Landlocked Blues - Part One, for kyrdwyn, Rossi/Reid, FRM/R (original) (raw)

Title: Landlocked Blues – Part One
Author: ???
Recipient: kyrdwyn
Pairing: Rossi/Reid
Rating: FRM/R
Word Count: ~ 18,600
Warnings/spoilers: Swearing (a lot), sexual references, angst, humor, hurt/comfort, references to violence, liberties taken with canon timelines
Summary/prompt: As soon as David Rossi decides he can’t stand Spencer Reid and his stupid hair and his stupid face, life conspires to screw with him. It always does.
A/N: Here’s my take on the prompt, “conversations in hotel rooms while on cases turn into friendship, then love, but making it work outside of cases is difficult.” The title is from the Bright Eyes song of the same name. Happy Christmas!

***

Truth, like light, blinds. (Albert Camus)

***

The stars are burning tonight. He can tell they are stars, because their light is clean and white and furious; but they are moving, shifting slightly in the sky, as though they are stumbling towards him. This is the kind of tragic poetry bullshit he hates, but since he’s got a goddamn bullet lodged somewhere above his abdomen and to the right of his heart, he figures no one’s ever going to know what crazy shit he was thinking. Disappointed, he wishes his mind, in these last moments, had been drawn to think of something more manly, like the good women he’s had, but then he realises he hasn’t really had many of those. Instead, he thinks of the good men he’s known, like Aaron Hotchner, the one who would give up everything to stop someone else hurting, and Jason Gideon, about whom the less is said now, the better.

Above all, though, his mind is drawn to the crazy motherfucker whose shrill, lilting voice he can hear just above his head, whose hands are hysterically patting him down, ripping open his vest and his shirt. He tries to say to the other man, “For the last fucking time, get your goddamn hair out of my face,” but he can form neither words nor sound.

Suddenly, the stars tilt drunkenly above him, and something jerks in his chest. David Rossi closes his eyes.

***

It is an inauspicious first meeting; Dave catches Spencer Reid trying to profile his office along with the rest of his merry band of freaks, and finds him a shameless and interminably annoying know-it-all.

“The kid’s goddamn sassing me,” Dave growls to Aaron later, after Reid has quoted several passages of Dave’s written work back to him verbatim.

“He’s not,” says Aaron, clearly amused. “It’s genuine admiration, the fact that he knows your stuff; you just need to get used to him.”

Dave privately thinks it’s hardly admiration if Reid’s eidetic memory allows him instant recall of everything he reads; he’d be able to quote back the cereal box or the TV Guide just as easily as one of Dave’s books. Dave rather thinks that Reid’s display was showing off; reminding him that Dave might have been published, but at the end of the day, his books are just a few among the hundreds (thousands?) of scalps Reid has collected.

People have humbly suggested, in the past, that David Rossi might have a bit of a self esteem problem. David Rossi humbly suggests that’s bullshit.

“I walked in on them profiling my office earlier,” he says. “And the kid was front and centre of the operation. Probably his goddamn idea.”

Aaron seems blithely unaffected by both his team’s insubordination and their egregious violation of Dave’s privacy. “How much of it did he get right?” he asks, with more interest than Dave thinks is entirely proper.

“I told them they were wrong about everything, but they weren’t entirely,” Dave mutters, “Don’t you dare say anything.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Dave glances down to the bullpen, where Morgan appears to be pelting Reid with pieces of candy, and Reid does not appear to be managing successfully to duck. “God knows how he ended up in the FBI,” says Dave, “He looks about twelve. Can he even shoot straight?”

“Not really,” says Aaron, “But it’s sort of a sore point, so we don’t really talk about it.”

Dave looks sharply up at the other man, but he is, as ever, dry and inscrutable, and Dave has no idea whether he is being serious.

On the plane after their next case, Reid pauses on his way to get coffee, just long enough to look over Dave’s shoulder at where he’s writing in his notebook. Dave’s unintelligible scrawl suddenly seems embarrassing and Reid nods earnestly. “Did you know you’ve got the handwriting of a sociopath?” he asks – all wide eyes and guile – and bounces off to the back of the plane.

Aaron leans across the aisle and smirks. “Now he’s sassing you,” he says.

***

Spencer Reid breathes very noisily and his hair sometimes hits other people in the face when he turns his head too quickly and also he has no concept of personal space.

David Rossi cannot believe this is his life.

One morning in Indianapolis, they’re both on the way out of their motel at the same time, and Dave offers to stop and pick up two coffees, so they don’t both end up late. It makes sense, after all. On an impulse, he buys Reid a raspberry and white chocolate muffin at the counter, and hurls the brown bag at the kid on his arrival in the police station’s conference room.

“What’s this?” asks Reid, his brow furrowed.

“I swear to God, watching you drink coffee every morning on an empty stomach curdles my intestines,” says Dave, in a tone that he feels could pass as ‘quite reasonable.’ “One of these days you’re going to get a goddamn ulcer.”

“Oh, thanks,” says Reid, beaming like Dave just shit a sunbeam.

When Reid gets up at the end of the meeting, he leaves a detritus of crumbs where he had been sitting. The kid absently-mindedly pats him on the shoulder on his way out of the room, and his fingers on Dave’s shirt feel slightly sticky. Goddamn.

The next morning, Reid offers to get the coffees and Dave takes a mouthful of his and promptly spits it back out on the right leg of his pants.

“What the hell is this?” he asks.

Prentiss, who is nearest, says absently, “If Spencer bought it, probably a hazelnut mocha with two sugars, extra whip and caramel drizzle.”

Dave gapes. “Does he want me to lapse into a diabetic coma?” he asks.

“Are you diabetic?”

