#i was like EXACTLY PHOEBE | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

nereidprinc3ss · 8 months ago

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come on home

in which the only person who can comfort you after your breakup with spencer reid, is spencer reid

inspired by the song "summer's end" by the artist currently known as phoebe bridgers

wc 2857

warnings: gn!reader (correct me if im wrong), minor mommy issues, angst, happy ending

a/n: thank you to the person who requested this:) u r an angel and I listened to this song the whole time i wrote (if you haven't heard, listen!!) i sincerely hope you enjoy, i like this one a lot<3

She hung up on you.

Forty-seven minutes of being insulted and berated after you’d called her looking for comfort, and you put up with every single cruel word—just for your mother to hang up on you. And it’s exactly the kind of thing she’d do, so you shouldn’t be surprised. An ache, you’d expect—but it shouldn’t sting like this. You thought you knew better.

Now you’re in a ball on your couch, clutching your phone to your chest and crying. There’s no point hiding it. Your roommate is out with her girlfriend for the evening—which is too bad because even though you feel like being alone, you’re sure that’s the wrong call. Your other friends are out having fun tonight, too. They’d even invited you, but you turned them down. Look where that had gotten you. Obviously, your mother is not the person you’re about to run to for comfort, either.

You try to pretend, while you’re thinking of all these people who have ever cared for you, that Spencer Reid isn’t on your mind at all. You try to pretend like you don’t care that the person who loved you until you believed you actually deserved it is a contact going stale deep in the bowels of your text cache. With bleary eyes��you scroll down, looking for your conversation where it gathers dust—the end of your relationship was a mutual decision, and you’re friendly, but you haven’t texted in a few weeks. Probably because every time the conversation starts to feel a little too easy, or the phone call lasts a little too long, that aching void in your chest gets worse and worse. Like pain in a phantom limb, you become acutely aware of what you do not have and how much it hurts.

So blame it on the tears, or the mind-muddling melodrama of your relationship with your mother, blame it on anything but the truth—when your thumb drops on that call button like the plunger on a syringe, you don’t regret it.

What you’re not expecting is for him to answer after the first ring.

“Hi,” you say with a snuffle before Spencer can get a word in. There’s a brief interlude, in which you pick at your nails, comfortable to just sit in silence if that’s what he wants. As long as he’s there.

“Hi.” Hearing his voice instantly melts a bit of the weight you hadn’t realized you were carrying. Another pause, for which you remain silent, because you can feel him formulating a question—and you’d like to hear him speak again. “...am I allowed to ask if you’re okay?”

Your lips purse and twist to the side, pained and comforted by how easily he can tell that you’re distraught. One word across a tinny connection, and he knows.

“No. Yes. I mean... I guess that’s why I called you. But you don’t have to ask me about it.” You sniff again and take a deep breath. “How was your day? What state are you in?”

“I’m in the district,” he answers after a moment, easing into a casualness that he likely doesn’t feel for your sake. Wind crunches through the speaker. He probably just got out of work. “My day was... it was good. I got to talk about my job to a bunch of elementary schoolers, which is always a confidence boost.”

You chuckle, still laying on your side on the couch and watching storm clouds gathering outside.

“Nice, nice. What else?”

“Let’s see... I forgot lunch, so I had three oranges, and they were actually pretty good. I reread Game of Thrones—I don’t know why I did that. I’m never going to like that book.”

“Masochist,” you smile. He laughs, and you hear the sound of a car door opening.

“Oh! I talked to my mom. Believe it or not, she says hi.”

A completely inadvertent snort constitutes your response. It’s not what you meant to do, and out of context it’s sort of mean, but you actually think it’s incredibly endearing that he still talks to his mother about you. He scrambles to explain himself.

“I swear, we barely talked about you this time. Mostly we talked about her new boyfriend Leonard.”

“No, no, that’s not... I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you or your mom. That’s really sweet, actually. Tell her I say hi too.”

When he next speaks, you can hear the smile in his voice.

“I will.” Another long pause. You imagine him sitting in the parking lot at Quantico, keys vertical in the ignition of his old car and feeling the silence just as much as you are. He surprises you by not ending the conversation—instead he asks a question. It is concern, poorly disguised with nervous humor. Or maybe you just know him too well. “Do I get to find out what’s on your mind, or are you leaving me in suspense here?”

