Chapter Text
Rossi walked into the conference room that Reid had commandeered for his yearly file reorganization. What would normally take a team of seasoned agents four months to collate, he did in about three days. While the entire team respected his skills, for about two and a half of the three days, it really just looked like Reid was playing with paper. He usually got a bit testy when interrupted but Rossi evidently thought that it was worth the risk.
“Reid, did you get this email from Emily about the get together on Saturday night? Can you explain to me why it says ‘formal attire requested’?”
Reid looked up for a second and saw Rossi waving his phone before his eyes dropped to his task with the sigh of a man settling in for the long haul. “I did not receive the email, but I will be there nonetheless.”
“Can you tell me what this is about, at least? How formal is ‘formal’?”
Reid’s hand shot out and dove into a pile of seemingly unconnected documents and retrieved one that made him smile for a second. “Emily and I are getting married on Saturday. Dress accordingly.”
“What?!”
Reid looked up, startled by Rossi’s alarm. “I’m not sure how my statement could have confused you…”
“Stay right there!”
Rossi bounded to the conference room door and shouted out into the bullpen. “Everyone get in here now.” He turned back and began texting furiously. “I gotta get Garcia in on this…”
“Rossi…”
“Wait, just wait.” Rossi held up his hand and Reid began stammering while not actually managing to voice an objection. Slowly, the team filtered into the room, careful to avoid tipping any of Reid’s mysterious piles. When Garcia skittered in with a breathless ‘what’s up?’, Rossi turned to them all with a mischievous lop-sided grin.
“I assume that everyone received an e-vite from Emily for Saturday night…”
Heads around the room bobbed in recognition. Rossi’s grin got wider as he turned to face Reid and cocked his fingers like a six-shooter. “Go on. Tell ‘em what you just told me.”
Reid’s face flushed and he lowered his gaze to his incomprehensible mounds of paperwork. “The…umm… invitations are to Emily’s wedding. And mine. We’re getting married. To each other, just so we’re clear.”
Rossi made a proud little ‘ta-da’ gesture as the team spent a split second being speechless and blinky. Then chaos erupted as Morgan jumped forward and yanked Reid up and into a hug. J.J. and Garcia made matching squeals and piled on around Morgan as Hotch stood in the corner watching and grinning. Then the questions started…
“Congratulations…”
“How long has this been going on?”
“How did it happen?”
“Why would you keep it a secret?”
“Oh my God, you’re not pregnant, are you?”
“Do you need any help with the arrangements?”
“What should we bring?”
“All right, all right…” Hotch stepped into the fray and made everyone pipe down for a moment. “Give him some space and a moment to breathe or he might blow a circuit. Congratulations, Reid - this is great news. For both of you.”
“Thanks.” Reid smiled before shooting his eyes back to his feet again. He felt that his face was most likely an unmistakable shade of red. “I probably could’ve mitigated the shock of the announcement better. I rely on Em to help me with such social subtleties but she’s embroiled in something spooky and deeply classified at Langley this week.”
“Awww, honey.” Garcia wriggled through the bodies in front of her and enveloped Reid in a hug. He was proud that he only twitched a little. “You’re adorable. You must be so happy.”
“Well, I have conclusive proof that no other woman could make me happier. And she claims to be very fond of me also.”
That got a laugh and even Reid smiled in between twitchy looks and delicately stepping around his piles of documents.
“So, man,” Morgan chucked him on the shoulder. “You’re gonna be that guy now.”
“What guy?”
“The guy with the really hot wife that every other guy envies.”
“Really?” Reid felt slightly appalled.
“Are you saying that you don’t think Prentiss is hot?”
“No, she is.” He vigorously nodded. “Indubitably. I guess that I’m just taken aback at the prospect of anyone coveting my life.”
“Well, get used to it.”