“Well, I wasn’t five minutes ago,” says Dave violently, scrubbing at the leg of his pants with a napkin, “But my pancreas is lodging a goddamn protest, and that could all be changing as we speak.”

***

“It wasn’t like this in my day,” says Dave, grinding his teeth as he gets to what he thinks is the bottom of his paperwork, only to find there are more pages cunningly paper clipped to the back of the manila folder. He is pretty sure this is all a plot of Erin’s to fuck with him; to teach him a lesson about… oh, his driving or his attitude or his interrogation techniques or how expensive his shirts are or whatever the hell else has been up her nose since Dave came back to the Bureau. He vaguely remembers that she used to be more fun, in the sense that breaking your arm is probably more fun than having your house burned down.

“In my day,” he resumes, and out of the corner of his eye sees Aaron pinch the bridge of his nose and shake his head slightly. Dave is working in Aaron’s office, ostensibly for the company, but in all reality because he has the attention span of a mentally challenged goldfish and it’s nice to have someone like Aaron – who is a robot when it comes to paperwork – to keep him on track. Not that he’d ever admit that, of course.

“I know, I know,” says Aaron. He looks up, exasperated. “In your day you used to ride dinosaurs to work and it was uphill both ways and then you had to carve your lunch order on stone tablets and there was none of this watercress and celery sandwich bullshit and you didn’t have to do goddamn paperwork.” His impression of Dave is really rather unfairly… familiar, and Dave wonders when Aaron grew this sense of humor – like a freakish extra limb – and what he is supposed to do about it.

“All I’m sayin’,” Dave says, feeling wounded, “All I’m sayin’, is that 20 years ago, I didn’t know what my desk at the Bureau looked like. I don’t even know if I had a goddamn desk at the Bureau. And you know what else?” he asks, warming to his theme, “They picked agents in the same way they picked the rest of the damn law enforcement officers, you know? They picked good Feds like they picked good Police. None of this 350-IQ and can’t shoot a gun for shit but I’m some Jason Gideon’s little pet project crap. You know what I think, Aaron?”

Aaron makes a funny strangled noise in his throat; odd enough that Dave looks up. Spencer Reid is standing in the open doorway, his pale face smooth and expressionless. Dave is unable to tell whether Reid heard any of the conversation or all of it or none. He is about to speak, when Reid gets in first.

“Hotch, I’ve finished that report on seasonal arson trends you asked for,” he says, in his stiff, tight voice, and that could still mean anything because that’s how the kid talks. “I’ll be off now, unless you need me for anything else.” He barely waits for Aaron’s say-so before he goes.

Aaron sighs. “Dave,” he says, quietly.

“Don’t say anything,” says Dave, his chest inexplicably tight, “Just don’t goddamn say it.” By the time he gets to the door of Aaron’s office and looks out over the bullpen, Reid is gone. He must’ve sprinted for the exit, and Dave feels remorse for a moment, even though he knows he didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.

The kid must have left damn quickly though, his desk cleared and bag and coat gone like a conjurer’s trick.

Once he gets to know Spencer Reid a little better, Dave realises the vanishing act is so good for a reason. It’s practiced.

***

When he reflects on it, he thinks that it’s amazing how small you can feel when you’re being ignored by someone you couldn’t even stand in the first place. Reid manages to do it without fanfare; he does not give Dave a deliberate cold shoulder, simply acts like he’s not even there. After his phenomenal fucking foot in mouth disaster in Aaron’s office, Dave expected the rest of the team to give him hell, too, but they are as friendly as ever, so Reid mustn’t have told them what he said. Dave doesn’t get that. He would’ve told everyone, would’ve wanted everyone on his side against the new guy who’d turned out to be an asshole.

Reid doesn’t smile his odd, nervous smile at him anymore, and he doesn’t try to quote one of Dave’s books every time they discuss a case, and he doesn’t get close enough to accidentally flick his stupid hair in Dave’s face. The worst part is that he misses it – not the goddamn hair, but everything else; the annoying, infuriating interruptions that somehow make his day more interesting. Perhaps he’s even more of an attention whore than he’d realised. Perhaps he has some kind of psychological problem where he needs everyone’s attention all the time. In fact, Dave thinks it’s more likely that he simply hates the boredom of the everyday, hates being able to predict what everyone’s going to say in any given conversation. He can never predict what Reid’s going to say – usually because it’s convoluted and nonsensical and ridiculous – and he realises he’d rather be flying off the handle at something bizarre Spencer Reid just said than be stuck as a bull with no red rag and not a china shop in sight.

He does have a very, very serious fucking mental problem, he reflects.

Sometimes Reid almost seems to forget himself, and he passes Dave a pen or hands him a glass of water, and Dave’s heart leaps at the thought of going back to what passes in the BAU as normal, with Reid giving him endless fodder for mockery just by opening his mouth. But Reid manages to make even the passing of a pen so disengaged, so mechanical, that no conversation ever comes of it, as though he is passing a pen into goddamn empty air.

When they’re paired up for a case in Montana – which, for a start, involves the quietest car trip Dave has ever been on – and a militia man calls Reid a pipe-cleaner with eyes, his wish that he’d thought of that insult first is swiftly overpowered by anger that this piece of shit redneck thinks he’s better than Reid. Doesn’t matter if the kid looks like Kermit the Frog wearing a boy costume; Feds deserve some goddamn respect.

“Thanks for having my back out there,” says Reid, stiffly, when they get back in the SUV.

Dave would rather not have the acknowledgement, but he nods, curtly, and says, “That asshole was all talk. You could have taken him, easy.”

Reid looks over to see whether he is being serious, and shrugs. “In a math quiz, sure.” There is a pause and then he shoots another quick glance at Dave. “I’m not going to go crying to Hotch, you know,” he says, almost defiantly. “Anyway, I could have handled it if I had to – Gideon once said that having a good profile was better than having a gun.”

