"Valerie, what are you hiding from us?"
"I'm not hiding anything."
"You're avoiding eye contact."
"Eye contact makes me uncomfortable."
"Your posture has changed, you're looking around you for possible exits, you're restless-"
"Val, just tell us."
"I can't."
"The most important thing on this team is trust. If we can't trust you and you don't trust us, then I'm sorry to say, but there's no point of you being here."
"Fine. The whole reason why I got my Ph.D. so easily and why I know so much about what happens after death is because I... I-I murdered my mom... Then I- I experimented on her body and dissected it, but I had to do it! It was the only way I could learn, you've got to understand!"
In which a charismatic, mysterious girl joins the BAU- saving lives is her passion, but at what cost?
TW: mentions of rape, abuse, torture, murder, and all those other jazzy things that come with a criminal minds fanfic.
["The second his lips touched yours, the roar of bad memories and gruesome crime scenes that always filled the silence in your mind dulled down to a whisper. The darkness of the world faded into an afterthought, barely a blip in the back of your mind. The demons stopped clawing at your throat and settled down to hibernate for the night.
For the first time in years, you felt like you could breathe. No amount of booze in the world could have compared to that feeling.
You had found a new distraction, a new way to forget, and he was highly addictive."]
*
Following a particularly grueling case and an unexpected night together, the reader and Spencer Reid become friends-with-benefits: no expectations, no strings attached, nothing more than just using each other for sex.
But as the reader and Spencer grow closer despite their best efforts, ghosts from the reader's past begin overtaking her present, threatening the delicate thing between them. And though their arrangement is just meant to distract them both from the horrors of their day-to-day lives, the reader comes to find that some horrors just refuse to be ignored.
Some ghosts just refuse to stay dead.
_
Beautiful cover by Cynthia (or clarade on ao3)!!