Two Older Things
Title: Every Bitter Pill
Pairing/Characters: Reid/JJ, Dr. Kimura
Rating: PG13-ish
Warnings: spoilers for Amplification & Memoriam, vaguely implied infidelity, schmoop
Notes: Awhile ago, the brilliant poeticpathetic & I did a back-and-forth prompting thing, and this (and the one after) is what came out of it. So this is ollllldddd, but... here 'tis!
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then
-- from Morning by Frank O'Hara
The first time he saw JJ, it was from the back. Covered head to toe, her shoes flat and stern, her hair pulled back so sleek and severe that it was painful just to look at. Spencer knew even before she turned around how beautiful she was. How young. She had to be if she was working this hard to be taken seriously.
Not that she should have to. Look at where she was. Look at what she did.
Look at...
Look at her face.
Even under the mask of makeup designed to add years when most women use it to shave them off, she was enough to make him swallow his tongue, if such a thing were a biological possibility. Which, of course, it's not, and for which he is still inordinately thankful.
JJ didn't notice him watching her, couldn't feel the weight of his gaze as she dug into her pocket for a bottle of Excedrin and dry-swallowed two of them. She popped them into her mouth like candy and knocked them back with a tilt of her head, and then she was back to the neat stack of files on the corner of her desk. Her fingers drummed absently - he can remember their rhythm, even now, not that that would be wholly unusual for him - and he noticed her hands: blunt nails chewed down at their beds and polished clear to try and hide it. No ring. Not then.
Those pills are bitter on the way down. They leave a taste in your mouth you can't wash out with your own saliva. He didn't know it then, of course.
The taste in his mouth now is sour and metallic, and it's sticky against his teeth. He can't open and shut his lips properly, can't navigate his own tongue, and it's just as well, he thinks, blinking against the ambulance lights that are suddenly melting his vitreous humor down like wax. His words have melted, too. Syntax, grammar, vocabulary - gone. For as long as he has been alive, all he has had are words, bits of information condensed down into phonetics like little life preservers, and now he is adrift in his own terror with no way to explain it, quantify it, tame it into logic.
His mouth tastes like death.
Dr. Kimura is hovering over him with a look in her eyes that makes him think, again, of JJ; of the anxious tenderness riveted to the steel she is composed of. If his mind was as aphasic as his speech, he might try to kiss her, to pull her against him and steal the sense from her lips, but it's not. His brain is clicking and turning just fine, and that's the worst part. He knows what this means. He knows that every breath he takes is as dangerous as it is necessary. He knows that he might die without ever stringing together another coherent thought.
His hands are okay, though. He flexes them and feels the IV needle jostle as his vein grows taut. He can't ask, so he reaches for the pen sticking out of Dr. Kimura's pocket, and she looks confused for a moment but lets him have it. It's a Sharpie, the ink wet and silky against the bare skin of his arm. It smudges over the bumps, shakes around the turns, and it's almost as frustrating as trying to talk, but he makes it work.
JJ, he writes. Tell her I'm sorry.
Sorry for what? Dr. Kimura doesn't ask, and he's not sure he could answer her, even if he had a book of college-ruled sheets and all the time in the world. She doesn't ask, she just says you tell her yourself, but she nods. She nods. She agrees, because maybe this is some last wish of his, some deathbed confession, some final letter home from the foxhole.
He is sorry. Sorry a thousand times over for the words he might not ever be able to say, for the ones that he did say, for making her coffee too sweet and missing her baby's birth and forgetting a condom that time in Michigan and making her use her sleeping shift to find a pharmacy in the middle of rural nowhere for some Plan B. For being reckless with her. For being reckless with his own life. For not offering her his Pepsi that first day five years ago.
For every bitter pill he's watched her swallow with a smile.
Spencer lifts his arm and brings it to his mouth and wets the ink. It runs like black blood into smears and rivulets, like the visual manifestation of his garbled speech, and when it starts to swim into Rorschach blots - the sign for Pi, a skull split down the center, the shape of the loop JJ makes at the bottom of her handwritten y - he closes his eyes and hears her fingers tap-tap-tapping out the rhythm of his heart.
Title: Small Favors
Pairing: Reid/JJ
Rating: NC17
Warnings: implied infidelity, spoilers for JJ (and I suppose everything after), language, memories of drunkenness? Ha.
Notes: See above ♥
I have been temperate always,
But I am like to be very drunk
With your coming.