Dave rolls his eyes. “Jason Gideon said that?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s complete crap.”

Reid snorts a little bit. “Actually, I had to shoot a guy right after he said it, so I’ve always sort of had my suspicions.”

“He was a good man, Gideon,” says Dave, “I liked him a lot. But with all due respect, he was, in a lot of ways, completely mental. I’m just sayin’.”

“I still don’t really know what I think,” says Reid, and he looks out the window into the quiet, desolate heat, and Dave decides not to push it.

“You know, we’ve passed three signs with misplaced apostrophes in the past two miles?” asks Reid, absent-mindedly.

“I counted four,” says Dave, and watches with amusement as Reid runs frantically back through the two-mile stretch in his head, looking for the one he missed.

“I was shitting you,” Dave says. “I didn’t see any. My editor calls my books ‘the Apostrophe Drinking Game’; I don’t have a fucking clue. She actually buys a bottle of tequila before she starts and I normally get a wasted phone call from her about halfway through chapter two... You know what we should do, though? Next one you spot, let’s pull over and we’ll go in and tell them what’s what.”

“Really?” asks Reid, his face brightening.

“No,” says Dave. “Jesus Christ. You have no goddamn idea when I’m being serious, do you?”

“Not as such, no,” says Reid, in his odd, earnest voice. “And besides, I find misplaced apostrophes a deadly serious issue.”

Dave stares.

“I’m joking. I can do jokes, you know. I have lots about physics and mathematics. Get this… Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?” He snorts a small, self-satisfied snort.

By the time they pull into the police station’s parking lot, Dave is beginning to arrive at the conclusion that other than badly needing a haircut and being batshit insane and perhaps secretly a trigger-happy lunatic, the kid actually might be relatively harmless. And so, when Aaron asks whether the militia men gave them any problems, Dave takes in the quick, pleading look Reid flashes him and says, “Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

The next morning, Reid buys him coffee. It is black as tar, and wonderfully bitter.

***

After knocking on what Dave understands to be the door of Aaron’s hotel room, the first sign that something is amiss comes in the form of a crash and a muffled thump. Spencer Reid opens the door hopping on one leg, the bottoms of his too-short pajama pants flapping around his shins.

“Bad time?” asks Dave.

Reid bounces maniacally on the spot, rubbing his knee with one hand. “I tripped.”

Dave peers into the room. “What, the chair jumped out and surprised you in a stealth attack?”

“Something like that.”

“Jesus Christ, you need those foam corners on the furniture or something. Or walking lessons. Is this not Hotch’s room?”

“Next one along,” says Reid. “I think he was going to turn in early though; he said something about it at dinner.”

“Oh,” says Dave. “The piece of shit TV in my room doesn’t have any reception and I was hoping to watch the late news on his.”

“You can watch it in here, if you like,” says Reid, nervously. “I normally do, anyway. I don’t actually sleep very much.”

This revelation only contributes to Dave’s dark suspicion that Reid is not, in fact, a real person. With a certain amount of foreboding in the pit of his stomach – the level of feeling normally reserved for extremely beautiful women or hot dogs purchased from street vendors – he crosses the threshold and into a room that looks cleaner than Dave’s was when he checked into the goddamn hotel. Reid’s clothes are folded perfectly on the table, each neat square of hideous knitwear perpendicular to the next.

“Jesus, you could be in the army,” he says, “Except for all the hair and the penchant for walking into furniture.”

“Did you know that some covert surveillance devices interfere with television reception?” Reid asks, cheerfully.

Dave stares. “Are you suggesting my room’s bugged?”

“No, I just thought it was an interesting piece of information. It’s actually much more likely that your TV’s just broken.”

“Well, that’s a fantastic consolation, thanks.”

Reid, because he takes everything completely bloody literally, smiles and says, “Not a problem,” and turns the volume up for the news as though he hadn’t just planted a festering canker in Dave’s brain. That’s what he does, though, thinks Dave, savagely. He acts all sweet and falls over the furniture and then he pounces.

He realizes that something about Spencer Reid is creeping up on him – like a sleeping sickness – and he can’t work out what it is, and he can’t shrug it off. It’s uncomfortable, too, because it’s never taken Dave longer than five minutes to figure someone out, but this one is a puzzle; the man who sets his face in a smooth line and gambles his own safety case after case, as though he doesn’t care about himself at all, and the man who’s sitting cross legged on a bed in fluffy socks and too-short flannel pajamas, eating handfuls of candy out of an enormous bag and heckling the TV news for factual errors and grammar mistakes.

“You manage to make it such a goddamn interactive experience,” says Dave.

“I often throw things, but this candy’s too good,” Reid says, peering into the bag and shaking the contents around. “You can’t just buy this stuff anywhere. This is gourmet candy.”

“You connoisseur, you.”

“You may well laugh…” says Reid, looking haughtily over the rims of his glasses. “Oh, do you know what’s on right now?”

“No,” says Dave, “Because I don’t memorize the goddamn TV listings; so how about you surprise me?”

“_Apocalypse Now!_” beams Reid, as though he is giving Dave a perfectly wrapped gift. “I know it’s your favorite movie.” He takes in Dave’s raised eyebrow. “Oh, I overheard you telling Morgan on the jet, in… July. July the 3rd. We were going to Houston, and Prentiss and Morgan were having a fight about whether it was a better film than Full Metal Jacket, and you said…” He looks at Dave again. “Um. Unless this is the sort of anecdote that’s going to lead to you labeling me creepy, in which case, um… I guessed it was your favorite and just happened to be right?”

