Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: The pain is brutal tonight. CRPS sinks its teeth in deep, and all you can do is hold on. But Aaron is there—quiet, steady, unflinching.
Tags: disabled!reader, depictions of chronic pain, crps flare, reader has crps, flare night rituals, touch sensitivity, slow and gentle care, reader is nonverbal for most of it, sensory overload, hurt/comfort, established relationship, aaron is the softest caregiver in existence, this is what love looks like, no use of y/n, domestic fic of sorts, intimate caretaking, background jack, just a quiet tuesday night
Word count: 3.4k words
You knew it before the sun went down. One of those nights—the kind that slinks in beneath your ribs and settles, quiet but certain, before you've even kicked off your shoes or thought about dinner. It makes a home of you before you realise what's happening. The ache starts deep—somewhere behind your knees, maybe, or right between your shoulder blades—but it spreads fast. It blooms into something molten and hungry, coiling low and mean in the pit of your spine, slick and venomous, threading burning wires down through your nerves until your limbs start to scream. And still, somehow, impossibly, it gets worse.
It's not just pain tonight. It's the kind of pain that unravels you, fibre by fibre, that leaves no room in your lungs for words or breath or sense. Every inch of skin feels like it belongs to someone else. Every joint sings with static. Your head throbs in time with the pulsing in your toes. You've lost the thread of your own body. What remains is a tangle of heat and sharpness, a body bristling from the inside out. It's a siege, and you're the battleground.
Your limbs feel like they're encased in lead. Every small movement echoes through you like shrapnel. The worst part is knowing it'll be hours before your meds take the edge off, if they do at all. Some nights, even the strongest prescriptions feel like sandbags against a flood.
By the time the house quiets, you're already curled in bed. Or, at least, as curled as you can manage. Your body's locked into that shape pain forces on you—half-fetal, half-rigid, one leg twisted just enough to draw the worst of the fire away from your hip. It doesn't help. Nothing helps. You're buried under too many blankets and still shivering, heat pooled at your chest while your fingers go cold, the chill chewing at your knuckles. The fabric is too much. The air is too sharp. You shift and the brush of cotton is like a rasp over raw skin. Each fibre is a brand.
Your skin feels electric. Everything tingles—but not the good kind. Pins and needles turned sinister. Like your body is rejecting itself. Like every nerve ending has forgotten how to behave.
You stare up at the ceiling. It swims in and out of focus, your vision crawling at the edges. Light pools in shallow waves across the plaster, painted by the hallway lamp outside. The walls pulse, blur. Your eyes burn but you can't shut them. Your lashes stick together from the sweat gathered along your brow. Even blinking feels like friction.
The hallway light seeps under the door, a dull, honey-coloured spill that paints shifting waves in the darkness. Those waves pulse in time with the throb in your legs, the tight pull in your back, the high white burn behind your eyes. Even your eyelids hurt. There's no relief in closing them—just more vivid colour behind the lids, flashes of red and orange like nerves lit on fire.
You become hyper-aware of everything. The faint whir of the refrigerator motor. The tick of the kitchen clock. The hum of the heater kicking on, then off again. Each sound feels too loud, like it's inside your skull. You flinch at nothing, at everything. Even silence has weight tonight.
Somewhere down the hall, you hear the dishes—faint clinks, steady rinsing, the scrape of a plate into the rack. Aaron never leaves them overnight. Even after the worst days, even when sleep could steal him without warning, he finishes the routine. Something in him insists on it. Maybe it's control. Maybe it's comfort. Maybe it's the same reason he always folds towels the same way. You don't know. You just know the rhythm of it is familiar enough to bear. Tonight, it's the only sound that doesn't claw at you.
Jack's voice follows, a rise and fall of quiet tones as they go over homework together. English tonight, or maybe maths—it's hard to tell through the closed door, but you can hear the way Aaron's voice softens, patient even when Jack protests. That voice has always been an anchor, low and calm and sure, something that settles rather than startles. Even now, it slips under the door like warmth. A small mercy. A tether. You picture him at the kitchen table, sleeves rolled, glasses perched on his nose, one hand absently running over Jack's shoulder as he corrects an equation or explains the difference between a semicolon and a dash.
Eventually, Jack's voice fades. A door creaks open, then clicks shut. The water shuts off. Silence blooms.
But the silence that comes after stretches. Longer than usual. It presses against your ears, heavy and breathless. You know what it means. That pause, that hesitation—it's not indecision. It's awareness. He's gauging, waiting, listening for any sign from down the hall. And then you hear his footsteps.
When the bedroom door opens, it's with the kind of silence that only comes from long practice. He's learned how to move without making sound. Not just for nights like this—but for cases, for ghosts, for his own haunted quiet. He crosses the room slowly, each footstep measured like he's moving through glass. Not out of fear—but respect. Reverence, even.
"Still awake?"
You don't answer straight away. Your throat is a closed fist, dry and tight, and even nodding feels like too much. So you shift instead—just a little, barely perceptible, but enough to shoot a burst of heat through your left leg that steals the breath from your lungs. You grit your teeth. Swallow down the sound that rises up and threatens to crawl out. The world spins in the corner of your vision.
He doesn't push. He waits.
You feel the bed dip, the slightest give of the mattress under his weight. He's careful, always careful. Not too close. Not yet. Just present. You hear the whisper of fabric as he moves—his sleeves brushing together, the soft pad of his hand reaching for something. Then the quiet slide of glass on wood. Your bedside table. The clink of pills against ceramic.
"I've got your meds," he says, voice pitched low, softer now. Like louder would hurt you. Like he knows it would.
Of course he does. He always does. It's not guesswork anymore. It's knowledge earned in the space between sharp breaths and long silences. It's knowing the pattern of your bad nights better than he knows his own reflection.
"Water too," he adds after a beat, the words almost an exhale.
You try to sit. Just a little. Just enough. But your body doesn't listen. Your spine lights up in an arc of white-hot agony that steals your breath before you can make a sound. Your hand curls instinctively into the blanket, claw-tight, nails biting through layers of fabric. The room stutters.
"Easy," he says, and there's no judgment in it, no pity either. Just calm. One of his hands hovers near your shoulder, not touching, not yet. The other holds the glass steady, poised and waiting. "Don't rush. Let me help."
Your limbs are tremors. Not even limbs anymore, but vague outlines of where they should be—trembling, spasming, untrustworthy. He slips his arm behind your shoulders, slow and steady. Doesn't touch you until you give the smallest nod. Permission, always. He knows better than to assume.
The lift is barely anything. Barely a shift. But it's enough to send a flare of pain behind your eyes, to set your vision sparking at the edges. You breathe through your nose. Shallow, fast. Like anything more would crack your ribs. Your skin is damp, feverish, and the hairs at the back of your neck stick to the pillow. You feel like you're on fire from the inside out.
The glass appears at your lips. You reach for it, because you want to, because you hate this, because the only thing worse than pain is helplessness. But your fingers betray you. They twitch mid-reach, seize, then curl against your palm in a tight, trembling fist. You pull back, ashamed.
You hiss, jaw locking.
"I've got it," he says again. Quieter this time. Like a promise.
You let your lips part. He tips the glass with that same care he applies to everything when it comes to you—deliberate, controlled, never rushed. The water is lukewarm but it tastes sharp, metallic almost, as it hits your tongue. It soothes the inside of your throat while your skin continues to riot.
"Little more," you whisper, the words almost too soft to carry.
He obliges. Another tilt. Another sip. It's enough. Barely. But it's something. The pills scrape down your throat in slow motion. You hate the way your body trembles even as you swallow. Hate how fragile this looks. Hate how necessary it is.
You shut your eyes. Just for a second.
"Thanks," you murmur. The word slips out cracked and quiet.
"You're welcome."
It's not just politeness. Never is. He means it. You can hear it in the way he says nothing else. In the stillness he keeps between you, soft and breathable. In the way his hand hasn't left your back, not quite pressing, just there. Warm. Steady. Present.
Then he settles beside you on the edge of the bed, knees bent, hands resting lightly on his thighs. The mattress dips a second time, a ripple of movement you feel like a shockwave. Even that tiny shift of weight makes your skin prickle. Not from his presence, never that, but from the way your body registers every vibration as a potential threat. He knows that, too. That's why he doesn't touch you right away. He waits a moment longer, eyes on your face, studying every twitch of discomfort, every flinch you try to mask. There's no rush. There never is with him. Stillness is his first language, and he offers it like a gift, a sanctuary in a body that's forgotten how to feel safe.
You focus on the sound of his breathing, slow and steady. It's one of the only things that doesn't set your nerves alight. Just the inhale, the exhale—calm, measured, grounding. You mirror him as best you can, even though your own breaths feel uneven, trapped somewhere behind your sternum. You're not sure you're doing it right. But it's something to cling to. Something that isn't the pain, or the way your limbs buzz with electricity, or the bitter taste of helplessness that's been sitting at the back of your throat all evening.
When he finally reaches for you, his touch is featherlight—like wind, like memory. His fingers ghost over the straps of your tank top, callused pads brushing your collarbone. He doesn't tug, doesn't assume. Just rests there, eyes searching yours in the low light, not for permission so much as reassurance that you're still with him. That the pain hasn't taken you completely. That you're still here, even in pieces. Even fragmented, you're still whole to him.
You nod.
The straps slide down, slow and careful, catching once on your shoulder where the skin is flushed too hot, too raw. You wince, barely, and his hand stills instantly. Another nod, slower this time, and he keeps going, steady and unhurried, until the fabric pools just beneath your arms. Cool air brushes against your skin, and the change is jarring enough to make you suck in a sharp breath. Your fingers curl slightly in response, tensing before you can stop them. The effort it takes just to let him help is staggering, a mountain you climb every time.
"Okay?"
You manage a hum, little more than breath, but he hears it. Of course he hears it. He always does. He shifts his weight minutely, positioning himself so he can reach you without pulling the blanket back too far. He's done this before. Many times. And still, each time, he waits like it's the first. Like the ritual of it matters. Like your needs change with the seasons and he's learned to read the weather of your pain.
He unscrews the tiny glass bottle on your nightstand, the one with the lavender oil you keep in a drawer that only he ever opens. The scent blooms before he even touches you—floral, soft, grounding. Like summer evenings and slow exhalations. It winds around your senses and pulls you down from the edge. The smell alone is a balm, tugging you back from the worst parts of yourself. It doesn't erase the pain, but it makes room for something else to exist alongside it.
The first touch is always the hardest. You brace for it even knowing what's coming. But it's gentle—his thumbs brushing circles into the tight knots of your shoulders, never pushing, never demanding. Just coaxing the tension back down from its high, coiled pitch. He starts small, spreading the oil with featherlight pressure until it slicks across your skin in thin, warm trails. Each pass is a question. Each pause, a space for your answer. He watches your face between strokes, adjusting before you even flinch.
"Too much?"
"No," you whisper. "It's good."
His hands are warm. Not hot. Just enough. His touch doesn't try to fix anything, doesn't force your body into shapes it doesn't want. He knows he can't make it stop. That's never the point. This is just about softening the edges, sanding down the sharpest points of the night until you can breathe through them. A pause. A breath. A kindness. A quiet act of resistance against the chaos. An offering of gentleness in a world that rarely allows for it.
He works slowly, methodically. Knuckles smoothing over skin, then pulling back before anything has the chance to sting. He uses the pads of his thumbs to map the ridges of your shoulder blades, the tips of his fingers to track the length of your neck. You're aware of every stroke, every breath, every shift of the bed beneath his weight. You've never felt more fragile. Or more seen. And he never makes you feel small for it. Fragility isn't a burden to him. It's just another language to learn.
Sometimes he murmurs things—not to fill the silence, but to stay tethered to you. Tonight it's just his breathing and the scent of lavender. You can feel his concentration, his focus. The way he adjusts the pressure based on the way your body twitches or stiffens. Nothing about this is automatic. It's devotion, practiced through muscle memory and love that's learned your rhythms. It's the intimacy of repetition. Of ritual. Of someone who's shown up every time you've needed to be carried through the worst of it.
"You're doing well," he murmurs. Not praise. Just truth. A marker of presence. A sign that you're still here.
Your breath catches. He doesn't pause this time. He keeps moving, keeps anchoring you. One hand works the line of your shoulder while the other cups the base of your skull, his fingers threading lightly into your hair. The motion is grounding. Not possessive—just steady. Just there.
The scent of the lavender settles around you like a blanket, calming but not sleepy. His hands work in silence for long minutes, until the pain dips just enough that you stop clenching your jaw, until your ribcage stops trembling every time you exhale. You feel yourself easing by degrees, sinking into the mattress molecule by molecule. Your muscles stop bracing against the inevitable. For a moment, there's space. For a moment, there's quiet.
Sometimes he talks to fill the quiet, but not tonight. Tonight, he stays silent, letting his hands speak for him. Slow, sure, patient. He shifts positions occasionally, adjusting to reach the base of your neck, the tops of your arms. He never moves faster than your body can tolerate. He's careful not to chase the pain—just to meet it where it lives. He follows it gently, soothing the path it leaves behind. His touch is never a demand. It's always a question, and the answer is always that you trust him.
After a while, he presses a final thumbprint into the space beneath your shoulder and draws back. He caps the oil and wipes his hands on a folded flannel he must've brought in without you noticing. You hear the faint rustle of fabric as he moves away, the whisper of his breath as he exhales. There's a pause as he watches you. Not with worry, but with the quiet reverence of someone bearing witness. Of someone who doesn't need you to be better to love you.
He brushes a hand down your blanket, smoothing it back into place with a sort of reverence. Not because the blanket matters—but because you do. Then he disappears into the ensuite, water running, drawer sliding. You lie still, blinking at the ceiling, tracking the ache as it reshapes itself in your limbs. Quieter now. Still there. Always there. But not quite so monstrous. Like it's taken a step back. Like it knows it's being watched. Like it knows you're not alone.
When he returns, he's barefoot, dressed down to a worn grey T-shirt and flannel pants, the kind you'd teased him for years ago. He only ever wears them on nights like this. Nights when comfort matters more than pride. When tenderness outweighs routine. When everything about him says: I'm here for this. All of it. No conditions. No timelines. No limits.
He climbs into bed with the same care he does everything else—with precision, with respect. He doesn't crowd you. Just lies close enough to be there. Enough for you to feel his presence like a low hum. His body radiates quiet warmth, a tether back to something solid. Something real. Something that doesn't ask anything of you but presence.
His fingers find yours first. You don't know who moves—if it's him reaching or you drifting—but suddenly his hand is on your arm, fingers tracing long, slow lines down from your shoulder to your wrist. He repeats the motion again and again, a rhythm like waves. Like breath. Like the passing of time without fear. He draws a map on your skin, not to guide you anywhere, but to show you you're already home.
"I'm here," he says quietly, thumb brushing the inside of your elbow. "I'm right here."
You exhale, softer now. Less jagged. Less like a break and more like a release.
