"HEY SPENCE?"

Katharine grabbed her coat from the closet, pulling it on over her shoulders before wrapping a scarf around her neck. "Can you drop me off early? I have a meeting with Strauss and Tony in less than forty-five."

Katharine stepped out of the closet and watched as Spencer stumbled out of the bathroom, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth and pajama pants low on his hips. He didn't have a shirt on, per usual, and his hair was still all over the place from the previous night's activities.

"Yeah," he said before ducking back into the bathroom to spit. Katharine took up her newly packed go-bag and slung that over her shoulder before taking up her regular work bag and putting that on. "Let me just put a shirt on."

She made her way into the kitchen and grabbed a granola bar as well as her coffee mug. Usually, they'd have breakfast together before leaving but when they were pressed for time, like now, a granola bar would often do.

Spencer emerged from their bedroom a moment later, a plain white tee pulled over his slightly-muscular frame. He had his glasses on, which Katharine thought was adorable, and his hair was... better than it had been.

He grabbed the keys from the hook by the front door, Katharine leaving the kitchen a moment later with the granola bar already half-eaten. She made sure to lock the door behind her, balancing her coffee mug and her two bags.

"You're going to drop everything," Spencer teased, poking her side lightly before taking her coffee mug and work bag for her so she could properly close the door. "You should invest in a leather messenger bag, like mine."

Katharine scoffed, taking back her coffee. They made their way to the car together, Spencer throwing her bag into the backseat while she climbed into the passenger seat.

"What?" she asked, buckling up. Spencer turned the car on before buckling his seat belt. "It's not enough that I have your last name? I have to adopt your fashion sense too?"

Spencer smirked, twisting so that he could back out of their driveway. Katharine tried not to stare. There was just something so inherently attractive about the way he backed out of places that made it hard for them to leave the car afterward.

"Exactly," Spencer continued their banter as he sat back in his seat, driving off toward the FBI campus. "And it doesn't hurt that you look really good in my shirts."

He looked over at her, or rather, looked over at the shirt she was wearing. Admittedly, she had taken to stealing Spencer's button-ups to complete her own outfits. She couldn't help if they just looked better on her.

Katharine rolled her eyes, taking a sip of coffee.

"What's mine is yours and yours is mine, baby," she said, a smile on her face. The drive over didn't take long, eight minutes at the most. If Katharine wanted, she could probably walk to work every morning. "At least until you divorce me."

Spencer pulled up in front of the building, putting the vehicle in park.

"And why would I ever want to divorce you?" he asked, leaning over the center console to press a kiss to her lips. Katharine grinned as she pulled away.

"I love you," she said, putting her hand up to his cheek and kissing him again. "Oh--" she pulled away-- "Can you pick up some milk on the way back home?"

Spencer hummed as Katharine unbuckled her seatbelt. He got out as well, grabbing her bag from the backseat for her. He came around to the other side and handed the bag over, pulling her in closer by her waist for one last kiss.

"I'll see you in two hours," she said, slipping her arm through the handle of her bag. She pressed a kiss to Spencer's cheek before heading into the building, using her ID to bypass security and head up to the BAU's floor. She stopped by her desk to drop her things before straightening out her outfit.

She fixed the collar of her shirt before straightening out the skirt she had on, making sure her thigh holster wasn't showing through the material.

She ducked into one of the bathrooms and checked her hair before bounding over to Strauss's office, knocking twice and waiting for an answer.

Once she got one, she opened the door to see Tony already there, messing with Strauss's knick-knacks while the older woman tried not to look too annoyed.

"Ah!" Tony exclaimed, dropping the ball he'd been playing with back onto Strauss's desk. Katharine saw the section chief take the ball and store it away in one of her drawers. "There she is! My favorite Government Liason."

Katharine rolled her eyes. "I'm your only Government Liason, Tony."

She closed the door behind her, making her way over to Strauss's desk and taking one of the seats. Tony sat in the other one, setting his phone up on the section chief's desk.

"Right," he said, pointing at Katharine. "Let's get to business. Firstly, I'm supposed to inform you that I will be needing Agent Reid for an unspecified amount of time in July of this upcoming year for a super-secret project."

"Isn't that already what you do, Mr. Stark?" Strauss asked, trying her best to keep up with the holographics that came up and off of Tony's phone. Honestly, most of the information he had displayed was bullshit, the only relevant information in code so that Strauss couldn't even understand it.

