A.N. One-shot, post-ep to 15X04, 'Saturday'

'Normal'

"I want you to have one normal conversation, with one normal person."

That's what the therapist had said to him. The one who wasn't as good as she should have been at not visibly reacting to the things her client told her.

"No, no. Who do you talk to outside of work?" The mild tone of impatience pegging his not having friends outside of work as a sign of failure.

I've always thought of it as a sign of success, that I have any friends at all. Who cares if they're the people I work with? We spend more than half our waking lives together. Way more than half, considering our away cases. Why would talking to them mean I'm not normal? Why do I have to have other friends? What is 'normal' anyway?

That one word had held such a position of power in his life. He'd never been a 'normal' kid. Never quite fit in with others of his age, not with his exceptional mental capacity. That's what his mother had always consoled him with, whenever he'd come home crying over having been called a name, or excluded from something.

"Never mind, Spencer," she'd told him. "They're just jealous because you are so exceptional."

His vocabulary had been advanced enough for his brain to understand what she was saying, but his heart hadn't quite kept up. It had urged him to strive, over and over and over again, to be 'normal'. And he had failed, each time.

He'd simply had trouble being excited by the things his contemporaries were excited about. He'd tried. He'd let his parents convince him to join the Boy Scouts, and that had been okay, but only because it had taught him survival skills. Then his dad has gotten him involved with Little League, but that had only served to highlight his poor gross motor skills. He hadn't played ball again until Morgan had coerced him onto the FBI softball team, for a grand total of one game.

Even his teachers had seen it. 'He doesn't have 'normal' intelligence. He needs to be in a gifted class.' And so he had been, until it had become clear that even his giftedness went beyond 'normal' giftedness, and then he'd simply been promoted up and out, from one level to another, one school to another. Even if moving so often hadn't done so, the sheer fact of his being so much younger and smaller than his classmates had made it impossible for him to develop 'normal' friendships there, as well. But it hadn't kept him from being every bully's favorite victim.

By then, his home life had been far from 'normal' as well. His parents hadn't even managed a 'normal' divorce, because his mother had become too ill to cooperate in the process. Instead, his father had simply walked out, and not looked back. It had been Reid who'd opened up that legal envelope announcing the end of his parent's marriage, and Reid who'd broken the news to Diana.

I felt like a son divorcing his mother. What's 'normal' about that?

On her good days, he'd felt like a normal son in an abnormal household. On her bad days, he'd not even been able to claim that. He'd been the grocery shopper, the dishwasher, the launderer, the house cleaner, the med dispenser, all while maintaining his role as the 'abnormal' student. He'd parented his parent, humored her paranoias, soothed her hysteria, and done his best to mask all of it from the well-meaning social workers who'd been sent to the home by concerned teachers, or neighbors, or even the doctors whose appointments Diana wouldn't keep. He mused that he'd actually conspired with his mother to resist 'normal'.

If I'd let them see it, they would have taken her, and me. Maybe I'd have been sent to a 'normal' home. But I still wouldn't have been 'normal'. I would still have been me.

Even his recruitment to the FBI hadn't followed the 'normal' trajectory. He'd been virtually…no, literally…plucked from a university campus by one of the founders of the esteemed BAU, the branch of the organization that functioned by journeying perilously within the criminal mind. Reid had brought none of the 'normal' qualities to the job, and had even had to be waived through a number of the usual FBI requirements.

But he'd thrived with the BAU, in a way that he hadn't in any other circumstance or time of his life. It had been precisely the aspects of him that were not 'normal' that had proven to be of value in the saving of lives.

Take that, 'normal'!

And, whether it had happened because of those characteristics or in spite of them, he'd acquired something he'd long yearned for…..true, lasting, friendships. Which also hadn't exactly been 'normal'.

There'd been nothing casual about his relationships with his teammates. He'd been too unskilled with small talk, and too little tolerant of it, in truth. For nearly the whole of his life, his mind had been caught up in two seemingly disparate areas of engagement….. the sciences, and literature. And, courtesy of his mother, especially medieval romance literature. To Reid, they were more complementary than disparate, and a conversation that began about either one….or any other topic, actually….usually came to include the other.