"You're safe," he murmurs, voice a near whisper. "You're here. You're not alone."
You swallow. The words hit something you didn't know was exposed. They land low in your chest and settle there. You nod, slowly, a flicker of agreement you don't have to speak.
"I know," you say, and you do. You really do.
But maybe he needs to say it out loud, too. Maybe he's reminding himself. Because this is the life after. After Quantico. After sleepless hotel rooms and endless flights. After grief piled up so high it nearly crushed him. This is the version of love that doesn't come with grand gestures or dramatic promises. It comes with pill schedules. And washcloths. And silence that doesn't demand to be filled. It comes with presence, not proclamations. With quiet nights like this, where the only thing that matters is showing up.
It comes with hands that never flinch, even when the hardest parts of you rise to the surface. It comes with presence, not performance. With constancy, not flash. With knowing your pain without asking you to narrate it. With staying, even when there's nothing to say. With patience, when everything hurts. With grace.
He doesn't speak again. He doesn't need to. The weight of him beside you says everything that needs saying. His hand never stops moving, never stutters. Down, and back. Down, and back. Until your body starts to believe it's safe. Until your breath settles into something almost steady. Until you remember what it feels like to simply exist without bracing for what comes next.
You lie there, breathing together, as the night stretches around you. You lose track of the minutes, the hours, the pain. Not gone. Never gone. But manageable. Contained. Held at bay by steady hands and a voice that never falters. A quiet promise, repeated in touch and silence: I've got you.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: A flare-up ruins your weekend getaway, but Aaron's love proves the trip wasn't about the destination.
Tags: disabled!reader, chronic fatigue syndrome, depictions of chronic pain, fatigue flare-up, muscle weakness, brain fog, aaron being your rock, no established relationship yet, hurt/comfort, eventual healthy communication, aaron helping you through a bad day, changing plans, changing expectations, comfort in small moments, self-doubt, some fluff, not feeling good enough, learning to let others help, eventual love, no guilt here, tender moments, slow burn, sick fic of sorts, love through the struggle
Word count: 3.3k words
You wake to the weight of your own body pressing you into the mattress like wet sand, as though gravity itself has thickened overnight, wrapped around every limb and joint, dragging you deeper and deeper into the sheets like a tide that refuses to let go. Limbs leaden, joints throbbing with a dull, bone-deep insistence, head fogged with something too thick to be called fatigue alone. It's more than tiredness. It's a full-bodied crash, a system shutdown wrapped in ache and laced with static, as if your entire nervous system is coated in wet wool. Your muscles burn with the echo of nothing, like you've been sprinting in your sleep. Even your skin aches. Even your breath feels too heavy, like you're inhaling through cotton.
Your eyes flutter open, only to squint against the grey light seeping in through the curtains, dull and uninviting. Morning. The morning. The day you were supposed to escape the noise and routine and relentless compromise of daily life. Your eyes blur and un-blur around the outline of your bedroom, and for a moment, you hope maybe you've misremembered. Maybe it's not today. Maybe the trip is next weekend, maybe you still have time.
But it is.
Shit.
You were supposed to be packing.
The bed-and-breakfast was booked months ago—somewhere quiet, nestled at the edge of a forest, tucked far enough from the city that the noise and urgency wouldn't follow. A place with creaky wooden floors and warm scones at breakfast, claw-foot tubs and mismatched armchairs by the hearth. You'd imagined it so many times: the way he'd look in soft lamplight, the curve of his smile when he loosened his shoulders at last, the warmth of his laugh when he finally stopped worrying about the next thing. Just the two of you. No buzzing phones. No files, no briefings, no heavy silences punctuated by work calls. A proper getaway.
You'd picked it because it felt timeless. Sacred, almost. A rare, unbroken window of peace in your otherwise fragmented schedules. You'd even counted the days. You'd laid out outfits, picked a book to bring, researched local cafes. You'd imagined waking to birdsong and the smell of woodsmoke, not this dizzying, aching fog that clings to you like second skin.
Instead, your body has other plans.
You try to sit up, but the world tilts with a vengeance, the room blurring at the edges like a poorly spliced film reel. Your spine protests, muscles aching like you've run a marathon in your sleep. You manage to swing your legs over the side of the bed, but the motion brings on a wave of dizziness so fierce you have to clutch the mattress for balance. Your hands shake as you reach for your phone on the nightstand, fingers fumbling with the screen, wrists aching. Guilt is a hot, sour thing in your throat, heavy with frustration.
You: I'm so sorry. I can't. I woke up crashed. Really bad today. I didn't see it coming.
You don't add how angry you are. How crushed. How much this was supposed to matter. That you'd circled this weekend on your calendar with a red marker, a childish gesture of hope. That you'd imagined the way his eyes would soften when he saw the place. That you'd chosen a room with a view of the garden because he'd once said how much he missed silence. That you'd wanted to give him something peaceful, something still.
The text sends with a soft whoosh, and you let the phone fall back onto the duvet, rolling slowly onto your side to keep the nausea at bay. You should eat something. Force fluids. The usual protocols. You know them by heart, drilled into muscle memory. But even those basic thoughts are slippery this morning, melting away before they can fully form. Your brain feels like it's been padded in cotton wool, every thought half-formed, every impulse delayed. You lie there, unmoving, for a long time.
It takes ten minutes to convince yourself to move again. Another five to stand. You make it to the kitchen after what feels like a small eternity, dragging your dressing gown over your pyjamas, feet bare and skin clammy. The tile is cold beneath you, and the overhead light feels like a punishment, too harsh against your light-sensitive eyes. You brace your hands on the counter, breathing shallowly, trying to remember what you came in here for. Tea. Food. Something. Anything that might cut through the fog. The thought of chewing feels overwhelming. The thought of standing much longer feels impossible.
You manage to fill the kettle, set it to boil with trembling fingers, and start digging through the cupboard for a granola bar or something small, easy, something that won't make your stomach rebel. You lean heavily against the counter while the water heats, your breath shallow, your vision swimming. You can't cry. If you start crying, you're not sure you'll stop. And you've already lost enough of the day.
And then you hear it.
The soft metallic click of a key turning in the lock.
The door creaks open.
"Aaron?"
His voice follows a beat later. "It's me."
He appears in the doorway, and the sight of him hits you like warmth after cold: dressed in soft-worn jeans and that dark grey jumper you love—the one that makes his eyes look deeper, softer, even when he's tired, even when he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. There's a paper bag in one hand and a takeaway cup in the other. Familiar. Steady. Him. His presence feels like home.
You blink at him, caught between relief and embarrassment, but mostly stunned. "You—you didn't have to come."
He steps in, shutting the door behind him with a gentle click. "Of course I did."
The paper bag crinkles as he sets it on the counter, pulling out two pastries—flaky, golden things from that little place near your flat, the ones you always say taste like childhood memories. And the tea you love most, still steaming in its cup. Chamomile, lavender, vanilla. Comfort in a cup.
"Aaron…"
He turns to you, eyes soft, mouth tugging in that near-smile he reserves just for you. "You don't have to say anything, and you definitely don't need to feel guilty."
You look away, ashamed, staring down at your bare feet on the cold tile. "I didn't want to cancel."
"You didn't." He sets the tea beside you gently, like he's afraid of startling you. "We just changed the plan."
Your eyes burn, stupidly, vision blurring. "It was supposed to be special."
"It still is."
You huff a breath that's nearly a laugh, nearly a sob. "You must think I'm—"
"I think you're doing your best," he says, cutting through your self-deprecation with the same quiet certainty he brings to every interrogation room. "And I think your best looks like making it to the kitchen even when your body wants to collapse. I think your best is still more than enough."
You close your eyes. He's always like this. Steady. Unshaken. Loving you without condition or caveat. And somehow, it's the steadiness that undoes you. It's not pity in his voice. It never is. It's love. Just love, clear and unflinching. Love without agenda. Love that waits.
"Come on," he says softly. "Let's get you back to bed."
You nod, too tired to argue, too grateful to pretend. He moves to your side, one arm curving carefully around your back, the other steadying your hand as you lean into him. The walk back is slow, measured, but he doesn't rush you. Every few steps he murmurs encouragement, barely above a whisper.
You make it. He helps you settle beneath the covers again, brushing the duvet up to your shoulders, brushing a hand against your hair as you melt into the mattress. The relief of being horizontal again is dizzying. The tea is placed gently on the nightstand, the pastry beside it. You probably won't touch it yet, but it's there. Like him.
He doesn't leave.
Instead, Aaron kicks off his shoes, sets his phone on silent, and eases onto the bed beside you without bothering to change out of his jumper or jeans. He lies on top of the covers, close but not crowding, and his arm wraps gently around your middle, the heat of him seeping into your chilled skin, into the hollow ache of your limbs. His presence is quiet but complete. He's not trying to fix anything. He's just here.
You shift, just enough to rest your head against his chest. His heartbeat is slow, steady, like a metronome for your frayed nerves. His hand finds yours beneath the blankets, thumb brushing slow circles over your knuckles. You feel the scratch of stubble on his jaw against your temple when he leans his head toward yours. His other hand moves in slow, comforting lines along your arm.
"I just wanted to be with you," he murmurs against your hair. "We don't have to go anywhere."
The words settle over you like another blanket, warm and true. No pressure. No disappointment. Just presence. Just love. It fills the room, silent and enormous.
Aaron stays after that.
Not just for a little while. Not for a quick cup of tea or to make sure you're comfortable. He stays like he's settled into the rhythm of your day, like there's nowhere else he'd rather be, like this—being beside you, being with you—is as necessary as breathing. He doesn't glance at his phone. Doesn't check the time. He's not distracted or waiting for a reason to leave. He stays, fully and without question, like love made flesh.
He takes off his watch and puts it on the nightstand without ceremony, as though to mark the passage of time irrelevant. He moves with an ease that feels like home, unhurried and unfazed. When you glance at him through the blur of your lashes, he smiles like he knows what you're thinking. Like he's thought it too.
After you've curled back beneath the duvet and he's stretched out beside you, you expect him to suggest leaving—to give you space or say he'll come back later. Instead, he makes a quiet hum in his throat and reaches for the book on your nightstand. The one you've been trying to read all week, the same page turned and re-turned because brain fog keeps swallowing sentences whole.
"Where were you?" he asks softly, holding it in one hand, fingers already ghosting over the familiar spine.
"Chapter four. I think."
He flips through, skimming until he finds a page with your familiar dog-ear at the corner. Then he reads. His voice is low and even, words flowing with a cadence that makes them easier to hold onto. He doesn't rush, pausing where the prose breathes, letting each sentence settle before moving on. You lose some of it, here and there—your thoughts drifting like feathers in a breeze—but his voice anchors you. You close your eyes and just listen. His thumb brushes against your wrist where your hand rests between you on the bed, grounding you like a tether to the waking world.
Every so often he stops to sip his tea or brush a hand gently through your hair. The feeling of his fingers moving slowly through the strands—soft, tender, reverent—is enough to make your chest ache. No one has ever touched you like that. Like they have all the time in the world. Like you're something to be cherished, not managed.
He reads until your eyes flutter closed again. When you start to doze off, he sets the book aside and pulls the blanket up over your shoulders. He doesn't leave, doesn't pull away. He lays beside you, silent and steady, hand moving in slow, patient strokes over your arm.
Time slips.
The day unfolds in quiet fragments: the soft rustle of pages, the rain beginning to patter against the windows, the warmth of his body beside yours, and the scent of lavender drifting up from the tea cooling on the nightstand. He hums sometimes, low and tuneless, and you drift in and out like you're being rocked gently on a tide. He stays with you through it all.
Sometime in the late morning, you try to get up again—need pulling you toward the bathroom—but your legs betray you the second your feet hit the floor. They tremble under you, knees threatening to buckle, the floor feeling too far away, too unstable.
"I've got you," Aaron says quickly, his hands steady at your waist before you can even sway. "Just lean on me."
He helps you up, guiding you with infinite care, his grip gentle but sure. He doesn't make a fuss. Doesn't comment on the fact that your body's given out again. He just helps. As if this is no more unusual than walking side by side on a normal morning. He whispers encouragement the entire way, his words quiet enough to feel private, sacred.
"I can manage from here," you whisper as you reach the bathroom door.
He nods but waits just outside. When you emerge again, he's there with open arms. No questions. No judgment. Just quiet support. He gets you back into bed like it's nothing. Like this is just how love works. He tucks the duvet around you again like a second skin and presses a kiss to your forehead like punctuation.
You sleep again after that, exhaustion winning out. Your body curls toward him almost instinctively, and he shifts to accommodate you, letting your head rest on his chest, your hand caught in his again. You drift in and out, not always aware of the boundary between sleep and wakefulness, but every time you surface, he's still there.
Sometimes you wake to the feel of his lips pressed to your temple. Sometimes to his hand smoothing over your back in slow, rhythmic lines. Once, you open your eyes to find him watching you, not with worry, but with that same warm, open expression he's always had with you—like he sees you. All of you. Even the parts you hate. Especially the parts you try to hide.
"Still here," he whispers when your eyes flutter open and immediately glass over. "Not going anywhere."
Later in the afternoon, he coaxes you into taking a few bites of one of the pastries. He tears it into small pieces, offering one at a time without a word of pressure. The same with the tea, gently lifted to your lips. You eat because of him. Because he's there. Because he makes it easy to try. Because he meets you where you are, without expectation.
When your hand trembles badly enough to spill a little tea, he catches the cup and doesn't flinch. "Don't worry," he says, wiping the drip from your chin with a napkin. "Nothing that matters spilled."
He doesn't flinch when your hands tremble. He doesn't sigh when your words falter. When your voice slips into silence, he follows it there. He doesn't fill every gap with sound. Instead, he lets the quiet wrap around you both like a blanket. When you cry for no reason, without warning, his arms wrap around you like a shield. He doesn't ask you to explain. He doesn't shrink away from your tears. He just holds you through them, brushing the back of your neck with his fingertips.
You talk a little. Not about anything important. Just little things. Books. A recipe you'd seen online. A memory from the last time the two of you went out—walking along the canal in autumn, hands clasped, pockets full of conkers. When you trail off mid-sentence, he doesn't push. He picks up the thread or lets the silence settle. He adjusts to you without hesitation, like he knows the shape of your quiet. Like he's memorised the rhythm of your breath, the way you pause before choosing certain words. He tells you about his week, about Jack, about a restaurant someone at work recommended. Nothing urgent. Just soft threads of conversation woven through the stillness.
By evening, the light has faded to soft gold, casting warm shadows through the windows. You haven't moved from the bed. Aaron hasn't, either. He reads again for a while, one arm wrapped around your waist, the cadence of his voice drawing you into sleep. He stops reading only to kiss your temple again, murmuring, "Sleep, love," before letting the silence bloom again. The book stays open in his lap, a forgotten gesture of intention, as he strokes your back and watches your breathing even out.
Dinner is simple—he heats up a soup you'd made earlier in the week, helps you sit up just enough to sip from a spoon in his hand. When your strength gives out halfway through, he kisses your forehead and says, "That's enough. You did well."