“You freak me out,” says Dave, fervently. “And on an unrelated side note, I’m going to start drinking now. I’ll stay for the film, if you’re keen to watch it, too.” Reid nods and Dave raids the mini-bar for a beer, settling back in his seat with Reid sprawled on the bed behind him. The younger man’s breathing becomes slower and heavier, but every time Dave shifts his weight as if to get up and go, Reid yawns and murmurs, wispily, “I’m still awake,” so Dave stays until the film’s end, because he’s enjoying it, even though he knows he’ll pay for it the next morning.

“Don’t turn the light off,” Reid calls, sleepily, as Dave leaves the room.

Dave pulls a face. He hopes that the you’re so incredibly goddamn weird is implicit.

Over breakfast, Prentiss leers at him when he tries, unsuccessfully, to stifle a succession of yawns. “Big night last night?” she asks.

“I watched Apocalypse Now with Reid, actually,” says Dave, because Reid is within earshot and there’s no point lying about being in Reid’s room, and why the hell should he? His TV was broken and he doesn’t need to justify anything.

Morgan frowns at Reid. “But you hate Apocalypse Now,” he says. “We watched it at Garcia’s on movie night and you hated it.”

Reid puts a butter knife in his cup of tea, with a violent splash. “N-no, I didn’t,” he stammers. “You must be thinking of someone else. Another person! Um.”

“Kid, you were traumatised,” says Morgan, amused. “You had nightmares for three weeks.”

The tips of Reid’s ears turn a dull pink. “Um,” he says, grabbing his messenger bag and slinging it across his chest like a shield, “Um, I think I need… I think I need to go back to my room for another… another sweater,” he says. “Excuse me.”

Dave drops into the coffee shop on his way to the police station, and gives the pretty barista a don’t fuck with me glare. “I need one of those mocha-frappa-whippa-latte-cino things,” he growls.

“Excuse me?”

“You know, one of those coffees with all the syrup and sugar and the jellybeans and sprinkles and unicorn dust and shit,” he says. “To take away. It’s for a friend.”

The girl smiles. “Right,” she says.

When Dave hands Reid the coffee, he tells the younger man he couldn’t sleep until he’d checked his hotel room for surveillance bugs. It’s not true, and Reid knows it’s not, but he smiles gratefully all the same.

***

Reid gloomily rests his forehead on the desk. He looks about as optimistic as the rest of them; Prentiss is picking at her nails with a dark air and Morgan’s drumming his fingers on the polished wood so hard that Dave’s thinking about breaking the man’s goddamn knuckles.

“Serial killers who think they’re goddamn literary geniuses,” says Dave, moodily. “Why do they always leave quotes from obscure bullshit at crime scenes? What would be the harm in quoting Joyce or fuckin’ Walt Whitman or some shit everyone’s read, you know?”

“Speak for yourself on Joyce and Whitman,” Morgan snorts.

“Vonnegut,” says Prentiss. “If he’d painted Vonnegut on the wall I’d recognize it in a heartbeat.”

“You know what I need?” asks Spencer, his voice muffled against the table. “I need to be able to cross reference all the books ever in the entire world against each other. In my brain. With, like, the best search algorithm ever invented.”

“Wait… You can’t do that?”

“No, Morgan,” Reid glares up at him. He’s a little cross-eyed with tiredness and, Dave reflects, his hair is unbelievably awful. “No, I can’t cross reference everything in the world in my brain, sorry.”

Aaron appears in the doorway, looking like a haggard, well-dressed ghost. He’s tired; they all are. They know they’ve only got a matter of hours before this unsub strikes again and they’re all furious with themselves for not figuring him out first.

“Any luck?” asks Aaron, and they all shake their heads sheepishly. Reid lifts his head off the table. He has smudged newspaper ink all over one cheek.

“We’ve got to go with the drug angle, Hotch,” he says, firmly.

“No,” says Prentiss.

“Hell no,” says Morgan.

“Absolutely not,” says Aaron, although without quite as much conviction.

Dave narrows his eyes in confusion.

“You know we’ve got to,” says Reid, urgency growing in his voice. “We know he’s probably going to take another junkie off the street tonight, and we’re going to find a body dumped tomorrow morning, and we can’t let that happen if we know we can stop it. Look, I’m confident in the geographic profile. If you all consider it logically, you’ve got to realize we need to put an agent on that block tonight. In the next couple of hours. And anyone who looks remotely like a cop’s going to scare everyone off, including the unsub…”

“I’ll do it,” says Morgan.

Reid rolls his eyes. “I could give you all the reasons you wouldn’t pass for five seconds as a junkie, Derek, but we don’t have time for a list that long.”

All of a sudden, Dave realizes.

“Oh, this is too fucking good,” he cackles, “You want to head out there in costume, dance around a bit with your arm out, lure the bad guy into a trap and save the goddamn day. That’s real cute. Just one thing though,” he says, looking over at Reid, “And I don’t mean for you to take this the wrong fucking way, but how are you, you goddamn Boy Scout, going to pass for a smackhead?”

Inexplicably, there is a sudden, harsh silence. Dave, aware from long and varied experience that he must have caused some kind of offense, runs back through what he just said, but he honestly thinks it’s much kinder to call someone a Boy Scout than a smackhead, unless Reid’s priorities are truly whack.

“Rossi!” carols Prentiss. “Coffee!”

Bemused, Dave stands to follow her out of the room. As he leaves, the argument between Morgan and Reid starts up with renewed enthusiasm. In the hallway, Prentiss catches his wrist in a steely grip.

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” she hisses.

“Er…” says Dave, with the injured air of one who is sure he’s being unfairly punished. “With Reid you mean? Jesus Christ, I was simply suggesting that if we’re going to send an undercover, we pick someone who has, I don’t know, ever seen a narcotic stronger than goddamn cough syrup.”

