Thursday: Work

[cyphersushi]

Happy Thursday dear writers, after any celebration sooner or later you have to go back to what counts for normality and that's what we are doing today with the theme Work. Maybe someone get's a new job, gets fired or is just doing what needs to be done

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FILL: Calm in the Face of Chaos (Criminal Minds, team, G)

[nevcolleil]

He gets it. He does. The team- They all still look at Spencer, sometimes, the way they've always looked at him. As the "kid", the baby of the team. The one who needs to be introduced as "Doctor" so the LEOs know to show him some respect. Maybe it's silly. He's also the one they turn to, more often than not, when it's crunch time and they don't know what to do next. The one they've got to watch out for, not because he's constantly needing to be swooped in on and saved, but because if one of them is going to take a long shot - to throw himself unprotected between danger and whoever else needs saving - it's going to be Reid. When they notice it, the obsolescence of the way they still try to put a cushion between Spencer and the rest of the world, they don't do anything to change. There are few constants in their lives. Few good ones, anyway, and they cling to the ones they've got. If Spencer minds, he never shows it.

Still, Derek can understand how this might confuse some of the people they come into contact with. Here they see this kid... This doctor who still looks too young to be out of med school. They see all of them, the BAU, going out of their way to make sure that nobody underestimates him. But at this point it's probably overkill. And Derek sees the looks that cross people's faces when they turn away from crime scene photos that steal their breath, and see Spencer assessing them coolly. The whole team has become, if not used to seeing devastation (you don't get used to some of the things that people do to one another; you just don't) then good at faking it, but only Spencer has the baby face, that choirboy voice, to make calm in the face of chaos truly unsettling.

"How can you just... know that and not be bothered by it? These people are dead!" one deputy says, interrupting Reid in the process of explaining the psychosexual implications of their unsub's methodology.

Derek wants to step in. He would have stepped in when Reid started to get a lot more detailed than these people probably prefer, but he knows better than to think that Reid didn't do it on purpose. These deputies have been resisting their profile. They need to know what they're up against. Hotch would have stepped in himself otherwise.

And Reid doesn't need anyone to speak for him. "Just because we can speak about this unemotionally, doesn't mean that we aren't bothered by it," Reid says. Acting as though the deputy addressed the team (though the man's eyes bore straight into him) to make the deputy's personal affront seem less personal. "And death is sort of our business. Would it help you if we pretended that we haven't seen this a dozen times before and therefore don't know exactly what we're talking about?"

Derek wants to smile, too - to high five the kid, if he's being honest - but that certainly wouldn't be professional. Still, he catches Hotch's lips twitching, out the corner of his eye; Prentiss coughs suspiciously. The sheriff makes some quiet remark to the deputy who just spoke out of turn and then asks Reid politely, almost deferentially, to continue.

They don't have much difficulty getting the profile across after that.