He doesn't push. Doesn't scold. Doesn't remind you of what's left uneaten. Instead, he sets the bowl aside and helps you lie back down, brushing your hair gently from your face as he settles in beside you again. The hours pass gently, blurred and soft, held together by his warmth, his steadiness, the rhythm of his breathing beneath your ear. You nap again. He watches another film on his phone, the volume low, his hand never straying from yours.
Night falls. The sky darkens slowly, clouds drifting like slow ships past the window. He changes into a clean shirt he must've brought in his bag, brushes his teeth in the bathroom, and returns with the same ease he left with. He doesn't ask permission to climb into bed again. He just does, like he belongs there. Like he always has.
You shift closer, burrowing into the comfort of his chest. He wraps an arm around you, his fingers drawing slow circles against your back. The weight of his body beside yours is the most grounding thing you've ever known. You breathe in his scent—clean soap, faint coffee, the warm spice of his skin—and feel something inside you settle.
The room is quiet except for the soft hum of the heating, the occasional creak of the floorboards, the steady sound of your breath. Your chest rises and falls against his, your heartbeat slowly finding rhythm with his. You feel the day finally leaving your body. He murmurs something soft into your hair—something you don't fully catch, but it settles in your chest like comfort.
"I'm sorry," you whisper, for the fifth time that day.
Aaron's hand stills. His voice, when it comes, is low but firm.
"Hush."
You swallow. "I just—"
"I didn't fall in love with the idea of you at your best," he says, his hand moving again, soothing. "I fell in love with you. The real, whole you. And I don't need anything else."
The words settle deep. Deeper than you expect. Deeper than anything has in a long time. They open something inside you that had been locked tight. That terrified part of you—the one always preparing for rejection, always braced for the door to close—starts to loosen its grip.
You press your face into his chest, eyes burning. "You mean that?"
He doesn't hesitate.
"I've never meant anything more."
The tears come then, slow and silent, leaking into the fabric of his shirt. He just holds you through it, one hand in your hair, the other wrapped around you like a vow. Not a single part of him pulls away.
You cry without shame. And when it's over—when the storm inside you quiets—he's still there.
And you fall asleep to the sound of his heart beneath your ear, steady and sure and absolutely, unquestionably yours.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: The walk doesn't happen, but Aaron comes home early anyway—and sometimes that's the better day anyway.
Tags: disabled!reader, chronic fatigue syndrome, bad flare day, hurt/comfort, soft!aaron hotchner, cancelled plans, rain as a metaphor and also just rain, the guilt that lives in your chest on hard days, aaron who doesn't need you to pretend, he just gets into bed with you, nonsexual intimacy, napping together, steady love, no rushing, no fixing, just presence, the plan can wait, we'll see how you're feeling, cozy and aching all at once, no use of y/n, domestic softness, late afternoon gold, the world looks washed clean after
Word count: 2.6k words.
The rain started sometime before you woke up. You can hear it still—a low, relentless drumming against the window that might be soothing on a different kind of day. Today it just sounds like a door closing.
You'd had a plan. A genuinely good one, the kind you'd written in your planner in actual ink because it felt too nice to risk forgetting: a walk through the park with Aaron, the one near the east side of the neighbourhood where the old oak trees line the path and there's a coffee cart on the corner that does those oat milk lattes you like. You'd even checked the forecast the night before. It had said partly cloudy. It had lied.
But the weather isn't really the problem, and some quiet part of you already knew that when you went to bed last night and felt that particular heaviness settling into your limbs—not tiredness exactly, more like your body had decided to fill your bones with wet concrete while you slept. You woke up and tried to sit up and got about halfway there before everything in you simply said no, and you sank back against the pillow and lay there staring at the ceiling and tried to figure out if you were disappointed or just too exhausted to feel much of anything at all.
It's both, you think. It's definitely both.
The fatigue on a bad day isn't like being sleepy. That's the thing that's hardest to explain to people who haven't lived it—it's not the kind of tired that a good night's sleep fixes, not something that more coffee or a brisk walk would shake loose. It's a total-body weight, a thick fog that presses in from every direction at once, making even small things feel enormous. Lifting your arm to reach for your phone took genuine effort. Holding it up to read a text took more. You'd put it back down after about thirty seconds because your hand had started to tremble faintly and you didn't have the energy to be frustrated about that too.
The text from Aaron is still there, unread except for the notification preview: leaving early, be home by 2—how are you feeling?
You don't answer it because you don't know what to say, or maybe because typing the honest answer feels like too much work, and lying to him has never come easily to you even in text form. He'd know. He always knows.
You shift very slowly onto your side, facing the window, and watch the rain streak down the glass in long, wavering lines. There's a dull ache in your joints that comes and goes on days like this—not sharp, just a grinding background soreness, like your whole body's been wrung out. Your head feels thick and heavy on the pillow. The light coming through the curtains, even diffused through cloud cover, is too bright in a way that makes your eyes want to close, so you let them. There's nothing else to do. Getting up isn't really a viable option right now—you'd tried that about an hour ago, made it to the bathroom and back, and then had to sit on the edge of the bed for five minutes recovering from the effort of it like you'd just climbed several flights of stairs. It's a special kind of miserable, feeling ridiculous about something as simple as walking twelve feet.
The guilt is the other thing. It's always there on bad days, sitting on your chest like a stone. You don't like cancelling plans. You don't like the way this illness rewrites your calendar without asking, the way it takes things from you on a seemingly random basis—a good week, a normal day, a walk you'd genuinely been looking forward to. You know, rationally, that it's not your fault. You know that. Aaron's told you, more than once, in that steady quiet way he has that makes it feel like something you're supposed to believe. But knowing something and feeling it are two very different things, and right now you mostly just feel sorry for yourself and sorry for him and tired in every possible direction.
You hear the front door open at ten past two.
There's the sound of keys, the soft clunk of something being set down, and then footsteps on the stairs—careful ones, the way he moves when he's not sure whether you're asleep. You want to call out but your throat feels dry and odd, and anyway he's already pushing the bedroom door open a moment later, still in his trench coat with rain darkening the shoulders of it, his hair slightly damp at the temples. He looks at you, and his expression does that thing it sometimes does—just a small shift, a settling, like he's taken stock of the situation and filed it accordingly.
"Hey," he says, quietly.
"Hey." Your voice comes out rougher than you intended. "You're early."
"I said I was leaving early." He comes further into the room, shrugging out of his coat and draping it over the chair by the door. "How long have you been in bed?"
"I got up for a bit," you say, which is technically true and also very thoroughly beside the point, and from the way his mouth does that slight, patient press you can tell he knows it.
"How are you feeling?"
"I'm okay," you say, and even as you're saying it you can hear how unconvincing it is, how thin. "I mean—it's not a great day. But it's fine. I was just going to rest for a bit and then—"
"You don't have to do that," he says.
You stop.
He sits down on the edge of the bed beside you, close enough that you can feel the slight chill that came in with him from outside, still clinging to the fabric of his sleeve. His eyes are on you, unhurried, and there's nothing in them that looks like impatience or disappointment or any of the things the guilty part of you is always half-braced for. Just steadiness. Just him.
"Shh," he murmurs. "You don't have to pretend with me."
Something in your chest loosens slightly, like a knot releasing. It happens every time he says something like that—like your body knows before your brain does that you don't have to hold yourself together around him. You feel your eyes sting faintly, which is embarrassing, except you're too tired to be properly embarrassed about it.
"I don't think I can go on a walk," you say, as if he doesn't know. As if he hasn't already pieced together the entire picture.
"I know." He reaches out and brushes the hair back from your face, gentle, a touch so familiar by now that it doesn't feel like something he has to decide to do. "It's raining anyway."
"It wasn't supposed to."
"No," he agrees, softly. "It wasn't." He leans down and presses his lips to your forehead, a slow, unhurried kiss that lingers for a moment before he straightens up. Then he looks down at you with that measured, quiet way he has, and says, "Move over."
You blink. "Aaron, you don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to." He's already toeing off his shoes. "Move over."
You move over. It takes a bit of doing—rolling onto your other side, shifting the pillow, doing all of it slowly because doing it fast isn't really an option today—and he waits without comment, just watching, not offering to help unless you need it because he knows you well enough by now to know the difference between wanting assistance and needing it. When you've made enough room he climbs up beside you, over the duvet, and then reaches across you to pull it properly up over both of you, tucking it in at your shoulder with a sort of careful precision that makes your chest feel too full.
You end up against him, your cheek to his chest, his arm coming around you—not tight, not pressing, just there. His shirt is slightly cool but he's warm underneath it, a solid and present warmth that seeps through to your skin. You can hear his heartbeat. It's unhurried, even, the same way he always is.
"You don't have to stay in here," you tell him, even though your body is already betraying you by relaxing incrementally into his, the tight-held tension in your shoulders finally starting to unwind. "I know you had things—"
"I don't have anything that matters more than this," he says simply.
"You were at work."
"And now I'm here." His hand moves to your back, fingers tracing slow patterns along your spine through the fabric of your jumper—not rubbing, just drawing, soft meandering shapes that don't mean anything except that he's there and he's paying attention. You feel yourself breathe out fully for the first time all day.
"The park will still be there," he says, after a moment.
"I know."
"We'll go when you're having a better day. The coffee cart will be there too."
"You remembered about the coffee cart."
"You mentioned it three times last week."
"I only mentioned it twice," you say, and he makes a quiet sound that might almost be a laugh, his chest moving slightly under your cheek.
"Twice," he agrees, in a tone that very much implies he's humouring you.
The rain keeps going outside. It sounds different now, somehow—less like a door closing, more like just rain, doing what rain does, indifferent and steady. Your eyelids are heavy. They've been heavy all day but this is a different kind of heavy, the kind that comes from finally feeling safe enough to stop fighting it.
"I hate days like this," you say quietly, not complaining exactly, just saying it. Just letting it exist out loud where someone else can hear it.
"I know you do," he says, and he doesn't try to fix it or reframe it or tell you it's not that bad. He just holds you a little closer, and his lips press to the top of your head, a warmth that stays even after he lifts his head again. "Just rest," he murmurs. "I'm not going anywhere."
So you do. You stop fighting the weight in your limbs and the heaviness behind your eyes and the vague, useless guilt, and you let all of it go sideways into the warmth of him, and somewhere in the quiet and the rain and the slow rhythm of his breathing you fall fully, genuinely asleep.
You wake up to stillness.
That's the first thing you notice—the rain has stopped. The light through the curtains has shifted from grey-white to something warmer and lower, late afternoon gold edging through the clouds, and the absence of that constant percussion against the glass leaves the room feeling different, more present somehow, like everything's come back into focus.
The second thing you notice is that Aaron is still there.
He hasn't moved—or if he has, he's moved back. You're still against his chest, his arm still around you, and his face is turned slightly toward you, lips pressed softly to your hair in a way that might be intentional or might just be where he ended up. His breathing is slow and even and you wonder for a moment if he fell asleep too, but then his arm tightens just slightly around you, and he speaks.
"Feeling a little better?" His voice is low and careful, hushed in the way of someone who's been keeping still for a long time so as not to wake you.
You take stock of yourself for a moment—the weighted-concrete feeling in your limbs is still there, but lighter, like some of the worst of it has been slept off. The ache in your joints has dialled back. Your head feels less like it's stuffed with fog.
"Yeah," you say, and mean it, a little surprised to mean it. "A bit."
You tilt your head back to look up at him and he's looking down at you with this expression you've never found exactly the right word for—it's fond and present and steady all at once, like you're something he's glad to have in his line of sight. He brings his free hand up and brushes his knuckles along your cheekbone, very lightly.
"Good," he says, and smiles—a real one, the kind that reaches his eyes, the kind he doesn't hand out indiscriminately. Then he leans down and kisses you, slow and soft and unhurried, like he's not on his way anywhere else.
When he pulls back he's still close, close enough that you can see the crease on his cheek from where he must have dozed against the pillow.
"You slept too," you accuse.
"For a little while." He doesn't seem particularly bothered by this. "You're very comfortable to sleep next to."
"That's arguably the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
He huffs, quiet and amused. "I've said considerably nicer things."
"Debatable."
He kisses your forehead again, brief this time, and then carefully begins to untangle himself—slowly, making sure you're settled before he moves, not in any kind of rush. You watch him sit up and run a hand through his hair, and he looks rumpled and unhurried in a way you don't get to see often enough, the professional composure softened at the edges into something easier.
"I'll take care of dinner," he says, already reaching for his shoes. "You just stay right here."
"Aaron, I can help—"
"You just slept for three hours because your body needed it," he says, in the same even tone he probably uses when he's explaining something completely obvious to someone who's being gently resistant. "Staying in bed is not a hardship I'm imposing on you. It's what you need." He pauses, looks over at you. "Unless you want to come and sit on the sofa. That's also acceptable."
You consider this with great seriousness. "The sofa might be achievable."
"Then the sofa it is." He holds out a hand. "When you're ready. There's no rush."
You take his hand, and you sit up slowly, and the fatigue is still there—it doesn't disappear, it never disappears all at once, it's more that it retreats to a manageable distance—but he sits with you while you get your bearings, one hand warm at the small of your back, not rushing, not watching the clock. The light in the room has gone golden and soft and the world outside the window looks washed clean and quiet, the streets dark with rain that's finished falling.
"The park will be like a bog tomorrow," you say.
"Probably," he says.
"Very romantic. We could still go."
He looks at you, a slight smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "We'll see how you're feeling."
It's not we'll see if you're well enough, not hopefully you'll be better by then, just we'll see how you're feeling—like either answer is equally fine, like the plan exists to serve you and not the other way around. It's such a small thing and it matters so much. It always does.
"Okay," you say. "We'll see."
He squeezes your hand once and then helps you to your feet, careful and steady, and you lean into him for a moment before your legs remember what they're for, and outside the clouds are beginning to thin, and somewhere in the kitchen there will be food you didn't have to make, and it's not the day you planned but it's yours.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Reader
Summary: The deadline won't wait, but Aaron won't let you destroy yourself for it—and somehow, in the dark, that's enough.
Tags: reader has chronic migraines, migraine attack, hurt/comfort, soft!aaron hotchner, reader pushing through pain, overworking, deadline pressure, reader struggling to ask for help, aaron seeing through every excuse, being carried without being lifted, he just knows, tucked into bed with so much care, blackout curtains and warm hands, paracetamol as an act of love, no use of y/n, quiet domesticity, late night, the body wins sometimes and that's okay, letting someone in, you are allowed to stop, fluff, slow tender care, intimacy without sexuality, the kindest firmness, reader's stubbornness meeting its match, sleep as sanctuary
Word count: 3.1k words
The clock on your desk blinks 11:47 PM, and you're still staring at the same sentence you've been trying to write for the better part of four hours—the same seven words, warping and swimming like something seen through heat haze, like letters printed on the surface of deep water that keeps shifting beneath them. You've read it so many times it's stopped meaning anything. The words have become shapes, the shapes have become noise, and still you sit here, shoulders hunched, jaw tight, because the alternative is to stop. And stopping isn't something you can afford.