Prentiss leans towards him. “Reid’s in NA,” she says, in a low voice. “I don’t know how long he’s been clean for, but I think about a year. Maybe more. And if you ever, ever use it against him or taunt him with it or do anything I construe as unfair, you will never, ever find where your fingers are buried. And you won’t be able to dig for them, because you won’t have any fingers.” She releases his wrist, and studies him for a reaction.

Dave reels. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “Use it against him? What kind of an asshole do you think I am? Actually, don’t answer that,” he says, hurriedly.

“Do you promise you didn’t already know?” asks Prentiss.

“Jesus,” says Dave. “Of course I didn’t. Of course I didn’t fucking know. And of course the kid can’t do the undercover, either. His hand-to-hand combat skills are, to be kind, negligible, and he’s shit with a gun. And now it turns out he’s a recovered addict and he wants to put himself into a situation like that? What if he ends up having to take something to prove he’s not a cop? No fucking way.”

Prentiss sighs, resignedly. “Yeah, just watch him, though,” she says.

When they walk back into the room and Reid announces he is doing it and no else argues – not even Aaron! – Dave storms out and slams the door so hard behind him that the handle comes off in his hand. He avoids the room where Reid is getting ready, and the others talk in hushed tones and don’t include Dave in their deliberations.

When Aaron finally comes over to speak to him, he barely looks guilty. “I don’t want a part in this,” Dave tells him.

“That’s a luxury you can afford and I can’t,” says Aaron. He looks so goddamn tired. “Anyway, Reid might be the most trustworthy agent I know. I have every faith that he’ll conduct himself in an exemplary manner and I know he won’t let the team down.”

“Jesus!” Dave explodes. “You think it’s about that for me? You think I’m worried he can’t be trusted around drugs?” he spits the words out. “I know he wouldn’t willingly let the team down, Aaron! He’d take a bullet in the head rather than let the team down; that’s the whole problem. And I’ve got no idea about the circumstances surrounding his addiction, but for God’s sake, it’s patently unfair and wrong to put someone who’s fought it and won, back into that situation! And with the added risk of a fucking murdering psychopath,” he says. “Jesus.” He wonders if he might break another door, and what Erin would say if the FBI received a bill for door handles.

“You know what the principles of undercover are,” says Aaron, quietly. “You best protect your agents by sending in the person most suited to the job, because that’s the person who’s most likely to walk out OK.”

“I don’t care about the goddamn principles,” says Dave. “I’m not having a part in this, and I can’t believe you are. The man I knew ten years ago wouldn’t have done it.”

“I’m not the man you knew ten years ago,” says Aaron, not meeting his eyes.

Dave is scathing. “That much is patently fucking obvious.”

He doesn’t want to see Reid in the skin of a junkie, doesn’t want to imagine how he’d looked, once; how desperate he might have been, once. He doesn’t want to see, and he doesn’t want to care, and he doesn’t know why he does care so very fucking much.

When Reid walks past him in the parking lot, Dave turns, very deliberately, away.

***

Several hours later, Dave leans against a hotel room door and tries to make a case for knocking on it and then a stronger case for walking the hell away. Reid’s probably not even here, he reasons with himself. The others wouldn’t let him be alone tonight, not after something like this. And then he thinks, I need to make sure he knows why I wouldn’t look at him. I need to make sure he knows why I walked away, and that it wasn’t because I cared what the fuck he shot up however the hell many years ago.

This train of thought is interrupted when the door he is leaning against opens and he falls like a sack of rocks into Spencer Reid’s hotel room. Reid looks down at him blankly, as though he is an especially uninteresting piece of plant-life.

“Are you alright?”

Dave staggers to his feet. “I might have broken my ass,” he grumbles.

“Coccyx,” says Reid, absent-mindedly. “You don’t break your ass; you break your coccyx.”

Dave stands there in the doorway. “Can I come in?” he asks, feeling irritatingly vulnerable.

“Oh, were you sent to check on me?” Reid asks, sullen. “Are you here to make sure I’m not using? Or thinking about using? Or high?”

“Are you?” Dave asks.

“You’d be able to tell,” says Reid, his anger seeming to dissipate behind academic bluster. “My pupils would be much more dilated.”

“Nobody sent me,” says Dave, “I didn’t come here for you. My room’s right above the fucking air conditioning unit and it sounds like roofing iron being run over by a fucking forklift in there. So there’s no need to be so goddamn self-centered.”

The corners of Reid’s mouth twitch.

“Mind if I have a drink?” asks Dave. “That was a rhetorical question, by the way.” He pulls open the minibar. “You want one?”

Reid sighs, quietly. “I don’t think I should probably drink alcohol tonight,” he says.

Dave looks down at the hotel’s choice of scotch in disgust. “I wouldn’t exactly call this shit alcohol,” he says. “In fact, I think there are countries where they use it to clean goddamn car engines.” After a moment, he cracks it open anyway.

“Elle used to drink,” says Reid, suddenly. “I mean, she didn’t drink a lot, and not often, and I used to think that meant you couldn’t be an alcoholic. But after I started going to NA, I realised that she had always drunk in patterns, you know; certain cases would upset her more than others and she’d have a drink, like she needed one.” He smiles. “She used to do it right in front of me, like she thought I wouldn’t get it, and I didn’t, I guess. Not until it was me.”

“How?” asks Dave. “How the hell was it you? What happened? If you don’t mind telling me.” The softer words feel odd falling out of his mouth.

Reid tells him, and Dave sees spots of rage dancing like tiny black leprechauns in front of his eyes when he hears it was a goddamn unsub who did this to the kid in the first place.

