His whole face goes red, like cherry tomato red, like Truman Bulldog red. I can see it out of the corner of my eye. I twitch and my hand moves up to my hair, ghosting over my headband. It's thin, just wider than my pinky. Standard issue in volleyball life. I've got about a thousand of these, all in the same three colors. Black, white, red. Black, white, red. Black, white, red. I've got a billion pairs of spandex shorts in millions of colors and patterns, but just three colors of headbands.

My brain catches on that, the repetition of colors. I like when things repeat. I find it soothing. When I was young I used to do this thing called 'echolalia,' that's how I knew that one of my tornado explosions was coming on. I haven't done it in over a year-not like that, at least- not since the last one where the only words I had were no, no, no, shhh, no.

My pulse picks up speed momentarily though I'm not in danger quite yet. It isn't until I start muttering out loud that I know that I'm going to have a problem.

I look at one of his stray curls and tug on a piece of my own hair absently. If he's going to react I wish he would just do it already. I hate waiting for bad things to happen.

Black. White. Red. Black. White. Red.

I wonder if I should apologize again or if that would make him more angry. I tug on the piece of hair again.

He finally starts.

"And you just… picked up on all of that?"

I blink, my eyebrows knitting together.

"Yes."

I let the -can't you?- circling in my brain remain soundless.

I can feel him looking at me. I don't know if he can tell that I'm not actually looking at him. I've gotten good at making it seem like I'm making eye contact when I'm really looking at the person's nose, mouth, or ear.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

I frown.

Where did I learn to do that? In my house, on the streets, at school, at the park, at my job, in my therapist's office, in an interrogation room, in a courtroom, in the child welfare building, getting food stamps, at the grocery store, the list could go on for years and I don't know which one will be appropriate to say so I don't say anything. Pat Sajak and Vanna White bid the audience a goodnight and wave to the camera.

I look down at my food and shrug.

While the least volatile of my answers, I know that it is a bad one. I wait for the sudden movement that will let me know that impact is coming. He could hit me. He could throw his glass at me. He could do just about anything and I wouldn't say shit because who would believe me?

My heart falls to my toes.

I hadn't thought about that before. In all of the ways that this could go wrong, I never thought about how easily he could get away with hurting me; with doing anything to me.

Smart, law enforcement, nice guy.

No one would ever believe me if something went down. Not even Maria. I mean, she clearly put this guy up on a pedestal. Wouldn't give me a name, or a photo, or even a single goddamn clue- lest I use my big brain to track him down like prey and ruin his life with my poisonous touch- until I was too old to actually need a parent and his life was pretty much set in stone.

She clearly valued him more than me; which is unsurprising I suppose, and she explained away years of abuse from her other boyfriends, so anything is possible.

Oh, Peaches, I hear her sigh, he isn't like that.

He isn't like that.

What are the odds that two out of her three kids weren't bred to total douchebags? Two out of double digits?

Not good. Not good at all. I do not raise.

He seems like a nice guy a small voice in my head speaks up, saying what I know that I have been thinking for a while now. But just because someone seems nice doesn't mean that they are. I know that for a fact.

"Sydney, can I ask you somethings?" He asks.

I reply without thought, too wrapped up in the dangers of living with people I don't know.

"Didn't you just?"

Buzzer sounds. Wrong answer. Incorrect.

My eyes flick quickly to his face, trying to calculate if I have time to get my arms up to block whatever he's about to do. Miller the Killer would have flipped shit if I had said something like that to him.

Dr. Spencer Reid does not. His lips turn up. It's a smile, small and nice. He seems genuine, for now. I am free to pass go.

"Is that a yes?" he asks "You don't have to answer them if you don't want to."

"Okay…" I say slowly, not entirely sure what to expect. There is a possibility that this is entirely innocent, but I never have been one for spilling my secrets; even small ones. It's best for everyone if I don't seem like a person, just a figure.

"Why don't you like your name?"

I frown deeply.

"What?"