The migraine that started this afternoon hasn't gone away. It's evolved. It's grown teeth and a personality, made itself at home behind your eyes like something that intends to stay. What was once a dull, familiar throb—the kind you've learned to work around, to half-ignore, to push through on paracetamol and sheer stubbornness—has sharpened itself into something surgical over the course of the evening, a precise and merciless percussion that pulses in time with your heartbeat. Every beat is a small, humiliating reminder that your body has opinions you didn't ask for and isn't interested in negotiating.
The deadline is a cold fist around your throat.
You've missed two already. Two. The first one you managed to explain away—a flare that knocked you out for three days, a sincere apology, a promise that it wouldn't happen again. The second one felt like the beginning of something. Your editor's emails have shifted register over the past month, gone from warm and collegial to professionally polite to, most recently, clipped. Single sentences. No sign-offs. You know what comes after clipped. You've been here before, in other jobs, with other people, and you know how it ends, and you cannot let it end like that. Not this time. Not again.
You can feel the shape of what's coming the way you can feel a storm before it breaks—in the pressure, in the particular stillness of the air, in the way everything holds its breath and waits. You can't afford another miss. You can't afford to stop.
So you don't.
You press the heel of your hand harder against your right temple and lean closer to the screen, as though proximity might force the words into alignment, as though sheer stubbornness might be enough to outwit your own nervous system. The brightness of the monitor is a blade between your eyes. You've turned it down twice already, dropped the colour temperature until the screen glows a dim and jaundiced amber. It's still not enough. Everything is still too much—the hum of the computer fan, the distant sound of traffic two streets over, the faint tick of the hallway radiator that you've never noticed before tonight and now cannot stop hearing.
You reach for your mug without looking at it and find it cold. It's been cold for hours. You drink it anyway.
You don't hear Aaron come in.
You're so far inside the narrow, painful tunnel of trying that the world beyond the screen has essentially ceased to exist, so you only notice him when the light in the room changes—a warm amber bloom spreading from the lamp in the corner, sudden and soft and still somehow, in this moment, far too much. You flinch away from it with a sharp inhale, your palms flying to your temples, your whole body curling slightly inward the way it does when it's had enough and hasn't been listened to—the instinctive, involuntary gesture of someone in real pain, the kind you can't quite manage to hide.
You hear him go still in the doorway.
"What are you still doing up?"
His voice is low. It's always low when he's worried—dropped down into that register that lives just above a murmur, the one that means he's measuring every word carefully, that means he's working hard to keep the alarm from bleeding into his tone and making things worse. You know that voice. You know what it costs him to use it. You don't look at him.
"I have to finish this," you mumble, the words coming out rougher than you intended, sandpaper-edged and thin.
He doesn't respond immediately. That's one of the things about Aaron—he never reacts before he's ready to. You hear him cross the room with that quiet, deliberate tread, the kind that has weight and intention behind it, the kind that means he's already made up his mind about something and is simply walking toward the conclusion. You hear him stop behind your chair. There's a pause, a moment in which you can feel him taking in the cold mug, the darkened screen, the way you're sitting—hunched and rigid and wrong—and then your chair is being gently, firmly pulled back from the desk. His hands settle on your shoulders, and they're warm through the thin fabric of your shirt, and they're steady in a way that makes you suddenly and terribly aware of how unsteady you feel. Like a wall you've been leaning on your whole weight against has just subtly shifted.
"You're not finishing anything like this," he says.
"Aaron—"
"Come to bed."
Three words. Simple, plain, offered without drama. And they shouldn't feel like a lifeline, but they do, and that makes you angrier than you have any right to be, because a lifeline implies you're drowning, and you're not drowning, you're working, you're trying, you're holding the whole thing together with both hands and your teeth and sheer pig-headed refusal to be beaten by your own body again.
"I can't," you say, and you mean for it to come out firm, decisive, the voice of someone who has weighed the options and made a reasonable choice—but the frustration that's been simmering under the surface all evening finally cracks through it, hot and uncontrolled and much bigger than you wanted him to see. "If I don't do this, I'll—"
Your voice breaks.
You hate that it breaks. You hate the way it splinters right down the middle, neat as anything, like something that's been under too much pressure for too long and finally gives at the weakest point. That's exactly what it is, and you know it, and you didn't want him to see it—didn't want him to see any of this, the cold coffee and the unchanged document and the way you've been sitting here all night accomplishing nothing except hurting yourself—and now he has. You bury your face in your hands and the darkness behind your palms is a mercy and a grief all at once, a small cave you can hide inside for just a moment.
"I'll lose everything."
The words come out muffled. Cracked. Smaller than you wanted them to be.
The room is very quiet.
Then he's crouching beside you—you feel the shift in his position, hear the soft sound of it—and his presence beside you is a warm and solid gravity, something that pulls at the most exhausted parts of you the way a tide pulls at sand. You don't look at him. You can't quite make yourself, yet. When he speaks, his voice has shifted entirely, shed every careful professional edge, become something honest and unhurried and almost unbearably gentle, the way it only ever is in rooms like this one, at hours like this one, when it's just the two of you and there's nothing left to perform.
"You're going to lose yourself if you keep going like this."
You don't say anything.
"You're in pain, sweetheart." The word lands somewhere deep and tender, a pebble dropped into still water. "Real pain. And you've been in it all day and you haven't stopped. You can't keep pretending it's not affecting you."
"I know it's affecting me," you say, and it comes out quiet and ugly with something that isn't quite anger and isn't quite grief. "I just don't have the option of letting it."
"That's not true."
"Aaron—"
"It's not true," he says again, gently, without heat. "I know it feels that way. I know the deadline is real and the pressure is real. But you sitting here at midnight unable to read the screen isn't helping you meet it. You know that."
And there it is. The truth of it, said plainly and without cruelty, without even the faintest shadow of I-told-you-so—just laid down in front of you like something he wants you to look at without flinching. You hate that he's right. You hate it the way you hate the migraine itself, deep and reflexive and a little shameful, the way you hate every limitation your body has ever imposed on you when you had somewhere to be and something to prove. The way you hate needing things. Asking for things. Admitting that there are battles you cannot simply white-knuckle your way through, that there are days when the body wins and the to-do list loses and the only thing to do is accept it.
He waits.
He doesn't fill the silence with anything. He's always been good at waiting—patient in a way that doesn't feel like patience so much as it feels like simple presence, like he's not counting the seconds until you come around, like he has no particular destination and is in no hurry to get there. It doesn't feel like pressure. It feels, instead, like he's simply there. Like he'll still be there regardless of what you say next.
Slowly, you let your hands drop from your face.
The room is dim and warm and Aaron is right there beside you, his expression the particular kind of open that he is only ever with you—unguarded, earnest, everything of the professional in him set aside like something he's put down on a table. The competence and the authority and the careful control, all of it stepped out of. Just him. Just this. You look at him and something inside you goes very quiet, like a string that's been wound too tight finally going slack, like the moment a held breath releases and you didn't even know you were holding it.
"Okay," you say.
It's barely a word. More the shape of one.
He doesn't make anything of it. He simply stands, and helps you to your feet, one hand at your elbow and his other arm wrapping around your waist with an ease that speaks of long practice, of knowing the weight and shape of you and taking it on without making you feel like a burden for having it. You lean into him before you've consciously decided to, and he doesn't comment on that either. His arm just tightens slightly around you. Just enough.
"We'll figure this out," he says quietly, guiding you away from the desk and through the doorway, and you don't look back at the blinking cursor, the unchanged document, the cold mug and the impossible sentence. "But not tonight. Not like this."
The hallway is dark and blessedly cool, a relief against the feverish warmth that's gathered behind your eyes and across your forehead. You walk slowly, and he matches your pace without comment.
"I keep thinking," you start, and then stop, because you're not sure how to finish it.
"I know," he says.
"You don't know what I was going to say."
"No," he agrees. "But I know you." A pause. "And I think you were going to say something about how you should be able to manage this. About how other people manage. About how it shouldn't be this hard."
You don't answer, which is its own kind of answer.
"Let me help you," he says, and his voice is steady and unhurried, a current moving deep below still water, something you'd have to go quiet yourself to hear properly. "That's all I'm asking. Let me take some of the weight. You don't have to carry all of it by yourself."
You want to argue. You can feel the argument still sitting at the back of your throat—the reflexive, exhausted resistance, the part of you that has been managing alone for long enough that being helped feels like a kind of defeat, like an admission of something you're not ready to admit. You've spent so long calibrating your life around the migraines, arranging everything in careful configurations that minimise the damage when they come—the blue-light filters and the blackout blinds and the rescue medication lined up in the bathroom cabinet like small soldiers—that somewhere along the way, asking for help stopped feeling like an option and started feeling like a failure.
But you're so tired.
The migraine is a tide that's been coming in since mid-afternoon, and you've been standing against it with your feet in the wet sand and your arms out, bracing yourself, refusing to move, and the tide has come in anyway, the way it always does. That's the thing about tides. They don't care how hard you brace.
The bedroom is dark when he brings you into it. He turns back the duvet with one hand and you lower yourself onto the edge of the bed, and it's only then—in the sudden and total quiet of a room that doesn't demand anything of you, that has no screen, no cursor, no unanswered emails—that you feel the full weight of the day come down onto you like something physical. Like sediment settling after a flood. Like a structure finally allowed to bear the load it's been carrying all along.
"Here," he says, and he's holding out two paracetamol and a glass of water, and you take them without argument, which might be the most telling thing you've done all night.
He tucks the duvet around you with a quiet efficiency that never feels clinical, that feels instead like something practised and deliberate and personal, like a thing he's chosen to learn how to do well. His fingers brush your hair back from your forehead—light as anything, barely there—and then he gets up and crosses to the window and adjusts the blackout curtain until no light gets through at all, and then he goes around to his side of the bed and sits on the edge of it, unlacing his shoes in the dark.
"You should've called me," he says. Not an accusation. Just a fact, offered quietly.
"I didn't want to bother you."
"You're not a bother."
"I know you think that—"
"It's not a matter of what I think." He sets his shoes aside. "You're not a bother. That's just true." Another pause. "Next time, call me."
He turns off the lamp.
The darkness is immediate and total and the relief of it moves through you like warm water, slow and spreading, loosening things that have been held rigid for hours, reaching into the tight and aching places behind your eyes and simply—easing. Not ending. The pain is still there, and you know it'll still be there in the morning, know the migraine doesn't simply dissolve because you've stopped fighting it, because you've put yourself somewhere dark and quiet and safe. But it's different, in the dark. Less urgent. Less like something you're racing. Less like a thing that's chasing you.
Aaron settles beside you, close but not touching—just the warmth of him, the steady sound of his breathing, the particular quality of stillness that he has when he's choosing to be still. It's not the absence of him. It's very much the presence of him, the deliberate and quiet kind.
"Sleep," he says.
Not a command. Not quite. Something softer than that—more like an invitation, the way he extends most things he means with his whole heart. Like he's setting something down in front of you and trusting you to pick it up.
You close your eyes.
The deadline is still there, somewhere at the back of your mind—a small, persistent ember, a distant ache that echoes the one behind your eyes. The emails are still unanswered. The document is still open on the desk in the other room, cursor blinking at the end of that stubborn and unfinished sentence, waiting in the dark. None of that has gone away. None of it will be different in the morning, except that you will be.
That's what he's been saying, you think. That's the whole of it, really.
In the dark, with the duvet heavy and warm and the pain beginning its slow retreat to something more manageable, something that might even let you sleep—in the dark, you let yourself be here. Just here. You let the bedroom be the only room that exists. You let the deadline be something that lives in tomorrow, which is a country you don't have to enter yet.
It's harder than it sounds. You've been so long in the habit of carrying it all with you everywhere, into every room, into sleep itself—the low-grade hum of everything that needs doing, everything you might be falling short of—that putting it down, even temporarily, even just until morning, feels like something you have to actively practise. Like a muscle you've let go weak from disuse.
But right now, in the dark, with Aaron breathing slowly beside you and the weight of the duvet pressing down like a gentle hand, you try.
Aaron's hand finds yours under the duvet. His fingers are loose and warm around your own, unhurried, asking nothing.
"We'll figure it out," he says, softer now, his voice already taking on the slow and slightly blurred quality of someone drifting toward sleep himself. "I promise you. We'll figure it out."
You breathe out.
It's not certainty, what you feel. Not resolution. It's something quieter than that, and more durable—the way a fire banked for the night is still warmth, still presence, still the promise of heat in the morning even when the flame is low. You don't have the answers. The deadline is still real. The pain is still real, still a dull and tired pressure behind your eyes, a reminder that your body requires things from you that you don't always want to give.
But Aaron's hand is warm around yours. The room is dark and still. And somewhere between one breath and the next, you find that you believe him—not because the problems are solved, not because everything is going to be fine in any simple or immediate way, but because he's here, and he means it, and that turns out to be enough to sleep on.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: You collapse in the shower without warning, and Aaron builds you a sanctuary while you recover.
Tags: disabled!reader, depictions of chronic illness, syncope, pregnancy symptoms, reader is pregnant, morning sickness, fainting spell, blackout, chronic illness flare, dizzy spell in the shower, reader passes out, aaron goes into crisis mode, hurt/comfort, emotional aftermath, gentle intimacy, domestic aaron hotchner, soft!aaron, reader is deeply loved, complex caregiving dynamics, no use of y/n, fluff, some angst, pregnancy with chronic illness, emergency preparedness as love language
Word count: 3.1k words
The morning is unremarkable in every way except for the nausea curling in your stomach like a lazy cat and the headache lingering behind your eyes—less a sharp pain, more a low hum of static electricity, ever-present and growing more insistent by the hour. You wake before Aaron, wrapped up in his arms and the scent of his skin, warm and steady and familiar. His hand rests over your belly—small, flat, still—but he cradles it like there's already life blooming under his palm, like he's listening for something only you can feel.
He's half-asleep, murmuring something soft against your shoulder, something about the weekend and breakfast and maybe staying in bed all day. But the second you shift to sit up, he hums low in his chest and trails his hand up to your back, rubbing slow circles there like it might settle the morning sickness. You kiss his temple and whisper, "Shower," and he nods without opening his eyes, fingers curling briefly around your wrist before letting you go.
The floor is cold against your bare feet, and the nausea has teeth this morning—biting, insistent, but not unexpected. Still, you move slowly, deliberately. You've learned your body's pace, its odd rhythms. The years of trial and error, of collapsing and standing back up, of tracking salt and fluids and sleeping positions. Of knowing your body's rebellions before they start.
A shower usually helps. Something about the steam and routine of it, the gentle rhythm of water over skin, the silence. It's one of the few places your body sometimes cooperates—where your symptoms are quiet, predictable, manageable. You like the cocoon of it. The way the fog wraps around your limbs and muffles the world. You sit for a minute first, like you often do—perched on the edge of the tub, waiting for your blood pressure to level, waiting for your head to stop swimming from the walk down the hallway. You're careful. You've gotten good at careful.
