Spencer hates tension. When awkward silences settle in, his first instinct is to start talking about something, anything -- statistics, interesting facts from history, the biological reasoning behind how much sugar he puts in his coffee, anything -- but, for the life of him, he can't think of anything to say right now.

No, that's a lie. It's hardly that he can't think of anything to say, but, rather, that he can think of far too much to say and none of it sounds right. All of the details are somehow different from the way he's imagined them, but they're nevertheless consistent, in their ways. He was right in thinking that they would choose a diner, but the patterned tiles on the floor are white and seafoam green, not red and yellow, or blue and brown, or rose and off-white. Everything is so small-town, from the waitresses' uniforms (starched, all matching, with each woman in the same sneakers, apron, and dress the same color as the tiles) to the day's specials on the chalkboard behind the cash register. The upper half of walls is the same green as the floor, with a line of checkerboard wallpaper pattern, peeling in places and separating the paint from inexplicable metal.

Spencer supposes that it's all meant to be comforting. If you dress a normal diner up in framed news clippings and pictures of the customers, in the smudgy fingerprints from local kids touching the metal, you can make it individual. In terms of atmosphere, he can feel the life cautiously replacing the trepidation that had been here only three days previously. Normal people would walk in here and feel right at home, instead of impossibly alone. The young married couple in the corner gossip without a care. The single mother reins in her three kids single-handedly and her eldest is no help with the younger ones. The elderly best friends compare regalia on their fishing hats and gab easily about where they're going, come Friday night.

It's all Spencer can do just to look across the table at Gideon, and he can't even manage that reliably.

Their server's name is Ellen. It says so in the clinically efficient typeface on her little red name tag. Were they meeting under different circumstances, Spencer might not be so awkward with her, but, when she brings his and Gideon's water and coffee, he only manages to look at her long enough to mutter, "Thank you." Her hair is graying at the temples and reminds him of one of the nurses at Bennington. Unwrapping a straw is easier than trying to consider this.

"You boys find what you'd like yet?" she asks brightly. Years of smoking are evident in the timbre of her voice, but she could be doing much worse for herself. In a decade, half that maybe, she won't sound nearly so clean.

"I'd like your Reuben, please. On rye bread," Gideon replies easily, like he does this all the time, as though he isn't sitting opposite his former protege after two years of no contact whatsoever.

She repeats the order as she takes it down. From the sound of her writing, she presses hard, using excessive pressure, at least while taking orders. Heavy pressure writers seek material gratification; they are uptight and, because they feel their emotions more strongly than the average person, they can easily overreact; and they can hold grudges forever, if it comes to that. Despite this, though, or perhaps because of it, their internal lives are rich, their imaginations vivid. She probably had higher aspirations than this life, but she met her husband (trying to look up at her, Spencer only makes it to eye-level with her wedding ring), fell in love, and doesn't regret a thing. Smoking is a habit, probably something they do together. Nightly love-making and a shared cigarette after. How happy to be normal and in something reliable.

Spencer manages to look at her right as she turns her attention to him. "What about you, honey?" she asks, her smile embarrassingly sympathetic.

"I -- uh, no, I'm fine," he stumbles over his words and hates every second of it. He even has to pause, swallowing thickly and looking back to the off-white table instead of at her. "Just -- just coffee for me, thanks."

It's Gideon, not Ellen, who questions this. "You're sure, Spencer? You might not get another chance to eat before your flight."

Gideon might be hard to profile -- even Hotch hadn't predicted that the team would find him in a suburb around Olympia, Washington, of all places -- but his subtext is fairly obvious. Mom's said the same thing every time Spencer's seen her since he started at the Bureau: you're so thin, you look so scrawny, all that coffee makes you skinny. Similarly easy to read is Gideon's unspoken question: Are you really taking care of yourself? Spencer's been trying, but he supposes that his answer won't really be the resounding yes that Gideon would like.

