KATRIN'S P.O.V
"It has been said 'Time heals all wounds'. I do not agree. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is still there" ~ Rose Kennedy
I watch him over the cover of my book, watch contently as his gold flecked chocolate eyes skim every word in the case folder and let my gaze trace the slight waves of his brown hair.
Spencer Reid makes me feel tingly and fuzzy and warm inside, something no human has been able to do for the past three and a half years. In fact, I'm so intent in watching him I don't notice when he walks over to me and sits across from me.
"Hello" he mumbles and I scramble to slam my book shut and stuff it in my bag before fixing my hair.
"Hi Reid"
There is silence filled with the sound of pages rapidly turning before he sighs and sets his folder down on the floor.
"Do you want coffee?" He asks, running a hand through his hair
"Yeah, coffee would be nice thanks" I smile and he stands up an walks off to the front of the plane.
Across the isle Prentiss's phone proceeds to ring and she fumbles awkwardly to answer it quickly.
"Er, Prentiss" she says, her frown slowly subsiding "Uh-huh.... Woah wait a second why are you calling me and bit my boss?-" her eyes flash with something unreadable and she looks over at me "Okay. Yes, yes I'll tell them. Bye".
She disconnects the line and looks up at us all, considering the fact we've been staring at her through the conversation.
"It was nothing, just some kid pulling a stupid prank" she waves us off and sets down her phone.
Everyone other than Reid and I returns to what we'd previously been doing before the phone call.
Emily turns away and I do too, because she obviously isn't going to talk to me- I doubt any of them willingly are- and a moment later a scrunched up piece of paper hits me in the head.
When I glance back at her she's subtly looking out her window "taking in the scenery" and I unscrunch the paper and hide it in between the open pages of my book.
A glance in Reid's direction tells me he's gone back to making us coffee and I quickly glance down, pretending to read my book but actually reading Emily's note.
I'm going to make sure I'm assigned with you and Reid; need to talk to you guys
~ Prentiss
I look back at her but she's still looking out the window so I stand up and walk to Reid, stumbling on my aching legs.
"Hi" my voice startles him and his head shoots up, making our foreheads collide with a thud!
"Ow" I rub my head and look over at Reid who is frowning and doing the same. I can hear Prentiss and JJ exchanging words and then chuckling quietly.
"I'm sorry" Reid says "your voice scared me- well, I mean, it wasn't your voice, your voice is actually quite nice but I wasn't expecting you to just appear next to me so..... Yeah, I rambling" he rubs the back of his neck and chuckles nervously before handing me a steaming cup of coffee.
"Sorry for, er, for startling you" I murmur before walking back to our seats, Reid following close behind.
On the way I hear Morgan pat him on the back and say
"Smooth kid, real smooth" before laughing.
When we sit down I notice JJ and Prentiss smiling at us and I stick my tongue out at them before we all laugh, even Hotch manages a small chuckle.
Perhaps he is slightly human after all. . . maybe.
"So" I turn to Reid "what do I need to know about the case"
"Well local PD found ten bodies all buried in a mass grave in the national park after a landslide uncovered them. They were all in different stages of decomposition, the oldest from 20 years ago the newest has only been dead about a week and a half. They haven't been able to identify the, um, the bodies yet but Garcia's gonna give us order when they do and run them through ViCap. And even though considering on average only one per-cent
of-"
"Murders committed in a year are serial-" I finish the statistic and he grins
"I think its safe to say this guy's a serial" Reid says and Prentiss and JJ start clapping and laughing.
"Well done Reid, Coleman I think you just briefed the entire jet, even Garcia who is on video conference call with Morgan" Hotch tells us
"Say hello Baby Girl" Morgan says into his phone and holds it up for us to hear
"Hello my Crime Fighters, the Faerie Queen is at your service 24/7" Garcia chirped happily "oh and, Coleman, Reid?"
"Yes" we say in unison
"Well done on your totally in sync briefing- K how do you understand him?"
