The Thoughts of the Lost Mindreaders: Rambling Criminal Minds One Shots

Maeve

Maeve: 673 words
Third Person

Spencer thinks that he should be back to work already. He can never seem to do anything other than that.

But those who care for him think otherwise. His girlfriend is dead, shot a few feet in front of him, and he still remembers every word she's said.

He had counted their time exchanging little jokes and experiences and messages in a language they crafted with each syllable. Thoughts passed between each other with an ease he had never imagined he could manage. It was like a Newton's cradle, an endless, effortless back and forth, like magic.

Everything she was was magic, but no pheonix would rise from her ashes and blood.

Spencer mourns the loss of the conversational tides, the back and forth he fears he'll never get back. He misses the anticipation of a conversation on a Sunday afternoon. He wants to hear that voice again. It was so sweet and gentle as if every word lulled in the air a moment before they were answered by Spencer's who, more often than not, tumbled out, rarely smoothed down much after his brain offered him a jumble of thoughts.

She was perfect but ephemeral. She deserved the world, but it was taken from her without anything resembling an explanation. She was everything, and she got nothing in return.

100.5 days.

He had heard her voice for 100.5 days, and he doubts that 100.5 years could satisfy him.

Before he joined the BAU, Spencer had his mother and his tormentors and no one else. Then, he suddenly had people that he cared for more than anything he'd known and who cared for him with what they could in return. He longed for them to never leave him. He had never said goodbye before in a way that made him want them back, and then, he said goodbye to Elle and Gideon and Emily. Of course he feared it, but before it happened, he never could have predicted how it would feel to have one of his connections mercilessly cut. Sometimes he hated that he still hadn't gotten used to uttering the word. Not even 100.5 days would be enough because there would always be a goodbye.

Maeve Donovan.

All he thinks about is Maeve Donovan and the book she gave him, and the same book he never got to give to her. He thought how he would forever have two copies of The Narrative of John Smith.

If you were to enter his apartment, you would have to tiptoe around endless novels and encyclopedias that cover the ground. After she was gone, he had nothing to do, no call to look forward to, so he just went home and felt her lost voice hang off his back. When it comes to those close to him, Spencer feels everything in their world, so when she died, it was like watching a planet bursting with life turn into dust in an instant. He needed something to turn that emotion off.

Spencer now sees that throwing books off of their shelves was a temporary solution, but it was a solution nonetheless. The only other option was time, but after a week and 5 days (plus the 5 hours and approximately 28 minutes he counted), he still couldn't gather the energy to put a single book where it belonged. Time is his least favorite cure.

And Hotch doesn't expect him back to work for while longer, but all he can think about is his dead girlfriend, and that's a painfully melancholic thing to devote every waking and dreaming thought to.

So Spencer Reid thinks that he should be back to work already because there are two options: working and thinking.

Working may drain the life from your veins, but it doesn't hurt.

Any thought that didn't consist of watching for tells or making connections or pulling back memories of long-lost trivia diverted his train of thought so that it barreled down jittering tracks and made him tremble with it.

So he worked and did nothing other than that.