"Yeah, I..." Spencer pauses again, making himself look up at her. "Could I get two eggs, scrambled, with the chicken soup?"

"Sure thing, sweetheart." And, with that, she's off, leaving Spencer to try and fill the silence again.

Instinctively, he takes a sip of his coffee before realizing that he forgot to put the sugar in; if he were a masochist, the bitterness would be a better mechanism for waking up than the caffeine. His entire face scrunches in concentration as he opens the sugar packets and dumps them, one-by-one, into the coffee. He mixes them in mechanically, the separate motions all too familiar. After six, he pauses to taste his concoction. It's not perfect, but it'll do just fine, and he finally forces himself to meet the gaze of the man sitting across the table from him.

The past two years have been good to Gideon, or so it looks. It's clear that he hasn't put the past behind him, though that could simply be circumstantial. His age isn't showing quite as visibly as it used to, the spark's come back behind his brown eyes (after Frank came back, Spencer was certain that it never would), and he certainly isn't overflowing with joy, but he's managed a smile, which is more than Spencer can say for himself. Gideon's hair hasn't thinned, not that Spencer can see, and any ghosts that cross his face are all too likely caused by the fact that, for the first time in twenty-four-and-a-half months, the reminder of his former life, of the BAU and what they saw, is physical and unavoidable. More than that, his reminder comes in the form of Spencer Reid -- a thinner, paler, more sleep-deprived Spencer Reid, but Spencer Reid nonetheless.

When he tries to open his mouth and speak, he can't find words or his vocal chords and his stomach lurches violently. It's the same way it would feel if he were riding shotgun while Derek played fast and loose with traffic laws. He never should have come here. He's gotten on two years without Gideon in his life, and no, it hasn't been easy, but he should have just left well enough alone. Derek would have been upset that he didn't deal with his 'Gideon issues' when he had the unexpected chance and maybe certain questions would have gone continually unanswered -- but how is that any better than what they have now? If Spencer can't bring himself to speak, it's just going to be worse than never seeing Gideon at all.

"What's on your mind, Spencer?" Gideon prods. Being faced with his smile is a staggering reality. Spencer's imagined it so many times, but he never thought that he might actually be here, sitting across a table from Gideon. He's started forgetting what it felt like before, but this, he knows, is far from his old experiences.

"I'd have a chance to eat before the flight," he says lamely, fussing with the wrapper from his straw. "I asked Hotch to stay over another night. ...So I could see you."

"How is Hotch?" He asks it in the same way that one might ask about a peculiar weather pattern. "How's everyone been?"

"Hayley left him," Spencer reports it as though it's a statistic and not his boss's personal life. "Strauss brought David Rossi in as your replacement. He's... different, but he grows on you, after a while. Garcia got shot--"

"Penelope? Are you serious?"

Spencer swallows thickly before he can get out, "As a heart attack. ...But she wasn't hurt that badly, and she actually started dating this other technical analyst, Kevin Lynch. Will -- Detective LaMontagne? From New Orleans -- anyway, he and JJ had a baby. Little Henry... they named me and Penelope his godparents..."

Gideon smiles again and Spencer can't look at him anymore. "You must be pleased."

"Yeah, I am, I guess... It's just -- I mean, it's amazing, on one hand, that Will and JJ wanted me to be the godfather. But it's so daunting, too, being responsible for something -- someone so tiny and helpless."

Idiot -- how could he slip up and call his godson a thing, even tangentially or off-handedly, like now? He might not be able to look Gideon in the eye again, at this rate. Some fauxs pas are acceptable or at least tolerable, but referring to Henry as a thing is decidedly not one of them. Continuing to fuss with the straw wrapper instead of paying attention to Gideon is only a step or two above that.

"How have you been, Spencer?"

