nina cried power [SPENCER REID]

ten.

CHAPTER TEN:
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

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Nina is twenty seven, and she's almost forgetting what manners are. She's used to getting what she wants, doing what she wants, all whenever she wants -- and most of the time she gets payed for it. So, knocking on a door without ulterior motives is an almost foreign thing for her, and the normalcy of it makes her feel odd. Like, huh, this is what normal people do.

It's not that she finds 'normal' to be boring. If anyone has a monopoly on boredom, it's her: the girl with no friends and an empty heart.

No, it's just strange, like deja-vu from a past she never had. In another world, maybe she's knocking on her father's door, he'll invite her inside his cottage, or his suburban bungalow, and call her peanut or honey and make her a cup of coffee.

But in this world, her dad lives in a run down caravan, shoots heroin in his spare time, and hasn't spoken to her in -- well, what would it be now? -- fifteen years? Maybe. She shut out anything that happened before the age of twenty a long time ago, and whenever the thoughts of her past arise she never likes to dwell on them for too long. People like Dr Reid would preach that it's a coping mechanism, but she just likes to think none of her teen years matter anymore. She's a different person now.

It's evening by the time she raps her knuckles on the metal doors, the sun closing down on the earth just behind her so that the sky is burning red and gold. She appreciates the beauty for a moment; it's the sort of red that doesn't make her think of blood, surprisingly, but of sun behind closed eyes and the smell of roses and her middle school backpack.

Then her dad opens the door.

He sucks in a sharp breath.

Now Nina thinks of blood. Sharp and coppery.

"Hey, gramps!" she says cheerily.

He just keeps looking and looking at her. And while she does have that effect on a lot of people, it just feels special coming from her dad.

"How many times have you imagined this moment?" she asks, hands in the pockets of her peach pantsuit and matching jacket. She hops in heels -- also matching, because of course -- up the steps and barges past him, delighted by the fact she's taller than him. "Have you shrunk?" she asks as she passes him, wrinkling her nose and keeping it wrinkled as she grimaces judgementally at his home.

Quite small, with simple wallpapered walls of a fading pink and a plain brown kitchen, she's glad to see her father's state of living is measly compared to hers. Her life is the the size of the sun, just as bright and endless, and his is as meagre and insignificant as a pea. It's pathetic.