The new year hits us like a train. I bring in my packed getaway bag just as Agent Hotchner asks. It monopolizes the bottom drawer of my desk. The week back, it is hard to get started. There is a backlog of cases from my little vacation. I spend practically every hour glued to my screen. The profilers start to call me Bouchard, and it catches on quickly.

On Friday morning, just two days after we returned, I am stuck. The analysis I am trying to run gives me nothing but error messages. When I blink to look down at my agenda, the pages look tinted blue. The only seconds peace I allow myself involves pinching the bridge of my nose.

"Do you want my help?" Reid asks, looking over my computer at me.

"Those are fighting words, Reid," Morgan warns.

"I'm fine," I insist.

New leaf bullshit.

I scan the code over and over. After thirty minutes of re-examining the t-values and IV and DV settings, I decide to run the whole thing again. I'm slower this time, more careful with my work. Rather than pounding my fingers off the keys I barely press down on them, looking at every letter I type rather than at my fingers. That evening, I am the last out of the door, and I'm the first back on Monday. I barely finish redoing every step before we are supposed to go home.

It still doesn't work. I am incredibly tempted to take the keyboard downstairs at use it as target practice, but I take the anger and swallow it. No one had better talk to me, or else I'm going to go ballistic. Excitation transfer theory and all of that criminal psychology stuff that Estelle insists is mumbo jumbo.

Dr. Reid must be familiar with the concept, but he speaks anyway, "you seem angrier than Friday."

"It keeps saying there is a syntax error," I grumble. "I swear, there is no syntax error. I would have found it by now."

"Reid can read 20, 000 words per minute," JJ offers.

She is putting on her coat, along with Prentiss. Everyone is standing up, ready to head out, and unlike them, it doesn't feel like the workday has begun. I'm no closer than when I started.

"I'm just going to stay late."

I don't even look up from my screen, running my eyes over everything I have typed. I'm beginning to go crazy. Numbers blur together, figures strong longer than the number of degrees Reid could put behind his name when he sends an email. Letters abbreviations, periods where they are supposed to be, brackets all closed.

"It'll still be there tomorrow, Bouchard," Prentiss says. "In the morning you'll look at it with fresh eyes."

"I already had the weekend to get fresh eyes," I insist. Without turning, I shoo them away. "Don't deny me the overtime. I'm not paid as much as you field agents anyway."

No one else offers anything. They don't even point out that we are salaried, so overtime doesn't matter as much to us as it would to people who are paid hourly. I'm still stuck in the mode I was in working for professors throughout university. I hear the others clearing out, so I turn my attention back to SPSS. The error has got to be somewhere. It is up to me to find it.

Then, a shadow crosses over my screen. The outline is vague, but I know who it is without having to turn around.

"You're such a backseat mathematician," I start rolling up my sleeves, trying to force myself to focus.

"I can still help," Dr. Reid says.

Rather than respond, I ignore him. Instead, I dig into the drawer with my getaway bag and pull out a hair tie. I've been trying to wear it down more since it's bad for your hair follicles to have it pulled out of your face, or so I hear, but desperate times, and whatnot. Dr. Reid moves behind me and for a second I let out an exhale. He's leaving.

He pulls out Morgan's chair and wheels it over until he is sitting beside me. I close my eyes briefly, forcing myself not to roll them.

"Pestering me isn't turning over a new leaf," I say.

My fingers move back to the mouse and begin to scroll through the code. It's got to be around 20, 000 words. Of course, it's mostly characters although there are some commands in here. I'd rather continue to do this for the rest of my life than suffer the humiliation of him finding the error in under a minute.

"I'm not pestering, I'm offering my assistance," he says. "My New Year's resolution was to mitigate insulting you, and to stop correcting your work without asking if you need help first. So, I've decided to ask."

"Those were your New Year's resolutions?" I look over at him, puzzled.

"Two of twelve," he says. His eyes linger on my face. "I do one per month."

With only a twitch of a nod in his direction, I return to my code. While I do that, he pulls out a banana from his bag. He eats it while I read and read and read. My eyes are starting to ache, so I pull out eye drops.

"Look at me," he says.

I turn to face him.

I don't know why. The impulse is too strong.

Dr. Reid's brow is furrowed and his eyes narrow in on me. I lean backwards, away from him. I don't like that he's profiling me. The way his eyes shift from my eyes to my nose to my lips is odd. I don't want to give myself away.

I belong to me. Me alone.

"Am I blurry?" he asks.

I blink back my confusion, hoping it doesn't show for a second in my eyes.

A little, "it just takes a second for my eyes to focus."

"Loss of focus flexibility and dry eyes are both symptoms of over-exposure to screens," he points out. "Are you also experiencing headaches or exhaustion? You should reduce the time you spend daily on the computer."

"I hadn't realized you also were a doctor of medicine, Dr. Reid," I roll my eyes and then squeeze them shut. I need those drops desperately, but I worry the second I look away from my computer he is going to take over.

"I like to read," he replies. "Also, our workday ended an hour and twelve minutes ago."

Then, I look up. Everyone is gone. The lights are off in Agent Hotchner's office and the break room. If I wanted to look, I am sure the clock on the wall would tell me he's correct.

"Fuck me," I mumble. I drag my eyes over to the computer screen.

I press on, scanning the code. There's got to be a comma where there should be a period, or the wrong value typed somewhere.

He slides in closer until the bottom of his chair clicks as it taps mine, "it'll only take a minute."

"I can handle it," I tell him. "I don't need your help. And I never will."

"What's the syntax error code?" he asks, ignoring me. "Have you looked it up?"

"Yes," I tell him. "Syntax error code 3900."

