto him, he dropped his head back and moaned in delicious agony. She started rising and falling slowly, planting kisses on his neck and nipping at his earlobes. As his breathing quickened she changed her rhythm, keeping her body close against his and sliding back and forth. His eyes shot open and his head lifted to watch what she was doing, gripping her hips though he made no attempt to control her movements. He reached down between them to touch her clit and she pushed his hand away. “Too much” she panted. “This part is just for you.” He returned his hand to her hip and trained his eyes on the place where their bodies met, slack jawed and wide eyed as she flexed her pelvis forward and back. When she could tell he was close, she increased her pace until he closed his eyes, he tightened his grip on her and cried out. As he crested over the most intense point, he opened his eyes again and looked at her face, locking eyes with her in the dim light of his bedroom as he filled her with his hot cum, desire giving way to the deep affection they held for each other. She collapsed against him and they sat like that for a while until she felt his fading erection slip out of her and a rush of fluid followed.

“Shit!” She said, sitting up with a worried expression. “I forgot about that part.”

He made a face that set her off giggling, which caused even more to drip out of her and into his lap. “Gah, don’t laugh, Scully, that makes it worse!” His protests only made her laugh harder and he smiled at her jiggling breasts as she wiped tears from her eyes.

“How about a shower, then dinner?” He proposed, and she nodded, still regaining composure.

After a hot shower and a borrowed pair of boxer shorts, they sat on his couch eating reheated lasagna and smiling at each other. After Mulder cleared their plates, he sat back down beside her.

“So” he said.

“So” she returned. What else could she say?

“I’m going to take the fact that you’re still here and that you’re wearing my underwear as an indication that this wasn’t a two-time only thing. Is that a sound conclusion?”

“It is” she replied with a smile.

[shemarmooresfedora]

Menagerie

Summary Quote: “Don’t you get it? It’s all been a lie, Spence. Since the moment we met, our entire relationship has been founded on a carefully crafted lie and since then, we have been tricked into thinking this was love...but maybe that was a lie too.”

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem! Reader

Genre: Angst with happy ending, Fluff

A/N: this fic has already been completed! it’s 25 chapters and just over 40,000 words. i don’t plan on posting all the chapters on to here but i have included the first two and the ao3 link to the rest is at the bottom if you are interested!

Chapter 1

You woke up from your peaceful slumber to hear a loud crash followed closely by someone yelling “FBI”. You screamed, alerting the agents of your presence thinking you were in danger but once the agents had reached your bedroom, you were being put in handcuffs and read your rights.

“W-What is happening? Is this some sort of sick joke?” you stuttered.

“Do you think killing three men is a sick joke?” the muscular intimidating agent spat back.

You were in utter shock. You barely even left the house let alone go out on a murderous rampage.

“I-I don’t know what you think I did b-but I can assure you I-I didn’t kill anyone or do anything illegal,” you tried to stay as calm as possible but you were shaking profusely.

The other agent that was the back-up in your apprehension seemed to notice this and took some sympathy on you by lightening his grip on your cuffs as he led you out of your front door that had been kicked down.

-

You sat in the chilly interrogation room wishing you had something else on rather than a thrifted oversized t-shirt with stains on it that said “Best Dad Ever” and sweatpants. They removed your handcuffs, I guess you weren't considered that much of a threat in a locked room in FBI Headquarters. Although you could not see past the one-sided glass, it was obvious the agents from before and possibly others from their team were standing on the other side, observing you.

-

“Well she is definitely not what I was expecting,” Prentiss was the first to break the silence as the whole BAU team watched you through the glass.

“She was sleeping when we apprehended her. Her facial expressions and body language showed clear signs of distress but I can not be certain if it was because we have the wrong person or she is scared she finally got caught. In her apartment, we found nothing in the slightest bit incriminating, mostly just lots of books,” Spencer spoke, while he was trying to remain impartial, he had admired your taste in literature as he was looking for evidence.

“I’m not convinced. I think this is whole ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ thing is an act,” Morgan stated as he strolled to the door leading to the room you were being held in.

-

The door opened and your eyes flickered up. Much to my dismay, it was the muscular agent rather than the tall, lanky agent who seemed a lot friendlier to you, given the circumstances.

He took the seat across from you and spoke firmly, “I am ready to take your confession whenever you are.”

At this point, you were just getting frustrated. You were ripped from your bed in the middle of the night given no explanation other than you had supposedly killed three men and he had the audacity to ask for your confession to something no one would even tell you the details of. So against your better judgment, you opened your mouth which has been known to get you in trouble from time to time.

“Well, considering no one has even told me what I am formally being accused of or the details, I can’t do that. Do you even have any evidence to keep me here? Oh wait...you don’t...that’s why you need a confession because all your evidence so far has been circumstantial. Only too bad for you...I know my rights. So, you have forty-eight hours to find some real evidence against me, that doesn’t exist if I may add, before you have to let me go.”

The agent looked back at the glass with his jaw dropped.

“I watch a lot of crime TV shows,” you huffed and crossed your arms.

-

“Okay this may be harder than we originally planned, folks. We are going to need everyone on call for the next forty-eight hours until we find some incriminating evidence,” Hotch spoke.

The agents began to depart from the room to review old case files and dig deeper into your personal history. Spencer stayed back for a few minutes and saw tears start to roll down your face when you thought no one was still watching you. You quickly wiped them away and wringed your fingers together. Spencer didn’t know if he should or not yet but he felt bad for you.

Chapter 2

The door opened again but this time, you just kept your eyes down at the table so the person could not see your watery eyes.

You have been trying to put up a brave face but every time, a different agent comes in to question you about your routine, friends, family, and personal life, you just feel exposed.

Traces of your DNA had been found on the bodies and they had all visited your bookstore but that wasn’t enough to convict you I guess. You didn’t know the victims personally but you still felt bad for them.

A cup of coffee was placed gently into your line of sight. You wrapped your hands around the warm paper cup and mumbled your thanks.

“I didn’t know how you liked it. I can add more creamer or sugar if you like,” the voice spoke.

You glanced up tentatively and it was the tall, lanky agent. Your lips turned up ever so slightly into a small smile but it was the most you could manage at the moment. You took a sip.

“No it’s fine, thank you. It really helps. I appreciate it,” you said.

“I’m Spencer, by the way”

“Y/N, but you probably already know that by now.”

He chuckled at your joke. Silence filled the room once again.

“I didn’t do it, Spencer...and I know I can’t really prove that but I wish I could. Most of my friends live in another state and so does my family so I don’t go out too often. I don’t have a boyfriend. I own a bookstore so I spend most of my time there. I don’t really know why this is happening to me,” you started to get choked up again so you stopped talking.

-

Spencer involuntarily blushed when you stated you didn’t have a boyfriend.

He really needed to get it together as much as he wanted to believe you.

You could be a murderer for all he knows...but a really pretty murderer with a great taste in literature and probably even a bigger collection of books than him.

Stop it, Spencer, get your head in the game. He smiled softly once more at you cradling your drink and exited the room.

-

The forty-eight hours were up. They had nothing solid against you. If anything, the team had less of a case against you.

The bodies were all dumped on the opposite side of town from where you lived but it was clear they had been transported there. Garcia’s digging showed you had no car and you weren’t lying when you said most of your friends and family live out of state so the chances of you borrowing someone else's car were unlikely.

Credit card receipts showed you hardly ever went to that side of town and they had profiled the unsub would know the area well.

The victims did come into your store a few times but they also visited all the shops on that street occasionally as well. It didn’t make sense for you to kill your customers. That would just be bad for business and easily linked back to you.

The team agreed that they believed Y/N was no longer a suspect.

-

An officer drove you back to your apartment where luckily, your door had been fixed.

You ordered takeout and took a shower to hopefully rid yourself of the stress of the past two days. Shortly after your dinner, you fell asleep hoping your door would not be busted down again by the FBI.

-

A few days had past and you were opening up the store for the morning. You were in the back organizing the nonfiction section when you heard the soft bell chime of the door opening.

You walked to the front expecting to greet one of your regulars. Once you saw who was standing shyly at the front desk, you stopped in your tracks.

“Spencer?”

“Uh h-hi-hello Y/N. How are you?”

“Good...unless you are here to bring me back in for more questioning”, you said half-joking half-seriously.

“Oh! Um no, you’re all set. I am truly sorry about that. But I do have a question for you”, he was nervously wringing his hands just like you do, looking anywhere but your eyes.

“It’s okay kind of sounds like the wrong thing to say because I would preferably not be dragged out of my bed in the middle of the night and then held for forty-hours but I understand, you were simply doing your job. Anyways, ask away,” you replied.

His eyes finally made contact with yours and he opened his mouth like he was about to say something but completely lost his confidence.

“Do you...um do you...do you have a nonfiction section?” Spencer blurted out.

You didn’t understand how the nonfiction section could make someone so nervous. He looked as if he was going to say something else but thought better of it.

“Of course! I was just organizing it! Right this way!” you chirped with a smile that seemed to untense his shoulders just a little bit.

Spencer perused the section a bit before deciding on a hefty book about the different plants and flowers native to the East Coast. When he made his way up to the front desk to check out, you praised his choice.

“Aw! I love reading about plants. I have some many succulents in my apartment. It's honestly more of a jungle. Have you ever seen forget-me-nots? So lovely!”

Spencer smiled and nodded, knowing if he tried to speak it would be gibberish because he could not focus on anything when he was looking at your radiant smile.

-

“Did you do it?”, Morgan asked as Spencer entered the bullpen with a brown bag.

“No but now I have a book on plants and flowers. I actually am excited to read it. Did you know that some plants like orchids do not require soil to grow they get their nutrients from-”

“You chickened out”, Derek sighed.

“She is so pretty! She was just standing there in all her radiance smiling at me and I couldn’t take the rejection. We dragged her out of her bed and put her in handcuffs only to find out two days later, she is innocent. I can hardly believe she is still being nice to me despite it.”

“Well believe it or not, the first night I met a girl, she was in handcuffs in her bed with me so it’s not always a bad thing,” Morgan smirked.

“Not appropriate, Morgan,” Spencer scolded.

“What are we talking about? I don’t like to not be included in the gossip!” Garcia ran over in her pink heels with Prentiss right behind her.

“Pretty Ricky here went to visit Y/N at her bookstore but then chickened out about asking her on a date,” Morgan informed them.

“Awwwww! I like her! She’s so pretty! Plus, I have already done a background search on her and she is squeaky clean now that we have proven she isn’t a murderer,” Garcia excitedly rambled.

Prentiss was nodding her head in agreement, grinning at Spencer.

Spencer had already chugged his morning cup of coffee during this conversation just to have an excuse to go get another cup and leave this conversation.

“You can’t run away from your feelings, Boy Wonder!” Garcia shouted.

Chapters 3-25

[prose-for-hire]

Clueless

Pairing: Angel x reader

Request: As I said, Spike will always be my favorite, but every now and then you gotta mix it up. 😅 So here comes my Angel request! 😀 The scoobies find out he has a human girlfriend. And when they meet you they get the impression that you have no idea of the supernatural. So they try to subtly prod if you're aware of what Angel is. You on the other hand are enjoying to play with them. Pretending to be clueless as hell even though you're well aware. 😂 Thank you Darling! 💞

Requested by: @kind-wolf​

A/N: I really enjoyed this one !! Reader is older than the Scoobies and works in the school library. The timescale is reaaally made up. Giles left to open the Magic Box while the Scoobies are still in high school.

[Also i know the gif has nothing to do with anything but it makes me giggle every time so I had to use it !!]

You were the new School librarian. Giles had left to open the Magic Box but still always managed to be in your library when you turned around. The excuse at the moment was that his personal collection had been left behind, but you new there was something more going on. You had a boyfriend that told you of the real side of Sunnydale.

His name was Angel. You had met him after dark, a shining ember amongst all of the despair. He was kind to you and you had kept running into each other until he decided it must be fate. So he asked you on a date. It was the Bronze and you both stuck out like a sore thumb – him for his dark clothing and because you were both slightly older than the regular clientele. You and Angel had been going steady for a while now. He was heavy into courting and doing everything properly. He wanted to keep you happy and ensure you felt safe with him at all times.

He called you his sunshine. You were the one thing that made his un-life worth living. The brightness in the centuries of black. The fiery flame of passion that could never be put out. You were his light. A kind of salvation he didn’t know he needed. All of his guilt. The doubt. The brooding about whether he was enough for you, for the world. For any of it. You filled in these cracks with light. With love and the most important thing: hope.

He knew that he needed to limit the amount of people that knew about you together to a minimum. You hadn’t understood why at first, but one evening when you had been wrapped around each other in bed, he confided in you. His relationships were not destined to last. Literally. He told you everything, almost reducing the both of you to an emotional mess. You laid there, underneath the sheets as you both recounted the worst moments of your lives. The secrets, the fears. Everything.

“Are you embarrassed about dating a human? Is it frowned upon in vampire… culture?” You asked, half embarrassed and half fascinated. He shook his head as you were still speaking, clasping a hand to yours and brought it to his unbeating heart.

“I, uh, just want this for us. You’re too special to me, y/n. I don’t want anyone else to ruin it. I love you more than you can imagine”

“You love me?” You ask, eyes shining with emotion. He nodded, pulling you into him as you told him how much you loved him back. Your voice muffled as you rested in the crook of his neck. He held you to him so delicately as if he was scared that you would break. That if he didn’t hold tight enough, you would disappear into nothing.

The Scoobies had caught glimpses of you around school and sometimes after school when you popped into the magic Box to ask to speak with Giles. Just to ask for tips on your new job in the library (and to check if he had stolen any of the dusty occult books you had started to lock away in case he was snooping again). You didn’t really know the Scoobies, you just recognised their faces from around school and now obviously you had heard the lowdown from Angel. But you weren’t so familiar that you could tell which one the slayer was if you were asked to pick her out of a line up.

One afternoon after you called your goodbyes to Giles and nodded at the teenagers on your way out of the store, talk quickly turned to you. Anya, Xander, Willow, Buffy and Cordelia were all whispering before the door had even closed properly behind you. The Scoobies loved to gossip. And each of them had their own titbit of information that they had heard from someone who had heard from someone else about you. Even Giles had become involved in the discussion as he had started to become aware you were making his life difficult and

“I heard they mastered kung-fu judo which is the most lethal form of martial arts”

“Apparently they were fired from their last school for literally throwing students out for talking too loud in the library”

“Well, they’re apparently an undercover agent planted by the CIA to monitor the supernatural”

“I heard that one – but they’re FBI, not CIA”

The piece of information they found most interesting was that you were human. Despite being the coolest librarian like, ever. Most of the librarians the student body had come across were positively fossils, most recent librarians not included. Suspected kung fu martial arts hybrid training aside, you didn’t have any supernatural powers to speak of. As far as anyone was aware. So, this became the most interesting thing about you, until Cordelia told all.

“They’re totally sleeping with Angel!” Cordelia said, as everyone looked extremely interested in this news, “I saw him open a door for them as if they were in some period drama! Way over the top but their eyes said everything! They’re having sex”

“You can’t tell that from a look”

“You can!” Anya insisted as Cordelia nodded along.

“Yeah, I can tell from hot librarian and the salty goodness that is Angel” Cordelia replied matter-of-factly.

“Do you think they know he’s-” Xander mimed fangs and held his hands up to imitate a vampire, “They can’t know. Why would anyone want to do that with Angel?” Xander insisted as the women of the room, and Giles, stayed silent. He looked around looking for some support for his statement but got nothing.

But now the fact was, they were concerned that Angel hadn’t told you about himself. The vampirism. The soul. The curse. So, the meddling kids decided it was their duty to make sure that they were acquainted with you and made sure you knew who Angel really was. Which was exactly what Angel presumed was going to happen. They were convinced that they were worried about how clueless you obviously were, but also it was their duty is seemed to get involved in other people’s personal lives.

This had been the plan, but it appeared that you were a very busy. You never stayed long hours after the school day ended like Giles used to. Nobody could follow you home because you always sped off in a shiny car. Plus, you often wore headphones in the corridors so you didn’t have to talk to the students.

It had been a while after their plans to befriend you and they had almost given up seeing you in your private time. They wanted to make sure the rumours weren’t true. That Angel wasn’t taking advantage of some clueless human.

Unfortunately, the whole gang stumble into you both while they’re on patrol. On date night. their eyes widen, it looks so normal. You’re both sat in the restaurant in the window seat and they all just stopped and very obviously stared. As if you were zoo animals. They noticed that Angel had ordered human food and had been moving it around the plate a little for appearances. This confirmed it. they decided they needed to save you. Who knew what horrible bad luck would befall you if you kept dating a vampire. 

Angel looked a little embarrassed when he sensed being watched and looked up to see none other than the people he had wanted to keep this from. Buffy had scowled at him, shaking her head. She wasn’t impressed that he would do this. Especially if you didn’t know – it wasn’t fair she decided. You noticed his look but didn’t comment until the group had walked past with their wooden stakes badly concealed under their jackets.

After your meal, you walk back together (he always insists on walking you to your car) and you softly ask why he was embarrassed. You wondered if it was because you were a librarian. You tell him you know people don’t think it’s a great job, but you really enjoy it.

“They just don’t think us being together is a great idea” He said and you nodded along. You understood. There was a history there. The Slayer obviously is the only one that makes and breaks the rules.

“Well lets introduce them to me properly?” You offer, trying to soothe him. Reduce the fretting. He had wanted just one thing. One good thing that was yours and his. “I know they’ve been trying to talk to me all week. I’ll make some lemonade and you can invite them over” You offer. He nodded, curling an arm around you as you walk together both in thought.

It had been a week and the day was finally here. You were meeting the... friends? Weird kind-of family? Annoying brats that were always under both of your feet? 

Angel had gone out to pick up some blood from the butchers before it closed now that the sun was down. This left you hosting solo for the moment. You showed them to Angel’s living room and started to offer them lemonade and snacks. They start dropping hints instantly to try and gauge whether you know about Slayers or vampires. For some reason, you decide to play dumb.

“Have you, uh, ever seen Angel’s teeth up close?” Willow asked, barely above a whisper.

