favorite insomniac | spencer reid
a little warm-up exercise i just finished <3 you can't sleep, so you decide to call the only other person you know who would be awake at this hour. ~500 words
You don’t get insomnia. Usually, you fall asleep quickly and easily, and then devolve into any number of nightmares or vivid dreams or somethings that cause to you wake up feeling like you hadn’t slept at all.
Obviously not great. But not insomnia.
Tonight, however, is not a usual night.
You roll over once again, after what feels like hours but is probably only twenty minutes of lying as still as possible and trying to will your body to be tired. You check the time on your phone; 3:14 AM.
Ugh. You have to be at work in less than 6 hours, awake in less than 5. Closer to 4, if you want to actually look presentable.
You groan, scrubbing your hands over your face and barely resisting the urge to start punching your pillows.
And then you give up.
There’s one insomniac you know who’s got a pretty good chance of being awake right now. You've dialed the number before you can even think about it. The line rings once, and you realize what an inappropriate, quite possibly disrespectful choice this had been. You’re about to hang up, hovering over the red button, when you hear him.
“Hey,” he says, voice raspy.
Oh god, oh god. “Please tell me I didn’t wake you up.”
“No,” Spencer chuckles bitterly, “You didn’t. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t sleep?”
His eyebrows raise halfway to his hairline. “So you called me?”
You and Spencer are coworkers. You’re friends. You just don’t really hang out much outside of work and work-related events. Not that you haven’t wanted to, you just… don’t really know how. Or if you should. Or if it would be particularly smart.
“I’m so sorry. I figured if anyone was liable to be awake right now, it’d be… I wasn’t thinking. I’ll let you go, I’m–”
“Hey, it’s alright,” he says, amused. You’re the only person he ever gets the opportunity to calm down; he’s usually the most nervous person in the room. “This doesn’t usually happen to you though, does it?”
“No,” you huff, flopping back against your pillows. “I’d ask you for tips, but whatever you’re doing clearly isn’t working.”
“That’s nice.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not wrong.”
You make a self-satisfied little “hmph” sound.
“What did you call me for then?”
Something in the timbre of his voice makes your heart speed up. “I don’t know, human connection across the ether that is 3 AM?” The sense that you’re the only two people in the universe. The sound of his voice. Not that you could say that part out loud.
“Wanna go for a drive?”
Huh? “Wh– We have work in, like, 5 hours.”
“Oh, you haven’t been counting, have you?”
“You mean like thinking ‘if I fall asleep right now at this moment I could get 5 hours of sleep’ but then I still don’t fall asleep and I watch the minutes go by until it’s only 4 and a half hours and then I get angry at myself for being awake and then I’m somehow even more awake?”
He chuckles, dark and rich through the phone. “The classic trap. Never count the hours.”
“Now you tell me.”
“Alright,” he grunts, and you hear him shuffling around, “I’m picking you up.”
“You're what?!"
"I'm picking you up," his voice lilts up, almost like a question. But not like he's asking for permission, more like he's teasing you. Like he knows your answer anyway.
"Now? You have a car?”
“Yes, now. And yes, I have a car,” you hear jingling on the other end. “You’re gonna like it.”
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