Chapter Text
According to Scientific America, there was no conclusive verifiable evidence that an adult could have an eidetic memory, and no proof that any person had ever had a photographic memory at all. Spencer could appreciate the difficulty in quantifying or comparing memory among people, particularly because memory tests conducted in artificial conditions were notoriously difficult to extrapolate to the experience of working memory in daily life, but he was pretty sure that his ability to remember every word of the article 19 months after taking 23 seconds to read it should have been evidence of something.
He was used to how his brain worked - and it was usually a good thing. The joy of learning something new was only half as great as the joy of getting to share that interesting fact with someone else. He had loved collecting pieces of information since he was a child, and the idea of those knowledge tidbits being lost felt like throwing away parts of his book collection. While space on his shelves was unfortunately finite, his own storage felt limitless. Obviously it helped him professionally; he couldn't imagine having to go look up a fact or statistic when he needed to refer to it or needing to go to the records room to flip through old files to find a case with similar signatures. He'd never known anything different and wouldn't know how to navigate, well, anything without it.
There was one key drawback, however: he could recall anything he wanted on-demand, but that didn't mean the things he wanted to remember were the only ones he saw. His mind was never quiet, never still. Something was always replaying. If he focused hard enough, fed enough information into his brain, he could override the random DVD selection system - at least for awhile. Sometimes even that didn't work, and he was left with a grisly carousel of the worst things he had ever witnessed or experienced. Jack Vaughan shooting Ryan Phillips as his daughter begged him to. His mother trying to burn down her bedroom to get rid of cameras that didn't exist. Digging his own grave on his knees with a too-small shovel as Charles barked orders overhead. The note Gideon left him. The gathered crowd of 18-year-olds staring at his naked body and laughing. The way relief flooded through him as he pushed the syringe plunger. Emily's funeral. The way his friends looked at him sometimes when he didn't realize they wanted him to stop talking. All on replay - over and over, usually when he least wanted to think about them.
He had learned how to handle it, at least enough to get through the day. How to compartmentalize it or focus enough on something else that it could help weaken the signal, like finding the spot where two radio stations converged so that only staticky snippets from each song came through.
But there was something new he hadn't anticipated.
"Okay then, Pretty Boy, let's see what you've got."
He could feel Derek's mouth on the back of his neck, hips rocking against his, pressed so tightly together that he could feel the older man's pectoral muscles flex against his back. The warmth and pressure of Derek's hand on his erection. He could smell the faint lingering spiciness of Derek's aftershave, feel the light friction of his goatee as he spoke and the press of Derek's strong hand on his chest, holding him in place-
Spencer's fingers tightened on the top of the round table as though he thought he could hold onto the surface for balance. He needed to focus. Garcia had put the crime scene photos up on the screen already - he should look at those. Try to pay at least a little bit of attention to what she was saying, because right now he wasn't sure he could repeat any part of the briefing so far (which he always found unnerving). Start working on a theory or at least the tasks he should take the lead on. Was there a geographic profile already? .
He heard Morgan's voice from two seats away but not the words he spoke. His mind filled in something else.
"I'm impressed." Every part of him felt weak, dizzy, shaking, on fire, full. His legs wrapped around Derek's waist, his hardon trapped against Derek's abs. The way Derek said it made him want to cry with how much-too-much everything was. Searching desperately for words and finding none. Then Derek's hand was at the back of his head, tugging lightly at his hair as he pulled him in for a kiss. His mouth was warm and tasted like the slightly-stale station coffee they'd been drinking all week, and Spencer held onto him tighter, wanting to feel Derek on every inch of him.
Spencer swallowed hard, fighting the urge to fidget - to play with his hands or push his hair back or something, anything, to ground him back in the present a little and get rid of the electric energy he could feel pulsing through him. Even though those weren't memories he remotely wanted to escape from, it wasn't the time. He would gladly revisit them alone in his apartment, but not sitting at work and surrounded by all of his friends. Coworkers. Boss.
Focus on the crime scene photos. There was nothing sexy about a murder victim.
Not to him anyway. To a necrophiliac the images of any dead body would be titilating. On the other hand, to an UnSub who got sexual gratification from his kills, pictures of his particular victim would likely provoke a sexual or semi-sexual response akin to other trophies even if photographs of unrelated dead bodies might not invoke a similar response.
That was better. Focusing on work. Statistics. Profiles. He knew what to do with those.
He swore he could feel Morgan's eyes on him, and he shifted in his seat, not daring to look away from the screen. ...was Derek remembering, too? Did he like what he remembered? And how the hell did Morgan manage to look all put together when Spencer felt like every part of himself was more flustered and nervous than usual?