But today, your body has other plans.
You don't feel it coming. No warning light flashing in the back of your mind, no tell-tale rise in that electric static, no creeping grey at the edge of your vision. Just one moment you're standing under the stream, hands braced against the slick tile, water cascading over your shoulders, heartbeat a touch faster than usual but nothing dramatic. You're even humming faintly, distracted by the heat against your spine and the relief it brings your tight muscles. The water smells faintly of lavender, a soap you've used for months, one Aaron once said made you smell like peace.
And then—
It's gone.
The world slips sideways. Gravity warps like someone pulled the floor out from under you. There's a dull thud as your knees slam into the bottom of the tub, your shoulder catching the tap on the way down. Cold, hard porcelain meets your spine with a jolt that wakes the dizziness just enough to remind you that yes, this is happening. Your vision tunnels, greys at the edges, water continuing to beat down against your legs as your body trembles.
There's a moment where everything is soundless. Just your heartbeat thudding in your ears, irregular and panicked. You blink slowly. You can't move. Your limbs feel full of sand. Water runs in rivulets over your ribs and down your legs, pooling at your feet. The heat of it barely registers. The smell of lavender turns sharp.
Then Aaron's voice.
Sharp. Panicked. Distant, and then suddenly close. The pitch of it cuts through the fog in your head like a knife. Not the Aaron who lectures calmly in boardrooms, or the one who reads with you in bed with his glasses slipping down his nose. This is another Aaron. The one built for war.
You hear the bang of the bathroom door crashing open, rattling on its hinges. He's shouting your name like he's already imagining the worst. The kind of voice he uses when someone's bleeding out. When a call goes unanswered on the other end of a comm line.
You're already half-awake again when he finds you, though it doesn't feel like waking—more like rising out of static. Drenched. Naked. Sprawled across the tub like something out of a painting that someone tried to scrub too hard, colours running. Your limbs don't work right. Your breathing feels hollow and wrong.
"Jesus—"
He's on his knees, practically diving in after you. One hand catches the rim of the tub, the other reaching for you, but not touching. His eyes are scanning—assessing damage, scanning for blood, bruises, breaks. His voice breaks apart when he speaks again.
"Hey—hey, sweetheart, can you hear me? Look at me. Come on."
You manage a shaky breath, blinking through wet lashes. "I'm okay."
Your voice doesn't sound like yours. It's thin, ghostly. "Just… dizzy."
But the fear on his face only deepens. You can see it crawling up from his gut, filling his chest, blooming behind his eyes like a bruise. He swallows hard, fingers twitching near your arm but still afraid to grab.
"You passed out," he says, more like an accusation to the universe than a statement. "God, you passed out in the shower."
You try to nod. Big mistake. The motion sends your vision spinning, a wave of nausea crashing over your ribs like seawater. You groan and sink a little lower, head tipping back against the tub. Your skin is slick, hair plastered to your face. There's a tremor in your thighs you can't quite control.
"It's POTS," you breathe. "Just a flare. I didn't feel it coming."
He's already moving. Shutting off the water with one decisive twist. The silence that follows is deafening. Only the drip-drip-drip from the showerhead remains, echoing off tile. He grabs the nearest towel, wraps it around your shoulders with trembling hands.
"I need to get you out of here."
His voice is low, tight. He sounds like he's negotiating with a bomb. Like the wrong move might break you further. When his hands finally touch your arms, they're warm, grounding. He slides one under your elbow, the other braced at your back. You let him pull you up—slow, steady—like rising from the depths of a lake.
The dizziness comes back full force. Your heart rockets, hammering in your chest like a trapped bird. You sag into him, water from your hair soaking through the cotton of his shirt. He holds you like it doesn't matter. Like the water could burn and he wouldn't let go.
You hear him muttering something under his breath as he steadies you. Maybe prayer. Maybe curses. Maybe just your name again and again like if he says it enough, the fear will subside. You feel his hand at the back of your head, shielding it as you lean forward, your chest to his, heartbeat stuttering against his.
He gets you to the bath mat, easing you down until you're seated on the closed toilet lid. Kneeling in front of you, Aaron grabs a second towel and begins wrapping it around your arms, then your legs, then over your back in broad, encompassing sweeps. He peels your hair gently from your neck, pushes it back behind your ears, as if needing to see your face just to believe you're still here.
His hands are steady, but his face—
His face is white. Drawn. Haunted.
You can see the memory of it playing already behind his eyes. Not this exact moment, but the echoes of others. Field injuries. Hostages. The people he's carried bleeding through doorways.
"I'm sorry," you whisper, the words tasting strange in your mouth.
He jerks his head up. "What in God's name are you apologising for?"
"You've never seen it happen like that," you murmur. "Not in the shower. I thought I had it under control."
Aaron shakes his head, gently cupping your jaw. His thumb brushes the water from your cheek. You're not sure if it's from the shower or your eyes.
"You don't have to be in control all the time," he says, quieter now, but firm. "You're pregnant. Your body's doing impossible things. You passed out. That doesn't make it your fault."
You nod faintly, lips pressed tight. He leans in, brushing his forehead to yours, breathing you in.
"I've got you," he murmurs.
"I know."
You stay like that a while. Your breath slows. The racing in your chest eases, not gone, but quieted. He pulls the towel tighter around your shoulders, then takes another and begins to carefully, reverently, dry your arms. Each movement is deliberate. Tender. Like he's afraid you'll shatter if he presses too hard.
He dries each finger individually, the soft cotton brushing over your knuckles like an apology. He presses a kiss to your damp forehead, then to your temple, and you feel the silent promise carried in each one.
"It's worse in the first trimester," you whisper after a beat. "It's common. But it usually gets better later."
He nods, lips brushing your temple again. "We'll talk to your doctor. Adjust whatever needs adjusting. If we have to put a chair in the shower or time them or… anything, we'll do it. No matter what."
He pauses. Pulls back just enough to search your face. "But are you really okay?"
You nod again, this time more firmly. "Just… rattled. That's all. I promise."
His eyes linger on yours, searching for any sign of a lie or a glossed-over truth, but whatever he sees seems to ease the lines in his brow. Still, he doesn't stop. Doesn't rush. He dries your hands like you're porcelain. Folds the towel around your waist like it's sacred. Then he gently rests your hand over your belly, covering it with his own.
"I need you both safe," he says, voice barely above a whisper.
You nod, throat too tight to speak. You lean into him, heart still skittering, but grounded now by the steady beat of his.
He carries you to bed like you weigh nothing at all, cradled against his chest with the towels still clinging to your damp skin. You're mostly dry by now, though the chill in your limbs hasn't quite faded. Aaron murmurs soft reassurances with every step. "Almost there. Just breathe. I've got you." You don't have the strength to respond, but you let your fingers curl into the soft fabric of his shirt, grateful for the solidity of him—grateful that when the world fell sideways, he came running.
The sheets are still warm from earlier, and he lays you down with exquisite care, like setting down something breakable. A hand brushes your hair back from your forehead; another tucks the blankets around your body like a cocoon. The room smells faintly of lavender from the oil diffuser he turned on that morning, and now the scent wraps around you like another layer of comfort. Everything is soft. Everything is still. Safe.
"I'm going to get you some electrolytes," he says, brushing a kiss to your forehead. "Don't move. Not unless you need to."
You hum in response. The dizziness is fading now, but your heart still isn't behaving—too fast, too uneven. Your limbs feel leaden, as though gravity has made a personal enemy of you. But you're not scared anymore. Not with him here. Not when you know he's already thinking three steps ahead.
He disappears for only a moment, then returns with one of your favourite electrolyte packets stirred into a tall glass of ice water. He holds it to your lips until you're steady enough to take it yourself. You sip slowly, watching him through heavy lashes, the glass cold against your hands, the citrus flavour biting and grounding. He crouches beside the bed, watching the way your throat works as you swallow, his fingers brushing your knee now and then just to remind himself you're here. He doesn't rush. Doesn't fidget. He just stays.
Then come the clothes. He chooses your softest loungewear—loose cotton, no tight waistbands—and helps you into it without a word. You're a little more coherent now, enough to help him lift your arms, steady your legs. Still, he does most of the work, gentle and unhurried, as if you're something sacred. He kneels beside the bed to ease the sweatpants up your legs, smoothing them carefully over your knees like the fabric might bruise you. His knuckles brush the inside of your ankle and linger there just a second too long. His reverence makes your throat ache.
He brushes your hair, too, coaxing the knots out of it before pulling it gently into a loose plait, his fingers deft and familiar. You catch his mouth twitching into a little smile when you lean into his touch. "There," he says, pulling the blanket back over you. "You rest. I'll be right back."
You drift.
Somewhere in the distance, you hear Jack's footsteps. Aaron's voice low and steady, telling him, "She's okay. Just resting. I'll drive you to school today." Jack doesn't linger long—he's used to Aaron's calm authority, and he trusts it. You're asleep before the front door closes.
Time blurs. You sleep. Or you float. The house breathes around you—creaking floorboards, the gentle hum of the dishwasher, a faraway car rolling past outside. You wake once to the sound of the front door opening and closing again. Keys dropped into the bowl by the door. The rustle of bags.
When you wake properly, sunlight spills across the floor. The clock reads just past eleven. The bedroom is quiet, save for the soft sound of drawers opening and the occasional rustle of packaging. And Aaron—Aaron is on the floor beside the bed, building something.
It takes you a moment to register the shape: a care cart. A three-tiered, rolling cart in a muted sage green, filled with labelled compartments. You blink slowly, watching in stunned silence as he places a small bottle of moisturiser into a box already half-full of supplies. There's a laptop open beside him, tabs open to medical forums, product reviews, patient blogs, and academic journals. He's been taking notes. Scribbling lists. Making comparisons.
There's everything.
Water bottles. Two kinds of electrolyte drinks, carefully selected for pregnancy safety. Salted snacks, dried fruit, your favourite granola bars. Ginger chews lined up beside a tiny ceramic bowl. A pulse oximeter still in its packaging. The tiny fan you keep in your handbag, probably loaded with fresh batteries. Instant ice packs. Dry shampoo and face wipes. Lip balm, moisturiser, your hairbrush and a stack of soft scrunchies. Your medications, organised into pill boxes by time of day. Your e-reader. Your work tablet, charger cable coiled beside it. A miniature rubbish bin attached to the side. A reacher tool for anything you might drop.
A heating pad. A soft eye mask. Even a lavender roller. There's a small pouch of mints you like to keep by the bed, tucked into a corner. A spare phone charger. A notebook with a pen clipped to the cover. A bottle of hand sanitiser. A stash of tissues. A jar of honey. A stress ball. Nothing is missing.
There's even a laminated note clipped to the side: instructions for emergency hydration, your most recent vitals, and reminders to himself in bullet points. He's thought of everything. In the corner of the note, he's drawn a little star and the word "breathe" in your favourite ink. Beneath it, another note in his handwriting: "I love you. Please rest."
Each item has its own space. Each space has a label. In his handwriting. There's no chaos to it. No clutter. Just calm. Intentionality. Love.
Aaron doesn't notice you're awake until he's lining up the electrolyte drinks in a neat row, grouping them by colour. When he turns, it's with a package of extra-long straws in hand. His gaze finds yours instantly.
"Did you do all that just now?" you ask, your voice hoarse with sleep.
He startles slightly, then smiles as he kneels beside the bed. "You were asleep. I didn't want to wake you. But yeah. I wanted you to have everything within reach. I ordered a proper shower seat, too. It should be here tomorrow. And compression socks. And one of those pregnancy pillows that looks like it could eat a person whole."
You stare at him, overwhelmed. Your throat tightens. You don't have the words, not really. You settle for whispering, "I feel guilty."
Aaron frowns, brows knitting together. "Why would you—"
You shrug a little under the blanket. "You're doing everything."
"Because I want to," he says without hesitation. "Because I can. Because I need you safe."
He stands, but only to slide into the bed beside you without another word, curling up behind you like he's been waiting all morning to. His lips press to your shoulder, soft and warm, lingering. His palm rests against your abdomen again, more firmly now. Protective.
"You're making a human," he says simply. "I'm just trying to keep up."
His arm wraps around your waist, hand resting gently over your belly. And even though it's too early to feel anything, even though the baby is still only a promise, you swear you feel something shift. Some invisible tether tightening.
You let your hand rest over his. His thumb strokes the back of yours without thinking. You both lie still for a long time. Just breathing.
"This scares me sometimes," he admits quietly into your shoulder. "Not because of you. Just because I hate seeing you like this, and I can't control it. But I can do this, I can make it easier for you."
You tilt your head slightly, just enough to brush your temple against his. "You do make it easier. So much easier."
His nose bumps against your cheek. "Then don't feel guilty. We're a team. And when I look at you—at us—I just think… this baby is so lucky."
You breathe in slowly, settling deeper into his chest, the weight of his arm grounding you. His fingers splay protectively across your stomach. He murmurs something you can't quite hear into your hair. A prayer. A promise. A vow.
And in that moment, you know with absolute certainty—
This baby will never go a day without knowing how deeply they are wanted.
Because love, in this house, looks like towels warmed in the dryer. Like colour-coded labels. Like loungewear and long straws and a man on the floor beside your bed, building you a sanctuary piece by piece.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: A fibromyalgia flare turns the morning heavy, but Aaron carries the day so you don't have to carry it alone.
Tags: disabled!reader, fibromyalgia, bad pain flare, depictions of chronic pain, depictions of chronic fatigue, hurt/comfort, soft!aaron hotchner, morning intimacy, domestic softness, he noticed before you said a word, toast with a face on it, aaron reads to you, being taken care of without asking, reader struggling with feeling like a burden, quiet reassurance, no grand gestures just presence, his thumb on the back of your hand, slow afternoons, film at the end of a hard day, no use of y/n, fluff, this is what steady love looks like, you don't have to be strong today, held and not fixed, the kindest kind of devotion
Word count: 3k words
The pain wakes you before the alarm does.
It's there before you're even fully conscious—a low, grinding awareness spreading through your joints like wet cement hardening in your bones, heavy and immovable and brutally patient, as though it's been waiting all night for the moment you'd surface enough to feel it. You lie still for a few seconds, taking stock the way you've learnt to—a quiet, clinical inventory of your own body, scanning from your shoulders to your hips to your hands, cataloguing where the damage is worst today. It's a ritual you've performed so many times it barely registers as grief anymore. Mostly. There are mornings where the sheer mundanity of it breaks something small inside your chest, and this is one of them, the pain sitting in you like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples moving outward in slow, relentless circles.
