i only dream (when i'm lying down)
relationship: spencer reid x reader, romantic pairing (part one)
summary: you're an agent of the violent crimes division of the fbi and you’ve fallen in love with spencer reid.
notes: part two! also posted on my AO3 account, kitkat_katsuki
warnings: vague mention of dead body (the shooter) and mild use of firearms
part one -> part two
you don’t shake hands. it’s a thing you’ve had since childhood— an aversion to touch and skin to skin contact. it’s stupid, you know, but everytime you go to peel off your gloves another statistic goes clicking through your head (a study conducted by researches at the institute of biological, environmental and rural sciences at aberystwyth university showed that a handshake passed about 124 million colony forming units of e-coli) and you’re pulling back your palm to wipe nervously on the hem of your shirt.
it’s been interpreted a lot of ways. a sense of superiority, some propose. others spit about a god complex, or just a plain old lack of basic etiquette. it doesn’t help that immediately after you’re proudly introduced as a “genius” by your ssa, left to stand there awkwardly while stevens brags about your iq (192), how fast you can read (30,000 words per minute), or your photographic memory (eidetic, you’re always itching to correct).
but you’re used to it. before your mother passed, she used to pull you tight at night and work her hands into your neck, whispering about how you were perfect just the way you were. it wasn’t your fault people got threatened when confronted with someone they perceived to be above them. it didn’t stop the harsh, barbed words that would always be hurled at you, but it did soften the blow.
your mother had always said you were meant for greater things than your dinged up apartment in la and your run down elementary school. she’d urged you time and time again to go where your brilliant mind was taking you, but you always turned her down. just because you could memorize a dictionary in seven minutes didn’t mean you couldn’t enjoy the fifth grade.
when she got stabbed for refusing to give over her purse in a mugging (and subsequently bled out over the dirty pavement, screaming and alone) you cried for the first time in years. you’d never been one to cry— your father had beat it into you long ago before your mother had managed to whisk you away half across the country. you gave yourself forty eight hours. then you dried your cheeks and took a placement test.
the administrator had been shocked, at first. you knew you had aced it. it hadn’t been that hard. when she had told you with slightly shaking hands that she recommended skipping you all the way to highschool (college was on the table too, she said, but you just shook your head. that was a bit too far of a jump). she enrolled you into your senior year of highschool, and you had rocked back on your heels with a satisfied grin. it was a tribute to your mother, you told yourself. one day you were going to stand at the top of the world and you were going to be able to tell her that you had let your brilliant mind take you all the places she had told you about. (of course, she hadn’t mentioned some things.)
you got thrown into a locker the first day of school. they were seventeen, going on eighteen— you were eleven. as smart as you were, it wasn’t hard to put together the conclusion that harassment like this was always going to be inevitable. unavoidable.
you’d swing by the drug store on the way back from school, buy a tiny tube of concealer to dab on in the denny’s bathroom before heading back to the “flavor of the month” foster home. you got bounced around a lot. couldn’t blame them.
you were three months into your senior year when you met austin. she was pretty. long, auburn hair and natural make up. high cheekbones and sharp, angular lines that made up her face. she told you she had lost her parents young, and she fostered to give other kids the childhood she never had. you didn’t trust her. you never trusted anyone.
she was, surprisingly, the first one who finally got a clue. it doesn’t match your skin tone, she’d told you, rubbing the concealer off your face with a wet rag. you didn’t flinch away from her touch and she smiled all soft at you. she was alright, you guess.
austin offered to step in. she might not be your actual parent, she had vowed, but she could make hell in the school system until those kids were reprimanded. you had laughed, assured her it was fine. it wasn’t, but this was one of those things you had to deal with yourself.
she’d been frustrated, but understood. after a couple more days of you coming back a little rough around the edges, though, she had snapped— and offered to teach you how to fight. you had accepted. seemed like a valuable skill to have, didn't it?
austin owned a gym a twenty minute drive from your house. the mats in there quickly became a safe space for you, a shelter of training and quiet and peace. you took to taekwondo immediately, transitioning from there into hapkido and jiu-jitsu, muay thai and just about anything else you could get your hands on. your frame began to fill in with wiry muscle and you began to catch the punches before they hit you.
after you beat harry summers into a bloody pulp by the water fountain after he tried to reach a hand up your skirt, people began to back off. you’d been suspended for five weeks but austin had squeezed your shoulder proudly on the way to the car. you’d let her. she would adopt you five months, three days, four hours and thirty two seconds later. (an eidetic memory did have its perks.)
the fbi recruited you when you were fifteen and at mit, hacking their servers on a drunk dare. you had done it after eight shots, and they had never been more delighted to their code so mercilessly destroyed.
they couldn’t take you on as an agent until you were of age, so you stayed a shadowed consultant for the three years, sorting through case files between lectures and research papers.
you signed away your life to them when you were eighteen and got a badge and a gun in exchange. it was an even trade, you mused. (the first time you would fire that gun you were quivering and bloody, beaten and scratched, but your hands were steady when you pulled the trigger. grayson davids, a serial murderer, died that day. when you got to hug a mother and tell her the man who had taken her daughter would never hurt anyone again, you found that you didn’t regret it.)
austin would always force you home on weekends. she’d moved to dc to be closer to you, and you would spar for old times sake in the living room, tackling each other over pillows and chasing around the kitchen counter. you found that you loved her, one rainy saturday when you were 19. you called her mom for the first time a week later, and you both cried.
you met penelope garcia at a party and you were instantly enraptured. technology seemed to bow to her will and you’d spent the entire night together, drinking and laughing and dancing. you kissed her in the bathroom and she’d sighed all pretty, leaning forward to snake a hand around your neck.
you’d left the party happy and floating for the first time in years. (though you loved penelope to pieces, you two had parted as friends that night.)
she’d often call you with questions or invite you over with movie nights, though you’d always end up bent over a computer with her, nudging each other and laughing as your fingers flew over the keys. she never asked about your job. you never asked about hers. it was widely understood that penelope garcia’s house was a serial-killer free space.
at least, it had been until she’d gotten shot on the steps of her apartment. you’d gotten a call from her late the next day, and you had flown into a nervous panic. you couldn’t lose her– couldn’t bare to lose anyone ever again. at the hospital, she’d held your hands and cried into your arms, and assured you that there would be police outside of her house. you had dismissed that, offered to stay over, but apparently a member of the fbi had already beat you to it.
you’d asked her if she trusted him. she’d responded, “with my life.”
so you had relented. gone home, took your phone off of silent, set it right next to your bed. she didn’t call, so you assumed everything was alright. (it wasn’t).
the next day you swung by her office with a jar of peanut butter cookies to leave on her desk. she loved them, and you’d figured it was a nice thing to come back to.
instead you found a police officer with a gun pressed to the temple of an fbi agent, and two men from penelope’s team standing in front of him, hands raised. you recognized him from a sketch an artist had made penelope complete the other day at the hospital. you shot him in the back of the head, bullet shattering the glass.
the room was silent. the man was dead. your hands, as always, were steady.
(you would meet spencer reid exactly twenty five minutes and thirteen seconds later.)