somewhere between (part4) spencer reid x reader
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one month later. a quiet morning that doesn't stay quiet. a case that brings booth and brennan to quantico. a name said out loud in a briefing room that changes everything. spencer reid has never been good at hiding things from hotchner.
prompt – worlds colliding, BAU briefing, booth and brennan at quantico, hotch notices everything, the cliffhanger warnings – none word count – 2.8k note – part four of somewhere between - the one we've been building to since the coffee shop
requests are open :)
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the morning starts like the good ones do.
slow. grey light through the gap in the curtains, the particular quiet of early dc before the city remembers itself. ivy is most of the way asleep when spencer's phone goes off — a case notification, she has learned the difference between the sounds by now — and she feels him go from still to awake all at once, like a switch.
he silences it quickly. looks at her.
she keeps her eyes closed.
"i have to go," he says quietly.
"i know."
he's quiet for a moment. she can feel him looking at her the way he does — that careful, complete attention she stopped trying to deflect weeks ago. then he leans down and kisses her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth when she turns toward him.
"i'll call you tonight," he says against her hair.
"you'd better."
she listens to him move around the apartment — the sounds she knows now, the specific rhythm of him getting ready, the coffee he makes even when he's rushing because he cannot function without it — and then the door, soft and careful behind him, and then quiet.
ivy lies there for a moment.
then she gets up and goes to work.
the jeffersonian is already running when she arrives, which is normal. brennan is in early, which is also normal. booth is already there too, which means something has happened, which is becoming its own kind of normal.
"morning tulip," booth says without looking up from the file in his hands.
"morning." she drops her bag at her workstation. "what is it."
"multiple homicide case. dc. the FBI has been working it two weeks and we're hitting a wall." he finally looks up. "we're taking it to the BAU this morning. full consult."
ivy nods, reaching for her coffee. "do you need me to come."
booth and brennan look at each other.
it is a very specific look. the kind they have developed over years of working together, a whole conversation compressed into two seconds.
"not yet," booth says. "we'll present first. but tulip—" he pauses. "the bloodstain evidence on this one is significant. extensive. it's going to come up."
ivy looks at him over her mug. "okay."
"just — be ready," he says. "we might need you this afternoon."
she nods and opens her notes and booth takes his file and leaves, and that is that, and ivy spends the morning working and does not think about the BAU and does not think about the fact that spencer works for the government somewhere in dc doing something that involves working backwards from evidence.
she doesn't think about it.
she is very busy not thinking about it.
quantico — 10:00am
the briefing room is the kind of familiar that stops registering after a while — the table, the screens, garcia's setup, the particular quality of light that makes everything feel slightly more serious than it might otherwise.
the team is assembled when booth and brennan arrive. spencer clocks them in the first second — booth with the energy of someone who has been awake since five, brennan with three files under her arm and the expression of someone who finds the concept of pleasantries mildly inefficient — and then hotch is doing introductions and everyone is sitting down and the case is on the screen.
it is, immediately, significant.
three victims. staged scenes. geographic clustering that suggests intimate knowledge of the area. a level of deliberation that puts the planning phase weeks ahead of the first kill. spencer reads fast, processes faster, and already has four threads he wants to pull before booth has finished the overview.
"the physical evidence is extensive," brennan says, taking over with the ease of someone completely comfortable in any room. "the skeletal trauma on victims two and three tells us specific things about sequence and method which i can walk you through." she clicks through slides, precise and thorough, and spencer watches the team absorb it — morgan leaning forward, prentiss making notes, rossi with that look that means he's already building a picture.
then brennan reaches the crime scene photographs.
spencer sees them and understands immediately why they're here.
the bloodstain evidence is — remarkable. not just in quantity but in complexity. layered patterns, transfer evidence, void patterns that contradict the initial read of the scene entirely. it tells a completely different story from the physical evidence and both stories are happening simultaneously and you would need someone very specific to hold both at once.
"this," brennan says, and there is something in her voice that might, on anyone else, be described as reluctant, "is not my primary area of expertise."
morgan raises an eyebrow. "what is your primary area of expertise."
"forensic anthropology. skeletal analysis. the bones tell me everything i need. but this—" she gestures at the photographs. "this is bloodstain pattern analysis at a level that requires a specialist." she looks at booth.
booth straightens slightly. the way he does when he's about to say something he considers important.
"we have someone at the jeffersonian," he says. "she's a grad researcher, georgetown program, been with us about a year now. bloodstain pattern analysis is her specific focus and she's the best in her field — and i mean that, i've worked with a lot of people and she reads a scene like—" he pauses, searching for the word. "like it's talking to her. bones here agrees and bones doesn't agree with people often."
"that's accurate," brennan confirms, without any particular inflection.