“There’s no fucking way Aaron should’ve let you go in there tonight,” growls Dave. “It wasn’t fair on you at all.”

“Nothing happened to me tonight. And this is a risky job,” shrugs Reid.

“Yeah, but it’s a goddamn calculated risk,” says Dave. He doesn’t know exactly how close it had been tonight between Reid pushing his panic button and Reid having a gutting knife rested against his throat, but he knows there wasn’t time for a goddamn cup of tea. “I take calculated risks. You take ludicrous, insane risks all the time, for no goddamn reason at all.”

“It’s not for no reason,” Reid says, quietly. Dave notices the younger man’s hands are trembling, although his voice isn’t. “That man we caught tonight was only a few years older than me, and he’s only ever had people – his family, the system, exploit him and screw him over. He was an addict before he was a serial killer, you know?” Reid nods to himself, numbly. “And when we have to shoot unsubs like him, we all lose, Rossi. No one wins like that. The others don’t realize. They think… They think if you have to shoot an unsub, then you have to, and that it’s a tragedy, but sometimes you’ve just got to do it. And I can’t stand that. I figure… Oh, I don’t know; I figure that if I’m the one standing next to the unsub when we catch up with him, then I’ve got a head start to get him to surrender before someone else pulls the trigger.” He rubs the side of his nose with a long, thin finger. “That’s why I do it. The risks and everything.”

Dave shakes his head. “God,” he says. “How the hell did you end up in the Bureau?”

Reid shrugs. “How does anyone?” he asks. “How did you?”

“I was angry,” Dave says. “Injustice makes me angry, in case you hadn’t fucking noticed.”

“Me too,” says Reid, and when Dave gives him a sharp look, he smiles. “You don’t have the monopoly on anger, Rossi, much as you make a valiant effort to make sure you own as many shares in it as possible.” Dave snorts.

“But for you, it’s anger on behalf of the victims and their families, right?” Reid asks, and Dave nods slowly. “For me…God, I don’t really tell people this, but for me its anger on behalf of the kids who turn into the people we hunt. The ones who never get a fair chance and by the time they’re old enough to make their own choices, they haven’t got a chance in hell of making a single good one. I’m angry at everyone else in the world,” he says, bitterness sounding odd in his light, thin voice. “I’m angry that we let people slip through the cracks and then we act surprised when they turn out to be serial killers and we’re forced to shoot them in the street. It’s crap, Rossi, and it’s not necessary.”

Dave takes this in for a moment, and he knows he’s supposed to be goddamn impressed by these noble ideals or something, but really he’s just infuriated by Reid’s naïveté. “If you keep acting the way you act and believing you can save everyone like that,” he says, struggling to keep his voice level, “Then one of these days, you’re going to get yourself really, really badly hurt.”

“How do you know I haven’t been already?” asks Reid.

Dave supposes he doesn’t.

***

When they are snowed in at the end of a case, and the jet can’t get off the ground to take them home, their main mistake is letting Derek Morgan choose the bar.

“I think,” says Reid, with a manful squint, “I think I might be a bit drunk.” He puts down his glass and makes the act of clambering to his feet, Dave reflects, look about as graceful as a monkey with two wooden legs dancing a jig. Reid holds his thumb and forefinger aloft, about an inch apart. “About this drunk,” he says. “Only a little bit.”

“A little bit drunk,” repeats Prentiss, who is flushed and smoky-eyed. “Hold on, I’m just going to check if the Pope’s still a Catholic.”

“You know what’s interesting about the Pope?” Reid asks, and there comes a tired chorus of shut ups and thrown cocktail umbrellas. He pouts. “I’m going home,” he says. “Well, not home, obviously, because it would take me…” He looks at the ceiling and wobbles dangerously, “14 days and two hours to walk there. But back to the hotel room, certainly.”

“Goodbye kisses!” shrieks Garcia, and Reid shuffles around the table to her, Prentiss and JJ, coming up for air with three perfect lipstick outlines on one cheek. Morgan shakes his head in disbelief.

“You can’t tell me that guy has no idea what he’s doin’,” he says.

Aaron laughs. “I should make sure Reid gets back OK,” he says, but Dave can hear a hint of resignation in his voice. Tonight Aaron has laughed exactly three times, which is about three times more than usual, and he is not wearing a tie. As much as Dave can gauge it, he thinks those are signs that Aaron’s actually enjoying himself.

“I’ll do it,” says Dave. He’s not exactly sober himself, and this way he gets to go home to bed without having to run the gauntlet of “old man” jibes.

“Make sure he gets to his room safely,” says Aaron, in an anxious approximation of his usual manner. “Make sure he doesn’t get hit by a car.”

“You have foiled my cunning plan,” says Dave, and reaches out to reel Reid in with one arm. “Come on, you goddamn lightweight.”

Outside it is silent as a church, and their shoes are soon wet with snow. Reid shakes it off himself outside the door to his room, and then performs a quick dance involving patting his pockets and leaping from foot to foot.

“Don’t have my key,” he mutters, his voice blurring at the edges, as though it can’t decide which word to form and is covering two at once.

Dave sighs. “Where is it?”

Reid points, defeated, at the door to his room. “In there.”

“I’ll go down and get the spare from reception.”

Reid shakes his head, mournfully. “I did it yesterday as well. The spare’s…” He waves vaguely at his door again, “In the pocket of my corduroy jacket. In my room. I forgot to take it back after I used it.”

“God,” says Dave. He can’t be bothered with this, and Reid is attempting to spoon the wall and Dave’s worried he might be about to fall asleep right here in the corridor. “The whole point of spare keys, you moron, is that you… Oh, fuck it. You can sleep on my floor and sort it out in the morning.”

