puzzles of a heart | spencer reid ✓

prologue

The abandoned bookstore, the deck of cards, and the missed plane ride. 

He couldn't figure them out, and they messed with Spencer's head while he trudged through the drenched sidewalks of Boston, the city possessing a dreadful sheen typical of east coast winters. The bitter wind ravaged the streets, whipping his wavy, mid-length hair in a flurry around his glasses. The previous congregation around the now desolated campus lawn had dispersed, a soaked textbook left in its place. 

"Reid, you good?" Derek Morgan lessened his husky strides and fell in step with him, his eyebrows knitting together at the sight of Spencer's gaunt face, drowning in the careful scrutiny of the unravelled case.  

"Oh, uh, of course," Spencer doesn't glance up, his fingers were knotted tightly around the frayed threads of the worn scarf wrapped around his neck in efforts to hinder the cold. "I can't figure this out, Morgan. I can't do it. I can't understand it."

Morgan was perpetually assuring in the way of comfort and encouragement. "Kid, we're at the end of the case. Hotch and the rest of the team are closing in around his apartment in Philadelphia as we speak. We're sure we got him."

"That's not it," his boots splashed around the remains of the prior storm. The main road was grimy, glistening from the recent downpour which swept the city and illuminated the jostling streets. "The profile was extremely rushed. Why did he do it, Morgan? And - and what did the cards left on the table mean?"

"He was mentally incompetent so there was no telling what he was going to do, we had to give out the profile sooner than later. Maybe he just liked playing cards, Reid. Not everything has to slot together perfectly." Morgan tipped his head at the scruffy shop ahead of them, "I'll be back."

The pair had missed the flight out of Boston, Massachusetts. It was Spencer who had delayed their leave in attempts to make sense of the peculiar manner of the bookstore. Tonight, the case stranded inside his head was difficult. Triple homicides in areas of New York, Boston - originated from Philadelphia. The team had split up across three provinces and Spencer was sent immediately to the industrial bookstore where the second crime had occurred; the police had found a deck of cards left on the table only feet away from the victim signed 'H'. It was no significance in figuring out the case despite what his supervisor had thought. He remained trapped in the draining void of interacting neurons, searching for the indefinite and abstract answer that he knew wouldn't be there. 

Spencer looked up to see Morgan exiting the shabby seven-eleven on the corner street with two styrofoam cups in his hands. He had passed one to him and slumped down wearily onto the graffitied park bench.

"Thanks for the uh, coffee." Spencer acknowledged the lukewarm cup in his hand and placed it gingerly down beside him after taking a heavy gulp of the watery, cheap caffeine. Nothing could ever overshadow the ones back in Quantico, which he survived on for more times than it was healthy and he had liked to admit. 

Morgan's lips curved into a brief smile, perhaps thinking of the same thing. "Yeah, no problem."

They sat in quiet, but the silence was natural to Spencer; it was the necessities for his constant racing mind after the gruelling hours of endless noises overcrowding his already confusing thoughts. It soothed him like a gentle summer breeze, taking away the jagged edges of the impending headache.

The phone buzzed furiously in Morgan's pockets, rending the tranquillity of the night. "Hotch?" 

Spencer turned to observe Morgan's expressions, trying to make out the outcome of the case or the purpose of the sudden call. Morgan had sounded frantic when he replied, his fingers crushing the feeble cup drained of coffee. "Are you sure? Hotch, you're sure it's him?"

He was already standing up and beckoning Spencer with his hands before the phone had slid back into his pocket. "Another body, here in Boston."

"We were wrong?" Spencer opened his mouth slightly and closed it. He was the one who had made the assumption that their unsub would return to the familiarity of his hometown for his newest - hopefully, final victim. "What have I have done, Morgan?" 

Morgan was on the phone to the local Boston PD and running back to the dark SUV parked a few hundred yards away from where they have strayed from. "Hotch made sure to state it's not your fault, we all thought it was the thing that the unsub was positive to do."

The unwritten rule of the job: never consider the cynical actions of another as your own to blame. The ones who don't take those words to the heart are simply an hourglass on a timer, ebbing away until the last grain of sand slithers down to join the rest. That wasn't always the case though, because after all, certain people have grown to be quite skilled at hiding their equally damaged and broken soul.