Fic: Fanfiction, Chapter 1 (Criminal Minds, Reid / Morgan, Hotch / Chad, Sean / Cain)
Title: Fanfiction, Chapter 1
Pairing: Spencer Reid / Derek Morgan,
Aaron Hotchner / Chad Christensen,
Sean Hotchner / Cain Christensen
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Criminal Minds Main List
“Are you finally going to tell me why we couldn’t just go home?” Reid groaned. He slumped down on the padded bench of their booth. “I’m tired, my contacts are burning my eyes, Clooney hasn’t been walked since this morning and this place has the worst coffee in Virginia.”
“Since when do you care about the coffee as long as there is some, and then half a cup of sugar.”
“Normally I don’t, but the stuff they have here tastes like burned tires, no matter how much sugar I put in it.” He ripped open one of the small sugar packages from the rack and dumped it’s content into his mouth. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m preparing for the caffeine nightmare.”
“You know, you don’t have to drink coffee just because there is some-”
“Morgan, you know what I’m like if I don’t get coffee.”
“Yeah… Waitress!” Morgan hailed at the passing waitress. “Two coffees, please.”
Hotch walked across the diner and shimmied into the booth. “Would you like to explain this?” He waved a neon green little post-it note in his hand.
“In a minute, we’re still waiting for someone.” Morgan turned his head to check the door, and spotted Sean walking over. “And there he is.”
“What’s with the notes?” Sean took the seat next to Hotch. “Couldn’t you just call or text me?”
“No.”
“You could have just come to my office.” Hotch added.
“Or mine. I mean not office, but you could have texted me.” Sean complained. “Any idea how much ribbing I had to listen when one of your rookies came to bring me your note? They were sure I was about to get arrested.”
“Morgan, the new trainees are not around to work at your beck and call.” Hotch reminded with his disciplinarian voice. “They are also not for your personal errands.”
“I couldn’t call.” Morgan defended himself. “And if I had gone to your office she might have seen me going in and come after me.”
“Who?”
“Garcia.” Morgan lowered his voice, using the tone he usually reserved for backseat drivers. “I’ve began to think she’s monitoring our phones, and it wouldn’t be the first time she’s spying us through the security cameras.”
Hotch gave him an unreadable glare, and turned to Reid. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”
“No.” The genius took the steaming mug from the passing waitress, dumped a few packets of sugar into it and started sipping greedily. “Normally I would say he’s done something he shouldn’t have and tries to redirect the conversation, but I’ve been with him all day, so it can’t be that.”
“I didn’t do anything, but I had to call an emergency meeting.” Morgan stated.
“In a diner, after work?”
“Yeah. I know Garcia has her final exam as we speak so she’s tied up for now.”
“What exam?”
“That on-line course she did, How to Break the Cycle.”
“What cycle?” Hotch intercepted. “Does she have some kind of a problem I should be aware of?”
“Web-cycle. It’s for people who spend unhealthy amounts of time on-line.”
“So they set up on-line courses for them?”
“If the Mountain won’t come to Mohammed…”
“I see. So why do we need to get together behind her back?”
“And be quick with it.” Sean added. “I gotta go home soon and we were gonna-”
“This is about these.” Morgan pulled a heavy stack of print-outs out of his bag and slammed it on the table. “Any idea what these are?”
“Misuse of bureau resources.” Hotch stated grimly.
“No. I first saw them on Garcia’s screen couple days ago. When she noticed me coming in she shut down the screen in a hurry.”
“Porn?” Sean guessed. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“No, not porn. At least… not strictly speaking.” Morgan sighed. “I saw she was on this site where people post their own erotic stories.”
“And how did you recognize it so easily, if you only got a quick glance at it?”
“I would like to know that too.” Reid added and emptied his mug. “Miss? Could I have a refill?” Once the waitress gave him a “just a minute” gesture, he continued. “Well?”
“I saw the name of the site, so later I went there and checked it out. That was when I realized the truth.”