Five minutes later, he looks down at Reid, where the kid is trying to nestle his tall, lanky form into the carpet of Dave’s room, and sighs in a manner which he hopes conveys his immense displeasure with – and hatred for – everything in the universe as it stands at this moment. Reid somehow manages to make lying on the goddamn floor look unnecessarily complicated; all of his limbs are bent at such odd angles that they look broken, and his back is not even remotely straight. Dave thinks the younger man will probably be in a lot of pain in the morning and then he will whine and Dave will have to deal with him and then he might finally fulfill his destiny and be moved to commit first degree homicide. Jesus Christ. He sighs again and nudges Reid with one toe.

“What?” asks Reid, sleepily. He has somehow – in only five fucking minutes on the floor – managed to turn his hair into a homeless shelter for stray raccoons, which has got to be some kind of land-speed hideousness record.

“Get in the goddamn bed,” says Dave.

Reid beams up at him. “Only if you don’t mind,” he says.

Dave privately hopes that he is killed very dead in his sleep, but he says, “Just leave your pants on.”

In bed, by the light of the lamp, Reid rolls over to face him. “Tonight was fun,” he says, lazily.

“Oh right, is this a slumber party now?” asks Dave. “Are we going to braid each other’s hair and talk about boys?”

“Do you want to talk about boys?” asks Reid, seriously. “Because, I mean, not that I’m implying, um, anything about you or anything, but, um. If boys are your thing, then, um?” His eyes, clear and almost sober behind his glasses, bore into Dave’s face, and a flush spreads across his throat.

“Oh God, smite me now,” mutters Dave.

“I’ve come to the conclusion, actually,” continues Reid, oblivious, “That I might actually prefer men. I mean, there have been women…”

“I’m shocked,” says Dave.

“Well,” concedes Reid. “Not really. But I sort of tried. Did you know I dated JJ once?”

“Jesus,” says Dave. “Please tell me that went exactly as well as I imagine it going.”

“Um, yes,” Reid says. “It was actually quite terrible and traumatic. Mainly for her, I think. Although it wasn’t a particularly joyful experience for me either.” He rolls a little closer to Dave, and slides one hand behind his own head.

“How long did you date for?” asks Dave, in what he tries to convince himself is horrified fascination.

“Um. When I said that we dated ‘once,’ I meant literally once. Like, one actual time.”

Dave snickers.

“I went to kiss her at the door and I accidentally head butted her in the face,” says Reid, “And fortunately for me, she sort of agreed to never speak of it again.”

“Your secret affinity for violence appalls me,” says Dave. “Wait, didn’t you get a number from that bartender you met on that case in Atlanta?”

“Well, yes,” says Reid, shifting uncomfortably, “But she was very pretty, and Morgan was trying to convince me to pick someone up and I sort of wanted to get him off my back. And then Austin and I talked on the phone a couple of times, but we never actually… You know, we never actually did anything.” He is going red, because he is obviously a 12 year old stuck in a man’s body, for Christ’s sake.

Reid clears his throat. “Have you ever, um…”

Dave rolls his eyes. “If I have, in fact, cracked your cunning code and ‘um’ means what I think it means, then yes, actually, I have.” He must be more drunk than he’d realized, he thinks. He must have taken leave of his goddamn senses.

Reid stares. “But you married women,” he says, faintly.

“Well, yeah,” says Dave, “But I like women as well. I’m equal opportunities. And besides, marrying women is kind of what you do when you’re middle aged and half Italian. It makes things a damn sight easier, anyway.”

Reid’s mouth is opened in soft O, and his warm breath tickles Dave’s face, because he has somehow inched closer, using his goddamn magician’s wiles, without Dave realizing. “I thought,” he says, “I thought…” He shakes his head faintly. “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

Dave wants to say, I think dislike is too weak a concept, or I bow in awe to your vastly superior powers of observation, but he compromises and says, “Why the hell does it matter?”

“Why does it…” Reid fidgets and leans closer. His cheeks are scarlet, and Dave wonders whether the younger man is sick or something. “Um, because of this,” says Reid, and he crosses the last few inches and presses his lips to the corner of Dave’s mouth.

Later, Dave makes a list of reasons why he did what he did next, rather than rolling Reid up in the duvet like a goddamn hotdog and dumping his ass unceremoniously on the floor. The list begins with, alcohol and goes through getting sexual frustration and hatred confused and bewildered by all the hair, to finish with, had my brain stolen by wolves. It is a comprehensive list. But what he actually does next, what he does, is pull his left hand out from under the covers and he raises it to Reid’s cheek, to stop him from going anywhere, and he corrects Reid’s aim, so that their lips meet, warm and dry and whiskey-sour, against each other’s.

Reid gasps a little bit. “Oh,” he says, “Are you sure…”

“Shut up,” says Dave, and Reid hums into his mouth and brings a tentative hand up to run over Dave’s shoulder and down one arm, careful as a neatly made bed. His kisses are a little thrilling and more interesting than Dave would ever have given him credit for, and he feels himself softening into the other man, drawing him closer, making patterns inside his mouth with the tip of his tongue, as though he is writing secrets there. They tug at each other’s clothes, ungraceful and insistent, and Dave is appalled by how good it feels, how clean, how natural. His bloodstream is coursing with alcohol, but that can’t possibly explain it all, because the hesitant, knowing way that Reid is touching him, the way he is pressing himself to the other man in response, is so much more considered than booze and circumstances.

Reid’s pupils are dangerously huge, so that his eyes look black, and when Dave traces his lips with a finger, Reid breathes hot against his hand and his glasses fog up, like a flush. They remove each other’s shirts, still so careful; each still expecting the other to say stop, or wait, or what the fuck, but Dave doesn’t even want to say anything (which has got to be a goddamn first). The lamplight bleeds over his nakedness and he feels oddly vulnerable under Reid’s gaze. The younger man’s spine is a cool ridge down his back, falling into a pressure of sighs, and Dave covers him with careful hands.