“Yes, we do kiss if that’s what you’re asking sweetie. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll have your first kiss soon” You smiled at her mock-sympathetically as you turned to the rest of the room.

“What about, ah, those specialist books I told you about, y/n? Have you read them as of late?” Giles questioned, his hint much craftier than the younger members of the group. The books had been vampire history and very specifically passages were highlighted about Angels past.

“Oh yes, Angel said he would give me the overview - he’s read them before” You smile as Giles shook his head and started to clean his glasses. This wasn’t a lie, Angel had told you instead of reading through that book he would tell you anything that yo uwanted to ask. Every gruesome detail if that was what you needed. But you had told him you cared for the person you knew now instead. “Isn’t he just the perfect man?” You continue, smiling dreamily (which if you’re honest isn’t even an act). 

“Man isn’t the word I’d use” Xander muttered and Buffy had to elbow him to make him be quiet. You frowned, but they didn’t realise that you had caught onto what they were doing. Angel entered and the room quietened. He nodded at everyone but came straight to sit beside you.

You sat comfortably, leaning against Angel as chatter started to warm up a little again. After a while, there was a bit of doubt from some in the room whether meddling was the right thing to do or not. You appeared friendly and you definitely cared about Angel. And he definitely cared for you. His eye was always on you and he had kissed your forehead more than once when he thought the others were wrapped up in conversation.

“Do you like Halloween? What about vam-” Cordelia was cut off as she yelped and scowled as someone had stepped on her toes to get her to be quiet. Especially after he had already said something himself that could have made things obvious. You and Angel shared a look and then a shrug as conversation started up again.

You excused yourself to make more lemonade after three more not-so-subtle-hints about your man’s true identity and Angel followed you. Meanwhile, they were whispering about how clueless you appeared and how familiar you both were in front of them – as if you were going to hide that you were in a committed relationship. You knew this as Angel was telling you everything that they said, between light kisses he was pressing against your neck. From your position pressed between his body and the kitchen counter you were grinning as you rested a hand against his side and used the other to lock your hand with his. He hummed softly, only able to get through this strange indirect interrogation was that he knew he always had you.

When you returned and offered everyone refills, one of them asked while you were pouring, “Does, uh, Angel like garlic bread?”

“You might have to ask him on that one, we’re still getting to know each other” you smile sweetly before catching Angel’s eye. He raised his eyes at you but didn’t say anything to ruin the fun. In fact, he had a glint in his eye too. This was the reason he loved you, you turned even a potentially serious situation with the Slayer into something that you could make fun.

 “Uh, have you ever seen Angel in the light?” the questioning continued.

“Have you seen his face? He’s beautiful in any lighting” You smiled sweetly, looking over at him again. He shook his head at you and you knew he’d be blushing if he had any circulation.

“Yeah but- in the daylight?”

“No, he has a sun allergy, isn’t that right sweetie?” You smiled around the room at their horrified faces. They knew it! They knew Angel had been lying, they just needed to find a way to break the news to you. Or warn him away from you.

When asked about his (and your) sleeping habits, you replied, “Some nights he’s dead to the world” You smile, “He sleeps really deep, sometimes I have to check on him – it looks like he isn’t breathing” You have to stifle a laugh at this one as Angel snorts out loud. It was awkwardly covered by a cough and he had to leave the room to hide his laughter.

He was happy with you, the only sunshine he wasn’t allergic to apparently. He was so happy in this relationship he was often worried that Angelus was only around the corner. You caught him stuck in his head, worrying about the what-ifs but you always offered your comfort any way you could. He was glad of you being there for him. Willow and Giles had been talking of working on a way to lift the curse, or at least make it so that it wasn’t so simple for him to change back into Angelus. That was the last thing any of them needed.

The evening started to darken further and conversation had started to lull. You were trying to think of a way to politely hint yourself that maybe it was time for them to go (your hints a lot more subtle and well-practiced than theirs). But before you had chance to open your mouth, you were interrupted, “Demons. Thoughts?” Anya asked bluntly. Nobody cut in this time, they wanted to hear your response now they suspected Angel was lying.

“The ones that creep in late at night when you’re trying to sleep? I try and just ignore them, or get a book to read if I really can’t sleep” You say smiling as you knew Angel had heard that one too when some plates clattered in the other room. You knew him inside out and, although rare, when something like this tickled him it really made him smile. You just wished he had been in the room so you could see his expression. His face lightened when he smiled and you told him all the time his smile was your favourite feature of his. He would also probably be shaking his head at you, trying to discourage you from getting into too much trouble with them.

Angel returned to the room and you couldn’t help yourself. You stood up and instantly closed the space between you. You looped your arms around his neck and kissed him softly on the lips. It was only a lingering peck, nothing too scandalous as these were students at your job. You always missed him when he wasn’t close by. You felt like a lovestruck teenager when he was around and admittedly, so did he. Giles saw the way you both looked at each other. Moved around each other, anticipating  and saw how real it was. It was the same he had with Jenny. He couldn’t let the rest of the group ruin this kind of love. It was rare and he wouldn’t wish it on anyone to lose it (not even the man with the face that tore his from him).

Giles shook his head as Buffy was about to shout something to break you both apart. Something about demons and vampires. About Angel and evil. His apparent lying. To try and warn you. She closed her mouth, rolling her eyes.

 “We need to go patrol- uh, not patrolling, just – walking. At night” She muttered instead, taking her jacket and giving Angel a hard stare.

“Make sure you watch out for vampires. There’s a couple extra stakes in the weapon’s closet if you’d like to take them” You smile sweetly, “You can never be too careful, some bite” you teased before kissing Angel on the cheek and reluctantly moving from his arms which were loosely looped around your waist still. You started walking over to clear the coffee table from the glasses everyone had used when they visited. Leaving the others wide-eyed and eventually laughing at the way you had kept up the pretence so well.

[scripts4dreamers]

I literally JUST sat down, pt. 5

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Six, Part Seven

AN: The case stalls, but no one’s willing to give up on you just yet. Characters: Spencer Reid, Penelope Garcia, Derek Morgan, Aaron Hotchner, Jennifer Jareau, David Rossi. Pairings: Spencer Reid x reader Spoilers: None Warnings: Mentions of crime and violence, alcohol

---------------------------

Saturday morning dawned cold and bright but you hardly felt rested. You’d spent the better part of the night trying to squash your panic, curled up under your duvet with your phone in your hand, convinced that the second you closed your eyes something terrible would happen. The facts of the case bounced around in your mind like wasps, angry and frantic, trying their best to get out, but it was no use. You simply had to accept it, someone you worked with was stalking you. They were stalking you and murdering innocent people in some sick attempt to fulfil the fantasy in their mind, and that put everyone in your life at risk.

You’d realized it the night before and the thought alone made you feel sick. Stalkers were, by nature, unpredictable so there was no way for you to know which of your friends would be a target. The stalker could see any of them as a threat and decide to take matters into his own hands. Your only comfort came in knowing that your parents were on a cruise near New Zealand, and all your friends were safe under Rossi’s roof. For now.

You sighed and forced yourself out of bed, pulling on the most comfortable set of clothing you had and shuffling downstairs. As you made your way into the kitchen you were met by a sea of friendly faces and your spirits lifted slightly.

“Morning, Sunshine,” JJ greeted sympathetically, “we were wondering when you’d be up.”

“What time is it?” You asked, accepting a cup of coffee from her gratefully.

“8:17,” Spencer answered, giving you a small smile.

You smiled back and looked around, doing a mental headcount of all the faces at Rossi’s kitchen island, “Where are Morgan and Prentiss?”

“Morgan went to meet the M.E.,” JJ answered, slinging a protective arm over your shoulder, “and Em-“

“She’s still in her room,” Garcia cut in, pushing a cupcake on a plate towards you, “she’s awake but she won’t come down.”

You frowned and looked at JJ for clarification. JJ sighed and gave you a gentle squeeze.

“She’s-uh-she’s taking this whole thing pretty hard,” she admitted softly, “she doesn’t want to admit it, but you know how she is.”

You nodded, “I’ll talk to her,” you said, pushing yourself away from the kitchen island and pouring a second cup of coffee.

You trudged up the stairs, exhaustion tugging at your eyelids with every step. Emily’s room was next to Morgan’s and, before knocking, you just took a minute to watch. Emily was sitting on her bed with her back towards the door, staring intensely at something in her lap that you couldn’t see and your heart dropped.

———————————

Your stomach hurt from laughing so much as you watched the man Emily had brought over scamper off with his tail between his legs. Some real life FBI agent he’d turned out to be.

“That. Was. Brilliant,” you laughed, jostling her with your shoulder, “you, Emily Prentiss, are brilliant.”

“Why thank you,” she smiled, “god sometimes it’s too easy. It’s just too easy with these guys. What, do they think we’re stupid or something?”

It was girl’s night. The first you’d had in months and, quite frankly, you needed it. Your workload was killing you, and the weight of all the death you saw on the regular was making it difficult to find joy in anything anymore. Which was why you had your girls. Emily had dragged you all out to a local bar and plied you with alcohol until you were laughing and giggling like a bunch of preteens at a sleepover. It was wonderful, and you could feel yourself getting lighter and lighter with each passing minute.

“Almost definitely,” you agreed, taking another deep swig from whatever drink Emily had forced on you.

“Or they at least think we’re stupider than them,” JJ clarified.

Emily made a noise of agreement and rolled her eyes, “Which is why I personally have no interest in dating them.”

“Not that we could even if we wanted to,” Garcia pointed out, “I mean, who has time to date with this job?”

“Not me,” you said, “I haven’t been on an actual date in ages.”

“Well I’m sure we can find someone who’d be willing to take you out, Y/N,” Emily teased with faux innocence, “let’s think, ladies; who do we know who’s smart and funny, with a similar work schedule, who Y/N might be attracted to and who already thinks she’s wonderful?”

“Hmm,” JJ played along, “ooo that’s a tough one.”

“I’m stumped,” Garcia agreed, “oh wait! Here’s a crazy idea, what about Reid?”

JJ and Emily gasped, clutching their chests with looks of surprise so melodramatic that you couldn’t help but laugh, despite your embarrassment.

“Oh my god, Reid!” Emily agreed, “It’s perfect, Penelope Garcia you are a genius.”

“But wait, Y/N swears she’s not into him like that, guys, remember?” JJ joked.

“Ooohhh,” Emily and Garcia chorused.

“Well, I guess it’s hopeless then,” Emily joked, slinging an arm around your shoulder and pressing a kiss to your cheek, “you’re stuck with me, Y/L/N.”

You smiled and kissed her back, leaving a lipstick smudge on her pale cheek, “Nowhere else I’d rather be, Prentiss. Nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Garcia clapped her hands together in excitement and pulled out a camera, “Everybody say BAU!”

“BAU!” You all cheered in unison, collapsing into laughter the moment the flash went off.

—————————————

“Hey, you,” you greeted, “you not coming down for breakfast?”

Emily’s head snapped up and you caught a glimpse of the photograph in her hands. It was the one from that girls night, one of the last you’d ever had at the BAU. Not that anyone had known that at the time. You could see the resentment in her eyes, and the pain and you felt a sharp stab of guilt for everything you were putting your friends through.

“Garcia’s bought those cupcakes last night, they’re really tasty.” You continued, stepping hesitantly inside, “I could fetch you one if you’d like.”

“I’m not hungry,” she replied simply, “but I’ll take the coffee if you’re giving.”

You smiled and handed Emily the cup, taking a seat beside her on the bed. For a moment you just sat in silence, drinking your coffee together and thinking, but eventually the silence had to break.

“Em I know you’re mad-“ you started.

“Mad?” She interrupted with an incredulous laugh, “Y/N I’m not mad.”

“Yes. You are,” you insisted, “you have been ever since I came back to the unit. I mean, come on, you made me share a desk with Reid so that your purse had its own spot.”

Emily sighed and stared down into her cup, tapping her manicured nails against the ceramic, “Okay maybe I was a little bit mad,” she agreed, “but can you blame me? You left without saying goodbye!”

“I said goodbye!”

Emily rolled her eyes, “Not properly. You never really explained why. One day everything was fine and the next you’d handed in your resignation. It sucked, and I was mad,” she sighed, shaking her head, “and then I blinked and suddenly it’s a year later.”

“Time flies.” You agreed.

“Yeah! Yeah and a year later you still couldn’t tell me you hadn’t actually resigned?” She probed, “How’s that supposed to make me feel? I’ve been walking around like some sort of idiot thinking that you’re gone for good.”

You nodded and nudged her shoulder with yours, deciding to ignore the ‘gone for good’ comment and focus on everything else, “Well, hey, let’s make a deal. After all this is over, we’ll meet up at your tombstone and you can yell at me all you like for keeping you in the dark, deal?”

Emily snorted and you felt the tension lift, “Okay, point taken.” she chuckled. You hummed your agreement and you lapsed back into comfortable silence before Emily continued, “But hey, the desk thing worked out great. You and Spencer seem to be getting along again.”

You felt yourself flush with embarrassment, giving Emily the ammunition she needed to start teasing you mercilessly. It was nice, and familiar and it made you feel grounded in a way you didn’t realize you were missing before.

“You’re so predictable,” she laughed, “making sad puppy dog eyes at each other from across the room all day.”

You shoved her over, which she responded to with an indignant yelp.

“Yeah well, unfortunately we’ve got more to worry about than my abysmal love life,” you reminded Emily, “so will you please come back downstairs with me?”

You stood and extended your hand, which Emily took with a soft smile, letting you pull her to her feet.

“Okay, agent Y/L/N, but only because I’m hungry and I don’t want JJ to eat my cupcake.”

“Mmhmm,” you agreed sarcastically, threading your fingers together as Emily tucked the well worn photo back into her pants pocket.

She must’ve brought it with her from home, you realized with a start. She’d dragged that photo with her all this time.

It made your heart swell and you couldn’t stop yourself from saying, “Hey, Prentiss?”

“Yeah, Y/L/N?”

“It’s still you and me, you know? You’re still stuck with me.”

She stopped, a soft smile creeping onto her face as her dark eyes softened. For a moment you just looked at one another, really seeing the person in front of you for the first time in a year. Then she squeezed your hand and you kept moving.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that, you sap.”

———————————

The rest of the weekend was as close to bliss as Spencer could imagine while working a potentially catastrophic stalker case. He didn’t know what had happened while you were upstairs talking to Emily, it wasn’t his place, but he knew that you looked happy when you came back down. Emily looked happy too and, when she took a seat beside him, she shot him a knowing wink, which made him blush.

After that, the team was back. Morgan had confirmed with the M.E that the newest victim hadn’t been drugged, and he had indeed been tortured before he was killed. He’d also confirmed that the contents of the victim’s stomach was another grizzly message from the killer; tandoori chicken and sparkling wine, the exact meal you always ordered at the little restaurant you went to after a long case. Everyone had gotten eerily quiet when that came out. But you moved on, going through case files and reports together in the hopes of coming across some common name. It was a fairly thankless task. The only plus side was how much time Spencer got to spend with you, reading files, pouring coffee, just talking in the garden during lunch. Spencer was giddy with it, and Emily noticed.

“Real subtle, Lover Boy,” she teased on Sunday night, as Spencer watched you disappear back into the house for a drink.

He flushed and looked away, “What-uh-I don’t know what you mean.”

Emily rolled her eyes but smiled fondly, collapsing into the outdoor couch next to Spencer, “Sure.”

Just then you’d walked back out, and Emily let the matter drop for the time being. By the time Monday morning rolled in, Spencer finally felt like they had a handle on things. The picture was still murky and undefined, but now they could at least grasp its edges and make out its overall shape. The team had a long way to go, but it was something, and they’d managed to get by with less in the past. Coming in separately had been Hotch’s idea. It was likely that the UnSub was watching the team and coming in together would tip him off to the fact that work was being done outside of the office. Secrecy was their biggest weapon right now, Hotch had reminded them, secrecy and surprise. The UnSub couldn’t know what they knew. Not now, not ever. It was essential to the investigation.

Spencer remembered looking over at you when Hotch said that. He remembered the way you’d looked, the nerves and anger bubbling underneath your calm demeanor, and the way that his resolve had hardened.

“So what have we got?” Morgan had asked, “Officially, I mean.”

Hotch pressed his lips together, “White male, late twenties to mid thirties,” he’d explained, “try and float the idea that we’re looking into an ex boyfriend from high school or college. Anything we can do to throw him off.”

Spencer repeated it to himself like a mantra as he walked through the FBI building and stepped onto the elevator, bound for the sixth floor. As more agents piled in, the hairs on the back of Spencer’s neck stood up and his anxiety spiked. Is it you? A voice in his head whispered as he glanced at the dark haired man from Sex Crimes. Or you? He wondered, as a sandy haired agent with a long scar met his eye. Is it any of you? The doors finally opened on his floor and Spencer practically leapt out, forcing himself not to look back and keep his pace as normal as possible as he pushed open the doors to the BAU.

Spencer was the last to arrive, just as planned and, because of that, you’d already taken your space at his desk. The sight of you looking totally at home surrounded by his books and files made Spencer unreasonably happy and his nerves settled. Or at least, they did until he noticed the particularly devilish look in Emily’s eye, and the lack of a second chair at his desk.

“Emily, where’s my chair?” He asked.

She shrugged, “How should I know?”

You looked up at the noise and smiled at Spencer, making his heart leap into his throat.

“Sorry, Spence, there was only one when I arrived. I looked all over the office but the other one seems to have just vanished,” you explained, pushing yourself away from the desk, “you take this one, I’ll stand.”

Spencer sighed, “Don’t be ridiculous, Y/N, sit down. I’m fine with standing.”

“No, Spencer. I’m already taking up half your desk space. I’m not stealing your chair as well. Sit down.” You frowned.

“Y/N-“

“Spencer.”

“Or,” Emily interjected, with faux innocence, “you could just share the chair.”

You both froze, staring at Emily like she’d just grown a second head.

“Come again?” You asked.

“The chair,” she repeated, resting her chin on her hand, “you could just share it. Instead of arguing and wasting valuable time.” She shrugged, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips, “Just a thought.”

