imagine being in love with Caleb for years, only to get constantly rejected again and again and again, says the fleet doesn't have time for romance yada yada, besides he only has one thing in mind, and that's getting back to MC.
imagine it was you who found MC when she chipped and tracked Caleb to a fleet clean up, saving her from a bunch of wanderers, but also deliberately injures her lightly as a warning to stay out of fleet's business.
imagine Caleb saw all that, gets mad at you, but what were you supposed to do? she was a trespasser. but you don't report her, no, that'll just put you on Caleb's bad side.
imagine you disappear shortly. no explanation, just gone. it bugged Caleb ever since. but you're tough, you're just out there, somewhere. not like he misses your company or something, not like he missed how you bring him the lemon tea he liked, or the lunches you bring, or how you almost, almost managed to make him laugh with your antics.
he surely doesn't miss how you always tell him you liked him, why you liked him. not your wittiness, your scent, your eyes. he doesn't miss you, and the lurching in his chest every time he sees your empty post, the way he keeps your letters, sticky notes and plane brooch you gave him on his birthday in the bottom of his office drawer. it doesn't mean anything... right?
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x reader
Summary: After the core truths of your relationship are called into question, you and Aaron work to find the truth that you can still believe in.
Warnings: ANGST! d1 grovelling (i hope), mentions of home invasion, aftermath of trauma, references to foyet arc and haley's death, cm-typical cases, complicated relationships, one reference to ep where hotch crashes his car
Words: 5.4K
Series Masterlist | CM Masterlist | Navigation
a/n: this is the end, friends! i hope you enjoy!
You woke up screaming. That happened a lot, but you didn't like to acknowledge that truth very much.
Footsteps hurriedly sounded, then your bedroom door opened, sending light from the hallway into the room. Your chest fell up and down rapidly, but you still squinted, seeing Aaron standing in the threshold with worry written all over his face.
He didn't say anything. He always waited for you to calm down first, which you appreciated. Only when you wiped all your tears did he finally ask, "Are you okay?"
It was a stupid question, no matter how softly he asked, but it was the only thing he could say. Hoarsely, you responded, "Yes." Just like always. But one of these days, you might just say no, and he was waiting for it. Not in a malicious way, but in the way of a man who just wanted to hold his woman.
You wouldn't let him.
He always stood in the doorway after that, as if your mind would change and you would ask him to hold you. You wanted that, too, despite denying yourself of it. It's why you wrapped your arms around yourself, even though you weren't cold at all.
You held your ground. "I'm fine, Aaron."
He stared at you like he could unravel you with his eyes. Profiler. He didn't believe you. But he wouldn't dare question you on it. Instead, he nodded. "Okay." His gaze went downcast as if to spare you from seeing the defeat, and then he lightly closed the door.
As soon as he was gone, you let out a shaky breath. Aaron didn't say I love you when he checked in on you, and that was upon your request. It hurt too much to hear.
Albeit, being in this house in two separate rooms hurt all the same. He gave you the master bedroom while he slept in the guest room. He woke up before all three of you anyway, so there was no worry of Jack seeing and wondering why you weren't sleeping together.
It was difficult to explain to an eight-year-old. Even more difficult to explain to a band of profilers when the sparkly ring on your finger seemed to disappear.
You pulled your necklace out from beneath your shirt, fiddling with the ring hanging from the chain. A sigh left you. Of course, all this had to happen at the height of your relationship.
But then again, you knew the saying as well as anyone. It had become a universal truth.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
—
"Taylor Swift on the line, speak now or forever hold your peace!"
You lightly snorted at Garcia's opening as Morgan responded, "You're on speaker, babygirl. Do you have anything on the victim's last whereabouts?"
Penelope glanced over at you, so you took over. "Yes. Sarah's credit card was last used at a grocery store, similar to Vicky. I'm assuming this means your unsub's a family man, or that he can blend in well with the crowd. Pen and I are combing security footage now to see if we can find anyone looking sketchy."
A new voice started over the line. "I agree with your assessment. Thank you, Y/N."
Your breath got caught in your throat. Of course, being on speaker meant Hotch was there. He was still your boss, you still had to talk to him—you still did talk to him—but not without this awkward silence first.
He would compliment you, tell you something about doing a good job. Then, the team would glance between you, like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even Penelope went quiet during your interactions. But you tried your hardest not to make it weird for everyone else.
"Uh, no worries. I sent you guys the store's address, so... we'll be off now." Just like that, you clicked the red button on the phone, ending the call.
You turned back to your computer right away, trying to avoid Garcia's pitying eyes. Softly, she said your name. "Y/N/N—"
You cut her off, "It's fine, Garcia." Your voice was a little too sharp to mean it, but after a few seconds of staring at you, she dropped it, turning back to her computer.
It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.
If you said it enough, maybe it'd become the truth.
—
A ringing pulled you out of your sleep. You blinked your eyes open, reaching for your phone.
Groggily, you said, "Hello?"
You were met with JJ's voice, apologetically telling you that you had a case. You glanced at your bedside table, where a picture frame of you and Aaron stood next to a clock. It read 5:31 AM.
You sighed, rubbing at your eyelids. "Okay, I'll be in soon."
You quickly got up and got dressed, haphazardly putting on whatever was closest to you and trying not to graze your bullet wound. It was fully healed, but you could still feel phantom pains that you'd rather ignore. The therapist Aaron ordered for you thought it was unhealthy, but you didn't care much for either of their opinions on the matter.
You opened the door to the room, finding him standing right on the other side. Your body roughly jerked, and you immediately slapped a hand over your heart. "Fuck, Aaron, you scared me."
Despite looking sorry, you still caught the gleam in his eye. It happened whenever you said his name— only when you were tired, and only when you were at home.
"Sorry," he said. "But we have a case."
"I know. JJ told me."
"Well, I've called Jessica, and she's on her way." Out of the corner of your eye, you could see him starting to rub his forefinger against his thumb. Automatically, you tensed, already sensing the direction this was going in. "I thought we could drive to the office together."
You exhaled a breath, searching for a way to put what you wanted to say in the nicest terms as possible. You really were trying. "No, I should probably drive myself, since you'll be leaving anyway."
He shrugged. "The case is local. And Garcia can drive you home later." You knew that. That used to be your whole routine when he left for cases before; you tried to find any opportunity to spend more time together. Driving to work together was that opportunity.
Was.
At that small reminder, you pursed your lips into a smile. "I should probably leave before Jess gets here."
His face immediately fell, causing a stabbing sensation in your heart. You pushed past him so you wouldn't have to see it.
"Y/N—"
"Sorry, Hotch, I've gotta go." You tried to keep the bite out of your voice, but it wound up there, anyway. If anything, you were grateful for it, because it got him to stop talking. Which was good because, the more he talked, the foggier your brain got.
You picked up your bag from the couch, half-glancing at the mantle as you did. You could remember a picture frame that used to sit there—of you, Aaron, and Jack all smiling.
You looked away promptly, remembering exactly when that picture frame broke.
Symbolically, you knew the glass wasn't the only that thing that shattered.
You slung the bag around your shoulder a bit rougher than you needed to, and then you were out the door without another word.
—
Since the case was local, the office was fully populated with the BAU. You still managed to avoid Hotch as best as you could, swerving past him whenever he tried to speak to you, leaving the room when he did.
This was your latest of attempts at trying to hide away from him, standing before the washroom mirror just so that you could avoid whatever conversation he was trying to have with you.
Since your accident, you'd learned that Aaron would go to any lengths to talk to you, including masking his intentions with work. Like psych evals you didn't want to have. Asking you about pain. Please drop the file off in my office. You'd resorted to e-mail.
You took a shaky breath, gripping the counter with shakier hands. You're fine. You're fine. You're fine. You're—
The door opened mid-chant. Expecting Garcia, you shouted, "I'm fine."
"Are you?" Not Garcia.
You spun around with furrowed brows, finding Emily standing behind you. Her gaze came with an edge, cutting away at you with surgical precision. Like you were still a subject lying on an operating table and she was profiling you to see how long you'd last— if you'd last.
"Yes," you confirmed. You crossed your arms defensively, trying to re-direct. "What is it? Is there a new development in the case—"
"Please, Y/N, stop it about the case for just a second." She held a hand up to your face, looking exasperated, like you were suggesting something outlandish. To you, this entire exchange was outlandish.
Your brows only knitted further together. "I'm confused. We are on a case."
Emily's lips parted and then closed as if she was stopping herself from saying something. Then she took a step closer to you. "Y/N, I know. We all know. But you bury yourself in the work like it's the only thing you see."
Your jaw ticked. "We're the BAU, Prentiss. I'd say we're all workaholics."
She scoffed. "And then there's that. Closing yourself off, distancing yourself from the people closest to you." You took in a breath as sudden guilt rushed through your veins. Emily's expression softened. "Y/N, what's going on? You almost died, and you're not even talking to Hotch—"
You swallowed, feeling a lump grow in your throat. "Emily—"
"You're not wearing your ring anymore—"
"Emily, please stop." Your voice cracked. Abruptly, you turned your back to her, trying to wipe away the tears before they could fall. They kept falling, anyway. "You don't get it," you breathed.
Her hand rested itself on your shoulder. You met her gaze in the mirror, finding determination staring back at you. "So help me get it."
You don't know why exactly you did it, but the words were spilling out of your mouth before you could stop them, re-telling every aspect of the argument right to when Hotch left. All the things you'd kept inside were now making their way out into the open, things you tried to repress but couldn't.
When you were done, sobs were wracking through your body, your shoulders shaking.
Emily was quiet and motionless throughout your explanation, save for the hand on your shoulder. Then, suddenly, her low voice cut through the silence. "I'll kill him."
You sniffled, "Emily—"
"No, how dare he?" You turned back around to face her, seeing a fire brewing in her eyes that rivalled unit chiefs across the bureau. "To say you aren't needed? That you aren't Jack's mother? Over that? Does he have any idea what you do for this team, for your family?"
"I don't know, I just—" you paused, rubbing a hand over your face. Your head felt fuzzy. "It's been a long time since it happened. And then the—" you searched for the word, having a hard time phrasing it. "the accident. It's been a lot. Maybe I should just get over it."
Emily's response was immediate. "No. Absolutely not. What he said to you was unacceptable, Y/N. You have to know that."
"Of course, I know that. I just—" Again, you stopped yourself, sighing. The words escaped you. At that moment, what you felt was beyond words.
Emily, fluent in many languages, seemed to be able to translate your feelings perfectly. Her eyes softened. "You love him," she said.
You responded without having to think about it. "Yes."
You loved Aaron Hotchner more than the hurt he made you feel.
If there was any universal truth, then it was that.
—
You opened the door to Aaron's office, asking, "You said you had an urgent matter, Sir?"
Any other time, he would've accused you of being teasing, but neither of you needed to be a profiler to tell you were trying to distance yourself with honorifics. Hotch didn't dwell on your phrasing, opting to nod to the seat in front of his desk with serious eyes. "Please, take a seat."
You hesitated. This could've easily been another ambush. But at work, you didn't have the right to just refuse your boss when he was outright asking you to do something. And you weren't a child.
Like you were trying to prove something, you sat down in the chair in front of him. It was only when you were right in front of the desk that you noticed the brown paper bag placed on top of it.
Your eyes narrowed. "What's going on?"
Aaron wasn't deterred by your tone. "We're going to eat lunch together."
The sigh that left you was full of exhaustion. "Hotch, I told you. I need time."
"You've not been eating properly," he stated, making you look up at him. He looked stern and resolute, telling you you're not leaving this office without having to say a word. "So don't focus on the together part so much as the eating part."
You clenched your jaw. "Fine."
Aaron opened the bag, starting to take the food out. "It's your favourite," he commented. You noticed the tiny traces of hope in his voice.
You glanced down at the containers. Then, you nodded. "It is."
Your favourite food. A tiny truth embedded into truths too big to tackle.
So you focused on that truth and avoided all the others.
—
"Momma, can I have ice cream after dinner tonight?"
You pause chopping carrots for just a second, glancing up at Jack before glancing over at Aaron whose expression betrayed nothing. You looked back down at the vegetables like you'd never looked up at all. "Sure, bud. As long as your dad agrees."
It was a new development: Jack sometimes calling you Mom, sometimes calling you by your name. You had no issue with it either way. The kid had no idea how it tugged at your heartstrings. Aaron, on the other hand, did.
'Mom moments' didn't happen often when he was around. But whenever they did, the word lingered in the air, interspersing between the two of you in a big mess that you didn't know how to clean.
You didn't dare look up from the cutting board, but you heard Aaron respond, "If you eat all your veggies, I don't see why not."
"Awesome!"
Jack ran off after getting approval, leaving you and Aaron all alone. Not too long ago, being around him made your heart race. Now, it still did, but for completely different reasons.
You tried not to show how affected you were, turning around and tossing the carrots into the pot. You hoped he wouldn't talk to you, but your prayers hadn't been being answered much.
"You know, he asks you first because he knows you'll always say yes," he said. The atmosphere in the kitchen felt heavy, but his voice was light and easygoing. Nothing about this was easy for you.
You wiped your hands with the cloth on the counter, and then, on a whim, you turned around to face him. There he was, on the opposite side of the island. The last time you were positioned this way, he was telling you that you weren't Jack's mother and then walking out the door. Turning a golden doorknob that haunted your nightmares.
That night gave you a lot of bad memories, yet you remembered the argument the best.
This time, you said his name to catch his attention. "Aaron, I'm not trying to replace Haley."
He was quick to reply, "I know that." He was quiet, like he always was, with conviction lying under his voice. That same conviction was in his eyes as he tried to make eye contact with you. "I know that. And I know I haven't done a good job of showing you that, but I do."
He stood up from the barstool and made his way around to your side of the island. You let him.
And when he tried to put his hands on your arms, you let him do that, too.
"Y/N, words can't describe how sorry I am for ever accusing you of that," he said. "You could never replace Haley, and that's not what you've tried to do. You've raised Jack in a way she would adore. You have given him the love she wanted him to have. And you have protected him the way a mother would. She is his mother, but that does not negate your place in his life."
You didn't know when the tears started building in your eyes, but they did. Too afraid that they'd fall, you just settled for, "Okay."
Aaron hesitated, like there was more he wanted to say. He did that a lot recently. Then, he said, "It doesn't negate your place in mine, either."
You swallowed and stepped back out of his hold, missing the way his face fell as you wiped at your eyes. Again, you repeated, "Okay."
It was all you could say.
You didn't have any better truths to tell.
—
Stuck in the bat cave and surrounded by screens, you stopped what you were doing to rub your eyes. Your disliked your job most when it cause your head to pulse. You had already spent all night staring at screens, specifically ones in your mind that replayed the same nightmare over and over.
Garcia was off visiting Kevin, so you didn't feel like you had to hide how terrible you felt. It wasn't her fault for being so worried about you all the time, but you didn't have to like it.
You were trying to get better. It was hard to do that when everyone kept looking at you like you were about to fall apart.
The sound of the door opening caused you to lift your head up back at the computer, your hand on your mouse like you'd been working the entire time.
You waited for Garcia to sit down, only she didn't. Instead, a cup of steaming coffee was placed beside you.
Your brows drew together and you looked up, finding Aaron standing right next to you. He stared down at you with a bit of concern and a little bit more love.
"You didn't sleep well last night," he reasoned. He didn't mention that you woke up screaming again. Soft and a little cautious, like he knew you didn't want to talk about it. You didn't.
You glanced away from him, choosing to look at the coffee instead. Your voice was quiet, reflecting the quiet gesture. "Thank you."
He left the bat cave soon after, but you felt his presence all the same.
—
You gave Jack a grin through the rearview mirror as he got into the car. "Hey, don't forget your seatbelt, little man!"
"I know, Y/N, I'm not a baby," the boy grumbled, doing as you said. Your smile just got wider; it wasn't lost on you that you really only smiled around Jack.
"Of course not, sweetheart."
You took the car out of park as soon as he was buckled in, driving away from his school. Jack rambled on about his day at school while you tried to guide yourselves to the ice cream parlour that he liked. You already clocked out of work, so you could take Jack out and then head home.
Your plan was to head home—that is, until a text from Garcia flashed across your screen.
Need all my favourite crimefighters back at the office ASAP!
Your fingers twitched nervously around the wheel. You glanced back at Jack, still talking about math and science projects and things Spener would have a ball about. You tapped the wheel, glancing back at your phone.
The smart thing to do would be to get Jack his ice cream, then take him to his aunt's. That was your initial inclination. But—
You don't get to bring him to his aunt. You are not his mother.
You exhaled a heavy breath through your lips, picking up the phone automatically. "One second, Jack," you interrupted him mid-rant. "Let me just call your dad."
You clicked on the first contact in your favourite, bringing the phone to your ear where you could hear your heart already thumping rapidly.
Aaron answered on the second ring.
"Honey?"
You took in a sharp breath at the pet name, forcing yourself not to pay attention to it. "Hi, Aaron." More tapping against the steering wheel. "Um, I have Jack now."