You bite the inside of your cheek.

“Um... well, actually, I just got off the phone with my mom, too. It didn’t go so well,” you laugh halfheartedly, “I know it was dumb to try and have an actual conversation with her, but... you know me. Always following blind optimism to the depths of hell.”

“Why’d you call your mom?” he asks, so gently it brings a fresh round of tears to your eyes. Still, you attempt to put a cheerful affect on your strained voice.

“Mm, you know. Just needed someone to talk to.”

Spencer’s knowing sigh does little to make you feel better.

“You know you can always talk to me, right? I know it’s... it’s different now, but... I care about you a lot. And, you know, I receive very few phone calls, so the line is pretty much always open.”

Your laugh quickly devolves into a cry.

“I appreciate that, but I can’t talk to you about everything.”

“Why not?” he pleads immediately, voice thin and desperate like it’s his most burning question. A million lies dance over the tip of your tongue. A million things that feel safer to say than the truth. But in the end, it comes out anyway—choked, and so quiet, but aloud nonetheless.

“Because I’m trying really hard to stop missing you so much.”

Another long beat of silence. The back of your throat feels dry and hollow—a cage for your hummingbird heart.

“If it hurts too much to talk to me, you don’t need to do that to yourself. But I also don’t want you to hurt yourself thinking you’re alone. You are... so important to me. I will always try to take care of you the best I can—whether that means staying away or being at your front door. If you ever need me, or even... vaguely want me, I will be there.”

Each word caves your resolve. Each syllable is a slap in the face to progress you’d been pretending to make. You can be strong—you've proven that over the past ten weeks. You can be stone-faced and slash at your heart until the scar tissue is thick and jagged, and eventually it won’t hurt anymore. But maybe, by letting someone tend to the wounds, they’ll heal a little nicer. A little kinder. Even if you can’t undo the damage, maybe one day you’ll be soft again.

“What if I vaguely want you right now?” you sniffle.

Finally, you hear the silver jingle of keys turning. The sputter and rumble of an old engine coming to life.

“Then I’m on my way.”

Twenty four minutes later, there’s a soft knock at your door.

After the call had ended, you’d wondered if you made it all up. Surely your ex-boyfriend wasn’t actually about to show up at your apartment. Someone you’ve grieved for can’t just come back—there are countless horror novels and movies based upon that very tenet. Does it matter if they ever actually died? How long is ten weeks, really? It feels like a lifetime.

You shuffle across the room, wiping under your eyes with your already damp sleeves, and undoing all the locks Spencer had conditioned you to start using. When the door cracks open, and you see Spencer standing there, windswept and concerned, for the first time in months, it hits you like a tidal wave. You are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, still just as in love with him as you ever were. The relief that floods your veins as he looks down at you with so much care in his eyes is like sinking into warm water. It’s a dead giveaway, and maybe it makes this whole thing a terrible idea, but you can’t seem to care very much. You open the door wider, and he enters, and he stands in your kitchen with his hands in his coat pocket as you shut the door and he’s perfect. It dawns on you that for the first time since the breakup, you feel safe. Like you don’t have to be a stone pillar anymore. This, of course, translates into even more tears, which you try to hide as you face away, re-locking the door.

“Sweetheart...” he sighs, because you can’t hide anything from him. Hearing the resonance of his voice so close to you once more is overwhelming. In an instant you’re rushing into his arms, and he accepts you without hesitation. You bury your teary face in the vetiver safety of his button-up and slip your arms under his coat, as if you could absorb his warmth and forever hide from the world that way. He pulls you even closer. It’s terrible and cruel how much he is exactly what you needed. “What’s wrong? What did she say?”

You shake your head and gasp a small sob.

Truthfully, you’re not really crying about the petty insults from your mother anymore. You’re back to square one, the reason you’d called your mother to begin with—you miss the man whose arms are currently wound around your shoulders.

His hand smooths over the back of your hair.

“Okay. That’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it.”

You stay like that—content even as you cry because being with him feels so much safer than being alone. It feels right—or perhaps it’s just familiar. You don’t know which is worse.