Afterwards, they collapse against each other like a house of cards. Reid grins his crooked, uneven grin and Dave tries not to smile back and fails horribly, goddamn failure that he is.

“Jesus,” he says.

“I know,” says Reid, with just a touch of smugness; which, considering what his long fingers were doing just a moment ago, is not entirely unwarranted. “Did I exceed your expectations?”

“That would be presupposing I had any goddamn expectations about your sexual prowess, which is leading me to a very dark place in my brain I do not care to visit,” says Dave. “But for what it’s worth, I was pleasantly surprised.” He decides that if you ignore, you know, his face, Reid is actually quite good looking. His outright refusal to buy pants that fit him conceals this truth cunningly, but there it is.

“We can’t ever talk about this again, of course,” says Reid, looking down at his hands.

“Of course,” says Dave, with just a hint of sorrow; because while his general dislike for Reid is a strong and well-constructed tower, that had been, specifically, some very good sex.

Reid smiles up at him; not a nervous smile this time, but a genuine one. It is so rare that it looks almost wrong on his face. “We can still be friends though,” he says.

Dave feels disgruntled. “I was going to suggest colleagues or people who happen to co-exist on the planet, or people I was going to smother in their sleep but now possibly won’t, but you can call it whatever the fuck you like,” he says.

“You’re very funny,” says Reid, comfortably, punching his pillow into place. “I’m going to get some sleep now. Thank you for the sex.”

Oh my God, thinks Dave. Oh my God. He tries to remember how old Reid is, and his mind gets as far as twenty-something and then all he can think is that if Aaron knew, he would shoot Dave and then remove his goddamn kidneys through his eyes. Oh my God.

He watches Reid sleep; curled fingers, shallow breaths, fluttering eyelids. Despite knowing that no good can come of this – none at all – he slides an arm around the other man’s shoulders, and thinks that perhaps, never again can start in the morning.

***

The night he realizes he has a goddamn huge problem which is completely out of control is the night he runs down the street for burgers. They’re in Georgia, and Reid has always been kind of weird in Georgia – not his normal, reassuringly freakish, weird, but the spacey, nervous kind that sets Dave’s teeth on edge. He has barely eaten anything all day and that’s the only reason Dave offers to go down the street for takeout. They’re in Dave’s hotel room watching a Hitchcock movie marathon and Reid is pale and drawn looking, and Dave can’t stand it.

He reasons, as he pulls his camel coat tighter around him and stomps irritably down the street, that everyone would damn well blame him if Reid flaked out on his goddamn carpet for lack of food, and Dave can’t be bothered with the drama. He tells himself that this has nothing to do with the images that reside under his eyelids when he sleeps, of a smooth, warm body stretched out in the lamplight and fluffy, silver-blond hair between his fingers. Dave shakes his head, as though he could rattle the image from his brain.

At the burger bar, he thinks about what Reid would most like, and spits out, “Cheeseburger, no pickles, and double… no make that triple cheese. No spicy sauce. Make it mayonnaise or something,” almost without thinking. And then he freezes in horror at how easily the order came to him. He doesn’t normally remember other people’s orders, doesn’t give much of a shit what they like, and he thinks to himself, oh, I am so very fucked.

It’s all he can think of the next day, that goddamn burger, and the way Reid had looked when he opened it and said, “Oh great, no pickles! And oh, so much cheese. That’s exactly the way I like it. Thanks!” And he had beamed for the first time in a week, and swallowed the burger in raptures, almost without chewing it.

When Dave slides in next to Aaron on the jet the next day, it occurs to him that Aaron’s the most considerate, thoughtful person he knows. He remembers little details about people the way Dave doesn’t care to. “Hey,” he says, trying to sound nonchalant, “Does Jack like burgers?”

Aaron screws up his face in confusion at the question, “Well, yes,” he says, “But what…”

“How does he like ‘em?” asks Dave, “I mean, what’s his favorite kind of burger?”

“Er,” says Aaron. “Er, I don’t really know. Meat of some kind, obviously. Maybe chicken? And probably cheese. I really don’t have a clue. Does it matter?”

“Nah,” says Dave, leaning back into his seat and massaging his temples with one hand, “It just means I’m sort of screwed. Never mind.”

He looks across the aisle at Reid, who is playing cards with Morgan. He looks up and, true to their agreement, meets Dave’s eyes coolly, without showing pleasure or affection. Reid has taken ‘never again,’ on board as a deeply serious endeavor, as though he is trying to prove something important. He doesn’t try to touch Dave when they’re alone, and doesn’t favor him or share in-jokes when they’re with the team. He really had meant it when he’d said, friends, and he performs the duties of friendship with a studied air; they have conversations and late-night movie sessions in Dave’s hotel room, and Reid tries to share his candy and does not try to share anything else.

Dave, on the other hand, Dave is the one who remembers that Reid hates pickles and spicy sauce and loves cheese; Dave is the one who wants to be less selfish and more… something, and Dave is the one who is hopelessly, hopelessly fucked.

When they are leaving Quantico, later that night, Reid and Dave end up in the same lift, and Dave, experimentally, presses the back of his hand against the back of Reid’s. The younger man jolts in surprise, but he doesn’t so much as look at Dave. They ride down like that, the bones in the backs of their hands pressed together, and when they get out in the lobby, Reid is pink-cheeked, as though they had shared something far more intimate.

In the parking lot, Dave wants to say something, but the other man opens his mouth and then, just as swiftly, shuts it again, and his footsteps are quick and light and deliberate as he walks away.

***
Part Two