✓ | sick of losing soulmates [SPENCER REID]

8.1

8.1
( lc. )

☆ ★ ☆

iris

It's not that she misses him.

Well, she can't miss him; he's right there, just a few feet away from her for the majority of the hours in her week — but that's the whole problem.

Losing a friendship she treasured is one thing. Being forced to see the remnants of that tattered relationship is in a whole other league, forcing her to see day by day all that she has lost. The trust, the companionship, the rock-solid unity they'd shared — the sorts of things that don't come around often — are always hovering, tauntingly, directly in front of her for the next few months, in the form of Spencer Reid himself. And she can never have it — has lost it.

Five months pass slowly. Iris sinks into a routine of driving to work alone, working without talking or looking at Spencer, and driving home alone. Her world becomes monotonous again, like it had been back in Beachwood.

God, she wishes she were twenty again, and not twenty-seven and nearing thirty and therefore nearing middle-aged and therefore nearing death.

(An irrational thought, yes, but when has Iris ever thought rationally?)

Cases and months and moments blur into each other, and again she finds her life is marked by key dates, but no longer because she's having so much fun. Now, her life is just one big . . . Clump of mud. And she's stuck knee deep, not moving anywhere.

Oh, God. She's having a mid-life crisis. At twenty-eight.

New Year comes and goes, and she enters 2009 feeling somewhat miserable and alone, even though she's in the middle of a dance floor with some friends from college.

But that's not a Spencer thing — the loneliness, the sadness. Hell, her crush on Spencer is practically non-existent by this point, and she's sort of forgotten what his voice sounds like when he's not sprouting statistics — forgotten what his laugh looks like (but not sounds like, because it's always a silent, open-mouthed thing). No, the loneliness is a single thing.

Iris has always been an incredibly independent person. Naturally so — growing up as a single child with a father who passed while she was a teenager. It's part of the reason she's in law enforcement now: she's a born leader, made to be responsible for others. But, God, the idea of having a boyfriend and not just a one-night-stand or a few unsuccessful dates sounds good. Heavenly, even.

When February ends, she celebrates a year of working at the BAU with the team at a bar and, surprisingly, Spencer joins, but they don't exchange many words and only a few tentative smiles. Halfway through the night, Emily joins her in the smoking area and mutters a soft, "Are you okay?"