Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).
I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.
Edit: this post is blowing up so I’m gonna shamelessly plug my art account. Follow me and I’ll draw the Godzilla lesbians @thenonbinaryfriendnamedcrumb
2nd edit: Yes. Female friends dance with eachother. But why can’t they be lesbians?? I’ve seen people on this website ship two men for astronomically less.
Summary: Spencer worries he talks too much, and you let him know that's not the case, all whilst realising that maybe you're a little obsessed with him.
Word count: 3.2k
Warnings/tags: fluff!! also a little bit of angst, head over heels reader, mention of crime, zoning out, confronting the issue, kinda sadness.
Author notes
╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ Hiyaa! This is my first ever fic that I have written, and I won't lie, I'm shitting myself posting this...
I really hope you guys like it and you decide to repost. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments, and I would be really grateful for any feedback. ❀˖°
I wrote this listening to Strangers by Ethel Cain, and so I tried to write it in that vibe, if it makes sense??
Spencer didn’t know how to stop talking most of the time, well, he did in ways, but he never knew when he was saying too much. You realised that from pretty early on, when you tracked the hand movements he made when he was given the opportunity to talk about something he knew pretty much everything about, when you saw the furrow in his brows, the small wrinkle that formed between them when he realised no one was listening to anything he was rambling on about.
Today was no different in that regard, the buzzing of the precinct's fridge in the corner was a faint song in your ears as Spencer went on about the diversity of toast or something another. Not even five minutes ago, a lone male officer came up to the small open-plan kitchen in the far corner of the Oregon precinct, where you and Spencer were currently sitting at the small wooden table closest to the back wall.
You had been tapping the blunt tip of your pencil against the dense pile of victim files on the table in front of you when you’d picked up on the sound of very irritating chewing and lips smacking. And sure enough, when you glanced to the right, the frowning face of the said officer was munching on some toast whilst peaking over at both of you. That then triggered a non-stop ramble from Spencer.
“-for example, the French have pain grillé, the British have beans on toast, Australians popularised avocado toast, and in Japan they often put thick-cut milk bread in a toaster and top it with things like condensed-”.
He does that small thing with his hands again, holding them in front of him and moving them every which way to emphasise his point. Who knew someone could speak highly of toast?
You watch his movements, not missing the way his eyes have a small squint when he talks about ‘beans on toast’. You knew he really disliked the taste of beans; he couldn’t handle the smell of them, let alone the texture of the squishiness he felt very uncomfortable bringing up in passing conversation.
You hadn’t noticed you’d been full-blown staring at his face, observing every emotion that passed. You blink, clearing the thick fog in your mind and bringing yourself to the present, too a world that didn’t just revolve around his hazel eyes and his soft breath that would bring goosebumps up your arm when he got too close. The sound of Spencer talking falls flat until it stops completely mid-sentence. You look up to him, curious as to why the loud silence brought a burning feeling to your skin, a sort of humiliation. When you lift your head, Spencer narrows his glance, his brows knitting as he watches the surely very red blush rise to your cheeks.
Oh, it looks so weird! You were staring at him, dipshit, of course he thinks you're some sort of weirdo.
“I'm sorry- my mind was occupied” Your palms turn sweaty, and you feel the need to explain yourself so you don’t look like you were just sitting there admiring Spencer with total heart eyes. Maybe it looked like that, or maybe it didn’t, but the realisation that it damn sure felt like that was what you were doing started causing a strange feeling in your chest, the likes of pulling knots. “Just zoned out”, you add.
You look to your side, taking your attention off Spencer for the first time in a few minutes. The bushy eyebrows of the officer are pulled tight, glancing between both of you. He shakes his head and walks away without a word. Infact you don’t think you heard a single word from him this whole time.