His eyes wide and his nostrils flared, Spencer forces himself to look up at the beatific, Buddha smile Gideon gives him. It would be comforting if Spencer couldn't see the curious spark behind the other man's eyes, and if he didn't know that this question is not nearly as simple as it seems to be. The easy surfaces of things go down like his sugared coffee, but this palatable disguise is a crop of lies, just a cover trying to mask the bitter kick-back that comes when you pry far enough into things. After six years in the BAU, it's nigh impossible for Spencer to believe in Occam's Razor anymore, for him to swallow things that appear to make sense without probing them first, for him to think that Gideon's investigative concern is only that and not riddled with some subtext. Something else's presence wouldn't comfort him, he knows that much, but it would at least give him the satisfaction of being right in his caution.

Once again, he finds himself in the wretched position of having too many things to say but not enough fortitude to say them. He thinks of his first NA meeting -- "Hello, my name is Spencer, and I guess... I don't really know what I am" (Hello, Spencer) -- he thinks of his letters to Bennington on the days when he wants this all to be a dream, and he thinks of all the things he's considered saying to her, then reevaluated --

"Dear Mom, Today was surreal. Agent Gideon brought me to the BAU and I think I've officially started there now. I know everyone's names already, but it was kind of like a first day at school magnified by a power of ten. At least in school, I knew enough about how things worked to feel somewhat more comfortable."

"Dear Mom, I saved someone's life tonight. Remember from a few days ago, how I told you about Nathan Harris, the kid who stopped me at the metro station? He tried to kill himself tonight. He bought a prostitute, I guess to see if he could sleep with her without thinking of murdering her, but, instead, he sliced his wrists. She called me and Penelope helped me save his life. He's going into a juvenile mental facility now, and I just hope that they can help him."

Spencer thinks of everything but the man sitting across the table from him.

Finally, he looks up. He makes himself look Gideon in the eye and, in a voice he hates hearing himself use, he manages to get out, "I've been better."

As though the silence hadn't said that for him.

~*~

As young as four, Spencer knows that he isn't normal, but he isn't sure he minds. He plays chess in the park with adults, some of them more than ten times his age, and he always wins. He remembers facts and figures that dazzle his age-appropriate playmates, whom he rarely ever actually plays with; it isn't that they've done anything to make him dislike them -- it's just that, when they aren't dull, they make no sense to him. He knows what the words on the sides of the cereal boxes mean. Whole grain oats are the main ingredient in Cheerios, but sugar is the main ingredient in Count Chocula, followed by the marshmallows, which have too many unnatural or modified things in them for them to be healthy. Changing something natural just seems ridiculous to him, but he likes the way his fake-chocolate cereal tastes.

He likes mixing his cereal with his parents' Cheerios. The two textures come together quite nicely and the tastes complement each other, Spencer thinks. Dad doesn't understand why Spencer won't just enjoy his Count Chocula like the other boys. Mom says he isn't like the other boys, he's better than they are, he's gifted, and they fight about Dad forcing him into baseball again while the cool milk and saliva wear down the cereal in his mouth.

When there's no more cereal, Mom and Dad are still arguing. Spencer quietly drinks the milk from the bowl and then wanders across the check-patterned linoleum floor to put his bowl in the sink. Neither of them notice as he steals into Mom's office and tries to find something to read.

He likes Chaucer better when Mom reads it to him.

By the time he's ten, Spencer wishes his life were more normal. He's starting high school soon -- maybe this fall, maybe not, it depends on what happens when some teachers talk to some other teachers, then those teachers talk to the school board, and then Mom talks to everyone, and it's all too much talking for Spencer to comprehend. The whole house still feels different with Dad gone, even though he's been gone for three months, two weeks, five days, two hours, and thirteen minutes.