“That will take some doing. It’s funny, I never think about us in relation to other people. I only see her…” Reid suddenly thought about the way Prentiss’s hand moved when she brushed her hair from her face and smiled - how it always struck him as a warm opening sentence in a long-awaited conversation. He was only brought back to himself when Garcia made some sort of tearful choking sound - he didn’t think he could handle unexpected crying to this news. What does one say to make someone stop doing that?
“Ummm, anyway, it’s Saturday at seven, barring any inconvenient killers or terrorist acts. Just bring yourselves, we’ll take care of the rest.”
“There will be no cases on Saturday, Reid, I give you my word. Congratulations again.” Hotch intoned with a smile and then shuffled the team back into the bullpen without any unfortunate manifestation of tears. Clearly his boss wanted to give him a break from the social scrutiny, no doubt because he wouldn’t receive such latitude from his friends on Saturday. Reid made a mental note to expect crying on that occasion. Rossi stepped forward and held out his hand.
“I’m proud of you, kid.”
Reid shook his hand although he was unsure about it. “Proud? Why?”
“Because I know what you had to do to get to this point.” Rossi murmured. “But you made good choices, and now you’ll be rewarded for them. I’ll be one of those envious guys on Saturday night, Reid.”
Rossi gave Reid a wink that was as mysterious to him as the handshake had been and wandered out of the conference room. Reid rocked on his feet and watched his colleague cross the bullpen and eventually disappear into his office. Then he pulled out his phone and dialed the first number on his contacts list.
“Prentiss.”
“Hey. Are you busy?”
There were shuffling noises over the phone and then a click. When she spoke again her voice dropped a little into a warmer range.
“I’ve got a few minutes for a pal at the Bureau. What’s up?”
“You should probably expect a flurry of emails in the next few hours.”
“Oh no. What happened?”
“Rossi got the e-vite and started asking me questions while I was focusing on something else… and, well, everyone knows now. I’m sorry - I’m really bad at this.”
“You really are.” She chuckled. "Oh well, it’s not as if it would’ve been a secret after Saturday anyway… How did they take it?”
“Pretty well. Everyone wanted to touch me - I’m assuming that’s a positive indicator. I think Garcia asked if we were pregnant, so expect a question about that. Actually… she said ‘are you pregnant’, but I’m sure that she meant it to be the informal plural…”
Laughter echoed across the line. “You’re not, are you?”
“And spoil my girlish waistline? Perish the thought.” He smiled as he felt his cheeks heat again and then lowered his voice. “I love hearing you laugh…”
“Good. I’m sure that there will be plenty of that in our future.”
“Our future…” He murmured and enjoyed the sensation that the words gave him. “Oh, and Morgan said that other men will envy me and, presumably, disparage my good fortune. It was an eye-opener, I must say…”
“Disparage your good fortune?”
“For having a hot wife.”
“Really.” Her voice got softer, which didn’t do anything to dispel her hotness factor. Reid wondered if she was aiming for seduction or irony.
“Yes. I’m worried that I’m not more paranoid about this. You work in an intense, alpha male environment, after all. And it goes without saying that there is little that can be done to diminish your considerable sex appeal…”
He heard a sigh. “Why, Doctor, I believe that you’re flirting with me.”
“It’s probably best to be upfront about this sort of thing. I’ve had problems with being unclear in the past. You turn me on just by walking into a room, Agent Prentiss. My desire for you is an unabashedly terrible need.”
She was quiet for a moment but he could hear her breathing as he presumed she moved the phone closer to her. “We should’ve started this over the phone years ago - we might have avoided so much misunderstanding with this kind of frankness.”
“It takes trust to be truthful.” He got serious. “And trust takes time.”
“You won’t need to worry about envious men, Spencer, even as a joke. I’ve found what I was looking for.” She took a deep breath as if trying to recover some composure, and that thought made him lose a little of his own. “Besides, you’re sexually indispensable, remember? This whole marriage thing is just a ploy to lock that down before you wise up.”
