switchblade faith//spencer reid

6

brief content warning: discussion of mental illness (schizophrenia). aside from that, happy reading!

the thing about growing up in a place where there are so many dinosaur fossils is that you start to search for them everywhere. my friends and I, in elementary school, saw the enormous bones, those huge sockets where eyes used to sit. and even though there was nothing in them now, they seemed to glare back at us. if you stood right in front, face-to-face, it felt like looking down the barrel of a gun. a several-ton, reptilian gun. petrifying.

and it wasn't like there was much to do in Montana, anyway. sometimes the sheer expanse of that place, especially if we drove a bit out of town, was enough to put fear in me. like we'd been abandoned there.

when my mom got her migraines, I dug holes in the front yard. occasionally, I'd find something-- a funnily-shaped rock, usually-- and it would look enough like a dinosaur tooth that for a moment I'd deceive myself into thinking that I'd made a discovery. it didn't matter that actual remnants would be buried much, much further in the ground than I could turn with my small hands. but I liked the slight rush it sent through my body, seeing what other people hadn't. sitting back on my heels and brushing off the excess, the only thing I could hear was my breath. there's something quite serene about that, the focusing in on something which normally I would never think about. my heart pounding. and I collected my findings so that I would be able to put them together again when there were enough pieces.

but this doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, particularly not when I'm short on time and staring at an upsettingly pathetic evidence board.

"the unsub said we needed a book, didn't he?" Spencer brings me to attention. there's an unfolded paper on the board that Hotch's wife dropped off an hour ago. he's talking to her in his office about who delivered it; we don't know anything else. all it has is a bunch of numbers written in neat black ink.

"yep." I bite the end of my pen and frown. "one that 'inspired many an adventure.'"

"then it's a book code," Reid says like it's the most obvious thing in the world. I arch an eyebrow and he continues. "each one of these sets of numbers represents a specific word. page 118, line 30, word 3." he points one long finger at a certain spot, and I follow it.

"so we just need to figure out what the words are and fill in the blanks," I lean forward in my chair, cradling a cup of coffee that's starting to grow cold. "except what book are we looking for?"

"I don't know," he shrugs. I lean back in my seat; if Reid doesn't know, we're all screwed. "the thing is that it has to be the exact same edition of the exact same book."

"that's encouraging." I sigh. the useless feeling puts me in a bad mood. we're wasting time by sitting and learning nothing. although there's nowhere to go.

I'm not sure how long we're there; hours, at least. night becomes less heavy, hues of a purplish pink sky slotting through the blinds and reminding me of just how exhausted I am. not enough to sleep. bone-tired.

Spencer crosses his arms, leans his chin on his fist and stares at the numbers like they'll suddenly make sense. and maybe they will; I don't know how his head works. some miracle that has eluded us for the past few hours might appear now. but the longer I stare, the more confused I get. instead, I start to sift through the pile of other evidence pieces scattered around the table. we could be missing something.

"you know, I can understand how this guy got our addresses and phone numbers, but there's no way all that information about JJ's butterfly obsession or Rossi's trips to baseball games would be in our personnel files." I frown. those things wouldn't be relevant.