You could hear his confusion through the phone. "Okay. That's good."
"Yeah, but— uh," how were you supposed to phrase this? "Garcia said to come in. Do you want me to— do I bring Jack to Jess? I was going to get him ice cream first, but I can just— I can stay here, too. Garcia can hold down the fort just fine. Just—" you cut yourself off, realizing you were rambling. Blood rushed to your cheeks. "What do you want me to do?"
Aaron was quiet on the other end of the line, making you think the worst. Shouldn't have asked, shouldn't have—
Finally, he spoke up. "You can still get the ice cream if you want, and then you can drop him off at Jess'. You—" he paused, sounding strained. "You don't have to ask, Y/N."
Your mouth opened and closed, unsure of how to respond. "Right. Okay, I'll, uh, see you at the office." You hung up before he could say anything else, letting out a breath once the conversation was over.
You took a glance at the mirror, putting back on your best smile. "Okay, bud. We're gonna go get your ice cream and then I'll take you to your aunt's, alright?" Jack nodded, prompting you to raise a brow. "Okay, now what were you telling me about the solar system?"
Jack continued where he left off, telling you about exploding stars and galaxies.
And at that moment, you felt like the universe was a less complicated truth to understand than your relationship.
—
By the time you got to Quantico, you had just missed the briefing and everyone was packing up to leave. You were gonna head straight to the bat cave when Hotch's voice sounded, calling your name.
You looked up to see him standing on the landing. "May I have a word?" He nodded toward his office.
You pursed your lips, glancing to see the rest of your coworkers all staring at you. You resisted the urge to fidget, nodding and walking up the stairs to his office.
Aaron held the door open for you, closing it as soon as you were inside.
Carefully, you started, "Hotch—"
"I'm sorry."
You spun around and met his eyes effortlessly. He was already looking at you with a pool of sincerity in his eyes so large you could drown in it. Earnestness, guilt, and other emotions you'd rather not name.
Unlike that night when he spoke to you like a suspect, he now spoke to you like you were a case he believed in. He continued, "I am so sorry for what I said to you. For making you believe that you need permission to do your job. To do what is right for our son. And I am sorry for making you doubt your place in our life." He took a step toward you, but didn't move to touch you. "You're not some girlfriend of mine that needs to ask to take Jack to his aunt. You are my co-parent and the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. I'm sorry for ever insinuating otherwise."
Water welled in your eyes, and against both of your predictions, you grabbed onto his hands. You were grateful that he let you make that choice for yourself. But as soon as you did it, the floodgates opened. A tear raced down your cheeks because, God, you almost forgot what it felt like to hold his hand.
You never wanted to let go.
"Thank you, Aaron." You meant that, because you knew he meant it. "I know you're trying. And believe me, I'm trying too." Another tear fell. "I miss you so much. And I haven't given up on us. I just— it hurts. It hurts a lot, and I'm trying to figure out how to be in this relationship without feeling that."
He swallowed, resting his forehead against yours. He whispered, "I am so sorry for hurting you. I have no excuses for it." He paused. The only sound you could hear was your own breaths, intermingling together. "I love you so much."
A little laugh left you. It didn't hurt as much to hear. "I know." Pause. "I love you, too."
He removed his forehead from yours, and you mourned the loss of contact. "Can we talk more when I get back?" There was that hope again, lighting up his eyes.
You couldn't say no this time. "Yes. We'll talk when you get back." You didn't want to avoid it any longer.
You would talk about the good truth, the bad truth, and all the truths in between.
—
You raced to the elevator as soon as you heard the team was back, your heart moving at an even faster pace.
The elevator doors opened and the team filed out, but the only face you could focus on was Aaron's.
The second he was within reach, you threw your arms around him, hugging him tightly. He hugged you back with the same fervour.
Your heart only slowed down when you realized he was real. He was real and he was alive. Alive and in your arms.
"Idiot," you muttered, your voice muffled by tears. You pulled back just enough to see his face and the bandage covering his forehead. Immediately, you shoved your head back into his chest. "How dare you let yourself get hurt before I've talked to you?"
He rubbed his hands over your back. "It was just a car accident," he said. Like that made it any better. Like you weren't on the line when he crashed into the unsub's car. Like your heart didn't stop then and there.
You exhaled. "Don't ever do something like that again, Aaron."
He kissed your head, and instead of getting angry, you leaned into it. "I'll try not to, honey."
You sniffled. You didn't know what you would've done if he wasn't okay. If he wasn't okay before your relationship could be okay.
You mumbled, "You really scared me, you know."
"I know. I'm sorry." It went unsaid that you'd scared him before, too. He didn't have to say it for you to know.
When you got shot, there was only one truth you wanted Aaron to know. So that's the truth you told him. "I love you."
He hugged you even tighter, and you reciprocated. As you hugged him for the first time in what felt like forever, the truth finally felt tangible.
"I love you, too."
—
Aaron was driving the two of you to work, like he had been for a few weeks. It was a big change, but you meant it when you said you were trying. You were both trying.
This relationship wasn't something you were willing to lose, and that truth was important to you. So here you were, trying. Trying to care for wounds and say the quiet truths out loud.
You furrowed your brows. "Aaron, you missed the exit."
He kept his eyes on the road, glancing at you for a half-second. "The case is in the suburbs. We're going to go meet with the victim's family first."
"Oh. Okay." Confusion laced through your voice, but you accepted his explanation. You didn't often go into the field, and if you did, you never talked to anyone. But you figured that Aaron was just bringing you since he had to drive you to work, anyway.
The drive wasn't to the victim's house wasn't too far away, only about 5 minutes from the office. It looked like an extremely nice neighbourhood, the perfect place to raise a family. It made you wonder what exactly happened to the people living there.
Aaron pulled into driveaway and got out of the car. Soon after, he was at your door, opening it for you. Your eyes widened a bit, but you concealed it, letting him help you out. "I'm coming in with you?"
"Yeah, it could take a while, so you might as well," he said.
With his hand on your back, he led you to the front door. He didn't knock or ring the doorbell. He just opened the door himself and walked right inside.
This time, you couldn't hide your shock. "Aaron!"
He didn't match your emotion, entirely indifferent. "Sh, sweetheart. Come inside."
You were too shocked to say a word. Aaron never used nicknames at work, and you couldn't imagine that he'd abandon that professionalism right as you entered a victim's home.
You stepped inside the house, looking around and waiting to see an appalled family staring at you. But there was no one there.
Your confusion only skyrocketed. You looked back at Aaron, questioning, "What's going on?"
He ignored your question. "So, what do you think?"
"What do I think?" You frowned. "Are you okay?"
He huffed a laugh through his nose. "I might have embellished slightly." He shortened the distance between you. "We're not at a victim's house."
"So whose house did we just break into?"
He sent you a soft smile. "It could be ours, if you want it."
Your world stopped. You glanced around in shock before looking back at him, your eyes wide. "Are you serious?"
Aaron grabbed your hands. "This is only one of the options," he said. "If you don't like this one, there are about five more lined up for us to look at."
Your eyes darted between him and the rest of the house. You couldn't stop looking. "This place looks like it costs more than my salary. A lot more. And then some."
"Don't worry about that," he told you, rubbing his thumb over the back of your hand. "Just worry about if you like it. Do you like it?"
"I— I love it." You were breathless. "But— a whole house? We have a house already."
He looked down for a second before looking back up at you. "I know. But you're not comfortable in it." You swallowed, and he stepped closer to you. "I know you're trying to suppress the memories, but it's difficult to move past something so traumautic. I don't want you to have to live in a house that doesn't feel like a home. Not if I can help it."
You blinked as tears gathered in your eyes. Aaron had seen you struggle with nightmares for months. He watched you avoid the living room. A profiler through and through, but more than that, he was the man who noticed the little things. He was the man who loved you. And you no longer had a single doubt about it.
"Aaron," a breathy laugh left you. "This might be the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me."
He smiled a real smile, the kind of smile that the rest of the world seldom saw. "So," he repeated, "what do you think?"
You smiled back at him. For the first time in a while, the smile reached your eyes. "I think... I love it." You removed your hands from his grasp, wrapping your arms around his neck. "And I love you."
His eyes softened. "I love you, too."
You leaned in, hugging him tightly. This house wouldn't fix everything, but it could give you a fresh start. It wasn't a clean slate; it wouldn't make you forget all that happened, but it could help you stop looking back. For once, you were looking forward.
You'd honour the truth of what happened the same way you'd honour the truth of what lied ahead.
You once had five simple truths. Now, you had one. It was faith that, no matter what happened, your family would pull through. Aaron believed in that just as much as you did.
One day, when you got married, you would hold that truth in the same light as your vows. It was a universal truth.
i can’t believe it’s over😭 i’m still reeling from the emotions i went through reading this series. i hope you know how well written this is bc it’s unmatched!! if i ever lose my memories, someone pls reintroduce me to criminal minds and bring me back to this masterpiece. thank yew🙂↕️
I've been complaining about how much I'm crying over non-mc fics nowadays and a lovely commenter suggested I share some. I probably missed some other amazing works so please feel free to leave more in the comments. To all the amazing creators I have mentioned here thank you for putting your hard work out there for people like me to enjoy. Here are my recommendations ❤️🩷
The Cure to His Curse by @makingfanfictionstosleep
The Cure to His Nightmares by @makingfanfictionstosleep
The Cure to His Burdens by @makingfanfictionstosleep This series is so good that I've been staying awake, not sleeping, because of these 🤣🩷. Absolutely love them and can't wait to read more!
You never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs) by @orphicmeliora There is just something about reading Zayne realize he fucked up and start working for it. It just hurts SO GOOD. Brilliant fic. Brilliant author.
Letters Unsent by @orphicmeliora ABSOLUTE CINEMA. I am not joking when I say I was sobbing in my bed after reading this.
Ever, Ever After by @kannady It's crazy how much I can feel the non-mc's pain in this one. I am rooting for them so much 🥹🩷
Gravity Hurts (you made it so sweet) by @kitimeq Caleb acting like a loser and being hit by consequences hard I was HOLDING MY BREATH reading this. Love it 😭
He Leaves You Out Like a Penny in the Rain by @icarusignite Again, Zayne. Again, brilliant work 🗣🩷
Another Zayne piece you can find here by @cno-inbminor I can read hundreds more of these and I will want more.
You never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs) | part 1
PAIRING: Zayne x Non-MC Reader
SYNOPSIS: An arranged marriage built on silence unravels into a love loud enough to echo—where a repressed heart finally claims what was always his.
WORD COUNT: 6.5k
NOTES: so.. this ended up being way too angsty than the original blurb but oh well no regrets. fair warning, prepare some tissues! The tag list for this fic is CLOSED.
MASTERLIST | part 2
The day you chose to deliver the papers was grey. Not rainy. Not stormy. Just… grey.
A sky without conviction. Wind without bite. The kind of afternoon that felt as indecisive as you were pretending not to be.
You stood outside his office door for longer than you were proud of. Long enough to memorize the grain of the wood. Long enough to talk yourself into it, and then out of it, and then back in again.
You pushed the door open softly, already shrinking into yourself.
You weren’t sure what you expected when you came.
That he’d be behind his desk, maybe. Pen in hand, papers meticulously arranged in little towers like the ones he builds in your mind—precise, unreachable, always half-tilted toward something you’re not allowed to see.
You thought you might say something rehearsed but kind. A line you practiced in the mirror, gentle but final. You didn’t want to hurt him. You just wanted to end the slow bleeding before it became a hemorrhage.
But the office was empty.
The silence hit first.
Not a tranquil silence. Not the kind that invites rest.
This one was clinical. Dry. Like the room had forgotten how to hold a heartbeat.
Zayne wasn’t there.
Of course he wasn’t. He was rarely anywhere you were. You’d grown used to missing him like one grows used to an old injury—limping out of habit, not pain. Not anymore. Not really.
You stepped inside anyway, shutting the door behind you with a quiet click. The room smelled like him—mint and paper, a trace of cologne sharp as memory. The blinds were half-drawn, the light filtering in like a sigh through cracked ribs.
You walked to his desk and placed the envelope down.
Gently. As if it were made of glass.
As if the act itself might shatter something irreversibly.
Why stay in this marriage when the instigator is already dead? It wasn’t a cruel thought. Just… practical. Your mother had orchestrated it all, hadn’t she? Down to the embroidered napkins and the painfully bright chandelier you never wanted. She'd made you both promises you never consented to, and now she was gone, buried in roses and obligations.
That question had come to you in the silence after her funeral, when the guests were gone and the condolences had dried into something brittle. You weren’t looking for liberation. You weren’t angry. But there was a kind of clarity that only grief could offer—harsh, clean-edged clarity that cut deeper the more you looked at it.
You stood there, staring at the divorce papers. The ink still smelled fresh. The curve of your own signature stared back at you like a challenge.
You didn’t hate Zayne.
God, if you hated him, maybe this would be easier.
But love had never bloomed between you. Not really. It had been all frost and formality, glances across long tables, the occasional brush of his coat sleeve as he passed you in the hallway. You learned his silences. He learned your smiles. But you never learned each other.
And even if Zayne had been mostly absent, even if he’d buried himself in work and left you to wander the quiet halls of your shared home like a ghost—well.
You weren’t completely blameless either.
You’d withdrawn before he could reject you. You’d built your own walls, brick by brick. You told yourself you were protecting yourself. But the truth was messier than that.
Maybe you’d been waiting. Hoping.
And when hope dried up, you folded your longing into politeness. Into pleasantries. Into dinner set for one.
Your fingers grazed the edge of the envelope again. He’ll see it when he comes in, you told yourself. He’ll understand.
He was good at understanding, wasn’t he?
But the part of you that still ached—the part that hadn’t quite given up—wished you didn’t have to do this alone. Wished he’d been here so you could have said something. Anything. So you wouldn’t have to walk out with your heart still clenched, still wondering if this was mercy or cowardice.
You turned toward the door slowly, letting your eyes sweep over the room one last time.
His chair was slightly angled toward the window. A mug of coffee sat abandoned on the side table, still half full. A scarf hung on the back of the chair, the one you once bought for him because he never remembered to dress warm in winter. He never wore it in front of you.
Maybe he wore it when he was alone.
Maybe he missed you, in his own quiet, useless way.
Maybe this wasn’t what he wanted either.
Maybe it was.
You didn’t wait to find out.
You slipped out of his office as softly as you had come. No tears. No dramatics. Just the sound of your heels clicking against the tile, carrying you away from the life you tried to build without being given the tools.
Behind you, the envelope sat motionless on his desk.
It would be the first thing he saw when he returned.
Or the last thing he expected.
Either way, the decision was made.
You just hoped he’d understand that it wasn’t born out of resentment.
It was born out of surrender.
And surrender, after all, was the only way you’d ever been allowed to love him.
You go about your day.
Mechanically, precisely. Like if you move fast enough, you won’t feel the weight of what you just did. Like if you keep your hands busy, they won’t remember how they trembled when you left the envelope on his desk.
You have dinner at a high-end restaurant downtown. The kind with mood lighting and cutlery that costs more than your first paycheck. The waiter greets you by name. You’ve been here before. Enough times to build a familiarity that feels almost like comfort.
You order your usual. A glass of wine, a dish too delicate for hunger. You smile when the waiter makes small talk. You nod when he compliments your dress. You even laugh—soft, practiced, hollow.
Around you, couples lean close, forks clinking gently against china, knees brushing under tables. You sip your wine and pretend you don’t notice. Pretend you’re above it all. That you chose this. That you’re fine.
You leave a generous tip and walk out alone.
You stop at a shop on the way home.
There’s a window display with crystals and tiny gilded mirrors and perfume bottles shaped like hearts. Useless things. Luxuries. Trinkets that mean nothing and say everything. You buy a pair of earrings that you’ll never wear, a satin ribbon you don’t need, and a music box that plays a lullaby you didn’t realize you remembered.
It doesn’t help. But it gives your hands something to hold.
By the time you return home, night has long folded itself over the city. You step out of your heels and into the silence, your keys landing with a metallic sigh in the tray by the door.
The house is spotless. Sterile. Like no one lives here. Like no one ever did.
You draw yourself a bath. You pick out the bath salts your mother once gifted you—lavender and sandalwood, soft and laced with memory. The water fogs the mirror, curls against your skin. You sink in, hoping the heat will coax something loose. The ache. The numbness. The way you still listen, stupidly, for the sound of the door opening behind you.
But there’s nothing. No footsteps. No voice calling your name.
Only the slow drip of a tap and the echo of your own breath.
After, you do your skincare. Layer after layer. Toner. Serum. Cream. A ritual. A mask. You look at your face in the mirror and wonder when you started looking so tired. You wonder if Zayne ever noticed. You wonder if he’d care.
You go to bed.
The sheets are cool, tucked too tightly. You lay there, stiff as porcelain, your eyes wide in the dark. The ceiling offers no answers. The night holds no comfort.
