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reiding-writing · 10 days

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Congrats on 1000 followers! That's such a huge milestone! For the climacteric event, could you do a continuation of 'Takedown'? Maybe a role reversal, where cold!reader witnesses a badass moment from Spencer (whether his 'takedown' is physical or verbal is up to you) and gets flustered about it? I love your cold!reader series so much, it's such a great character dynamic with the rest of the cast!! Congrats again!

TAKEDOWN [CLIMACTERIC]

/ˈteɪkˌdaʊn/ /part one/

Spencer might be a know-it-all, but at least he actually knows the things that he talks about.

WARNINGS: fem!reader, just some guy being really obnoxious and annoying, mild mansplaining

spencer reid x cold!reader || fluff || 2.4k || event masterlist!!

a/n: we’re gonna ignore i uploaded this prematurely and just focus on the fic thanks 😭🫶

main masterlist!! ⋆｡°✩ cold!reader masterlist!!

this is a continuation of my original ’takedown’ fic for cold!reader with a role reversal!

Spencer wouldn’t say that he liked to ‘show off’.

He knew he was smarter than most people, and his teammates knew he was smarter than most people, and that meant that when he displayed his intelligence to provide important details about a case, the team would take his word for it.

It saved a lot of time in explanations for where he got his information from and allowed for profiles to be built at twice the speed.

But sometimes asking someone to quote a source was necessary.

Case in point, a police detective from Indiana who just would not leave the BAU team alone as they tried to curate a profile for the serial killer they were hunting.

Some of his muses, most definitely flukes in knowledge, actually did have a productive outcome.

“A majority of stabbing cases have an underlying sexual motive, so I’ve taken the liberty of looking into the sex-offences registry for anyone who could be our killer,”

And some…

“Have we considered the possibility that our killer is actually killers, I mean if you look at the stab patterns across the victims, there’s a clear dominant and submissive personality no?”

…were the exact opposite.

“What you’re seeing is a progression of the unsub’s confidence,” Spencer shook his head slightly at the detectives attempt at an explanation. “The slashes are only jagged and uncertain in the two first victims, with all of the victims after that displaying much more confident wounds, which clearly shows the evolution of one individual, not multiple,”

He didn’t like having to shut other people’s trains of thought down, it was something that he’d gone through enough to not want to put anyone else through it, but when they were the complete opposite of productive, sometimes it was for the best.

It was remarkably easy to tell when somebody had read something on the internet rather than actually going through the training required to be competent in a certain specialty. Especially when it came to the forensic side of things.

Throwing in key words like dominant and submissive personalities didn’t mean that he knew what he was on about. It just meant that he’d read a few case articles on a certain subject and then passed that off as a rounded understanding of whatever concept he was trying to explain.

And it was really frustrating.

“What’s wrong with you today?” You enter the put aside meeting room with narrowed eyes, a cup of takeout coffee in your hand that serves as a relic of you being able to escape from the hellhole that Spencer was inherently trapped in.

“It’s nothing, i’m alright,” He presses his lips into that awkward smile of his, but it lacks any of the genuity that it’s usually accompanied by, merely a shell of a smile that Spencer knows you’re not buying.

A quirk of your eyebrow is the only push needed for his façade to break immediately.

“It’s just—” Spencer exhales heavily through his nose, biting the inside of his mouth in a will for him to keep himself together. “I’m just frustrated.”

You gesture with your head for him to continue, and it’s like you’ve blown a hole in a dam with how fast everything comes tumbling out.

“Officer Harrison keeps interrupting the investigation and talking about absolute nonsense under the guise of it being objective fact and I’ve spent so long correcting him that I haven’t actually managed to do anything,” He gets it all out in a single breath, and it’s honestly quite impressive to watch until he’s caught at the end with barely any air left in his lungs and has to take a moment to catch it up.

“I just wish he would leave me alone,”

You haven’t met Officer Harrison, too busy with the coroner and taking interviews, but if you had to make an educated guess you’d say Spencer’s apparent frustration was well founded.

He wasn’t one to exaggerate things.

“Tell him to then,” You shrug out your answer like it’s easy, leaning your lower back against the table to sip at your coffee.