"Meh, I just do.... Did you just call me K?" I say, frowning
"Yeah... Is that an okay nickname?" Garcia sounds worried she's said the wrong thing and I chuckle
"Yeah Penelope, its fine".
I hear her sigh with relief before speaking again. I don't dare tell her that K was what Benson had called me over in Syria, that just hearing the word makes me think of the school...
"Hey Chocolate Thunder when you get back we should grab some dinner at that fancy place down town" Garcia purrs
"Yeah momma? What should we get?" Morgan asks, grinning to himself
"An authentic Mexican dish..." I can hear the smile in her voice before she slips into a stupidly seductive tone "you know what's for dessert sugar"
"Behave Girl, you're on speaker" Morgan cautions
"Bu-" he quickly turns off speaker and plugs in his headphones so only he can hear the faerie queen and her dirty talk.
"When we land I want JJ and Morgan to go to the local PD, collect the information and set up office there, Rossi and I will check through missing persons cases from the last twenty years-"
"Fuuunnn!" Rossi interrupts Hotch with a sarcastic yell
"-And I want Reid, Coleman and Prentiss to check out the crime scene".
I meet Emily's eyes and she gives a slight nod of her head before turning back to Hotch.
Emily Prentiss what are you hiding?...
I go to grab a case file and my hand overlaps with Reid's.
An electrical current surges through me from the point of contact and I jerk away. quickly
"Sorry'.
My new mantra; I will not fall for Spencer Reid...
But how long can a mantra really work for?
REID'S P.O.V
We pile into a black SUV that is waiting for us at the landing strip, Emily and Katrin in the front and me, as usual, in the back poking my head through so I could speak to them.
"If there's only ten bodies and they date back twenty years to now, this guy's either been very unorganized and killed them every two to three years or he's just had a very long cooling off period in between his kills" I state and Kat turns her head to face me
"How long do you reckon his cooling off period would be though?" she asks
"It's hard to say unless we can identify all ten victims and when they disappeared then compare that to when they died then-"
"then figure out when the next one went missing and create a timeline so we know his pattern"
"If he even has one".
Prentiss briefly looks at us, frowning before her attention turns back to the road
"How do you know what he's talking about every time?" she asks Kat who shrugs in response and says
"There's not much else to do with my brain".
There's a loud crash as Emily drives the car through a pothole
"Shit!" she swerves to avoid another but ends up almost smashing into a sign post.
"This road is really crap" Katrin observes, looking out her window.
Trees rush by in a blur of green and wooden brown as we continue driving on the bumpy dirt road, almost hitting an array of different things and small animals en route.
I have to yell over the sound of the wheels colliding with another pothole to be heard when I speak
"Bridge"
"What?" Emily frowns
"There's a bridge up ahead, a very unstable looking bridge!".
Emily screeches the car to a stop and hangs her head in her hands
"We probably have a flat tyre, I think I hit a small racoon back there and now there's a bridge? Thanks so much Hotch, I really appreciate it!"
"That's okay Emily" Hotch's voice comes from Katrin's phone and Emily groanes loudly.
"Garcia has some new information for you so listen to her carefully" Hotch tells us and we all huddle around the phone. There's a loud beep as Garcia is patched into the call and she greets us cheerily.
"Hello my busy little elves, the Faerie Queen has some new all important info so listen up with those pointed little ears" Emily and I grin at her silliness and Katrin chuckle quietly to herself before Penelope speaks again.
"Now, of the ten bodies found we've manged to identify three"
"Who would they be Garcia?" I ask and she taps her keyboard loudly in the background.
"First victim- she's the newest to be killed BTdubs we only Id's the newest three but it's a start- anyways, first victim is 4 year old Kelli Sharp, she went missing last December from a shopping mall not too far from Arizona local PD. Report says she was stabbed multiple times, none of those killed her though because C.O.D was blunt force trauma to the temporal artery"
"Four?" Katrin whispers the word so quietly it's hardly audible.