Your fingers find the empty side of the bed.
And stay there.
Still.
Quiet.
You don’t cry. You don’t let yourself. Because you made this choice, didn’t you?
You left the papers.
You left him.
But as sleep evades you and the silence tightens like a noose, you wonder if he’ll notice the way your perfume still lingers on the pillow.
And if he does—
You wonder if he’ll miss you.
Or just the absence.
You wake in the dark, unsure what pulls you from sleep. There is no noise, not exactly—just the strange pressure of being watched, the weight of something pressing too hard against your ribs.
Your eyes blink open slowly.
The room is dim, only the amber spill of the hallway light trailing in like a whisper beneath the door. The sheets have tangled around your waist, your body curled in that way it always is when you sleep alone, when there's too much space and too little warmth.
And then you see him.
Zayne.
Kneeling at your bedside.
His head is bowed, his hands gripping yours like lifelines, like they’re the only thing tethering him to the earth. His shoulders are trembling. There are tear tracks on his cheeks—silent and luminous in the half-light. His palms are cold, clammy, too tight around your fingers, but you don’t pull away.
You can’t.
Because you’ve never seen him like this.
Not composed. Not distant. Not restrained behind the iron wall of manners and duty and that maddening, unreachable calm.
No. This is Zayne—undone.
“Please don’t leave me,” he breathes.
The words are so soft, they barely make it past his lips.
Your breath catches.
You stare at him, heart thudding with a terror you don’t understand. He’s not bleeding. Not wounded. Not dying.
But he looks like he is.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes, voice breaking like something rusted. “I’m so—God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to be your husband. I didn’t even know if you wanted me to be. I thought—” His grip tightens, desperate. “I thought you were happier without me. I thought I was giving you space. I thought it was what you wanted.”
You try to sit up, but he’s still holding your hands, head bowed so low you can feel his breath against your skin. He presses his forehead to your knuckles like he’s praying. Or confessing.
“I saw the papers,” he says. “I came back and I saw them and—” A pause. A shudder. “I felt something inside me go still. Like the part of me that hoped you’d someday choose me… just stopped breathing.”
You swallow.
Your throat is dry. Your heart is loud. Your hands are still in his, small and warm and useless in the face of this.
Zayne’s never begged for anything. Not when you married. Not when you drifted. Not even when the silences stretched longer than the days.
But he’s begging now.
And it breaks something in you.
“I don’t care about the arrangement,” he says, lifting his eyes to yours for the first time, and—God. They’re red-rimmed and wet and unguarded in a way you’ve never seen. Not even when his mentor died. Not even when yours forced a ring onto your finger. Because that's exactly what she was—a mentor before a mother.
“I don’t care who started it. I care that I can’t sleep knowing you won’t be there. That I won’t see your shoes in the hallway. Your cup in the sink. Your voice in the morning. I know I’ve been gone—I know I made you feel alone. But I never stopped—”
He cuts himself off, like the words are too big for him to hold.
“Don’t leave me,” he says again, hoarse. “Please. Tell me it’s not too late. Tell me I can try. Tell me I can love you better.”
And then he says it.
“Because I do—”
Soft. Crushed. Almost drowned in breath.
“—I do love you.”
You sit frozen, trembling with something that isn’t shock but grief—but hope—but disbelief.
Because you’d spent months mourning something that had never bloomed.
And now here he was. On his knees. With all his walls gone.
Waiting for you.
His words echo in your chest like footsteps in an empty hall. They don’t settle. They don’t land. They just… circle. Hover. Haunt.
And yet—your hands stay in his.
You want to pull away. You should pull away. That would be easier, wouldn’t it?
But your fingers won’t listen. They're traitors. Trembling, but curled around his like they still remember how to hold on.
Zayne’s eyes are still on you—pleading, ruined, impossibly gentle. And you hate him for it. You hate him for coming to you like this now, when your chest is raw and bandaged over with resignation, when your heart has learned to live with its hollow space.
You don’t know what to say.
You’ve always known what to say. You’ve always had something ready. A laugh, a line, a quiet deflection. You were raised to survive with poise, to never let the cracks show.
But now?
You don’t know how to speak through the knot lodged in your throat.
“I…” Your voice barely comes out. It sounds foreign. Bruised. “Zayne, I don’t—I don’t know.”
His brows draw together.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” you whisper. “You didn’t want me. You wanted peace. You wanted quiet. I gave you that.”
You’re breathing faster now, not from panic—but from all the things you’ve never let yourself say aloud.
“You weren’t there,” you murmur, looking somewhere past his shoulder. “Not when I waited for you to come home. Not when I made tea and poured two cups out of habit. Not when I cried so quietly I thought I’d go mad from the silence.”
He’s shaking his head, tears falling again.
“I didn’t know,” he breathes. “I didn’t know you felt—”
“Because I didn’t tell you,” you say sharply. “Because I thought I didn’t have the right to want more. We weren’t in love. We were just… two people honoring a contract.”
Zayne looks like he’s in pain.
Real pain.
The kind that doesn’t bleed, just bruises the soul until everything aches.
“I’m not saying this to punish you,” you whisper. “I just—I need you to understand. I don’t know how to believe you now. I don’t know how to trust what you’re offering me, when all I’ve ever known is how to be alone in this marriage.”
He closes his eyes like he’s been struck.
“I’m not whole,” you add, voice cracking. “And I don’t know if I even know how to be loved anymore.”
There’s a pause.
A long, trembling pause.
Then, quietly—softly—Zayne presses your hands to his lips.
He kisses your knuckles like he’s asking permission to breathe.
“I don’t expect you to believe me right now,” he whispers. “Or tomorrow. Or the day after. I just want you to know—I’m not leaving. I won’t run from this again. From you. Even if you don’t forgive me. Even if you never say those words back.”
You stare at him.
Still unsure. Still aching. Still raw.
But something inside you shifts.
Not healed.
Not certain.
Just—listening.
And maybe that’s enough for now.
He stays kneeling for a long time.
Even after your fingers loosen in his grip. Even after your breathing slows and your eyes drop from his face to the twisted bedsheet between you. Even after the tears stop falling from both of you.
He stays. Like a man rooted. Like he’s afraid that if he moves, you’ll disappear.
Eventually, you whisper, “Get off the floor.”
It comes out hoarse. Less command, more tired breath. The words of someone too wrung out to carry this moment any further, but too tender to let it close alone.
He looks up at you, cautious. But the moment has passed for confessions. He knows it.
So he rises slowly, joints stiff, fabric creased and damp from where his knees met the floor. You shift aside, just a little—enough to make room without saying it aloud.
He doesn’t assume.
He stands for a beat longer than necessary. Hands fidgeting. Shoulders tense. And then he moves—quiet as snow—and slips beneath the covers, staying on top of them at first, as though unwilling to cross some unseen line.
The bed dips with his weight. You both lie there, backs half-turned, inches away and aching with silence again—but not the old kind. Not the lonely, echoing kind.
This one is... full. Thick with things unsaid but understood.
His shoulder brushes yours. He doesn't move. Neither do you.
You let your eyes close, but sleep doesn’t come.
Your mind is loud in the hush. Not with words. With fragments. Ghosts. That night at the wedding when your mother held your hand too tightly and whispered that love is just a fantasy. The first time you saw Zayne sleeping at his desk, collar loose, lashes brushing his cheek, more beautiful than anything you were allowed to say. The moment your fingers twitched toward him once, and you stopped yourself. Every almost. Every if.
You feel him shift beside you. Just a fraction.
Then his hand—a single scarred hand—moves slowly across the space between you. Hovers. Waits.
You don’t open your eyes. You don’t breathe.
And then, as gently as anything you’ve ever known, he rests his fingers on your wrist.
Barely a touch.
Just a presence.
I'm here, it says.
You don’t move. You don’t speak.
But you let him stay.
The sheets rustle as he slides down slightly, mirroring your position. His forehead brushes your shoulder. His breath warms the back of your arm. His hand stays wrapped around your wrist like an apology without words.
Minutes pass. Maybe hours.
You fall asleep like that.
Not in his arms. Not pressed close. Not healed.
Just… not alone.
For the longest time, your mother dictated the weather of your world.
She didn’t just control the room—she was the room. Her presence seeped into the walls, into the silence, into the decisions you hadn’t even made yet. She knew what you’d wear before you opened your closet. She could recite your schedule before you checked your calendar. She didn’t raise a daughter—she built a reflection.
And she expected that reflection to obey.
At first, it was subtle. Childhood rules disguised as safety.
“Don’t play in the sun, you’ll get too dark.”
“Keep your voice down, good girls don’t shout.”
“Smile when guests are around, don’t embarrass me.”
But over time, the rules turned into walls. And the walls became a prison. You learned to swallow words before they formed. To weigh your tone. To apologize for breathing too loudly.
It didn’t matter what you wanted. What mattered was what she thought you should want.
And then Zayne entered the picture.
A calm man. A blank page. A voice with the temperature of winter mornings—cool, crisp, distant. You hadn’t even fallen for him. You’d simply watched as your mother’s attention pivoted from micromanaging your life to orchestrating your marriage.
He was her dream son-in-law. A doctor. Unshakeable. Mannered. From a family she couldn’t nitpick.
She didn’t ask if you liked him.
She didn’t need to.
She assumed you would be grateful.
And in some ways, you were.
Because Zayne—unavailable as he was, emotionally constipated and always at the hospital—did one thing your mother never did.
He left you alone.
There was no suffocating presence. No list of expectations folded into every meal. He didn’t demand you dress a certain way. Didn’t police your volume, your mood, your silences. He didn’t ask much of you at all.
And in that eerie vacuum, you found something terrifyingly precious.
Autonomy.
Even if he barely spoke to you, even if he barely saw you, Zayne gave you the one thing you craved more than affection.
Freedom.
At home, your mother would barge into your room with unsolicited opinions. In Zayne’s apartment, you had a key to your own space. At home, your mother would correct you mid-sentence in front of relatives. Zayne would barely notice if you said something silly, let alone make you feel small for it.
He didn’t tether you.
And while that coldness carved an ache in your chest during sleepless nights, it also came with a strange sense of safety.
He was distant, yes.
But he was not cruel.
When your mother visited your new house for the first time after your wedding, you saw her try it—try to step into your space like she still owned it. She scanned your kitchen with sharp eyes, criticizing how you stored the spices. She told you you were putting on weight. That you needed to stop being lazy, that Zayne would leave you if you didn’t “keep up appearances.”
She said it lightly, like a joke.
Zayne was standing by the coffee machine.
He looked up, his gaze ice-cold.
“I didn’t marry her for appearances,” he said, voice clipped, face unreadable. “And if you’re done insulting my wife, you can go.”
The silence that followed was deafening.
You remembered the way your mother blinked. Like someone had thrown cold water on her. She huffed, lips pursed, and left without another word. She didn’t even say goodbye.
And you…
You’d looked at him like he was a foreign language.
He didn’t look at you. Just poured his coffee and left for work without a second glance.
But you had stood there, rooted to the floor, hands shaking.
Because for the first time in your life, someone chose you.
Zayne had drawn a line in the sand.
And your mother had been on the wrong side of it.
You hadn’t cried then. Not even when the door slammed shut and silence filled the apartment again. But you remembered the tightness in your chest. The way you stared at the floor like you were thirteen again, except this time you weren’t helpless.
Because someone—your husband—had made it clear you were not to be messed with.
You still think about that moment. More than you probably should.
Because Zayne never brought it up again. Never mentioned her. Never asked how it made you feel.
But he didn’t apologize for defending you.
He didn’t make you feel like you owed him for it either.
And somehow, in his detachment, there was a kind of tenderness your mother had never offered you.
He gave you space.
He gave you a shield.
And somewhere in the folds of that cold, quiet marriage, you started seeing him not just as the stranger you were legally tied to—but the man who, even in silence, stood between you and the woman who broke your voice.
He might not have held your hand.
But he kept your name safe in a house that was finally your own.
And maybe that didn’t look like love in the way you were raised to recognize it.
But it was protection.
And for someone like you—raised to feel like a burden—that meant something.
You wake before the sun.
The room is still steeped in the heavy blue of early dawn, where everything looks softer than it really is. Blurred at the edges, like grief.
There’s a moment, a breath, where you forget. Where you wake as if from a dream and all is suspended. The air is cold against your cheek. The sheets heavy with the imprint of two. And there’s warmth behind you. A weight.
Zayne.
Not a memory. Not a phantom. Not another figment of wishful thinking conjured up by your loneliness.
He's still here.
The realization sinks in slowly, like tea bleeding into water. At some point in the night, he must’ve shifted closer. One of his arms is draped around your waist, tentative but real. His chest rises and falls against your back, the rhythm steady, anchoring. And his face—God, his face is tucked into your shoulder like it’s the only home he’s ever known.
You don’t move.
You just lie there, blinking up at the ceiling, your body stiff with exhaustion and the kind of grief that has no name. You're not sure what it is you’re mourning. Only that it’s something vast. Something invisible. A version of this marriage you never got to live. A thousand versions of yourself you never got to be—with him, beside him, for him.
There’s a heaviness in your chest that isn’t pain. Not sharp, not sudden. Just... present. Like fog. Like longing left too long in the cold.
You think about the envelope still sitting on his desk. Signed. Final. As binding as a scar.
You think about how easy it would be to slip out from under his arm. Walk away before the sun catches you both in this quiet trespass. Before the ache turns into expectation. Before kindness gets mistaken for forgiveness.
And yet—you stay.
Not because anything has been resolved. Not because his whispered apology last night has undone the loneliness you watered for so long it grew roots inside you. But because you're tired. And his breath is warm. And for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, you’re not waking up to a silence that only belongs to you.
He shifts slightly, his hand tightening instinctively on your waist. Just a twitch. Just enough to remind you: he feels you there.
The tears come before you can stop them.
Slow. Silent. The kind you don’t sob out loud. The kind you let slip into the pillow because you’re too proud to make a sound.
You wish you could hate him.
You wish he’d never said anything at all. That he hadn’t come into your room like that. That he’d left the papers on the desk and let the story end quietly.
Because now there’s a crack.
A crack in the coffin you tried to bury this marriage in.
And through it, something stirs.
Not hope. Not yet.
Just the unbearable truth that he’s still in there, somewhere—beneath all that absence. That maybe he always was. That maybe, just maybe, he had been mourning it too, all along, but in his own cold, closed, unreadable way.
Zayne breathes in deeply, then exhales with a small, uneven sigh. Still asleep.
You glance down at the hand around your waist. His fingers twitch once, like he’s dreaming of holding you tighter but doesn’t quite know how.
It hurts.
Not because he’s touching you—but because of how long you’ve wanted him to. Because of how gentle it is. Because tenderness, after all this time, feels like both a balm and a blade.
You close your eyes again.
You don’t move.
You don’t wake him.
There is a funeral between your ribs and a heartbeat beside you, and both feel sacred.
And maybe—just for this morning—that’s enough.
The eggs are overcooked.
Zayne stares down at the pan like it offended him personally, the browned edges curling up as if mocking the silence that’s wrapped itself around the kitchen. The yolks aren’t runny the way you like them. He used the wrong kind of salt. The tea might be too bitter. Everything’s a little off today.
Or maybe he is.
Zayne places the plate gently on the table, careful not to make too much noise. You’re sitting across from him, wrapped in your robe, a thin line between your brows as you butter your toast like it’s a task that requires precision. You haven’t spoken much. Not since waking up to find him still there, hovering in the doorway with eyes swollen from a night spent begging the universe to turn back time.
He watches you through the soft steam rising from the tea.
And he aches.
Not with longing, though that’s part of it.
No, this ache is older. Rooted in something he thought he buried years ago, back on that cursed mountain where blood froze faster than it could pool, and lives ended mid-sentence.
He shouldn’t be thinking about that morning—not here, not with you sitting across from him—but he is.
Because the divorce papers, the ones still waiting on his desk like an open grave, reminded him exactly how it felt to lose something you didn’t know how to hold.
That night on Mt. Eternal… years have passed since then, but the cold never really left his bones.
He still sees William’s face sometimes. In dreams. In the flicker of a hallway light. In the space between one breath and the next, when memory has no mercy.
He hadn’t known the man for long—barely a few months, a blip in the timeline of his tightly folded life—but William had burned bright. Reckless, brilliant, infuriatingly intuitive. He had a way of making people feel seen. A way of cutting through Zayne’s silence with nothing but presence.
And then—
Zayne remembers pressing his hand to William’s chest, trying to keep the life in. His own blood mixing with his friend’s. He remembers the way the air smelled—like frost and iron and finality.
He remembers thinking, If I survive this, I will never love anything fragile again.
And then he met you.
He looks up.
You’re chewing slowly, eyes unfocused. Lost in your own world of unspoken grief.
You hadn’t said anything last night after he fell asleep against your shoulder. You hadn’t moved away. But you hadn’t touched him, either.
Zayne doesn’t blame you.