Sitting at the table with a Lunchable, Spencer wonders which school registration he'll have to go to, and whether or not Mom will be lucid enough to take him. Dad took him last year and Dad explained that, yes, it was odd for a nine-year-old to be signed up where he was, but everyone understood what was happening. Drumming his fingers on the airtight plastic cover, he isn't even sure if Mom will be able to make it this year. What if she's having an episode because she doesn't take her medication? What if he has to go alone? The high school isn't far, he's walked there and back with Jeff and Ethan several times (Ethan has longer legs, so he walks faster, something he's never shy about saying) -- but what if Spencer has to try and explain to the PTA moms running things that his name is Spencer Reid and he really is supposed to be here, that he's neither lost nor confused, and that he only came alone because his mother is crazy and his father's gone? What if he tries to get a teacher to help -- Mister Leventhal, the biology teacher, is an old friend of Mom's; his wife teaches at the university too and they know the situation, as the adults tend to call it -- but the PTA moms still don't believe him?

Spencer looks at the tightly packaged assemblage of well-preserved meat, white flour crackers, and pasteurized cheese food as though it all contains some kind of answer. He knows what goes into Lunchables, and the articles he's read all scare him. They scare him more than trying to find an answer for the new, fighteningly thin, spindle-necked research librarian at Mom's university, who had to interrupt his searching by asking if he needed more age-appropriate literature. Clearly, she had to be new. Spencer didn't remember her face or the way her glasses hung on the silver chain around her neck, and she didn't know yet that schizophrenic Professor Reid's son was above reading Little Women, or some picture book Tom Sawyer, or whatever other simple-minded children's books they kept around for faculty kids.

Even though it scares him, Spencer knows he needs to eat something and trying to cook scares him even more than what goes into Lunchables. He can manage it and he's getting better, but he wishes Dad were still here to do it. He wishes Dad were still here to talk to those people because, when Dad talks, people listen.

Instead of plucking up the courage to eat this so-called food, Spencer leaves it on the table and walks down the hallway towards Mom's room. He doesn't knock before opening the door. There isn't any point to niceties when the only people in the house are the two of them and her delusions. Mom's still in bed, wearing her nightgown and her sweater -- the same one she wore when Dad walked out, the same one she'll be wearing several years later, when her dutiful, her brilliant son finally turns on her -- and surrounded by her books. She sleeps with them instead of with Dad anymore.

Although her eyes are distant now, their vivid spark replaced with that alien expression she has during these difficult times, but she still looks at him and she smiles. "Spencer..." she says as though she's remembering some long-lost friend. She reaches out towards him with both arms. "Come here, baby."

Without questioning, he comes to the bed and climbs in beside her. He can shut the world out when he's here with Mom and her books and her wild mass of untamed hair. Shushing him even though he's made no noise, she takes him in her arms and he clings to her, nestling his head in her neck and wrapping his arms around her shoulders. They aren't so strange when Spencer pretends that there are no other people, no other standards to which to compare them.

He only speaks when she asks him what he'd like to hear: "Could you read Chaucer?" he asks, hoping she won't point out how many times she's read it to him. "Please?"

Stroking his hair, she places a delicate kiss on his forehead. "For you, baby -- anything." The book isn't even on the bed when she starts; she recites the poem from memory: "The life so short, the craft so long to learn / Th'assay so hard, so sharp the conquering / The dreadful joy alwey that slit so yearn / All this mean I by love..."

Children from two-parent households, on average, receive three more years of higher education than children from single-parent household. What effect, Spencer wonders, does having a schizophrenic professor of fifteenth-century English literature for a mother have on that statistic? Are his years at university going to be measured in some dark little room, by some beady-eyed little keeper of large numbers, based only on their most simple values, or will it be considered that he had two Bachelor's degrees at sixteen, three Doctorates at twenty, and most of a third Bachelor's under his belt despite the onslaught of working in the BAU, becoming an addict, and always wondering if, some day, Diana Reid won't be the only schizophrenic in the family?

Several years from now, Spencer is twenty-six and he has sex with Derek Morgan for the first time, on the sofa in his underfurnished home (he doesn't even have a TV, one of the first things Derek noted upon entering). They've just gotten back from Colorado. This case was hard -- which doesn't say much of anything, because, in one way or another, all their cases are difficult.

