CM fic: What the newbie saw.
When she had first arrived at the BAU, it had taken Emily a few days to notice it. It was subtle. But it was there. Nothing that you could really put your finger on at first, and Emily had even managed to convince herself that there was nothing to see, but after a few days of close observation, she decided that there were most definitely some strange occurrences taking place.
It wasn’t as if they were strange enough to attract any serious attention, but little mysteries had always intrigued her, nagged at the back of her mind, not relenting until she had an explanation.
And so she watched.
After a couple of days, she had gathered that it seemed to centre mostly on Reid. And after a few more days, she had narrowed this down even further to Reid and his relation to objects and the passing of time.
She had been vaguely aware that Reid had a habit of fiddling with anything within reach. That had been clear from her first day with the team; it was something that had almost always been going on in the background, but nothing to actually pay attention to.
The only reason that she had actually began to take notice of Reid’s fidgeting and twiddling was because of Hotch.
They had been sitting in the same small field office for hours. The local police officers were bored and frustrated with their lack of progress. They were bored and frustrated with their lack of progress. They had come to a dead end, and had been throwing ideas around for hours, rehashing old theories, coming up with increasingly remote new ones, and generally getting nowhere.
Hotch and Morgan had been pacing the length of the room, discussing some finer point of obsessional crime with Gideon, and she and JJ had been content to hash out some way of using the media to their advantage. Throughout all this, Spencer had been sitting silently in his chair; eyes scrunched half closed, as though he had a headache, as he merely stewed on all the different theories floating about the room.
At that point, a local detective had entered the conference room bearing news of a probably unrelated matter. When it became clear that this new information was probably not going to break the case, the harried man had tossed his handcuffs down on the table in frustration and anguish, and made a swift exit.
Lightening quick and startlingly silent, Reid’s hand darted out, and his agile digits snatched up the abandoned handcuffs and brought them close to his chest. His eyes never broke their far-away gaze, as his chain of deep thought went apparently uninterrupted by his own movement.
Even as Morgan and Hotch prowled around the entire table, doggedly thrashing out the latest hypothesis - “But if he burnt the body, surely he would have burnt the car as well; it doesn’t make any sense that he would...” Reid began to tinker with the handcuffs now in his possession, seemingly without even realising it. This went on for a good ten minutes; Reid sitting silently, contributing nothing to the conversation, just twisting and turning the handcuffs, manipulating them, poking at the joints in the metal with a pen, pulling and squeezing them, until Emily was unable to focus properly on what JJ was saying.
On his next round of the table, without pausing to even flick his eyes towards the younger agent, Hotch reached down - all the while keeping eye contact with Morgan, their conversation never once faltering - and gently but deftly plucked the cuffs from Reid’s curious hands. His grip was firm on the metal as he lifted it away from Reid, who only frowned very slightly in confusion at the sudden movement, as if he couldn’t quite understand what he had been doing to move Hotch to make physical contact with him.
The gesture was so...paternal - no that wasn’t right. It was so....strangely intimate that it made Emily want to blush. She internally cringed as she waited for an air of awkwardness to descend on the room once she realised that everybody had seen what had happened.
But when she felt no change in atmosphere she looked around to see that nothing had changed. No-one seemed at all fazed at what had just occurred, there had been no break in conversation, no-one was staring at Reid or Hotch, and the momentum went on unchanged.
Ten minutes later, Reid piped up for the first time in hours, with an insight that got their investigation moving swiftly to a conclusion.
The next time had been a conversation she had overheard.
She didn’t usually eavesdrop, and to start with she hadn’t really cared. After all, it had only been Morgan asking Reid a question.
“Wanna come out for drinks with me? To Tutti’s?”
She had just kept on walking, barely hearing the conversation that had been of no real interest to her.
Until she had heard Reid’s response.
“But it’s Wednesday.”
She had stopped then. That hadn’t made much sense. But she supposed that there could be a perfectly practical explanation. She hadn’t meant to stay to listen.
“Yeah, I know. That’s okay.” Had been Morgan’s soft and casual reply.
“But - ” She heard Reid floundering, as if not wanting to say what was clear to both of them.
“But...we go to Tutti’s on Friday.”
At this point she had given up on trying not to listen in. She just couldn’t figure this out.
“Yeah I know, but I thought we’d go tonight for a bit of a change.” Again Morgan’s voice was soft, laying down this proposition carefully.
“But...”
She had admired the older agent’s infinite patience.
“Come on, it’ll be fine.” He had coaxed. “We’ll have a good time. Nothing’ll happen.”
At which point an oddly frustrated bark of laughter from Reid had startled her.
“I know. I know that nothing will happen. I know that this makes no sense at all. I know that it’s completely illogical.” It sounded as though this was the part that really got to Reid. And she could see why it would be frustrating for a man like Reid (whose line of thinking and whose job heavily involved logic) to have to refuse an invitation for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
Morgan, however, had not seemed in the least bit annoyed. Prentiss could just about make out a soft and understanding smile cross the man’s face.
“I know, man. It doesn’t always have to be logical, you know.”
The last time had involved a stapler.
It had been a day full of paperwork and backlog, nothing new or exciting. Everyone was sitting at their desks quietly clacking away at keyboards, with the occasional rustle of paper and bubble of chatter.
