A year after leaving the BAU, Spencer Reid is restless and struggling to adjust to civilian life. Not finding any fulfillment or respite in it, he decides to take a position with Homeland. On assignment he meets you, a former Master Gunnery Sergeant...
Summary: You accidentally show too much of yourself to Spencer, and he's such a good guy about it... you just can't take it.
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A few weeks after you set Spencer up on his call with his family, you still couldn't sleep.
You'd think the exciting events of the last month and a half would knock you out nightly, but the darkness wasn't your friend and never had been.
Plus, it was Teddy's birthday today. He would have been thirty eight.
You'd only been married two years when he died, and on nights like this, heady with memory, you couldn't help but think of the life you'd lost with him.
You'd planned for a family, a big one you'd dreamed of. You spent days putting together a room for Alijah to have when she came home with Teddy, proud and excited and ready to be a mother for her.
I tried to go easy on the pink, but it's such a pretty shade, Ted. Do you think she'll like it?
I know she will. We can't wait to see it, angel.
But then you'd been called up for duty, went to Afghanistan, and you got shot in the darkness. They pulled Teddy early from his mission so he could be by your side, and his plane exploded on its way to the military hospital in Germany.
They said it was mechanical failure, an accident. You didn't believe that for a second.
Before he died Teddy sent you a notebook, coded in the cipher he'd created as a kid so his brothers couldn't read his journals. He said he thought someone on his team was feeding information to Sayeed and his merry band of drug traffickers. Two weeks later he was dead.
Alijah's case was immediately pulled from the urgent pile, and she was sent back to Sayeed. She was twelve years old at the time, and they sent your daughter back into the arms of a child molester and murderer.
You'd die yourself before that happened to her again.
It was why you kept a stranglehold on who knew she was there. You didn't trust anyone, not even your unit, to visit her. It took a year for you to entertain the idea that Peanut could be someone in the room, and even then you'd changed your mind a million times.
The decision to let Spencer do it was a calculated one. Luke Alvez had served with Teddy in Iraq, and you'd come across him over the years on missions and the like. If Teddy trusted him, so did you, and now Spencer had proven himself to you so many times you couldn't help but do so.
You didn't think you could be Alijah's mother without Teddy being her father. You just didn't have it in you anymore. You'd woken up alone in that hospital bed in Germany with a bullet just missing your heart, and then it had been shattered irreparably when two Marines in Service Alpha uniform walked somberly in and told you he was dead.
