Left alone with Spencer, you reluctantly share more about the victims and about yourself. Your unexpectedly intimate conversation blurs professional boundaries and deepens your mutual curiosity. As admiration and suspicion become entangled with one another, Spencer offers you reassurance where you’ve learned to expect doubt.
Word count: 2.3K
masterlist
Warnings: murder, strangulation, sexual assault, drug use/addiction, alcoholism, depression, suicide, disordered eating, child physical and emotional abuse, homophobia, religious trauma
A/n: much less plot-heavy and mostly just them yapping
MINORS DNI
“Well,” you start, feeling awkward being alone with him, “I hope you got what you wanted.”
Spencer fails to hold back a laugh, “I mean you didn’t give me much to work with. Or honestly really anything at all to work with.”
You have been nothing but difficult with him, so he can’t fully rationalize why he wasn’t upset with you.
Smaller, far more insignificant things than being obstructed in a murder investigation have caused him to so easily snap before. But he is just intrigued by you.
You, who like science fiction. Who skipped grades and is the youngest in her year. Who takes extra classes for fun. And yet somehow did not draw the ire of her peers. More than that, they truly seemed to like you.
He should be jealous of you. Bitter. Angry that your life here was so far from the reality he had experienced. But he was happy for you. Impressed.
“What did you even need from me anyway?” You halt his train of thought, “I have no idea who is doing this and I don’t know how I could help,” you grumble.
He can sense the fear underneath your anger.
“We just need an idea of who your friends were. People,” he very carefully does not use the word ‘victims’, “can be targeted for a variety of reasons, and learning about who they were could help us figure out if they shared anything in common, which we could then backtrack to find out not only why the killer chose them, how he found them, and maybe even who he is going to target next,” he explains.
His words reignite the guilt curling like dark smoke inside your chest. This was your fault. You could have stopped this.
The accusations clang around your head.
You take a deep breath and steel yourself for what you are about to offer when really you should be rushing him out of your bedroom.
“Would it help you to stay here longer talking with just me? I could drive you back there later if your partner has to go now. I have cheer practice later on anyway and the station isn’t too far from the field.”
Spencer is surprised by your offer, and tries not to be too excited by the prospect of spending more time with you, alone, a totally inappropriate feeling, when he accepts your offer to stay back at the sorority house.
After explaining to Derek, he carefully props your bedroom door open as he leaves for good. This leaves the both of you blushing like teenagers. You are finally alone—really alone. But this time it doesn’t take long for the conversation to move past awkward and into comfortable.
He could still sense that you were holding something back, he just couldn’t even pick up a real hint what it was about.
But you seemingly shared an in-depth description of all of the victim’s lives. Better than before.
You only really knew one of the women personally, the most recent one, but due to your involvement in the sorority you knew a decent amount about the second one who was also in a different sorority, Samantha, and still knew about the other two due to the small nature of your college.
You don’t open up easily, not without getting something in return first. He isn’t like the law enforcement officers you know—your father—and you find yourself wanting to understand what he did. What he really did.
Spencer delivers his explanation in record time, falling back on Gideon’s familiar description of the job as being part cop, part psychologist.
To his delight, and his shame that he found delight in this, you don’t spend the whole time talking about the case. He felt like the two of you talked about everything. And nothing. He could barely follow the spontaneous path of your conversation.
You somehow end up talking about philosophy, and you explained why you hate it so much.
“It is just ridiculous!” You start, “It made sense in the time before electricity and when people thought the earth was flat and the configurations of the stars at your birth determined who you are—“ “and some people still believe that,” Spencer points out, to which you roll your eyes and continue your rant as if you weren’t interrupted.
“But here and now in the real world where we know that thoughts are just the summation of neuronal firing in different parts of your brain— that feelings and emotions are just your amygdala, hippocampus, and multiple prefrontal cortex regions working in tandem, and memories are just the entorhinal cortex along with the hippocampus encoding information and storing it in its respective locations throughout the cortex, and the different regions of the frontal lobe all working together are what really forms your personality. There is no reason to subscribe to this woo woo.”