“I’m not like you,” Spencer sighs exasperatedly, his shoulders in a slump alongside his mind. “I can’t just— scare people off,”

You give a small quirk of your eyebrow at his assessment of your personality, and Spencer can see the small traces of amusement in the corners of your mouth. “You have the authority Reid, you outrank him tenfold,”

“I know, I just—” Spencer shrugs, defeated. “I don’t know, I just can’t,” He uncaps his marker to return to the barren whiteboard to try and actually get some decent headway on the profile with a solemn expression, submitting himself to the inevitability of having to do two jobs at once.

“Do you want me to talk to him?” Your offer sounds almost like an assassination proposal, monotonous and almost too serious.

“No,” Spencer shakes his head lightly. “No it’s alright, it’s not your problem, I’ll be okay,”

“You’e sure?”

“Yeah,” He gives you a small nod over his shoulder, lips pressed into a line as a grateful but dismissive smile. “Thanks anyway,”

You push yourself from the table with a sigh, joining Spencer at his side to pull the marker from his hand.

“Wh—“

“Go make yourself a coffee Reid.” You cap the marker with a knowing tilt of your head, putting it away in your back pocket so he can’t try and take it back from you. “You need to take five and calm down, you aren’t going to get anything done like this,”

You can see the want to turn your idea down, to say that he’s fine and not affected by the officer in his expression, but you both know it’s not something to be acted on, and so gives you a small nod with an exasperated exhale as he drags himself out of the meeting room to do as you’d asked.

He’s grateful for it really, the warm ceramic under his hands serving as a grounding point and sickly sweetness of the drink as it reaches his taste-buds a welcome distraction from the rampant frustration inhabiting his prefrontal cortex, but that small voice in the back of his head continues to torment him about the inevitability of having to deal with the officer again and all of th

He knows he should at least try to let it go over his head. If he stepped back into the meeting room like he was you probably wouldn’t even let him get one foot in the door before sending him on a longer break, but he didn’t want a break, he wanted to work, to crack this profile open and actually make some real headway.

He just needed to take a second to breathe.

When he does return to the meeting room, you’re not alone anymore, and Spencer can practically feel the amount of will power you’re using to keep your mouth shut as Officer Harrison rambles on about something he’s not quite close enough to hear yet.

“…very unlikely for that to actually happen,” The officer points to a section of scrawl you’d added to the whiteboard after Spencer’s departure, something about brief episodes of mania as a possible reason behind the unsub’s violent attacks.

“That’s not actually true, it’s been disproved dozens of times over,” You shake off his attempt at over-explaining your own theory to you with a full tone and a shake of your head, a clear indication for him to leave you alone.

He doesn’t of course, and Spencer swears he sees your eye twitch as Officer Harrison continues to talk aimlessly.

“I’m just saying, there’s research to support the idea that serial killers make their crimes more gruesome than they need to post-mortem so they can plead insanity in court if they’re caught,” He raises his hands in mock surrender, and you quirk your eyebrow at his explanation.

“And where did you get that information from?”

“A doctorate thesis paper from Stanford,” Officer Harrison crosses his arms like he’s secured a victory over you in knowing something that an expert doesn’t. “You’ve probably never read it, it was an investigation into the differences between legal and clinical insanity, and it concluded that serial murderers over gruesomise their kills to plead legal insanity in court despite being completely sound of mind,” He points back at your scribbling with his index finger, knocking his knuckle against the board. “So this theory isn’t worth looking into sweetheart, trust me,”

The use of the placeholder ‘pet’ name makes your eyebrows furrow until there’s a prominent frown line between them. “I have read that paper, for your information,” You spin the whiteboard marker between the fingers of your left hand, likely a way to expel some of the tension in your muscles as you grow increasingly frustrated with the man.

“You don’t have to lie sweetheart, it’s alright, no one’s expecting you to have read an 85,000 word paper from almost a decade ago, I just like to educate myself in my free time,” He shrugs with a nonchalant expression, but there are traces of what’s almost condescendion in his tone and Spencer decides it’s time to stop this little debate before Officer Harrison ends up with a broken nose and you end up getting a very long talk from Hotch.

“She wrote it,” Spencer presses his lips into a tight line as he walks around the table to join you at the whiteboard.