There have been times
I feared to walk down the street
Lest I should reel with the wine of you,
And jerk against my neighbours
As they go by.
I am parched now, and my tongue is horrible in my mouth,
But my brain is noisy
With the clash and gurgle of filling wine-cups.
- from Anticipation by Amy Lowell
It's two in the morning, but Reid isn't sleeping. He's just drifting through that strange space between consciousness and none, suspended and surreal, which is the closest to rest he ever seems to get when he's in the field. When he hears his phone vibrate against the particle-board nightstand, it barely even jars him.
He assumes it's another body, another pretty hog-tied blonde bled out on some poor stranger's front stoop, and he sighs wearily against the pillow. He misses JJ - misses her like he'd miss one of his lungs, actually - but in a way he's glad she isn't here for this one. They all look too much like her.
He talks himself up and reaches for the phone.
Thirsty?
It isn't a body. Not a dead one, anyway. The word blinks up at him in the dark, bats at him like a pair of long-lashed eyes, and he smiles back at it like she can see him through the screen. Very, he replies, then runs his thumb back and forth across the button, pretending to hesitate, before he presses send.
In humans, smell is the weakest of all of the senses, but it is the one most closely linked to memory. Reid can attest to its power, can translate the spicy-earth scent of a Bloody Mary into her legs wrapped around his waist, the grip of her teeth on his neck, the wild thumping of her heart against his in the closed kitchen of a DC bar. That was the first time. The Bloody Marys were hers. He prefers whiskey, was drunker than he'd ever been in his life - JJ's fault - and when she'd whispered why don't you just fuck me instead of fucking your hand and saying my name? in his ear, he was in no position to be rational. So he wasn't.
He came too fast, came as soon as she asked him how it felt, came right after he answered her and said, it feels like I'm dying. He knew what death felt like then, that out of control spin towards nothingness, that inability to come to the surface, that utter and total terror. That's what it had felt like. Death. That breath-stealing freefall. He'd pulled out at the last possible second, made a mess out of her thighs and her yanked-aside panties and the hem of her hiked-up skirt, and she'd just smiled and used it to wet her fingers and get herself off, her vodkapeppertomatojuice tongue shoved behind his teeth. He remembers the smell of that moment - her drink, her hair, bleach, sweat - so well that it seeps into his dreams and he wakes up hard for her, hard for the half-innocence of it all, hard for her wrecked voice as she slumped down into him and sighed I fucking love your cock. Hard for her beautiful, drunk, filthy mouth.
Every time she touches him is brilliant, undeserved, reckless - but that. That changed everything. That's what he can smell when she slips him their code in the middle of the night, a thousand mile apart now. That's what he's thirsty for.
Good, she texts back. I want to wet your lips.
He waits a few seconds to see if she'll call, and she does, all silence and secrets, tucked against the wall of her living room. He can picture it, the placement of every photograph and the tilt of the television in the corner, and he adds her into the picture piece by piece as she talks.
Tonight, she wants him to tell her what to do. How many fingers, how fast, how hard. She wants him to bear the weight of her pleasure because she is tired of carrying everything else.
He counts her breaths and the spaces in between, taps into the pitch of her noise, calculates its tension. He knows she's going to come a full second before she does, and even though the receiver falls against her lips and it's lost in a sea of static, her orgasm satisfies him all the way to his bones.
There are no extraneous words, no directions, by the time it's his turn, but he doesn't mind. He's two thirds of the way there already just from listening, and when she says let me hear you come, he gives her what she wants.
Oh, you're beautiful, she says. God. I miss that so much.
Afterward, he mops up his belly with a thin motel towel and wraps it in the one from his shower, suddenly guilty at the thought of the housekeeper's horror. He tells JJ, and she laughs and says they've seen worse.
Haven't we all? he answers, then sends her off to bed and tries not to imagine that particular room in as much detail when she goes.
Two hours later, his phone buzzes again, and this time he knows for sure that it isn't good. His eyes feel sticky, and his stomach feels sticky, and he puts on layer after layer to cover the smell of come and Bloody Marys and the slow burn of his conscience.
This woman is blonde, just like all the others. Tied the same. Dumped the same. The difference is the neat, horizontal scar a couple of inches below her navel. She's a mother.
Reid lets his knees touch the cement, and he ignores his left one when it shrieks in protest. It might be a prayer, almost, if he believed in God: lamentation, repentance --
and gratitude, at the last, for the small favors he has been granted.