This one, though -- it was harder than the average case. It wasn't being taken hostage. Spencer's been someone's hostage more times than he likes, and, comparatively speaking, this time wasn't so bad. Some times, like in Texas with Elle and Doctor Bryar, work out better than others; in the other times, he ends up drugged on Dilaudid, staring up the barrel of a gun, and muttering Biblical codes for a webcam audience, hoping Hotch will see the tacit meaning. At least this time he wasn't arguing with a delusional physicist or trying not to cry, lest it bring out Charles or Raphael. It wasn't even watching Cyrus beat the Devil out of Emily -- that turn of phrase, Spencer thinks, is proof that Tobias hasn't ever left him -- though Spencer certainly didn't need the extra guilt.

The real reason is something Gideon said just two days before Tobias: "I'm tired of people perverting religion to justify the terrible things they do." All he thought about, whenever Cyrus quoted scripture, was Gideon's face when, under the filtered daylight in the Kyles' home, he made that confession. When Cyrus and his men left him alone long enough, Spencer tried to think of what Gideon would have told him, only to find that his memories of Gideon's voice were distorted. Try as he might, he couldn't get them to sound right. Had he slowly been losing his recollection of that sound, or was it all too new?

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because, now, without intending to, he's kissing Derek Morgan and he isn't sure which one of them started it. He likes it for its vagueness, though, and, as odd and alien as it is, he likes the gentle, impenetrable motion of his and Derek's tongues against each other. Gently, Derek coaxes him onto his back and eases off all their clothes, telling Spencer to just relax, to stop thinking about it so much and just enjoy himself. Compared to its promise and its foreplay, the sex is messy, and painful -- Derek tries his best to make it go smoothly, but the fact of the matter is that Spencer hasn't had it at all since his days as an undergrad, and, at that, all of Spencer's goes at it had been unsatisfying and with girls. He's never been penetrated.

His eighteenth birthday -- he knows full well that, come this weekend or the next one, he's going to put his legal seniority to work and act in Mom's best interests, but his friends refuse to let him think about that or about his work for his dissertation. There's a party one of their friends is having, ten miles away in a modest middle-class house. They make Spencer go with the promise that he'll have fun, they get him drunk despite the law by making him drink every time he says something academic. Inevitability is the name of the game. Even though he tries to kill his tendencies, he can't. He always slips up into statistics or something else. Sometime around one AM, they shove him at a girl whose name he doesn't know -- "Melody," she tells him right before pulling him into someone's mother's bedroom.

During the last few months of his work on his final Doctorate, he's tutoring an undergrad in Chemistry. Her name is Alissa and she has the brightest, ginger-colored hair he's ever seen in his life. She's constantly in awe of the fact that he isn't that much older than her at all (he's just nineteen; everyone's in awe of him). Without his full awareness, she turns a few of their tutoring sessions into dates and then kisses him behind the stacks of art history texts in the back of the library. They have sex right there, and then a few times after, and, when he's finished with his Doctorate, they split up with no hard feelings. He follows Gideon to Quantico and he never calls her again. He never even properly asked her out.

After the Redskins game with JJ, for the first time in five years, Spencer goes home with someone. For the first time ever in his expansive memory, he goes home with a woman. Melody and Alissa were girls, but JJ is a woman. She carries herself differently, with more confidence and self-respect, and Spencer is in awe of how she can be so young in the BAU and not be some kind of nervous wreck the way he thinks he is. She doesn't keep beer at her place, like Melody and Alissa would have, but breaks out a bottle of wine that doesn't notably intoxicate and makes their kisses taste funny.