This is startling. And incorrect. I like my name. I think it's pretty, both round and sharp, feminine but not glittery. I like that she didn't name me after the city. Well, not really at least. She named me after the warship- the HMAS Sydney- and that was named after the city. She used to tell me stories about the HMAS Sydney- mostly the man who sailed on it- but what she didn't tell me is that the Sydney sank in 1941. She didn't tell me that when the Sydney went down, it took all 645 people on board down with it, then went missing and stayed that way for 67 years. She told me about soldiers and courage and doing what's right.

So, yes. I do like my name.

I just don't like when it is directly at me.

"You frown whenever somebody says it."

I feel the corners of my lips pull down just a little before I smooth my expression back into place. I hadn't noticed I did that.

I pop my knuckles and consider how to explain this in a way that he'll understand. It takes a second but I finally come back with something.

"What's your middle name?"

"Sydney-"

I give him a brief look.

"I'm not changing the subject, I'm trying to give a real answer. What's your middle name?"

I can tell that he has no idea where this is going but he answers anyway.

"Daniel."

I blink then.

Spencer Dan-yul Reid. Sydney Dan-yuh Reid. I know that my mother is probably sitting in her cell smirking right about now, feeling pretty smug even if she doesn't know why.

That sneaky bitch.

I keep going.

"Did anyone ever call you by your first and middle name when you were little? Like when you got in trouble? Like-" I put on my best scolding mother voice "Spencer Daniel-"

He laughs at my tone, which is understood in almost all spoken languages.

"Yeah, my mom used to do that when she found out I read through the night instead of going to sleep." I smile and look up at the ceiling. That would be his example. I used to get in trouble for that, too, back when my mom gave a damn.

"That's how people use my first name. Nobody's called me 'Sydney' to my face outside of an accusation in years."

I give a small, bitter smile to no one in particular. I remember when I was little and stubborn. I didn't see what was wrong with me just being myself and I refused to let anyone outside of the family call me anything but my name.

That was a lifetime ago.

"So what do people call you?"

I start to count on my fingers.

"Reid, Romano, Syd, Syddie, Cap, Peaches, Maria's Girl- You Know- The Leggy One, Maria, Ria, O, Topolina, and now Baby Reid and Munchkin, I guess. I'm sure there's more, but I'll respond to pretty much anything at this point so it doesn't really matter."

I pick a mushroom out of my lo-mein and take another bite, shrugging. Spencer puts his fork down.

"People call you Maria?"

"They mistake me for her at least. It happens all of the time. I can have a full conversation with someone before they notice that I'm not her."

I don't say that I've used her ID to drive, work her shifts, go to Nico's parent's nights, buy alcohol, pay the rent, set a bank account up for myself, get my tattoo, and get into casinos to play poker. It is one thing to be mistaken for someone, it is a whole other thing to commit identity fraud. I'll never admit to that.

He seems skeptical, so I dig around in my phone, looking for a picture with my mother and I together. It's difficult because I don't hang out with my mother unless she's sober and she's almost never sober. The most recent one is from Junior year, the week that my brother was born. One thing that I will give my mother credit for is that she quit with the drugs, sex, and alcohol when she found out she was pregnant. She's an asshole but not that much of an asshole.

In the picture I am in a pair of lime green running shorts and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off so deeply that you can see my lime green sports bra and the place where my stomach meets my ribcage. My hair is twisted into tight braids and I look sweaty and exhausted. Maria is wearing a hospital gown, her cheeks are round and her skin is glowing but she, too, looks sweaty and exhausted as she sits next to me on the hospital bed. August cross country two-a-days and pushing out a baby both do that to you apparently.

Neither of us is smiling, or looking at the camera for that matter. We're looking past it with identical expressions of faint amusement on our faces. She had dyed her hair a soft brown that year so the only real differences between us are the color of our eyes, my barely visible split lip, and the scar through my left eyebrow.

I don't look fourteen and she doesn't look thirty. I pass him the picture and his eyebrows shoot upwards, mouth falling open slightly. I laugh at his expression.

"You believe me now?"