If looks could kill, Emily Prentiss would be dead. Spencer was considering pouring a bottle of water over her head when he caught your eye and blushed bright red. He hated how easy it was for you to undo him, how quickly he became completely obvious about his feelings towards you.

“We-we can’t share,” you stuttered.

“Why not?” Emily asked.

“Because!” You protested, “Spence is a germaphobe. He’d be uncomfortable sharing with me.”

“I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable,” he said without thinking, “not with you.”

You paused, surveilling him with a kind of softness in your eye that made his stomach all fluttery and weak. Emily watched the exchange with amusement, but didn’t interrupt, just waiting to see what happened as you and Spencer sized one another up.

“Okay then,” you agreed, “let’s...share. Somehow.”

Spencer fiddled with the strap of his satchel, but breathed an inward sigh of relief as the tension passed. The office chair Emily had left you with was a big one, and Spencer didn’t exactly take up a lot of space, but it was still tight. There was no getting away from casual touches, the pressure of your leg against his, the smell of your perfume clinging to your hair when it brushed by him, the low roll of your voice as you hummed along with the song in your head. Almost all of his senses were suddenly filled with you instead of empty space. The whole thing made his brain short-circuit. Maybe he hadn’t thought this completely through. As you read through a case file, Spencer caught Emily’s eye across the desk and mouthed ‘I hate you’ at her while you weren’t looking.

“You’re welcome,” she mouthed back, shooting him a wink as she turned back to her laptop.

You shifted in your seat, sending another rush of scent through Spencer’s nose.

“Is that-” he started, “are you wearing a different perfume than normal?”

You met his eye, a little confused, but played along, “It’s new, yeah. I bought it just over a week ago but it hasn’t been warm enough to wear it, why?”

“I’ve smelled it somewhere before,” he explained, riffling through the evidence box he kept on his desk until he found the right bag. He was acutely aware of your eyes on him as he sliced through the seal, reached in with a glove between his fingers and pulled out the letter that had been left at your apartment. He inhaled, filling his nose with the familiar scent, and his stomach dropped, “I knew it. Here, smell.”

You followed his lead and Spencer watched your eyes widen with horror when you confirmed his theory, “Oh my god, he scented the paper.”

“With a perfume you hadn’t even worn yet.” he continued.

“Which means he had to have known that I’d bought it, and that I’d intended to start wearing it soon,” you followed, “which means he must have been following me that day.”

“And if he was, there’s a chance one of the stores has him on camera. Do you remember when and where you bought it?”

“I do.”

“Get that information to Garcia, we’ll have to talk to the store owners before they erase the tapes, and then she can track your movements and see if anyone’s a little too close for comfort.” he said.

Your eyes lit up with that intelligent sparkle that Spencer had always loved, the one you got in the moments when a case finally started to seem solvable.

“Spencer Reid, you are the key to everything, aren’t you?” you teased.

He opened his mouth to respond, his cheeks already flushing bright red, when Hotch’s door opened and their team leader stepped out, a stony expression on his face.

“Alright everybody,” Hotch’s voice boomed through the bullpen, “briefing room now please. We’ve got a case.”

----------------

Taglist:  @ourfavoritesergeantbarnes​, @confused-and-really-hungry, @word-scribbless​, @reidloversisforever​, @ashookykooky​, @l0ve-0f-my-life​, @shilohpug​, @tangerinenotions95​, @petitchatonbleu, @pirateismywayofspeaking​, @must-be-a-weasley-92​, @whovianayesha, @holding-on-to-my-youth, @quie-pls, @fear-less-write-more​, @astraea-writes​, @mac99martin​, @word-scribbless​, @levylovegood, @easygoingtheatre​, @purpleraindrops, @eevee0722​, @bisexualdisaster106​, @sgold, @openheart12​, @shilohpug​

[moonflower-31]

I Won’t Forget You - Spencer Reid x Reader

Masterlist 

Part 8 

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader 

Warnings: A lot of yelling, language, and some supernatural references (if you squint) 