He doesn’t know what to make of your silence—whether it’s resignation, or fear, or kindness. Whether he’s been forgiven, or whether you’re still too tired to fight.
He wishes he knew how to ask.
He wishes he were the kind of man who could reach across the table and take your hand, just to show you he's still here. That he finally wants to be here. But he isn't that man. Not yet.
And you deserve better than half-formed promises from someone still trying to dig his heart out from beneath layers of protocol and loss.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, almost without realizing it. The words come out hushed. Fragile.
You glance up.
Your eyes meet.
There’s no anger in them. But there’s no relief, either. Just tiredness. And something that looks too much like a mirror of his own sorrow.
Zayne swallows.
He wants to tell you everything. About the nightmares. About the way guilt has hardened in his chest like a scar tissue. About how hard it is to come home to a soft, warm bed after you've learned to sleep beside death. About how sometimes, when you smiled at him, he looked away not because he didn’t care—but because it hurt too much to hope.
But he doesn’t say any of it.
He takes a sip of tea. It’s scalding. Bitter. His throat burns.
He watches you spread jam on toast with careful, robotic movements before you casually reach over and add two spoonfuls of sugar into his tea, and thinks—I should’ve told her sooner. I should’ve told her everything.
But he didn’t. And now, here you both are. Sitting in the ruins. Pretending it's breakfast.
There’s no music. No birdsong. Just the soft clink of ceramic and the breathing of two people who don’t know how to mourn what never had a name.
He looks at your hands—those same hands he held last night like a prayer—and wishes he could rewind time.
Just one month. One year. One heartbeat.
But he can’t.
So he lifts his fork. Cuts into the eggs. Forces himself to chew.
Because this is what it looks like, sometimes, when you try to make amends:
Burnt breakfast.
Too many silences.
A table full of ghosts.
And you—still here.
Not forgiving.
Not forgetting.
But here.
And for Zayne—for a man who’s only ever learned to grieve in private—that is a beginning worth mourning, too.
His phone vibrates against the table.
He flinches—guilt, maybe, or just the startle of being dragged out of a thought you didn’t want to leave.
You don't look up, still quietly chewing, lost in that dreamless place where sorrow goes to sleep in you like a second skin. But Zayne reaches for the phone, thumb swiping across the screen, half-expecting some emergency at the hospital. A late case. A consult. Another impossible situation to fix so he doesn’t have to fix himself.
But it’s a text from Greyson.
"You still coming to the charity gala? Need someone to block Dr. Malik from hijacking the auction with his ugly vintage duck paintings again."
He exhales—one short breath, barely a sound. The message is simple. Banter, really. Nothing urgent. Nothing pressing.
He hasn’t replied to Greyson in weeks.
He hasn't thought about the gala either. Usually an excuse for donors to parade their goodwill in overpriced suits, for surgeons to trade horror stories over cocktails, for the hospital to raise enough funds to keep the rural outreach programs going another year.
Zayne’s gaze flickers upward.
You’re sipping your tea now. Still quiet. Still careful. But you’re here. Still in this kitchen. Still in his orbit.
Zayne lets a thought settle in his chest—tentative, unsteady, like a flame in high wind:
Perhaps not all is lost.
Maybe not everything has calcified into endings. Maybe not every door has shut. Maybe there's still a sliver of future that hasn’t collapsed beneath the weight of what went unsaid. You hadn’t kicked him out last night. You hadn't pulled your hand away when he clutched it like a lifeline in the dark.
And now, this. A small, ridiculous gala. The softest suggestion of routine, of life continuing.
He looks back at the message, thumb hovering over the reply field.
Maybe… maybe he could take you.
The thought startles him with its tenderness.
Would you even want to go? Would it feel like a poor excuse to make up for everything? A bandage over a bullet wound? Would you dress up just to stand beside a man who once vanished when you needed him most?
Zayne’s thumb lowers.
He doesn’t reply.
Instead, he watches you butter another piece of toast with slow, mechanical grace. He memorizes the way your lashes cast shadows down your cheeks. The way your hand trembles just slightly, like you’re barely holding yourself together.
You were so strong, always. And he—he let himself believe you didn’t need him. That your strength meant he could keep hiding inside his cold logic and call it love.
He knows better now.
Maybe it's too late to be the man you needed back then. But maybe… maybe he can still learn to be someone you don't have to heal from.
He slips the phone screen-down on the table.
Then, with hesitant hands, he reaches across the table and nudges the jar of jam closer to you. A quiet offering.
You glance at it.
He meets your eyes again.
And in that fleeting glance, something moves. The first light in a room long sealed shut.
The moment passes too quickly.
Your eyes lower again, lashes shuttering the fragile connection. You spread the jam he offered, slow and deliberate, as if trying not to let your hands betray you. Zayne watches the knife tremble ever so slightly in your grip. Not enough for someone else to notice. But he does. Of course he does.
He’s used to studying tremors for a living—on monitors, in pupils, in dying pulses beneath his palm.
And now, you.
You, trembling under all that quiet.
He clears his throat.
It’s not a loud sound, but it slices through the morning hush with a clean, surgical precision. You blink up at him, guarded again. As if waiting for him to say something devastating, or worse—dismissive.
Zayne presses his palms against the edge of the table. He doesn’t lean forward, doesn’t crowd you. He keeps his voice level. Gentle. Low.
“I, ah…” he starts, and immediately hates how uncertain he sounds.
You set your knife down.
Zayne exhales softly through his nose, schooling himself into coherence. He can do this. He speaks to grieving families, for God’s sake. Tells them about cardiac arrests and brain deaths and the final moments of their loved ones. He can string a sentence together.
But this—this is harder.
“The hospital is hosting its annual charity gala this weekend,” he finally says. “Greyson asked if I was coming.”
You tilt your head. Neutral. You say nothing, but he thinks you’re waiting. Letting him go on.
Zayne looks down at his mug, watching the swirl of steam curl like a vanishing thought.
“I was thinking,” he says carefully, “maybe you'd like to come with me.”
There.
He doesn’t look up immediately. He can’t. He doesn’t want to see your hesitation, your polite refusal, the way you’ll swallow your discomfort and say maybe next time when you know there won’t be one.
But then—
“Why?”
Your voice is not sharp. Not cruel. Just… tired.
Zayne looks up.
You’re watching him now, one brow faintly raised, lips parted slightly—not in expectation, but confusion. Sincere confusion. And something deeper beneath it—wariness, perhaps. The kind that comes from being wounded too many times in the same place.
He leans back in his chair. Not retreating. Just trying not to suffocate you with the closeness of his yearning.
“Because…” he begins, but the rest of the sentence gets tangled somewhere in his chest.
Because I want to be seen with you.Because I want to try again.Because I miss being beside you even when we weren’t really together.Because I can’t bear the thought of showing up alone and being reminded of what I let die between us.Because I want to be yours.
Instead, what comes out is softer. Smaller.
“Because I’d like you to be there.”
You don’t answer.
Instead, your eyes move over him—like you’re taking stock of the man across from you. Not the doctor. Not the public figure. Not the version of Zayne that the world sees. But him.
You study the way his hands are folded, the way his jaw is clenched not with arrogance but restraint. The hair still damp from his morning shower. The sleeves of his dress shirt slightly creased because he didn’t take the time to iron them.
He’s not posturing. Not performing.
He’s just… here. Holding out a hand through the quiet wreckage.
And finally—finally—your lips part.
“Is it black tie?” you ask, like you’re still testing the water, still waiting to see if this is real.
Zayne blinks.
Then breathes.
“Yes,” he says. “Full formal.”
You nod. Just once. A small thing. A quiet gesture that still manages to bloom something in his chest that almost feels like hope.
“Then I’ll need a new dress,” you murmur.
And Zayne doesn’t smile. Not fully. But something in his expression softens, loosens. The beginning of light behind stormclouds.
He knows it’s not forgiveness. But maybe, maybe—it’s the start of returning home.
Zayne finishes his tea in silence.
And as he stands to leave, brushing past your chair to take the dishes to the sink, he lets the faintest hope settle into the hollowness of his ribs.
congrats! you're officially the first anon i've ever blocked on tumblr. genuinely impressive how you managed to be this tone deaf and annoying.
i'm literally dealing with no electricity and slow internet because of a recent super typhoon. my circumstances are shit right now and i was planning to respond to your ask once things got better. but instead of reading the room, you decided to send me ANOTHER ask today continuing your unsolicited lecture about why i should empathize with your genocidal fave.
you claim you're "not a suguru apologist" but the sheer volume of asks defending him says otherwise. you're trying to "explain" why people empathize with him. when i've literally already posted analysis about this—his trauma response is human, that's WHY people connect with him. i get it. doesn't make genocide okay. you're lecturing me about media literacy. when you apparently can't tell the difference between understanding a character and excusing their actions. the timing is absolutely insensitive. i’m dealing with actual crisis conditions and you're spamming me about your anime boy
let me spell this out for you since you missed it the first time:
understanding ≠ justification
yes, suguru's breakdown after the star plasma vessel incident was understandable. yes, his disillusionment with protecting non-sorcerers who can't even see what they're being protected from is a very human response to trauma. yes, compared to satoru’s resilience, suguru's path feels more relatable to many people.
BUT NONE OF THAT MAKES GENOCIDE OKAY.
here’s why calling him a wannabe hitler isn’t that wild, you keep trying to minimize suguru's ideology but let's be real:
- hitler targeted groups he saw as inferior/threatening ✓
- suguru targets non-sorcerers he sees as inferior ✓
- hitler had political/economic motivations behind his hatred ✓
- suguru has ideological motivations behind his hatred ✓
- hitler's victims at least knew they were in a war ✓
- suguru's victims don't even know jujutsu society exists ✗
hypnotically, suguru's worse because his targets are completely defenseless and unaware. hitler's victims at least knew there was a war happening and that they were being targeted. they could fight back, flee, resist, or at least understand what was happening to them.
suguru's targets are completely clueless civilians who don't even know curses exist, can't see them, can't defend themselves, and have zero understanding of why they're dying. they're being systematically eliminated by someone with godlike powers they can't comprehend for reasons they'll never know.
that's actually more horrific in some ways—at least hitler's victims had the dignity of knowing they were in a conflict. suguru's would just die confused and helpless, never understanding why.
instead of flooding my inbox with the same tired talking points, you could have:
- made your own character analysis post
- respected that i was dealing with a literal natural disaster
- accepted that people can understand a character without excusing mass murder
- literally just minded your own business
i don't need you to teach me about geto suguru. i've analyzed this character plenty. i understand why he's compelling—the tragedy of someone who started with good intentions and fell so far. i understand why people empathize with his pain. but empathy for his trauma doesn't extend to empathy for his genocidal solution. there's a difference between "his breakdown was understandable" and "his actions were justified." learn it.
if you want to write suguru meta, go write it on your own blog. stop trying to convert people who rightfully call him a genocidal freak. some of us can appreciate complex writing without excusing fictional war crimes.
tl;dr: read the room, learn some media literacy, and maybe don't lecture people about genocide apologia when they're dealing with actual disasters. thanks.
Summary: You spent years orbiting Dr. Zayne Li, but when a careless comment shatters the fragile bond you thought you’d built, you walk away. Only then does Zayne realize what he's lost.
Warnings: Hurt/comfort, angst. slowburn. Zayne being emotionally constipated rip
Word Count: 4.3k
A/N: This is my first time writing for LADS, and Zayne is my bbygirl, so I wanted to give this a try, hopefully it came out alright. I love me a good non-mc angst, so that's why this is the way it is. Part 2 will include Zayne's POV, but it's up to y'all if you want a comforting/grovelling chapter or more HURT lol. Would love to hear yalls thoughts <3
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | AO3
Dr. Zayne was an enigma of the most maddening, magnetic kind, and unfortunately for you, curiosity had always been your gravest sin. Nonetheless, it was a flaw you wore with something resembling pride. After all, not everyone could claim they'd managed to peel back even the faintest layers of the glacial fortress that was Zayne Li. But you had. Over the years, through careful observation and an embarrassing amount of persistence, you had glimpsed—just barely—the man who hid behind that frigid exterior. Not all of him, of course. He had never let you in entirely. But you liked to think you'd grown on him, just a little, like stubborn lichen.
Your fascination had begun back in medical school, the place where sleep went to die and energy drinks reigned supreme. Zayne was the kind of brilliant that made you question whether he was entirely human. The kind who could skim a textbook once and retain it with eerie precision, like his mind had never known the concept of forgetting. Meanwhile, you were a walking collage of colour-coded sticky notes, caffeine-induced tremors, and desperate all-nighters. A parody of a student, barely holding yourself together with mismatched socks and sheer willpower.
It wasn't fair, the way he always looked so composed. You'd catch sight of him walking into the exam hall, spine straight, slacks pressed to perfection, sweater vest unwrinkled and somehow smug in its neutrality. Meanwhile, you, in your hoodie that hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine in days, would feel something curdle inside you. Was it irritation? Admiration? You hadn't known back then.
At first, you'd approached him under the guise of academic interest. You told yourself you were merely studying the competition. A reconnaissance mission, nothing more. You wanted to see how he prepared, how he dissected practicals and diagrams with such mechanical ease. But somewhere along the line, observation turned into participation. You started joining him. Not officially, because Zayne didn't do invitations, but he didn't tell you to leave, and that was an invitation enough.
Were you friends?
You weren't sure. Not once in all those long years of shared library tables and late-night coffee runs had he properly smiled at you, but at least he let you stay. That had to count for something.
You suspected he only tolerated you because you came bearing offerings, carefully chosen pastries from the bakery three blocks away. Lemon tarts. Matcha cake. Anything delicate and within your meagre student budget. You'd Pavloved your way into his company.
Zayne's presence had a gravity to it, even in the silence, his attention never once straying from his notes. Watching him work made you want to do better as well. He didn't need to speak for you to learn from him. He just needed to exist beside you, head bowed over anatomy flashcards, long fingers ghosting over textbook pages like he was reading by touch alone.
It was enough for you. You'd learned long ago not to ask for too much. Life had a way of punishing the greedy.
It was a stroke of serendipity that after years of drifting through separate orbits, you and Zayne found yourselves working beneath the same roof again.
You hadn't expected it. The world was large. The medical world, larger still. Yet here he was, striding through the sterile white halls of Akso Hospital like a ghost from your past, just as distant and devastating.
You didn't expect your paths to cross often. As one of the hospital's new pediatricians, your hands were full with small patients and even smaller attention spans. Your pockets jingled with sticker sheets and crinkled candy wrappers, and your days were painted in primary colours. It was fulfilling, exhausting, and utterly chaotic work.
But somehow, you kept seeing him.
At first, you chalked it up to mere chance. But then a pattern began to emerge, and Zayne became a frequent fixture of the pediatric wing. Too frequent for someone whose field wasn't pediatrics. Too present to dismiss as a ghost.
Maybe you noticed because you were looking, or maybe the universe simply had a cruel sense of humour.
However, most surprising of all was his demeanour. Gone was the man who kept his emotions triple-locked beneath ice and iron. Or rather, he was still there, but softened in the presence of his smallest patients. You watched him kneel beside a whimpering five-year-old with a broken arm and distract her with the clinical grace of a magician. You saw him take time out of his rounds to bring puzzles and books to a chronically ill boy who refused to eat. And one morning, peeking around the curtain of Room 415, you caught him braiding a little girl's hair because she was weeping about not being able to do it herself post-surgery.
Your heart stuttered.
Admiration. That's what it was. That ache in your chest every time you watched him from across the room had to be admiration and nothing more. A professional curiosity and a desire to learn. You'd flourished under his shadow in med school, so it wasn't so strange that you wanted to do so again.
You told yourself that often, rehearsing it like a prayer.
Your own patients adored you, though your methods were far more chaotic than Zayne's methodical care. You bribed your way into affection with cartoon Band-Aids and fruit-scented stickers, offering jellybeans and lollipops like sacred talismans. The younger kids squealed when they saw you coming down the hall; the teenagers pretended not to smile while secretly pocketing the candy. You had always been this way—eager, perhaps too eager, feeding on approval like a deprived animal.
But there was one person whose approval you could never quite gauge.
After all these years, Zayne was still an unreadable cipher. You didn't know what he thought of you. Whether he remembered your shared study sessions or noticed your offerings. You carried forth the rituals from med school into the real world like a superstition you couldn't let die.
During late-night shifts, you'd sometimes find yourself hovering outside his office. You didn't knock to chat. You'd long lost the reckless bravado of your student days. No, you simply rapped twice on the door, cracked it open just enough to slip inside when he told you to enter, and placed a steaming cup of tea on his desk. Sometimes it came accompanied by a carefully wrapped dessert.
He never looked up right away, and his gratitude was an awkward mumble, but he never asked you to stop, either.
And foolishly, it was enough.
You never lingered long enough to chat, retreating with a bright, rehearsed smile and your usual farewell. "Make sure to take breaks, Dr. Li!"