Was Spencer really sitting there for ten minutes expressing his fondness for toast without anyone really listening or adding to his words? You were sitting there with your mind elsewhere, and the officer was standing there, half-eaten slice of toast in his wrinkled hand, just staring at Spencer with a look in his eyes that you're sure spoke the words behind them. Something like ‘Is he wired by AI?’ or ‘Is he real?’.
The murmur of the police station comes back to you, the mumbled and tangled parts of you soothed by the sound you're so used to that it gives you a sense of comfort. You pick up the pencil you left lying on top of your notebook and open the current victim file you're going through and taking notes of.
You noticed earlier that Spencer had gone through five of the victim files and written detailed notes on all of them at the same time that you had gone through one. You had given him three of the files on your side of the table, and with no surprise, they were in the ‘done and noted’ pile in the middle.
“Do you think I talk too much?” Spencer interjects the sound of your pencil against the rough notepad paper.
His voice is airy as the question leaves his lips, like it was something he had been meaning to ask for a while but held back until it ate at him, and came out with asking for his permission first.
“I think that you will get a different answer from everyone if you were to ask.” You tuck your hair behind your ear and continue, the question coming from Spencer oddly hurts, everyone knows he talks alot but have we really made him feel like that? The guilt settles in your stomach, unease tying tight pretty bows of ribbon against your bones, bows that scrape against your insides when you so much as breathe.
“I think sometimes it gets on people's nerves, but I also think that it does more good than anything," you reason. “I learn something every day because of it, even when I zone out, I somehow subconsciously take home new information. I mean, before the other day, I didn’t even know that frog extract-”
“-Their stomach to clean it, because they are incapable of throwing up”, Spencer finishes the sentence before you have the chance to, his eyes light up like he’s surprised that you remembered such a thing. “It’s called gastric eversion”
He sits up straighter, a smile tugs at the corner of his lips, and the metaphoric ribbons around your bones ease at the sight. “Did you know that sea cucumbers- creatures related to sea stars in ways- can eject their intestines out of their rear as self-defence to tangle up and frighten anything they seem a threat?”
You blink and shake your head, “And I thought the frog thing was weird”
⏔⏔⏔ ꒰ ᧔ෆ᧓ ⏔⏔⏔
The team was currently in the field, Emily and Morgan headed to the last known crime scene following the brutal murder of a young girl in her home in north Oregon. Hotch, Rossi and JJ were… You didn’t really know where; you had zoned out halfway into the team briefing, a bad habit of yours that Hotch and Spencer had brought up more than once.
You and Spencer were still at the Oregon precinct and were given the task of geographic profiling- two hours in, and you felt like your knees were going to give out based on the shaking that crept up your body. It turns out that standing still for a couple of hours when you're given a whiteboard pen, a whiteboard and a list of possible old cases that were linked to the current one, does in fact hurt after a while.
“Garcia, darling, I have narrowed it down to five possible past crimes based on the VICAP hits you gave me. I’ve just sent you a list of the victims”. You wipe down the whiteboard with a cloth as Spencer writes down all the information we came up with on paper.
He’s half stood up and half hunched over the table as he quickly writes in handwriting you would say was unreadable, but he has said more than once that- ‘Messy handwriting can happen when someone’s brain processes ideas faster than their hand can physically write them down.’
“Garcia, if you could go through all of the victims, old and new and look for any connections.” He tilts his head up, taking his focus off the page in front of him as he talks to the phone placed on the large table in the middle of the room. “Workplace, friends of the family- anything that tells us they crossed paths with each other”.
“Anything for you two. I will let you know if I come across anything,” Penelope responds before the small beep.
You pull out one of the chairs tucked under the table and sit down, sighing in relief as your legs get the rest they so desperately need. Spencer is back to hunching over and scribbling on the paper in front of him; he seems like his mind is working in its genius ways. His eyes are furrowed as his mind goes a million, his handwriting barely keeping up with his thoughts.