Tags: @dra-reid, @eevee0722, @ceeellewrites, @anotherr-fine-mess, @ssahoodrathotchner

~~~~~~~~~~ 

You took deep breaths as Hotch led you towards the interview room. You tightened your fists at your sides as you ran through your mind how you planned on doing any of this. The last time you'd tried to negotiate with a man like him, it hadn't been pretty. 

"You need to get him angry, alright? That's his weakness. Figure out which of the archetypes he is. Get as much as you can out of him, but do not under any circumstances let him speak to anyone or manipulate you. We will switch out with Morgan to watch over him in an hour. Good luck." Hotch readied you, giving you the files you needed. You clutched the manilla envelope against your chest, trying to calm your ever racing heart. 

You nod wordlessly, facing the man in the see through mirror. He was wearing a red flannel and a black shirt underneath paired with ripped jeans. He had hunters boots on as well. He had a bruise forming on his jaw and a fresh cut that was bandaged on his forehead. 

Morgan stepped up behind you, placing a reassuring hand on your shoulder. "You can do this, kid. Promise. Don't let him get to you." He insists. You nodded shakily, looking up at the man again. 

You turn towards Morgan with a determined look. "Just promise me you won't interrupt. Even if he tries to attack me." You insist. Morgan widens his eyes. 

"Princess, we can't do that. If anything goes wrong-" he began, unable to find the right words to fill the gap. "You could get hurt. And that's paperwork." He adds with a sigh. You giggle and shake your head. 

"Morgan, we both know paperwork isn't what you're worried about." You tease before you turn around and find the handle to the interview room. Here goes nothing. 

You walk in, closing the door behind you. As soon as you turn around to do so, you hear a whistle from behind you. 

"Damn… and here I thought they'd be sendin' in some prissy princess. How you doin'?" The man asked. You swallow. This was exactly how you expected him to treat you. You'd had experience with narcissists and manipulators before. This was the first thing they did. 

"I don't know, Jensen." You greet, grateful you had stolen a glance at his profile and which one of the brothers he was. He smirked at you, leaning forward and biting his lip flirtatiously. "Why don't you tell me how you're doing with all of these murders. I mean, it has to get to you somehow. All that blood on your hands… all that guilt… unless it's just fun for you." You ask, smirking at him as you changed the subject. Jensen's face shifted slightly, twitching at how focused you still were at getting these answers. 

"Sure it's fun. But I only do it cause I have to. You know… I'd stop if I had a girl like you…" he insists, attempting to reach across and touch your chin. You back away slowly, just about enough to make him think you were playing hard to get. You batted your eyelashes and threw your hair behind your shoulder. 

"Oh really? You would?" You asked, pulling out a photo. "What about that brother of yours? Sam, right? What's he like?" You ask in a flirtatious tone. Jensen yet again shifts a little in his seat, uncomfortable that he was losing control of the conversation.  

"Hey, Sammy can't even get it up half the time. All the girls he fucks he kills afterwards. I'm better, trust me." He insists, winking at you from where he sat slouched in the seat across from you. He bit his lip a little harder and hummed gently. "Man… you know, if I didn't have these handcuffs on I could show you a pretty good time…" he trails, giving you a seductive look. Had this been over five years ago, this flirting would have seriously got you. No one had ever flirted with you this way. Not even now. But after all your experience with secret motivations behind smiling masks, you knew better. 

"Oh yeah? I thought you were… more the kinky type. Let a girl think she's in control for a good little bit." You ask, purposely shifting in your seat to slightly pull up your skirt. Your plan has been working so far. Hopefully Morgan was keeping his promise. 

Jensen licked his lips and looked you up and down. "I'm guessing this ain't your first rodeo, is it, princess?" He asks, giving you a flirtatious glance. You bite back a disgusted groan that would've fallen from your mouth if the situation were different. 

You giggle and hold a hand to your mouth. "No, no I'm afraid it isn't." You tease. Jensen flashes a white smile you're sure has charmed plenty of women in his past into his pants. 

"Good. I like women with… experience." He flirts back. "You think I could get a beer in here? Some whiskey?" He asks. 

"How about you answer a few questions for me, big boy? Then maybe I'll let you ask for a few things. Of course, within reason." You remind, winking back at him. Jensen leaned back in his chair and pondered what you offered. 

"Sure, lay it on me, Baby." He allows, nodding to you. You let out an undetectable sigh of relief before you start up again. So far, so good. 

"So… Jensen… how would you describe your relationship with Sam? Strong? You get along good?" You ask, internally groaning at how much you sounded like a therapist. 

Jensen seemed to share this sentiment and let out a groan for you. "Geez, you sound like a goddamn shrink." He grumbles as he sits up. "Yeah… me and Sammy are always by each other. I practically raised him. He's my baby brother. What do you expect? Some people say we're codependent on each other but, really, who are they to judge?" He shrugged, looking at you. 

You nod, looking through the information. Just as you begin to open your mouth to ask another question, Jensen slightly hits the table. 

"Nuh uh, sweetheart. You asked me a question, so I get to ask one too. Am I right?" He clarifies, giving you a shit-eating grin because he knew he was right. You sigh and nodded, closing the file for a moment. Jensen smirked and leaned forward towards you. 

"How come we ain't on a first name basis yet, hm? You know my name, what's yours sugar-tits?" He asks, raising an eyebrow. You swallow gently. 

"My name is Agent-" 

"No-no-no-" Jensen interrupted. "I mean your real name, sweetness. You know, the name mommy and daddy gave you when they signed that slip of paper." He insists, pressing a finger into the table. 

You sigh. "I can meet you half-way and give you my middle name-" you attempt to compromise. 

"No, damnit!" He growls, slapping his fists into the table. "I want a damn name! No name? No answers, bitch!" He yelled in your face. You swallowed all the nerves building up in your throat, clearing it for a moment. 

"Alright, alright, calm down. Or we'll have to detain you again. And then you won't get the chance to hear my name or potentially strike up a deal, you hear me?" You ask, biting the inside of your cheek just barely. 

Jensen seemed satisfied with your answer, settling back into his chair. 

"They call me (Y/N)." You answer after a quiet moment. Jensen smiles greedily. 

"(Y/N), huh? You don't hear that one everyday."

"No, you don't. Now… Jensen. Can you tell me, what exactly you and your brother were doing when you decided to kill these two men?" You asked, pushing the pictures of the crime scene in front of him. He rolled his eyes.

"They were tax guys. We didn't wanna pay tax, is that too hard to get, baby?" He asks with a chuckle.  

"No, I figured that. No, what I want to know, is why you decided to pour salt on the body once they were already dead, and set them on fire?" You questioned. Jensen began to protest but you held up a hand. 

"I'll let you ask two questions once you answer me." You promise, pointing at one of the photos. He sighed and leaned back. 

"Ain't I allowed a lawyer?" He asks. 

"Not since you escaped prison and are not a legal, non-incarcerated citizen. Sure, you will receive an attorney for trial. But I doubt a lawyer will help you here. I'm your best bet at being able to strike up a deal." 

Jensen grumbled, looking around the room, still refusing to answer. You nod as you begin to take mental notes. 

"Ah I see. This all has to do with the man who burned your mother, doesn't it?" You ask him, catching him off guard. 

"Wha-?! How did-?" He began. 

"We're the FBI, Jensen. Not some local police officer you can convince you were just experimenting how to build a bonfire and try to tell me they got just a little too close. You see, your mother was salted and burned too. But I bet you knew that. That man assaulted her in your brother's nursery and started the fire. You reserved that method for him. But you couldn't remember whether the man was blond haired, or dark. So you killed them both the same way. Didn't you, Jensen? You and your brother got caught up in your daddy's little business-" 

"Shut up-" Jensen growled.  

"And now you can't stand to let him down. To break the promise you made to him-" 

"Shut. Up." He hissed.  

"And you brought your little brother into it too because you couldn't face all the guilt all alone. Because you're afraid of being abandoned. Despite all the ways you have to fill up that void: Drink, Sex, Money, you know that you can never be satisfied." You insist, leaning closer to Jensen as you begin to raise your voice.  

"Shut the hell up, bitch!" He attempted to shout over you. 

"You can never be satisfied because all you are is daddy's little pawn. And without him? You see no purpose for yourself-" 

"Son of a bitch-!" He growled, slamming his fist into the table again. "Shut the fuck up before I make you-" 

"Then answer me this one question, Jensen." You insist, standing up as he does. 

"Why should I-?" He roars. 

"Cause I know you never wanted this. That you wanted a regular family. And I can find that family you tried to hold onto." You insist. It was a long shot, but you had to try. 

"What the hell are you talking about-?!" 

"Men like you, who have broken homes, broken families with deadbeat fathers, they try to start over. Try to be the man their father wasn't. And I can see that you fit right into that, Jensen. You tried to have a family. You desperately tried. But you were too sucked into this second life you had that you had to choose. And you regret it. Now, tell me where your brother is, and I'll find them for you." You promise. 

Jensen widens his eyes in shock, as if he was surprised you could get all of that from just this little interview. He tensed up and took his seat again, twitching with anger and disbelief. "You're bluffing… she… Daneel moved on from me. Changed her name. You can't find her." 

"I bet that I can. I'll find them and let you see them again. If you tell me where your brother is." You restate, calming your voice to a caring tone. He leaned forward and put his face in his hands. 

"There's an old factory we both head to… when one of us gets caught. It's down south of Lebanon. He'll be there. Now you better find her for me. Or I will strangle you here and now-" he began to threaten. 

"I wouldn't lie about that. You'll see her. You'll see your brother too. Just behave, and I may be able to get some visiting privileges worked out for you." You promise, collecting the files again and head towards the door. 

"(Y/N)..." 

You turn your head as you hear your name. Before you can even reply, he finishes his statement.  

"Thank you." He says just barely audibly. You smile gently and nod to him before you leave the room. 

Once out you exhale your hardest, taking in a similar inhale. That, was a lot. 

"Damn… how the hell did you get all that? How did you… even do that?" Morgan asks, helping you up from where you had unknowingly leaned against the door. 

You shook your head, smiling somewhat. "I… I trusted my gut. I've unfortunately dealt with guys like him. And the one thing they treasure is something they know they can never have." You explain, looking up at Morgan. 

"Well still, you did a good job staying calm in there. I mean… Hotch and I didn't know whether or not you were seriously flirting with him or not." Morgan chuckles. 

"Yeah well… sure he was handsome but, he isn't my type." You reveal. Morgan smirks and nudges your shoulder. 

"Yeah, cause your type is 6'1 and a gigantic nerd. Who by the way, couldn't stay in the room watching the interrogation after you started flirting with him. You should've seen him, all red faced too." He grinned. You widen your eyes at his reveal, doing a little blushing of your own. 

"Really?" You ask. 

"Yeah, kid. But seriously… (Y/N)? You've been holding out on me princess! Why didn't you tell me you had a name like that?" He teased, leading you out of the room and towards the rest of the station. 

"Well… you can call me (Y/N/N). I go by that more often by friends." You insist. Morgan chuckles.  

"And we are most definitely, friends." He says, holding up a fist for you. You giggle and give him a fist bump, walking with him back out to where Hotch and the rest of the team were. 

"We all need to split up and take different entrances to the factory. He probably knows the building better than we do. Once we're in, we'll corner him. Without his brother he is vulnerable." Hotch explains, unaware Morgan was walking up behind him. 

You look down and pull your skirt back into place. You didn't need anyone thinking you were trying to get some. 

"So Hotch, what's the plan?" Morgan asked. 

Hotch turned around and faced the two of you. "I'm having Garcia get the layout of the factory now. There's only one down there, so we have to assume that's the one Jensen meant." 

"Great work, (L/N)." Prentiss says, smiling at you. 

"Thank you." You respond. "I… just trusted my gut. Hotch?" You spoke up. The man in question turned his head towards you. You sigh and begin to speak up. 

"I called Garcia to find her for you." Rossi interrupted, smiling at you. "I'll put it on my record, so you can still have a clean one." He promises, winking at you. 

Hotch nodded. "Yes, we'll get in contact with this Daneel. If any pop up in his history, we'll call her down to see him. Now we need to hurry. Jensen may have a way to tip off his brother. You need to change out of that and get down to the factory." He says to you. 

"She can change in the car with me." Prentiss insists. "Like you said we don't have much time." 

"Alright. (L/N), you ride with Prentiss. Let's go." He says, prompting all of you to head towards the doors. 

○●♡●○ 

"Damn, (Y/N), where have you been all my life?" Derek asks as you both come back into the station, followed by the rest of the team. 

They had managed to apprehend the brother. Turns out that Sam had been contemplating suicide and when you had told him he could see his brother again, he gave in. So he was much easier than his brother. 

"I dunno, Morgan. Probably hidden under all the other chicks you had to take out first." You teased, giggling a little as you all took a seat (and or leaned against the wall, as was Morgan’s thing.) 

Spencer, on the other hand, chose to head into the evidence room instead. You raised an eyebrow, confused. 

"Hey, uh… is Reid okay? I mean, he was the one who got the guy in handcuffs. Did you see him though? He had to be at least as tall as Spencer." You chuckled. 

"Why do you say that?" Prentiss asks. 

"Did you not see him skip this little after case review? He went straight into the evidence room. I've never known him in the two months that I have, to go clean up evidence boards before talking to all of us." You point out. 

"He's probably just jealous." Morgan teased. You furrow your eyebrows and wack Morgan’s arm. Morgan smiles and winces playfully in pain.

"I thought you promised me you wouldn't talk about it!?" You hissed. 

"Ooh, talk about what?" JJ asks, taking her own seat instead of standing. Hotch smiles softly and chuckles. 

"The obvious crush Ms. (L/N) has on Reid." Hotch spoke up. 

You whip around faster than the swivel chair can as you look at Hotch in surprise. "Don't tell me he told you!" You whined, your blush making a reappearance on your face as you cover them. 

Hotch chuckles and lets Rossi take over his defense. "We all know already, kid. You aren't exactly slick about it." He says with a chuckle of his own. 

"You all suck. Capital S." You grumble. 

"Hey, I didn't do anything about it." Prentiss points out. "Though sure, I may have said something about Reid…" she trails. You groan louder. 

"Seriously? How obvious have I really been?" You ask. "And be honest with me please." You insist. Each of your team members looked to one another before they each said: "Very." 

You let out a frustrated growl and lean back in your chair. Morgan chuckled as he put a hand on your shoulder. 

"Kid, you weren't slick." He admits. 

After a moment, Morgan gets an idea and smirks. "So… does he know your name?" He asks, wiggling his eyebrows. 

Prentiss and JJ gasp for a moment, smiling at you expectantly. A third gasp joins them, causing you to crane your neck to find out where it came from. JJ turned her phone around and showed Garcia's caller ID. You should have known. 

"Come on kid, is it safe to tell us yet?" Morgan asks, smiling genuinely at you. The most real one you'd gotten thus far, you think with a grumble. 

You sigh as you begin to grin from ear to ear. Guess you weren't getting out of this. You had finally been able to let your guard down around the team. You felt welcomed and not like a burden. So you said it. 

"My name is (Y/N). But you all can call me (Y/N/N)." 

A few shrieks from Garcia's end were quickly heard then silenced through the volume button of JJ's phone. Prentiss smiled at you, sitting back gently.  

"Really now? Never thought I'd say it but I never pegged you for a (Y/N)." She commented. You snickered. 

"Yeah, well, you can thank my grandfather for  that one. He insisted my parents name me something normal. Or at least something that wasn't Gwenevere. So they compromised on (Y/N)." You laugh, bringing a few more members of the team with you. 

This was home. You'd only known a true home one time before this in your life. And this was it. This is what home was to you. Not a random apartment, not some desk job, this. This work family you'd built up for the past two months. 

You just hoped you hadn't screwed up with Reid again. 

[self-proclaimed-chaotic-good]

The Road Ahead | Adam Milligan x Reader

Words: 2279

Warning: None, except some typos and Adam not being in this one as much.

A/N: How does writing work again? What do you mean I have to type it out? I’m thinking of a series name for this to organize these continuous oneshots. No promises of regular updates. It’s only when I can.

Continuation of [True Winchester Fashion] and [Night at the Museum].

-

The museum director hummed softly to herself as her heels echoed through the empty halls of the building. The exhibit was coming along nicely and her contact had come through and found an actual grimoire. Finally, her years of searching were finally over. If only she had brushed up on her Latin, then she would have had no problem translating it herself. Her senior curator had fallen sick after a week of trying to translate the ancient book, which left the college student rookie to translate. She had kept an eye on you for some time now. She had seen the potential in you, the potential of witchcraft. It takes practice and intelligence to master it and she had only wished the matrilineal side of her family had kept on the tradition of passing down the defunct coven’s knowledge. No matter. Blood of the coven is thicker than water of the womb, as they say. You make your own family.

With each passing week of you translating the grimoire, more incidents had been occurring around town. She wanted to approach you about it, to help you control the power of the book, but it would mean revealing her intentions too soon. She had watched you run in fear when the growing number of creatures had reached the museum. Then, those damn FBI agents had to get involved. They stopped by the museum after you had reported the bodies of the security guards that night and she had to pretend to be a clueless director that had limited knowledge about the objects in the museum and the history they hold.

It would be a matter of time before the grimoire gets out of control.

Exiting the museum, she felt a cold presence behind her. She spun around and saw a woman with the reddest hair, palest skin, and radiating the most powerful energy she had ever felt. The woman’s red lips split into a smile, a chill running down the director’s back telling her that it wasn’t a friendly one.

“Who are you?” she asked, taking a step back.

“Oh, dear. Oh, sweet dearie. You dare mess with magic and not know who I am?” The woman chuckled, taking a step forward. “I’m Rowena, the most powerful witch that ever graced this horrible planet and… the current Queen of Hell.”

“Queen of Hell. You must be joking.”

Rowena stared her down and the director suddenly felt her knees giving out. “I have been told that I have a grim sense of humor, but I do not joke about this. And you, missy, must think that witchcraft is a joke. What was it? Some kind of soul searching, finding out who you are from your family tree? Think you could feel close to them if you get a fancy old book and a cauldron?” she said mockingly. “What’s your name, sweetheart.”

“Joana Faith,” she gasped as the weight on her shoulders lifted.

Rowena hummed. “You. You need to fix this mess. As much as I love chaos, I love organized chaos and I’m not going to let some amature run around with a powerful grimoire like she’s in Harry Potter. You watch yourself, because I will also be watching you, Joana Faith.”

“Alright, alright.” Joana slowly picked herself off the ground. “And what about those FBI agents that have been snooping around? How is all of this going to be explained?”

Rowena rolled her eyes, a mix of irritable fondness in one gesture. “Those boys. They probably already know by now. As long as you set things right, you don’t have to worry about them. You do know how to stabilize that grimoire, right?”

“Well…”

Rowena rolled her eyes again.

-

Adam felt Michael’s presence in the back of his mind, asking to take over. “I can help,” the archangel said. Adam nodded, taking a step back and allowing Michael to take control.

“I don’t know what to do,” you moaned, clutching your head between your hands as eerie figures began to crowd around the windows of your apartment.

Your eyes landed on the grimoire, the leathery surface and crispy pages drawing you in like a magnet. Heat radiated off of the old padlock as your hand drifted closer. There were ancient powers in that book, power to change things, to manipulate them, and to end things. And the grimoire chose you.

You could hear Adam’s voice, but it sounded like you were under water. You couldn’t catch what it was, but you felt your heart pick up in panic. This wasn’t right. This was something that you don’t know about… but maybe you can learn to.

Firm hands gripped your shoulders as you were yanked away from the grimoire. Adam’s hazel eyes were looking down at you, but it didn’t feel like Adam. You still couldn’t understand what he was saying. He frowned, pressing two fingers onto your forehead. Heat spread through your head, brightness filling your vision as if you were pulled out of the ocean.

“Sam and Dean will be coming to deal with the monsters outside, but I need you to focus.” He paused, watching as your eyes still drifted down to the grimoire. “That thing doesn’t call to just anyone, you know.”

As you calmed yourself, so did the noises outside, the dark shadows disappearing from view. Your eyes snapped back to him. “What does that mean?”

“It means, my dear, that you have a gift and a curse,” came a Scottish woman’s voice.

You spun a head around and saw a red haired woman and Joana who looked haggard. The red haired woman rolled her eyes at her.

“Oh, please, you want to be a witch and you can’t even handle teleportation,” she chided. She looked over at you and Adam and smiled. “Hello, Michael. Fancy seeing you here. Playing college student, I see.”

“Rowena,” ‘Adam’ said with a curt nod, “You’re here for the book.”

“Of course I am. Even if the Winchesters deal with those monsters outside, there’ll be more coming if we don’t get that book under control. You,” Rowena sauntered over to you, “How much of the book you’ve read already?”

“Almost all of it,” you said sheepishly.

She hummed, looking almost impressed. A grimoire would be difficult for a beginner, but for someone who had no experience to make it that far into the book is a feat in itself. Maybe you’d be useful to her in the future, or maybe become a potential apprentice.

“Well, you two are glad that I’m here. Listen up, I’m about to give you a Witchcraft crash course and I expect you to pay attention. You wouldn’t want me to visit you when I’m upset. Michael, help those boys outside while I sort this out, would you?”

Adam stood up and gave her a look of warning. “Make sure (Y/n) is safe-”

