✓ | sick of losing soulmates [SPENCER REID]

10.1

"Apart from Morgan's boy-band comment," Iris says, attempting a smile.

He hums and returns the expression, appreciating the sentiment even though her grin didn't reach her watery eyes. A moment of silence ensues, and then he says, "What about you? Do you like it?"

Iris nods. "Of course. You look," she catches herself before she says something else, a blush rising to her cheeks all of a sudden, like even her thoughts are embarrassing.

"What?" Spencer asks, a grin rising. Whatever she's thinking, it's gotta be good if it's making her blush.

Iris breaks into a small smile herself — the first real one of the evening. "Nothing," she dismisses.

He ducks his head, eyes finding hers, and flicks his eyebrows up in an attempt to make her tell him what she's thinking — cruelly, perhaps, because he always knows what she's thinking. He just wants her to say it.

She rolls her eyes, and then sighs as she admits with a small smile, "Fine. You look really good, okay?"

Spencer chuckles. "Thanks," he says. "I was unaware you had such a problem complimenting me. You never used to."

He must have embarrassed her, bringing up their argument from so long ago; Iris goes quiet again, swirling her milkshake around in her glass with her striped straw, making the ice clink, before she takes a gargling sip.

Spencer looks out of the glass window, into the fading light of the sky, at the pedestrians wandering aimlessly past or marching purposefully toward their destinations. There's so many people out there on the high street, and he wonders how on earth each of them can exist, can have their lives and their worries and their crushes and their dreams, just like he does.

"What are you thinking?" Iris asks.

He purses his lips, eyes lingering on the view beyond the glass, and then flicking back to Iris. "I'm wondering if any of the people out there," he gestures with a bob of his head out the window, "have had as bad a week as we have."

Iris swallows, sliding her milkshake away from her. "Maybe. But it's not likely." She pauses, tracing her finger along a swirling pattern in the mahogany table. "Not many people go through what we have."

"Yeah, I know," he says. He glances out the window, but quickly looks back at her when he's struck by a sudden thought.

Iris isn't looking back at him, eyes focused on the table.

He wonders if this is what Foyet saw, back in his days of observation, of stalking. He observed all of them, that much was clear from some of the final words he would ever say, but Iris was his favourite. He was smart, smart enough to control himself for the sake of getting to Hotch, but he knows self-control had been unnecessary anyway; Iris gave him the sadistic pleasures he needed to resist the urge of killing — she fed him enough fear, and pain, and anguish, to keep him from going on a murder-spree for months.

He thinks of her leg, and he thinks of watching her on crutches, and he thinks of her tear-stained face standing in Benjamin Cyrus' chapel, and he thinks of a dozen other things at a rate too rapid for a normal human mind to comprehend. A broken soul . . . That's what he'd said, wasn't it?

Spencer ducks his head, catching Iris' eyes in his own again, and says, very quietly, "Iris."

Her eyes flick up, peering into his. He can see himself in her irises, suspended in two shining drops of bright amber, can see himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, with the hair curling over his forehead and the little bit of stubble growing around his mouth.