Objectively, he knew it was a crush, but he missed out on those formative years in favour of focusing on his studies, so he had no idea how to deal with it. It was just sometimes when Derek spoke to him his stomach got caught in knots and he went all red and found it hard to speak. There wasn’t enough of them. So of course, Reid was put with Morgan, which was not conducive to a good working relationship because he was much too concerned with accidentally weirding his friend out that he ended up ignoring him. Then, when they did find a hotel to stay in, there was a problem with the rooms. None of the public seemed willing to give them a place to stay, all too scared of the murderer running around their town to risk being seen helping the FBI. This was one of those cases where everything seemed to stand in their way.įirst, it was the hotel. Two pairs of glasses, just in case, took two bags of clothing, rather than one. (His usual bag and his gym bag from high school, the one he had stuffed to the back of his closet, unable to look at it and the memories it held and yet unable to part with it all the same. He had packed that one, years ago, on the way to MIT to complete his third doctorate and had never opened it again. His mistake was not checking the contents before he grabbed it and left.) He had anticipated the case being a long one. He packed all his remaining contact lenses. Sometimes, despite his preparations, things still went wrong. This was one of those instances. There were some things though, that he could not prepare for. Sure, they probably all thought that he wore them at some point, but it was the principal of the thing. This was the case with most of the team- JJ, Emily, Morgan, Rossi. Where there were people who had never even seen him with glasses on before. It got to the point where he forgot what the weight of them resting on the bridge of his nose felt like. He invested in contact lenses and began wearing them more than he wore the glasses. He still broke them, it wasn’t like he had become any more popular during his years at university, or during the academy, but at least now he had spares, he had the money to get replacements, and he no longer needed parental consent to get an eye test. He still had those glasses, even if he no longer wore them, even if he no longer acknowledged them or their history. When he turned sixteen, he bought a new pair. They were broken on a near daily basis, and he couldn’t replace them without parental consent. After his four years of high school, when he left at the age of 12, those glasses were held together by electrical tape, glue, and sheer force of will. When he was young, he had exactly one pair of glasses. There were some things in his childhood that he couldn’t over-prepare for, things that as a result, he over-over-prepared for in adulthood. He bought clothes almost exclusively from charity shops or in the sale, because that meant that if they were ruined (by his mother in a delusion or by the bullies at school) he had spares, and they didn’t cost much to replace. He triple-knotted shoes and tied them around his ankles so that they couldn’t be ripped off his feet or untied and tied back together without his knowledge. He wrote out three copies of each of his homework’s, because if the bullies ruined the one hidden in his books there was the spare at the bottom of his rucksack and if they found the both of them, there was the spare spare copy he kept under his vest. Literally. This meant that he often over-prepared. He bulk-bought coffee to make sure he never ran out. It was a testament to the conditions of his childhood that he liked to be in control, and part of being in control was being prepared. It meant he didn’t have to rely on anyone. (That way, when people inevitably left, it wouldn’t hurt as much, because he was prepared for it. ScribeSmith's Fanfic Library, miQ_y's fav fav fics Stats: Published: Completed: Words: 11000 Chapters: 5/5 Comments: 68 Kudos: 739 Bookmarks: 115 Hits: 9131