"Next victim was 7 year old Tabitha Hepton, same deal, multiple stab wounds C.O.D blunt force trauma but- and it is a big but- she disappeared from her hospital room after having her appendix removed in July 2014"
"I'm sorry Garcia, did you say hospital room?" Prentiss asks raising her eyebrows
"I'm afraid so my cupcake. Now we have also victim number three; 10 year old Pippa Undersee, she was taken from, again, a hospital, like uber expensive, like only for Angelina Jolie and JLaw and she was being treated for epilepsy, same C.O.D and wounds and icky icky stuff"
"Thanks Garcia" Katrin swallows hard "We'll call if we need anything okay Faerie Queen?"
"Yes my humble elves, have a good day in magic land" then there's a beep as she disconnects the line and Katrin shoves her phone back in her pocket before turning to look at the bridge.
"How are we gonna cross that?"
"Theoretically we could times the strength of the wood by the-"
"Reid!" Emily yells and I shut up and awkwardly move into her seat as she gets out of the car.
"What do you think of the job so far?" I ask Katrin and she shakes her head
"A four year old, a seven year old and a ten year old. This.... won't be easy" she says looking at me with her big smokey blue eyes that hold a strange sadness behind their disguise of anger.
"The first time's always the worst"I assure her and she turns to fully face me
"Does it ever get easier though?"
"Yes. Eventually. I can't say if the niggling feeling ever goes away, I don't know yet to be honest, but it does get better".
She thinks for a minute before asking
"Reid have you ever faced some kind of trauma?"
I don't know whether I should answer that question for a girl I'd known for all of four hours.
"Yes" I tell her, because it feels like I've known her longer
"Do the scars ever go away? The mental ones, not the physical ones?" she asks, staring off into the distance at nothing in particular
"I don't know, I mean, I don't think so because, you can't escape what's happened. you can't erase a memory from your mind"I tell her and she nods
"Thanks, that's all I wanted to know".
Emily chooses that moment to stick her head through my open door and say
"I think we can cross it, as much as I know you want to drive pretty boy, it'll be a lot safer if I take the wheel so..." she makes a backwards motion with her thumb and I dive into the back seat as she waits for me to put my seat belt on before continuing along the crappy crater filled road.
KATRIN'S P.O.V
Spencer Reid is insane, With his statistics and knowledge he is completely insane and I love it.
But when I asked him whether he'd gone through some kind of trauma something flashed through his chocolate eyes. Something heavier than pain.
We arrive at the crime scene and jump out of the car, the heel of my boot causing me to slip in the mud and slam into Spencer who has stopped abruptly in front of me while walking towards the crime scene tape wrapped around the trees.
He grabs my arm and pulls me back up from my awkward half falling position
"You okay?" he asks, concern lacing his voice
"Yeah, my shoes aren't though" I say, looking at my mud covered boots and chuckling a little.
Prentiss is already talking to a detective when we reach her, asking questions about the bodies.
"Oh, um, Detective Erwin this is Dr.Spencer Reid and Dr.Katrin Coleman" Emily says and we both wave and nodpolitely before Spencer looks around and says
"Can you show us the bodies please?"
"Right this way"
Prentiss stays back to question some of the detectives and we go on ahead.
My knees begin to shake about ten meters from where I can see a massive trench dug into the earth and I stopwalking, standing so still I wonder if I'm actually frozen in time.
"Katrin?" Reid turns to look at me with a worried expression on his face.
Inhale, Exhale, Inhale, Exhale.....
He places his hands gently on my shoulders and looks down at me.
I must be about seven inches shorter than him, just short enough to be looked down at when he speaks
"Come on Katrin, it's okay"
I just shake my head and swallow hard, I feel like I might puke all over his shoes otherwise
"Spencer I don't think I can do this job" I confess quietly and he tilts my head with his hand so I have no choice but to look directly up at him
"Of course you can" he tells me
"No I can't, everyone expects me to fail" I whisper.
Reid turns his head to face detective Erwin
"Could you please inform agent Prentiss I had to take Coleman for a drive because she wasn't feeling well but will be back in about an hour?" he asks and Erwin nods curtly before slowly moving away.