“Woo woo?” Spencer questions with a smile.
“Is mumbo jumbo better?” You ask.
“Sorry I just don’t ascribe to this cartesian dualism separating the mind from the body. The mind is the brain. The brain is the body. That’s it. ‘I think, therefore I am?’ More like ‘I think therefore I am alive with a functioning brain.”
“Is that really all you think we are? Electrical activity?” He questions honestly.
“I’m surprised someone like you doesn’t agree with me on that?”
“And what am I like?” he presses, slightly pleased that you may feel you know him. See him.
“You know..” You vaguely gesture at him.
“Ah ok, yes, that explains it. I hope your papers are filled with better arguments,” he jokes lightly.
Spencer feels more invigorated by your conversation than he has in a very long time. Recently it feels like everyday is a constant struggle, and that every moment of everyday he has to work tirelessly to not think about dilaudid. When he even tries. Which is rarely. But it hasn’t crossed his mind even once since he started talking to you.
“Well, I guess that’s why you are going to fail this class,” he continues.
“Ugh!” You groan, covering your face with your hands. “You’re right. I’m totally screwed.”
“I’m guessing you could fail this class and still graduate with a 4.0, am I right?”
You try, and fail, to hide your smile.
“I could help if you wanted? With your final paper?” He gestures over to your draft laying out in the open on your desk, quickly scanning it.
“I’m not a cheater, and I don’t need any help,” you kindly dismiss him without any venom in your voice.
“Well, it wouldn’t be cheating, I’m definitely not offering to write it for you,” he laughs, “but I could help edit it, and hopefully convince you out of these long tangents attacking the merits of philosophy, which will most certainly make you fail,” he smiles.
You love your friends here. It had been hard adjusting at first, but this time around, you feel like you have crafted the perfect version of yourself. It isn’t fully a lie, and you aren’t hiding too much, and you truly aren’t faking a lot either, but you are just putting forth the best, most acceptable, version of yourself. But that has left a nearly imperceptible barrier between you and the outside world.
And sometimes you feel like even Maddie is on the other side. She has been more successful in this borderline deception and sometimes you envy her for it. But in the past 3 hours, you’ve grown not to feel this way around Spencer.
Has it really been 3 hours?
But then again, maybe you just feel like he knows you because he has a problem with boundaries.
He doesn’t give you a chance to reply, and starts rifling through your desk before you can remember what he might find in there. He pulls out an envelope with Johns Hopkins lettering.
“What’s this?” He muses.
“Give it back!” You quickly snatch it out of your hands, but you don’t realize just how fast he can read.
“You’re going to Johns Hopkins for medical school next year? That’s really impressive,” he genuinely beams at you.
“Can you just keep your voice down, it’s kind of a secret,” you deflect his praise, flushing with embarrassment.
“Why would you have to keep this a secret?” He honestly wonders, confusion creasing his brow.
“You just don’t get how things work here..” You trail off.
“And that’s part of figuring out what’s going on now. Who is doing this. Having a better understanding of this community,” he points out, “and I was hoping you were going to continue helping me with this?”
He knows he is essentially manipulating you. While everything he said was true, he knows deep down that’s not why he wants to know. He just wants to know more about you.
You sigh. “Listen, my…family, would not be supportive of this. On numerous fronts. Leaving. Going to medical school at all. It might not even happen. There’s no way they’ll help me pay for it. It’s only if I truly almost get a full ride that I can go. It’s a major long-shot. I’m not going to be going,” you say with finality.
You chide yourself for your dishonesty. Why are you implying that your family is anything more than you, your father, and the distant memory of your long dead mother?
Spencer can hear how disappointed you are, even though you attempt to cover it with irritation. Another one of your habits.