"we'd want her on this," booth continues. "she'd need to come in and look at the evidence directly but based on what we've got here i think she'd have a read within a few hours." he glances around the table. "her name is ivy. ivy senna. she's—"
spencer stops hearing the rest of the sentence.
not because booth stops talking. booth does not stop talking. the briefing continues, perfectly normally, hotch asking something, morgan following up, the case moving forward the way cases do.
but spencer reid is sitting very still at the briefing table with booth's voice continuing somewhere to his left and the name ivy senna sitting in the centre of his chest like something has landed there and he needs a moment to establish what it is.
ivy.
his ivy. who interns at a lab. who does something specific. who had smiled at him in that particular way when he'd said bones and blood tell stories like he'd confirmed something she already knew. who had never pushed him on the details of his work because she understood, instinctively, what it was to have a door you kept closed.
he understands now why she understood.
he looks at the crime scene photographs still on the screen. looks at the complexity of the bloodstain evidence. thinks about a tuesday text about a research paper, methodology in the third section is questionable but the conclusion holds, and how she had asked how have you read that and he had said i read a lot and left the door where it was.
of all the—
he does not finish the thought. he is aware, with the particular hyperawareness of someone who profiles people for a living, that he is sitting at a table with some of the most perceptive people he has ever met and that his face needs to be doing something normal.
he makes his face do something normal.
he looks back at his file.
he turns a page.
across the table, completely without drama, hotch looks at him.
not a long look. not a significant look. just a glance, the kind that could mean nothing, the kind that with hotch never means nothing — a quarter second of eye contact that says, with complete economy, i saw that. i filed it. we'll discuss it never or whenever i decide.
spencer looks back at his file.
"reid." hotch's voice, even. "thoughts on the unsub's geographic comfort zone."
"northeast quadrant," spencer says, and his voice comes out exactly as it should, calm and considered. "the clustering isn't random — the spacing between sites suggests he's operating outward from a fixed anchor point, probably residential, probably somewhere he's lived for at least two years based on the confidence of the escalation pattern." he looks at the map. "he knows these streets. not just the layout — the rhythm of them. when they're busy, when they're not."
hotch nods. moves on.
morgan leans over, quiet. "you good?"
"fine," spencer says. "why."
morgan looks at him with the long-suffering expression of someone who has known him for years and finds him, occasionally, exhausting. "you went somewhere for a second."
"i was thinking about the geographic profile."
"sure you were."
spencer looks back at his file and does not say anything else and morgan, mercifully, lets it go.
booth is still talking. the case is still unfolding. and somewhere across dc, completely unaware, ivy senna is at her workstation at the jeffersonian doing the work that has apparently been sitting one degree of separation from his work for the entire four months he has known her.
he thinks about this morning. her face turning toward him in the grey light. you'd better.
he thinks about a museum on a saturday and arms almost touching.
he thinks about goodnight ivyana and the way she'd gone still.
the briefing continues.
at the end of it, hotch closes the file.
"we'll need your analyst," he says to booth. "this afternoon if possible. we'll come to the jeffersonian." he looks around the table. "we leave at two."
the team begins to move. files closing, chairs pushing back, morgan already on his phone.
spencer sits for a moment with his file open in front of him that he has not been reading for the last forty minutes.
then he closes it.
stands up.
he is almost at the door when hotch says, quietly, not looking up from his own files, "reid."
spencer stops.
hotch still doesn't look up. "are you going to be professional about this."
a pause. not a question about the case. not really.
"yes," spencer says.
hotch turns a page. "good."
spencer walks out.
the jeffersonian — 3:45pm
ivy is at her workstation when booth texts.
BAU is on their way. twenty minutes.
she sets her phone down.
looks at her notes.
looks back at her phone.
she thinks about four months of i work nearby. of i can't be specific. of doors kept carefully closed on both sides and a mutual understanding of why.
she thinks about the BAU.
she thinks about the particular, specific, completely unreasonable possibility that dc is even smaller than she thought.
angela appears at her elbow with the timing she always has.
"you've gone very quiet," angela says.
"i'm thinking."
"about the case?"
ivy looks at her.
angela looks back.
"ivy," she says slowly. "what—"
the doors open.
booth comes through first. then brennan. then a team of people, and ivy is processing, she is good at processing, she does it quickly and professionally and she gets through morgan and prentiss and rossi and jj and then—
spencer.
who stops.
who looks at her across the length of the jeffersonian lab with an expression she has never seen on his face before — not quite surprise, because she doesn't think either of them is entirely surprised, but something more complicated than that, something that looks a little like relief and a little like of course and a little like something she doesn't have a word for yet —
booth looks at ivy.
looks at spencer.
looks back at ivy.
"tulip," he says, very carefully, "do you know this guy?"
ivy looks at booth.
looks at spencer.
spencer, for the first time in four months, has absolutely nothing to say.
which is, ivy thinks, with the particular warmth of someone who has been waiting, a very specific kind of answer.
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