"I'm gonna take you away from here for a while and then when we get back we're gonna look at the crime scene and-"
"Catch the son of a bitch who did this"
We give each other weak smiles before walking back towards where we'd parked the SUV, Reid in the driver's seat (which isn't such a scary thought till he begins driving) and me in shotgun.
"No more bridges?" I ask as he turns the key in the ignition
"No" he promises, "No more bridges".
===========================================================================================
After a while of driving through the winding bumpy road in silence Spencer looks at me as we go through yet the fiftieth pothole today
"Why did you ask me about trauma?"
"Huh?" I mumble because I barely even caught a snippet of what he'd said
"Back at the bridge" Spencer says looking back at the road, "you asked whether the scars left by trauma ever go away. Why?"
"No reason" the lie rolls off my tongue easily and I feel my stomach flip as we move around a bend.
Silence.
"You said yes when I asked if you'd ever experienced trauma, why?" I finally say
"I'll tell you if you tell me" he counters
"I asked because I wanted to know how long it's going to be before I can close my eyes again, your turn"
"Let's play twenty questions"
"What, that game we used to sit in a circle and have fun playing in kindy?"
"Yeah only different, let's get to know each other".
I raise an eyebrow at him
"Okay then, what is there to know about the oh so mysterious Dr.Spencer Reid?"
"Well that depends. What is there to know about you?"
"What do you wanna know?"
I know this is probably a bad idea, I really do, but I want to get to know him.
In fact, maybe a small part of myself has begun to like him in some way.
"Okay, how old are you?" he asks
"Twenty five, you?"
"Thirty one, favorite food?"
"Coffee, you?"
"Same, any family?".
It feels like someone plunged a knife into my chest and is twisting it around repeatedly
"My Dad died when I was ten and my mom and my little sister died two years ago"
"Sorry. My mom's schizophrenic and my dad left when I was ten and I had to care for her. I admitted her into the Bennington Sanitarium when I was eighteen though, I still feel guilty about it.... Does that make me a bad person?" his eyes flash with hurt and I shake my head.
"No, not at all. You did the right thing for you and that's what she'd have wanted... have you ever had a girlfriend?"
Real pain registers on his face and I know I've turned a bad situation into a shit one
"Once. Only ever once, her name was Maeve, she was a geneticist and we only ever got to talk over the phone and through letters because she had a stalker..... turns out her stalker was woman called Dianne Turner who was angry because Maeve rejected her thesis at a college so Dianne kidnapped Maeve and committed murder suicide. I watched her get killed and I couldn't do anything about it"
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked.... I've never had a boyfriend, ever in twenty five years"
"Hey why'd you freak out back at the crime scene?"
"It's just... they were kids, they didn't deserve to die. I mean I was almost killed when I was 22 but four? I'd give up my life if that little girl got to have her's back".
It's a very heavy topic of conversation to be having parked in front of a rain forest.
"Hey Spence?"
"Yeah?"
"You said you like coffee right?"
"Ten points to Colemandoor for remembering, why?"
"When we get home do you wanna go get coffee somewhere, I mean you don't have to and it'd be nothing but a... friendly gesture. We could talk more over coffee than we can sitting in a parked car"
a spark of something- excitement? surprise?- registers in his eyes and he nods
"Yeah, coffee sounds nice... Hey Coleman?"
"Yeah?"
"You think you're ready to go back now?"
"Yeah, let's go kick some ass".
He laughs quietly and I laugh too, feeling my whole body tingle with warmth.
Damn it Katrin, it's only a friendly gesture, nothing more... besides, when did a guy ever look at you like that?
I look over at Spencer briefly and smile, he smiles back.
Since then....
A/N: Hello Reiders, hooollly crap it took me ages to write this so I hope you enjoyed it ~ X's & O's, Spencer-the-kat :)
P.S: OMFG THIS TOOK SO LONG TO EDIT!!!!!!!!!!