Chapter Text
Aaron Hotchner was lost at sea. He had been for some time. The sea was angry and dark and cold and touched him always, but not ever in the way he wanted. He was an anchor, and the boat with all his people was far, far away.
Long, long ago, he tried to claw for the surface sometimes. On weekends or a quiet afternoon. Tried to breathe air again. God, how he missed it as bubbles slipped, still, from his lips.
He was breath-held.
He was rope-pulled-tight.
Every time he tried to tell someone, tried to climb that rope into the sun, water poured from his mouth.
Haley railed about the mess. Hotch stopped trying to speak.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch could almost admit he liked being at the bottom of the ocean because ghosts could survive there. There was no light to prove they were see-through. He could pretend they were real.
And Hotch’s boat kept getting bigger. Jack and the team and his ghosts piling one on top of the other, demanding he keep them still and safe while the sea, the sea, the horrible sea, grew more violent by the day.
And Reid came, skinny little Reid, and Hotch’s sea got a little choppier. He wasn’t sure it was worth it, at the start, all the extra tension he now held and the way his lungs began to burn and how, when he woke up, saltwater leaked from his ears all night.
Then Reid helped them solve six cases in a row, and the opposite became true. While, yes, there was a little more burn, there, too, was a loosening in the slack of his rope in the form of knowing they put all those monsters behind bars. In the many hours, days, even weeks Reid saved them by diving beneath the waves of information and coming up, bleary-eyed and half-starving, with the pearl of a pattern they could use between his teeth.
The pearls held up when Hotch brought them to his teeth. Every single one. He recognized the taste of the ocean. How did Reid know what was down there in the depths? He belonged on the surface. Everyone except Hotch did.
The taste of salt flooded Hotch’s mouth every time he looked at Reid.
He found he liked the taste.
The waves, the waves were worth it, if it meant Reid was on the boat, too.
Hotch was kicking Reid, hard, and he didn’t want to be kicking Reid hard. Didn’t want to be kicking Reid at all. Not with the way Reid looked up at him, just before Hotch’s shoddy plan clicked.
In that moment, the waves stood still, and the rope pulled tight around Hotch’s neck and Reid, Reid looked like he was thinking he deserved each and every second of Hotch’s foot coming for his stomach, every letter of Hotch’s horrible words. The clutching to Hotch’s ankle, the way he curled in on himself, it was clear, crystal clear, this was not the first time he’d been treated like that and, worse by the strange relief Hotch saw flash across his face, he had been expecting it all along.
There wasn’t a lighthouse in the world that would pierce through this storm of guilt Hotch felt when he saw that look cross Reid’s face. It was only a moment, yes. Reid caught on quick. But it was there. Unmistakably.
God, the damage Hotch did in that singular moment was mountainous. Reid would never recover. Neither would Hotch. The rope pulled tighter, ripping at his skin. Why couldn’t anyone see it choking him?
The pearls, the pearls, he wanted to say.
But all that came out was water.
Reid brushed Hotch off with his eyes downcast, and Hotch’s torso was pulsing, jerking, dying. He fought the urge to reach out and take Reid by the shoulders, shaking him. The urge to rattle Reid from the depths of whatever darkness Hotch had damned him to.
Hotch was the only one allowed to drown here.
That night, well past when he wanted to be home, he tried to tell Haley what happened. She said, “This is getting ridiculous.” The sheets were drenched. She slept on the couch with a sigh.
But Hotch, Hotch was used to the water. He didn’t move all night.
He thought about Reid for a long time, hoping beyond hope Hotch’s words meant nothing to him. That Reid only knew the best parts of the ocean. That he didn’t linger long in the dark.
Hotch knew Sarah Jean was an anchor the minute he saw her. The others, the boat-dwellers, the surface people, they hadn’t a clue, and Hotch couldn’t say, not without sounding like he’d gone off the deep end, but he knew.
Only an anchor would volunteer to plunge into that unknown just to keep their loved ones afloat.
Only an anchor destined to stay down there.
She cut her own rope and watched everything she loved drift away, dreaming, dreaming, all the while of the moon, and Hotch understood. He’d leave himself behind in the depths of the ocean if it meant saving his boat, if it meant the alternative was dragging them all down with him.
He was certain it would be him, one day, to bring his boat sinking down. It wasn’t a question of whether, but of when.
The Fisher King. Elle. After, Hotch filled the bucket with soap in the dark.
Only the depths were supposed to look like that. Only his depths.
He’d do what it took to keep it that way. He’d scrub every inch of the blood from the walls so Elle wouldn’t have to see it ever again. So it wouldn’t burn behind her eyelids the way it did Hotch’s. He saw that writing every time he closed his eyes. Every single time.
He was lucky to be at the bottom of the ocean, with the sediment and the salt. No one could hear him screaming.
Sometimes, Reid looked at him across the conference table or their makeshift workspace or the jet with a wince in his eyes, and Hotch wondered if Reid could hear it. But that would be ridiculous. Anyone who heard what was going on in Hotch’s head would have abandoned ship a long time ago. Man overboard. Anyone with half a brain would have taken their chances with the sharks.
All his doubts, all his uncertainty, it was lucky the ship hadn’t run aground already. With all the storms they encountered, an unnatural amount, and Hotch trying to keep them afloat through them all. They forgot, the team, that some of the storms were for him and him alone. He weathered them all from below.
So far away.
Always, always, so damn far away.
No, Reid was just being Reid. He didn’t hear a damn thing.
Reid was just being Reid, too, when Tobias tied him up. When Tobias hurt him, killed him, brought him back to life. Hotch could see Reid’s eyes, drifting around the room, going unfocused.
The boat hadn’t ever been so heavy. Hotch tried and tried to save Reid. Stared at those fucking cameras every second he could, stomach churning and salt rising like bile as he watched Reid suffer. He listened to Reid’s every word. He always had. And fuck if it didn’t make Hotch feel like a piece of shit when Reid had to save himself.