"Wheels up in 30."
Spencer blinked twice as he realized the briefing was over. He hadn't actually absorbed anything they had talked about. As he gathered his files from the tabletop and started to stand, he realized that going into the case blind wasn't his only problem.
The slight tug of his uncomfortably-tight trousers as he rose from the chair sent a wave of embarassment through him, and he sat back down in a rush. He looked around nervously, certain that the entire room of profilers would know exactly why he was blushing. He couldn't remember the last time this had been a problem - CalTech, maybe? No, before that, at MIT. Not since then. The advantage of not generally connecting physical attractiveness and sexual acts was that he hadn't struggled with controlling urges for nearly as long as the tall stack of books on puberty had told him he would. Noticing that there was a pretty girl or a handsome boy in his class had almost never caused this after the first couple years of adolescence, for which he was eternally grateful.
But the memory of Derek's low voice in his ear, tongue tracing over a spot on Spencer's neck he'd never even known existed...
He wished he were wearing one of his thicker sweaters instead of his vest, something he could wrap in such a way as to disrupt the obvious visual tell. Or, better yet, he wished he'd come straight into the room instead of having time to stop at his desk and drop off his bag. He settled for the next best thing - the only thing he had on him: a stack of files clutched tightly in his right hand that he positioned awkwardly just in front of him.
"You okay, man?" Spencer's head jerked up at the voice he couldn't get out of his head and saw Derek looking at him with genuine concern.
Spencer swallowed hard and tried to nod, the action left him feeling more like the world's tallest bobble-head doll. "Y-yeah, I'm fine. W...why do you ask?"
Really smooth.
Derek looked him over, and the worry in his eyes turned to amusement. Amusement. Spencer was going to keel over from a combination of embarrassment and misdirected bloodflow here on the floor of the BAU, and Derek was going to find it hilarious. Derek seemed to barely be keeping himself from laughing, and if he was going for a reassuring smile it looked more like a cocky smirk. "Got it." He gave Spencer a fond, teasing pat on the shoulder, which was decidedly not helpful, then just couldn't help himself. He checked to be sure none of their colleagues were nearby, then tugged Spencer a little closer to offer in a low, teasing voice: "You know, if we had more time before wheels-up, I'd offer to help. It's gonna be a long flight."
Spencer wasn't sure if he believed Derek actually loved him, because right now he was pretty sure the man was actively trying to kill him.
* * * * *
The choice of which seat to take on the plane had been much more difficult than he was used to.
Normally Spencer didn't give it a second thought. On the way home from cases, he tended to either sleep on the couch or sit at the table to play poker. Sometimes if the case had been really rough, he might sit at one of the single chairs towards the front of the plane and let himself take stock. On the way to cases, he often ended up perched on the arm of the couch or at the table to better flip through the file as they all gathered in the vicinity of the table to discuss theories and how to proceed. There were no assigned seats, no one always sat next to anyone else, and while he hadn't been keeping strict track of his locations on the jet over the nearly 11 years he'd been part of the BAU, he felt reasonably certain in stating that even his most frequent seat would represent a plurality rather than a majority of flights.
He just wasn't sure what the rules were now.
A part of him wanted to sit next to Derek. That in and of itself wouldn't be unreasonable; while he more often sat across from Derek than directly beside him, the difference in frequency wasn't so stark as to make the act of sitting next to him inherently suspect. What made him feel unsure was why he wanted to sit there. He wanted to enjoy the way the man made him feel vulnerable and safe at the same time - as though he were on display but completely protected. He wanted to hear the faint strains of music that passed beyond Derek's headphones, because despite repeated warnings about the risk of long-term hearing damage due to amplified music - especially in light of the amount of time they all (but especially Derek) spent shooting firearms in the field and therefore without ear protection - Derek still liked to turn his MP3 player up to an unreasonable volume. He wanted to feel Derek's arm graze his and maybe kind of...lean against him a little.
All of that would be a really bad idea right now, and not just because of the memories that left him with a deep yearning in his stomach and a dizzy ringing in his head and blood pooling below. It wouldn't be professional. They were at work. They were on their way to a case, and that was important. Neither of them could afford to get distracted. Besides, the FBI had anti-fraternization policies in place for a reason, and they applied to all employees. They weren't breaking any of those policies yet - he had re-read them the night before to make sure he didn't miss anything - but he strongly suspected that cuddling on a government jet would run afoul of the admonition that "Agents must remain professional in their demeanor and in their conduct at all times."