Neither of the first two were personal or intimate, which being with Morgan -- with Derek seems to be inherently. They knew his neuroses, and Ellen even came to know his hang-ups about where he did and didn't feel comfortable having sex, but they didn't know him the way that Derek does. JJ knew him, but not in a way he likes. The way she knew him was vulnerable and nigh incompetent, and she seemed to sympathize, even stroked his hair and told him it was fine, but he made himself feel sick with failure. She doesn't say it, but she probably hadn't expected much to begin with, a fact that, oddly enough, isn't comforting at all. They never talk about the date with anyone.

Derek doesn't make Spencer feel so ridiculous. In contrast, actually, being with him feels so inexplicably right. For the first time since he stopped laying in bed, letting Mom read to him, Spencer finds his face at home in the crook of someone's neck. The way his and Derek's limbs fall together feels natural, a long time coming.

When she's in her right mind, Mom keeps peonies in a vase in the window. Halfway through her recitation of the Chaucer, she catches Spencer looking at them and explains, in a voice and speech he's heard before, that peonies have a more understated beauty to them than roses that often gets overlooked in favor of the garish. People are, as a whole, losing touch with the fine art of subtlety, she tells him. Besides that, peonies are symbols of intelligence. Just under fourteen years from now, he brings a bouquet of peonies to meet JJ at the game, something that takes her by surprise. Seven months from then, he sends a bunch to Elle while she's in the hospital, too terrified by what he might see if he were to visit.

Shortly after the one-year mark from there (a month over, to be precise), Elle isn't in the BAU anymore and, on an ugly Monday morning, Spencer brings a bouquet of pink peonies to her replacement, Emily Prentiss. He spent the long weekend in withdrawal and he still isn't entirely right, but she deserves an apology for how he acted in Houston, so she gets the flowers and an earnest, "I'm sorry for treating you so terribly." He forces himself to make eye contact with her.

Penelope pulls him off to the side and asks what's up with him and peonies. He shrugs and lies and says he just likes them.

He's only ten and he knows without question that something is wrong with his mother and their relationship. He shouldn't be the one taking care of her. Her strongest moments of motherhood shouldn't be reading Valentine's poems to him. Nine years later, he's playing chess in one of the student spaces after going to a recruitment lecture from the FBI. No one beats him until Agent Gideon, the pleasant, smiling man from the talk, sits down and asks if he can have a game. Smirking isn't something Spencer does quite often, but his face twists into one now. Never mind that Gideon is an FBI profiler, Spencer's been trouncing so-called 'superior' intellects for sixteen years now, practically since he learned the game.

Two hours later, and he's lost all eight games. He stares at the board, confused, trying to trace how, exactly, he's been beaten and, before he knows it, Gideon's taking him to an off-campus diner for dinner together.

Over sandwiches and coffee, after talking to Spencer in a way that no one has before, he asks, "How soon can you be done with your degree, Doctor Reid?"

"What -- the Chemistry Doctorate?" Spencer fumbles his words at this title. Even though it's his proper one, he hasn't heard it since being awarded the Mathematics Doctorate. "The work is almost done, really -- I'll have everything finished and the loose ends tied by the end of the month. ...Why?"

Gideon smiles and nods. "We could really use a mind like yours in the BAU."

Something about the way he says it leaves Spencer unable to refuse. Everything about Gideon reminds Spencer of the father he thinks he never had, and won't acknowledge having until several years later, when the loss of his surrogate father prompts Emily to breach the BAU rule about agents not profiling each other.

~*~

"Is that it?" Gideon asks, as though Spencer's just told him a joke with a let-down of a punchline. "Just that... you've been better?"

Their waitress walks by and Spencer almost considers ordering a strawberry milkshake, just to remind Gideon of Frank and spite him for acting like this is so easy. But that, he decides, would be far too cruel and Spencer's only use for her becomes having his coffee refilled.

As he continues his decimation of the sugar packets, he says again, "I've been better."

Gideon sits back in the booth and Spencer's expecting everything but what he hears: "Talk to me about it."