“Or else what, dearie?” she smirked. There wasn’t much use arguing with the Queen of Hell, especially if it was Rowena Macleod.

He glowered before turning to you. “It’s going to be okay,” he assured you.

You watched him disappear with a small gust, strands of your hair flying out of your face and loose paper flying off the table. “What do you mean by Michael?” you asked Rowena.

“Oh, he didn’t tell you? Your boyfriend Adam is the vessel of the archangel Michael,” she said nonchalantly, “but we’ll unpack that later. We’ve got work to do.”

-

There was an energy that coursed through your veins that you never knew was possible. It was invigorating, like you could fly or punch through a wall. Rowena warned you about becoming too power hungry.

“Ambition is good, but too much can kill you,” she said, then added with a smirk, “Unless you find a way to cheat death, I suggest you know your limits first.”

After the incident with the grimoire, everything seemed to go back to normal. Your friend, who the Winchesters had saved from the vampire den also had no recollection, convinced that she was drugged and kidnapped while your other friend was not so lucky in getting out. The two of you mourned all the same, but only you knew how she really died. No one in town even remembered what happened with the disappearances and the killings, except for you and Joana. You now see her in a different light, knowing what her main goal was in creating the Salem witch exhibit. Her talk with Rowena seemed to humble her and she regarded you with a little more respect than she used to. The exhibit was still ongoing, but this time, no dangerous objects for display. No, that grimoire stayed with you after Rowena helped the two of you contain it. It was now imprinted with you and under your care. You didn’t know where to start.

Adam had disappeared that night and no one remembered him, either. It was as if he had vanished along with everything that was unnatural, like some weird fever dream. Rowena had said that he was a vessel to an angel, the archangel Michael of all things. In any other circumstances, you would have had a hard time believing it, but with the grimoire and the monsters and witches that came with it, it was just another piece to the universal puzzle found. Now you know the truth. The things in stories like the werewolves, the vampires, the witches, and even angels and demons, were all real, and there were people that dealt with them within the shadows. They come and go and only a few even notice them. They save lives without any recognition or reward. Hunters, they were called. The Winchesters.

After graduating college, you weren’t sure what you wanted to do. There was the museum library, but it was no longer what you wanted to do. Now that you have discovered witchcraft, you wanted to know what you could do. Maybe you could help people, too, like Adam and his brothers.

You cleared up your desk at the museum as you snacked on the brownies that a senior curator had brought in for your last day. They were sad to see you go, but you told them that you had applied to a museum in the city and wanted to see where you went from there.

“You are always welcomed back here,” one of them said as they hugged you.

Your last stop was the cemetery where your friend had already left flowers. She didn’t talk to you all that much, saying she needed more time with her family and had sought professional help to cope with your mutual loss. Maybe it was for the best. You still blamed yourself for your mutual friend’s death after all.

You turned to leave and was immediately faced with Joana. She had dropped her perky and enthusiastic mask that she had kept up around others and offered a sympathetic smile instead.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, “I didn’t realize that an old leathery book would cause this much trouble. I’m sorry.” She looked around, eyes squinting as the summer sun beamed down on the two of you. “I heard you were leaving town. Good for you. I… there’s another thing I should apologize for.”

It was then you realized that she had a small book tucked under her arm. She pulled it out and handed it over to you. It was worn from constant use, scribbles and rough sketches on every page. Flipping through them, words like wendigo, werewolves, and revenant, stood out.

“It had been left on your desk that night when… the whole thing with the grimoire had been put to rest. I got curious and… I might have borrowed it. I realized it must have been left by those hunters that had helped us,” Joana explained.

“Possibly by Adam,” you muttered, closing the journal.

“Adam. Rowena said that he was a vessel of an angel. Is that true? Did you know?”

You shook your head. “Not sure how much from the Queen of Hell is true but I wouldn’t be too surprised anymore if it was. There is a lot out there that people don’t know about. What about you? What are you going to do now?”

She shrugged. “I could dabble here and there. I think I want to use it to protect this town, though. After everything that happened, I realized the impact of one thing could have on a whole community, especially when it involves things that people don’t believe existed. If those hunters hadn’t come here, hell, even if Adam hadn’t decided to go to school here, who knows what would have happened.”

“Yeah. Makes you think about those that weren’t so lucky. I’m going to try to learn more about this… this whole business with supernatural things. If I have a gift, I should use it, right?”

Joana nodded before stepping back. “Well, good luck. Come back whenever and tell me about what you’ve found. I’m curious, but I don’t think I’m cut out for venturing.”

“I’ll be sure to do that.”

As you walked towards your car, there was the bittersweet ache in your chest. You had never lived away from home before, the town was practically all you knew. Yet, there was something inside of you that felt that you had the potential to do more and be more than what you were now, and it wasn’t going to change unless you stepped away into something new.

The road ahead was dangerous, but it was better than staying in one spot forever. Maybe one day, you would even run into Adam again.

[hailing-stars]

@febuwhump day 12 who are you

the world minus one 

summary 

“Who the hell are you?”

“Agent Woo,” he says.

“Ha,” says Peter. He grins. “That rhymed.”

“I’ve been assigned to oversee your home detainment,” he tells him, flashing his card as if he were a magician, and they were at a magic show, instead of the most boring place on planet earth

OR

Agent Jimmy Woo is assigned to oversee Peter's house arrest post far from home, and Peter's eyes see probation officer but his brain screams FRIEND.

Peter considers chopping his foot off.

Did he really need two feet? Maybe Mr. Stark could fashion him a prosthetic like he did for his own Infinity Gauntlet damaged arm, or maybe Peter could spend one of his annoyingly long days trapped inside this apartment figuring out how to do it himself.

He’s exiled to a much larger apartment than the one he and May share in Queens, but somehow, it still manages to be cramped and suffocating, as if the air there was thick and might smother him before the boredom drove him up the walls.

That is if his ankle monitor doesn’t choke the life out of him first.

He pulls at it, itching at it from his place sitting in the middle of the living room floor, when the doorbell rings and Peter stops, he frowns. Mr. Stark isn’t expected to visit him today, and May isn’t due for dinner until a couple of hours.

With a sigh, he stands and walks across his apartment. He opens the door to an unfamiliar face wearing a familiar and unwelcome FBI jacket.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Agent Woo,” he says.

“Ha,” says Peter. He grins. “That rhymed.”

“I’ve been assigned to oversee your home detainment,” he tells him, flashing his card as if he were a magician, and they were at a magic show, instead of the most boring place on planet earth.

It’s an awkward moment. Him just standing there, in the hall, and Peter basks in his ability to make a Fed sweat.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Are you a vampire?”

“...I’m sorry?”

“Vampires,” sighes Peter. “They have to be let in. Feds usually don’t wait for an invitation. Not used to one having manners.”

Peter walks away from the door, leaving it open, and hoping that’s enough of an invitation. It isn’t like he has a choice anyway.

Agent Woo shuts the door behind him, and something stabs at Peter. He’s being rude. His aunt taught him better than that, and there’s something about Agent Woo that Peter decides he likes. The magic trick, maybe.

Peter offers him coffee. Agent Woo looks over at the kitchen, which is admittedly a disaster zone, and politely declines.

“So, what’s your job?” asks Peter. He clears a space off of the dining room table for them to both sit down. “Making sure I’m not staging an escape attempt?”

“Basically, I’ll be dropping by from time to time, to ensure you’re behaving yourself,” says Agent Woo. “Tony Stark did bribe me to harass you about your online classes and that’s not typically part of my job description, I need the money for my children’s college -”

“-you have kids?”

“Not yet, but I plan to, and with the way the economy is-” Agent Woo pauses. “We’re really supposed to be talking about you.”

“I’m behaving myself,” says Peter. “I’m attending my online classes, and I’ve got no plans to take up a new identity and flee the country. Now back to you. Anyone special you’re planning on having these kids with? I need all the details.”

It’s true. He does.

There isn’t much entertainment in his life what with being locked up in an apartment, spending most of his days alone. It’s for May’s safety that they aren’t able to live together during his house arrest, during the massively long stretch of time before his trial, but that doesn’t mean Peter likes it.

Agent Woo spills something about a doctor before pausing a second time and getting back on track. He recites the same information Peter’s heard before. It’s really boring and a waste of time, but Peter supposes he’s got lots of it to waste, anyway.

“Any questions for me?” Agent Woo asks, once he’s finished with his spiel.

“Can you show me how to do that magic trick?”

“Maybe another time,” he tells him, then looks around. “You know, a lot of people in your situation find it helps to form a routine and create a clean living space. Waking up in the morning, showering, putting on normal clothes.”

Peter frowns at the sudden callout. “Who says pajamas aren’t normal?”

“Just offering some friendly advice.”

He stands, and heads for the door, telling him he’ll be by in a couple of weeks, when Peter feels the throbbing near his ankle.

“Agent Woo,” says Peter, before he gets to the door. “You wouldn’t, um, know how to loosen the ankle monitor? I may have been what Mr. Stark fondly refers to as tactless with the agent who put it on and they may have retaliated just a little bit.”

So, Agent Woo loosens the ankle monitor, and Peter, once he’s alone in the apartment, collapses on his couch and decides that he and Agent Woo are going to be friends, despite the unsolicited advice.

*

Peter’s prepared the next time Agent Woo visits.

Coffee is going, the apartment is clean, and he’s got five packs of playing cards laid out on the kitchen table. It had been a lot of whining on his part to convince Mr. Stark to drop everything and run to the store and buy them, but this is an emergency. A magic emergency.

He’s also ordered a pizza, and it arrives just as Agent Woo starts his regular round of checkup, interrogation questions.

“Oh, that’s the pizza,” says Peter, when the doorbell rings.

Agent Woo opens his mouth as Peter leaps up from his chair, but ultimately doesn’t say anything. Once Peter’s back to the kitchen table, he opens the box and lets the aroma fill the apartment.

“Want a slice?”

“That would be crossing professional bounds…” says Agent Woo. His voice trailed off. He stared at the pizza. “But that pizza looks really good, and I haven’t had lunch…”

Peter pushes the box closer to the FBI agent. Agent Woo grabs a slice, and official talk about Peter’s detainment falls to the wayside.

“Tell me about the doctor,” says Peter. “Is she pretty?”

Agent Woo obliges, and Peter begins to understand why Woo’s crushing on her so hard. She sounds kickass. And Peter’s rooting for them.

“You gotta ask her out, man,” says Peter. A string of melt cheese hangs off his mouth and swipes it away. “I mean, Agent Woo.”

The agent laughs, and by the time he leaves, Peter knows how to do the magic trick and almost no time was spent talking about his upcoming trial or the conditions of his house arrest.

*

Peter bleeds out on his living room floor.

He hadn’t meant to get stabbed. He hadn’t even meant to step out of his apartment, but it’s getting to him. The confinement. The crime happening below his apartment and he’s expected to sit by and let happen.

Mr. Stark is going to kill him, and he wouldn’t have called him if not for the pain, the unbearable pain of his skin stitching itself back together. Superpowered healing doesn’t come without it’s trauma.

To make matters worse, his doorbell rings, and he isn’t expecting anyone, so he knows it’s Agent Woo.

He inhales deep. He tries freeing his face from displaying the terrifying agony he’s experiencing in his leg, and he limps over to answer the door.

Agent Woo isn’t fooled. “Jesus Christ, is that blood?”

“Is that Delmar’s?” Peter momentarily forgets his situation when he spots the brown bag in Agent Woo’s hand, and when he smells the unforgetful aroma of Delmar’s Deli.

“Forget the sandwiches,” says Agent Woo. He walks into the apartment, helps Peter back to the couch, and places the bag on the coffee table. “What happened to you?”

“Don’t freak out,” he tells him. “I accidentally stabbed myself with a steak knife.”

Agent Woo stands, crosses his arms. “I’m supposed to believe you did that to yourself? On accident?”

“To be fair,” says Peter. “You’ve known me long enough to know that’s also extremely probable.”

“How could you do this,” says Agent Woo. He isn’t angry. His voice sounds the same as Mr. Sark’s had on the phone. Worried. Afraid for him, and what’s done, putting his own privilege of pretrial house arrest on the line for a few minutes fighting petty criminals. “You know what’s at stake if you break the rules.”

“I know,” says Peter, softly. “I’m sorry.”

“We need to put pressure on that.”

Agent Woo disappears from his sight and returns with a towel he carefully ties around Peter’s leg wound.

“Are you sure you don’t need a hospital?”

Peter shakes his head. “Spider healing will work it’s magic.”

He closes his eyes and tries to block out the pain, and when that doesn’t work, he decides a distraction is what he needs.

“Tell me about Dr. Lewis,” he says, through a grimace. “Have you asked her out yet?”

Agent Woo sits on the couch next to him. “Not yet.”

“You gotta get on that,” says Peter. “Before someone else does.”

“I don’t know about that, Pete,” he tells him. “I don’t know if someone like her would say yes to someone like me.”

“Someone like you? Someone who’s a nice person? And likes all the same cheesy sit-coms as her?” asks Peter. “Dude, you two are perfect for each other. You’re gonna ask her, and she’s going to say something like geez, finally, I was waiting for you to get a clue, and then you’ll have little Dr. Lewis-Woos running around all over the place.” He stops, the pain stabs, and he keeps going. “She’d be lucky.”

“Thanks, Peter.”

“Anytime,” says Peter, his voice cracking. The edges of his vision blur, but he’s able to focus on the brown bag on the coffee table. “You really brought me Delmar’s?”

“Last time I was here you said how much you missed it.”

“Make a habit of doing favors for murders? Fun.”

The pain’s making him more bitter, more honest, more angsty about the fact that the entire world thinks he’s killed that clown Mysterio. Maybe that’s what his temporary escape is really about. Trying to prove that he’s good. That he’s against the crimes people say he’s committed.

“I know you’re not a murderer.”

The entire world minus one, he guesses, along with his friends and family.

“You believe me?”

“I’ve dealt with killers before,” says Agent Woo. “You’re not one of them.”

Peter feels lighter, better even in his leg, by the idea of someone like Agent Woo believing his innocence. Gives him hope maybe his house arrest will end with freedom instead of prison, like Mr. Stark has been telling him from the start.

His good feeling doesn’t last long, though, because Mr. Stark barges through the door and Peter’s spidey senses know he’s about to get a lecture.

“How could you be so stupid?”

“Mr. Stark -”

“-No,” says Mr. Stark. “No excuses. I’ve warned you over and over again. Where is it?”

Peter pulls the device he’d built to interfere with the ankle monitor out from his pocket, and hands it over to Mr. Stark, who breaks it.

“For a genius,” says Agent Woo, as he eyes the broken parts of the interference device. “You really lack common sense.”

Mr. Stark turns his attention to Agent Woo. “Look, Agent -”

“-I’m off duty,” says Agent Woo, standing up from the couch. “Just a guy bringing some sandwiches, and I’ve really got no reason to believe he didn’t slip and fall, uh, on a kitchen knife. Just… never again.”

Peter nods his head. “Okay, yeah, never again.”

Agent Woo leaves them, Mr. Stark softens and gives him his extra strength pain relievers, and Peter drifts off, but not before devouring the sandwiches he loves and dwelling on the tiny spark of hope Agent Woo offered to him.

Not everyone believes he's a murderer, and for that moment, it’s enough.

[dcforts]

[monday 9: undercover]

Something went wrong.

Dean’s got his back against a wall and a knife at his throat and the girl that’s holding it seems like she knows exactly how to use it.

“Who are you?” she asks.

He raises his hands in surrender and kind of regrets ordering a sixth round on a hunt night.

“Hey, hey, easy now. I told you, I’m just a tourist.”

“Bullshit.” The hand that pins him to the wall presses deeper into his shoulder. “A bit too many question for a tourist.” He feels the cold blade press on his throat. “So tell me.”

“Okay, okay, I’m FBI. I’m an agent, undercover.” She’s still unconvinced. “See for yourself. Left pocket.” She slips a hand in his jacket, takes out his fake badge and holds it up towards the dangling lightbulb that lights the backroom of the pub they are in. Her confidence falters. She takes a step back and frees Dean’s throat from her knife. He takes a deep breath.

“So you’re an FBI agent?” she says as she hands him back the badge.

“Yes, and you just attacked me.”

“Sorry.” she says, but doesn’t sound sorry. “You are here about the missing people, right? Look, I know it’s gonna sound weird, but trust me on this, this is not your regular case.”

“How do you know?”

She looks hesitant for a moment, then says: “I hunt monsters. And I think what we are dealing with is -”

“Wait, you’re a hunter?”

“The FBI knows about us?” she asks bewildered.

“No, it’s - uh, I’m a hunter too.”

She tenses up and holds up her knife again. “You gotta decide what you are, dude.”

“No, I’m – I’m a hunter, I swear. I pose as an FBI agent to ask questions without raising suspicions.”

“Good job there.” She deadpans. “So you are a hunter, pretending to be an FBI agent, pretending to be a tourist?”

“Y-yeah?”

*

He and Castiel had rolled into that little town in Michigan that morning. They read about the people reported missing during their annual town festival and they are pretty sure it’s due to a wendigo waking up from his hibernation period.

The victims were all last seen at a pub conveniently surrounded by thick woods. The wendigo just had to wait for someone to come out after a rough night and without much effort drag them into its lair.

So Dean and Castiel had stepped into the pub three hours before, dressed as civilians, pretending to be tourists in town to enjoy the festival. 

And then… well, they- okay, Dean may have gotten a little distracted. It had been the cheery atmosphere, the people drunkenly singing at karaoke, the beers and - Castiel.

Mostly Castiel.

In only his white shirt, with his cheeks flushed, and the lights dancing on his face.

Dean had been painfully aware of their knees pressed together under the table. At one point Castiel had rested his hand on Dean’s forearm to get his attention and leaned closer to talk above the loud music and Dean had turned his head and kinda forgotten how to breathe so close to his lips and his eyes.

Castiel had blinked slowly and Dean’s heart had done things in his chest. He hadn’t heard one word he’d said and he is quite sure his mouth was hanging open. And for a moment, a tiny, hopeful, bright moment, he’d believed the night was going to end in a way that neither of them had planned.

At least, until he’d remembered that they were actually on a job and they were supposed to look for clues and ask around and only act as they were having a night out and not actually having it.

And that maybe this was all in his head, and Cas was actually doing what they were supposed to be doing and it was only Dean who was building up imaginary castles. Castiel was not flirting with him.

He’d wished he hadn’t told Sam that he didn’t have to worry and could stay behind for this one

Finally, he’s made an effort to pay attention to their surroundings. They’d talked to a few patrons and then stopped Denise, their waitress, to ask a few questions and the vagueness of her answers and the clipped tone in her voice had immediately aroused their suspicions. She definitely knew more than she wanted to let on.

So Dean had walked up to her when the pub was half empty and done his usual seductive dance – “Oh, really? That’s so interesting. Maybe we should talk about it later, say, when you finish up here?” complete with wink and all – and Denise had been easily convinced.

Only, well, cause she was playing him. 

She’d thrown him against the wall as he’d entered the backroom where they’d agreed to meet. 

*

Dean and Denise are still standing facing each other when the door slams and Castiel appears.

“Dean? I heard - ”

He scans the room and his eyes zeroes on the knife in Denise’s hand. Dean sees the glint of the angel blade sliding in his palm.

“Cas, wait.” he says, stepping between them. “It’s okay. She’s a hunter.”

“Oh. My apologies” says Castiel leaning on one side to look at her behind Dean’s back.

“You’re a hunter too?”

“He’s an angel,” Dean says at the same time Castiel says “Yes.”

She raises her eyebrows. “An angel posing as a hunter posing as an FBI agent posing as a tourist. Wow, way to complicate your lives guys.”

*

Denise has got a fair idea of where the lair of the wendigo is. They gear up with flamethrowers and silver equipment. Dean feels pretty good about this. He’s splashed his face with fresh water and he’s now sober enough to be able to tackle a seven feet humanoid cannibal. Just another day on the job.

As they are about to head out Denise stops Dean on the door. “He gave you away, you know that, right?”

Dean’s eyes flicker towards Castiel who’s just stepped outside the pub. He’s aware that they are still within angelic earshot.

“You mean the fact that the first thing he asked you was ‘Do you know any of the missing people?’ Yeah.” he huffs a laugh. “He’s still working on the interrogation side of the job. You know, thousands of years of ‘smite first, talk later’ do that to a guy.”

“No, I’m not talking about that. I mean, I figured you out because of him.” She studies his confused face as if she’s deciding if she should say more or not. At last, she takes pity on him: “You’ve been all over him all night, barely spared at glance at anyone else. Then you come chat me up at the end? Come on.”

Well, that is embarassing. Dean feels his cheeks burning. “Oh. I was - We are not -  ”

“Look, I don’t care. I’m just saying - if you go undercover as an available guy, don’t bring him.”

“I just - was it that obvious, uh?”

She just looks pointedly at him and then takes off without another world, jogging up ahead towards the tree line to lead the way.

Dean follows after a moment, falling in step with Castiel.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You heard what she said, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Castiel says. Dean doesn’t know what to add. Thankfully, Castiel does. “We were not... professional.”

“Yeah. Sorry. ‘t was my fault.” he says and it sounds like a confession. 

“It was my fault too,” he says with a quick glance in his direction. Then, after a moment: “Maybe we should talk about it later, say, after we finish up here?”

Dean stops in his track. What’s even happening to him?

“Did you just use my line on me? Are you chatting me up?”

Castiel stops too, a few feet ahead. He shrugs. “Did it work?”

“Course it worked, it always works. I invented it.”