It's a bad one. You know within thirty seconds. You know the way you know a storm before the clouds arrive—something in the pressure of it, something in the specific quality of the ache, the way it's lodged itself deep rather than sitting on the surface where you could almost manage it. Today is going to be one of those days where brushing your teeth will feel like scaling a mountain in wet boots, where the distance between the bed and the bathroom will feel unfair in a way that you'll never quite be able to articulate to someone who hasn't lived inside a body like yours.
You exhale slowly through your nose.
Aaron is still warm beside you, a steady, solid heat at your back, his breathing deep and unhurried in the last loose threads of sleep. The room is grey and soft with early morning, the curtains filtering the light into something gentle, and under any other circumstances it would feel like a perfect morning—the quiet, the warmth, the weight of him close to you. But your body is a country at war with itself, and the beauty of the moment keeps slipping through your fingers, impossible to hold onto when everything hurts.
You shift slightly, just enough to adjust your weight, and even that small movement sends a fresh wave of aching rolling through you, slow and inevitable as a tide.
Aaron's hand finds yours under the covers before you've said a word.
His thumb moves in a slow, careful arc across the back of your hand—once, twice, a gentle repetition like the world's smallest metronome. He's not fully awake yet, or maybe he is, maybe he's been awake the whole time, reading the language of your stillness the way he reads everything—quietly, thoroughly, without making a fuss of it.
"Bad day?"
His voice is low and sleep-rough, barely above a murmur, and there's no alarm in it. No performance of concern. Just a simple question asked with the kind of steadiness that makes you want to fall into it like falling into deep water.
You nod. You don't trust your voice yet.
His hand tightens around yours, just slightly, a small pulse of pressure like a full stop at the end of a sentence.
"Okay," he says.
Just that. Just okay, as though your bad days are something he's folded into his understanding of the world without complaint, without ceremony, without making you justify them or qualify them or apologise for them. The frustration rises anyway—not at him, never at him—but at the situation itself, at the unfairness of it, the sheer grinding absurdity of waking up in a body that treats ordinary life like an endurance test. You don't want to feel this way. You want to get up easily and make your own coffee and exist in your own skin without negotiating with it first, and the wanting of that simple, ordinary thing sits inside your chest like a fist closing around something fragile.
It's not fair, you think. And then, because you've thought it a thousand times before, you let it move through you and out the other side. You don't hold onto it. Holding onto it doesn't help.
Aaron shifts behind you, sitting up slowly, and you feel the warmth leave your back like a small bereavement.
"Stay there," he says.
"Aaron—"
"Stay there."
There's no harshness in it. It's not an order so much as a quiet certainty, the particular firmness of someone who has already decided, who made his decision the moment he felt the tension in your body and isn't going to be talked out of it by your reflexive need to insist you're fine. You press your lips together. You want to protest—some part of you always wants to protest, trained as you are in the architecture of self-sufficiency, in the belief that needing things from people is a kind of imposition—but you're tired. You're tired and it hurts and the protest dissolves before it can fully form.
You hear him moving through the flat, the soft sounds of him navigating the kitchen—the click of the kettle, the quiet clink of crockery, the low, domestic percussion of someone making themselves useful in the most unshowy way possible. It strikes you sometimes, the way Aaron expresses care. It's not loud. It's not declarative. It moves through actions rather than announcements, settles itself in the small details—the way he remembers exactly how strong you take your tea, the way he always puts the mug on your right side because he's noticed, without ever being told, that it's easier for you to reach.
He comes back twenty minutes later with a tray.
You push yourself up against the headboard carefully, and he sets it on the nightstand with the deliberate gentleness he usually reserves for things that are breakable. There's tea—your tea, the right brand, the right colour, exactly the right amount of milk—and there's toast, and the toast is arranged into a face, two neat rounds of jam for eyes and a curved smear of it for a mouth, slightly lopsided, more endearing for the imperfection.
You stare at it for a moment.
Something in you softens so quickly it almost hurts.
"Aaron."
"Don't," he says, but he's smiling, that rare quiet smile that doesn't reach his eyes so much as settle into them, deepening them, making him look younger somehow.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You had a face."
"I always have a face. I have one face. It's the only one I've got."
He huffs, quiet and low, almost a laugh, and it does something to the air in the room—loosens it, makes the morning feel less like something to be endured and more like something the two of you are simply in together. He leans down and presses his lips to your forehead—not a quick, perfunctory kiss but a slow one, a deliberate one, his hand coming up to rest lightly against the side of your face as he does it.
"You don't have to be strong all the time, you know."
"I know that," you say, though even as you say it you're aware of how automatic it sounds, how rehearsed, the answer of someone who knows the right words without quite believing them yet.
Aaron pulls back just enough to look at you properly, his eyes moving over your face with that particular quality of attention he has—unhurried, thorough, the kind of look that makes you feel both seen and steadied in the same breath.
He straightens.
"That's my job now."
You don't say anything. You're not sure you could. The words have landed somewhere tender, somewhere you don't usually let things land, and they sit there quietly, settling into you like warmth settling into cold hands.
You drink your tea. It's perfect. Of course it is.
The morning passes the way bad pain days pass when you're alone in them—slowly, unevenly, the minutes occasionally stretching and then suddenly lurching forward. But you're not alone in it. That changes the texture of it in ways you're still learning to describe, still learning to accept without guilt. Aaron moves around the flat quietly, bringing you things before you've asked for them—a blanket when the morning chill comes through the window, your medication with a glass of water at exactly the right time, a pillow repositioned with two careful hands when he notices you've shifted awkwardly. He doesn't hover. That's the thing about Aaron—he occupies space the way good weather does, present without being oppressive, attending without smothering.
By mid-morning, you've migrated to the sofa.
It had taken some doing—the short walk from the bedroom had been its own small ordeal, the kind of thing that would be invisible to anyone watching but that costs you something real, something that gets quietly deducted from the day's limited account—but Aaron had been there, steady and unhurried, not rushing you, not making commentary on the pace of it. Just there, his hand at the small of your back, patient as a lighthouse.
The coffee table has a stack of paperwork on it, manila folders and printed reports, the detritus of his consulting work. You eye it with a flicker of guilt.
"You had things to do today," you say.
"They'll keep."
"Aaron—"
"They'll keep," he says again, sitting down beside you, and there's something immovable about the way he says it, not defensive, not martyred, simply settled.
"You have a deadline. The Whitmore case, you said Thursday—"
"Wednesday," he corrects, without missing a beat. "And I've got time."
"That's not what you said on Friday."
He looks at you then, really looks at you, and there's something patient and unhurried in it, the look of a man who is completely uninterested in winning this particular argument.
"What would you like me to do?" he says. "Go and sit in the other room and work while you're on the sofa?"
You open your mouth.
"Because I can," he adds. "If that's what you want. But I'd rather be here."
You close your mouth again.
"That's what I thought," he says, not unkindly, and reaches for the book on the side table—the historical mystery you've been working through together for the past three weeks, a fat, dog-eared thing with a cracked spine and a bookmark that's migrated through its pages in fits and starts, dependent entirely on how you've both been.
"Where were we?" he murmurs, flipping it open to the bookmark.
"The bit with the letter," you say. "I think. I can't remember."
"Chapter seventeen," he says. He'd remembered for you. Of course he had.
He begins to read.
His voice settles over you like something physical—low and measured, unhurried, each word placed with the quiet precision of a man accustomed to briefings and courtrooms and quiet authority, but softened now, the edges of it worn smooth by the intimacy of the setting. It moves through the room like water finding its level, filling the spaces between the furniture and the grey morning light, and you close your eyes and let it carry you. The story unfolds—a murder in 1920s Vienna, a detective with a past, a woman who knows more than she says—and you don't follow all of it, your mind drifting occasionally on the warm current of his voice, surfacing for the good bits and sinking again during the expository passages, and this too is a kind of rest.
His hand finds yours on the cushion between you.
He doesn't comment on it. He just holds it, lightly, and keeps reading.
The afternoon softens around you both, the grey light from the window shifting incrementally as the hours pass. Aaron reads for a long time, pausing occasionally to ask if you're comfortable, adjusting his position when yours shifts, never drawing attention to the accommodation, simply making it. Once, he gets up to make more tea without breaking his reading stride, managing somehow to pick up the thread again from memory when he returns, sliding back into the narrative like he'd never left. You watch him do it from under heavy eyelids, struck—not for the first time, not even for the hundredth—by the particular kind of love that expresses itself this way. Not in grand gestures or dramatic declarations. In continuity. In showing up and staying.
By the late afternoon it's begun to recede slightly—not gone, not even close to gone, but loosened around the edges, the grip of it less total, less consuming. You're aware of yourself again in ways that go beyond just the pain—aware of the warmth of the room, of the smell of the tea Aaron had made an hour ago, of the solid warmth of him at your side. The world has a texture again beyond the texture of suffering, and that in itself feels like something worth noticing.
"Thank you," you say, quietly, into the peaceable silence.
Aaron looks at you.
"You don't have to thank me," he says.
"I know," you say. "I'm saying it anyway."
He's quiet for a moment, the expression on his face settling into something you've come to recognise—not quite a smile, not the way most people smile, but a softening at the corners of his eyes, an easing of the usual careful composure. It's the look he gets when something matters to him and he's not going to perform the mattering of it.
"I used to feel like such a burden," you say. You don't plan it. It just comes out, quiet and factual, a thing you're trusting him with. "On days like this. Like I was making everyone around me smaller."
Aaron is very still for a moment.
"You know that's not—"
"I know," you say. "Now. Mostly." You pause. "It's different with you."
He looks at you for a long moment. Something moves behind his eyes, something that takes its time arriving at his face.
"You've been strong for so long," he says, finally.
It lands differently than you expected, the words moving through you like a slow, warm current, touching things you hadn't known were cold. You don't argue with him. You don't deflect. You let it sit, let it be true, let yourself be seen by him in the way he's always tried to see you—not as someone to be fixed or solved or managed, but as someone worth showing up for, exactly as you are, on exactly the days when you're least able to be anything other than this.
He opens his arm and you shift into him, your head finding the familiar geography of his shoulder, the specific warmth of him, the steady rise and fall of his breathing that you've mapped so thoroughly it feels like home. His arm comes around you, careful, adjusting to what you need rather than what would be easiest, because he always does. Because that's who he is.
He reaches for the remote.
"Film?" he says.
"Film," you agree.
The evening opens up ahead of you both—unhurried, undemanding, the kind of time that doesn't ask you to be anything in particular, that simply holds you and lets you be held. He picks something easy, something neither of you have to concentrate on, something with enough story to follow but not enough tension to sit up for. The room goes dim around the edges as the light outside fades, the blue of the television washing over the two of you in shifting waves, and you feel the day's particular weight beginning to dissolve into something softer, something that doesn't require a name.
Your body is still talking to you. It always is. But the volume of it has dropped to something manageable, something that sits alongside experience rather than consuming it, and in the space that opens up around it you feel—not fine, not fixed, but held. Held by him, by the room, by the specific quality of this ordinary evening, which is extraordinary in all the ways that don't announce themselves.
Aaron's thumb traces a slow path along your shoulder, absent and rhythmic, not a gesture that's asking anything or saying anything in particular. Just contact. Just the wordless language of I'm here, of you're not alone in this, of the thousand small daily choices that add up, over time, to something that looks like devotion.
You think about the smiley face made of jam.
You think about the way he picked up the book mid-sentence and found the thread again without a moment's hesitation.
You think about that's my job now and the way he'd said it—not as a burden, not as resignation, but as something chosen, as something claimed, as though taking care of you was a role he'd taken up willingly and with full knowledge of what it would require on days like this one.
The film plays on. His breathing is steady. The pain is there, at the edges of everything, the familiar low hum of your body being what it is—but it's at the edges now, and the centre is this: the warmth of him, the blue-grey light, the quiet that stretches out between you like something that was made to be inhabited.
You close your eyes.
You let yourself be taken care of.
Outside, the evening settles over the city like a held breath slowly released, and inside, the two of you hold your own small piece of ordinary life between you—imperfect and real and enough, more than enough, sufficient as a heartbeat, as a hand held in the dark, as a voice that keeps reading even when you've stopped listening, because the voice itself is the point.
You don't have to be strong right now.
You were, and you will be, and on the days in between, there is this.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: The flare has finally lifted, and coming back to Aaron feels like coming home to something you didn't realise you'd been holding your breath for.
Tags: disabled!reader, lupus, post-flare recovery, hurt/comfort, soft!aaron hotchner, the tender aftermath, reader scared he'll get tired of it, he never will and he means it, joint pain, fatigue, skin sensitivity, the week you couldn't be touched, laced fingers in the dark, being carried home even when you can walk, morgan checking in by proxy, garcia being garcia, deep sea documentaries and anglerfish discourse, the bread basket promise, falling asleep safe, no use of y/n, quiet domestic intimacy, love as steadiness, ordinary feels extraordinary after loss, the relief of being held again, couch cuddles, amber light going dark, he kept almost reaching for your hand
Word count: 3.1k words.
The flare had taken almost a week from you.
Seven days of lying in bed watching the ceiling change colour as the light moved through it, your joints swollen and aching in that deep, grinding way that no amount of paracetamol ever quite touches. Your knuckles had been the worst of it at the start—puffy and hot to the touch, so stiff in the mornings that you'd had to lie there for twenty minutes just working up to making a fist—but by the third day it had spread to your hips and knees too, that particular kind of diffuse, bone-deep ache that makes even shifting position in bed feel like a negotiation. The rash across your cheeks had flared up as well, tight and tender when you touched it, and the light from the window had bothered your eyes in a way you'd given up trying to explain to anyone who hadn't experienced it themselves. The fatigue had been its own separate monster entirely, the kind that doesn't feel like tiredness so much as gravity deciding it has a personal grudge against you. Every time you'd tried to sit up properly, your body had just quietly refused, like a car that turns over but won't start, and eventually you'd stopped arguing with it.
Aaron had been there through all of it. Not hovering—he'd learned early on that hovering made it worse, that sometimes the most loving thing he could do was sit in the armchair across the room with a book and just be present without expecting anything from you. He'd brought soup you mostly didn't eat and tea that went cold on the nightstand, and he'd changed the sheets on the third day without making a production of it, just stripped the bed and remade it while you sat on the edge of the mattress and tried not to feel useless. He'd kissed your forehead every morning before he left for work and every evening when he came back, and he hadn't once made you feel like a burden, even when you'd snapped at him because your hips hurt and you were frustrated and frightened in that familiar, exhausting way that flares always brought with them—the fear that this time it wouldn't lift, that this would just be what your life was now.
But it had lifted. Slowly, the way it always does, retreating like a tide going out.
You're sitting on the couch now, tucked into the corner of it with a blanket over your legs and your hands wrapped around a mug of tea, and you feel—not good, exactly, but like yourself again. Recognisably yourself. The ache in your joints has softened down to something manageable, a background hum rather than a shout, and you'd actually had a shower this morning and dried your hair and that had felt like an enormous victory. You'd even eaten a proper breakfast, stood at the kitchen counter in the morning light eating toast and feeling almost normal, and that particular small triumph had made your eyes go hot in a way that would have been embarrassing if anyone had been there to see it. You feel fragile still, the way you always do coming out the other side of a bad flare, like something that got knocked over and glued back together—mostly fine, but aware of where the cracks are. Your body has that post-flare hollowness to it, that sense of having been wrung out and set back down, and you know from experience that it'll take another few days before you're properly yourself again. But you're close. Close enough to sit on the couch with tea and feel the late afternoon light on your face and think about something other than how much everything hurts.