Dr. Reid leans in a bit closer. My eyes dart over to look at him. He's not looking at the screen, which I appreciate. Instead, he seems to be staring off into nothing.

"XXX Unrecognized text appears within the STRING VALUE value specification. Execution of the command stops," he repeats it.

His memory shouldn't surprise me after the incident with Estelle, and yet it does. There are thousands of syntax errors, and that is the one I'm experiencing.

"The data is numerical though," I told him. "There are no alphabetical components. Everything I have input is entirely quantitative, and I used the raw numbers. There aren't even any variables that could be mixed in as text, since I'm not looking at anything qualitative at all, so I've got no idea what's happening."

I find myself moving over to let him have a look before I really think about it. Maybe it's because it feels like he's including me in the solution. The solution is mine, and he's just guiding me through it. Back in our Oxford days, Estelle and I used to lounge on chairs late at night, her sitting upside down so her head hangs off the sofa and myself by the fire with my cheek against my knees. We'd study for quizzes, asking each other questions and listening to the other's answers. No notes in front of us, just both of our brains working through problems together. I wasn't testing her, but testing that I knew the answer to the question as I asked it.

There aren't many places I miss. Really, I don't even think I miss Oxford. Maybe I miss that time. Regardless, I move over so Dr. Reid can question me, to prove to himself that he knows.

"This isn't your project on seasonality," he remarks, scrolling through. "What is this?"

"I'm looking to see the relationship between those who commit multiple separate sexual assaults and people who engage in intimate partner violence," I say. "It was supposed to be an easy break from the seasonality project. Obviously, the break isn't going well."

"Let me look," he says.

I watch him scroll through the text. I look at the clock on the wall, watching the second-hand tick by. With each passing second, I hear the mouse scroll again. My back is sore. Maybe I do need to get off my computer more frequently. Since joining the Behavioural Analysis Unit, I haven't been going to the gym in my apartment as frequently. Really, I should go again, even if just to stretch out my shoulders.

A minute passes. I turn my head, and he's scrolling back to the top of the code. He's already read anther thing.

He scrolls again, and another minute passes.

"Execute the program again," he says.

"You didn't type anything," I turn back to the computer, and press my finger against the screen. "The same syntax error is going to pop up right below the last two."

He doesn't answer, just waiting. So, I force the program to execute once more. It takes three minutes to load because while the FBI can afford the best, SPSS is not known for its efficiency. When the results come through, just as I promised, the same syntax error pops up. Dr. Reid leans back from the computer. I watch him for his shoulders down, relaxing them. I swear I hear the crack of some bone in his shoulder.

"I've stumped you, have I?" I ask.

"No," he says.

He takes the mouse again. Navigating SPSS is difficult for him, and I watch as he clicks around the screen. He drops the mouse and gestures to me.

"Show me the cases that you've imported," he says.

I minimize SPSS and open up a file folder. I'm thankful I moved copies of all the referenced cases into the same spot.

"The paperwork is uniform, so I just had a different program convert the files into data that could be imported by SPSS," I explain.

There are two hundred cases, each of which would only have at most a thousand words in the fillable sheets. It shouldn't take him more than ten minutes to read through them all. I haven't bothered, because it would take the better part of two days to read them, and another day to manually import the data.

As he begins to fly through, it takes longer for the documents to open than it does for him to read them. While he works, I begin to stretch out my own shoulders. It is terrible to admit, but I'm kind of happy that he hasn't been able to find the error. Actually, he seems to think my code is fine, which is a first for us.

"Here it is," Dr. Reid says.

He drags his cursor over the middle of the paperwork, and my jaw slacks open. Some idiot cop filled out the form using numbers written out alphabetically and not in numerals as they are supposed to do. Instead of 27, the sheet says 'twenty-seven', and I imagine that's how it's been imported.

"Holy shit," I say, reading over the document. "So, the software imported the numbers in alphabetical words, and confused that for an attempt to create string values?"

"So, it would seem," Dr. Reid says. "I imagine that this error is not a significant pattern amongst police. If you would like, I can read the rest of the files to see if this error repeats, but it might be more fruitful to change these values in SPSS and then execute the program to see if it works before continuing our search."

"Got it," I say. Now, I'm thankful that I bothered to name the files their case codes. Consequently, I have an easy time finding them on SPSS. The numbers are right there, all written out in plain English. It takes less than a minute to switch the numbers.

Then comes the moment of truth. I execute the program once more. These three minutes are the longest we've spent in the office. Then, it executes. If I weren't so excited, I might leap out of my chair.

"Fucking finally," I say. "Holy shit. I felt like I was going insane."

It wasn't my code. Thank God I did everything I could correctly. I save the results to the computer and boot it down. It's half past seven already, but I don't care.

"It was a problematic challenge," Dr. Reid says. "I've never seen a police officer make that mistake. The UCR program usually combs through their files before filling them for us. You should let Garcia or Hotch know so that we can let the people working the UCR program know to check for this kind of thing."

"It can wait until Tuesday," I sigh. "It's time for me to head home. Good work, Dr. Reid."

It's the closest to a compliment that I can think to give him. Perhaps, I have not said anything quite that nice, and possibly I won't say anything like that again.

"I can help more often if you'd like," he offers.

Both of us begin to leave. I turn off the computer and pull on my coat. Finally, I can get out of here.

"I'll let you know," I don't mean it. If all goes according to plan, I'm not going to need his help again.

~~~~~

I've been pre-writing too much for this. I have just finished chapter 50 and let me tell you, my god do things really start to get crazy. What do you think of this so far? Anything you are really looking forward to seeing, or things you'd like to see? Which of the side character OCs are you most interested in? Let me know in the comments!