“Well, then I look forward to this conversation.”

“Yeah. You should. It’s gonna be a very long conversation.”

“Good.”

“Get ready.”

“I am.”

Denise’s pissed off voice comes from someplace in the dark ahead of them. “Alright, lovebirds, what it’s going to be? You gonna help me or you gonna chitchat a little more?”

Dean and Castiel smile at each other and resume walking.

I am participating in the spnstayathomechallenge by @bend-me-shape-me @pray4jensen @helianthus21 

[thenexusofsouls]

Muse: “Priest”/Ivan Pace

[Bio and other information below the cut!]

Type of Character & Fandom/Source Material: Canon character from the movie Priest (2011)

FC: Paul Bettany as “Priest” in Priest

Race: Human (Priest genetic variant)

Age: 40

Sexual/Romantic Orientation: Heteroromantic/heterosexual, but under a vow of celibacy

Occupation: A Priest, which is basically a religiously-oriented, specialized soldier with supernatural abilities trained to hunt and kill the creatures known as vampires

Family: A brother, Owen Pace (deceased); a wife, Shannon Pace (deceased); a daughter, Lucy Pace

Potentially Triggering Material in Threads: Violence; blood; death; grief; forced service; PTSD; trauma-induced nightmares; war-related trauma

Negative Personality Traits: He’s stubborn, unbending, stoic, and sometimes comes across as very cruel. He’s also arrogant and has a significant temper.

Positive Personality Traits: He’s brave, selfless, willing to do anything to protect his family and loved ones, has a bigger heart than he wants anyone to know.

Background, Unique to Ivan: Ivan’s abilities developed later in life, when he was in his early 20s. By that time, he was married to a woman named Shannon who was pregnant with his child. He was taken by the Church before the child was born and didn’t meet his daughter, Lucy, until she was almost nineteen years old. Because Shannon needed support and Lucy needed a father, Ivan’s brother Owen married Shannon, and as far as Lucy knew, he was her father. She didn’t learn the truth until she met Ivan later in her life, when she was kidnapped by a former Priest and friend of her father’s who had been turned into the first-ever human vampire by the vampire queen. Ivan rescued Lucy from Jacob, who wanted Ivan and Esther to come for him so that he could share with them the truth of things. The queen had removed his inhibitions, made him no longer care for his vows as a Priest, and showed him that there was no god. He wanted them to be turned along with him, but they refused, so he tried to kill them instead as revenge for allowing his fate to happen in the first place. Jacob blames them for his capture and turning, despite that he claims to be much happier and freer now. Ivan blames himself as well, and doesn’t like to talk about the incident that still gives him nightmares to this day.

Background, Shared With Esther: Priests were noticed by the Church and recruited to fight against the “vampires,” which, unlike traditional vampires who are “sparkly” or romanticized version of humans, were more feral, animal-like creatures with no eyes that hunt by smell and heat signatures. They’re not sexy emo men, they’re a different species entirely. They’re brutal, savage hunters with a queen overseeing them all. They kill and eat humans, but sometimes they make familiars (when a vampire makes you drink their blood instead of the other way around) that are tied to the vampires that made them. Unlike the vampires, who burn up in the sun, their familiars can be out in the daytime and thus can protect their master’s coffin or get valuable information for him/her on where food might be located at night.

There was at some point a great war between humans and vampires, and the humans won, only by virtue of the Priests, which are unbeknownst to most of them, genetic variants that are more highly evolved than humans. These natural variants that have occurred over time have better skills, faster healing, and supernatural abilities over and above regular humans. The Church  controls the Priests’ “Order” and issues them commands based on their agenda. Because the Priest genetic variation is hereditary, all Priests are forced to take a vow of celibacy upon induction into the Order. The Church tells them this is necessary for them to eliminate distractions and dedicate the whole of their lives to the service of the Church and the protection of mankind. In actuality, the Church does not want them breeding, growing in numbers, and perhaps rising to defy them, so they enforce the vow of celibacy to limit their reproductive capabilities.

After the war ended, the remaining vampires were placed on reservations where they were restricted to a certain area. Humans lived in protected cities where the Church’s influence is strong, but some humans lived in towns far away from the cities to live by their own rules and not be under thee Church’s thumb. Some people even live out on the Fringes, the barren deserts with contaminated soil from radioactive weapons of old that span the landscape between the cities and towns. The Priests were disbanded and expected to integrate back into regular society. Because of the horrors of the war and the forced nature of their service, and because many Priests were taken as children, war was the only thing many of them knew. Being a soldier was the only skillset they had. To suddenly be expected to get mundane jobs in waste management or public service was an unrealistic expectation at best. Many of them fell into a deep depression while others became angry. Still others tried their best to integrate but were turned away by many employers because they had “no applicable skills.” It was as if society was just throwing them away, even though mankind had literally be saved by them. It was crushing and infuriating for both Ivan and Esther to navigate civilian life with little to no support. On top of that, Priests were seen as frightening figures in society. Most people shun them, mothers pull their children away from them, and in some ways, they’re seen as monsters just the same as the vampires are. 

When Ivan went against the Church who wanted to keep the Priests out of commission and decided to go after his kidnapped daughter, Esther was reinstated by the Church along with a few other former Priests to hunt Ivan down. Instead of hunting him to capture or kill him, however, she warned him and then joined his cause. After Lucy was rescued, Jacob/Black Hat had gone missing, and the Church’s denial about the existence of free vampires attempting to invade the cities was exposed, Ivan and Esther went rogue permanently to try and figure out what the vampires’ plan was... and hopefully to bring other former Priests over to their cause.

Contemporary Verse: I could see the Priests being a division of the CIA, FBI, or in a Marvel Verse maybe S.H.I.E.L.D. or S.W.O.R.D., to fight vampires, creatures like them, or other supernatural or alien threats. They would be much like the Avengers, in that they would be specialized soldiers deployed to stop supernatural, high-tech, or not well understood threats to earth or mankind. I probably wouldn’t hold them to the vow of celibacy, but if possible I would want to keep them rather corruptly run, as it fits with how they’re deployed and managed.

Potential Starter Ideas:

In his canon world, Ivan could rescue your muse from vampires, or you could team up with him to fight/track them.

In a contemporary verse, he would be good as a hired or assigned supportive agent/hunter/etc. on missions of all sorts. Maybe even law enforcement or FBI-associated, something like that.

There are a lot of other slice of life things I’m sure we could figure out, depending on your muse.

Fun facts: 

While it is true that Ivan loved his wife, Shannon, years ago before he was taken, he is very far removed from the person he was almost two decades ago. The reason he didn’t return to Shannon after the war ended was because he knew she wouldn’t love the person he had become. Also, by that time his brother had already taken his place as far as taking care of Shannon and their daughter, and he felt it was best not to disrupt that.

He is currently in love with Esther, but he has never told her that or given her any impression that he feels that way. In fact, he turned her down when she tried to confess how she felt. All he said was, “I can’t,” which she took to mean that he was still in love with and loyal to Shannon. The real reason is that he believed at the time that the vow of celibacy was a real thing that God wanted, and he also felt that moving on would dishonor Shannon’s sacrifice.

I can detach Ivan from Esther with regard to shipping, if anyone is interested in attempting to ship with him, but he is a very hard nut to crack, so good luck with that, haha.

His former friend-turned-human-vampire, Jacob, a.k.a. Black Hat, told him that when he was brought to the brink of death, he saw nothing (deleted scene). There was no light, no God, just nothingness. He was convinced that this meant that the Priests had been fighting for a god who never existed. While Ivan isn’t sure he would go that far, Jacob’s words threw into question so much of Ivan’s faith and understanding in God, in the Church, and in the strict life of sacrifice the Priests have had to lead. He is now a lot more questioning than he was previously.

Lucy inherited her father’s genetic mutations with regard to having the ability to become a Priest. She has the potential to become one herself if she trains properly at it, however Ivan believes the best thing he can do for his daughter is to stay out of her life.

[austennerdita2533]

A/N: Just a Literati trifle in celebration of GG’s 20th Anniversary Week. I still have another chapter or two to write but I wanted to get this out before the event officially ended. (Canon compliant + OS + divergences)

Also here: (AO3)

Enjoy! 

xx Ashlee Bree

An Archive of Words Between Us

One day, many weeks into it but still no closer to clarity about what it is between them, Rory does what she does best: she makes a list.

Marked at the beginning, from when she and Jess first met, she soon starts to add to it with frightening regularity. A new entry comes any time there’s news, insight, questions, or growing confusion to report. She writes it all down. Out. She compiles everything in a beat-up old notebook she’s taken to carrying around.

Over the years that follow it becomes a confessional of sorts for her, a still developing story. She reaches for a pen whenever the mood strikes, and writes…then writes some more…

Committing to paper all the things they’ve said to each other over the course of their history, as well as many of the things they didn’t.

- i. things we said when we were strangers -

“Hey, Dodger, wait a minute,” she calls out before he disappears behind the gazebo. “Is this a gimmick of yours? Do you always write margin notes in the books you steal from strangers?”

Jess stops. Casts a cursory glance over his shoulder before turning back around with hands in his hoodie pocket.

“Depends, I guess.”

“On?”

“Does it matter?”

Rory shrugs.“You could be a literature-defacing miscreant on the lam for all I know. Your face might be tacked to Wanted posters all over New York City. I’ve got to edge my bets, protect my assets.”

“What,” he says, “you aiming to sentence me without a trial or something?”

“Thinking about it.”

“Wow. I can’t believe you’re going to bust out the cuffs already, Judge Judy,” he chuckles, raising his hands in supplication before rocking backwards on his heels like he’s been shot. “That’s not very neighborly.”

“Sounds like there’s evidence to be had if I dig a bit.” A pause. A teasing quirk of an eyebrow. “Is there?” she asks.

Though he stays silent at this, a spark of something catches deep in his dark eyes as their gazes meet, and Rory's stomach flips.

“Well?”

“You tell me,” he says, all smooth and inscrutable and James Dean cool as hell.

“I’m no Agent Scully at the FBI, but the truth is out there. Don’t think I won’t uncover it,” Rory replies, her wit flowing strong and sure. “If I think it’s warranted I could hire Kirk to lay chase for a while…he likes detecting. Takes payment in Skittles, too. Boxes of which I will have no trouble acquiring, I assure you.”

“Who the hell’s Kirk?”

“Let me worry about that,” she beams back at him coyly, bouncing the book he’d pilfered earlier against her hip.

“Save your Skittles, concerned citizen. I’m clean.”

“Oh, yeah? And why should I believe you when I hold proof to the contrary?”

“Because—” Ambling backwards in the middle of the street, a crooked smirk forms along the corner of Jess’s mouth as he gives her one last idle loll of his shoulder. “I only leave notes for people who might appreciate them. Start with the one on page three, by the way,” he adds with a farewell salute. “It’s a doozy.”

Curiosity piqued, Rory ignores the warmth in her chest as she watches him turn to leave a second time. Instead, she buries her nose in the margins of Howl and peruses. Losing herself in his tiny blocked script the whole walk home.

- ii. things we said because we were lying to ourselves -

Pacifying the town's fears about their friendship isn’t easy.

Especially not after Jess outbids her boyfriend at the basket-bidding festival to win an afternoon of her company. Or the night he shows up on her doorstep unannounced, bearing food and intellectual discussion after she swears to everybody else she wanted to spend the evening alone. Or when he wrecks her car on their way back from a spontaneous hunt for ice cream cones.

Then there’s the time she misses Lorelai’s graduation because she’s stuck on a bus next to some scruffy-looking creep who spits chew into a soda can while he mumbles the names of state capitals under his breath in an Appalachian-sounding litany, Rory having skipped town impulsively to visit Jess in the Big Apple after Luke had sent him packing because of an accident that had no real bearing or blame. At least not unless it was half hers to share in, too, in any case.

She expends a lot of energy defending what they are to people. Clarifying what they’re not.

Pretty soon a truncated version of the truth skips from her mouth like a message she’s spent months concocting, memorizing, and then recording, with her smart enough not to speak it aloud until it sounds convincing. And it does. She makes sure of it.

Tensions abate after that, for a time. Mostly because of the distance.

Mom and Dean, in particular, seem to breathe easier with so much of it stretched between them. They’re much happier once Jess is no longer there to lurk around Luke’s, or clog the aisles of Doose’s, or stake out chalkperson outlines on the sidewalks of town where he can draw her closer to him. Too close for comfort, as far as anyone else is concerned. Even if his only aim in doing so had been to imbibe her in intellectual conversation.

Rory finds it funny how his absence from Stars Hollow makes it both easier and harder for her to placate everyone’s misgivings. The words may be simple to say, but the meaning behind them feels deflated. Half-bodied at best.

Like calculus, it causes her headaches. Forces her to work twice as hard to make everyone believe she doesn’t care that he’s gone and likely never coming back again. That the vacant space he’s left behind doesn’t sting whenever her gaze passes over it, remembering.

Exhausting though it is, however, she does her best. She makes the effort.

She starts by dolling out extra attention and assurances to Dean about her commitment to him. To their relationship. Then she pivots around mention of Jess’s existence to her mom because she knows she doesn’t approve of him let alone agree about any of his good qualities. With Lane, she focuses on school and Mrs. Kim and music they can add to her floorboard collection. And in front of Luke, so as not to burden him with more disappointment, she acts as if nothing is different. Pretends that nothing much has changed.

Omission quickly becomes a habit for Rory. A way of life.

Only once does exposure threaten to spoil everything when her mom confronts her openly one afternoon about a placeholder that’s slipped out of her copy of For Whom The Bell Tolls.

“It’s nothing,” Rory says as she makes a quick grab for it in the kitchen and blushes.

“Really? Because nothing to me looks a hell of lot like a paper plate fragment. One that’s smudged in pizza grease and blue scribbles.” Laughing, completely unaware of her daughter’s wide-eyed discomfort and humiliation, Lorelai hands it back to her without inspecting it closely. “I’m surprised by your choice is all. Messy and makeshift isn’t your typical bookmark M.O., hun.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when Paris accosts you at the break bell. You drop things. People jump, drinks spill. Beloved bookmarks go soaring…”

“Ah. I take it she was yelling in dog decibels again?”

“More like she put out an APB on all aliens living a few hundred million lightyears away and then gave them exact shouting coordinates for where to find her. So same difference, really.”

Her mom snorts. Passes over the ranch dressing.

“She’s a pill, that one. I’m telling you Pink wrote that song with her in mind.” Shaking her head, Lorelai closes the fridge behind her as she bites into another French fry. “So how’d you come by the plate?” she asks, her mouth full.

“It was spontaneous. I was running late so I nicked it from the cafeteria on my way out,” Rory lies, knowing full well Chilton never dispenses paper or plastic dishes for dining.

“Oh.” Her mom considers this. “Well, I suppose there were times even Madeleine Albright couldn’t find anything better to use in a pinch. That was very…replateful of you.”

“What can I say,” she exhales with relief, feigning amusement as her fib is accepted with alacrity, “the Forks was with me.”

“Only the Forks? Don’t tell me you’re leaving out the spoons and the knives. How could you?” says Lorelai, aghast, as she scoops stray kitchen utensils to press them against her chest in a bodily cuddle. “It’s cutlery discrimination!”

“No, it’s punning.”

“Says who?”

“Me.” A pause. A nibble of pizza. “Also, Shakespeare would agree.”

“Psssh, Shakespeare! That old killjoy,” her mom says dismissively, rolling her eyes in good humor as she tucks a box of strawberry Pop Tarts under her armpit and motions toward the living room. “What’s that you have written on the inside there, anyway? French? Calculus? Rolling Stone lyrics? A blueprint for the evil plan you’ve hatched to shoot Grandma to the moon? I’m dying to know.”

Waving her off, Rory tucks the shard back into the spine of her book where it belongs. Hiding it from view. “It’s for school,” she assures her as they settle onto the sofa.

“So tell me about it. I don’t care if it’s boring.”

“Pass.”

“Come on! I could use a good Chilton-instigated snooze.”

“Too bad. No beauty naps for you.”

Lorelai pouts, fake affronted. “Rude!”

(Turns out that ‘shard,’ that ‘thing for school’ which is stuck between the pages of Rory’s Hemingway, isn’t boring at all. In fact, it has a history. A story. The truth is it’s a souvenir she’s saved ever since she and Jess talked books over pizza at Antonioli’s on basket-bidding day.

Toward the end of the meal he’d ripped off a piece of plate so he could jot down his phone number and a quote. Only sliding it into her hand, folded in half, crinkled up like a note passed between desks at school, in the moments before they parted ways and headed home.

It’s stupid she’s kept it. She realizes that now. Stupider still to slip it between the pages of each new book she reads or unfurl it in the privacy of her bedroom to puzzle out if the line he’d included from A Moveable Feast is meant to have double meaning:

“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and [liked] each other,” it reads.

Stupidest of all, she can’t seem to bring herself to stop looking at it. To throw the darn thing away. A note…a number…a greasy sliver of paper plate!)

“Like I said, Mom,” Rory swallows before smiling over at her convincingly, “it’s nothing. Really.”

- iii. things we said on the verge (of something) -

In early June, Sookie’s wedding day arrives.

Things are static again. Serene. Normal.

Granted, slight changes do sprinkle into the mix here and there because of her dad’s presence, because Dean holds her a little tighter around the waist now than he once did, but mostly it’s the same here as it’s always been. Pleasant people fade into gossip and nonsense while fun blurs into peculiarity.

Life feels simple once more. A tad plain and colorless, maybe, but simple.

Then Jess returns to town on a whim or a fluke or a who the devil knows what he’s thinking and everything goes sideways, pear-shaped, belly-up-and-down in seconds because this is the last thing she’d been been expecting and suddenly the only thing that registers is the length of the grass plus the number of steps it will take to close the distance between them. All that matters is he’s here, he’s back, he’s near enough to touch, and she’s smiling so hard she can hardly breathe as she drinks him in from head to foot like a glutton: her pulse leaping, her heart lurching free from the cage of her chest.

The whole world tilts. Collapses. The pale yellow of the sun shines down like a spotlight so it’s only a rippling alcove she sees. Just him, just her. Just them canopied beneath these flittering fronds of green.

Any rational thought Rory possesses scatters across the wind with the pollen. And then before she knows it, the ground tilts out like a ramp underfoot.

It pushes her forward. Outward. Sliding her toward him until she’s thrust and tangled in his arms with no memory at all of how she got there, or why their mouths feel so hot and wanton like this, so damn unsatisfied. It all seems impossible considering they’re still pressed together in a kiss that can only be described in one way: illicit.

“Not a word,” Rory pants when they stop and Jess pulls back, his jaw taut, his expression shuttered, to nod once understanding.

“Okay,” he says.

“Promise me.” The huskiness of her voice feels at odds with this demand, with the trembling fist she still has curled in the lapel of his jacket, but she cannot think about her stinging mouth or his tongue right now so she clings to desperation instead. “Can you do that?”

“Okay,” he repeats, all eyes, eyes, eyes. And with that single look, she forgets to breathe let alone digest anything he’s promised.

In the end, it’s an impulse that overtakes them not a decision. It’s a moment of clandestine passion they share, not a confession that will alter the circumstances any.

And yet it’s guilt, not regret, that begins to pull like an anchor in her belly until she’s running in shoes that chafe the back of her heels. It’s terror and confusion, not apology, that ripples along her nerve endings until she’s dashing through the trees like a coward or a swindler because she needs to believe behind her there’s still a haven of black and white she can cross with both feet.

Only when Rory stops does she feel the change. Does she discern the difference. It takes one sting, one breathless stitch in her side, for her to know she’s tumbled forward into color without noticing.

Looking down, and there it is. His name already singed across her chest in scarlet letters.

- iv. things we whispered on the hood of your car -

“Tell me something no else knows.”

“About what?” he asks around midnight the following April, the two of them sprawled on the hood of his car at a deserted rest stop off the I-95 on their way back from a concert in the city.

“You, silly.”

“Funny you’re thinking about penning my biography already, Churchill. I’m honored, truly, but aren’t I too young for that sort of enumeration?”

With a roll of her eyes plus a protracted har-har, Rory lifts their intertwined hands, watching, mesmerized, as their fingers thread then unthread as they lay side-by-side parked beneath the Big Dipper in this forsaken parking lot. Though they’ve been together about six months now, prying Jess open has been slow work. It’s like taking a crowbar to cement: one chip, one crack, one crumble at a time.

“Stop deflecting, Mariano,” she warns. “Evasion’s for chumps.”

“Fine,” he sighs. She presses a kiss of reward against his knuckles before curling tighter into his side. “How about this: every year roughly sixteen hundred people in New York City are bitten by other humans.”

“Bitten?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“That’s just it,” he says in his best horror story voice, “could be vampires, could be cranky commuters, could be urban mania or road rage…nobody knows.”

“Oh, please. As if I’d let you off the hook with that obvious dodge. You’re killin’ me here, Smalls!” Rory says with an elbow rib and tsk. “Second of all, you so made that biting thing up.”

When she edges her head back onto his shoulder to look at him, Jess drags his pointer finger down her forehead before bopping her affectionately on the nose, his expression neutral.