"Um, yes. You look a lot like how I remember her but she- it's been so long I thought-"

"That she would have aged at least a little? I know. According to my great-grandmother, girls in our family age young and stay that way for a few decades. It's been sixteen years and she still looks like Esmeralda."

He frowns.

"Who?"

Heat crawls up my neck and into my cheeks.

"Esmeralda? The Disney Princess?"

'Esmeralda. Dark hair, works with a goat, remember?'

I want to say the quote out loud but judging by the look on his face it would go right over his head and it would be too embarrassing to explain. He is obviously still confused.

"The Hunchback of Notre Dame? You know, just like the book except it's a lot less french and nobody dies? That's who I always thought she looked like when I was little."

That is the musical that Clayton is putting on this semester. I've done every musical and play that has been put on in my time at school. Not as an actor, but as a techie. I love building the sets.

My hands flex, muscle memory forcing my fingers to curve around an imaginary hammer or maybe it's a screwdriver or maybe even a soldering gun. My hands want things that I cannot give. My hands want the whole wide world all for themselves. I should sit on them so Spencer can't see. I should squash all of their urges to reach out and grab and touch and see and speak.

I force them to be silent by forcing them into fists.

Quiet hands.

Quiet hands, Miss Reid, you have to have quiet hands. Behavior does not equate communication, Miss Reid. Open your mouth and close your hands, you need to speak.

My nails bite into my skin.

"I could call you something else, if you'd like."

"No!"

It comes out louder than I intended, so I backtrack.

"I mean- no, please. I kind of miss my name."

I miss the story behind it. I miss everything that my mother wanted for me and everything she once intended me to be. I like to think that I exceeded expectations, even if she doesn't see it.

I shake my head a little, like a magic eight ball, hoping my own icosahedron will come up with a different set of words. There are twenty sides to the die in a magic eight ball, did you know that? Twenty different answers. I imagine holding one and shaking it furiously, asking all of my questions.

Will I ever get over my mother?

Reply hazy, try again.

"You said questions. Plural. Do you have more?"

"Why don't you like Will?"

Jesus, Spencer. Just like that, huh?

My answer is immediate and preprepaired. I know that I slipped when I first saw him, I reacted without thought and it was an incorrect response. I knew there would be questions eventually, though I thought they would be from JJ.

"I don't dislike Will, I don't even know him." Truth.

Spencer frowns, profiler mode fully in place. He can tell I'm not lying but I didn't really answer his question.

"So why did you react the way you did?"

I could ask him to elaborate on my reaction and exactly what was so wrong with it, but I already know and procrastination will not help me right now.

I put a small frown on my face, forcing my eyebrows together a little.

"He looks just like one of my first foster parents-" Truth.

"It freaked me out. " Truth.

"Why would that freak you out? Was he...bad or something?"

Yes. He was horrible. He was so horrible, you don't even know. Jaime wouldn't be dead if it weren't for him. I wouldn't be like this if he hadn't done what he did. He ate our souls, chewed us up and spit us out; Ileana too. But I didn't know about them back then, when I was little and he got fifteen years for the video that Maya's nanny cam made. Did they tell you that, Spencer? Is it in my file?

"No. He wasn't bad-" Lie.

"He and his wife were some of the only decent foster parents I ever had-" Truth and Lie. Maya was kind. He only pretended to be.

"But it's been, like, five years since I've seen him-"

Five years, three months, and ten days.

"And I don't know if you've noticed but I live roughly 2,422.4 away now. What are the odds of actually running into him here?"

Answer?

Microscopic, near impossible. I suppose he could break out of prison and hunt me down to this very apartment, but it would be difficult and very unlike him. He is a snake, hiding in the grass, waiting to strike. He is not built to act out, he wouldn't break out of prison illegally. He manipulates, makes you think he's the good guy, makes you feel guilty for being alive. Breaking out of prison won't make him look like a victim.

I think he buys it. I told enough truth for it to not be a complete lie, enough to balance out my microexpressions. I have finished my food.

"Any other questions?" I ask, hoping that he will say no because I am so tired.

