The answer: Meh yeah. Demo made this thing, I watched Demo’s thing, which made me watch all of this mecha on fish action thing, and now I’m glad I watched the thing. I’m going kinda dumbass Inception here, but my point is Demo made a good case for Blue 6. and I recommend watching it too.
Reid is understandably befuddled when Elle Greenaway begins making sudden appearances in his life. At first he thinks he's hallucinating, but then a case from the other side of the country catches his attention.
Time to sleep now;
Time to sink way into the blue, dear.
He hadn't seen Elle in over a week. They'd returned from Washington with decidedly mixed feelings about the case: they'd caught the UNSUB, but only five bodies had been recovered, and Elle Greenaway's wasn't one of them. They also didn't know for sure if seven were Novak's actual victim count, as the man still remained cagey about it. Of course they were all glad he was off the street (and out of the parks), but they couldn't shake a lingering sense of things left undone.
He still didn't understand what Elle had meant when she'd said she'd come to help him find himself. He tried to put it out of his mind; it was a cryptic, schmaltzy thing for her to have said, and he thought she'd done it only to annoy him. Spencer Reid knew perfectly well who he was: FBI agent, child prodigy, Star Trek fan, nerd incarnate—though the latter had never bothered him as much as it seemed to bother other people.
Reid, in an attempt to find a bit of closure for both Elle and the team, had planned a small memorial for their former colleague. It wasn't much, just the team together at their favorite bar knocking back drinks and swapping stories about the woman they'd known so briefly. Stories about Elle had segued into stories about Gideon, and those had segued into Rossi regaling them with tales of the BAU's earliest days, when they'd occupied the "dungeon" at Quantico, and everyone had regarded profilers as either quacks or snake oil salesmen.
She'd been there, he had noted, watching them in wistful silence. He had wished she could sit down at the table with them, but he'd known she wouldn't have even if she were actually there in the flesh. She'd looked wispy, he had thought, a bit more like he'd always imagined a ghost would look. He had seen her smile when Hotch told Rossi and Prentiss about how she'd sometimes called Gideon "Dad," and how Gideon had hated it. He had watched her brush her fingers across her cheek as JJ stood to make a toast; searching for tears, he'd thought, or wiping away the ones that should have been there.
That was the last time he saw her. He was a bit disappointed by the cliché of it all: she'd haunted him, they'd found her killer, held a memorial for her…and now she'd found closure and moved on. He shouldn't miss her; it was ridiculous to do so. How often had he missed her in the years since she'd left the BAU? Hardly at all, and it made him feel like a hypocrite.
These were the things he pondered as he sat alone in his dark apartment. Part of him wished for Dilaudid, but it was a dim, distant pulse of want, and not enough to prompt him to call his sponsor or seek out a meeting. What would he say, anyway? "My former colleague has been haunting me for the past six weeks, but now she seems to be gone. It's weird, but I kinda miss her. What step does that fall under?"
He opted instead to take a hit from the demitasse cup warming his hand. Garcia and Prentiss had given him a fancy espresso machine for his last birthday, and at first he'd found the thing confounding and frightening; he'd used it to store stacks of bills and other clutter. One night, after an especially long and grueling case, he'd unearthed it determined to decode its buttons, levers and switches. He still refused to steam milk (the first try had been a disaster he didn't care to repeat), but he did enjoy the dense, bittersweet shots of espresso it dispensed into the tiny cups JJ had given him as a companion gift.
"Why is it always so dark in here?"
Her sudden appearance, as though he'd conjured her, made him start in surprise and nearly spill his small cup of coffee. "Why do you insist on doing that? Does it give you some sort of ghostly thrill to scare the pants off me?"
She smirked, the expression barely perceptible in the faint light. "Next time I'll rattle my chains on the way in. But if I'm disturbing your quiet contemplations, Dr. Reid—"
"No," he interrupted hastily, "don't go. I thought you weren't coming back." He reached out and pulled the cord on a nearby lamp. Golden light illuminated chest high stacks of books, knee high stacks of VHS tapes (Morgan despaired of ever converting him to DVDs; he also had an aversion to both CDs and MP3s and kept his music on vinyl or cassette), and various scattered piles of papers, files and old mail.
The cracked vinyl sofa didn't creak as Elle shifted her weight, and he couldn't feel her movement the way he had been able to before. "I almost didn't. I figured we'd…said what we had to say, and I should just go."
"So what happened?"
She hitched a shoulder. "I changed my mind. You know, you should really think about hiring a maid."
"There's a system. A maid would just mess it up."
She rose with a slight sigh and began circling the room. No papers fluttered as she passed, and unlike with the pile of newspapers in his bedroom, none of the stacks of books seemed to be in danger of toppling. She stopped at a plant, a spider plant in a blue pot, and tugged at one of the brown leaves. "Poor thing. It's as dead as I am."
"I kept forgetting to water it," he admitted. "And then with all the traveling I do…." He trailed off with a guilty little quirk of his lips. "I should throw it out, I guess."
"That memorial thing was nice," she said after a few moments' silence.
"It was nothing."
"No, it wasn't. It was nice. I didn't realize any of you even thought about me anymore."
He opened his mouth but found nothing to say. Feeling foolish, he closed it again.
"Prentiss seems like a good agent. And Rossi; I've read his books. You guys are all really good together."
"I…Elle…why are you here?" It came out ruder than he intended, but he was growing weary of these meandering, non sequitur filled conversations.
She turned to him; she looked a little lost. "To say goodbye, I guess. But I don't really want to. I'd rather just go. We don't really need each other anymore, and…." Suddenly she smiled. "I'm glad you found him. He was already hunting someone else, and it was really pissing me off."
"Why do you say that?"
