Evolution, a Spencer Reid/Criminal Minds Fanfic

Chapter 25. Promise Number Three

It had been a little over a week since Anastasia’s younger sister, Sarah, had been murdered. Ana had gone home for the funeral service. Then she had fled back east, returning to the life she was making for herself in New York. It was too soon for her to speak of her sister without risking tears. But she didn’t expect anyone other than immediate family to feel the same way.

Certainly not a strange man she’d only just met.

As she watched Spencer Reid cry, amazement supplanted some of her sorrow.

Ana had always been an excellent judge of character. When she was little, she would draw pictures of people. She didn’t limit herself to physical appearance. Ana drew what she felt emanating from human hearts and souls. The disturbing results had made her teachers schedule several conferences with her parents. Twice, a child psychologist had been asked to see her.

In the end, Ana was given a clean bill of health, both mentally and emotionally.

In the end, Ana learned to hide what she felt. She tried to ignore it. Deny it. On her own, far from home, she felt she was moving closer to accepting it. Whatever ‘it’ was. She hoped the Paranormal Investigative Center would give ‘it’ a name, once they’d examined her.

But in Spencer Reid’s case, she couldn’t ignore what she’d felt.

When he had stumbled his way through their first awkward meeting at the Center, she had felt him from across the room. Intelligence. Curiosity. Sincerity. Loneliness. And above all…hope. He was someone who would live hopefully ever after. Always trying to fit in. Forever trying to find someone to devote himself to. More than anything, and most secret of all, Reid hoped for love. But he’d settle for acceptance. He’d given up on hoping for ‘normal.’

Ana understood him within seconds.

She’d felt a sudden FLASH behind her eyes. She’d seen him standing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the mid-Manhattan library. By the time she’d left the Center, Ana knew she would spend every spare minute she had in the company of the library’s stone lions until Spencer showed up.

And now he was crying. She didn’t understand. She felt sorrow pouring off of him, which might be explained as sympathy for her loss. But the guilt was inexplicable. And much worse. It didn’t pour off and drain away. It enveloped and clung to him. Ana had learned to know when an emotion she felt in another person was temporary. Anger, fear and hate were often especially fierce, but she could sense something qualitative in them that marked them as transitory. Then there was the other kind. The kind that stuck to a person and left them with scars and deep, psychic injuries.

That’s what Spencer’s guilt felt like.

Ana didn’t understand. But she wanted to. She moved closer to him.

Passersby shot them the occasional, curious glance, but this was New York. No one interfered in whatever drama was unfolding between the young couple under the tree.

Ana sat on the ground, her legs folded beneath her. She was as close as she could get to Spencer without actually touching him. They had met too recently for her to be comfortable taking any personal liberties involving physical contact. So she did the next best thing. Privately, Ana called it ‘putting out the antennae.’ Publicly, she’d stopped talking about it in grade school after all the fuss with the child psychologists. She might not have, but she’d seen the worried looks her parents gave her. When they turned the same anxious regard on little sister Sarah, wondering if she would follow in Ana’s footsteps, Ana had decided it would be best for everyone if she played the ‘don’t say anything; pretend you’re normal’ game. That was something her grandmother had bequeathed her before she’d passed away. Advice from the deathbed of a woman she’d hardly known. At the time, Ana hadn’t given it much thought. In the years since, she’d come to consider it something of a survival guide.

As close to Spencer as she could get, Ana calmed her own sorrowful memories of Sarah. She imagined tendrils unfurling from the place between her eyes that always felt a little warm. In her studies, she’d learned that spot was referred to as ‘the third eye’ in certain spiritual traditions. She let them extend and imagined them falling in delicate, gentle patterns over Spencer.

She could access what he was feeling, but not the ‘why’ of it. She’d have to try something else.

“Spencer? Spencer…” He slitted his eyes open, giving her a sidelong look of pure misery. “Spencer…thank you.” She hit him with the unexpected. He blinked several times, bringing her into sharper focus.

“F-for what?”

“For your tears. They’re for Sarah, aren’t they?”

He nodded, looking away from her. “Don’t thank me. You don’t understand.”

“But I want to. Please tell me.” Ana didn’t think it was the right time to let Spencer know that if he didn’t tell someone, the envelope of guilt would thicken, and strengthen, and in the end would seal him within it irrevocably. She’d seen it happen to others. It was a terrible waste of a life when it did.

He closed his eyes again. “I don’t know how.”

He hadn’t refused. Ana saw that as a hopeful sign. “It’s very simple. You start at the beginning, wherever or whenever that is. Then you go to the end. Then you stop.” She didn’t feel any mirth, but gave him a tremulous smile anyway.

Spencer looked at her for several heartbeats. “What if it’s really bad? What if it makes you hate me?”

Ana’s smile faded. She felt fear rolling off of him. Her hate was a very real possibility in his mind. It was her turn to close her eyes. She let the tendrils of her other ‘sight’ replace natural vision. No, he’s wrong. There’s nothing…hate-able…in him. Not for me anyway.

When she looked at him again, he was still watching her. Waiting for a verdict of some sort. She gave it to him.

“I promise, Spencer Reid, with all that I am, that I won’t hate you. I should tell you, I don’t make promises lightly. I’ve only made two in my entire life…adult life, anyway. First, I promised my parents I’d take care of myself in this city. I would be smart and stay safe and do my best at whatever I chose. Second, I promised my mother that, whatever else I do, I’d try to be happy. Because she said that’s really the only thing she wants for her children…child, now. I’m the only one left.” Ana’s voice tightened as it stumbled over the realization.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say it yet, but I have a feeling that if you don’t get past whatever’s blocking you right now, if you don’t let me in, I might be breaking that second promise. The one about trying to be happy. I keep seeing…flashes of things. And you’re there. And I’m happy. So, I’ll give you my third-ever promise, Spencer. And if you don’t take it, you might also be part of breaking promise number two.” She took a deep breath and looked into his eyes as steadily as she could. “I promise, I will not hate you. Ever. Now, talk to me. Help me keep promise number two.”

Reid felt the world around them recede. There were only the two of them and the terrible story he kept inside.

“I work for the FBI, Ana.” Her eyes widened. “I was there in Needles. I was there in the woods. I found your sister. Too late. She might be alive if I hadn’t been scared to…uh…do…what I needed to find her.”

He watched her go blank. Her gaze transferred to the ground. All Reid’s fears and worst imaginings started to brew and bubble up from the darkest corners of his soul. Ana’s voice, when it came, was distant.

“You were there…”

“Yes.”

Then she did what Reid would never have dared wish for. Even at his most hopeful. Even if the circumstances hadn’t been so terrible. She moved closer. She nestled in beside him. Laying her head on his shoulder, she sighed and rested against him.

“You better tell me everything.”

 So he did.