Wicked Game

Everything that can happen, will happen

Spencer Hastings knows it's too early to sleep. Nevertheless, she wants to turn her mind off for a while, she wants something that counterfeits death just enough to allow her some peace. Even if momentarily. In a concerning manner, she wants to sleep to pass the time, to turn today into tomorrow, but also to turn her mind off from herself for a few hours. She needs a break, some time without being perceived, not even by her neurotic self.

When these kinds of urges come to mind, Spencer Hastings knows she is in for anything but a sound night of rest. This time around, for instance, she has been staring at a sleeping pill for about 45 minutes. She is sitting on the kitchen counter, holding her fourth cup of chamomile tea. The pill is stares back at her. She sighs, rubbing her eyes, counting the drops of water falling from the faucet on the kitchen sink as if it is a clock.

For a few days now, she started to notice her urge to take something (anything) to either stay awake or go to sleep is betraying her senses and her restrain - she found the pills in her mother's bag a year before, and she flushed the bottle down the toilet. She kept a single bright green pill against her better judgment, trusting a better version of her would prevent her from relapsing.

It's been three days since A (or their copycat) resurfaced, and it's been three days since she last slept for longer than an hour. That also means that her restlessness now is worse than other occasions when the urge to play Sleeping Beauty haunted her. She needs rest, so she feels it's justifiable to consider drugging herself.

Tonight, after turning and tossing around her bed from eight to ten thirty, she took the pill out of its hiding place and started what was now an hour-long internal battle of whether or not she should take it.

She tries to get her mind off it for the first few minutes. She reviews the article she is co-writing on pharmaceuticals regulation; she pretends to read tomorrow's paper, she scans over results on "how to cure insomnia" and "how to fall asleep quickly", and finally she challenges one of her college friends on online scrabble. She considers trying to reread Carl Jung's "Man and his symbols", as if over analysing every single dream she had in the past month would invoke her subconscious to demand down time to update its catalogue.

The pill comes along in her pocket, then finds its way to the kitchen counter, like a silent companion.

Her urge to take something is not unsettling anymore - after so long, it feels almost familiar, like a childhood friend with whom you don't have much in common anymore, but the sense of safety they provide is both nostalgic and sad in a way that keeps you going back to them every once in a while. She despises her addiction, and yet she cannot help a strange feeling of fondness towards the drugs itself.

How much more manageable it feels when they are with her, in her.

As she taps her fingers on the counter, her eyes travel back and forth to her screen and the pill. She is so immersed in her own internal dispute she doesn't notice Spencer Reid walking in through the back door, wearing an oversized Washington D.C hoodie and sweatpants. He doesn't strike Spencer Hastings as athletic, so she is surprised when she finally notices his flushed cheeks and the strands of hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. He looks younger now, brighter, and Spencer Hastings has to mind herself not to stare at him too much.

"Oh hi." he whispers, looking astoundingly handsome under the yellow lights coming from the gardens outside. "Sorry, I didn't think anyone was awake and this is the only way in after -"

"Relax, I'm not my mom, you can use whatever door you want." She replies a bit too harshly, making a point to dismiss her mother's overly strict house rules established for the agents.