Reid knew Hotch more than he realized. Knew exactly how his brain would be working just then. Knew he’d be watching, listening, retching into his mouth when no one was looking, all saltwater and seaweed. Reid knew Hotch so much, he could speak to him in code.
When had that happened, and why did it make Hotch, for the first time in a long time, want to see the surface?
It was Hotch’s fault, all of it. In the graveyard, it was difficult to let go once he had his arms around Reid. But Hotch knew, he knew, if he opened his mouth, the horrible creatures from under the sea that lived inside Hotch now would come pouring out, and no one, especially not Reid, deserved to see that.
He made sure Reid was with Morgan and all backs were turned before he veered off the path to vomit them up, one by painful one. They flopped there, these grotesque creatures made of his guilt, struggling for air the same way he was. There’d be more, all his failings far outnumbering anything else that lived inside of him. It wasn’t even close. There’d always be more.
No one noticed he was gone.
No one looked up when he boarded the plane.
As he sat down, he felt Reid’s eyes on him. He was blinking slowly, head tilted as if listening to something from far away. Hotch turned his back. He couldn’t look at Reid and not think of all the ways he had failed in exquisite detail, replaying every second of the video over and over again. Every single second.
Spencer was struggling, and the boat was getting rockier and the rope, the rope, he wanted to stop feeling the rope for one goddamn second in his life so he could figure out how to help Reid, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t even breathe.
Each time he tried, no words came out. The rope pulled too tight. All he could do was look from afar, wanting more than he had in a long while to be able to come to the surface. Just once, he pleaded. Just once. He’d come to the surface of whatever lay between him and Reid and help him, and then he’d go back down. He promised.
He’d stay down there forever if only the dark let him go this once.
He’d never ask for the surface again.
The ocean laughed at him in the form of Spencer missing his flight. In the way Spencer stopped touching people more than he ever had before, flinching out of Morgan’s nudges, ducking from J.J.’s hugs.
At home, the phone rang and rang, and the silence on the other end wasn’t an anchor. Haley was sick of tasting the sea when she kissed him.
Each time he opened his mouth, she sighed. “You fool, you’ll drown us both.”
He couldn’t tell her he wasn’t trying to drown her. He was only trying to save himself. He was only trying to breathe again. Just one single breath would be enough. Just one.
“It’s selfish to take me down with you,” she said. “Leave the BAU. Learn to breathe air again.”
They both knew lungs didn’t work like that. He had always been a sea-dweller, his whole life. With his father, with his brother, with her. She used to like the taste of salt. She used to love following his rope to the depths and surfacing again. She delighted at the fish, bubbly laughter.
But, she wanted him to laugh too, and he didn’t know how to tell her he couldn’t laugh at the same time he drowned. It would only make the water fill his lungs faster.
And Garcia was shot outside her own damn apartment, and Haley had divorce papers delivered in front of his whole team and, and, and. His life was a series of ands.
The rope began fraying at either end, a storm on the horizon he wasn’t prepared for. He should have been. He should have seen it coming. He failed, again, to do his job, and the people on his boat were tossed around, slamming into furniture and the floor because of it. They’d never forgive him for these bruises. No, they never would.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wished for a smaller boat. Wished for some reprieve. He knew his place, of course he did, he had scars on the shape of a rope around his neck inches deep to prove it. He had the grit of salt in his teeth. He hadn’t confided in anyone in years, all his secrets building sandcastles at the bottom of the sea.
When Hardwick pulled his little stunt, and Reid sat across the table, eyes darting nervously to the clock, Hotch thought, well, I bet it feels so fucking good when the rope finally snaps. He tugged his tie off, rolling up his sleeves. Fuck this guy and this job and this life he found himself in where Reid can sit at a table like that and not feel safe, not even with Hotch around.
His only role in Reid’s life was to keep him safe. The only one Reid afforded him.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wished for more.
But he couldn’t think about that now. Now, he needed to beat the shit out of this asshole who made Reid stiffen like that. Who threatened Reid while Hotch was standing right fucking there.
Yeah, it was going to feel good as hell when this rope snapped. So what if this meant the boat went on without him. So what. Let them leave him at the bottom of the ocean. Fired and divorced and alone. It wasn’t like any of them would notice anyway.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wondered if he wasn’t the cause of all their storms.
Maybe without him, they’d be smooth sailing. Maybe he’d been dragging them down all along.
He was about to find out when Reid opened his mouth and drew Hardwick’s eye. Hotch flinched, hating that Hardwick dared even look at Reid. Reid who was so smart and so funny and so alone. Reid who solved cases in six seconds flat and made rockets out of film canisters and invited his teammates to go out time and time again only to have them laugh at him.
If Hotch hadn’t been an anchor, he would have said yes. He had no way of explaining to Reid that the surface was so far away.
Hotch rounded Hardwick, step by step, body thrumming, pulsing with the craving to pummel him into nothing. Into less than nothing. Into negative space. Reid would know what the word for that was, but Hotch? Hotch knew the feeling. He wanted to erase him from the world with his fists for daring to threaten one of Hotch’s passengers. For daring to threaten Reid.
That feeling stayed long after the guards returned, breathless and dull. Long after they began the drive back home. His grip on the steering wheel threatened to break the plastic, his knuckles permanently white. As with the seawater, he’d have to find some way to swallow this down, too.
“Thank you,” Hotch said. Reid, yet again, had done the saving between the two of them. Hotch was inches away from committing career suicide because he lost his cool on some asshole who didn’t even deserve it. But God, all he could see were Hardwick’s eyes on Reid every time he blinked. Right there beside every other tragedy he’d caused because he was too slow to prevent it. Elle’s bloody walls and Garcia’s hospital bed and Haley’s reaction to his very existence now.