The front piece of hair slips from its place and dangles between his eyes; he seems to pay no attention towards the brunette curl. You are aware of it as it sways when his hand moves across the page. It's not your face it’s hanging in front of and yet you have an urge to brush it out of the way of the face it is.
Before you make the stupid decision of reaching across the table and fixing it yourself, Spencer does it for you, standing up and brushing it out of his face with his fingers. That small curl in the front of his face, the one that always does that, it’s your favourite piece of hair on his head. It’s probably not normal to have a favourite hair strand when it comes to your colleague, but you do.
He came into work last week with his new ‘boyband’ hair, as Hotch called it, and since the hair change, the strand has made more of an appearance. The tip aways curls to the right, dangling in front of his eye more times than it's ‘in place’.
“You okay?” Spencer asks with a small hint of worry written over his face when he looks your way.
You nod, blinking quickly to get a hold of yourself. “Yeah, im- im just really out of it today”
“Are you sure you're okay because you don’t seem very with it and-” Spencer starts.
“I'm fine”, You cut him off with a tone that makes his voice flatter. You hadn’t meant to come across hostile, but the moment you register how your tone came out, your body heats up. You open your mouth to apologise, but Spencer's mind works faster than your voice does.
“You’ve been zoning out a lot today”, He fiddles with the pen in his grip, his fingers moving it around his hand “It’s a mild dissociative response- your brain is trying to reduce cognitive overload by temporarily desengaging you from your surroundings. It’s actually pretty common when someone is under a lot of stress or processing so much information at once”
Spencer studies your expressions, ready for you to tell him something he’s heard too many times from those around him. He waits for you to say something about not needing to know, or about how that’s an unnecessary amount of information.
“You're not talking too much”, your voice speaks the soft, honeyed words of reassurance.
His earlier worries about speaking too much are still fresh in your mind, and you take the chances to make sure he doesn’t think that when he's around you. Even when your hostile response a few seconds ago spoke differently in a way you didn’t want it to.
His throat bobs, and his expression eases. “It is slightly different when you're zoned out whilst looking at someone, it generally means that you're watching their movements, analysing something, or admiring in some situations”.
His eyes widen slightly, looking like he’s said something wrong, “I'm not saying you were admiring- I- I don't think that's what you were doing. With the way your pupils widen, it was probably analysing me, but you didn’t even realise it” He nods along with the last sentence.
“It probably looked really weird, me just staring at you”, you point out with a small smile, your leg bouncing under the table.
Spencer shakes his head in disagreement, “No, not really. I'm just worried about you”
“You don’t have to be, you just caught me on a bad day”
“I will always worry about you, you're my friend and I - I care”
His words burrow into a deep part of you, finding a comfortable place to lie down and rest. Your heart beats at a faster pace than it did before those words came out of his mouth. You always get emotional when someone you care for deeply expresses such a fondness towards you. A smile tugs at your lips, and a soft heat settles across your face before you can even attempt to hide it.
“Thank you, Spencer”, You whisper before a comforting silence covers the room as you get back to work.
⏔⏔⏔ ꒰ ᧔ෆ᧓ ⏔⏔⏔
The case had wrapped up quicker than they had all expected. Sometimes the pieces fall into place faster than the team expects, and this turned out to be one of those cases.
Emily was bruised up, not badly, but enough that you could hear her hiss every time she moved from the other side of the jet. It was mostly always you tackling down the unsub and causing damage to yourself because you were too stupid to let anyone else get hurt, so you had a good laugh and teased her quite a bit when the team met on the airstrip before take off.
You and Spencer had helped them from over the phone, telling them the information you had found out, and ultimately figuring out where the last victim was being held using geographic profiling and going through the victim's timeline.
You had both shared a moment earlier when you had got the call from Hotch to share that the unsub had been caught and the victim was safe. You had shared a smile from across the table, and the air had changed, an unspoken string between us that pulled in that moment.
The brown noise of the jet had soothed everyone when the flight started. Rossi and Hotch were talking softly to each other at the table to the right of yours.