You never got a response, but every now and then, you'd see expression soften the tiniest amount, which was akin to receiving a full-blown grin from a man like him. It made your heart hiccup.
You couldn't say how long this odd back and forth of yours continued like, but you began to catalogue your moments with Dr. Zayne like treasure.
There was, of course, that one time it was raining at the end of your shift, the vindictive kind that came down in sheets.
You stood under the hospital's awning, trying to muster the courage to open your umbrella and brave the trudge to the train station. But then you saw him, and all hesitation vanished.
Across the small stretch of concrete outside the side exit, beneath a narrow overhang, stood Dr. Zayne. His posture was immaculate as always, one hand clutching his phone, the other tucked neatly into his coat pocket. Water dripped in thin lines down the sleeves of his blazer, and you noticed—almost indignantly—that even in the middle of a storm, his expression was as unreadable as ever. His collar was damp, and his hair, though still neatly combed, was slowly giving up the fight.
You didn't think. You just acted.
You jogged across the short distance, the icy rain lashing against your legs. You flipped open your umbrella mid-step and thrust it up over both your heads, standing a little too close beneath its narrow span.
He looked up and blinked at you in surprise.
"Dr. Li," you greeted breathlessly. "You planning on standing there until the rain evolves into hail?"
"No."
You squinted at him, then angled the umbrella slightly more in his direction. "Lucky I found you before you melted."
His eyes flicked toward you, then back out at the storm. "I'm not made of sugar," he stated simply.
"Well," you replied, grinning, "you're certainly not as sweet."
Something in his expression shifted, like he wasn't entirely immune to the jab, and he stepped further into the umbrella's shade. Closer to you.
You adjusted your grip as the two of you fell into step. His legs were longer, and his pace brisk, so you had to hold the umbrella awkwardly high, your left shoulder slowly soaking through with rain.
Zayne noticed, but didn't say anything until you were halfway to the station.
"You're holding it too far left."
You glanced up. "I'm trying to keep you dry."
"You're getting wet."
You gave a half-shrug. "So? I'm replaceable. You're Akso's golden prodigy. Can't let you get drenched and catch a cold."
"That's a ridiculous hierarchy."
"Says the guy with the patent leather shoes."
"...They're waterproof."
You snorted. "Of course they are."
The silence that followed was companionable in a strange, off-kilter sort of way. Rain hissed around you, cars splashed by in the distance, but for a brief moment, the storm felt far away.
At the station entrance, you pressed the umbrella into his hands. "You need it more than I do," you insisted. "Your hair might actually un-gel out there."
In response, Zayne's brow creased like the suggestion had short-circuited a pattern in his brain.
"I'll return it," he said finally.
"I know."
He didn't reply, disappearing back into the crowd without a word, but the next morning, when you opened your locker at work, the umbrella was waiting for you. There was a thin elastic band wrapped around the handle, anchoring a packet of candy to its handle, and you felt a tentative smile tug at your lips.
You'd mentioned it once in passing during a night shift to one of the nurses—something about craving a very specific, obscure brand of citrus-flavoured hard candy your grandmother used to send you during your med school days. You had lamented about not being able to find in stores anymore.
Yet here it was, that familiar crinkled package winking at you.
You didn't stop grinning for the rest of the week.
Then there had been the incident with the wrist brace.
It had been a long week, an endless carousel of back-to-back surgeries, sleep-deprived consults, and aching hands from scribbling charts long past the point your fingers had gone numb. Everyone was tired, and even the invulnerable Dr. Zayne looked frayed around the edges.
You noticed his injury, almost instantly, a falter in movement as he flexed his right wrist after signing off on a file. It was expertly hidden, but you had spent years watching him, cataloguing every subtle shift in his expression like rare meteor showers. So, of course, you caught that wince.
"Overworked?" you asked mildly, leaning against the nurses' station as he passed by.
"Repetitive strain," he responded without inflection.
You hummed. "Do you want—?"
"No."
Of course not.
Still, when he left, you disappeared into the on-call lounge, rummaging through the staff med-kit you were fairly sure only you ever used properly. Thankfully, you found what you were looking for before he returned to his office. A soft, fabric wrist support brace in neutral grey. Nothing flashy, just something to ease the tension. You placed it on his desk without expectation.
He didn't bring it up the next day, or the one after that. There was no thank-you or acknowledgement, and you assumed that he'd thrown it out.
Until three days later.
You returned from rounds to find your usual patient folders neatly stacked on your desk, and beside them—perched so innocently it took you a moment to realize it hadn't been there before—was a box of your favourite pens. The ones you hoarded like treasure and had recently, much to your dismay, run out of.
There was a Post-it stuck to the lid.
"I assumed you'd prefer the 0.38mm ones. You always complain about ink bleed."
You stared at the note, and then at the hallway beyond the glass window of your office door, where Zayne was coincidentally passing by.
You stepped out into the hall and caught up with him. "Dr. Li!"
He turned and looked at you with an arched brow.
You held up the box. "You're not subtle, you know."
His gaze shifted to the pens. "I wasn't trying to be."
"Returning the favour, were you?"
"I don't believe in unbalanced exchanges."
You laughed. "I gave you a wrist brace, not a kidney."
He didn't smile, but his voice softened just slightly. "It helped."
Your breath hitched, but you tried not to show it. "I see...well, thanks for the pens."
There was a beat of silence.
Then Zayne calmly continued. "You should pace your charting. Your handwriting deteriorates after the fourth file."
You gaped at him. "Are you analyzing my handwriting now?"
"It's just always been that way."
"Wait. Always?"
Zayne's gaze remained fixed somewhere beyond your head. "Finals, third year. You wrote so fast during the pharmacology mock that your 'f's started looking like sevens. I wasn't sure if you were prescribing medication or unlocking a bank vault."
"You..." You squinted. "You remember that?"
"It was difficult to read your notes when we shared a study table."
"You remember us sharing a table?"
Zayne tilted his head minutely. "It was the only one near the east windows. You always took the seat closest to the outlet and claimed the light helped you concentrate."
"I didn't think you paid attention to any of that."
"You assumed I was unaware of the person sitting across from me for three years?"
"I assumed you were... indifferent."
Zayne's lips twitched in an imperceptible frown. "You used to rewrite your notes three times. All in pencil, because you said pencil was less threatening when you had to re-memorize everything from scratch. You also always sat cross-legged in library chairs and collected pens from every club's fair booth."
You let out an incredulous laugh.
"And," he added, still with that maddening calmness of his, "you muttered anatomy terms in your sleep during overnight study sessions."
"You—you heard that?" you exclaimed, horrified.
"You once said 'ischiocavernosus' so many times, I thought you were casting a spell."
You buried your face in your hands, groaning. "I want to dissolve into the floor."
"You seemed very dedicated."
You peeked at him through your fingers. "That's a nice way of saying I was completely unhinged."
"Also accurate."
You shook your head, but under the mortification was something else. He had remembered, and not just a few throwaway details, but every odd little habit you thought no one ever noticed.
"Why didn't you say anything back then?"
Zayne shrugged, as if he had no response.
You had been making progress. You were almost certain of it. Not in any obvious, sweeping way—Zayne wasn't a man of dramatic gestures or sudden declarations—but in the quiet consistencies, and the way he'd started waiting a beat longer in the hallway when he saw you approaching.
You were still careful not to be greedy. You never dared ask for more. What you had was already more than you expected: acknowledgement. A place in the periphery of his otherwise closed-off world. You orbited him the way the Earth orbits the sun—at a safe, unchanging distance. Warm enough not to freeze, far enough not to burn.
That was until she appeared.
No, not appeared. That implied novelty. You doubted she was new in his life. No, she seemed important, someone who had long ago carved out a space that had never been yours to want.
The Hunter. Dazzling and alive in the way people like you rarely allowed themselves to be. She was a presence that demanded space and then owned it unapologetically. You understood immediately why he who lived so carefully might have made room for her.
You hadn't meant to see them together. You were only there to return his charger—the one he'd left at your station after overhearing you grumbling to the nurses about your broken one. You hadn't even realized he'd been listening.
When you knocked on his door and he called for you to come in, you had smiled hopefully.
Only to find her perched on the edge of his desk like she belonged there. She was laughing casually, legs crossed, one hand braced behind her as she leaned toward him. She was telling a story, something fast-paced and colourful, her hands moving animatedly. And he was...
Smiling.
Not the faint, fleeting lift of his mouth he sometimes gave you on your most persistent days. Not the polite nod of acknowledgment.
No, this was a whole half-smile. Unmistakably soft and real.
You'd never seen him look like that. Not in all the years of having known him. Not even when you had once tried to make him laugh with horrible anatomy puns.
You'd barely stepped into the room when Miss Hunter spotted you.
"Oh!" she cried delightedly. "Look at this, what a coincidence!"
You blinked, caught off guard.
She beamed. "You work here? I had no idea you were at Akso too!"
You nodded numbly. "Pediatrics."
"Right, of course, silly me. All our conversations, and I didn't think to ask you where you worked," she apologized.
"It's alright."
"She's my neighbour, you know," Miss Hunter added, turning back to Zayne like sharing a favourite secret. "I haven't seen her come home in days! I hope you're not overworking her, dearest Zayne."
You felt something inside you crack at her term of endearment. And then you felt guilty. You hadn't done anything wrong technically, but the feeling took root anyway.
Had you been pining after a taken man?
Oh god.
The thought alone made your skin prickle with shame.
You'd never so much as look at him again if that were the case. You'd pull away completely and pretend you hadn't spent the past however-many months—years, even—watching his every glance like a starving thing. You would bury your humiliation deep, fold it into some quiet compartment inside yourself, and walk away with your dignity intact.
But was Miss Hunter really with him?
You remembered her laughter echoing in your kitchen last weekend when you had finally managed to crawl home after a particularly long shift. She'd come over with refreshments, and after one too many drinks, she had begun to ramble. Her cheeks had been flushed with wine, feet up on your coffee table as she slurred names and nonsense.
"He's so frustrating," she'd said, in that melodramatic tone she took when tipsy. "Like, emotionally constipated. But god, when he lets his guard down, it's like... ugh. It ruins you. He lives on the floor right above ours—you've probably seen him around. Tall. Blue eyes. Smells amazing."
"I don't go around sniffing my neighbours," you'd deadpanned.
"Well, you're going to have to trust me on this one, then," she'd insisted. "He's from the Association. I've worked a few cases with him."
You dragged yourself out of your reverie.
Surely if she were dating Zayne, she would have said something. You were friends. Not best friends, maybe, but close enough. She told you when she hated her lipstick. When she found a new favourite song. When someone from the Hunters' Association made a pass at her.
She told you everything.
Whatever had begun to splinter inside of you deteriorated even further when Zayne finally reacted to her words.
"I hope you're not overworking her," she repeated, "or yourself, for that matter."
"I'm not her boss," he replied curtly. "She makes her own hours. Maintaining a work-life balance is one's own responsibility."
"I—well, yeah," you tried to laugh. "That's rich coming from you, Dr. Li. Pretty sure you haven't slept in three weeks."
You looked to him, searching for the usual twitch of amusement and the barely-there softness he sometimes allowed when you teased him. But he didn't look up, and his jaw tightened like he was holding back a scowl.
"I have paperwork," he declared flatly.
Your hand, still holding the charger, hovered in the space between you. You hesitated before setting it on the edge of his desk. "Right... of course, I just wanted to return this."
You didn't let yourself feel the sting until the door clicked shut behind you, and you were alone again in the hallway, blinking at the linoleum floor as if it might give you answers.
You thought you were making progress, but maybe all you had ever been was a convenience. A background hum in the routine of his life. And now, suddenly, you weren't even that.
Over the next few weeks, a new pattern emerged, one that kept chipping away at pieces of your fragile heart. Perhaps it was your fault, too. You kept returning to the scene of the damage, stupidly hoping this time it would be different, but it never was.
You kept stopping by Zayne's office, in the hopes of regaining his favour. You'd even started doing the routine errands that should have been passed off to interns or residents. You told yourself it was more efficient to do it all yourself, but really, you just wanted to catch a glimpse of those elusive hazel green eyes, even if they now looked at you with disdain.
And every time you passed by, Miss Hunter was there too. She seemed to be always in his office, no matter the time of day, even at odd hours of the night. Sometimes you'd catch sight of her perched on the window ledge with her legs tucked beneath her, and other times she was just by his desk, leaning into his space. And most miraculous of all, Zayne allowed it.
He only allowed it for her, though. While in med school, he might have allowed you to share a library table with him, these days, he seemed adamant to distance himself from you as much as possible.
You wondered if Miss Hunter was working on a project with him. You couldn't really tell the true nature of their relationship, but that had to be the only explanation as to why she was always around. On your rare days off, she still came over to your apartment to keep you company and gush about her charming coworker, so you were still under the delusion that she wasn't dating Zayne.
It was the sort of delusion that was going to hurt you one day. And that day was today.
Tonight, when you stopped by the man's office, you fully intended to pass by without lingering. That is, until you heard your name.
Miss Hunter’s amused voice floated clearly through the door. “…I swear, she’s the only person I've ever met who doesn’t hate double shifts,” she was saying, chuckling fondly. “That girl is sweet. Like dangerously sweet. Even to you, and I know you don’t exactly roll out the red carpet.”
Zayne’s response was as dry as ever. “I didn’t ask for her kindness. She’s not helping anyone by wasting time with personal errands. If she spent as much energy on her department as she does playing nursemaid, maybe the pediatrics wing would run on schedule.”
"Don't you think that's a little—"
You didn’t stay to hear the rest of Miss Hunter’s reply. You didn't care to see if she would try to defend you or join him in his condemnation. The damage was already done.
Humiliation was the only word for how you felt. Humiliation and utter defeat.
You had done nothing but your best.
Day in and day out, you poured everything you had into your work—your time, your focus, your very soul. You had held the hands of anxious parents, wiped away the tears of frightened children before anesthesia dragged them under, and taken on shifts no one else wanted. You stayed late, came early, and went without sleep. You had practically bled for this job.
And now here he was, the man you admired so diligently, cutting through you with a few harsh words spoken in private. Words that struck you like open-handed slaps across the face.
You felt sick. Like something had lodged in your throat and was refusing to budge.
So that was what he thought of you.
When he wasn’t pretending to be nice. When he wasn’t lending you his charger or leaving pens in your drawer, this is what he believed. That you were incompetent and unprofessional. That your kindness was a distraction.
Zayne hadn’t just criticized your habits. He had questioned your calibre and your right to be here.
Suddenly, you were ten years old again, sitting in the back of a classroom while a teacher shook her head at your test score. You were fifteen, being told by your guidance counsellor that maybe medicine wasn’t for someone “with your academic record.” You were seventeen, crying in the school library after your chemistry teacher told you some people just weren’t “wired for science.” You were eighteen, slumped at your mother’s kitchen table, listening to your parents whisper that maybe it was time to pick something “more realistic.”
You were every failure, every disappointment, every bruise to your spirit, and now Zayne had joined their chorus.
His anger might have been easier to swallow than his indifferent dismissal of your abilities.
And the worst part?
You didn’t think your patients were suffering. In fact, you knew they weren’t. You were a good doctor. You had earned every stitch of your white coat. The day you took your Hippocratic Oath, you had vowed to devote your entire life to it.
So why did you feel like a fraud now? Why did one man’s brutal judgment make you want to pack up and disappear?