“Haley wants me to sign the divorce papers uncontested, so nobody wastes money on lawyers,” Hotch said, and water pooled in the cupholders between them, surging from his mouth. Couldn’t he set this one down? Couldn’t he get a little more space to store this new failure?
Spencer frowned, but not at the water. No, he frowned at Hotch. “You don’t want to?”
“What I want, I’m not going to get,” Hotch said, more water filling the SUV, their shoes now resting in puddles. Spencer didn’t look down, not once. Hotch kept waiting for the sigh. For the moment Reid decided this was too much of a hassle, wet socks for the rest of the afternoon.
Passengers never had to think about the anchor. Not until they were storm-deep. To make Reid think about him when he didn’t need to was to only remind Reid of panic. It wasn’t fair.
But all Reid did was reach out and touch Hotch on the shoulder, hand warm against Hotch’s cold skin. He stared at Reid’s hand as he pulled away, expecting it to come away drenched. Expecting it to float right through him, finding him made of water after all. All this time, he concerned himself with human things. Maybe he should have gone to the ocean and let it take him. Maybe all his issues were because he was pretending, pretending, all this time to be like the people he loved.
An anchor couldn’t change shapes.
He should have stopped trying long ago.
Beneath Reid’s palm, the warmth and how solid it was, Hotch let out his first real breath in years. It startled him, the rush he felt as it passed through his lips. He flinched and Reid pulled his hand away.
Reid frowned down at his hand, whispering under his breath, “Making sure you’re real.”
Hotch was only just wondering that exact thing. Was he imagining voices now, too? Was this all a hallucination, a trick of the sea to beckon him home? His siren, come calling in the form of...this? Not that it wasn’t working. He wasn’t much of a scantily clad woman singing songs kinda guy anyway. Figures this would be what got him, Reid in a car, reaching out to touch him, telling him he was real. Hotch would follow Reid to the ends of the earth if he kept doing that.
“What?” he forced himself to say, a wave. He clutched the steering wheel harder, so he didn’t grab Reid’s arm and never let it go. Somehow, when Reid told him he was real, Hotch believed it. He remembered how to breathe air again, if only for a second.
“I’m sorry about Haley,” Reid said.
Hotch frowned. He wanted Reid to tell him he was real again. He wanted to talk to Reid until the car filled with water and they both drowned in it. There was something about Reid that tasted like salt, filling the space between them. Something that made Hotch start to think Reid might actually understand what he was trying to say.
But that was just his siren, wasn’t it? All the songs warned him it’d be coming. So what if it was in a different shape than he’d expected. Nothing in his world ever looked like it ought to. His sky was miles and miles away, his sun nonexistent. This new development was no surprise.
“Me too,” Hotch said. He was really sorry that this wasn’t real. This moment between them. That it was only a trick of the light.
The light he didn’t belong in.
The light he desperately tried to save for Reid.
Reid sat beside him the rest of the way, his palm up on his thigh. Right there. Right there. One movement and Hotch could hold it. Almost like he wanted Hotch to. Almost.
But Reid hated touching people. It was a miracle he’d reached out at all.
Hotch clenched the wheel harder, bones in his hands creaking against the force. Fuck. Of course, his siren would be goddamn Reid. Reid who was smart and compassionate and lonely. Reid who was so very far away.
Reid stood between the bullet and his grave, and Hotch was certain he’d never breathe again. That was much too much for his rope to take. The fraying was worsening by the day, each time he thought of Reid and tasted salt and found he liked the taste more and more.
And yeah, Hotch was going to shoot Owen no matter how much he reminded him of Reid. The isolation, the years of shitty treatment, the light behind his eyes. Yes, Hotch would shoot him, and it would take years to recover from that singular trigger pull. He blinked, and Reid switched places with Owen. Again and again, they swapped in Hotch’s mind.
He could have pulled the trigger.
He should have pulled the trigger.
But, fuck, he couldn’t. Not when all he could see was Reid.
He was a shitty anchor if this small storm was enough to unground him.
Reid stood between the bullet and his grave, and it killed Hotch to see what might unfold, what would unfold because he was too much of a coward to do what needed to be done. No one else on the team deserved to see what came next. What they all knew would come next. Reid’s body on the ground, Reid’s side stained red, Reid’s eyes gone from the light, banished to the dark place Hotch called home.
His vision went foamy at the edges, the sea creeping in. If the ocean was good for one thing, it was rage. It rose within Hotch, this inherent unending unsettlement and he knew, he knew, he was more ocean than man. He always would be, now. Because of this moment, seeing Reid on the floor over and over again in his mind. In no universe could Hotch imagine a way to save him. He had missed his chance at fishing him from the water. Boat’s gone, bub. Better luck next time. Fuck.
The waves of the ocean were full of too late. Of should-have-but-didn’t. Where else would the undercurrent come from if not regret, the ache of it hurting so badly it would take everyone down with it?
Hotch didn’t even see the resolution, Owen standing down. All he could see was Reid’s body on the pavement. Every time he blinked, it was there. On the plane, he looked at Reid and saw bullet wounds dotting his body, making him see-through. Hotch retched in the toilet, an oil spill, before sitting down across from him.
He was trying to say, thank God you’re okay.
He was trying to say, I need you.
But what came out was, “I should fire you,” and “you’re not the only one in that room,” and “you’re keeping score, just like Owen.”
It puddled on the table between them, soaking the elbows of his jacket with the cool, dark water. Reid glanced down at his reflection, frowning.
It wasn’t as if Hotch hadn’t wanted to do the exact same thing Reid had one hundred times over. As if he hadn’t seen himself inside these monsters. There was little difference between Hotch with a gun and the man on the other end pointing back. The sky and the ocean, reflected constantly, constantly back until he could not tell the difference any longer.