“Didn’t you?” He shrugs in that cute off-the-cuff way of his then smirks into her hairline. “That’s unbelievable!”

“It is what it is.”

“So, what,” she says as she throws her leg over his hip to lug him closer, her arm already stretched out across his middle, “is there a case of zombiepox going around that the CDC has neglected to inform us about? Because I’ve got to tell you if that’s so then I’ll need an inoculation ASAP, mister! Frazzled, bloodshot, and half-rotted is not a good look for me. It just isn’t.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Hey!” she exclaims.

“No offense, critter of Frankenstein,” he chuckles, absorbing her retaliatory swat with a grunt and rolling her further on top of him, “but I’ve seen you pre-coffee. It isn’t pretty. We’re talkin’ bolts out your neck, monster glares, frothing purple mouth and everything.”

“Yeah, yeah. Keep up your running tally and you might find I bite you next. Rory the Ripper does have a nice alliterative ring to it—you best remember that,” she warns all narrowed eyes and silky breath and arms folded under her chin.

Jess cocks his left eyebrow, brushes his thumb over her bottom lip. “Idle threats don’t scare me, Gilmore.”

“They should.”

“Maybe.” A lazy grin forms at the edges of his mouth. “But yours don’t.”

“Fine,” she blows out a breath. With her head resting in the center of his chest, Rory fixes him with one long steady look, her voice dropping an octave lower as it drains free of sarcasm to assume a more serious edge. “Name one thing that does then. That scares you, I mean,” she says.

He doesn’t answer right away. In fact, he fidgets so long beneath her that by the time he settles with his hands clasped behind his head, lost in thought and translation, peering up at the sky, she’s half convinced that silence or deflection is the best she can hope to expect from him in reply.

Reticence is a quality she’s come to recognize in Jess. It’s one she can reflect back at him in part because they’re both cut from the same quiet, introspective cloth. However, it’s also one that restricts her access to his thoughts and feelings when she most wants it, and that can take a toll. Makes her wonder if they’re parked at different weigh stations in this relationship or not.

It’s bizarre to reconcile how she can understand him so well in some contexts, to the point where she can predict his next reaction or sense a good joke hanging in the periphery that's about to descend; while in others, he’s a total head-scratcher. Like a Sudoku puzzle with numbers that don’t add up to anything.

The silence between them continues to stretch. It becomes an awkward, formless wall.

The stillness, too, which is illuminated only by the light of the moon and the faint din of the car radio, hangs between them until he draws her up his body and folds her over him with a green plaid blanket. His fingers tracing languid strokes up and down her spine.

“Swans,” he says at last, his tone subdued. Scratchy. “Swans scare me.”

“What else?”

“Tennis balls. They’re too small and fast as they zip past. I hate how they can leave imprints on your face like ugly yellow snitches.”

“Okay then. Weird but fair. What else?” Rory asks all warmth and eagerness, her eyes searching his for something he wouldn’t want to slip free.

“Pennywise.” Though she snickers at that, it’s a valid fear. Clowns unsettle her, too. Evil ones especially. She’d had nightmares for eight months after she’d read Stephen King’s It for the first time, and had taken to sleeping with the bedside lamp on for years.

“Anything more?” she asks.

“Cricket bats.”

“Ooh-ho!” Poking him, “So Mrs. Kim got to you, did she?”

“Listen, I tried to be cool and unaffected but who knows what would’ve become of my head if she’d taken a swing with that thing?” Jess shudders at the same time she imagines Humpty Dumpty and laughs. “Jeez.”

“Things would’ve gotten messy,” she adds honestly.

He stalls a moment, then blinks back at her all wariness to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “How messy are we talking here?”

Rory cocks her head and bites the corner of her mouth, musing. “Think pumpkins.”

“Smashed ones?”

“Yep.”

“Figures,” he mutters miserably.

With an encouraging pat, “Don’t worry, I would’ve stepped in before Mrs. Kim buried your handsome yet indignant face beneath the floorboards or behind a brick wall in the catacombs with Fortunato. It’s the least I could do since I sort of like you and all.”

“Sort of?” Jess asks.

“Yeah. I’m no unreliable narrator girlfriend who'd escort you to your doom, you see. I’d much prefer to keep you,” she says with an adoring grasp and swivel of his chin, which he deflects by tickling her breathless as she bends down over him.

“Gee thanks, Casper. Nice to know you care about me.”

“Not about you exactly,” she teases, her flip-floppy giggles still piercing the air. “Just your head.”

That stops him. “My head, huh?”

“Sure.” Still a little breathless, she reaches toward him to fist her fingers through thick black tendrils along his nape. “It’s pretty.” She gives the strands a little tug. “Full of thoughts I’m hoping to pilfer for further study.”

“You know, I always thought there was some hoodlum in your DNA. Now I’m convinced,” he says as he leans over to commence the tickling again. “And you will pay."

The two of them continue to roll then thump against his windshield all elbows and knees until the levity starts to leaden and transform. As Jess reaches over to cup her cheek, their gazes meet in the silvery darkness and hold, kindling like flint.

Quiet washes over them again for a moment. Only this time, it’s bloated; it’s heavy. It’s a mess of a hundred thousand decipherable something’s teetering on the precipice of expression.

A flicker of alarm passes over his features as he frames her face with his hands, palms flat against the car. He hovers aloft, unsure. Indecision mixes with fear to tangle with retreat even as gravity beckons him nearer, his head dropping low enough for their foreheads to touch.

“I sort of like you, too, you know,” Jess breathes softly, his lips lowering to press against her mouth in a quick but lingering kiss. “A lot.” His jaw clenches. “Maybe too much.”

Suddenly there’s a tightrope pulled taut and vibrating in every direction because there’s no shrinking back from the dense electricity pulsating between them. There’s no more room to dance around unnamed emotion whenever it identifies itself in blown pupils, in a bobbing Adam’s apple, in hands that slip and slide until they fit together like aligning planets.

In that instant Rory knows. She knows right then and there she’s falling in love with him, that she’s half fallen already. And it’s both a revelation and a fact so natural she can feel the truth of it whistling from deep in her bones.

Looking nervous, vulnerable, more fragile than she’s ever seen him, he swallows hard then shifts to squint out at the shadowy tree line while scratching at his nape. “It’s just…so many people have treated me like garbage that all I know how to do is spoil things. I destroy, Rory—ruin what’s good. It’s what I do best. It’s all I know. I’m trying here and all, but I…don’t know how to do this,” he says, gesturing lamely between them. “How to do us right.”

“Hey now,” she thumbs his cheek, tries to turn his head back toward her but it won’t budge, and neither will he. “That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about. Go easy on him, will you?” He nods into her palm, softening a little. The tension leaves his body as he gathers her in his arms again, her head conforming to the crook of his neck, but she’s not convinced all is well yet.

“There’s no rulebook or anything,” Rory says placatingly. “We’ll figure it out together, okay? You and me.”

“Yeah.”

“We will,” she says with an emphatic, assuring squeeze. “I know we will.”

With a caustic laugh, a heavy sigh, he runs his teeth over his lip, “I’m a screw up, Rory.”

“Hey. Not true.”

“I am.” Jess sounds so resigned, so convinced, it ties her into knots thinking he sees himself that way.

“Not to me, you’re not.”

“No,” he says with a deadened inflection, with a sad downturn of his mouth. “Not to you.”

Frowning, she feels his cynicism, his self-deprecation, descend like a slash across the gut. Helpless to do anything but try to be a soft place for him and his insecurities to land, she pulls him toward her, embracing him, quieting him, caring for him more with each passing second even though a warning gong goes off in her heart when she leans in to steal another kiss.

“Maybe I’m not a screw up to you yet,” he whispers, “but I could be at another time. On another day.”

“Stop,” Rory declares forcefully, holding her finger against his lips so he knows she means it.

Jess relents. “Okay,” he sighs. “Just know I’ll get it if you change your mind.”

- v. things we cried out at a crossroads -

Strained.

Silent.

Distant.

Those are the best adjectives to describe the status of her and Jess’s relationship as the bus pulls away from the curb a couple weeks later. After the party from hell. From her place on the sidewalk, her chest full of a heaviness she can’t name, Rory stares after it - after him - with little to no regard for the hour’s lateness or for the morning bell which signals the start of homeroom.

It’s the middle of May. That means finals, graduation, and summer loom on the periphery but she doesn’t care. None of it resonates. In the background she can hear Paris barking orders at a few trembling freshman and minted sophomores, but she does nothing to intervene. She makes no move to prevent her frenemy’s yellow journalistic splatter from crushing the innocents to smithereens.

Instead, she watches the hum and bump of the vehicle’s dusty rubber wheels as they roll down the street. She tracks the plume of smoke swirling from the exhaust pipe into the sky, which clouds over with blacks and grays instead of with clearing blues and radiant yellows. She waits until the bus turns left, its engine loud, roaring, to putt around the corner. Disappearing from view.

I hope he calls later, she thinks with a pang, with an iota of hope. We need to talk soon.

Rory’s eyes want to keep traveling with him long after he’s gone. So do her feet. They seek to follow along wherever Jess has gone, to ride beside him until they’re able to make sense of this mess between them and fix it. Fix them again.

Unfortunately for them both, they don’t. And it’ll be some time before they can, let alone before they do.

[440mxs-wife]

Family Issues, Part 1

Pairing: Ketch x Reader

"Director of Operations, Director Wallace speaking," you answered. "Yes, I'll speak to him. Sheriff Dullard, is there some sort of problem? Because you should know that Agents Taggart, Rosewood and Foley are my top agents....I assigned them to this case because they are my best investigators," you explained. Once again, you were being asked to validate credentials for Sam, Dean and now Ketch, for some nosy, small-town sheriff.

"But...." the sheriff persisted.

"We don't want this kind of situation to get out of hand, now do we? Wouldn't want your little town to be known as 'the place where that thing happened' now would you? No, I didn't think you would, so let my agents do their work so they can wrap this up and leave town. Afterwards, your biggest worry will be some dumb kid climbing up the water tower, just so he can spray paint 'I heart Becky Sue' on it. I expect your full and complete cooperation with my agents, Sheriff Dullard. Is that clear?" you snapped.

"Yes, ma'am. I understand. Here you go, Agent Taggart," Sheriff Dullard said, handing Sam his phone back.

"We good?" Sam asked you.

"Yeah, Sam, you guys are good, he's handing over the files. You shouldn't have any more problems with Sheriff Dumbass," you muttered. "Stay safe, and watch out for each other, yeah? See you soon," you replied.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

You hung up the phone, rolled your eyes and let out an exasperated groan. These small town authorities are so suspicious and territorial, you thought. Sam and Dean were following up on what looked like vampire activity in town and on the road to town. They were having trouble locating the nest, so a specialist was called in from another sector.

Arthur Ketch was currently working with Sam and Dean to help find and clear the nest. He still had access to some technology belonging to the former British Men of Letters, like tracking software and weapons. There was one particular weapon that dispensed rounds created specifically for fighting vampires. It used ceramic rounds that when they hit their victim and exploded, they released a dose of dead man's blood and paralyzed the vamp.

When Arthur Ketch was brought in for this mission, you tried to keep your focus on the task at hand. This was proving more and more difficult the more often he was brought in on cases and considering how you felt about him.

Ketch's handsome face with his blue-grey eyes and mischievous smile constantly invaded your dreams. You blushed at the mere thought of what it would be like to have his strong arms around you. You longed to run your fingers through his dark chestnut hair and hear your name fall from his lips in that sexy accent of his.

However, you also lived in the real world, where you were sure that the attraction was purely one-sided. You were fairly certain that he didn't give you a second thought. You told yourself that he probably thought of you as nothing more than a friend. Or worse, Sam and Dean's annoying little sister.

Ketch could have his pick of any woman in the world, all of them more beautiful and sophisticated than you would ever be. You convinced yourself that for these and many other reasons, he would never choose to be with you. So, you settled for his friendship and continued to push your feelings down and out of the way.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Your phone rang again, but the Caller ID said "Restricted". You hesitated before picking up, but decided to answer using your Fed ID, in case it was the sheriff calling back. "Director of Operations, Director Wallace speaking," you answered.

Silence reigned on the other end, but you could hear someone breathing. "I know someone is there on the line. Who is this?" you demanded.

"I'll tell you who I am if you'll tell me who you really are. It's not nice to lie. I also know what you are, and you're not FBI," the voice taunted. With a click, the call ended.

You carefully placed your phone on the table with shaking hands and closed your eyes. Your mind was racing a mile a minute, so you tried to calm yourself down with deep breaths. You stood up from the table and slowly started walking around the room, your hand across your heart, trying to slow it down.

A whooshing of wings was heard, signaling Castiel's arrival. He met you in the library and concern flooded his blue eyes at seeing your distress. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Not exactly, Cas," you replied. You proceeded to tell him about the mysterious phone call you received after hanging up with Sam.

Cas pulled out his phone and started to dial. "We should tell Sam, Dean and Ketch. They'll want to come back right away if they think you're in danger," he stated. Your hand shot out to cover his phone and stop him from calling anyone. "No! Cas, please, it's really not that important, it was just a silly phone call. I don't want to bother the guys during a hunt for something like this," you implored. "It was probably a wrong number anyway," you suggested.

He looked a little skeptical with your assessment, but Cas finally relented and put his phone away. "All right, I won't call them. But please promise me that you will explain the situation to them when they get home?" he said sternly.

You nodded. "I promise, Cas. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, but I will discuss it with the boys when they get back," you replied. Cas nodded, then smiled and disappeared.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

A couple of days later, you had been watching a movie, but fell asleep about halfway through. Your phone started buzzing from the side table where you'd left it. The Caller ID display again showed "Restricted", which kicked up your heart rate. "Hello?"

Near-total silence on the line again, except the sound of someone breathing. "Who is this and why do you keep calling me?" you demanded.

"You and I have unfinished business, an eye for an eye, you might say. Your luck is running out, then it'll be time to pay the piper," the voice taunted, then the line disconnected.

You closed your eyes and concentrated on taking deep breaths to relax yourself. The phone rang again and startled you, causing you to nearly drop it on the floor. Caller ID said it was Dean, which helped to calm you down a bit. "He-hey Dean," you answered shakily.

"Just checking in, to let you know--wait are you okay? You sound a bit upset," Dean observed.

A couple of tears streaked down your face and you sniffled in response. "Yeah, I'm okay, Dean," you rasped.

"Uh-uh, try again. What's going on?" he asked.

"Nothing, Dean. I'm just not awake yet. I fell asleep watching a movie," you explained, hoping he would drop it.

"Look, we're almost home, then we're going to talk about whatever it is that's going on," he affirmed.

"Understand, Dean. See you when you get here. Over and out," you sighed.

In the car:

"What's up, Dean?" Sam asked.

"Dunno, Sammy. I think there's something bothering her, but for some reason, she doesn't want to talk about it," Dean answered.

"Perhaps there really is nothing going on, Dean," Ketch interjected from the back seat.

Dean caught Ketch's attention in the rearview mirror. "If you had heard her on the phone, you'd know something is up," he replied grimly.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

When Ketch first met you, he thought you seemed a bit cautious and shy around him and you really didn't say much. As he got to know you, he found that you were an intelligent woman with strong hunting instincts. He thought you were kind, compassionate and had a great sense of humor. Definitely one of the best cooks he'd ever encountered.

Ketch smiled as he thought back to a previous mission where the two of you were partners. It was another vampire hunt, and you'd had to pose as a couple at an invitation-only party. He remembered how ravishing you looked in your sparkly midnight blue evening gown. He couldn't take his eyes off of you and how well your dress accentuated your curves. As he led you across the dance floor in a waltz, he marveled at how perfectly you fit into his arms.

The hunt had gone sideways, though, ending with you getting injured from a vampire bite and a concussion. Ketch completed the mission when he sliced the head off the vamp and his vamp sister, then rescued you from any further injury. The drive back to the bunker was terrifying for him, because he thought at one point he might have lost you. Fortunately, he made it back in time, and you got stitched up, with a full recovery from your injuries. It was after this hunt that he started to examine his feelings for you, and discovered they were a little more than friendly.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Around 11:00p.m., you heard the roar of Baby's engine as she eased into her regular parking space in the bunker garage. You rose up from the couch to greet Sam, Dean and Ketch at the bottom of the spiral staircase.

Dean was first down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he pulled you into a hug. "Hiya, sweetheart," he murmured into your ear and gave you an extra squeeze before releasing you.

"Hey, Dean. You guys all okay? Anything I need to patch up?" you asked.

"Nope, we're all good," Sam replied as he dropped his bag. You stepped into his arms for a brief but comforting hug. After releasing you, he picked up his duffel bag and headed for his room.

Ketch was the last man down the stairs, and with each step his concern for you grew. He could see how exhausted you were, and how the light in your eyes seemed to have dimmed a little. "Lovely to see you again, my dear. How have you been?" he asked.

You gave him a quick smile, but it didn't seem to reach your eyes, causing Ketch to frown a bit. Whatever the source of your distress, Ketch hoped it wasn't too serious. He disliked seeing any pain or sadness in your beautiful hazel eyes.

You cleared your throat to keep from bursting into tears. "Shall we sit over here and wait for Sam and Dean?" you inquired.

Ketch joined you on the couch, but didn't sit too close to you. He didn't want to risk that you would close yourself off from him before revealing what was bothering you. "Would you like to talk about it?" he asked.

"Can we please wait for Sam and Dean? I'd rather just say it once, if that's all right," you replied shakily.

"Of course, Love. Whatever helps you feel better," Ketch answered.

At that moment, Sam and Dean both entered the living room and each settled into a chair. "All right, so, what's been going on? 'Cause I know you're upset about something," Dean remarked.

You told them about the first mysterious phone call you received after you verified their credentials for Sheriff Dumbass. You explained that there was something slightly familiar to you about the voice, but the call wasn't long enough to be sure. "Cas happened to pop in just after the phone call--"

"Wait a minute. Cas was here? Why in the hell didn't he say something to us after it happened?!?" Dean thundered.

"Because I begged him not to, Dean," you shot back. "I thought it was just a crank call, a one-time thing. I didn't think it was important enough to disrupt the mission for it," you finished.

"Then why were you so upset when I called?" Dean asked.

"When you called, it had just happened again. At that point, I was sufficiently spooked, but you said you were almost home. After the first call, I promised Cas that I would talk to you about it when you got here. It was the only way I talked him out of calling you," you explained.

"You said there was something slightly familiar about the voice," Sam cut in. "Who do you think it was?"

You thought for a moment then shook your head. "Nah, it couldn't be....," you replied. The three men looked at you, expecting you to share your thoughts. "I was thinking that it sounded a lot like Martin, my sister's fiancé. My sister, Angela, has been dead for years, but he couldn't possibly...." you trailed off.

"There was a crossroads deal, one I begged her not to make. Martin was in a horrible car accident, ended up in a coma and wasn't expected to survive. Angela was out of her mind at the thought of losing him, and I knew she wasn't above doing something drastic.

"For the first few days, I never let her out of my sight. Then one night, I was sitting up with her in Martin's room, hoping against hope that he would wake up. I must have fallen asleep at some point, because she was able to sneak past me and find a crossroads demon. Martin woke up from his coma about the time she was walking back into his room and I knew. I just knew what she had done.

"With us being hunters, she only got five years before the hellhounds came for her. After it was over, Martin and I lost track of each other, even though I tried to keep in touch with him. But whenever I called, our conversations would always end with him blaming me for her being gone. He said I should've found a way to get Angela out of the deal that took her away from him. At one point, he even said that I should have traded places with her," you finished quietly.

Tears began streaming down your cheeks again as you abruptly got up from the couch. You walked into the library with your arms hugging your sides. All three men looked at each other, with Ketch finally coming to stand behind you. He placed his hands on your shoulders and gently turned you around to face him.

"He's right," you whispered, turning your gaze on Ketch's face. "About everything, Martin was right. I should've found a way. Angela was my SISTER for Chuck's sake! I didn't do everything I could have done to stop her. She was my responsibility. And she's gone," you sobbed. Ketch brushed your tears away and wrapped his arms around you. He whispered soothing words in your ear as his hand rubbed up and down your back.

Sam walked over to where you and Ketch were standing. "It's not your fault, you know. There wouldn't have been any way to break the deal, not without you making one yourself," Sam responded.

"Sammy's right. Not only that, but she chose to sneak out of the room to make that deal. I doubt you would've changed her mind anyway, sweetheart," Dean remarked, joining the group. "Usually when someone's blinded by grief, they aren't always thinkin' clearly."

