(no subject)
Prompt: Jejune
Every day Dr. Spencer Reid would write a letter, address an envelope, add postage and post a letter. It was not every day that Dr. Spencer Reid would be the receiver of a letter.
Then again, breaking into a cabin- ok so he had the key so it wasn’t really breaking into it- to retrieve said letter all but addressed to him still didn’t make it sting less.
One of the few letters he’d ever received, and it was all but a Dear John letter of abandonment to him.
Somehow, somehow he really thought- genuinely thought, that of all people Jason Gideon would not be the sort to just discard him like that, knowing his own father issues (he recruited him after all… he had studied up on Reid he was certain) and his own estranged son… Reid had just expected… more from the man. That had been naïve. No, naïve was the understatement of the year. The jejune reasoning of a profiler who had been practicing for years was almost inexcusable save for his own youth.
Had Reid not yet kicked the habit, this would be one of those moments he’d have battled with himself over using for such a thing, instead he found himself drawn to the same chair he had perched in over-night when Gideon had neglected to arrive for a game of chess.
It made sense that Gideon could do such things to him, he could abandon his own flesh, so really, some smart kid he picked up in Nevada to recruit… well, it wasn’t that hard to see how plausible Reid’s current situation was.
Intellectually, Reid knew that Gideon, with the vast age difference, was up for retirement soon. He also knew the man would’ve been able to tell everyone at once, have a party, be commemorated and walk out with his head held high if he had so chosen to. That Reid wouldn’t have felt betrayed or discarded then. But this flimsy piece of paper, as if pretending to be an apology… it was too much. Too much and completely not enough, a paradigm that Reid had to swallow down, and get to work despite it; he hunched deeper into the chair feeling more fatigued than ever before in a non-emergency setting.
It begged questions of who would be next to abandon him, and if he should even risk putting himself out to others. Would Morgan leave him? Hotch? He hardly knew Prentiss, but would she leave someday too? JJ? Garcia? Which of them would be the next to walk away from him? He wondered if he’d still feel the same hurt and abandon when they’d leave, inevitably.
No, no Reid convinced himself he wouldn’t, and with that proved to still be just as jejune as he had been in his anticipations of Gideon’s inevitable departure. This was his family, any time a family member would leave and be completely out of his life it would hurt. It would be crushing actually, yet he still refused to admit that the hurt wasn’t just Gideon’s abandonment of him and his mentor-pupil/father-son role, but that he just missed his friend who made it clear he wanted no more contact with this chapter of his life.
Fin.