“I know it’s painful when the person you identify with is the bad guy.”
“What’s that make me?” Reid asked, looking at Hotch.
Hotch had to believe, he had to or it’d kill him, he was doing the right thing. That he was better because he cared about what happened when he pulled the trigger. Just like me, he wanted to say. “Good at the job.”
Reid didn’t seem convinced. Hotch wasn’t either. The puddle spilled into their laps, turning Reid’s shirt and pants dark. Dark like the blood that could have been.
Because Hotch was a coward.
Because he couldn’t find it in himself to shoot Reid.
The bomb went off and Hotch was in the darkness for long enough to think he wasn’t ever coming back and no one arrived to help them and his ears were ringing so loud he couldn’t think straight. All he could hear was the roar of the ocean telling him, over and over again, how badly he failed. Kate on the asphalt. Hotch unable to save her through that storm.
And Morgan with the ambulance and the silence and how stupid a move that was. How selfish it was to get in that driver’s seat without so much as a thought for his own life.
“Hotch, I did it for this team,” Morgan said.
Morgan had always wanted to be an anchor, but he couldn’t be. Not with the way he loved like he did. The only one damned to the depths was Hotch.
“If that bomb had gone off, do you know what that would have done to Garcia? To Reid?” Hotch asked, stepping closer. “You are not an anchor, as much as you might think you are.”
And all Morgan heard was “Would you do the same for me?” as the water spilled from Hotch’s lips. God, God, he wished someone around here understood the language of the water. He was tired of going home with soggy shoes and the knowledge no one would ever, ever understand.
And Hotch’s ears, well they’d never let him forget the ocean again, a reminder always of where he belonged.
In a world that wasn’t this one.
In a world that wasn’t Reid’s.
Reid on the other side of the windowpane, trapped in there with death itself. His voice wavering as he called, wondering what he should do. Asking, really, at the heart of it all, for Hotch to help him despite all Hotch’s previous failures. Asking Hotch to save him.
It was better for Reid to stay inside, as much as it killed Hotch to say it. He was already exposed, what use would pulling him from the room be?
Hotch’s throat tightened as he said it, the slightest waver slipping through his lips in the form of water. I don’t want you to stay.
Morgan, beside Hotch, paced and paced, wanting to have been the one exposed, the one trapped on the other side of the glass, just so Ried wouldn’t have to be. Hotch’s fingers twitched against the phone, squeezing until the plastic creaked.
The boat was getting away from him. He had lost any thought he’d ever had that he had it under control.
Hotch did not visit Reid in the hospital. He retched ocean water the black of guilt, bathtubs full at a time.
Hotch woke to the team hovering around his bed and pain, that sharp pain cutting through the fog of whatever medication they had given him. He counted all his passengers one by one.
“Where’s Reid?” he asked, panic clawing at his throat, clearing the fog in an instant. How long had he been out and had Foyet gotten to him too? Had he known by some miracle that Reid was the one Hotch was the softest for? The one that would kill Hotch the most to be unable to save yet again?
Every breath tugged at stitches, pulling on his rope. The fraying was halfway through and getting worse every second no one said anything about where Reid was. With the glance Prentiss and Morgan shared, it was as if they’d only just remembered Reid existed.
“It was a happy ending,” Rossi said about the case they’d worked while Hotch was missing. If it was such a goddamn happy ending, where was Reid?
As far as Hotch was concerned, no ending was happy if he wasn’t there.
The others had a different picture of what happy meant.
Hotch later learned happy meant Reid, left on the lawn with a bullet wound in his kneecap. Happy meant Reid on crutches for months, in physical therapy for longer, still. Meant surgery now, maybe surgery later. Meant a lifetime of compensating for the damage that was done. Meant Rossi leaving him in a ditch without any way except pain, out of there.
No wonder Hotch tasted salt when Reid was around. The rest of the team left him at sea so often that he started to learn to breathe it.
One night, after the bullpen emptied of everyone except the two of them, Hotch hovered at Reid’s desk.
I’m sorry, he tried to say. “How’s the knee?” he asked.
Reid shrugged. “It’s fine. Not your fault.”
But it was. It was. If Hotch hadn’t been stupid, if Hotch had been paying attention, he would have known Foyet was inside his place. That Foyet was there. He could profile a man down to his socks for fuck’s sake. His only excuse was the rope stretched too thin. And now Reid was hurt and alone because of it.
I would have visited you. I didn’t know. “I know.”
“Hotch, come on. You had more important things to worry about.”
But the anchor was never as important as the boat. Never. You’re important. “Reid.”
The bullpen was half-full of water, desks lifting from their places. Reid stood, looking down. Hotch sighed, apologizing. He turned to go, wading through the knee-deep water.
“Hotch, wait,” Reid said, catching Hotch’s wrist in his fingers. Warm, solid. Two things that couldn’t survive in the world Hotch lived in.
He tugged, gently, away from Reid and Reid, after a moment, let go. “Don’t.” I’ll only drown us both.
Reid opened his mouth to reply, but Hotch left before he could. It was hard to balance, this being separate from the team but being a part of it at the same time. He could only get so close, but he couldn’t ever breach the surface. If the ringing in his ears was proof of anything it was that he belonged down below. He could hear the waves, that deep silence, even now.
And Haley died. And J.J. left. And Reid’s headaches began, rope tightening further when he continued to hide them. And Emily had to fake her death and Hotch had to watch that storm ravage his team without being able to do anything about it.
A new case arrived in June, each and every victim completely and totally alone. Reid flinched as he read the case on the jet, his whole body jerking. Hotch was the only one who saw and he averted his eyes just as Reid glanced around so he wouldn’t know Hotch saw. Another Owen. There would always, always be another Owen.