"Um? Because he's a killer, and I—"
"No," he said with a wave of his hand, "not that part. Why do you say we don't need each other anymore?"
"Oh…well. You found him. He's going to jail and all that good stuff."
"Right, OK, that's why you don't need me anymore, but…maybe I do still need you. Maybe…?" He turned the cup around and around in his hand, swirling the dark liquid inside and avoiding her steady gaze.
Her smile deepened to reveal the dimple in her cheek. "You never needed me, Reid. That's the point. Besides," she said, nodding toward the door, "you have them."
And all of this life
Moves around you;
For all that you claim you're standing still,
You are moving too.
The chime of his doorbell forestalled what he might've said next, and when his head rose with an astonished snap, she was already gone. For good this time, he thought. The bell went again, more insistently, and he set the cup aside to go answer.
"Hello, my pretty young genius!" Garcia crowed through the small crack between door and jamb. "Open up and let us in!"
"Us?" he echoed blankly.
JJ's bright head appeared around Garcia's shoulder. "It's cold out here, Spence, and I'm hungry. Open up."
Wide-eyed, he closed the door to unhook the chain. Garcia and JJ. OK, he could handle them; they probably wouldn't stay long anyway.
"I brought take out from that Indian place you like," Garcia said as she plowed past him. "I hope I got enough for everyone."
"Everyone who?" he asked. They ignored him.
JJ offered him a smile and a Tupperware container. "I made cookies for Will's birthday, and I had a bunch left over. I thought you might like some."
Thoroughly nonplussed, he started to close the door behind them, but it was pushed open before he had the chance.
"I brought wine and soda," Prentiss said. "The soda's for you."
"Um…?"
"Hey, kid, what's up? Garcia told me we were havin' Indian food." Morgan stripped off his scarf and coat and hunted for a place to hang them. "Anything like a coat rack around here?"
"The, uh." He shook his head. "Just throw them on the couch, I guess."
"Reid," Rossi said with a nod as he followed Morgan through the door. "I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by to borrow that book we were talking about last week. You remember the one."
"What…?"
Hotch's head popped through the open door. "Reid, good, you're home. I thought I'd return that movie you loaned me."
"That was six months ago, Hotch."
"Better late than never. Do I smell curry?" He rubbed his hands together and his olive eyes brightened in anticipation.
Reid watched his colleagues flood into his small, crowded apartment with a furrow of consternation across his brow. Garcia and JJ were busy in the kitchen gathering plates and utensils; Prentiss was pouring wine and soda for everyone; Rossi and Hotch were trying to figure out his book sorting system; and Morgan was plugging some contraption into his TV.
"A DVD player," he said in answer to Prentiss' questioning look. "I brought the Die Hard movies. I thought we could have a John McClane marathon."
"Die Hard," Garcia said with a wrinkled nose as she poked her head through the kitchen pass through. "I hate those. Too many explosions."
"That's what makes it art, Garcia."
"I could go for some Die Hard," Rossi said. "I can't find that book anyway."
"Jack's with Jessica," Hotch said. "Garcia, did you bring any lamb tikka masala?"
"But of course, my fearless leader. I also brought tandoori chicken, curried tofu, spice-rubbed—"
"Guys!" Reid cried.
The room went still. Six faces turned toward him.
"What are you all doing here?" he demanded.
Garcia smiled; carefully navigated the room and gave him a gentle pat on the cheek. "We came to see you, of course. We were worried."
"I'm fine. You didn't need—"
"Yeah, we did," Morgan said. "The case was weird for all of us, Reid, but we couldn't help but notice how it affected you."
"We thought it wouldn't be a bad idea if we spent some time together. Just as, you know, a family," JJ said with a gesture that encompassed the whole group.
He bit his lip; his eyes found the dead spider plant in the corner and stayed locked on it. "She never really was part of the family, was she?" he asked softly.
"She didn't try to be," Morgan said, an unexpected gentleness tingeing his voice.
"It was a bit different then," JJ said. "In her defense, things were different."
"She wasn't ready to come back," Reid said. "She shouldn't have come back yet. And then that case…."
"We couldn't make that decision for her, Reid," Hotch said. "She made her choice, then and later. These days I'd like to think we're there for each other, and something like that wouldn't happen again."
Prentiss put a cup of sweet, fizzy liquid in Reid's hand and offered him a small, sad smile. "We're here now," she said. "None of us have to be alone like that again."
He knew she wasn't talking about Elle, and he managed to meet her smile with a wavering one of his own. As though coming to a decision—or a realization—he knocked back the drink in a few swallows. "Morgan, unhook that thing; we're not watching Die Hard. Rossi, the book you want is in the third stack from the door, second one down; blue cover. Hotch, you returned that movie last month, remember? Garcia, um, after we eat, maybe you could show me how to steam milk on the espresso machine?"
She nodded, pigtails bobbing. "Sure, I—"
"I refuse to sit through any of this science nerd crap you've got around here, Reid, so unless you're hiding a stash of real movies somewhere…yippee-ki-yay," Morgan interrupted with a scowl.
Good-natured squabbling—interrupted by Rossi's exclamation as he found the book and then toppled the stack in his attempt to retrieve it—broke out in a homey, familiar cadence. Garcia tugged Reid toward the kitchen, fussing about the mess, and he found the he was smiling in spite of himself.
He paused on the way to the kitchen to nab the dead plant. Tossed it into the trashcan and felt a weight slide off him. With a relieved sigh, he stood straighter than he had in months. Elle was gone, and nothing was going to bring her back. Gideon, too. But the team—his family—was here, together, and life carried on.
When I sink my teeth into the concept of beauty
I’m always left to wonder whether the taste of it
Is as subjective as carrots or sprouts
To a seven year old
Or whether the palate needs to be trained
To recognise the finer overtones and underlines
That I see now
In you