I need to sleep. I need to rest.

"Not at the moment."

"I'm tired," I say, rising off the couch. "I think I'm going to sleep."

I scrub my plate in the kitchen, putting it in the dishwasher even though it's clean, then I grab his and do the same. Once the mess is cleaned up I do my fifteen minute night time routine and crawl into bed. After a second of thinking in fast circles, I give into impulse and grab my bottle of sleeping pills from my bedside table. I dry swallow one.

I really do hate having to depend on pills to force my body into performing basic functions. I pull out my phone and type in Cam's number, setting up a new contact, then shoot out a single text before powering down my phone entirely and plugging it in.

'Hey, Cam. It's Syd. I told you I would remember.'

I only went to Jamie's house once but I remember her room clearly, sky blue walls, shelves full of trophies, little white desk. I remember because I was violently jealous. She had a house, a bedroom to herself, and all kinds of non-essentials. I remember her closet, full of golden trophies and medals probably dating back to middle school.

That's how I know where I'm standing.

Even though it was August and school hadn't even started yet, her mom had already bought her honor cords. I could see them hanging on the back of the door. I reach up and touch my throat where I can feel a faint kind of pressure.

"She goes a little bit crazy about that stuff," Jamie says from behind me. "Gets ahead of herself."

The hair on the back of my neck stands up and I know, even as I start to turn, that something is horribly wrong. It is Jamie standing behind me, it's her. I know it's her.

But it's also not.

Yes, there is the thick nike headband and long ponytail, there are the grey joggers and the black t-shirt that reads 'kiss my ace' that she loved so much, but there are also obvious differences.

Her blonde hair is limp and greasy, her lips are an ugly blue, and blood vessels in her eyes have blown; leaking red into the whites.

"I mean, she just assumed I would make it to graduation."

Her neck is bruised, blue and black hovering over the gaping hole in her esophagus where the doctors had put a tube in an attempt to push air into her lungs. I know that, in the end, Jamie didn't die that night hanging from the rod in her closet. The article had gotten that wrong. Daphne Clarke just didn't care enough to get the story right. The reality is that Jamie died of a stroke in Grace Memorial Hospital nearly five months after that day, a side effect of histotoxic hypoxia. Her brain hadn't gotten enough oxygen to keep going.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind her, the huge one that was built into her ancient dresser directly across from her closet. I look the way I did the day of Jessica's funeral. My hair, on that day, had been forced into neat ringlets for the first time in my life.

Until Audi poured a pot of purple paint directly onto my head in the middle of art class.

It was Jamie who had helped me rinse it out in the locker room showers. It was Jamie who washed out my dress, then dried it under the hand dryer. Then, when the stains didn't come out of my peter pan collar and I was sobbing hysterically about my dead best friend, Jamie was the one who hunted through every lost and found bin in the school and came back with a black cardigan so I wouldn't have to go to Jessie's funeral looking like a slob.

Jamie circles around and comes to stand behind me again. She grabs my hair, freshly damp, and begins to french braid it. Just like she did that day.

The pressure on my throat increases and I'm convinced that there has to be something wrapped around it but when I reach up and try to pull it off, there isn't anything there. It is getting harder to breath.

"I told you that you could be beautiful, if you tried." She says absently.

And she had told me that. She had been the catalyst to my swan transformation that summer. She had pointed out that; without my child sized glasses, my eyes swollen a size smaller, with my hair pulled away from my face- I looked quite doll-like. The kind you keep on a shelf, too beautiful to play with or even touch.

As much as I've always hated dolls, I wanted that.

I wanted to be untouchable.

"You aren't," Jamie says, reading my mind without looking up from my hair. "I made sure of that. I'm not either, thanks to Ileana." She frowns, then looks up from the back of my head.

"I'm sorry about that," she says "so was Ileana, by the way."

I shrug, knowing that Ileana McDowell was never sorry for anything.

"We're all sorry." I speak for the first time. Jamie ties off my hair and smooths out my black sweater.

"We both died sorry. So will you."