All of the people in all of the cars could have left. They could have left. The same way Hotch could have left the BAU. The same way any of them could, but didn’t. Hotch knew all about how it felt to be trapped with the keys in his hand and still, still, he couldn’t bring himself to open the goddamn door.
Three days into the investigation, Reid didn’t show up at their makeshift office made in the breakroom at the local police department. Morgan shrugged. “Maybe he finally got some sleep.”
He and Hotch hadn’t left the night before until well into the morning. Maybe he passed out the way he did on random couches and floors and sometimes sitting up when exhaustion finally snuck up on him from behind. Hotch left an extra blanket in his SUV because of his tendency to do just that.
It was strange, though, that he’d sleep in his hotel room. Reid hardly ever spent any time in there. Hotch couldn’t pick out a single time Reid had stayed more than a few hours in his. He was at the office to the very end. The only one there longer was Hotch, who often sat there, staring at the walls, while Reid slept beside him.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch found he liked the sound of Reid’s breathing. It drowned out the waves, somehow.
When noon came and there still was no sign of Reid, Hotch’s mouth filled with water. Where the fuck was he and why was he the only one to care?
“Leave him alone,” Prentiss said. She eyed Hotch and he understood. Maybe he had a headache.
But, usually, Hotch could tell. The way Reid’s eyes winced, his hands shook ever so slightly beneath the table, the way his body caved in where he sat, trying to curl around the pain. He didn’t see any of those signs the night before. Hours before, really, when they’d parted ways.
“Pretty boy needs his beauty rest,” Morgan chimed in, frowning at the case file in his hands.
But Hotch couldn’t shake how wrong this felt, all of it. The way, the night before, Reid wouldn’t meet his eyes.
At 2:02, Hotch shoved from the table, causing all heads to jerk in his direction. He didn’t stop or explain himself. He was pretty sure if he opened his mouth, so much water would come out none of them would survive it. Worry bubbled in his gut, dread building. There was only one piece of the rope holding him together and this? This threatened to snap it as if it were straw.
Reid wasn’t in his hotel room. Reid’s SUV wasn’t in the parking lot. His phone was turned off when Hotch asked Garcia to check, his voice too high for his own good.
“Find him,” he demanded. Black water in the toilet and the bathtub and the side of the road.
When he got back to the police station, every face in the room was more concerned than before. It was about time. Had it been JJ or Morgan to disappear, would it have taken Reid this long to notice? Of course not. Of course not.
“Just sleeping, huh?” Hotch growled.
“We didn’t know,” Morgan said.
“He’s part of this team whether you like him or not.”
“We like Reid,” Prentiss protested.
“Act like it,” Hotch said, going back through the case from the beginning, finding it harder and harder to breathe. His torso pulsed, flinching for air, sweet air, but he couldn’t find it anywhere. Not even when he pushed out of the precinct onto the sidewalk, the sun shining down from a cloudless sky. Reid was the only one who made him feel like he could breathe again.
It was a steady roar in his ears, the only thing that had ever drowned out the sound of the waves except Reid’s soft breathing, the fact that Reid is gone, Reid is gone, Reid is gone.
Hotch was certain, now, his rope had snapped. His boat was lost to the waves and he couldn’t give less of a shit if that meant Reid wasn’t on it. If that meant Reid was trapped or hurt or, well, Hotch couldn’t think beyond that before he was bent over, gasping for air with his hands on his knees.
The door at his back opened and he knelt pretending to tie his shoelaces, as feet appeared in his line of vision.
“We’ll find him,” Rossi said, placing a hand on Hotch’s shoulder.
Hotch flinched, remembering when Reid touched him that day in the car after Hardwick. The expression on his face, the palm left on his thigh, facing up. Making sure you’re real, he had said.
Hotch hadn’t been sure since that moment, nor any moment before. Only under Reid’s palm, under his assurance, had Hotch ever believed he existed. Because Dr. Reid spoke in facts. In truths. If Reid said Hotch was real, he was real and that thought, so intoxicating and so horrible, slammed into him as he crouched on the sidewalk.
If he was real to Reid and Reid was gone, that meant he’d have no way of knowing ever again.
He flinched out from under Rossi’s palm, standing straight to hide his lungs pulsing with need.
“I know,” he said, keeping his voice even. So even. Not even an inch of panic seeped out. He made sure of it.
“Aaron,” Rossi said, looking at Hotch in a way Hotch didn’t want to be looked at in. The crinkling at the corner of his eyes, the downturn of his mouth. No, Hotch didn’t want to be looked at like that. It told him he was doing a shit job of hiding his feelings. It told him Rossi knew too much about what Reid meant to Hotch, how precariously everything was balanced around him.
Reid was the one Hotch saw when he glanced out his office window at two, three, four o’clock in the morning, without fail. The only one. After the whole Tobias fiasco, Hotch glanced at Reid every five minutes it seemed, just to be sure he was still there. It was a habit, a bad one by the way Rossi was now looking at him, but he couldn’t help it.
If Reid was there, it meant things were at least a little bit okay.
It meant there was hope for this boat.
But now the hope was gone and Hotch was having a fucking hard time keeping that inside. The amount of goddamn water raging in his chest, surging up his throat, roaring in his ears, was much too much. He was going to drown the world if things went the way he couldn’t stop thinking about them going, no matter how much it killed him to. Splitting open old scars, pressing on bruises, thinking the worst imaginable thing over and over again. A reminder of what could happen if he dropped the ball and, fuck, he dropped the ball this time, letting Reid out of his sight for even a second.
“I know,” Hotch said, refusing to look at Rossi. Refusing to cave. Straight shoulders, always upright. Such was the way of the anchors, never changing their shape.
“He’s smart,” Rossi said, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Hotch said. Reid was the smartest person in every room they ever walked into which meant one of two things happened. Either whoever grabbed him was smarter, a horrifying thought, or...or...Reid didn’t get outsmarted. He went willingly.
