✓ | sick of losing soulmates [SPENCER REID]

1.2

1.2
( phone calls. )

☆ ★ ☆

spencer

"You know, the one thing I don't get," Iris says after a while, "is why the Tommy Killer? Why that name?"

Spencer flicks his eyes up from his book, which he's been reading at his usual rate, and takes in her appearance with a quick up-and-down glance. While they've been waiting for the call, they've gathered around the desks of the office, so Spencer sits at the corner of hers, while she is perched cross-legged in her office chair, doodling in a notebook — his notebook, he realises. She doesn't look up when she speaks, but she does when he asks, "You've never heard of the rock opera?"

She shakes her head no, and he raises his head all the way up with a frown of surprise.

"It's an album by The Who. You know, the band?" he elaborates, but her expression of confusion and mild curiosity remains. He scoffs, hardly able to believe it. "Please tell me you've heard of The Who."

"The Who?"

He smiles in pure disbelief at first, but then the look of confusion on her face and the entirely real crease in the space between her trimmed eyebrows makes him falter. "Wait — you've seriously not heard of The Who?"

Her face relaxes, pulling into a lazy grin; she's taken her hair down during their long wait, and now she looks even more like the living embodiment of happiness with her hair in loose, messy waves around her tanned face and sunshine smile. "Of course I have. I'm just messing," she assures. "I mean, come on, Dr Reid. We may be a remote town but I'm not living under a rock over here, alright?"

He returns her grin with a small smile of his own, and when she goes back to doodling, he goes back to his book.

But his mind can't help but wander.

It's been troubling him for most of the day, during which he's got very little sleep and he's been relying far too much on coffee, which he supposes is part of his whole problem. Maybe it's the isolation of being locked up in this station with very little human contact, but her expression from earlier, when he recognised the ballad, has been lingering with him. It's almost seared into his eyelids, always there.

It's bothered him more than most things usually do. And when it bothers him, it scratches at him, and a whole range of other things come leaking out. The fact that he isn't . . . normal. His problems with his mom — though he's not ready to share that with anyone but his own mind.