You weren't sure how you made it back to your office without breaking down into tears, but when you finally closed the door, you sank into your chair with a sharp inhale and buried your face in your hands. You could not find it in yourself to cry, so all you could do was exist in that suffocating space where shame and grief and rage all sat too closely together.
the quiet strength of satoru gojo: why parts of the fandom underestimate the strongest
time for a deep dive into one of the most misunderstood characters in jujutsu kaisen—satoru gojo—and why the fandom's persistent framing of him in comparison to suguru geto reveals something deeply uncomfortable about how many people process strength, trauma, healing, and emotional resilience. this isn’t just about two characters. it’s about the narratives people choose to uplift, the pain they validate, and the quiet courage they ignore.
the empathy gap that drives me insane
here’s the thing that’s been gnawing at me for months: this fandom will go to wild, mental-acrobatic extremes to empathize with suguru geto. people say things like: “he was traumatized by watching his friends die,” “he was exhausted by the expectations of protecting non-sorcerers,” “he was too young to handle the burden of being powerful,” or “the system failed him and pushed him to that point.”
and listen—none of that is untrue. trauma is real. the curse of empathy is real. grief and pain can twist even the most grounded person. suguru’s fall is tragic. the world he inhabited was cruel and unrelenting. he was pushed to a breaking point. his descent into villainy wasn’t born out of malice, but anguish.
but here’s what boggles the mind: the same people who empathize with suguru’s unraveling turn around and paint satoru gojo—who endured every single one of those agonies and then some—as emotionally shallow, arrogant, naive, or even emotionally dependent on suguru to keep him human. as if satoru only had worth when filtered through suguru’s emotional lens.
the double standard is staggering. the math isn’t mathing. the logic unravels when you actually sit with it.
the uncomfortable truth about relatability
here's what i think is really happening: people empathize with suguru because his response to trauma is relatably human. giving up when things get too hard? most people have been there. choosing cruelty when the world feels endlessly cruel? they can imagine that spiral. breaking under pressure and lashing out at the world that hurt you? that's a very human-sized reaction to human-sized pain.
suguru's villain arc follows a pattern people recognize: good person faces trauma → trauma overwhelms their coping mechanisms → they break → they choose a path that hurts others. it's tragic, it's understandable, and most importantly, it's something many can see themselves potentially doing under the right (wrong) circumstances.
but satoru represents something that makes people fundamentally uncomfortable: incomprehensible resilience in the face of circumstances that should have broken him.
he had every single reason to become exactly what suguru became—isolated, bitter, convinced that non-sorcerers were beneath him, willing to burn down the system that failed him. the fact that he didn't isn't just impressive; it's almost alien in its strength.
and because many can't relate to that kind of resilience, they diminish it. they rewrite his story to make it more palatable, more human-sized. they make him dependent on suguru for his moral compass. they act like his principles came from somewhere outside himself rather than from an internal strength most people can't even comprehend.
a personal perspective: why suguru's actions are inexcusable
as someone who tends toward pessimism about the world and human nature, i find it fascinating that i can't muster even a shred of empathy for suguru's choices. i understand being disillusioned. i understand seeing the worst in people and systems. i understand feeling like everything is fucked and meaningless.
but genocide? murdering innocent people, including children? deciding that an entire group of humans deserves to die because some of them are awful? that's not a trauma response—that's a moral failing. that's choosing to become the exact kind of monster that makes the world darker.
pessimistic people often have the clearest view of how broken systems and circumstances can be, but recognizing that the world is cruel doesn't make cruelty acceptable. if anything, it should make you more determined not to add to the suffering. the fact that people can empathize with "i'm hurt so i'll hurt others" while struggling to understand "i'm hurt but i'll try to heal others" says everything about what kind of strength they can imagine themselves capable of.
satoru saw the same darkness suguru did—saw it even more clearly because of his isolation—and his response was "i'm going to try to make this better." that's not naivety. that's choosing hope as an act of defiance against despair.
the myth of suguru as satoru's moral anchor
this might be one of the most persistent misreadings in the entire fandom: the idea that suguru was responsible for satoru’s humanity. that he grounded him. saved him. kept him kind. that without him, satoru would’ve become something monstrous.
but let’s actually look at what canon—and context—shows us.
suguru's background: he had a loving family, recognition, camaraderie, a sense of purpose. people looked up to him. his morality was affirmed and echoed back.
satoru's background: born into isolation. groomed for a title, not a life. dehumanized from the moment he displayed power. forced into leadership before he was ready. no one taught him how to care—he just did, anyway.
and here’s the key difference: satoru didn’t learn restraint from suguru. he didn’t need a moral compass handed to him. this is someone who, as a literal child with godlike power, never misused it—not even out of spite. he had every reason to lash out, to fall, to become everything the world feared he would—but he didn’t. he made the choice not to. over and over. alone.
people point to lines like “should we kill them?” and treat them as some crisis of ethics, as if he was one breath away from becoming a villain. but that was a teenager processing grief and asking for a second opinion—not a boy on the edge of darkness. the fact that he even asked proves he already had the conscience people think he lacked. and when suguru fell, when he committed atrocities, when word reached satoru that his best friend had massacred an entire village—he didn’t believe it. he couldn’t. not because he was blind, but because he didn’t want to believe it was true.
that denial wasn’t proof of emotional dependence. it was grief. real, raw, deeply human grief. but grief doesn’t erase autonomy.
because here’s the truth: if satoru had truly needed suguru to stay good, then he would’ve broken right alongside him. but he didn’t. he chose to keep going. he didn’t become bitter. he didn’t turn cruel. he became a teacher. he started reforming a system everyone else accepted as immutable. he chose the future.
their bond mattered—but it wasn’t his foundation. people reduce satoru to “the boy who lost his best friend” as if that’s the most interesting thing about him, as if that one rupture defines every action after. but that flattens him. suguru was significant, yes. but significance isn’t destiny. and grief isn’t identity.
satoru's emotional arc isn’t about trying to rewrite the past. it’s about refusing to let that past define him. his love doesn’t rot into vengeance—it turns into action. he protects kids who could end up like suguru. he shoulders responsibility others run from. he teaches. he reforms. and he does it despite the pain, not because someone pulled him back from it.
he’s not a weapon on a leash, held back from destruction by a single lost friendship. he’s the one who disarms himself. every time. not because anyone taught him how—but because he wants to do better. because he knows what he’s capable of. because he cares, even when the world doesn’t care back.
so no, suguru wasn’t his moral anchor. he was a companion, once. someone who could relate to the burden. someone he loved. but satoru’s principles were never borrowed. they were born in silence, held together through loneliness, and reaffirmed with every act of kindness he chose after he lost suguru.
and that’s the kind of strength people keep refusing to see—because it's the kind they can’t imagine themselves having.
the empathy that never arrives
and that’s maybe the most frustrating part: that satoru—despite carrying more weight than anyone else in the story—rarely receives the empathy people so freely extend to others. the fandom will analyze every angle of suguru’s pain, dissect his fall, explain his choices, mourn what he became. but when it comes to satoru? the same kindness isn’t offered. people praise his power, his technique, his fights—but they rarely sit with how hard it must have been to stay soft. to keep choosing others. to keep choosing hope.
it’s like he’s too strong to be seen as vulnerable, too capable to be comforted. even fans fall into the same trap the jujutsu world did: they assume he’ll always endure, so they don’t bother asking if he’s okay. and they certainly don’t pause to understand how lonely that endurance must feel.
he never asked to be the strongest. and yet he lives every day carrying the cost of that title, quietly making the right choices when the wrong ones would be so much easier. he shows up. he gives. he believes. and still—he gets picked apart more for what he didn’t do than he gets recognized for everything he chooses to hold back.
when people say satoru gojo is emotionally shallow, or arrogant, or only human because of someone else—they’re echoing the same erasure the jujutsu higher-ups inflicted on him. they saw a weapon. fandom sees a trope. both refuse to look deeper. and maybe that’s what makes his quiet strength all the more tragic: that even now, after everything, so many still can’t find it in themselves to treat his endurance with the same empathy they give to someone who gave up.
the strength nobody wants to acknowledge
everyone talks about satoru being the strongest in terms of raw power. six eyes, infinity, hollow purple—yeah, he's op as hell. but his real strength, the one that actually defines him as a character, is something entirely different.
satoru gojo looked at a world that:
isolated him from birth
treated him as a weapon rather than a person
gave him godlike power with no guidance on how to use it responsibly
failed to protect his best friend
constantly demanded everything from him while giving nothing back
would have been perfectly fine with him becoming a tyrant as long as he protected their interests
and he said “no, i'm going to be better than this.”
not because someone taught him to be better. not because he had a strong support system. not because the world gave him reasons to hope. he chose to be better because that's who he decided to be, in the face of every circumstance that should have made him worse.
he chose to:
become a teacher who genuinely cares about his students' wellbeing and growth
work within a corrupt system to change it rather than tear it down
use his power to protect rather than dominate
maintain his sense of humor and humanity despite carrying unimaginable burdens
believe in the next generation enough to literally bet his life on them
never stop trying to save people, even people who've given up on themselves
the mischaracterization that reveals others' limitations
the way parts of this fandom consistently underestimate satoru's internal strength reveals something uncomfortable about how many people process exceptional resilience. they're so used to stories where good people are broken by bad circumstances that they don't know what to do with a character who endures and remains good anyway.
so they rewrite his story. they make him naive instead of recognizing that he chooses to see the world's potential for good despite evidence to the contrary. they make him emotionally dependent instead of acknowledging that he formed deep bonds despite having no model for healthy relationships. they make his strength into a weakness, his principles into privilege, his resilience into denial.
but here's the thing: satoru gojo spent his entire life surrounded by people who would have been perfectly fine with him becoming a monster. the zenin clan would have loved a satoru who believed in might makes right. the higher-ups would have been thrilled with a satoru who saw non-sorcerers as expendable. a corrupt system would have welcomed a corrupted strongest sorcerer with open arms.
the fact that he looked at all of that and said “i choose to be kind anyway” isn't naivety. it's not privilege. it's not emotional dependence.
it's moral strength on a level that most people can't even conceptualize, let alone replicate.
why suguru's fall makes satoru's resilience more impressive, not less
suguru had advantages satoru never did: a loving family, natural social connections, validation from others, a clear sense of purpose. and when the pressure became too much, he broke. that's human. that's understandable. that's tragic.
but it also makes satoru's resilience even more remarkable. he had fewer resources, less support, more pressure, and greater isolation. by every logical measure, he should have broken first and broken harder.
the fact that he didn't isn't a failure of the writing or a sign that his trauma wasn't “real enough.” it's evidence of a kind of internal strength that's so rare it seems almost fictional—which, ironically, is probably why it appears in fiction.
the flower quote and understanding without reciprocity
satoru once said something about being able to admire a flower without expecting it to understand you in return. it was about his relationship with regular people—how he could protect and care for them without needing them to comprehend his experience or validate his choices.
that quote encapsulates everything about his character that people miss. he didn't need others to understand his burden to make it worth carrying. he didn't need validation to know his principles were right. he didn't need reciprocity to keep giving.
most people in his world either feared him, used him, or put him on a pedestal. very few actually saw him as a complete person with his own struggles and growth. and yet he kept protecting them anyway. that's not emotional detachment—that's love so profound it doesn't require understanding to exist.
the love that bears the unbearable
satoru himself said that “love is the most twisted curse of all,” but his entire character arc is proof that love—not romantic love, but love for humanity, for the future, for people who will never know his name—is also the only force strong enough to bear the unbearable.
he loved his students enough to die for the possibility of their future. he loved the world enough to keep protecting it even when it gave him nothing but pain in return. he loved the idea of change enough to work within a system he could have easily destroyed.
that kind of love doesn't come from external validation or support systems. it comes from a depth of character that's almost incomprehensible in its strength.
recognizing true strength when you see it
as someone who naturally tends toward cynicism about human nature and the world's capacity for good, i find satoru's character deeply moving precisely because his hope isn't naive—it's defiant. he sees the darkness clearly and chooses light anyway. he understands how cruel people can be and decides to be kind anyway. he knows the system is broken and works to fix it anyway.
that's not the behavior of someone who doesn't understand pain or hasn't experienced trauma. that's the behavior of someone who has looked directly into the abyss and decided not to become it.
people who truly understand satoru gojo recognize that his greatest power was never his cursed technique—it was his refusal to let the world's darkness consume his capacity for love. that's a strength so rare and so valuable that it deserves to be seen and celebrated, not diminished or rewritten to fit more comfortable narratives about how people respond to pain.
the real tragedy
the real tragedy isn't that suguru fell—though that is tragic. the real tragedy is that satoru spent his entire life being misunderstood, even by people who claimed to care about him. he was seen as a weapon by his enemies, a tool by the system, and apparently, according to large portions of this fandom, as incomplete without the person who ultimately chose to become everything he stood against.
satoru gojo deserved to be seen for what he actually was: not just the strongest sorcerer, but one of the strongest people to ever exist in any story. his power was never his most impressive trait. his most impressive trait was that he had every reason to become a monster and chose to be a protector instead.
conclusion: putting respect on his name
satoru gojo might be overrated in powerscaling discussions, but he's criminally underrated in character analysis. large portions of this fandom will write thesis-length posts about why various morally gray characters deserve sympathy and understanding, but somehow can't extend that same analytical energy to recognizing the almost supernatural level of moral fortitude it took for satoru to become who he was.
his greatest strength was never infinity or six eyes. his greatest strength was looking at a world designed to corrupt him and choosing love anyway. choosing hope anyway. choosing to believe in others anyway.
if that's not the most powerful character writing in the series, then people are reading different stories.
it's time for more people to stop underestimating satoru gojo's heart and start recognizing it as the most impressive thing about him. because in a world full of characters who break under pressure, he stands as proof that sometimes—rarely, miraculously—people can endure the unendurable and come out kinder instead of crueler.
and that's a kind of strength that deserves more respect than certain parts of this fandom have ever given it.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x reader
Summary: Aaron had always valued the truth above all else. But sometimes the truth isn't enough.
Warnings: home invasion, murder (self-defence), cm-typical cases, references to foyet arc and haley's death, aaron was mean, grovelling, complicated relationships, lots of angst
Words: 4.7K
Masterlist | Part 1
a/n: omg, i'm so sorry for leaving you all hanging! i genuinely forgot ab this with exams and everything. but thank you so much for all the love! it means the world. lmk if you want a part 3!
Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
"Hotch."
Aaron looked from the papers haphazardly placed across the table, seeing Morgan standing in the threshold. "Yes?"
Derek nodded his head outward. "Garcia's on the line. We've got a lead."
He was up before Derek could finish his sentence, following him out of the makeshift office and into the conference room where the rest of the team sat.
"Go ahead, babygirl."
Garcia's voice crackled to life from the receiver on the table. "Okay, so after some deep, deep sleuthing, I have found that the victims do all indeed have something in common. Each of them has been involved in a court case, specifically domestic disputes, that kind of thing. Andrew Sykes was a character witness in a rape trial, Maya Zhao the plaintiff in another, and Carson Williams the accused. The only reason Carson's name didn't come up immediately is because his record was expunged—he was a minor at the time."
Emily raised her hand into the air, her eyebrows scrunching together. "Wait, wait, wait. So the unsub is targeting just random people who've been involved in rape cases?"
Reid tilted his head. "Garcia, what was the outcome of each case?"
"Um..." she paused, her keyboard clacking. "The first case with Sykes was dismissed, Maya's rapist was found guily, and Carson was found... not guilty."
"Guys, what if the unsub doesn't just choose his targets because they're involved? What if he's choosing them because he thinks they're lying?"
JJ raised a brow. "Lying about the crime?"
"Yes! What if that's the link? Not because of the lives they lead but the choices they made?"
"That would explain the overkill," Rossi added. "If the unsub believes the victims are disingenuous, ruining people's lives, then that may be his justification for taking them."
Hotch nodded, going over the details in his head before he agreed. "We're ready to give the profile. Thank you, Garcia."
"You got it." A click resounded, signalling the call was over. Similarly, everyone cleared the room, slowly filtering out.
Emily was the last one in the room, appearing to be grabbing her files before setting them down on the table once everyone was gone. "Hotch."
He stopped turning halfway through, turning to give her his attention. While he expected curiosity on her face, what he didn't expect was the pure inquisitiveness, if not interrogation, that he saw.
"What's going on with Y/N?"
He had to stop himself from intaking a breath, but he knew even that was futile. Emily was nothing if not a great profiler, and she had taken to profiling him very well. When he saw the curiosity on her face start to resemble accusation, he knew that he gave something away, anyway.
Before he could even think of anything to say, she continued, "She hasn't been to work in days. She says she's sick, but... you haven't called her once to check in on her. And normally you call her all the time when she's in perfect health." She tilted her head in a way that felt like a challenge and then repeated herself. "What's going on?"
Hotch's first instinct was to defend himself, even though Emily didn't know anything about what happened. He could explain it, but then what would he say? That he told you that you weren't Jack's mother? That he called you an accessory? That he was cruel?
He implied that you weren't a member of this team. But the way Emily was searching for information told him otherwise.
This wasn't a case. He couldn't lay out all the facts and present it to jury. And he couldn't coldly tear you down like you were a defendant in need of prosecution.
But you did, his mind echoed. You already did that.
He wished he didn't.
He stopped avoiding Emily's eyes, and he told the best truth he could tell at that moment. "We got into an argument," No, he berated you. "and we haven't spoken since. I've been... trying to give her space."
Emily looked as though she were mentally calculating what he could've said to warrant so much space. But if he told the full truth, the honest truth, then she would know that he created a distance between you that he didn't know how to bridge.
"Hotch—" she paused like she was debating whether or not to speak her mind. "Don't take this the wrong way, because I'm saying this with the utmost respect. But you have a great thing with a great person." She let her words soak in before delivering the final blow. "Don't mess it up."
Hotch didn't need to respond to that, and Emily didn't need to say anything else, leaving the room right after. He already messed up a marriage, and she knew that. She was there when he received the divorce papers. So were you. Yet you let him fall in love with you anyway, and you loved him back with everything you had.
But at that moment, he felt like he didn't deserve any of it.
—
Standing in the police station's bullpen, Aaron's fingers hovered over his keyboard, twitching with uncertainty. He didn't know what to type.
He was good with words. He sent people to prison with compelling arguments. He co-wrote the textbook on hostage negotiation. He didn't need Reid's lexicon to know he was good with words. But maybe it would help with knowing what to say to you.
There were too many things to apologize for, and not enough variations of the word sorry to account for any of it. Sorry didn't hold enough weight.