His sense of wonderment, and his fascination, not just with human nature, but with the nature of being human, infused nearly every conversation he had with his friends, and moved it to a deeper level. Sharing a piece of poetry, or a quote from a favorite author, became his way of sharing himself. And so, at long last, he'd not been gifted with simple friendship. He'd been gifted with deep, substantive relationship, the kind that hurt whenever it was disrupted. And there had been nothing 'normal' about it.

Perhaps the most 'normal' phase of his life had been the one where he'd fallen in love with his coworker. JJ had been kind, and beautiful, and intelligent and, once he'd gotten past his wariness, he'd found her to have a heart that matched each of her external characteristics. It was true that he hadn't exactly pulled off a 'normal' date with her, and it was also true that, until six months ago, he hadn't realized that his feelings had been reciprocated. Hadn't even thought to hope for it. Hadn't been familiar with that kind of good fortune.

Maybe it would have happened, who knows? Maybe if Hankel hadn't….. Or maybe if I hadn't….

But Hankel had, and Reid had. And then JJ had found someone else to love, someone who might have seemed healthier, and less complicated. Someone more 'normal'.

Having lost someone he'd never tried all that hard to win, Reid had returned to the most consistently faithful relationships he'd had throughout his life. He'd spent his time reading, and pondering, and visiting with the great authors and philosophers, those whose understandings of the nature of life and humanity both resonated with and expanded his own. For him, it had been entirely 'normal', and it remained so.

And then….Maeve. 'She who intoxicates'. And she had intoxicated him. The softness of her voice, the keenness of her intellect, the sense of mystery, had all drawn him in. Maybe that had been 'normal'.

But she'd also had a stalker, and an unshared history. And then a bullet to her head. Even his grief at having lost her had extended far beyond the 'normal'. After that….

I'm not even going to think about prison. Not thinking about it. Not…

But it still had a habit of invading his thoughts, turning even 'normal' things, things like turning off the lights, or doing laundry, into heart-pounding ordeals. Less often, these days. But still.

And then, there are things like being taken hostage. Which, considering how many times they've happened to me, might fall into the category of 'normal'.

He could count them on the fingers of one hand. All of the fingers.

So, if numbers meant 'normal', then being taken hostage was a 'normal' thing for Reid. But what had happened the last time had been anything but 'normal'. For the first time, he'd been taken hostage with his best friend, the woman he'd fallen in love with fifteen years ago. And she'd told him of her love for him.

The two women in my life who have loved me, and the most emotional thing I've shared with them has been being bound and under imminent threat of death together.

The experience with JJ was what had gotten him into the therapist's chair in the first place. Not just that he needed to get past her, but also that he'd never told her. Never reciprocated her 'I love you', no matter how many times she'd said it.

She just seemed to know. So did Maeve. Thank God.

He hadn't sought therapy so that he could learn how to say it, or break through whatever interior wall caused him to be unable to utter the words. Given their circumstances, it was better for the words to stay where they were. He'd sought therapy to try to get his heart to join them there.

He didn't quite understand how his therapeutic goal had morphed in the mind of his therapist. He'd come to her to learn how to put his feelings for JJ away, or at least into perspective. And, instead, she'd just ordered him to go and do something 'normal'.

What about 'normal for me'? Why is 'normal' a goal? Who gets to decide what 'normal' is?

But he'd made a decision, when he'd chosen therapy, to commit to it. The only other option would have been to put physical distance between himself and the woman he so longed to be able to think of, once again, as his best friend. Not to mention that he was paying a substantial co-pay.

So he'd simply nodded to the therapist, the lack of verbal assent ostensibly giving him an out. And he'd gone to the park, and been just about to order a coffee, planning to settle down with a book, when he'd been approached by a young boy. And then other things had happened.

And so, he'd failed his assignment. He would have to tell his therapist that he'd not been able to accomplish the task of having a normal conversation, nor a normal day. He'd proven, once again, that he was incapable of 'normal'.

But it turned out that he was, as his mother had so often told him, quite capable of 'exceptional'.