It wasn’t exactly as if Hotch hadn’t ever thought about walking into the ocean and never resurfacing. And, could Hotch blame Reid for wanting to? The team treated him like shit and the whole Tobias thing and the drugs and the headaches and, and, and. Reid’s life was a series of ands the same way Hotch’s was. Bruises never allowed to heal before new ones were punched on top.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch felt the same way.
“Guys,” Prentiss said from the doorway. “Two people have been reported missing.”
Rossi turned, instructing Prentiss and Morgan to interview the first family, JJ and Rossi would take the second. He waited until Prentiss disappeared before looking back at Hotch who still stared out at the passing cars, breath held.
“We’ll find him.”
“Go,” Hotch said.
Rossi paused a moment, eyes on Hotch, before disappearing back inside. He waited ten seconds, twenty, before letting out a gasp, trying and trying and failing to take in any air.
He went inside, pushing into the bathroom, splashing water on his face. When he looked up, his lips were blue in the mirror. He was so close to staying at the bottom of the ocean. To letting the boat crash and break into pieces and scatter everything he spent so long protecting become shark food because, fuck, it was exhausting day after day, keeping track of it all.
The hours passed, Hotch reading for the hundredth time every document in the case file they’d been given for any sign of where Reid might have gone. The team came back, shoulders slumped. All the missing people had been estranged from their families, more or less. Isolated and living alone and at odds with the ones who loved them. It was a miracle they’d been reported missing at all, chance family dinners scheduled at random or the rare plans made and bailed on. They wouldn’t have even counted at missing persons, had the last two sets of people not been found. Had Hotch not demanded they be informed of every single report that came through the minute Reid went missing.
On the second day, Morgan sighed. “Wish Reid were here. He’d have this thing solved already.”
Hotch couldn’t help himself, snapping, “Remember that next time you leave him alone with a bullet wound in his knee.”
“He told us to go. To find you,” JJ said softly. “He said he was fine.”
“We’ve all said that. Why do you only listen when it’s Reid saying it?”
Hotch’s hospital room was brimming. Everyone was there the minute he woke up. They only seemed to listen to protests at being cared for when they came from Reid’s lips.
“Hotch, you were -”
“So was he.” He stood from the room and stalked outside, anger joining his panic in one horrid cocktail that made him lightheaded.
They didn’t know how bad Reid was. They couldn’t have known. He could have bled out before the ambulance even arrived. He could have lost his leg. It wasn’t a terribly far stretch to imagine that whole scenario going much, much worse.
They’d all said they were fine. Even when they weren’t.
It was well past dark and Hotch looked up. Stars stabbed through the depths everywhere he looked, little pinpoint eyes staring down, down, down. He wanted Reid to tell him about the stars. He wanted to hear Reid talk and talk whole universes into existence.
God, he just wanted Reid to be alive and okay enough to ramble until Hotch’s brain went blank and he didn’t have to think about anything at all for a while. He could just let Reid tell him something incredible. The rope would give, just a little, and Hotch would get a moment of peace.
No one came to fetch Hotch and when he returned after too long, all heads were bent down, frowns pasted on every face he looked at. Even Garcia’s voice on speakerphone was muted and dull as she came up empty yet again on any connection the victims had.
It wasn’t until the sun came up that anyone slipped away to sleep.
On the third day, two more people were reported missing. A woman, Kristie Louis, mid-thirties, single mother with twin boys and not nearly enough money to stretch around what she was spending on their preschool and a man in his sixties, dying of cancer. His family thought he’d gone off to die, but figured he’d have left at least a note behind.
“We’ll need to retrace their steps the day they went missing,” Hotch said.
“Shouldn’t we try retracing Reid’s, too?” JJ asked. “Look at him as a victim rather than one of us?”
Fuck, the restraint it took not to flinch was astronomical when JJ said the word victim and Reid in the same sentence. He pictured all those bodies in all those cars, gaunt and rotting and alone. So goddamn alone.
That would be a tragedy from which Hotch would never recover.
His sea would never still again.
“Who spent the most time with him on Friday?” Prentiss asked.
Every head in the room turned in Hotch’s direction. He nodded. “Prentiss and Rossi, take Kristie. Morgan and JJ, the other.”
Hotch hesitated at the precipice of Reid's hotel room. He felt like he was crossing some boundary they’d never spoken aloud. Not that Reid was in his hotel room much, but still, it was his. All his things were in there.
Then Hotch pictured those people, dead in their cars, and the panic overrode his hesitation. He tore the goddamn room apart, searching for any sign of where Reid had gone.
Nothing. He had nothing.
He sank down onto Reid’s bed and thought. Where would Reid have gone if he couldn’t sleep? Hotch could tell he hadn’t, the sheets were too perfectly rumpled for that. Reid wanted him to know he hadn’t slept. He was too smart to think Hotch would be tricked by that.
So where else would he have gone?
Reid often walked to nearby coffee shops and, sometimes, when he thought no one was paying attention, to payphones in the area.
Hotch would do that. He’d walk all day if he had to.
The first coffee shop turned up nothing, and Hotch was about to give up at the second when the flyer on the bulletin board caught his eye. Prize money, bring only your car, come alone. Tick, tick, tick. This was it. It had to be.
He had Garcia running the phone number for a location before he even made it back to the office. She read him a few addresses: an apartment complex, a shopping center, a park in the middle of nowhere. Bingo.
Garcia let the rest of the team know, but they were across the city and wouldn’t make it as fast as Hotch would. He had Garcia call ambulances to the scene. He had a feeling he would need them as much as that made the panic roar up his throat. He coughed and coughed again, water filling his mouth he was so full of guilt and grief, trying to clear some room so he could focus.