He paused for a moment. “Strangely, I’m okay with that.”
She was laughing again. Bliss. “Well, then, I guess all of my duplicity was unnecessary.”
“Yes. I thought that my acquiescence to sexual servitude was obvious.”
She almost guffawed. Well, at least that’s how it sounded to him. He was now grinning like an idiot.
“You can’t say things like that when I’m at the office. This is a serious place - laughter is seen as a threat to national security… You should probably get back to work.”
“Yes.” He didn’t want to get back to work at all. It was probably a mistake to call her in the middle of the day to begin with. Now that they no longer worked together, he felt a little greedy about whatever time they carved out for themselves. He could become quite distracted by his need to have more. “Emily?”
“Yeah?”
“I, uh… I’ve loved you for two thousand one hundred and one days.” He wasn’t sure why he said it other than he’d never told her that before and perhaps she ought to know. After all, it didn’t feel like enough – and it never felt like he said it enough. “But I wasn’t in love when I finished your star puzzle on the jet.”
She paused before answering. “Maybe it’s just enough that I was in love that day.”
“You were?”
“I think that it might have started then, yeah, but I just didn’t recognize it.”
“W-wow.” He stuttered because never in a million years would he have assumed that.
“There’s a way that you can make it up to me though…”
“Oh, yeah? How?”
“Dance with me at my wedding, Doctor.”
“Deal.” Perhaps Rossi could give him a few pointers before Saturday, just so no one got hurt. “Umm… perhaps I should mention it more… that I love you, I mean. I’d like to make it up to you that way. I’d probably be moved to say it often…”
The confession made him feel oddly vulnerable.
“Even in public?” She sounded a little shocked. Why would she be shocked?
“I don’t know. I’ve come to understand that public expressions of affection can be annoying to others.”
“Perhaps we could use a code.”
He paused for a moment but the answer was obvious to him. “Giraffe. The code is giraffe.”
She murmured something that he didn’t catch and his brain began spinning out possible answers when he heard muffled voices in the background. Prentiss must have covered the phone because he couldn’t hear her response, and when she came back she was using her ‘professional’ voice. “Sorry, I have to go. The minions tell me that the sky is falling.”
“Oh, umm… yes. Of course.”
The call disconnected abruptly before he even finished his sentence. He looked at his phone and then slowly placed it in his pocket and turned back to his piles of paperwork. They didn’t seem as interesting to him as they had minutes before.
It had been wrong to call her - now he was distracted and that would affect his collating. Maybe he was getting too emotional in his interactions with her… He hadn’t made a conscious decision to do that, she just brought it out in him and he didn’t see any reason to hide it now that they were going to make their pair bond permanent. Maybe it was the idea of permanency with him… Perhaps it made her nervous - he didn’t want to make her nervous. People spoke of ‘cold feet’ before marriage and it seemed like something to be assiduously avoided. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told her how long he’d loved her. Maybe placing a number on it lessened it somehow. And he definitely shouldn’t have told her that he was indifferent when he solved the star puzzle. It suggested that his love was newer than hers, although he could see no correlation between duration and intensity in these matters. He just wanted to tell her that it had overcome a lot of change… that it was unchangeable… Was he over-thinking this?
His pocket began to vibrate as he looked at the mass of paper at his feet and let his mind fritter. He fished out his phone again and saw the text message:
* Giraffe *
He smiled - big and goofy and unashamed - as his fingers quickly flicked over the keypad and pressed SEND.
When he looked back to the papers, the psych evaluation that was missing from the July case notes stack stuck out to him like a sore thumb. He hopped over the delicate piles, snatched the errant report with a flourish and placed it in the appropriate stack. Then he saw the coroner’s report from the fifth victim in the Henshaw case languishing in the duplicate reports folder from the Yarmouth kidnapping, and despaired that no one in his department gave a damn about organization but him. Honestly, sometimes it was as though no one understood how one detail could change everything.