"Yes," Tony said, "but, I could be needing her for upward of a month this time. Of course, it would work as an exchange because you would be giving me Agent Reid for a month and I won't be requesting her for the months December through February, and May."

He looked at Strauss briefly, making sure that the woman was following along.

"And then there's the issue of what happened at the hearing," he continued without letting her talk. Katharine looked at Tony in surprise. She didn't know they'd be talking about the hearing at this moment. "Now, Strauss, is it? I understand that even though you were there you made no move to help Agent Reid."

"I--"

"I would like you to know," Tony continued, not letting her get a word in edgewise, "That cuffing Agent Reid was in fact technically a war crime. According to her signature on the Accords, she was to be protected against the unlawful use of the specially engineered cuffs. Now the uniformed officers have been dealt with and the senator--well, the senator's another problem, but due to Katharine's insanely big heart, we've decided to leave you and the bureau out of the legal trouble."

Katharine gave Tony a sideways look. It wasn't often Tony showed that he was angry, but his passive-aggressive way of informing Strauss on the situation was more than enough to tell her that he was pissed. While Tony thought the bureau should have been held accountable, Katharine thought they should be at least a little more forgiving.

After all, Katharine was, if anything, an angel.

"Agent Reid will be compensated for her troubles," Strauss gave a careful look between the two adults sitting in front of her. Katharine felt like she was sitting in the principal's office in middle school again. Only this time Tony was her mom and Strauss was Mr. Beker. "And there will be new protocol put in place to ensure that does not happen to any other Enhanced member of the FBI should the FBI choose to hire more Enhanced individuals."

"Yeah, I doubt that'll happen," Katharine snorted. "Inhumans don't exactly like the government, nevermind working with them. I was a special case."

Tony collapsed his phone, which Katharine was one-hundred percent sure was only used for intimidation purposes and stood from his chair. Katharine followed suit, smoothing out her skirt around her thigh holster before the meeting came to a close.

They left Strauss's office together for dramatic effect, as Tony would have insisted.

"You think we overdid it?" Katharine questioned as she walked him back to the elevators.

Tony smirked. "I think we did fine, but, uh, you should clear your calendar in July."

"Do I get to know what the super-secret mission that you mentioned to Strauss is?" she asked, raising an eyebrow as Tony stepped into an empty elevator.

He put his index finger to his lips as the doors began to close, giving her a wink.

"Super secret," was all he said before the doors closed, leaving Katharine to question everything that had just happened in the last ten minutes.

Deciding that it wasn't really worth the headache, she turned on her heel and headed back to her desk. There were just some things that weren't meant to be questioned. She'd taken this as one of those things.

NEARLY TWO HOURS OF INCONSISTENT WORK LATER, Katharine found herself sitting beside Spencer in the briefing room while listening to the banter happening between Garcia and Rossi. To say that it was entertaining would be correct.

"No, no," she watched as Garcia set the tupperware of food down in front of herself before sitting. "I followed it down to the micron, aside from the pig. Look, master of all things Italian, I am having a Fellini festival at my house this weekend and I must serve the beautiful food of his country."

Rossi looked between Garcia's cooking and the woman herself, amusement showing through the disbelief.

"Maybe you should show a Disney film and stick with burgers," he suggested. Katharine laughed as she played with Spencer's fingers, twisting the wedding band and the engagement ring around in opposite circles.

"You know," Derek butt in, "Rossi, you could always give Penelope a cooking lesson."

"Oh, my gosh, that would be amazing," Garcia praised Derek's suggestion. "That would be like--that would be like the Iron Chef meets the BAU. And we could do it at your house."

Rossi smirked. "I don't have a house. I have a mansion."

Katharine rolled her eyes goodnaturedly at the older man's words, fixing the rings on Spencer's finger before letting go of his hand as Hotch entered the briefing room.

"All right, let's get started," the bossman said, all work and no play as usual. He took up his seat between Spencer and Rossi.

"All right, mes amis," Garcia said, taking up the remote from the circular table. "You are jetting to Durant, Oklahoma because, in the last three days, two women have been found dead after being sexually tortured and then blinded with a sulfuric acid solution. Abby Elcott is our first victim. Nineteen-year-old art student. She was headed to campus for an advanced drawing class. She'd been missing for two days. Same goes for our second victim, Beth Westerly, seventeen. She had just finished her coffee shop shift and was on her way to a bar method class."