He pulled into the parking lot and found seven cars parked, spaces between them, and in the last spot on the right side, there was Reid’s car. The fear of what he would find froze him. Ice age come in one singular second. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t.
But, if he didn’t, someone else would. Morgan or, worse, JJ. He had to, though he couldn’t. Thus was the way of the anchor with a boat too large to handle. He had to keep shit together even when it was impossible. It was his job. It was his role. He had no other use in this world than this.
Hotch yelled Reid’s name as he approached the vehicle, searching for any sign of movement through the glass. But Reid’s eyes stayed closed, a small smile pasted on his lips.
“I’m smashing the window,” Hotch warned. If Reid could hear, he wanted him to be ready for the onslaught. Hotch shattered the window after one, two, three strikes with the butt of his gun, sending shards raining down, red pinpricks blooming on Reid’s arms and face.
Still, he didn’t move. Hotch reached in, slicing a large line down his forearm as he did. Grasping Reid’s cheeks, he shook him, needing to see him move, needing it so badly he wasn’t sure he’d survive this. When he still got no response, Hotch yanked him from the car. Too hard, too hard, but panic had his muscles singing.
He could lift a vehicle.
He could smash the world.
And he would, he would, if this world was a one in which Reid left them all behind.
He searched Reid for any vital wounds, finding only the ones left behind by the glass. None would even require stitches, by his assessment. He let out a sigh of relief.
“I need a medic,” Hotch called, voice splitting. “Where are those ambulances?”
Garcia, on the other line, called out their ETA. Sixty seconds.
Hotch held a hand over Reid’s lips, relieved to find him still breathing. A twitch of Reid’s fingers against the asphalt.
“You’re okay,” Hotch said, grasping at Reid’s hand so tightly he felt the bones grind together. He was so goddamn mad, he wanted to break every finger on Reid’s hand for coming here, for doing this willingly, for wanting to leave him behind. And, more than that, for not saying goodbye.
“Thank God,” Hotch growled. “How could you be so stupid?”
The flashing lights arrived and two men with stretchers came over. More ambulances filled the parking lot, shattering windows and pulling bodies from inside. Two of the victims were semi-conscious. Everyone else was unresponsive. They’d gotten there just in time.
As they loaded up Reid, Hotch said, “I’m riding with him.”
The guys hardly spared him a second glance, slamming the doors and peeling out of the lot the second Hotch sat down.
Now Reid was in front of him, his anger grew and grew, worse, even, than the panic ever was. How could Reid do this to the team? How could he do this to Hotch? Weren’t they friends? The team, he could understand with all their quips and eye-rolling and silence, but Hotch talked to Reid and asked him questions and spent time working beside him so much he could tell by the scratch of his pen if he was stumped or if he had made a breakthrough. He knew Reid.
This, then, and the fact he could not have predicted it was a slap in the face.
Did the team, this job, this life, mean nothing to Reid? Did Hotch?
“You gave up,” Hotch muttered, over and over again. “You gave up.”
Reid’s eyes opened as whatever the man gave him through the IV kicked in. His voice was weak as he said, “I am not welcome in the kingdom.”
Hotch opened his mouth to argue when Reid continued. “I think I invented you.”
And Hotch couldn’t stop thinking about Reid, those three days in that car, all alone. So alone. Alone enough to be there at all. He rubbed at his temples so he wouldn’t start yelling. Hotch was certain, more than ever, this was the universe in which he was the most disappointed by the world.
“I wasn’t alone. The ghosts kept me company. Your ghost.”
“The ghosts?” Hotch asked, staring at Reid.
“The ghosts of you.”
Hotch sighed. Reid was out of it. He shouldn’t let the idea of Reid, inventing Hotch in his darkest hour to keep him company surge through his chest like that. It meant nothing. He must have invented hundreds of people.
At least Reid was talking, even if he wasn’t making any sense. Hotch wanted to keep him talking, proof that he was going to be okay. “What do the ghosts say?”
Reid smiled. “They are kind to me like no one else is.”
Hotch flinched, trying to hide it from Reid. He definitely didn’t need Hotch's feelings making things worse just then. No, he had far more important things to worry about like staying fucking alive.
“When I was shot, they filled all of the empty chairs.”
“I’m sorry,” Hotch said as he watched Reid’s eyes close. They fluttered as he tried to fight it.
“Your lips are blue,” Reid whispered.
Then he lost the fight and lost badly. It was a good thing to lose a battle that meant nothing but peace. Perhaps that’s what made Reid call that number, drive to that parking lot, refuse to use his keys to unlock his goddamn door even though they were in the cupholder, right there, the whole time he began to starve.
Sometimes, in the dark of the night, Hotch wished he wasn’t too much of a coward to lose his battle, too.
Hotch watched from outside as the team surrounded Reid when he woke back up. They’d made it to the scene only minutes after the ambulance had left. Morgan and Rossi stayed to get the rest of the victims into ambulances and called the crime scene unit in before racing back here. It wasn’t long before Reid was blinking awake, all of them angry and hurt and so relieved he could feel it seeping off of them like ripples from a large stone.
One by one, the team filtered out of the room, glancing in Hotch’s direction and trying to hide it as they did. He couldn’t help the anger that had built, an underwater volcano erupted, the more he thought about what Reid had done. How scared it made Hotch those three long days.
When the room was finally empty, Hotch stalked in. He made no attempts at hiding his rage. The ocean did not. Why should he? “We need to talk.”
Reid, in the bed, had the audacity to roll his eyes. Hotch scraped a chair so close to the bed his knees pressed into the plastic, knobs digging into his skin. He rested his elbows on the bed.
“You’re real this time.” Reid’s eyes were narrowed, as if he wasn’t quite sure.
“I’m not one of your ghosts, Reid,” Hotch sighed. He wanted to talk to Reid, but he didn’t know how. Especially not with Reid talking about these hauntings.
