The Axiom Of Equality [SPENCER REID]

one.

CHAPTER ONE
january 2009, katherine

The first lesson Adam Joyce has to learn is that rushing through paper work is not going to get him anywhere. He is not going to make the early bus home, he is not going to make it out of the office first, and he is not going to make his 5:15pm dinner plans.

Katherine Fisher knows this, and is delighting in watching him rush through his final few pages of work. It is 4:47; he wants to be gone by 4:50. What he doesn't know is that, when that pen slams down, the ever present Agent Hotchner will appear from nowhere and plop one 'last little thing to review' in front of Agent Joyce, and keep him here until 5 on the dot. If it isn't Hotch, it'll be JJ. If it isn't either of the two, it will be a phone call, or the ping of an email, or a fire alarm that means they have to evacuate the building ten minutes before they could leave anyway.

But Katherine will let him learn this himself.

She's surprised he hasn't had the concept of an early finish banished from the recesses of his mind by earlier experiences in law enforcement. He's made it all the way to the FBI with the glimmering hope of maintaining a work-life balance captured like a butterfly in a case — a tiny, hopeful, fruitless thing. She checks her watch. 4:49. That butterfly is about to wither and die.

As expected, the phone at his desk rings. Adam slams the pen down. "You're joking, right?" he says to the phone. Then, over the division between their desks, he says to Katherine. "He's joking, right?"

"Why is your phone a he?"

Adam's already picked up so her question goes ignored. The phone call is quick; Adam patches the caller through to someone else, slamming the device down impatiently. 4:53. He bends back over his paperwork.

"You haven't done anything for the past seven minutes," he says, without looking up.

He's talking to her, although she only knows this because there's no one else around. They've been working together for the past week, since Adam started that Monday, and he still hasn't addressed her by name. It's his first job at the FBI and he doesn't know her well, so she's guessing he doesn't know whether to call her Fisher, Agent, Agent Fisher, Katherine, Kat, Miss, Miss Fisher, or any other combination of title and nickname you can think of. She's starting to find it funny how he's managing to dance around using her name. 

"I'm quite distracted by you assigning your phone a gender," she says, smiling.

"Quite honestly, it was a misogynistic assumption that whoever was on the other end was a man." He raises the hand that holds the pen in a conciliatory gesture, but he doesn't look up, scanning his pages with a finger of the other hand following the words. "I do respect women, I promise. My dog's a woman."

Katherine snickers. She turns to her computer, logging onto her email to check for any correspondence before she logs off for the weekend. "Was it a man?"