Spencer is rubbing soothing lines up and down your back as you cling to him, soaking him up in all his ephemeral, comforting glory. He surprises you by chuckling—it vibrates through his chest, buzzing against your ear.

“Nice Magritte print. I bet the person who bought that has fantastic taste.”

“Are you gonna ask for it back?” you mumble into the fabric of his suit jacket. He is, of course, referring to the painting you’d more or less stolen from his apartment seven months ago. You really don’t want him to take it home. It’s the most overt Spencer memorabilia you’d allowed yourself to keep in plain sight.

“No, baby. You can keep it.” The words are low, and kind, and they settle you some, but you can’t seem to get him close enough. “What can I do?” he whispers after a moment, helpless as you take a shuddering breath. “Can I make you tea? Have you eaten?”

“Will you just... stay for a little bit? I’ll—I promise I’ll stop crying.”

There is an unexpected lull where you thought you’d receive pretty immediate agreement, but before you can pull back and ask what’s wrong, he murmurs, “yeah. I can stay for a while. But you have to kick me out before it gets too late.”

You wonder if you’re imagining the double-entendre that seems to underline his words in bold red ink. Spencer is too smart to have not noticed a thing like that. You don’t mention it—it all boils down to the same unspoken idea.

Don’t let me stay, because I might not leave.

“I will,” you sniff, finally stepping back and wiping your own tears. It hurts to lose his touch, but at least you know he’s not going anywhere for the next few hours. This, as opposed to everything else lately, can be a beginning instead of an end.

At least, until he goes home.

Three and a half hours later, after tea, an impromptu dinner comprised mostly of cheese and crackers, and several vinyl changes on your record player (which served only as background noise for your long, ambling conversations), things are seeming to wind down to a natural stopping point. Which you hate. The whole time you’d had a dull ache in your chest because talking to him was easier than breathing and you knew it wouldn’t last. There had been one or two false bottoms already—the first when you’d yawned around nine, and the second when you’d gotten up to do your skincare and brush your teeth half an hour later. Even then he’d just leaned against the doorframe, watching your reflection above the sink as you talked for fifteen more minutes. Now you stand across from each other in the kitchen, plates restacked and everything in order. Of course he’d insisted on helping you clean up.

“I should go,” he says, with a soft sort of finality in his voice.

“Is your carriage turning into a pumpkin?” you tease gently, to hide how much you don’t want him to leave. He smiles—a small, weary thing—but genuinely and endlessly charmed by you.

“That among other things.”

“Would you—would you walk me to my room first?”

The hesitance is clear in his eyes and the way his lips part as if to say, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea’, but you're sure he’s really going to leave in a moment and you’re also sure he won’t deny you this one small thing before he does.

“Okay.”

It’s a short, silent walk through the living room and down the hall to your bedroom door, but you can feel him trailing behind you the whole way. You stop in front of your open door, turning face to face with him.

“Thanks,” you murmur.

His lips pull into a melancholy smile.

“Anytime.”

There’s nothing left to do but wrap your arms around each other once more, tuck yourself into the you-sized space between his head and shoulder and hold on for as long as he’ll let you. The hug lingers for longer than is wise. Spencer adjusts his arms looped around your waist, pulling you closer, and you nuzzle against his neck, grateful that at least he seems as reluctant to let this end as you are.

But eventually, it relaxes. Your hold on each other loosens. His face is just inches from yours, and you get to study every plane and valley and line like you’d thought you never would again. It seems he’s doing the same—losing himself in the luxury of seeing you up close.

“Will you kiss me goodnight?” you whisper, unable to muster any self-consciousness though you know it’s a fool’s errand. Spencer strokes your waist.

“I can’t do that, honey.”

“Why not?”

His voice is just as quiet as yours. It falters slightly as he speaks, so gently, so patiently.

“Because we’re not together anymore.”

“Why not?”

Your feeble, desperate supplication sounds pitiable even to you. You’re not proud, but you can’t find it in yourself to be ashamed, either. All you want is an answer. But it’s like a child asking why the sky is blue, or the earth is round. There is a definitive explanation, but mostly, the adult will shrug, and say, that’s just how it is.

Spencer’s eyes squeeze shut. His head tilts down.