I go stiff, lungs aching as I reach up once again to touch my neck where I can feel the strange pressure. I whip around to face her, but it isn't Jamie standing behind me.

I scream.

My throat hurts, stinging on the outside and aching on the inside. A sharp shrill sound is ripping through the air. I think it must be Jamie, it must be her, so I try to get up to find her, but I can't move. I can't move. Jamie is somewhere, screaming, and I can't move. Something is holding me back. I twist frantically, thrashing around, but whatever restraints I've got around me just tighten. There is a soft muttering somewhere but I can't make out the words.

My throat hurts.

Why does my throat hurt?

The sound gets louder- more shrill- and the muttering picks up volume and speed but I still can't understand what they are trying to say.

I'm in Jamie's room. There's the blue walls, and the white desk, and the closet full of trophies- not clothes.

I am in Jamie's room, but where is Jamie?

More importantly; where's the Monster?

She didn't leave me alone with him, did she?

It wouldn't have been the first time, but she was here a moment ago. She was here when his hands were around my neck and he was squeezing and squeezing, and I couldn't breathe, and she was saying "It's okay, Cap. It's okay. Dying isn't so bad. You'll be okay, I'll stay with you."

But I won't be. And she didn't.

My jaw is clenched and I'm crying. Hard. I can feel the wetness and taste the salt. The shrill, unending scream is hitching, tripping over itself. I can't breathe. I just cry, slumped against whatever is preventing me from getting up. I try to reach for my neck again, trying to make sure that he isn't still choking me, but my arms are pinned. My hands flex somewhere near my waist then ball themselves up. I try to twist free one last time, fail, and then surrender; chest heaving as I hyperventilate. The scream has stopped, giving way to the ugly sounds of me unable to catch my breath and the muttering, which I can almost understand now.

"...okay...you're okay...safe…"

I keep crying; unable to be embarrassed while my heart is beating so fast.

Someone is touching me. Someone is smoothing my hair back. I don't like people touching me and I'm almost glad that I can't breathe enough to get words out, because I'm not here enough to politely choke that comment down.

"...okay...open...eyes...it's okay...safe."

Safe. I am not safe. I am never safe, some kind of threat is always there, looming just out of sight. And when I'm twenty-five- a mere nine years away- and his sentence is up, there won't be a place on this earth for me to hide. There won't be a place in this galaxy.

But I'll be out of school by then, be fresh out of the FBI Academy; and even if I don't make it into the Academy or the FBI, I'll join the military. I've spoken to recruiters, they'd take me in a heartbeat.

I'll be older.

I'll be able to protect myself.

I'll have a gun.

And Nico will be nineteen by then. She'll be in college, out of reach of my mother. Out of reach in general.

Twenty-five is so far away.

"...you're okay...just open your eyes...deep breaths…"

The muttering is becoming clearer, though a bit more worried. I notice then that I'm sitting upright against something warm.

I am not in Jamie's room.

Where am I? Why do they keep telling me to open my eyes? They are open. I blink, watching the wall color snap from 'deep sky blue' to almost grey. I blink again, trying to banish the black spots that come with under oxygenation.

The desk is wooden, not white.

"Dream...Sydney...please...try to take...few deep breaths...can you try…"

Sydney. Sydney. Nobody calls me Sydney anymore, not even my grandparents, always Syd or Peaches or Cap or Casper. Nobody except Maria, when she is furious and ranting, cutting up my name to distance me from her-

"Sydney Reid, Little Miss Perfect, you think you're so much better than us, don't you? You think you aren't immigrant trash like me just because people say you're smart?You're the worst mistake I've ever made-"

"Sydney, please try…"

The tone isn't angry. They sound distressed. They keep saying 'please.' I try to get my panicking greymatter to focus on determining who it could be.

Someone else calls me Sydney. Someone calls me by my full first name even when they aren't mad because I gave them permission. I gave them permission because it's my name and I kind of like my real name without the negativity. People think I was named after the city but I wasn't, not really anyway-

Spencer.