"Both low-risk victims," Emily observed.

"And physically similar," Katharine said, looking between the two girls. They were both pale in skin tone, each having the same wavy blonde hair. Each girl also had blue eyes, though Abby Elcott's eyes looked darker in shade than Beth Westerly's.

"How close are the two abduction sites?" Rossi asked.

"Five miles apart at bus stops," Garcia told them. "Abby's cell was found near one, Beth's scarf near the other."

Spencer leaned forward in his seat, eyes shifting from the screen to Garcia.

"Where are the dump sites?" he asked.

"One in an alley, the other in a field."

Katharine frowned, looking away from the screen to scroll through the photos on her screen. Both girls had so much to live for. That was always the problem when working with cases involving teenagers or kids, knowing that they'd never be able to amount to what they were meant to.

"So he stapled their eyes open," JJ said, observing the postmortem photos, "then he blinded them."

"It's about power and control," Derek said. "Maybe he didn't want them to watch while he hurt them."

"Or it could be about shame," Spencer theorized. "Perhaps the unsub is disfigured himself. Blinding the victims leaves them helpless, lost, totally dependent. It may be a manifestation of how he sees himself in this world."

"It is a form of enucleation, just without the scalpel," Emily said.

Katharine read through the first ME report.

"His face..." she said, trailing off before looking away from her reading. "His face is the last they see before darkness."

"Garcia, come up with a list of jobs that would give the unsub access to sulfuric acid," Hotch delegated, folding up his file. "The rest of us, wheels up in thirty minutes."

Katharine gathered up her things, moving out of the briefing room with Spencer at her side.

"Did you get the milk?" she asked, reviewing the case information as they walked.

"I did," he answered, guiding her down the set of stairs so she wouldn't trip. "I also picked up some more eggs because we had, like, three left."

"'Like, three left,'" Katharine repeated, looking at Spencer questionably. "Since when did you say 'like' so casually?"

Spencer groaned, sitting in his chair while Katharine took up residence on the corner of his desk. She kept the tablet in her hand so she could keep up the guise of working.

"Since we told Nina she could stay in the guest bedroom for a week while you were gone," he said, pulling himself closer to the desktop. "We're not hosting her anymore. One week and her speech patterns have already rubbed off on me."

Katharine laughed, messing with Spencer's hair slightly. He swatted her hand away, frowning as he reached for the compact mirror she had stored in his desk. She watched as he used the circular piece of reflective glass to fix his hair before snapping the cosmetics item closed.

"And since when did you care about how your hair looked?" she asked, tilting her head to the side.

"Since my wife came home and I had to start to make conscious appearance choices again," he teased, squeezing her thigh. It was her turn to swat his hand away, sticking her tongue out at him. "How'd the meeting with Strauss and Tony go?"

Katharine rolled her eyes, shutting her tablet off and putting it to the side.

"Don't remind me that happened," she lamented, her head falling backward in exasperation. "Tony basically told Strauss that she deserved a life sentence in prison, like those officers, and then 'asked' to borrow me for an entire month, which we all know means he wasn't asking."

Spencer raised an eyebrow. "An entire month?"

She nodded, playing with the ends of her hair.

"But don't worry," she reassured him. "That's not until July and it might not even be for an entire month."

"You're already away for a week each month," he grumbled. "It's not fair."

"He's not taking me for December through February, though. And May, so at least we have our anniversary month together," she said. Katharine put her hand under Spencer's chin. "And then after July, Tony said he'd finally be settling down, which would mean he'd only need me once or twice a year."

"Really?" Spencer asked, resting his hand on her thigh. "You didn't tell me that."

"I didn't tell you because it was supposed to be a surprise, grumpy boy," Katharine said, flicking his hand before hopping off his desk. She made sure to grab her tablet, turning it back on. "I'm gonna go and get some actual work done while you do whatever it is you do."

Spencer shooed her away to her own desk, a smile appearing on his face as she settled back into her own chair. Katharine would bet real money that if they were at home, he would have most definitely stuck his tongue out at her. She grinned, taking her attention off her husband and focusing on the half-finished document in front of her.

Maybe she'd finish the paperwork from this case on the plane ride back. Katharine thought about it for a moment before discarding the thought, knowing that that'd never happen. She'd stick to doing the paperwork the day after like everyone else.