“Well, it honestly already was a long-shot for you to get in,” you shoot him a glare at this, insecurity barely held back at the best of times and interpreting his statement as questioning your intelligence, but he continues, “I mean seriously! Nothing against you. But you are in an extremely small college, in an extremely small town, deep in Texas, but you got in. Do you know how many applications they get in a year?”
When you shake your head he continues, “well last year there were 5,958 applicants and they only accepted 2%.”
Your eyes widen, “how did you just know that off the top of your head?”
He ignores your question and continues, “so believe me when I’m telling you, the odds already weren’t in your favor, but you made it. So what’s to say that won’t happen again?”
You size him up again. He barely knows you, but he is already more supportive and believes in you more than anyone else you know. Your friends supported you, in their own ways, but they don’t understand how important this was to you. Don’t understand how you could possibly want to leave and not set up roots here with a husband, 2.5 kids, and a dog.
His gaze flickers back to your left wrist, and he decides to test his luck.
“What happened there?” He asks in a way that he hopes is entirely nonthreatening.
Your face becomes guarded again while you tug at the velcro straps of your wrist brace.
“Sprained it. Cheerleading is a lot more dangerous than you might think!” Your smile falls flat and looks more like a grimace.
He hopes that by not pressing you and accepting your obvious lie that he can buy back some of the goodwill he had lost with you by intruding in your space and snooping around your desk.
“Actually,” Spencer begins, “injuries such as sprains are fairly common, accounting for over 65% of cheer-related pediatric office visits, and more serious injuries such as concussions account for almost a third of all cheerleading injuries.”
You give him another appraising look.
You weren’t simple yourself, but you prefer people who were consistent. Who made sense. You still don’t know what to make of him. Unless all of this was part of some elaborate profiling strategy, a long manipulation he hadn’t bothered to disguise, you couldn’t get a read on him at all. One moment he felt like he could be just another classmate in a study group. The next, he was prying open old wounds, pressing for answers he wasn’t prepared for and seemingly oblivious to how dangerous that could be.
He knew he couldn’t stay here with you forever, but when he receives the call from Hotch, summoning him back to the precinct, a wave of disappointment rushes over him.
What is wrong with him?
“No worries, I’ll take you back, and I promise I’m a decent driver” you jokingly reassure him.
As the two of you exit your bedroom, you pass by several of your sorority sisters. Most of them just puffy eyed and flushed, but your cheerleading flyer is still actively crying.
“I’m just freaked out. Sorry” she hurriedly wipes the tears from her face when she meets your gaze.
You pull her into your arms, “don’t be sorry! We’re all freaked out. I’m freaked out.” Spencer is surprised to hear you admit this.
“But everything is going to be okay?” You look at Spencer expectantly, clearly wanting him to reassure you all, but to his dismay he finds he is incapable of sharing any false platitudes with you.
He wishes everything will be okay. That you will all be alright. But he knows that’s not a promise he can be certain of keeping.
He instead pointedly avoids directly answering your question and rambles off statistics about the probability of violent offenders staying in a location after law enforcement has gotten involved, how often and in what time intervals serial killers tend to murder, and how often him and his team are successful in apprehending them before they strike again.
He’s sorry for the disappointed look in your eyes, but the last time he told someone—Tobias Hankel—that his team could save him, could save both of them, it couldn’t have been further from the truth.
The new narrative from crazy goob is that misha knew about the prequel that’s why he does not have a holding contract and was able to do the food show as a side hustle until the Winchester starts filming. 🤪
LMAO!!! Oh Goob, he never disappoints! So now a holding contract is a good thing? Weren't both of Jared's holding contracts bad things because it meant Jared was stuck in one place? Make up your mind, Goob!
Who wants to predict how Goob is going to spin a Walker renewal tomorrow? I know I want Walker and Walker: Independence to be picked up on their own merit, but if that happens and there's no word about The Winchesters... well... Goob being sent into a tailspin would just be icing on the cake!