What you're also aware of, sitting here in the quiet afternoon light, is how much you miss him. Which is a strange thing to realise when he's been here the whole time, but there's a difference between Aaron being in the room and Aaron being with you, and for the last week you'd been too exhausted and too sore for the latter. You'd barely been able to tolerate being touched, your skin hypersensitive the way it gets when the inflammation is bad, and so the small ordinary intimacies of your life together had been on pause—the way his hand always finds yours when you're watching television, the weight of his arm around you, the unhurried good-morning kisses before either of you are properly awake. You hadn't realised quite how much you'd been missing all of it until now, sitting here with the absence of it settling over you like something you could actually feel.
You hear his key in the lock, and something in your chest does a small, embarrassing leap.
You set your mug down and push yourself up from the corner of the couch, wincing as your knees and hips register their protest—they're always the last things to fully settle after a flare, and you've been sitting still for a while, which doesn't help. You move carefully, one hand on the back of the couch for a moment as you get your balance, and then you're walking toward the hallway, slow but upright, just as the front door opens and he steps inside.
Aaron looks tired. He always looks tired at the end of a long day at the office, this particular kind of worn-through that settles across his shoulders and lives somewhere behind his eyes, and he's still in his work clothes, jacket on, tie loosened just slightly at the collar. He sets his briefcase down by the door and he's reaching up to take off his jacket when he turns and sees you standing in the hallway, and the look on his face does something complicated—his brow creases and his eyes go soft at the same time, the way they do when he's worried and relieved in the same breath.
"You should be resting," he says, but it comes out gentle rather than stern, more like a question than an instruction. He's already moving toward you.
"I wanted to come and say hello," you say, which isn't quite the whole truth, but it's the part of it you can get out without your voice doing something embarrassing. "I'm okay. I'm a lot better."
He reaches you before you finish the sentence, and you step into him without really deciding to, your face pressing into the side of his neck and your arms going around him, and he wraps his arms around you and pulls you in properly, carefully, one hand splayed across your back and the other coming up to cup the back of your head, and you feel him exhale. Not a sigh—something more than that, like a tension leaving his whole body.
"I missed you," you admit into his collar, and your voice comes out smaller than you intended. "I know that sounds stupid when you've been right here, but I missed—I missed this."
"It doesn't sound stupid," he says quietly, his lips moving against your temple. He holds you like that for a moment, neither of you saying anything, and you can feel his heartbeat, steady and familiar, and you think about all the times over the last week you'd been lying in that bed listening to him move around the flat—the quiet sounds of him making tea, turning off the lights, checking on you—and how that had been its own kind of comfort, knowing he was there, but also how it hadn't been enough, not quite.
"How are you feeling?" he asks eventually, pulling back just enough to look at you, his hands moving to your face, and his thumbs brush along your jaw in that particular way of his, unhurried, like he's got all the time in the world.
"Better," you say honestly. "Still a bit stiff. Tired, but normal tired, not—not that other tired." He'll know what you mean. He always knows what you mean when it comes to this, now—he's learned the difference between your tiredness and your lupus tiredness, the way you have to explain it to most people but never to him.
His eyes move over your face and you can see him reading you the way he reads everything, carefully and quietly, and after a moment something in his expression settles. "Okay," he says softly, and then he kisses you.
It's slow. That's the thing about kissing Aaron—he's never in a hurry about it, never treats it like punctuation or habit, and this one especially feels deliberate, like he's been waiting for it. His hands are still at your face, thumbs resting against your cheeks, and the kiss is warm and unhurried and goes on long enough that you stop thinking about your stiff knees and the faint ache in your hips and just feel it, just feel him, familiar and solid and here. When it ends he keeps his forehead against yours for a moment, both of you just breathing.
"Better?" he asks, and there's the faintest trace of a smile in his voice.
"Much better," you say.
He pulls back properly then, looking at you, and then before you've properly registered what he's doing he's got one arm around your back and one under your knees and he's lifting you, smoothly and without apparent effort, and you make a noise of protest that comes out sounding considerably less authoritative than you intended.
"Aaron, I can walk," you say, though you're already being carried back down the hallway toward the living room, which rather undermines the point.
"I know you can," he says, not even slightly bothered.
"I walked out here to meet you, didn't I?"
"You did," he agrees, entirely too calm about this.
"So you don't need to—"
"I know," he says again, and he sits down on the couch with you in his lap, one arm looping around your waist and the other reaching across to pull the blanket back over your legs, and he does it all so matter-of-factly that somehow the protest dies before it's fully formed. You end up leaning into him, your head finding the spot against his shoulder that seems like it was made for exactly this purpose, your fingers curling into the front of his shirt, and you think—not for the first time—that he is unreasonably good at this. At taking care of you without making you feel taken care of. At the difference between the two.
"I didn't need the taxi service," you say, but there's no real heat in it.
"Mmm," he says, which is Aaron for I don't agree but I'm not going to argue. His hand moves in a slow circle against your back, and you feel the last of the tension in you start to unspool.
You stay like that for a while, neither of you talking, the flat quiet around you. The afternoon light has gone amber and low, coming through the windows at that particular end-of-day angle that makes everything look warmer than it is, and you can hear the city outside doing its evening thing—distant traffic, a siren somewhere far away, ordinary life carrying on. Your hip is a little uncomfortable at the angle but not enough to make you move, and you shift slightly and Aaron adjusts without being asked, like he always does, until you're settled again.
"How was work?" you ask eventually, your voice a little drowsy.
He makes a low sound, somewhere between a sigh and a hum. "Fine. Long. Strauss wanted to go over the unit's budget projections for the next quarter, so most of the afternoon was that." He pauses. "Morgan kept stopping by my office on various pretexts. I think he was checking on you by proxy."
Something about that makes you smile into his shoulder. "That's very him."
"It is," Aaron agrees, and you can hear the faint, fond exasperation in it—the tone he reserves exclusively for his team when they do something he'd never admit to appreciating. "Garcia sent me a message at half two asking if you needed anything dropped off. I told her you were improving."
"You told the whole team?"
"I told Garcia you were improving," he says, which is its own kind of answer, because telling Garcia something is functionally identical to telling everyone within a five-mile radius. "She seemed relieved."
"I'll have to text her tomorrow," you say, and you make a mental note, knowing already that you'll probably forget and she'll send you something—a meme, or a very long message full of exclamation points, or both.
His chin comes to rest on the top of your head. "Tell me about your week. Not the flare—not unless you want to. Just. What you thought about."
You think about it. "I watched three documentaries about deep sea creatures," you say. "I thought about whether I'd rather have gills or echolocation. I thought about the fact that I never finished that book on the nightstand and I've been meaning to for six months. I thought about you." You pause. "Quite a lot, actually."
"Good thoughts, I hope," he says, and you can hear the warmth in it.
"Mostly," you say. "I was a bit grumpy with you on Thursday."
"You were," he says, without any particular judgment in it.
"I'm sorry about that."
"You don't need to be sorry," he says, and the way he says it—quiet and absolutely certain—makes your throat tighten in a way you weren't expecting. He says it the way other people say things they've thought about, really thought about, and you know he means it. That he's never once made you feel like you owe him an apology for being ill.
"I know," you say. "I know I don't have to be. I still am."
His arms tighten around you slightly, just for a moment. "I missed this too," he says, and it's so quietly said that it takes a second to land. "The week was… I hated not being able to—" He stops, and you can tell he's choosing words carefully, the way he does when something matters. "I just wanted to be able to hold your hand," he says finally, simple and a little rueful, "and I couldn't. I kept almost doing it and then remembering."
The thought of him stopping himself from reaching for your hand all week, quietly, without saying anything, does something to your chest. You press closer without thinking about it, and he lets you. His arms shift to accommodate it, pulling you in rather than just holding you, and you feel the difference, the way you always feel the difference with him—between being tolerated and being wanted.
"I hated it too," you say, after a moment. "Being untouchable. I know it's just—I know it's the illness, I know it's not permanent, but during it I always think—" You stop, because finishing the sentence feels like more vulnerability than you'd planned for. But he waits, the way he always waits, and somehow that makes it easier. "I always think, what if he gets tired of this. What if there's only so many flares before it stops being worth it."
He's quiet for a beat, and then he tips his head down to press a kiss to the side of your head. "Not possible," he says, and it's not performative, not reassuring in that hollow way people sometimes are—it's just a statement of fact, offered without fanfare, the way he says everything he actually means.
"You don't know that."
"I do," he says, simply. And because it's Aaron, because of the particular way he says things when he's sure of them, you find that you almost believe it.
"You can now," you say, shifting back to safer ground, and he huffs something that might almost be a quiet laugh.
He finds your hand where it's resting against his chest and laces his fingers through yours, and holds on.
The two of you sit there while the light goes from amber to gold to the soft grey of early evening, and you don't bother turning on a lamp, and neither does he. Your hip stops aching. Your joints settle into the warmth of him. Outside, a car passes, and somewhere on the street below someone is calling to someone else, and the ordinary sound of it feels like a kindness—the world just quietly going about its business while the two of you stay still inside it.
You think, not for the first time, that this is the thing no one tells you about loving someone through chronic illness. Not the difficult parts—everyone braces for the difficult parts—but this, the particular quality of the easy moments after hard ones. How good ordinary feels when it's been taken away for a while. How a man sitting on a couch with his fingers laced through yours can feel like the most significant thing in the world, if you've spent a week not being able to have it.
"I think," you say eventually, your voice fuzzy with the beginnings of sleep, "that when I'm fully better I want to go somewhere. Not far. Just—out. Dinner, maybe."
"Wherever you want," he says.
"I want pasta," you say. "Somewhere with good pasta and those little bread rolls that come in a basket."
You feel him smile against the top of your head. "I'll find somewhere with an excellent bread basket."
"That's all I ask," you say solemnly, and he makes that almost-laugh sound again, low and quiet.
You stay awake longer than you expected to after that, long enough to hear him tell you about a piece of music Jack had been learning at school and how he'd tried to play it on the piano at home and gotten frustrated and then, apparently, tried again. Long enough to tell him about the deep sea documentary and argue gently but with some conviction about whether the anglerfish is objectively terrifying or simply misunderstood, and for him to take the misunderstood position entirely unprompted, which delights you more than it probably should. Long enough that the grey outside the windows has gone fully dark and the room has gone dim around you and neither of you has moved to do anything about it.
By the time you do fall asleep it's slowly and easily, and without the weight of the week sitting on your chest anymore.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: The worst of the migraine has finally passed, and Aaron has been there for all of it.
Tags: disabled!reader, chronic migraines, migraine recovery, post-migraine exhaustion, hurt/comfort, soft!aaron hotchner, aaron being quietly devastated, he looked it up and that says everything, two days in the dark together, he never once left, reader feeling wrung out and held, nonsexual intimacy, tender domesticity, falling asleep in his arms, the relief of the storm passing, silence as safety, no use of y/n, fluff, slow quiet love, he tiptoeing in the hallway wrecks me, shadows under his eyes because he didn't sleep, love as presence not performance, you are so safe here
Word count: 3k words.
The worst of it is over. You know this the way you know most things after two days of a migraine—not with certainty, not with any real confidence, but with a bone-deep, exhausted intuition that the storm has finally decided to pass. The pounding that had taken up residence behind your left eye, that relentless, rhythmic siege that had reduced you to a creature of pure suffering, has faded to something duller. Something almost manageable. A bruised, tender ache instead of a blade.
You're lying on your side in the dim bedroom, the blackout curtains doing their job with a kind of quiet diligence you're genuinely grateful for. The room smells faintly of the peppermint oil you'd had Aaron dab at your temples sometime yesterday—or maybe the day before, time having lost most of its meaning over the past forty-eight hours—and the sheets are cool against your cheek where you've turned away from the pillow that's grown too warm. Somewhere in the last hour you'd managed to drink most of a glass of water, small careful sips, and your stomach had accepted it without complaint, which had felt like an enormous victory. Small mercies. You'd take them. Your body feels wrung out, like something that's been put through a wash cycle too many times. There's that particular exhaustion that only comes after a bad one, not just tired but emptied, scraped clean of everything that isn't the simple, animal relief of not being in agony anymore.
It had been a bad one, even by your standards. The kind that starts as a warning—that creeping visual disturbance at the edge of your vision, lights going slightly wrong, the world acquiring a strange, brittle quality—and then arrives like something with intent. The nausea had been the worst of it this time, or maybe the light sensitivity, it was hard to rank these things when they were all happening at once. At some point on the first day you'd made it to the bathroom and Aaron had been right there, one hand steady on your back and the other holding your hair, not saying anything because he knew by now that talking didn't help, that what helped was simply the fact of him being there and not making you do it alone.
You hear him before he comes in. The quiet, deliberate fall of his footsteps in the hallway, careful and measured in that way he gets when he's trying not to make noise—Aaron Hotchner, a man who can command an entire FBI unit without raising his voice, reduced to tiptoeing outside a bedroom door. The handle turns slowly. The door opens on a thin wedge of hallway light and then closes again, and then he's there, a shadow moving through the room with the careful economy of someone who's been doing this for two days. Learning the geography of your suffering.
He sits on the edge of the bed first, testing the mattress with a deliberateness that makes something in your chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with pain. You'd asked him once, early on in your relationship, how he'd learned to be so careful about it, and he'd looked at you for a moment like he was considering whether to deflect, and then said that he'd looked it up. Just like that. He'd looked up how to help someone through a migraine, made a quiet list of the things that helped and the things that made it worse, and filed it away. It had made you want to cry a little, at the time. It still does, actually, in a fond and slightly overwhelming way. Then he shifts, settling in beside you with so much care that you barely feel the dip of the mattress, and his hand finds your shoulder—warm, solid, real—brushing over it once in a gesture that manages to be both a greeting and a question.
"Hey," he whispers, and his voice in the quiet of the room is barely a sound at all, more like the shape of a word than the word itself.
You roll over to face him, slow and careful out of habit, the movement automatic even though the sharp, nauseating agony of the last two days has receded. There's still a faint throb behind your eye when you move too quickly, a ghost of the thing that had been trying to crack your skull open from the inside, and you wait a beat before you open your eyes fully. When you do, Aaron is right there, closer than you'd expected, his face only a little more than a foot from yours and his expression doing something complicated in the low light.
The relief in his eyes is almost hard to look at. It's the relief of someone who's been holding himself very still for a very long time.
"Hey," you say back, and your voice comes out rougher than you'd like, scraped raw from the groaning and the retching and the long hours of lying in silence with your jaw clenched. You clear your throat softly and try again. "Hey."