But it was all he could think of that was acceptable to say over text, and Emily was right: he couldn't afford to mess this up.
So he started typing, starting with an absolute truth before he said anything else.
I love yo—
Garcia's contact filled his screen, interrupting his message. He sighed, and then immediately felt guilty about it. He had three victims and the potential for more. The case had to be his focus, not his wrongdoings, no matter how wrong they were.
He accepted the call, pressing the phone to his ear and getting straight to the point. "Have you found anyone in connection with the three court cases?
"No! Well, yes, but no, that's not what I'm calling about. Sir—" Garcia cut herself off with something that sounded like a sob.
Hotch furrowed his brows. "Garcia?"
"Hotch. Some— something happened." Garcia took a deep breath. "It's Y/N."
Hotch felt his world stop. All time and reason and logic ceased to exist. All he could hear were Penelope's words, playing on a loop like a broken record he never wanted to hear.
It's Y/N.
Just like that, the earth started spinning again, making bile rise in the back of his throat. "What happened?"
From the corner of his eye, he could just barely see the team looking up at him. He couldn't really pay attention to it.
When the silence went on too long, he repeated himself. Sharply. "Garcia. What happened?"
"There— there was a break-in at— at your house." Hotch's heart dropped to the bottom of his stomach. No. No, no, no— "Jack is fine, he's completely unharmed, but Y/N—" Garcia's sobbing cut her off once more.
"Where is she?"
"Bethesda, at Suburban Hospital."
"I'm on my way there right now." Hotch immediately hung up. When he looked up, he found expectant faces staring back at him.
Rossi broke the silence. "Aaron?"
Hotch didn't waste another second. "My house was broken into. Y/N's been—" He didn't even know. He wasn't sure if he wanted to know. "Y/N's in the hospital. I need to leave."
Everyone was quick to rise to their feet. "What?" Morgan's voice cut through the air. "Hotch, we can't just stay here. This is Y/N we're talking about."
Hotch had completely forgotten about the case, but it was brought right back to his mind. "No, you have to. This is still an active case—"
"Your house was broken into. You don't call that an active case?"
"It is. But we can't all leave. Garcia has another update, call her back and find out what it was." He didn't stay any longer than that, leaving the room without another word.
He stormed past officers gazing at him curiously. He couldn't bring himself to care about any of it.
He threw open the door to the SUV, the keys nearly falling out of his hands for how badly they were shaking.
You aren't needed.
"Aaron!"
Hotch wouldn't have heard the calling of his own name if the car door hadn't opened, startling him. He looked over, seeing Rossi get in the passenger seat.
"Dave—"
Rossi appeased, "It's alright. I left Morgan in charge. Told the others to update me and I'd update them. Now, let's go."
If Hotch had the will or the energy to argue, he would've. But all he could think about was you. The same you he callously tore down without care for your feelings. The same you who said yes without thinking twice when he proposed. The same you who could be in any condition right now, not knowing how much he loved you.
So, he just nodded. He started the car, squeezing the wheel so hard his knuckles turned white to stop his hands from shaking, praying that you were okay.
He prayed that you knew the truth. Unsent messages and unsaid words.
I love you.
—
When Aaron got some of his wits back, he realized he had to call Garcia. It was stupid to sit on the jet without knowing how you were.
You were shot. While protecting his son.
Your son.
Sharp words echoed through his head, words he knew would cut deep and said them anyway. Now you were the one bleeding in an operating room while he was still hours away, and the distance between you had never been so large.
You are not his mother!
"Aaron."
Hotch looked up, finding Rossi staring at him with concern swirling in his eyes. Whatever he was going to say to comfort him wouldn't work. This wasn't something Hotch could be consoled over.
"She's going to okay," Dave reassured. He looked like he truly believed it, but Aaron knew the importance in not making promises you couldn't keep. "She shot the guy back—put a bullet right between his eyes. Whose influence do you think she got that from?"
Aaron sighed. He taught you how to shoot a gun. But he may as well have been the one to pull the trigger. "It's my fault, Dave. If I had never left her there—"
"She still would've gone home, Aaron."
"No, you don't understand. I left her." Aaron met his eyes, even though Rossi's figure started to blur. "I left her, and I—" he cut himself off, swallowing harshly.
He couldn't even believe that he said it. Before this, he couldn't have imagined a world where he said any of it.
You were his world. You and Jack were his family. But he made you feel like you weren't part of it at all.
Dave cocked his head. "Something happened between you two," he stated. Not a question.
Aaron swallowed a second time. "Yes."
He almost thought Rossi would ask him what happened, but he did the opposite. He only sighed. "Look, Aaron. I don't know what happened between you, or what you said that has you ruminating so deeply. But whatever happened, you have to know that it is not your fault that this happened to her."
"Dave—"
Rossi waved his hands in the air. "No, I don't really care for whatever illogical, self-deprecating argument you have right now. She wouldn't, either." He sat up straighter in the seat across from him, leaning forward. "What you need to think about right now is the fact that she's okay. That is what you need to believe. She shot this asshole, and we'll figure out who he is as soon as we touch down. You can apologize later. But she is okay, Aaron."
Were you, though? Even if you were physically okay—which he had no way of knowing—were you okay mentally? What about your relationship?
Another lifetime ago, Hotch could remember a relationship with a wife who grew to resent him. The image of her body sprawled across the ground was etched into his memory.
He closed his eyes, and when he reopened them, he was blinking tears away. "This has happened before, Dave."
Rossi didn't have any real response. Quietly, he said, "I know." He remembered just as well as Aaron, just as well as everyone else.
No one had ever forgotten.
—
By the time Hotch and Rossi got to the hospital, it was already dark out. Rossi insisted that he be the one to drive. Hotch was getting out of the car before it'd even fully stopped.
Garcia already told him what floor to go to. She was there when he came running out of the elevator.
She quickly stood up. "Sir—"
"How is she?" He was out of breath.
"I-I don't know. She's still in the OR. They— they've been in there a while, but no one has been out to update me yet— oh, God. Oh, God, I hope she's okay."
Hotch ran a hand through his hair. You were still in surgery. He didn't know what that meant.
He couldn't think about it. If he thought about it, then—
"Jack?"
"Oh! Yes, um, he's with Jessica. They were here but I told them to head home. I'm so sorry, I didn't even think— of course, you would want to see him. I can—"
"No, that's okay," he assured, even though it looked more like he was assuring himself. "He should be in a place that's familiar to him right now." Oh, his poor boy. His poor, sweet boy had seen enough blood to last a lifetime. Hotch couldn't help but think that Jack already lost a mother once; he couldn't lose one again.
You are not his mother.
He released a shaky breath, then tried to school his expression. "Okay, what do we know about the unsub?"
Garcia's eyes widened. "Everything! I have him dead to rights, Sir." Without reading from a screen, she recited, "Forensics ID'd him as Joshua Lawrence—"
Hotch cut her off, recognition flashing in his brain. "Lawrence?"
"Yes, Sir. Lawrence was the unsub in a murder case you prosecuted back in '94. Went to prison for life after being charged with second degree murder of his girlfriend when he was 16. He was just released on good behaviour 2 days ago."
The pit in Hotch's stomach deepened. His voice was grave. "And so he wanted to punish me by going after my family."
Penelope winced, not for the first time since their conversation started. "Yes, Sir. And he's dead now." For some reason, that didn't make Hotch feel all that better. His family was still paying for his sins. Jobs he had. Deals he didn't take.
Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
"For Y/N Y/L/N?"
Both Aaron and Penelope turned around in quick speed. A doctor in blue scrubs stood before them, a scrub cap still sitting atop her head. Aaron stopped breathing. He barely even noticed Rossi coming to stand beside him.
But he was the head of the BAU, and he could spot the doctor's cool expression a mile away. So the weight on his chest felt lighter before she even said a word.
"I'm Dr. Reyes. Ms. Y/L/N is stable. We removed the bullet, and she should make a full recovery. There were some complications during surgery. The bullet knicked a major artery, but we were able to replace the area with a graft. She is incredibly lucky," she emphasized. "If the police hadn't been called at the time they were, the outcome could have been entirely different."
Aaron let out a breath of relief while Rossi asked the questions he didn't have the mind to ask. "How long will she be in recovery?"
"I'd like to monitor her here for about a week," Reyes replied. "She's resting right now in room 305, but I can allow one of you in there."
Finally, Aaron could speak. "Thank you, Dr. Reyes." He couldn't truly put his appreciation into words.
Reyes nodded, and then she turned and walked away. Rossi and Garcia immediately turned back to him. "Well? What are you waiting for? Go see her," the former urged.
Hotch hesitated, much unlike the man his team was used to and much unlike the man he was used to. He masked it with careful redirection. Turning to Garcia, he asked, "Where are we with the case?"
The blonde was wiping mascara from beneath her eyes, looking confused for half a second before realization dawned on her. "Oh, um, the case has been solved, Sir. Stenographer Albert Brown was the culprit; Morgan et al. pursued him just an hour ago. They should be wrapping up at the station now."
Hotch nodded. "Good."
Tiredly, she added, "Would've found him sooner if we'd made the connection between the cases earlier. Y/N/N had a hard time with that one record since it was expunged and all—"
Hotch's brows furrowed. "Y/N? She hasn't been to work."
Garcia's glasses suddenly fell back to her nose, her eyes widening in a way that told them both she'd said more than she meant to. "Right," she whispered. "Right, she hasn't. Except— she has. She comes in right after dropping off Jack and leaves when it's time to pick him up."
Despite the way the words rapidly tumbled out of her mouth, Aaron understood every word. You were still coming into work. Doing the job without receiving any credit for it. Even after what he said to you. Not only that, but you were staying with Jack like it was your top priority, even though you were working.
If Aaron hadn't felt sick before, he surely felt sick now.
Rossi was looking at him like he was a ticking time bomb set to explode, Garcia bracing herself for the impact.
Hotch cleared his throat. "I'm going to see her now," he informed them. Neither of them said another thing as he walked in your direction.
But deep down, he didn't feel like he deserve to see you at all.
—
When you opened your eyes, the first thing you did was close them again. The light was too much, and your eyelids felt as though they were being weighed down.
The dull throbbing in your abdomen made you open your eyes again, looking down to see your body covered in a hospital gown atop a hospital bed. For a second, you were confused, until the memories hit you like a train.
Doorknob. Gun. Man. Blood.
You took in a sharp breath, which made the pain worse. As if the noise had triggered it, movement started to your left.
You turned your head, seeing a man in a suit sitting in the chair beside your bed. Light streamed in from the curtains, highlighting his brown hair. And although you couldn't see his face right away, you only knew one man who would sleep in an uncomfortable chair in a suit.
Aaron.
He rubbed at his eyes, and you deduced that he must've been there for a while. When his eyes were no longer obscured by his hands, they locked with yours. You watched them soften in real time.
Quietly, he said, "Hi."
Your heart squeezed. "Hi—" your voice broke into a cough. Aaron was quick to grab the water at the side table, guiding the straw into your mouth. The water felt cool travelling down your throat, but you couldn't stop the way your face warmed.
Aaron put the water back when you signalled you were done, and then he stood there awkwardly. Under different circumstances, you would've found it cute. But how could soft eyes and gestures mean anything to you when you could still remember the hardened scowl on his face before he left?
You don't know how long the silence lasted before he spoke. "Y/N—"
"Can I see Jack?" You didn't mean to cut him off, not really, but it was instinctual. You didn't know what Aaron was going to say, but you knew you didn't want to hear it yet.
Aaron's shoulders deflated, but he didn't say anything in protest. "Yes, of course." He nodded—to you or himself, you weren't sure. "I'll go call Jessica now."
Aaron left the room, phone in hand. As soon as he was out of the room, you sighed to yourself. At the sight of your engagement ring glinting in the light, you screwed your eyes shut once more.
Not a mother. Not a team-member.
Were you still a fiancé?
—
"Y/N!"
At the sight of a blonde flurry of hair rushing your way, you smiled wider than you'd smiled in days. You laughed, despite the fact that it made your stomach hurt. "Jackers."
Jack rushed the side of your bed, only stopped by his father's voice. "Easy, Jack." The smile on your face faltered slightly at the sound, glancing at Aaron standing in the doorway. His eyes were fixed on his son. "Remember what we said, okay? Y/N's been hurt, so you have to be gentle." He glanced at you momentarily during the explanation, looking strained.
"Yes, Daddy. I know." After his confirmation, Jack's attention was back on you, concern colouring his features. "Are you okay, Y/N?"
You softened at the serious look on his face. Aaron used to joke that he was all Haley, but that look was purely him. "Yes, I'm fine, buddy," you lied. "Don't worry about me."
Jack didn't look like he believed you. You didn't blame him. "Are you sure? There was a lot of blood."
You took a deep breath. In your peripheral vision, you could see Aaron take a step forward, but you collected yourself before he could say anything. "I know. And I'm really sorry you had to see that." You blinked away the tears welling in your eyes. "You did very good, Jack. Listening to me and calling the police."
Jack's grin stretched from ear to ear. "I did?" he echoed.
You nodded, smiling back at him. "You did. Thank you."
"I'm just glad you're okay, Mommy." Your breath hitched, but Jack looked none the wiser. If you dared to glance at Aaron, you would see him in the same speechless state. As if he didn't just turn your world upside down, Jack followed up, "Can I come lay with you?"
This time, Aaron intervened. "Jack—"
"Of course, sweetheart. You can come sit right here." You moved over on the bed, ignoring the ache altogether. And for the first time since Jack entered the room, you looked directly at Aaron, silently asking him with your eyes to help him onto the bed.
The cautious look in his eyes told you he disagreed with you, but he still walked over and helped Jack up, anyway, carefully placing him on the bed. You immediately wrapped your arm around him as he settled into your side. The feeling calmed you down more than the morphine pumping through your veins.
Jack yawned, prompting you to ask, "Do you want a bedtime story?" He nodded fervently, despite whining that he was 'too old' for that now, causing you to giggle. Running a hand through his hair, you started, "Okay. Once upon a time, there was a princess, hiding away in a tower. You see, it wasn't safe outside. Someone had captured the sun and made it so dark outside that she couldn't leave. So she waited, and waited, and waited for the day the sun would return. And one day, her saviour came. A knight arrived, and he courageously fought the sun thief. He was scared, too, but he was brave enough to do what was right. And so, the next day, the princess watched the sun rise for the first time after so much darkness." Your voice lowered as Jack's eyes fluttered closed. "She thanked the knight for bringing her light back to her, and everyone in the land lived happily ever after."
You caressed Jack's hair as he fell asleep, smiling at the sight, even as your eyes burned. You didn't know if this story would have the happily ever after you wanted it to.
Aaron's voice penetrated the silence, reminding you that he was there. "I told the team to come back tomorrow once you've gotten more rest." He was quiet, mindful of Jack.
"That's good," you responded.
"They were really worried about you." Pause. "I was really worried about you."
You sighed. "Aaron—"
"I'm sorry." He sat down in the chair beside you, desperately trying to meet your eyes. "I was spiteful and purposelessly cruel. I had no right to be angry, and I should not have said any of the things I did."
When you finally met his eyes, a tear fell down your cheek. "But you said them."
"I didn't mean them," he disputed, begging you to believe him. "Everything I said was untrue."
"No." A humourless chuckle left you. "I'm an accessory. Garcia doesn't need me to excel at her job, and the BAU certainly doesn't need me for anything she can't already do." Aaron opened his mouth to protest, but you continued, more tears falling from your eyes. "And I'm not Jack's mother. He's tired, and he slipped earlier, but that doesn't make me his mom."
"Y/N—"
"But Aaron," your voice cracked. "Even though I am not Jack's mother, he is my son. And you have to know that."
"Y/N." Aaron reached out for your left hand, engulfing it in both of his. If your eyes weren't so blurry, you would've seen the tears in his eyes, too. "You have raised Jack for over half of his life. You are his mother. I wouldn't take that from either of you. I'm sorry for ever implying otherwise. And I'm sorry for implying that you weren't a part of the team. Garcia told me how you linked the victims together while only being there 6 hours out of the day. You are the reason that case was just solved. You are an integral member of the BAU, and I took that for granted."
"No, Hotch, you don't get it." Hurt flashed across his face at the name, but you held your resolve. "You didn't just imply that I wasn't a part of the team. You implied that we weren't a team, and that is what killed me inside." You ripped your hand from his, but it didn't escape either of you that you then used your other hand to wipe away your tears.
Aaron swallowed, letting his hand fall to the mattress. "We are a team. You're the love of my life." Even he could hear how he was grasping at straws.
Lightly, you shook your head, staring back at him with a pitiful smile. Pity for him. Pity for yourself. "You didn't make me feel that way."
A sense of inevitability settled over the room. Aaron's gaze was drawn to the ring on your finger before he looked back up at you. "I will spend the rest of my life proving it to you if you let me," he promised. You both understood it for what it was: a plea.
