nina cried power [SPENCER REID]

thirty-five.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE:
MIRACLES AMONG TRAGEDIES

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"I have a gift for you."

Nina raises her head from his shoulder, her eyes meeting his. They're so close he can see his reflection hanging, suspended, in her stare, and it robs him of all breath.

"A gift?" she repeats, only half a question.

He crosses to his messenger bag, still mostly unpacked from when they'd arrived home the day before, and takes out her diary. Behind him she protests when she sees him handling it, but the sound dies when he opens the front cover and slides out his 'gift'.

It's the crisp line of photo-booth photos she'd used to bookmark the page of her diary with Elodie's details. Folded and refolded often, it's faded over the years from being handled, and Spencer is gentle like it's an antique as he passes it over to her. He sees her swallow when her eyes drop to the photographs.

"This was one of the last times I saw her," she whispers, maybe talking to herself. "I must have been, what, fourteen? Before she was adopted and Ed took me in."

It's the two of them-- so clearly sisters with their matching hairstyles and backpacks -- crushed into a photo-booth. Elodie has braces, but her smile is huge in every picture, bunching her cheeks into apples and scrunching her eyes closed. In the first two pictures, the smile is fake and overdramatic, but in the last it's turned into a real laugh as her head tilts towards Nina -- who, in every photo, is pulling a different face, each more ridiculous than the last.

Leaning over her shoulders, Spencer can't help it: he smiles; he loves the motion of the picture, the way the two girls move into each other and around each other, how he can so clearly see the moments between the pictures as well as the moments of them.

"You look so young," he says softly. All he can think to say.

"And happy," Nina adds. Then, like she's coming out of a dream, she blinks and clears her throat as she quickly raises her head to look at him. "Are you even allowed to give me this?"

Spencer swallows and scrunches his nose. "It's rightfully yours."

Nina seems to sense the avoidance of her question, but if she does she says nothing. Spencer wonders if he's lying to himself when he thinks he sees admiration, or appreciation, or something like that, maybe, deep in her eyes. But if it's there, she looks back at the photograph after a long moment, and the expression passes.

"See," Spencer says, and he forces a smile into his voice, "you do care about people. Sometimes."

"For her, and for you, and nothing else."

It is the most sincere, unflinching thing she has ever said to him.

"I've never been able to exactly describe my feelings," continues Nina. "I haven't since I was a teenager. I knew how I was feeling was wrong though. When everything was just empty and cold."