City Limits (Spencer Reid Fanfic)

Chapter Ten: Targeted

I jerked awake, and, upon finding my face wedged into my laptop keyboard, groaned.

The previous night came back to me in a flood of coffee cups and Google searches, which did little to improve my early-morning mood. Birds chirped happily outside, and judging by the sunlight streaming in through the window, it was set up to be beautiful, Mary Poppins-type of jolly holiday afternoon.

But I was so not feeling supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

I stirred from my spot in Chief Caulfield's guest room and sauntered over to the bed. As I plopped down between the pillows, I thought back to the fax I'd received yesterday.

In the second grade, I'd had a talent for folding paper into the tiniest possible squares. There's that urban legend, or common belief, or whatever you want to call it, that you can only fold a paper six times, but I'd managed to fold a piece six and a half times. It turned out I still acquired that talent, and used it to conceal the ominous poem. In the back of my mind, I realized that I was probably breaking, like, seventy-eight cardinal rules of the BAU, and that withholding a vital piece of evidence from federal agents was a crime, but I was too in denial to care.

There was just no way that the Babysitter had such a fixation on... me, of all people. In my blind hope, I'd prayed that the whole blood-on-window situation had been a fluke, but this fax confirmed my worst fears. That being said, I wasn't stupid. I knew that entering a career in law enforcement would be inherently dangerous, but it'd never occurred to me that I could actually be targeted by an unsub.

And now I was.

To add fuel to the flame, my coping mechanism was sub-par. Rather than confronting a problem head-on, as with my panic attacks, or simply confiding in someone, I'd always preferred to deal with things myself. I couldn't let Reid, or the rest of the team, see through me.

It wasn't like I belonged, anyway. These people were a family—not by blood, of course, but by something deeper and unspoken. They'd created a bond based on mutual tragedies and triumphs, and I was a foreigner to their unit; an outsider, a lone puzzle piece that would never fit into their jigsaw.

No matter how much I wished for things to be different, for me to be considered a contender with Reid, I knew I never stood a chance. It was up to me, now, to keep him out of this mess. He had to stay safe. If he died because of me... well, he'd die over my dead body.

I blinked back tears and stuffed the damning poem in my pocket. We'd been invited over to Chief Caulfield's house for dinner, and I'd excused myself to the bathroom only ten minutes into the meal. All night, I'd been avoiding conversation and refusing food and just generally being robotic, and I was worried the others were starting to pick up on my wounded puppy facade.  

I'd retreated to my room to begin a private investigation on the note and the Babysitter himself, researching anything and everything I could find on stalkers, self-defense tactics and intercepting fax machine signals. No matter how many search engines I used, I just couldn't come up with any solid results on how to outsmart and possibly single-handedly catch a serial killer.

As I wiped a trail of drool from my cheek, a knock at the door startled me into shutting my laptop. I knew someone was bound to check up on me, given my weird behaviour, but I'd expected it to be Reid or JJ or even Hotch, not... Rossi.

"Hey, kid. How are you?" he asked gently, coming to sit beside me on the bed. I noticed a tray of assorted breakfast foods in his hands, which I gratefully accepted. Nothing a little bacon couldn't fix.

I scooted over so he'd have room and did my best to put on a smile and look like I wasn't dead inside.

"I'm... great! How are you?" I chirped, hoping my voice didn't sound as stiff to him as it did to me.