“Excuse me?” The officer blinks at Spencer blankly, eyebrows knitting together in a mix of confusion and a slight amount of irritation at Spencer’s intrusion.

“The thesis paper you’re talking about? She was the one who wrote it,” He nods his head in your direction, and he can physically see the way the officer’s air of intellectual superiority drains from his face.

“And I’m not actually convinced that you’ve read the whole thing yourself, everything you mentioned was part of the paper’s abstract, which at an average reading speed of 238 words per minute, should have only taken you a minute and 24 seconds to read, rather than the 5 hours and 54 minutes to read the whole thing,” Spencer feels a little guilty for how good the drop in Officer Harrison’s face makes him feel, but it’s easily overrun by inherent relief at getting the frustration off his chest.

“Can you name anything important from that paper apart from what you just mentioned? Anything at all?” The frustration underlying Spencer’s tone was obvious, and it was almost gratifying for you to watch him take a stand in his own beliefs for once.

There’s a few moments where he pauses, giving Officer Harrison the very slim opportunity to redeem himself and prove he had actually read through the whole document.

Neither of you needed to watch him try and stumble through his answer to know that he didn’t.

“Maybe if you had read it you’d know that the ‘fact’ you just mentioned, was proportional to the percentage of serial murderers that weren’t diagnosed with any mental illness prior to their arrest, which was only 63% of the total sample that was analysed. 114 of the murderers were actually diagnosed with some form of clinical psychosis, which is still entirely probable for the unsub that we’re looking for,” There’s a lingering trace of snark dousing Spencer’s tone, joined by an elevated sense of conviction as he narrows his eyes towards Officer Harrison. “Or maybe you’d at least remember that it was actually 97,502 words long, not 85,000,”

The fact that Spencer recalled such specific details of your thesis shouldn’t be a shock to you, his eidetic memory was practically a staple of his character after all, but considering you weren’t even aware he’d read it in the first place until five minutes ago made that revelation hit you just a little harder than it probably should.

“If you want to act like an expert in something, become an expert in something,” Spencer crosses his arms and it may as well have been a done deal. “Don’t pass off surface level, incorrect information as objective fact, all you’re doing is slowing the real experts down,”

The assertiveness in his tone, whilst occasionally used when arguing his point for a specific topic, was much more present as he shut down the Officer, and it was almost a little too gratifying to watch the wind get knocked out of his sails at Spencer’s reprimand.

“Now if you’d please excuse us, we have a profile to work on,” He gestures to the whiteboard with his head, and Officer Harrison is off like a whippet, retreating out of the room with his tail between his legs and a traffic light red coating his face from the embarrassment.

You give a dragged out whistle as the door closes. “Congratulations on telling him to leave you alone,”

Spencer laughs almost pathetically. Was he really so socially inept that he had to be congratulated on standing up for himself?

“Thanks,” He presses his lips into that typical Spencer smile as he fiddles aimlessly with the button on the cuff of his right sleeve. “And uh, thanks for letting me handle it on my own,”

You shrug nonchalantly. “You asked me to,”

“I know, I just— thank you,”

“It’s nothing to thank me for Reid,” You shake your head dismissively, but Spencer knows you’ve accepted his thanks through the slight quirk in the corners of your mouth that break the ever-present scowl that cements itself on your face. “I didn’t know you read my thesis,”

Spencer blinks for a moment before giving you a small and enthusiastic nod. “Three times actually, it’s extremely well written from a logical perspective, and the transcripts from the interviews you held were very interesting,”

And there’s the Spencer you knew.

“You’re an incredible psychologist, it’s no wonder you skipped your bachelors,” He emphasises his words with exaggerated head movements that make the curls of his hair bounce against his forehead.

“Thank you, Reid, that’s very sweet,” There’s a fondness to your voice that you’d deny if he pointed out, but you’re trying much less to hide it from Spencer than you would from anyone else in your team.

Spencer Reid had read your thesis three times. You wouldn’t be surprised if he knew it better than you did. You’re almost certain he knew it better than you did. He could probably recite the whole thing word for word where chunks of it had already been forgotten in your mind.

It wasn’t exactly something revolutionary, but it may as well have been.

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #criminal minds #criminal minds x reader #spencer reid fluff #criminal minds fluff #climacteric 🪶

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