“We can’t do this again, sweetheart. You know why we’re not together.”

In theory—yes. You’d had so many conversations when you’d broken up. It had been a long, painful process, spanning multiple all-nighters at his kitchen table, nursing coffee and trying to convince each other and yourselves that it was the right choice. But it just feels like a horrible, horrible mistake. You feel desperate to explain this to him before he slips away again—the words come out flustered, inelegant as you cling to him.

“But I don’t think I’m getting better without you. I tried, I tried so hard to be good on my own, but everything is worse and harder and—and we weren’t sure about it then, and I don’t think it was the right choice, because I still really need you. Like, all the time. I’m—it’s not getting better without you. Nothing got better.”

He swallows, eyes darting between yours for an infinite second. You’re breathless and your heart is pounding after your confession—you can feel your eyes stinging with the few tears that managed to escape as you spoke.

“Everything is worse,” he agrees shakily. “Everything. I’m—I’m getting disciplinary infractions from Hotch like I’m a child because I can’t focus on anything. Game of Thrones is the most complex literature I can comprehend right now. I had to use a calculator the other day.”

You want to laugh, but nothing is funny until he’s yours again.

“Then come back. Please come back, Spencer.”

Finally, he leans closer, until your heads are pressed together, and his nose bumps yours, feather light. You're dizzy. You exhale. He inhales.

“I don’t think I knew how to leave in the first place.”

When he kisses you, it feels like home.

#spencer reid #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x fem!reader #spencer reid x self insert #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid fic #spencer reid angst #spencer reid fluff #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds

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setaripendragon · 27 days ago

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So, because I've been working on this series again, I've been getting back into Charmed a bit, and I decided to do something I've been wanting to do since I was, like... eight? And that is to figure out exactly what the Warren Family Tree actually looks like... given that the one we see in canon has some laughably incorrect dates on it.

(Getting birth and death dates wrong on incosequential people I can forgive (Grams' brother apparently married a woman born in 1870-something? It's not impossible, I suppose? She's probably a demon or something.) but what I can't forgive is that they messed up the details of the crucial plot point of that episode that the family tree was made for. (Phoebe gets the family tree out to look up their past lives, and lo and behold, the family tree tells us that Prue's past life died after she was born.))

Still, it's the only real canon information we get about everything between Prudence Warren and P. Baxter (who is Grams' mother. Somehow, I don't think the creators thought through the implications of that. Piper was raised... by a woman she raised. Even if she doesn't remember it, that's still gotta be a bit of a trip if you think about it too hard. Like, do you think Grams learnt the 'keeping her hands busy in the kitchen' thing from her mum? And then teaches it to Piper, who is her mum...). Anyway! That's... over two hundred years unaccounted for, and I don't do well in a creative vacuum. Blank page paralysis is real and devastating.

So I did my damnedest to decipher the very blurry screenshots I managed to get off ITVX, and...

You know another mistake they made? The Charmed power is a female power, and given the show's rather, uh, unconsciously gender-essentialist approach to girl power, it boggles my mind that the family tree is still so patrilineal? Apparently, the Charmed Ones aren't even descended from Prudence Warren? They're descended from her little brother instead? What? How did that get past anyone involved in the process?

But! I jiggled some things around so that the line from Melinda to Prue is an unbroken line of women (trans inclusive!), and discovered that they also, to no one's surprise, didn't put any real thought into the rest of the dates on this thing! In order for all the generations I could see on the family tree to fit into the timescale given, a lot of these ladies were having kids, uh... quite young.

And, sure, one or two, I'd accept, even the majority being under 25 given the social mores/life expectancy/infant mortality of the times, but... I've got a whopping seven (out of fifteen) generations who were 18 or under when they had their first kid. It goes up to eleven if it's 20 or under.

I was really tempted to take a generation out. There's a few that are just one girl baby after another towards the end there, so I could've just whipped one out and rejiggled the dates, but for reasons to do with symbolism and also perfectionist nonsense (I may have been flipping genders left and right, but just toss the dubious canon info out the window?! Never! -rolls my eyes at myself-), I was reluctant.

