criminalminds | Fic: Like Onions

Title: Like Onions
Author: Hagar
Rating: G
Summary: excerpts from Penelope Garcia's Handbook of Profiler Handling. (Yes, it's a series now.)

Profilers are like onions. Yes, sure, they might make you cry – if you've seen or survived or (heaven forbid) done something horrible and they need you to tell them all about it. Profilers will totes make you cry if they need to, but plenty things can make people cry that aren't onions and aren't like onions at all: that's not why Penelope tells herself that profilers are like onions. The reason she actively reminds herself that is because like onions, profilers have layers; and like onions, no matter how many layers you peeled off, there will always be another one.

Reading people like crime scene photos is the job, and honey attracts more flies than vinegar. On a casual professional basis profilers aren't charming only because it freaks people out. They're nice, though, and almost unfailingly kind. (Unless a profiler decides callousness will be more effective: in that case, it sucks to be you.) It's a semi-conscious, default thing, like never sitting with one's back to a door or a window, and it takes profilers time to break out of it. Derek took a month to warm up to her, and Penelope is qualified to pronounce that a record time.

Derek had totally skipped this stage with her but sometimes, when they begin to get used to someone, profilers get cold, or awkward, or distant in some other way. It was awful on Penelope when she was new. JJ had calmed her down, then, told her that it meant she was liked. "They'll get over it and they'll have no idea they were like that," Jaje had said. "Don't bring it up. This job's hard enough as it is." It made no sense to Penelope, then: it felt like being hazed. That was then; this is now, and Penelope understands.

Then there's the Stable Professional Relationship phase. It feels like a normal workplace (not that Penelope had ever worked in one), and it's the closest most people get. It's the closest profilers get to each other, too, if they're not on the same team. The default is still Stepford Wives nice, like Casual Basis, except you're known, trusted, held to expectations that are about you and your own character and abilities, rather than the standard for your profile and your role. It means you get to see the tiredness, and the anger, and you'll so get slapped if you slip.

The layer after that behaves differently for everyone. Hotch just might go straight from Stage One to Stage Four if he likes you, but you won't know if from Stage Two until much later; Spencer, too, but with him she can tell the difference; Emily's the inverse, her Two looking like a Four. Penelope thinks Four scares them because what it's made of is the things they keep see going wrong for other people, the reasons they're calm and kind and considerate when they only can. The Fourth Layer is the possessiveness, the territoriality. At the Fourth Layer, you're family.