MAGPIE ♱ Criminal Minds

My bones are smouldering and my knuckles are bloody. Forgive me. Forgive me.

▎MAGPIE ╱ Spencer Reid

Two years ago, when Joni Beck had been personally recruited onto the Behavioural Analysis Unit by the ever-revered Unit Chief Aaron Hotchner himself, she had wondered what in the world she had done to count herself so lucky; bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and freshly twenty-three, plucked straight out of the FBI Academy and plunged head-first into the icy waters of serial killers and sadists. It wasn't what most other young women envisioned for themselves, but Joni had always been a thinker, an analyst, and, by all technical standards, gifted.

Spencer Reid had known, from the moment that Joni walked through the doors to the bullpen, that he was a lost cause─that the next few days, weeks, months, would involve him psychoanalysing his feelings into oblivion, admiring from afar. Spencer knew this because, despite his genius intellect and a lifetime of knowledge stored neatly in his eidetic memory, he didn't know a single thing about what love felt like─not until Joni.

From then onwards, Spencer was lost, drowning like a lovesick fool. And, in the two years that they had worked together, he hadn't spoken a word of how he felt. Not before it was too late.

Not before Operation Magpie.

CRIMINAL MINDS SEASON 4 ╱ Spencer Reid
© Written by spacedvst, 2026.