“Morgan, I know you enjoy the attention.” Hotch said tiredly. “But we’ve all had a long day, so get to the point.”
“She isn’t just reading, she posts her own stuff. I recognized her penname.”
“What was it?”
“bigBAUmama”
“Of course.”
“We came here for that?” Sean wondered. “So she likes to write smut. I hardly know the woman, and that didn’t come as a surprise even to me.”
“She writes about us.” Morgan buried his face behind his hands. “All her dirty little stories are about us.” He looked up and realized all three men had frozen into a panicked silence. “Don’t worry, there’s no last names and no mentions of the bureau or Quantico. Just first names and physical descriptions.”
The result of his declaration was varied. Reid’s mug was hanging midway in the air, Hotch`s stony face had suddenly gone gray, and Sean’s jittering had stopped for once. Morgan decided to take advantage of the silence and continued.
“For example…” He picked up a few pages from the stack. “… in this one, I’m a liberated slave wandering across the country after the civil war. I arrive into a dusty little town called Las Vegas, and meet a reclusive genius called Spencer and his pet cow Gideon.”
“Are they all like that?” Reid stammered.
“In this one, Hotch is a traumatized World War Two veteran, who came home only to find his wife gone. Then he seeks consolation from his squadron commander.” He moved on to the next one. “And here he’s a stone-faced CIA man, who likes to unwind by getting spanked in a sleazy S&M club.”
“Bro…” Sean giggled uninhibitedly. “I had no idea you like it like that.”
“It’s not real.” Hotch grunted and reached across the table to examine the prints.
“And you really shouldn’t throw any stones.” Morgan smirked at Sean and selected a few stabled prints. “These are about you.”
“Do I wanna know what’s in them?” Sean asked. His giggles had died down and he kept avoiding his brothers eyes.
“I think you’d get a kick out of them.” Morgan grinned, leafing through the prints. “Here you are a meek, but bullheaded archeologist, who gets lost in the middle of a revolution in some remote little country. You meet a rugged stranger and you can probably guess what happens then.”
“Sex?”
“In a small hut, while the monsoon rains are coming down outside.”
“That’s so wrong! If I gotta be an archeologist, I wanna be Indiana Jones!”
“You’re more like that guy from StarGate.”
“Movie or the TV-show?”
“TV.”
“Okay, I can live with that. What else?”
“Here Hotch is a stressed out Wall Street type, who decides to get himself in shape and hires a personal trainer.”
“I think I know how that goes…”
“Yeah, bench pressing.” Morgan nodded. “I’m pretty sure you don’t get the full benefit of it, if you do it like that-”
“Give it to me.” Hotch snatched the prints from him. He flipped through a few of them, his expression becoming grimmer. “This is… highly unprofessional.”
“You should go and read the comments people have left for her.” Morgan grinned. “Apparently I’m too good to be real, but they got wet just thinking about me. And that wasn’t my ego talking, that was a direct quite. By the way, has anyone noticed anything weird?”
“Yeah, but that’s normal.” Sean shrugged. “What do you have in mind?”
Morgan eyed Reid carefully, then tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hello? We’ve been talking for a while, but you haven’t said anything. Are you sick?”
“No, I’m still processing…” Reid said thoughtfully. “We’ve have been fictionalized by our friend, and used as characters in various scenarios, that are available to an audience, that doesn’t know it is based on existing personas. Therefore you could say the characters, that have been based on us have lost their original context, and have moved on to exist on their own as two-dimensional fictional characters. We could also speculate whether or not the loss of connection between real life and fiction can sever the contact between the role-model and the manifactured replica, and allow the latter to grow and develop within the confines of an individual story, regardless of whether or not they are based on us. And if people don’t know we are real, do we really even exist outside the confines of our limited field of interaction with the outside world or at least the world as we perceive it to be?”
Morgan waited a moment to make sure the genius was finished before he leaned closer to whisper in his ear. “Baby Boy? If you gotta say stuff like that, dumb it down for the rest of us. Less words and more sock puppets.”
Chapter 2