Spencer offered to call me something else but I said no, I said that I kind of missed hearing my name, I said I didn't mind. I gave Spencer permission.

I am in my room, not Jamie's.

I'm in Spencer's apartment.

I suck in a shaky breath, trying to make it deep, do as I'm told. Someone sighs near my left ear and I flinch.

"Good...good job...keep taking deep breaths…"

Dream.

Dream. It was a bad dream. Jamie is dead, the monster is in prison, and I am awake.

I am awake.

I take another breath, ignoring the pain in my chest, and let it out. It sounds like a wheeze.

The room is spinning a little. I feel a bit buzzed. Panic attack; my brain supplies helpfully.

Fuck you I fire back.

Panic attack. At least that's familiar.

I keep my head down as I try to ground myself. My arms are still pinned to my body, but now I can see why. Somebody- it must be Spencer- is hugging me straight jacket style and we're rocking slightly. It's tight and I know what he's doing. He's applying deep pressure paired with gentle motion. This is a page pulled right out of the dealing with your child's sensory processing disorder handbook. My mom used to do this when I was little and my tornado explosions had me on the floor thrashing into furniture so hard it left deep, black, bruises on my limbs, or I would try to claw my way out of this prison I call a body. I wonder if she told him about this or if he found it in a book. Either way, it's calming.

I take another breath in through my mouth even though it feels like I've eaten a cereal bowl of broken glass.

"Good job," he says "you're okay. Just keep taking deep breaths."

I stay slumped, too exhausted to lift my head, but my hands are clenched in tight fists. They ache and tingle but I can't get them to relax. There are spots of red on my white shirt and I know from the sting that I must have clawed my neck to beat hell. I don't care at the moment, even though I know I will tomorrow. I keep wheezing, my heart rate beginning to slow. I stare at my sheets. They're grey. I kicked off my blanket at some point in the night and must have kept right on going because his legs are on either side of mine, bent at the knees and out of range enough that I couldn't hurt him but preventing me from going at the wall as well. I notice that I am in my black leggings and he must not have gone to sleep because he is still in his work pants. I can notice all of this, even though I am not wearing my glasses and everything is fuzzy. My heart rate increases again. They could be here, they could be in this room and I would not know because I can't see.

I'm going crazy. Certifiable.

My breath catches again even though I know it isn't true, it is just the last of the nightmare tormenting me while it is still alive. I want my glasses. I try to make my mouth move enough to form coherent sounds but it won't, my face is too tense. We are still rocking so I close my eyes, forcing out the last of my tears.

We stay like this until my breathing is steady other than the occasional hitch and the muscles in my stomach, face, and shoulders relax. They throb like I just did a long workout, and I can't seem to get my hands out of fists. If anything, they curl tighter. The saline that leaked out of my eyes earlier has dried tracks into my cheeks. The rocking slows until it stops and I've got enough in me to marvel about him having enough abdomen strength and stamina to have done it continually for so long. I've done long rocking stints all of my life and I am almost always a little sore afterwards. I am still slumped forward as far as I can be and if he lets go now, I will land on my face. I try and take stock, inventory of what happened and how I feel.

What happened? Nightmare or night-terror, I've never quite been able to identify which. On the one hand I can remember them, they usually stem from trauma, and I can- clearly- be woken up, which is nightmare specific. On the other hand, I kick around and, while possible, it is obscenely difficult to wake me up.

How do I feel? Shaky and gross. My body is still twitching with terror, I am covered in cold sweat, and I can no longer feel my hands. These are not good signs.

I am also practically in Spencer's lap and the embarrassment is beginning to set in. He does not let me go or loosen pressure and, as properly horrified as I can manage to be at this moment, I am grateful.

I remember, now, why I hate taking those sleeping pills.

AN: Hey guys. Thanks to the Coronavirus, my classes are cancelled for two weeks and I've got nothing but time. I've been working on this one since before I posted the last one and finally finished tonight. This is the longest chapter I've ever posted. If you guys wouldn't mind reviewing, I would love it! I love reading what you guys have to say!

- Blink Vinyl :)