"Martin was also being incredibly unfair, darling," Ketch stated. "Don't forget, that while he may have lost his fiancée, you lost your sister. I can't even begin to imagine how that must have hurt," he added.

You thought about what each of your friends said, and decided that it made a good amount of sense. "Thank you, fellas. I appreciate what you're saying," you replied with a yawn. "I think I'm going to head to my room now, getting a little sleepy," you said with a weary smile.

Sam and Dean each gave you a quick kiss on the top of your head with their goodnight wishes. Ketch stayed behind a bit, gazing directly in your soft hazel eyes. "May I walk you to your door?" he suggested.

"Thank you, Arthur," you said. As you slipped out of his arms, he caught hold of your hand and interlaced his fingers with yours. A blush crept across your face, which did not escape Ketch's notice. Once you reached your door, you and Ketch stood facing each other. "Well, I suppose this is goodnight. Thank you again, Arthur," you said softly, just before placing a lingering kiss on his cheek.

"Goodnight, darling, see you in the morning. Can't wait to taste some of your delicious pancakes for breakfast. If you're up for it," he hastily added.

You grinned and squeezed his hand a little. "Pancakes it is," you winked and entered your bedroom, closing the door behind you.

PART TWO up next!

[mchalowitz]

the process by which time passes

REPOST. you guys. @lilydalexf is the true mvp of this saga. she happened to have the story still open and was kind enough to send it to me. i owe her so much gratitude (as well as the other amazing xf bloggers that reached out to me). although i don’t interact much socially around here, it is amazing to be a part of a fandom that is so kind and supportive! writing xf fic is a creative outlet i enjoy so much and i love sharing it. now back to our regularly scheduled reading. (also if you guys wouldn’t mind boosting this new version so i can see the feedback, i would be so grateful.)

this is something i’ve been writing (at this point) for probably almost a year, which is one reason i’ve been pretty quiet on the fic-posting front. i’m so excited for everyone to finally see it but terrified at the idea that it’s not just an idea that only i know about anymore. it was originally the back half of a wip i abandoned but i couldn’t let this part go. enjoy!!

Mulder gives her a tight hug on the side of a desert highway. Scully presses her forehead to his chest, hoping her thoughts might leave her mind, reach his heart, and convince him to stay. He still gets in the SUV and she never sees him again.

In true Fox Mulder fashion, his physical presence isn’t needed to be a constant reminder. Government officials that she once exchanged pleasantries with at the coffee machine bang down her door and rip apart the life he abandoned.

“Have you heard anything?”

Skinner rifles through papers until the door clicks shut. Her badge feels heavy on her lapel. It feels wrong to be here.

“Only the official warrant,” Skinner answers. That was weeks ago. She has to frequently remind herself that he is doing the best he can. He can’t make it too obvious he’s interested in the hunt. She certainly can’t go digging herself.

“They’re closing the X-files,” he informs her. “There is an appeal process…”

“That’s not necessary,” Scully interrupts. “My assignment was to assess the validity of Mulder’s investigations. There is nothing to assess.”

“You believe in the work.”

“I’m a scientist,” she reminds him, offering nothing else.

Her final report is a jumble of words that states, no matter what she believed, the X-Files should never be reopened.

–

Scully spends idle days breathing in wet air on her mother’s porch. She hopes the sea might soothe her.

A week later, as she plans her return to Washington, she decides emphatically that it did not.

She discovers heart medication in her mother’s bathroom cabinet. Maggie attempts to downplay the circumstances, “It was a blip on a screen, Dana. The doctor said it was just precautionary,” but to Scully, it’s a call to action.

It isn’t difficult to resign. It seemed like it should, after giving the FBI almost a decade of herself, and much, much more than that.

She cries silently in her car after handing over the keys to her dream apartment and saying goodbye to her meticulously curated life.

She reminds herself starting over is the only way to move on. But she isn’t sure she believes it.

–

Scully is a seasoned Special Agent of the FBI, an instructor of pathology, but she struggles to call herself a doctor. After an onslaught of rejected resumes, she begins to believe the medical community of Maryland agrees.

A small hospital outside Baltimore is wowed by her determination alone. At the bottom of the ladder, no one knows the reputation of Agent Scully. She showed promise and expertise in her role, even if her partner was a kook. Dr. Scully has never formally practiced medicine and her bedside manner leaves something to be desired.

Scully hopes for an opening in pathology, where she might be more understood. John From Human Resources hums along with her plight. “I’ll keep an eye out,” he promises.

She begins noticing him behind her in the cafeteria line. On a fall day, she is trying to decide on the best fruit cup when he sides up to her. He is whisper-quiet, conspiratorial in tone when he says, “I wanted to give you a heads up that Dr. Harris may be retiring at the end of the year.”

The may sounds more like an is. A weight inside her lifts.

John assures her she is the first choice when the position officially becomes available. When he leads her to her new office in January, he asks her out to drinks to celebrate, and Scully is surprised, because she forgot people could see her that way.

John is completely unlike anyone else she’s been with. He is endlessly dependable. She never has to worry about where he is because he calls when he’ll be late. He thrives on a fastidious routine and makes safe, informed decisions.

Scully finally moves out of her mother’s house and into a modern three-bedroom she purchases with John. She leads an entirely new life. She climbs the ranks in pathology and is still able to go on real dates, and eat home cooked meals while they’re still hot, and sit in the pew every Sunday. She goes on weekend hikes and uninterrupted trips to the coast and has fine, but not life changing, sex. She accepts John’s proposal on the beach with a beautiful ring.

They have a small wedding. She doesn’t take his last name.

John tries so hard, never asks about her time in the FBI, even tries to adopt a child with her. When it falls through at the last minute, they decide on a dog instead. They get divorced after two years.

In her office one late morning, the phone on her desk lights up. “Dr. Scully, there’s a man on line one asking for you.”

“Thank you,” she says into the speaker. She picks up the receiver with the assumption of a request for a consult. “This is Dr. Scully.”

“Hey, Scully, it’s me.”

She drops the phone.

–

Scully’s stomach is in knots. She is too nervous to order any food. Mulder sits across from her at a diner, looking older and scruffier, and she wonders if this is all a cruel hallucination.

“Where have you been?”

His fingers tap nervously on the table. “Farrs Corner.”

After exploring little towns in the far reaches of nowhere, she remembers that’s Virginia. When she presses for how long, she discovers he’s been within driving distance almost this entire time. Her fingers clench. She wants to strangle him.

“It’s been six years, Mulder. Why now?”

“The FBI dropped the charges against me. I helped them with a case, they wiped the slate clean. I can start my life again, Scully, come back.”

Forget strangle, Scully wants to kill him. He thinks he can just come back? His ignorance to the domino effect of his actions has to be purposeful.

There was a life they wanted to live together that never had the chance to become a reality. She has spent six years trying to fill her life with meaning. Her marriage failed, her career path faltered. They have a child that is no longer theirs.

Scully stands from the booth. She stares down at him, asserts her power.

“I thought you were dead.”

He just nods. He suggests she give him a call, now that she has his number.

She doesn’t.

–

Scully always forgave Mulder too quickly; it was their fatal flaw. She frequently ignored this piece of common knowledge by justifying his more unsavory behavior as residual childhood trauma, or a severe lack of social skills, or plainly being obtuse.

She never found a way to justify him leaving her when she needed him without looking like an emotionally manipulated moron. How could she possibly forgive the embarrassment and isolation she felt after giving up her own child for ostensibly no reason?

Scully bared her soul to him, her body, and gave him everything she had, and she still took a backseat to his quest. There was a brief time where she thought something finally switched in him and the quest would take a backseat to her. In the earliest days of the millenium, working their way up from something undefined to something real.

A month passes. She speaks to no one about her meeting with Mulder, but when she has idle moments, it fills her mind. She tries to remain hot when she begins wondering what Mulder’s life is like now. She attempts to imagine how he filled six years worth of time, because he was never a picture of duality, never able to separate his life from his work, and what can he do after leaving it behind?

It’s a slow burning curiosity. Weeks long. She begins to think he didn’t push during their last meeting because he knew it would happen like this.

She scrolls through recent calls to find the number he left on her office phone. Scully hears the hello in that familiar voice and doesn’t hesitate to respond, “Mulder, it’s me.”

–

Scully sees a dream realized when she pulls up to a little house with a spacious porch on sprawling land. Mulder never liked the city.

He is clearly thrilled to finally present his vegetable garden and his paintings while giving her the grand tour. He recounts putting in the new water heater himself and his plans to replace the roof next spring.

Mulder makes her pasta and gives her the “good chair.” When her stomach is full, they talk about old times. She hasn’t talked about these things in years because she knew there was no one else that can laugh about what she saw instead of instantly recoiling except for the man sitting across from her.

“I have to get back,” she realizes when she sees the sun beginning to set out the window. They spent almost the whole day together. He nods in understanding.

“You see I’m not living in squalor,” he jokes as he walks her to her car.

“It certainly wasn’t the dilapidated hut I was expecting,” she teases. Her tone shifts from silly to serious. “You know, Mulder, after our last meeting, I really didn’t want to come here. I thought…I think you know what I thought. But I’m glad I came.”

“I appreciate any chance you’ll give me, Scully,” he replies.

–

Farrs Corner becomes a regular destination.

Mulder easily becomes the companion she was lacking, the return of the best friend she lost. Even with the passage of time, he still knows her better than anyone else.

She stops offering up her free Friday nights for on-call autopsies and tox screens to watch movies with take-out picked up just before civilization ends.

Without a Saturday shift to spoil their fun, they indulge in the full six pack of their favorite beer. His feet are propped on the coffee table next to their abandoned pizza box, as she folds her legs underneath her on the cushion beside him. She is full-bellied and warm.

“I can’t believe you were married,” he says in disbelief, taking a swig from his bottle. “Considering how many of my proposals you turned down.”

“Maybe I would’ve accepted if any of them had been serious.”

“So you’re saying there was a chance?”

She laughs and nudges his shoulder with the side of her bottle.

When she catches his eye, she sees a person that, yes, she thought she might marry someday. When she was younger, less hard, and had never seen the face of a child that was half him, half her.

She leans forward and presses her lips to his, jerking back as soon as he begins to respond. She tries to find something to say, a reasoning, but she finds his curious gaze, and can’t think of anything to say.

He closes the distance between them and starts where she left off. His kiss is wonderful. It’s hopeful and sexy as all hell.

He nudges her jaw aside with his chin, his mouth seeking out her neck. Her fingers tangle in his hair. “Let’s go upstairs,” he suggests.

–

Standing at the foot of his bed, Scully realizes she’s never been in Mulder’s bedroom before. He has simple furnishings; dark wood and soft blues. His belt clunks when it hits the floor. His bare chest warms her back.

She remembers his warmth, his proclivity to be so tender and gentle, and to let her lead the way. She turns and guides him onto the bed.

Modest kisses quickly turn unrestrained. He breaths in long pants as he shoves her panties down her thighs, letting her kick them over her ankle before hooking them over his hips.

He slips in so easily. Scully explores his changed body; the shifting muscles in his back, his thinner, sweat dampened hair against her hands, his ass clenching as he rocks into her.

Electricity runs through her when his fingers drift to her clit, taking her right to the edge. “Fuck,” he groans, his lips at her ear. “I can’t believe it’s really you.”

She moans in utter bliss, deliriously overtaken. When she comes, she shatters. Mulder thrusts two, three times more, before following behind. He spurts hotly into her with growls of satisfaction.

Breathing heavily, they lay bonelessly on their backs. She feels the sweat cooling at her hairline. Her lips break into a big smile and a laugh leaves her lips. His follows and he raises her hand to his lips, feeling his joyous puffs of air against her skin.

“We are still very good at that,” she decides, turning her head toward him.

“You did always bring out the best in me,” he agrees.

Scully finds his boyish nerves when he mentions spending the night charmingly endearing. She wordlessly moves to press herself into his side, clinging to him in answer.

–

Mulder calls their connection cosmic, though Scully doesn’t believe in cosmicity. An otherworldly connect would trivialize their effort so far in their new era.

She worried how they would assimilate into each other’s worlds without the commonality of what easily linked them before. While their forced separation may never be seen as a positive in her eyes, it did allow for the growth to be content in domesticity.

Scully adores the version of Mulder she met over two decades ago. With his unwavering desire for truth and his absolutely brilliant mind. The hours they can spend talking remind her of that man often. They spar as they always did, laugh like no time has passed.

She delights in the side of him that is at peace with the mundane. He likes filling her drawers with clean scrubs, and working in the yard until he returns smelling like freshly cut grass, and giving her drafts of his paranormal mystery novel.

Uncensored honesty is their biggest challenge. It would be so easy to never discuss what plagued them in the past. They finally get to air their fear, their guilt, and their grief. Scully thinks she and Mulder come out better on the other side.

Mulder leads her to the quiet corners of the world, using his freedom to finally venture off his little property. They luxuriate in the Bahamas shortly after their first night together and they start stopping at all the roadside attractions they used to skip. He plans to finally take her to England and show her all the off beaten paths from his youth. She would go anywhere with him.

A beach house in Maine is this weekend’s activity. Scully accidentally leaves her stack of reading on the desk in her office. “I’ll grab them quick and we’ll go,” she promises him, hanging onto the open passenger side window.

“Don’t leave the coast waiting too long,” he teases. “I’m starting to lose my island glow.” She rolls her eyes at him and pushes up on her toes to kiss him briefly.

Though she promises to be quick, Scully still signs into her computer. She printed out the newest articles hastily before an autopsy and notices now that the first ten pages of the article on top are missing. She finds herself drawn to begin reading when she goes to reprint. She pulls out her chair with blind arms, sitting down absently.

She doesn’t realize how long she’s been gone until she sees Mulder enter. “I was starting to think you’d fallen in,” he jokes.

“Sorry,” she mumbles. He brushes off her apology with a wave of his hand, rounding the desk to brace his hand on the back of her chair.

“What are you reading?” he asks.

Case 43-2009. 8-year-old with Brain Scan Abnormalities Presents Potentially Unseen Neurological Disorder.

She breaks her gaze at the screen to bring her eyes up to Mulder.

“We need to find our son.”

[parkmin--seo]

Is that MINNIE PARK? Wow, they do look a lot like LEE JI-EUN. I hear SHE is an EIGHTEEN year old university FRESHMAN. Word is they are a REGULAR student at Luxor Academy. You should watch out because they can be SENSITIVE and NAIVE, but on the bright side they can also be INTELLIGENT and CREATIVE. Ultimately, you’ll get to see it all for yourself.

class schedule:

astronomy 

spanish

baking

choir

advanced sociology

theatre

poetry 

extracurricular: 

theatre ( costume design )  art club 

BIO:

okay, so minnie, born park min-seo, was raised in washington and lived there for the majority of her life up until being sent to luxor her freshman year of high school.

her parents weren’t insanely rich or anything, but they were fairly well off. her mother, lee ha-yoon ( yoon lee ), owned her own dance studio, as well as an art studio and her father, park hyun-jae ( jae park ), was an fbi agent. they were both born and raised in seoul, south korea and they met when they were just teenagers. the way they always told it, they fell madly in love and left seoul to live out their dreams in california, which they did for a while until ha-yoon became pregnant. they moved back to seoul and moved back to the states, this time seattle, when minnie was five. 

minnie’s love of art came as no surprise to her parents, given the amount of time that she spent at both of her mother’s studios. however, despite her mother’s efforts to convince her to take dance classes, minnie never loved dancing as much as she loved sketching/painting. they were passions that she threw herself into, particularly as she got older and found herself needing an escape from what would still to this day be considered the worst thing that had ever happened to her. ( but we’ll get to that in a minute . )

if asked, minnie always swore that she loved both of her parents equally, but she was definitely more of a daddy’s girl than anything else. she always said that was because he wasn’t around as often as her mother, so the time she spent with him meant even more to her because she knew how lucky she was that he took the time to make time for her??? when he very well could have just… not done that and chosen to focus on his work more than he did his family.

her father was just generally an all-around a+++ guy, but she really did love both of her parents and aspired to be like them in a lot of ways because she didn’t think there were two people who were more good. even if that made her bias.

TW: MURDER

when minnie was a teenager, her father started investigating a series of killings. it wasn’t ever something he really talked about with his wife or daughter, but he was home a lot less and threw himself into the case.

she was thirteen when she was pulled out of a history lesson and greeted with the sight of her mother, who looked like she’d just seen a ghost, as well as her father’s fbi partner and another one of the officers he’d been investigating the case with.

a lot of worst case scenarios ran through her mind and she’d already guessed the worst thing before her mother even said the words, that her father had been brutally murdered by the same man responsible for all of the other murders.

it was only a couple of weeks later that they caught the man they thought to be responsible. a man who was revealed to be the father of someone she had been close to growing up. 

END OF TW

after losing her father, minnie started to shut everyone out. especially the son of the person who had been arrested for the murder. because she couldn’t take her anger out on the man responsible, so she took her anger out on that man’s son. her best friend who wasn’t her best friend anymore, because she couldn’t look at him without seeing the man who had killed her father. around everyone else, she was still that sweet girl she’d always been, but with leo, she was cold, distant and she wanted everyone to hate him as much as she had convinced herself that she did.

minnie threw herself into her art even more, because it was the one thing that made her feel okay. she didn’t cry at her father’s funeral or hasn’t really dealt with his death since learning of it. her mother grew as distant as she had and spent more time at her studio than she did with her own daughter, given how unable she was to cope with her husband’s death. it was like his ghost was everywhere, in their house and at the studio and in her mother’s eyes.

she tried to commit suicide and spent the summer before her first year at luxor in a mental institution. this was a secret until it was revealed by the circle at prom. 

it came as a relief to minnie when her mother announced that she was going to send her to luxor for her schooling when she entered high school. she was ready to get out of washington and to escape the ghost of her father.

when she got to luxor, she joined theatre to do costume design, because she still had dreams to become a fashion designer some day. she also joined arts club, because of her love of art.

life at luxor had been more tolerable than her life at home and she’d almost forgotten her sadness and that anger, buried it until she couldn’t feel it anymore… and then her secrets had been revealed. 

ahhh okay, that’s all i can think of but i might add more later. as for her personality, she is literally the definition of sweet as pie. she doesn’t ever have a bad thing to say about anyone, except for one person in particular. still, she isn’t so nice that she doesn’t know how to stick up for herself and in the event that anyone was ever mean to her for some reason, she wouldn’t be afraid to fight back. she’s artsy and it shows. the true definition of a fashionista and she WILL talk fashion all day, every day. very loyal, the kind of friend that anyone should want to have on their side, and is incredibly trustworthy. she tries to give everyone a chance, but she does have trust issues, which makes it hard for her to believe in second chances. basically, hurt her once, shame on you and you don’t get another shot to do it again. ummm, she’s really really smart and honestly could have been given a scholarship but her mother is well-off enough that she was able to pay for everything without the aid of a scholarship. likes to crack a lot of jokes, but they’re all really lame. think dad jokes, but, like, the teenage girl version of that. she has mood swings sometimes, but they’re never so sudden that it gives people whiplash. if she doesn’t want to talk, she won’t be rude about it. she’ll just say that she isn’t feeling well and lock herself in her dorm until she feels better. and yikes, i can’t think of anything else because she’s a new baby, but will add more if i think of anything.

random facts:

while she was raised in washington for the majority of her life and it’s all she remembers, she was actually born in seoul, south korea.

if you don’t like k pop, never ask her to play music because it will be one of the only things she plays

she’s fluent in english, as well as korean because both of her parents were from korea and they wanted to teach her how to speak it. they also were notorious for only speaking korean when at home to make it easier for her to learn. she also knows a little mandarin and can speak semi-decent french and japanese. she’s currently taking german and plans to add that to her list once she masters it.

she can often be seen wearing her father’s fbi cap because it’s one of the only things she has left of him. that, and his jacket.

comes off somewhat confident, but she’s actually really really insecure and doesn’t think too highly of herself at all

can secretly sing very well/also rap but she won’t usually do so in front of anyone because she’s incredibly shy. ( voice claim: lee ji eun / iu )

literally the embodiment of walking on sunshine

she refuses to talk to her therapist or take her medications for depression/anxiety ( most recent secret reveal )