Pairing/Characters: Reid/JJ, Dr. Kimura
Rating: PG13-ish
Warnings: spoilers for Amplification & Memoriam, vaguely implied infidelity, schmoop
Notes: Awhile ago, the brilliant poeticpathetic & I did a back-and-forth prompting thing, and this (and the one after) is what came out of it. So this is ollllldddd, but... here 'tis!
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then
-- from Morning by Frank O'Hara
The first time he saw JJ, it was from the back. Covered head to toe, her shoes flat and stern, her hair pulled back so sleek and severe that it was painful just to look at. Spencer knew even before she turned around how beautiful she was. How young. She had to be if she was working this hard to be taken seriously.
Not that she should have to. Look at where she was. Look at what she did.
Look at...
Look at her face.
Even under the mask of makeup designed to add years when most women use it to shave them off, she was enough to make him swallow his tongue, if such a thing were a biological possibility. Which, of course, it's not, and for which he is still inordinately thankful.
JJ didn't notice him watching her, couldn't feel the weight of his gaze as she dug into her pocket for a bottle of Excedrin and dry-swallowed two of them. She popped them into her mouth like candy and knocked them back with a tilt of her head, and then she was back to the neat stack of files on the corner of her desk. Her fingers drummed absently - he can remember their rhythm, even now, not that that would be wholly unusual for him - and he noticed her hands: blunt nails chewed down at their beds and polished clear to try and hide it. No ring. Not then.
Those pills are bitter on the way down. They leave a taste in your mouth you can't wash out with your own saliva. He didn't know it then, of course.
The taste in his mouth now is sour and metallic, and it's sticky against his teeth. He can't open and shut his lips properly, can't navigate his own tongue, and it's just as well, he thinks, blinking against the ambulance lights that are suddenly melting his vitreous humor down like wax. His words have melted, too. Syntax, grammar, vocabulary - gone. For as long as he has been alive, all he has had are words, bits of information condensed down into phonetics like little life preservers, and now he is adrift in his own terror with no way to explain it, quantify it, tame it into logic.
His mouth tastes like death.
Dr. Kimura is hovering over him with a look in her eyes that makes him think, again, of JJ; of the anxious tenderness riveted to the steel she is composed of. If his mind was as aphasic as his speech, he might try to kiss her, to pull her against him and steal the sense from her lips, but it's not. His brain is clicking and turning just fine, and that's the worst part. He knows what this means. He knows that every breath he takes is as dangerous as it is necessary. He knows that he might die without ever stringing together another coherent thought.
His hands are okay, though. He flexes them and feels the IV needle jostle as his vein grows taut. He can't ask, so he reaches for the pen sticking out of Dr. Kimura's pocket, and she looks confused for a moment but lets him have it. It's a Sharpie, the ink wet and silky against the bare skin of his arm. It smudges over the bumps, shakes around the turns, and it's almost as frustrating as trying to talk, but he makes it work.
JJ, he writes. Tell her I'm sorry.
Sorry for what? Dr. Kimura doesn't ask, and he's not sure he could answer her, even if he had a book of college-ruled sheets and all the time in the world. She doesn't ask, she just says you tell her yourself, but she nods. She nods. She agrees, because maybe this is some last wish of his, some deathbed confession, some final letter home from the foxhole.
He is sorry. Sorry a thousand times over for the words he might not ever be able to say, for the ones that he did say, for making her coffee too sweet and missing her baby's birth and forgetting a condom that time in Michigan and making her use her sleeping shift to find a pharmacy in the middle of rural nowhere for some Plan B. For being reckless with her. For being reckless with his own life. For not offering her his Pepsi that first day five years ago.
For every bitter pill he's watched her swallow with a smile.
Spencer lifts his arm and brings it to his mouth and wets the ink. It runs like black blood into smears and rivulets, like the visual manifestation of his garbled speech, and when it starts to swim into Rorschach blots - the sign for Pi, a skull split down the center, the shape of the loop JJ makes at the bottom of her handwritten y - he closes his eyes and hears her fingers tap-tap-tapping out the rhythm of his heart.
Title: Small Favors
Pairing: Reid/JJ
Rating: NC17
Warnings: implied infidelity, spoilers for JJ (and I suppose everything after), language, memories of drunkenness? Ha.
Notes: See above ♥
I have been temperate always,
But I am like to be very drunk
With your coming.