And then I thought:

Technically, that spell up there that I wrote is a curse. A death curse, even. And I've since decided that both Prudence and her daughter also cast it on their deathbeds, it's a Threefold Death Curse. Because, well, on rewatching a bunch of episodes to check historical dates including, specifically, the one with Melinda's birth in, I was reminded that the Charmed Ones aren't just... extremely powerful witches, but The Most Powerful Witches Of All Time. As in, Eva cast a spell to summon the most powerful witches, and got the Charmed Ones, so it's not just a cute title.

(Now, given Charmed's dubious worldbuilding, you could say that's the Elders sticking their grubby little hands in and doesn't actually mean there will never be a more powerful witch than Prue, Piper, and Phoebe, but I'm going with, no, Eva cast her spell, and magic itself decided Prue, Piper, and Phoebe were what she was asking for.)

So yeah, whatever made the Charmed Ones the Charmed Ones has to pack a mean-ass punch.

Threefold Death Curse it is.

Which means that... Actually, there's an in-built reason why all these Warren Witches are getting pregnant as soon as they discover what sex is. They're literally cursed.

Melinda, dying, grasping onto her vision of her descendants as a last spark of hope: "...My line will continue unbroken, to my daughters this gift I now give..."

Every single future generation, in a chain of faulty pills, broken condoms, inconsiderate lovers, accidents, and possibly worse: "Fucking thanks, Mel" /sarcasm

(Also, we stan P. Baxter, who fought the curse for a whopping thirty-three (33!) years before popping out our beloved Grams. This even while fucking two (2!) guys on the regular for a while there. No wonder she was destined to be reborn into one of the most powerful witches of all time, she was already kick-ass even without that power-boost. The next oldest was Prudence Warren herself, and since that's before the curse got tripled ("Fucking thanks, Prue"), I'm quite satisfied with that.)

Apologies for vanishing again~ ^^” August has been a Hell Month for me, cause I managed, somehow, to break my ankle at the beginning of the month, and let me tell you, that has been an Adventure (and not the good kind). Writing is just not a thing I want to do when I’m having multiple-panic-attacks days alongside eight-hours-in-the-hospital days (the two are not unrelated). And spiffing up my writing for posting is even futher down my list of priorities, so, it maybe another month or so before I get any new writing posted (but! I’m pretty sure I do have a whole completed fic ready for editing and posting once I’m ready to get stuck back in =D)

That being said, I did get a creative itch after a couple of weeks of not touching my writing, so I started digging into some plotting/research I’d been putting off for the sequel to my Charmed AU, The Last Charmed One. (For those of you who remember that/are hoping for the sequel, I have about half of it fully written, but things didn’t go exactly to plan, so I had to re-adjust the entire second half of the plot to compensate… Which I have now done! =D And unless I go nuts at some point between now and then, I’m thinking I’m going to make finishing it my NaNo project this year, so… -fingers crossed-? =D)

Anyway, all this is a prelude to the fact that, in jiggling my plot about, I re-encountered a note I’d made about the… mechanics of the Charmed power in my ‘verse. And this may end up being spoilers somewhere down the line of this series (like… I think it might be part of the plot for book… seven? eight? Something like that…), but given that I have no real guarantee that I’m ever going to get that far, I figured I could throw it into the void now anyway?

Random Charmed/Gramarye backstory ahead (with bonus spell!):

Keep reading

#Charmed #The Last Charmed One #Gramarye #Gramarye series #Melinda Warren #Prudence Warren #The Charmed Ones #piper halliwell #prue halliwell #phoebe halliwell #The Warren Family Tree #family tree #if anyone's interested in what I put together #both the purely canon nonsense and the sense I pieced it into #lmk #watch me worldbuild around canon contradictions #like idk if it's true because the wiki doesn't cite its sources very well #but apparently Prudence's daughter was born 1671 #you know exactly ONE (1) year after her GRANDMOTHER #did I decide this was thus nonsense and should be ignored?#No!#Prudence now has a timey-wimey adventure #where she gets stuck in the past for seven years and a day #and gets married and has a daughter called Cassandra #before magic whisks her back to her rightful time #leaving her poor husband and daughter to grieve her #NEVER KNOWING that she was a time-traveller #and that Cass's best friend is actually her grandmother

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