It was the sound of Rossi checking in on Hotch without trying to make it too obvious, even though Hotch knew that every time Rossi sat next to him on the jet, it would lead to questions about his well-being. They had been doing that a lot recently, following the death of Haley, Hotch’s wife… ex-wife, you suppose?
You slipped your headphones on when they had started talking, overhearing a private conversation about your boss’s mental state felt wrong.
After a few minutes of quietly humming lyrics about ‘leaving your man in the middle of the highway’, your eyes open when you become aware of someone shuffling onto the chair in front of you.
“Hi”, Spencer does his tucked-in straight lip smile as he plants himself down in the white leather seat. He nods his head towards the Sony headphones hanging around your neck. “What were you listening to?”
“Oh- uh, Ethel Cain”
Spencer’s eyebrows raise in response to your answer, “Really?”
You nod with a smile of amusement, “What, do you think little old me doesn’t listen to gut-wrenching songs?”
Spencer huffs out a chuckle, “I didn't say that, it’s just- unexpected”
“Oh yeah? What do you listen to?” You challenge him with an interested tone, raising an eyebrow.
He shrugs, “Not much interesting, mostly classical and jazz. Mozart, Beethoven, Copin- you know the basics”
“I can’t say that's surprising”, you lean your head against the coldness of the plane window.
It’s almost romantic, the way this conversation feels so deeply in your bones. It’s the small breaths between his words in the almost silence, the way his eyes unmistakably sparkle when he holds eye contact with you.
You both know the books someone reads, and the music they listen to hold a meaning towards a person. It’s one of the things that are taught pretty early on in the BAU. Music and books let you look inside a person's mind, and you tend to learn more about them and who they are.
You move your head, no longer resting it against the window as you unzip your backpack on the seat next to you. You slip the headphones off your neck and place them into your bag, and then take out a pair of wireless ones before zipping it up.
Once you’ve moved the backpack onto the floor, you glance up at Spencer again. He was watching your movements with curiosity. Why put your headphones away if you're just going to take more out, with the only difference being the wires?
“Come sit next to me”, you ask, patting the seat on the right of you.
Spencer's eyes widen, and his eyebrows raise. “You- you want me to come and sit next to you?”
As soon as your head moves in a nod, Spencer is out of his seat and making a couple of steps around the table to sit down in the chair next to you. His presence this close to you shouldn’t shock your system as much as it does; you feel goosebumps rise on your arms despite the warmth of the plane.
Spencer gets the idea of what your plan is when he watches your hands move in a way almost described as gently, you press onto Spotify and pull up the artist you mentioned. Ethel Cain.
“It’s clean, they’re new” You hold out the left side of the wired earphones in front of his face, motioning for him to take it.
He picks the song strangers, purely because of the way your mouth turned up into a smile with anticipation when he hovered his finger over the song.
When the lyrics ‘Am I No Good?’ play, and the beat changes, you find the nerves to lean your head down on his shoulder and close your eyes.
You fall asleep with the soulful sound of the song in one ear, whilst the other ear picks up the commentary of Spencer as he talks to Morgan.
“You know, eyewitness testimony is one of the least reliable forms of evidence, right? Memory isn’t like a recording device—it’s reconstructive. Every time someone recalls an event, their brain slightly-”
The pitch of his voice goes up when he talks about something he is interested in. You can hear the excitement he’s trying hard not to show too much. You fall asleep on his shoulders to the sound of Ethel Cain, but Spencer's voice is what lulls you under.
⏔⏔⏔ ꒰ ᧔ෆ᧓ ⏔⏔⏔
You go home with a lot of information that day, but the most prominent piece of information that seems to make its self know with a burn in your chest, is that your favourite song is Spencer Reid rambling. And you know no other feeling better than hearing the joy that fills his words when he spends half an hour being a genius by sharing all his information on a topic he knows everything about.