"I know." No tears fell this time, despite the lump lodged in your throat. Just above a whisper, you put forward, "Just give me time, okay?"
Aaron didn't respond immediately, but you could see the shift in his eyes. Not quite the look of a man who lost, but not quite the look of a man who won.
"Okay," he whispered back.
You thanked him, going back to caressing Jack's hair. The silence was less loud now, punctuated by the truth.
Your story with Aaron didn't start with Once Upon a Time. And it didn't end with Happily Ever After.
But you ended with the truth. And that's all you asked of him.
additional a/n: thank u all for ur kind words! i basically tagged u if u commented or reblogged (tysm for supporting!). lmk if you'd like to be removed from the taglist for this series! also, many of ur tags aren't working, and i don't know why! they're underlined on my screen, but when i leave edit mode, half the tags aren't working anymore. if anyone has any insight, pls let me know.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x reader
Summary: You have five simple truths. But when your relationship and your life are put on the line, you start to question what you believe in anymore.
Warnings: reader is a bau tech analyst, serious angst, aaron is being mean, big argument, mentions of haley's death, references to foyet arc, home invasion, graphic descriptions of violence
Words: 3.5K
Masterlist
a/n: there will be a part 2.
1. Aaron doesn't yell at you.
If all else was unsure, then this was one of the five things you knew for certain. You weren't sure if he yelled at all. Maybe at work with criminals, but never with you.
This was still true.
Right now, he wasn't yelling at you. He was speaking in an even tone, but you knew him well enough to notice the difference. His voice was as cold as his rigid stance, like ice ran through his veins. His arms were crossed, and so, even if you weren't a criminal—even if you knew you were his fiancé—you sure as hell felt like one.
Standing on the other side of the kitchen island, you were in opposition of each other in every sense of the word.
You took a deep breath before speaking. "Aaron—"
He cut you off before the words could even leave your mouth. "We've had this conversation before. I've already told you how I feel about it."
You repressed the urge to take another breath, knowing he was a profiler. Knowing he could profile the discomfort all over you, regardless. But you picked up a few profiling tricks, too.
You could see the way he was staring at you. Like you were an idiot.
Maybe you agreed on that.
Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot—
You took the breath, anyway. "Aaron, I said I'm sorry."
You tried to step closer to him, and he didn't move away. But he didn't usher you into his arms, either.
And despite the fact that Aaron doesn't yell at you, you could tell he really wanted to.
"And I'm saying you shouldn't have to say sorry. We shouldn't be having this conversation because you shouldn't have done it," he scolded.
You took another step closer, rounding the counter like your body was trying to get him to physically understand, to remind him that you were on the same side.
"What was I supposed to do?" Your voice was desparate now, almost like you actually wanted him to answer. "You were working. I had to work. You weren't picking up the phone—"
"That's right," he cut you off again. This time, he stepped closer to you. "I was working. You weren't."
2. You have an equal relationship.
The second truth was what had you tilting your head. You were already flushed from the heat of the argument, but now you could feel yourself getting a little angry.
"What do you mean I wasn't working?" you questioned. "Yes, I was. Garcia said you called everyone in; you said to get there stat."
He was quick. "I meant everyone that was necessary. You aren't."
You could feel the cut immediately, etched deep into your skin. It didn't matter how he said it, frivolous or not—the words were sharp enough to cut you effortlessly.
You aren't necessary.
The words echoed through your head. Words you'd heard before, but never from him. Never from the man who swore to be better than everyone else who ever hurt you.
Yet, no matter how much you'd been hurt in the past, it hurt a thousand times more to come from him.
You waited for him to say something else, waiting for any sign of regret to cross his face.
Nothing did.
There were many times when you wished you had Aaron's poker face, but right now, you didn't have to try. The sadness flooding your body remained internal; the only thing that showed on your face was rage.
Your eyes narrowed. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
Hotch doubled down, staring you right in the eye. "It means your job is an accessory. Garcia does the same job as you—you aren't needed."
That was a lie so blatant it made you scoff. You were a technical analyst for the BAU, and you'd proven yourself time and time again. Hotch was the one that hired you—he's the one that said he saw something in you.
Apparently not.
"I'm not needed," you echoed, sarcasm lacing your voice. "Right. So when an alert comes out that there is an active hostage situation and a potential terrorist threat, what do you expect me to do? Not come into work?"
"Yes," he deadpanned. "Not when you're picking up my son."
You ran a hand through your hair, stuck in disbelief. "You can't be serious—"
"When you're picking up my son, what I expect is for you to take him home."
You spoke over him, countering, "I brought him to a place where I knew he'd be out of harm's way. You weren't picking up the phone. I did what I thought was best—"
"You brought him to Jessica—"
"I brought him to his aunt—"
For the first time since the conversation started, Aaron raised his voice just enough for it to stop you dead in your tracks. "You don't get to bring him to his aunt. You are not his mother!"
3. You are not Jack's mother.
You knew that. God, you knew that. You were there to see the carnage in the Hotchner household after Haley's death. The blood that splattered the walls. The boy who was too young to spell the word devastation but still felt it in his bones.
You knew you were not Jack's mother. You lived in a house with her pictures on the wall. Jack was a mirror image of her; he was her son, and you knew that. It was one of the truths you held the most conviction in.
It was the truth.
But you still recoiled, almost like Aaron had slapped you. A part of you thought maybe that would've hurt less.
All the fire you had was extinguished. You didn't have a rebuttal for that. What could you say? It didn't matter if you loved Jack like he was your own—that didn't change the fact that he wasn't.
You avoided Aaron's gaze, choosing to stare at the pattern of his tie instead and trying not to succumb to the sting in your eyes. You liked this tie; it was one of your favourites. You were close enough to him to see all its beautiful details.
But, at the same time, you'd never been further away from him.
Aaron still hadn't said anything, and out of fear that the dam would break if the silence continued, you spoke up. "I—" your voice cracked. "I know I'm not Jack's mother, and I'm not trying to be." You paused. "I was just doing what I thought was best."
You left it there, not knowing if the right words to say the right thing even existed. Saying the right thing was always Aaron's thing, not yours.
But whatever words he was going to say were cut off by the shrill pinging of a cellphone. Two cellphones.
Aaron picked up his first, sighing immediately. You didn't have to guess what it said. "We have another case." The heat in his voice was gone; he sounded like himself.
That didn't mean you felt any less burned.
"Okay, um—" you couldn't stop yourself from sniffling even if you tried. "I'll stay here and watch Jack. You go."
Another sigh left him. "Y/N—"
The sound of your name leaving his mouth almost made you cry, but you persisted, "No, you can go, it's fine." You chuckled if not just to make light of it for yourself. "I'm not needed there, anyway."
"Y/N."
"Aaron." You fingally looked up at him, and you saw it. Remorse swirling in his brown eyes. The same eyes that crinkled at the sides when you said you'd marry him. Somehow, that made it worse, knowing that it was the same person who said both of those things. Who built you up from scratch just to bring you right back to the bottom.
You repeated yourself, "Go." The team needs you, you wanted to say. The only reason you didn't say it was because he'd already accused you of trying to be his past wife; you didn't need to prove him right.
You could practically hear the churning of his inner turmoil, torn between staying and leaving. It was pointless; you both knew what his decision would be.
When he reached for his go-bag, it was final. And in some ways, he was leaving more than just the house.
As if he could sense that, he turned around. "We'll finish this discussion when I'm back," he said. That was an anchor: telling you something about the present by talking about the future. When I'm back meant that he'd be back. Discussion meant you had something to talk about, a two-sided activity. We meant you were still one unit; you were still a we.
Maybe that's what he meant by it. If you scoured through his words and read between the lines, maybe you'd find the beginnings of an apology—in his own way, at least. But he wasn't sorry, not for what he said. If anything, he was only sorry that he said it.
You wouldn't profile him and ascribe meaning to words that didn't mean anything. We'll finish this discussion when I'm back meant you'd finish the discussion when he was back.
When you replied, that was what you were replying to. "Okay."
You weren't okay.
This wasn't okay.
Aaron cast one last look at you before he crossed the threshold. You looked away.
And then he was out the door, leaving you in a house that no longer felt like your own.
—
"Y/N, my love, I thought I'd die without you!"
Penelope was on you as soon as you walked into the bat cave, shooting up from her chair and hugging you so tightly that you would've thought you'd been gone for ages. Really, you were only gone for a night.
You told Aaron that you wouldn't be coming in, and you were holding true to that, but you weren't gonna make Garcia work alone if she had to, even if she was perfectly capable of it.
You knew you weren't needed. Hotch was right: this ship could sail just fine without you. But you could help.
You'd just dropped Jack off at school, so now you were here, ready to work until you had to pick him up again.
You forced yourself to laugh at her words, causing her to hit your back. "No, I'm being serious! You're my oxygen—I can't live without you."
At that, you snorted. "Okay, Penelope."
She pulled back, resting her hands on your shoulders. "Seriously, though." She looked deep into your eyes, seeming to be looking for something. "Are... are you okay? I don't even think you've taken a sick day since... since forever."
You smiled at her exaggeration, even if it didn't really reach your eyes. "Yeah, I'm fine, P. I just have to leave early to go get Jack, and um... I'm gonna stay off camera today. And off the phones." You shifted your weight. "Not like it matters or anything, but I just don't really want Hotch knowing I'm here. I just want to stay in the background today, if that's okay?"
Her brows raised, but she quickly affirmed, "Yes, that's okay! Totally okay. We'll keep this 100% incognito."
It was in Garcia's nature to ask questions, so you knew she had them, but she didn't voice a single one.
You talked about work, and new bureau technology, and your next girls night, and everything but what you asked of her.
You'd never been more grateful.
—
It'd been two days since the team left, two days of bouncing back and forth between the office and back home with Jack. The son that wasn't really yours. The son that felt like yours, anyway.
If you were doing as good as you thought you were, then nobody knew you were even there. Garcia was telling the rest of them that you were sick. Your phone had been flooded with get well soon messages from everyone except the one person you really wanted one from.
Aaron hadn't spoken to you since he left. You wished it didn't hurt as badly as it did.
"Okay, Jackers! I think it's time we head to bed."
"What?" You held back a laugh at the incredulity in his voice, knowing that—for an 8 year old—this was a very serious matter. He looked at you with traces of shock, somehow looking everything and nothing like his father at the same time. "But it's only ten o'clock!"
"Ah, and yet it is still past your bed time. Mine, too."
Jack frowned—and there it was. There was that bit of Aaron you were looking for. "You say that, but you're just going to stay up after I go to sleep."
You couldn't suppress the smile on your face any longer. "No, Jack. I promise you I'm so tired, I'll be out as soon as my head hits the pillow." You ruffled his hair, your smile becoming a grin as he groaned. "Now go brush your teeth, little man."
Jack got up from the table, his little feet pitter-pattering across the floor as he made his way to the stairs. It didn't sound much like a pitter-patter anymore now that he was getting older, but he would always be the same little boy to you. So, "pitter-patter" it was.
Until suddenly, you heard a different noise.
Not pitter-patter.
The door.
Your eyes darted to Jack as he stopped in his tracks, then they darted to the door. The knob, turning lightly, gold glinting in the light. The sound of your own heart beating was just as loud as the turning. The person got impatient, the knob turning faster now, like someone was trying to pry it open.
Fuck. Fuck.
Your mind ran a mile a minute. That wasn't Hotch. You weren't expecting anyone, and whoever was at the door certainly wasn't asking for an invite in.
They were trying to force their way in.
Somebody was breaking in to the house.
With that realization, you were moving. "Jack." You caught his attention easily, spotting the fear on his face right away. More than fear.
Familiarity.
He went through his before. Oh, your Jack. He'd been through this before, and he would know what to do. You did.
Conversations with Aaron flashed through your head, just-in-case scenarios, if then statements. Emergencies.
You knew what to do, too.
You just never thought you'd have to.
You grabbed onto Jack's shoulder, immediately feeling how his body was trembling. "Jack, I need you to listen to me." The knob got louder. You lowered your voice. "I need you to work the case, okay? Like with your dad. Do you understand me?"
His eyes went wide. "Wait, Y/N. What about you—"
"Jack. Do you understand me?" He went quiet, and then he nodded, making you sigh in relief. "Okay, take my phone. Call 911, but don't make a sound." You handed him the phone, and then you let go of him. "I love you." Your throat closed up. "Now go."
Jack ran up the stairs, and you were up automatically, trusting he'd do as you said.
It was like someone else was in your body, telling you what to do. You opened the pantry, looking where you'd never looked and typing numbers into a keypad you'd never touched.
Why do we need a safe in the kitchen? you had laughed at the time.
In case of an emergency, Aaron had said. You thanked his forward thinking.
The only way you knew that you were still there was by the violent shaking of your hands as the cool metal touched your skin. You'd only ever operated a gun once or twice. Did you even remember how to load it?
The door banged, making you jolt. You had to remember now. Come on, Y/N. Load the fucking gun.
You thrusted the magazine into the well and then pulled back the slide. Another bang. You turned the safety off.
Hold the gun with both hands.
God, Hotch, when will I ever need to do this?
Well, I hope you never have to. But we can never be too safe.
Another bang hit the door, this time more forceful. We can never too safe. Tears flooded your eyes, and you promptly blinked them away.
Then. There was another bang, and this time, the door hit the wall.
You intook a sharp breath, hearing footsteps thump against the floor. You closed your eyes, focusing on the noise. One set of footsteps.
Aaron's voice echoed throughout your head. Are you sure?
You screwed your eyes shut tighter, straining your ears. Yes. One person. Loud. Heavy. Male.
Okay, that's good. What else do you know?
You knew they spent a long time fiddling with the door knob before busting the door open. That could either mean they lacked physical strength or they were trying to taunt you. The second option. You knew this was a low-risk neighbourhood. You knew your car was out front. This wasn't about money. This was personal. Intentional.
You knew this was an FBI agent's house. You knew—
Wait. You strained your ears more, following the footsteps. They weren't heading for your direction. No. No, no, no, no.
Jack was upstairs.
You couldn't let this man go up there.
4. You love Jack Hotchner unconditionally.
Knowing number four makes you act fast with a determination you'd never felt before. The pantry door swung open as you left the enclosed space, instantly raising the gun in the air like it was weightless.
You pointed it at your stairwell where a masked man stood, motionless.
"You better stop right there, you son of a bitch," you threatened, cocking the gun like it was second nature to you.
The man raised his hands into the air slowly. He tilted his head at you as if he was trying to mock you.
And then he smiled.
Before you could even realize what was happening, he was running at you. Your eyes widened, pulling the trigger. You barely got to see if your shot made it before he was tackling you to the ground, knocking the gun out of your hands.
The back of your head hit the ground, making a sickening crack. You gasped for air, and then you were wheezing as the man's hands wrapped around your neck, squeezing tightly.
You looked up into his demented eyes, hearing not the sound of your own voice but Hotch's. Use what you see. Frantically, your eyes flew all over the unsub's body until you saw red staining black, right at his shoulder.
Without thinking about it, you stuck your finger into the wound, hearing him scream. He was stunned enough that he loosened his grip, giving you the chance to kick him off of you.
You scrambled to your feet, searching for the gun and finding it in the middle of the living room floor. You dove for it right as he got back up, getting to you before you could try shooting again.
His hands wrapped around yours, trying to wrestle the gun from your hands. You held on like your life depended on it because it did. Your life depended on it— Jack's life depended on it.
You fired a shot into the ground and then another into the wall as he fought you, knocking a picture frame off the mantle. You couldn't see where the gun was pointing anymore, but then, suddenly, pain radiated throughout your lower abdomen, and you knew it was pointed at you.
You gasped, looking down and seeing blood spreading through the white of your tank top.
You looked back up, seeing the asshole smile at you with his teeth. They were pearly white. So clean for a man so dirty.
You sought to make them red, too.
In a surge of energy, you twisted the gun out of his grasp and didn't think before pointing it at his head and firing.
You watched the bullet penetrate his skull before he fell to the ground. Like a domino, you followed, crumpling against the couch.
The gun slipped out of your hands and they immediately went to your wound, making you hiss in pain. You pressed down on it, feeling blood flow between your fingers like a river.
Keep swimming. Keep your eyes open.
The fatigue hit you like a train. You blinked, trying to keep your eyes open, but they felt so heavy.
Jack. Jack was upstairs. He called the police.
He was okay.
You heard sirens in the distance. The police were coming.
You could sleep now.
And so, as you remembered your fifth truth, your eyes started to flutter closed.
5. You love Aaron Hotchner. And he loves you.
You let yourself fall into a dreamless sleep, hoping that somehow, on some plane of consciousness, he could hear you say I love you one last time.
You loved Aaron Hotchner. You knew that for certain.
made this collection for myself and to keep track of everything I've read so far. some are crossposted on tumblr and ao3 so I'll try to add both links (though i might miss some so let me know).
Status: Unedited & Incomplete tags; More fics to be added soon
stormborns
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
kaledo-art
discoholicmusic