Reid and Morgan had just re-entered the bullpen after a coffee break, but when he reached his desk, Reid had stopped for a moment, his eyes sweeping his workspace and the desks surrounding it. He seemed stymied, as if some major change had come over the office, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do.
If he had come back to find his desk painted purple, Emily might have understood the expression on his face.
And for a moment Morgan, standing at the other’s elbow, looked just as confused, until his eyes did a once-over of the Reid’s space, at which point he seemed to register something which Emily did not. His brow furrowed in frustration, and he hissed quietly, “I thought I told that bastard to take mine if he needed one.”
Reid - who had been staring at his desk with something close to unease all the while - seemed to mentally shake himself, and raised his eyes to Morgan.
He smiled, though to Emily it seemed rather strained, but nonetheless seemed to brush off whatever was bothering him and said to the older agent, “It’s fine. It’s okay. I’ll deal. Nothing to worry about.”
He sounded slightly as though he was trying to convince himself as well as Morgan.
He sent the doctor a concerned and somewhat sceptical look, raising his eyebrows and ducking his head very slightly so that he could make eye contact with Reid, whose head was lowered, studying the desk with a puzzling intensity, as though he were trying to adjust to some change that he found incomprehensible.
“You sure?” She hadn’t known that rambunctious, cheerful and boisterous Morgan could be so quiet and...was that tenderness? Wow.
Reid’s smile became just a little more convincing, and he began to sit down at his completely normal-looking desk. “Yeah. I’m fine. It’ll be okay.”
The other had only nodded and walked back to his own stack of work, though his eyes would flick periodically towards the doctor’s desk at regular intervals.
And Emily had to admit that her eyes were doing exactly the same thing. Because for the first few minutes, there had appeared to be no change in Reid. He had seemed the same as ever, quietly working through his ‘In’ tray at an alarming and envious speed.
But after about ten minutes, he had begun to fidget. He couldn’t seem to sit still and was restless, his eyes no longer focused on the case files before him, instead constantly flicking to the completely empty and harmless right hand corner of his desk.
Emily couldn’t work it out. She had craned her neck to see what her colleague had been looking at, but she could only see an innocuous corner of a standard-issue office desk.
Eventually, she had been unable to keep quiet, and had leaned over and asked, “Reid? Are you okay?”
He jumped, looked across at her and flushed, as though embarrassed to have been caught staring. Staring not at a co-worker, or attractive employee, but at his own desk.
“Oh-oh yeah, yeah, I’m fine, thanks.” He had not wanted to meet her eyes.
“Are you sure?” She had pressed. “Because you don’t look alright.”
It had seemed for a moment that Reid had been about to say something, but he stopped, seeming to realise that there was no point in maintaining that he was fine, that she would see through the lie.
He gave her a strangely weary smile, and looked uncomfortable and sheepish when he replied.
“It’s nothing really, it’s just that - that, my stapler is missing. Someone’s taken it.”
For a moment she had been relieved, and had obliviously grasped her own stapler, and waved it in front of Reid, the bright red object shining before the doctor’s eyes.
“Oh, you want to borrow - ” She had started to naively offer, before Morgan’s voice suddenly cut through the air, interrupting her, but not at a volume that would draw people’s attention.
“Emily. I’m gonna get some coffee, come help with mug duty?”
She had been about to protest that Morgan had just gone to get coffee, but quickly rethought this when she saw the man’s expression. She had followed him to the small kitchen, feeling like a naughty toddler.
As soon as they were far enough from earshot, Morgan had turned to face her with a stern expression, and said, “Just leave it.”
She had been surprised and not a little insulted to be treated so coldly for what she considered to be an offer of help to a friend. She had said as much.
“Excuse me?” She rose her eyebrows, incredulous. Her lips had pursed angrily. “Leave what? I haven’t done anything wrong here; all I was doing was offering to help Reid, would you please explain to me why I’m suddenly faced with threats from you?”
At this, Morgan’s face had softened slightly, and he had turned around to lean against the sink.
“Sorry. I know that you were only trying to help. And I appreciate that. I’m sure Reid appreciates that too. But all you were really doing was drawing attention to something that he can’t help, and which makes him uncomfortable.”
Before she could even ask what Morgan meant by all this, the other man had continued in lower voice.
“It’s blue.” Emily hadn’t even attempted to get a question in this time.
“There’s always a stapler on the right side of Reid’s desk, in the corner. And it’s always blue. That’s just how it is.
When it seemed that no more information was forthcoming, she had just been about to tell Derek that she was sorry, but she really didn’t get what he was driving at.
Then suddenly it clicked. The fidgeting, the mannerisms and all the little oddities, the importance of patterns and routine.
She had opened her mouth, but Morgan had beaten her to it.
“No.” He had said firmly. Utter conviction and fierce protectiveness. “He’s not. Not really. He’s unique. He’s a genius, and that comes with its own quirks. That’s all. He’s just Reid.”
She almost felt that before that day, although everyone had been friendly to her and there had been a connection, she had not truly been a part of the team. She felt that that had only happened once she was the one that didn’t bat an eyelash at Reid’s quirks, and she was the one warning outsiders to just let it go.
The End.