There have been times
I feared to walk down the street
Lest I should reel with the wine of you,
And jerk against my neighbours
As they go by.
I am parched now, and my tongue is horrible in my mouth,
But my brain is noisy
With the clash and gurgle of filling wine-cups.
- from Anticipation by Amy Lowell
It's two in the morning, but Reid isn't sleeping. He's just drifting through that strange space between consciousness and none, suspended and surreal, which is the closest to rest he ever seems to get when he's in the field. When he hears his phone vibrate against the particle-board nightstand, it barely even jars him.
He assumes it's another body, another pretty hog-tied blonde bled out on some poor stranger's front stoop, and he sighs wearily against the pillow. He misses JJ - misses her like he'd miss one of his lungs, actually - but in a way he's glad she isn't here for this one. They all look too much like her.
He talks himself up and reaches for the phone.
Thirsty?
It isn't a body. Not a dead one, anyway. The word blinks up at him in the dark, bats at him like a pair of long-lashed eyes, and he smiles back at it like she can see him through the screen. Very, he replies, then runs his thumb back and forth across the button, pretending to hesitate, before he presses send.
In humans, smell is the weakest of all of the senses, but it is the one most closely linked to memory. Reid can attest to its power, can translate the spicy-earth scent of a Bloody Mary into her legs wrapped around his waist, the grip of her teeth on his neck, the wild thumping of her heart against his in the closed kitchen of a DC bar. That was the first time. The Bloody Marys were hers. He prefers whiskey, was drunker than he'd ever been in his life - JJ's fault - and when she'd whispered why don't you just fuck me instead of fucking your hand and saying my name? in his ear, he was in no position to be rational. So he wasn't.
He came too fast, came as soon as she asked him how it felt, came right after he answered her and said, it feels like I'm dying. He knew what death felt like then, that out of control spin towards nothingness, that inability to come to the surface, that utter and total terror. That's what it had felt like. Death. That breath-stealing freefall. He'd pulled out at the last possible second, made a mess out of her thighs and her yanked-aside panties and the hem of her hiked-up skirt, and she'd just smiled and used it to wet her fingers and get herself off, her vodkapeppertomatojuice tongue shoved behind his teeth. He remembers the smell of that moment - her drink, her hair, bleach, sweat - so well that it seeps into his dreams and he wakes up hard for her, hard for the half-innocence of it all, hard for her wrecked voice as she slumped down into him and sighed I fucking love your cock. Hard for her beautiful, drunk, filthy mouth.
Every time she touches him is brilliant, undeserved, reckless - but that. That changed everything. That's what he can smell when she slips him their code in the middle of the night, a thousand mile apart now. That's what he's thirsty for.
Good, she texts back. I want to wet your lips.
He waits a few seconds to see if she'll call, and she does, all silence and secrets, tucked against the wall of her living room. He can picture it, the placement of every photograph and the tilt of the television in the corner, and he adds her into the picture piece by piece as she talks.
Tonight, she wants him to tell her what to do. How many fingers, how fast, how hard. She wants him to bear the weight of her pleasure because she is tired of carrying everything else.
He counts her breaths and the spaces in between, taps into the pitch of her noise, calculates its tension. He knows she's going to come a full second before she does, and even though the receiver falls against her lips and it's lost in a sea of static, her orgasm satisfies him all the way to his bones.
There are no extraneous words, no directions, by the time it's his turn, but he doesn't mind. He's two thirds of the way there already just from listening, and when she says let me hear you come, he gives her what she wants.
Oh, you're beautiful, she says. God. I miss that so much.
Afterward, he mops up his belly with a thin motel towel and wraps it in the one from his shower, suddenly guilty at the thought of the housekeeper's horror. He tells JJ, and she laughs and says they've seen worse.
Haven't we all? he answers, then sends her off to bed and tries not to imagine that particular room in as much detail when she goes.
Two hours later, his phone buzzes again, and this time he knows for sure that it isn't good. His eyes feel sticky, and his stomach feels sticky, and he puts on layer after layer to cover the smell of come and Bloody Marys and the slow burn of his conscience.
This woman is blonde, just like all the others. Tied the same. Dumped the same. The difference is the neat, horizontal scar a couple of inches below her navel. She's a mother.
Reid lets his knees touch the cement, and he ignores his left one when it shrieks in protest. It might be a prayer, almost, if he believed in God: lamentation, repentance --
and gratitude, at the last, for the small favors he has been granted.