He wanted to say they all were haunted. It wasn’t a new development. But, there was something about Reid’s insistence, his simple statement of fact, that allowed Hotch to keep his anger in check. Reid wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. He was being visited by ghosts of people who were still alive.
“You were, before. In the car.” Reid’s voice broke. Hotch softened. If Reid wanted to talk in metaphors, Hotch needed to catch up enough to join in.
“What did I say?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed the water filling the room until now. He was ankle deep and it was only getting worse the longer he talked to Reid.
“You asked me what I wanted. You asked me to tell you about the stars.” The stars. The stars. Like that night he looked up and wanted exactly that, wanted Reid to tell him about them all.
He sighed. If Reid needed to invent ghosts just to get someone to ask him a question, they’d failed him so badly they didn’t deserve the title of a team. “I’m sorry. We were so wrapped up in ourselves, in the cases, we failed to notice your struggling.”
“I’m not welcome in your kingdom,” Reid shrugged, as if it was fine, as if he didn’t mind. “I’m used to my exile by now.”
If this team was a kingdom, it was Hotch who was not welcome. Hotch who spoke another language and couldn’t ask to come through the doors. Not Reid. Never Reid. “You are,” Hotch said, too loud, too hard, too much. “There is no kingdom without you.”
“I don’t believe ghosts,” Reid said and on the bed, he turned his back on Hotch. His spine shone through his hospital gown, too exposed. The sight made Hotch sad, thinking of dinosaurs, thinking of desperation, thinking of extinction.
In a small and faraway voice, Reid said, “It hurts too much, their promises, when they disappear.”
Anger surged, yet again, at the thought that even Reid’s inventions weren’t kind enough to stay. He caught himself, shifting as the need to do something rattled through him. “How do I prove it?”
“Prove what?”
“That I’m real.”
After so long Hotch wondered if Reid lost the battle against his exhaustion again, he asked, “Was it you in the ambulance?”
“Yes.”
“You found me.”
“Yes.” Hotch’s voice threatened to break on the word. God, now Reid was there in front of him, relief seeped out. A crack in the bottom of the ocean, letting long-forgotten feelings free. The water had overtaken them both.
He thought of the twitch of Reid’s fingers on the asphalt. The way Reid touched Hotch’s shoulder after Hardwick to make sure he was real. On impulse, Hotch reached out and grabbed Reid’s hand, the IV wires sticking out.
Reid’s hand froze and stayed frozen for long enough Hotch began to doubt himself. Had he crossed yet another unspoken boundary between them? Was it only okay for Reid to touch him and not the other way around? Just as he was about to pull away, an apology spilling from his lips, Reid’s hand tightened around his own.
“Does this prove it?” Hotch asked.
“Yes.”
Water to the ceiling, they both remained where they were, clutching each other, breathing water. Reid, too, held oceans inside. He’d long ago grown gills.
“You’re real,” Reid said, grinning.
“I’m real,” Hotch said, returning the grin.
“He’s asking if you’re real ,too? What’d you do, pretty boy, hit your head while you were starving yourself to death?” Morgan appeared in the doorway, shattering the moment. The hospital room was just a hospital room again, not a drop of water left behind. But Hotch? Hotch could breathe now all that water was gone.
Hotch clutched Reid’s hand so hard, his knuckles went white as the team filtered in. Reid made to pull away as every set of eyes lingered on the bedspread, but Hotch refused to let him. This was real. He needed to know this was real.
“There aren’t enough chairs,” Rossi said as bodies sank into the chairs scattered around the room. Before, Hotch had been outside. Always, always, outside. Now, there were not enough chairs and Rossi was looking at him in that way again and moving anywhere meant letting go of Reid’s hand.
Hotch made his decision in less than a second, letting Reid’s hand go so quickly, it landed on the bed with an audible thump. He glanced up with a look on his face, the same look he had while Hotch kicked him all those years ago, the same look that flashed across his face when Hardwick began to round the table. He had been expecting this.
His deduction game was off.
He profiled Hotch all wrong.
Hotch tapped Reid on the shoulder, gesturing for him to move over. Reid, open-mouthed, followed orders and Hotch squeezed into the space. It was a tight squeeze, if he was being honest, and probably not the most appropriate plan of action in retrospect, but the length of his entire body pressed against Reid’s.
There would be no doubting what was real anymore.
Hotch pretended not to see the way eyes dodged past them around the room, as if they were witnessing some obscene act. Maybe, considering his track record with affection of any kind, this would be a shock to them. But he wasn’t leaving. They’d adapt.
Garcia whispered him through how to get the sky projected on the ceiling and hit the light switch across the room for him so he wouldn’t have to leave. “Tell me about the stars, Reid.”
Hotch could feel Reid hesitate, guessing even now if this was some schoolyard trick. He pressed, harder, against Reid’s side, convincing him that this was real and he wanted to know and the team would sit there if he wanted to talk for six years because they were a team and that’s what teams did. Hotch made that very clear while they waited for Reid to wake up. Very, very clear.
“Saturn would float, if there existed a body of water large enough to hold it,” Reid said hesitantly, glancing around the room. No rolled eyes, no side conversations, only the crunching of snacks and eyes on Reid as he continued to tell them about the stars.
Hotch refused to budge as nurses came to check on his IV and his vitals and whatever else they scribbled onto their clipboards. Refused to budge as Reid shifted to get more comfortable after half an hour and then again an hour later. Refused to budge that night when Reid fell asleep beside him.
The sound of his breathing such sweet relief, Hotch wanted to weep.
Aaron Hotchner was lost at sea, but against all odds his boat made it through the storm and Reid breathed water, sometimes, and the whole team was there in front of him and the surface was not as far away as he thought it was. Not anymore.