Also he wasn't entirely sure if Derek would want to. He didn't really strike Spencer as a 'cuddly' person - though Spencer was pretty sure most people wouldn't define him that way, either, and ordinarily he wasn't. It was a new development that he wasn't entirely sure how he felt about it. The closest he'd come to something like this before was lying in his mom's bed while she read to him, or sitting beside JJ on her couch as he wordlessly leaned against her side and tried to figure out how to keep going after Emily died. This was different, it was...
He knew the word 'romantic' wasn't precisely the one he wanted, but nothing else in his extensive vocabulary was quite right, either.
Derek had made clear he didn't consider this a one-time thing, but Spencer still wasn't sure where that left them. Did that mean they would do more of what they had done whenever they happened to need to share a room? Or do more even when they didn't need to share a room? Or at each other's apartments? Or...dating?
Were he and Derek dating? Did Derek want to? Did he want to? He honestly didn't even know what that might entail. Social convention dictated a variety of typical outings, dinners, movies, drinks at a bar, and sometimes copulation was part of the conclusion to those outings, but he knew there was a lot more to it than that.
He'd never been on a date. He had tried twice, but neither had actually come to fruition. What did people do on dates that made it different from going out to dinner with a friend? He and Derek had certainly eaten together before - everyone on the team had, as a group or in almost every possible permutation. Was getting lunch together different if they were dating than if they were best friends? How different? And was that what Derek wanted?
If the word 'dating' was ambiguous, then "relationship" was so broad as to be virtually meaningless. Any connection between two or more people was technically a relationship, so just saying that he and Derek were "in a relationship" wouldn't tell him anything - if, in fact, Derek considered them to be "in a relationship" at all.
All he knew was that he found himself perched on the edge of the couch...and really hoping that there wouldn't be enough rooms for each of them to stay separately again. He wasn't sure if that was a good idea, but he knew it was what he wanted.
He wasn't sure if it was what Derek wanted. He hoped so.
Why would it be, though? Derek could get anyone he wanted, he didn't need to hang back and teach Spencer lessons in things he probably should have been able to figure out for himself years ago. Spencer fidgeted with his hands, reminding himself that Derek had been very clear about that much: Derek loved him. He liked what he saw. He liked...watching Spencer enjoy himself. (He fought the urge to blush at that memory, too.) Derek had stated that he didn't want to run away from this, and that he wanted him.
Derek had never lied to him to spare his feelings before; there was no reason to believe that he would now. So if Derek said he wanted him, then he had no reason to disbelieve the statement.
Derek wanted him. The thought sent a jolt of confusion and pride through him. He was used to being told he was good at things - exceptional, really, was a more common word - but being told he was wanted was something entirely new.
So he just had to figure out how not to ruin this.
Derek already knew all of his secrets, so he didn't need to worry about that. He just needed to make sure that he didn't let himself turn from an object of love into a source of annoyance. So he should follow Derek's lead. Derek would know what a relationship should look like and could guide them the same way he had guided everything else.
...Did Derek know what a relationship should look like?
On one hand, it seemed like such an obvious answer. Derek had been dating women almost constantly the entire time Spencer had known him and certainly before that as well. There were frequent references to how good his weekend was, accompanied by a knowing smirk that it had taken Spencer embarrassingly long to decode at 23. Any time the group went out to a bar, women surrounded him practically all night, and Derek made no secret of the fact that he gladly accepted phone numbers except when on the clock. Spencer couldn't calculate the total number of women Derek had gone out with, as he didn't know for sure how many of the referenced weekends might have involved the same woman, and at least once Derek had gone out with the same woman twice without realizing it but he wasn't sure if that had happened subsequently. Plus Spencer was sure he didn't know every time that Derek had gone out with someone.
But had any of those been relationships? Or dating? Or going out, because he knew there was a subtle difference between 'going out' and 'dating' but had never been able to get a clear answer on where exactly the line was between the two.
He knew that Savannah had been around for longer than any of the other girls, but Spencer wasn't entirely sure if she and Derek had been together for the entire duration or not, or how any of it mapped onto the definitions he'd laid out. There had been a few women who seemed to really like Derek but who Derek insisted he wasn't dating. But even applying the most generous definition Spencer could to the phrase "romantic relationship" (in contrast to other types of relationship), he didn't know if Derek had actually ever had one.
He should know this, he told himself. He had an eidetic memory and seen him every day for the past 10 years. Besides, there were subtle personal signs that a person was in a relationship - he'd read about them though never been able to apply them precisely, much to his frustration.
He should talk to Garcia, he concluded. She would know the answer.