"How are you feeling?" It comes out quiet and careful, the way he phrases things when he's trying not to assume, and you appreciate it even as you appreciate the fact that he's not turning on any lights, not asking if you're hungry yet, not doing any of the things that would require you to be more awake than you currently are.
"Better," you tell him, which is true. "Really tired, but better." You pause, because there's more to it than that—there's always more to it, the strange, particular aftermath of a bad migraine, the way your thoughts feel slow and your body feels like a borrowed thing—but you're not sure you have the words for it right now, or the energy to find them. "The worst is done, I think."
He lets out a breath that you feel more than hear, and something in his shoulders drops that you hadn't noticed was held up. He leans in and presses his lips to your forehead, slow and warm, lingering there for a moment before he moves to your cheek, and then—carefully, with the same deliberate gentleness he's been giving you all week—to your mouth. It's a soft kiss, not urgent or demanding, just a long, quiet press of his lips against yours that says things he's probably not going to say out loud. At least not right now. Not in the dark, in the whispered aftermath of two days that had, by all accounts, been pretty awful.
When he pulls back, his hand comes up to cup your face, his thumb tracing the line of your cheekbone like he's reminding himself of it. His palm is warm against your skin. You realise, belatedly, that you probably look terrible—two days of a migraine does not leave a person looking their best, and you'd sweated through a shirt at some point yesterday and he'd helped you change into a clean one without making a single comment about it—and yet the way he's looking at you doesn't have a single trace of anything but concern and something softer than that. Something that makes your throat feel tight.
"I hate seeing you in pain," he says quietly, and there's a raw quality to his voice that he doesn't often let out, a thread of something unguarded that he usually keeps pulled close and out of sight. It's not a complaint. It's not even really directed at you. It sounds more like something he's been carrying around for forty-eight hours and is only now setting down.
"I know," you murmur, and you reach up, your hand a little unsteady from the exhaustion, and tangle your fingers in his hair. It's softer than it looks, always has been, and the familiar texture of it is grounding in a way you can't quite explain. You pull him gently closer until your foreheads are resting together, and for a moment you both just stay like that, breathing the same small amount of air, his thumb still moving in slow circles over your cheekbone.
"I'm okay now," you tell him. "I really am."
"I know," he says, and he does know, you can tell—Aaron Hotchner has been reading people for the better part of his adult life, and he's been reading you specifically for long enough to know the difference between you saying you're fine when you aren't and you saying you're fine when you mean it. But the expression on his face doesn't entirely clear, and you understand that too. Two days is a long time to watch someone you love be in that kind of pain and not be able to do very much about it.
"You were here the whole time," you say, and it comes out softer than you'd intended, almost wondering, even though you already knew. You'd known it through the haze of the worst of it—had been dimly, gratefully aware of him moving quietly through the room, leaving a glass of water on the nightstand within reach, adjusting the blanket when you'd kicked it off in the night, sitting with you in the dark not saying anything because there was nothing to say that would help. At one point, sometime in the deep middle of the second night, you'd surfaced just enough to be aware that he was sitting in the chair by the window with a book, the small reading light angled carefully away from you, just present. Just there. You hadn't said anything. You'd just let yourself sink back down, knowing he was in the room, and it had been enough.
"Of course I was." He says it simply, like it's not a remarkable thing, like he hadn't taken time off work and rearranged whatever he'd needed to rearrange and spent two days in a dark room because you needed him there.
"You didn't have to—"
"I wanted to." He pulls back just enough to look at you properly, and his expression is matter-of-fact in that specific way that means he's also being very sincere. "There's nowhere else I would've been."
You look at him for a moment in the dim room, at the shadows under his eyes that tell you he hasn't slept nearly enough, at the way his collar is slightly rumpled and his hair is doing the thing it does when he's been running his hand through it. He's been worrying. You know his tells. There's something else too, a particular quality to his stillness that you've learned to recognise—not the controlled stillness he uses at work, the one that means he's reading a room or managing a situation, but the quieter kind. The kind that means he's been frightened and is only now starting to let it go.
"How bad was it?" you ask, and you mean from his side of it, which is a different question from how bad it was from yours, and he understands that immediately because he always does.
He's quiet for a moment. "Bad enough," he says, which from Aaron is a fairly significant admission. "You couldn't keep anything down for most of the first day. And you were—" He stops, and something moves across his face that he smooths over before it fully forms. "You were really out of it for a while. I wasn't sure if I should take you in."
"I'm glad you didn't." The thought of a hospital—the fluorescent lights, the noise, the relentless, assaulting brightness of it—makes you want to burrow further into the pillows even now. "I always feel worse there."
"I know. That's the only reason I didn't." He says it evenly, but there's weight behind it, the weight of a decision he'd had to make and live with for two days without being entirely certain it was the right one. You reach out and press your hand flat against his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart under your palm, and his hand comes up to cover yours.
"You made the right call," you tell him.
He nods, once, and some of the remaining tension in his jaw releases.
"You should've slept more," you say, and the corner of his mouth does something that's almost a smile.
"I slept plenty."
"Aaron."
"I slept enough," he amends, which is not the same thing, and you both know it, and he knows that you know it, but neither of you press it further because it's the middle of the night or close to it and neither of you has the energy for a conversation that goes in circles.
You shift closer to him instead, because that feels more useful, and he takes the hint immediately—he always does—and opens his arms and draws you in against his chest. His arms wrap around you and you tuck your face against the soft fabric of his shirt and let out a breath that feels like it's been sitting in your chest for about two days, waiting for this particular moment to leave. The warmth of him is immediate and encompassing, and the sound of his heartbeat under your ear is steady and unhurried, doing exactly what it always does, which is to say that it makes everything else feel slightly less catastrophic.
His lips find the top of your head and stay there, not moving, just resting, and after a moment you feel the slight tension in his hold ease as he settles more fully into the bed, his chin coming to rest against your hair.
"I love you," he murmurs, very quietly, into your hair.
"I love you too," you say into his shirt, and your voice is still rough and a little hoarse but the words come out steady, and you feel his arms tighten just slightly in response.
For a while neither of you says anything else, and you're glad of it. The silence between you has always been a comfortable thing, not empty but full—full of the small sounds of the house settling, of his breathing evening out above you, of the distant, muffled world going on outside the curtains without you. You've had relationships before where silence felt like something that needed to be filled, a gap that implied something was wrong. With Aaron it's never been like that. With Aaron the silence is where a lot of the most important things live.
You shift slightly, tucking yourself more fully against him, and he adjusts without comment, one arm repositioning to hold you more securely, his hand finding the curve of your waist.
The ache behind your eye is still there, faint and far away, like the memory of a headache rather than a headache itself. Your body is still tired in that deep, structural way that a bad migraine always leaves behind, the kind of tired that sleep helps but doesn't entirely fix, the kind that takes a few days of being gentle with yourself to fully recover from. You know the drill. You've done this before and you'll do it again, and there's a particular grimness to that knowledge that lives in a back corner of your mind on the good days, the awareness that your body does this, will keep doing this, that there isn't a cure for the way your nervous system occasionally decides to stage a full-scale revolt.
But you also know, with the same quiet certainty, that Aaron will be here when it happens. Has been here. Is here now, with his arms around you and his heartbeat steady under your ear and his chin resting against the top of your head like there's nothing else he'd rather be doing at whatever hour this is on a weeknight.
That's not nothing. That's, in fact, a great deal.
The room is very quiet. The curtains hold back whatever light might be trying to get in from the street. Somewhere outside, distantly, a car passes. Aaron's breathing is slow and even, not quite asleep but not far from it, the particular quality of a man who is finally allowing himself to rest because the worst is over and the person he loves is safe in his arms. His hand moves in a slow, absentminded stroke along your back—up and down, up and down—and you're not sure he even knows he's doing it, it's just a thing he does when he's holding you and starting to drift.
You let your eyes close properly for the first time in two days without bracing for what's behind them.
There's no flash of light waiting for you. No gathering pressure. Just the warm dark and the sound of his heart and the slow, certain tide of sleep coming in at last.
You think, right at the edge of it, that you should probably eat something tomorrow, that you'll need to reply to a few messages, that there are things that have accumulated over the past two days that will need to be dealt with. You think that you should tell Aaron to properly sleep in, that you'll make him coffee in the morning, that you want to hear about whatever he's been reading while he sat with you in the dark. You think all these things in that loose, half-formed way of someone who is most of the way gone already.
And then you stop thinking, because Aaron is warm and solid and here, and his heartbeat doesn't waver, and there is nowhere in the world right now that is safer than this—tucked against his chest in the quiet dark of your shared bedroom, with the worst of the storm finally behind you and his arms around you and the whole long, gentle expanse of the night still ahead.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: A Meniere's episode takes the world out from under you, but Aaron is already there—quiet, sure, and not going anywhere.
Tags: disabled!reader, Meniere's disease, vertigo episode, tinnitus, chronic illness, hurt/comfort, soft!aaron hotchner, reader gripping counters and pride, aaron who researched your condition without telling you, soup as a love language, no use of y/n, the unfairness of an unreliable body, being witnessed without being fixed, he doesn't ask if you're okay because you taught him not to, quiet devastation and quieter care, sunday evening domesticity, hands that say everything mouths can't, fluff, grief that coexists with love, you are whole and he knows it, stubborn meets stubborn, always as a statement of fact
Word count: 3.5k words.
The world tilts again, and this time you're not ready for it.
You're gripping the edge of the kitchen counter—knuckles white, fingertips pressed hard into the cold laminate—because it is the only fixed point left in a universe that has decided, arbitrarily and cruelly, to stop behaving. The floor isn't where it was. The ceiling has become a suggestion. The kitchen—your kitchen, the one with the chipped tile by the hob and the crooked cabinet door Aaron keeps meaning to fix and the familiar smell of last night's tea still faintly haunting the air—has turned hostile and strange, tilting like the whole world is a snow globe someone picked up and shook for sport.
The ringing begins.
It does not creep in. It never creeps. It arrives all at once, enormous and insistent, a sound that is not quite a sound—more like pressure, like something being pulled too taut behind your eardrum, a frequency that swallows everything else whole. Aaron had been saying something. His voice was there a moment ago, soft and unhurried, the particular cadence he uses on Sunday mornings when the day hasn't demanded anything from him yet. You catch a fragment, a syllable, maybe your name—and then the ringing takes it. Takes all of it. Swallows it down and leaves you in the roaring.
You close your eyes.
This is strategy, not surrender. The logic of it is simple and hard-won: if you cannot trust what you see, you remove the variable. You stop asking your eyes to do a job they are currently making worse. You breathe—or try to. The breath comes out shaky, thin, a thread of a thing, and the ringing presses in from all sides like water rising in a sealed room, like static filling every frequency until there is nothing left but noise.
Meniere's has been your companion for years now.
Actually, companion is generous. Companion implies something that at least occasionally behaves. What Meniere's is, more accurately, is a recurring ambush. A hostage situation with no reliable schedule. You have catalogued its textures the way you might catalogue the moods of a storm—there are the small episodes, disorienting but manageable, the ones that blur an hour and leave you wrung out but functional. And then there are the ones like this. The ones that arrive without the courtesy of warning, that take the world you were standing in and fold it in half, that hollow you out from the inside and leave the shell of you clinging to a kitchen counter like something washed up after a wreck.
Today it is especially cruel.
You breathe. You hold the counter. You wait.
There is a particular kind of loneliness in the waiting. Not the loneliness of being alone—you have never been more aware of Aaron's presence in the next room than you are in moments like this—but the loneliness of being inside a body that has sealed itself off, gone somewhere no one else can follow. The ringing does that. The vertigo does that. It closes a door around you that you cannot open from the inside, and all you can do is wait for it to open on its own, on its own inexplicable schedule, in its own time.
"Hey."
Aaron's voice cuts through—barely, just barely—and you realise his hands are on your waist before your brain fully processes that he's crossed the room. His grip is firm and unhurried, the kind of hold that doesn't ask anything of you, doesn't require you to rally or reassure or perform steadiness. He is simply there, behind you, a wall of warmth and solid certainty, and he is guiding you—gently, without urgency, the way you'd guide someone you were not afraid of dropping—toward the chair by the kitchen table.
You let him.
That is its own kind of thing, letting him. It took a long time to learn how.
You spent years, before Aaron, insisting on managing episodes alone—partly out of practicality, because explaining Meniere's to someone who'd never heard of it was its own exhausting ordeal, and partly out of something older and more stubborn, the deep-grooved belief that needing help was a thing to be minimised, apologised for, got through as quickly and invisibly as possible. You have unlearned this, slowly, the way you unlearn most things—not all at once, but in small painful increments, with evidence.
Aaron is the evidence.
The chair is cool against the backs of your thighs. You sink into it and immediately put your head in your hands, elbows to knees, forehead pressed into your palms, because the pressure helps—or at least feels like it should, and sometimes that is close enough. The ringing is still there. The world is still unreliable, still slipping and shifting, still doing its best impression of a boat in a gale. But Aaron is crouching in front of you now. You can feel the change in the air, the warmth of him at a lower register, closer to the floor.
He doesn't ask if you're okay.
He has not asked that question in a long time. You had a conversation, early on, where you tried to explain—haltingly, with more frustration than eloquence—that being asked if you were okay during an episode was like being asked to do maths while someone held a torch directly into your eyes. The question required an answer. Answers required coherence. Coherence was not available. And beyond the logistics of it, there was something about the asking that felt like a ledge you'd have to talk yourself down from every single time, a prompt for reassurance you didn't have the capacity to give.
Aaron had listened. He had not argued. And he had simply—stopped asking.
What he does instead is stay. His hand finds your knee, rests there without pressure, a warmth that does not demand. His breathing is slow and deliberate, just loud enough that the rhythm of it threads through the ringing, a small counter-frequency, something to measure the world against. He waits. He has always been extraordinarily good at waiting, at the particular discipline of making stillness feel like a presence rather than an absence, like a hearth rather than a held breath.
The spinning begins, with agonising slowness, to ease.
It does not stop cleanly. It never stops cleanly. It withdraws the way a tide withdraws—pulling back in increments, leaving behind a residue of exhaustion and the particular fog that always follows a bad episode, the grey-wool sensation behind your eyes, the heaviness of limbs that have spent the last several minutes tensed against a fall that wasn't coming. Your hands are still shaking faintly. You are aware of this the way you are aware, after a storm, of the wet leaves plastered to the pavement—a detail that registers now that the larger emergency has passed, a quiet aftermath settling into all the spaces the crisis has vacated.
You lift your head slowly.
Aaron is right there. Of course he is. His dark eyes are fixed on your face with an expression you have learned to read fluently—worry threaded through with the deliberate restraint of someone who has chosen not to project his worry onto you, who is holding it carefully in his own hands rather than asking you to hold it too. There is love in it. There is also the particular grief of watching someone you love suffer something you cannot fix, and he does not hide that from you either. Aaron has never been good at the kind of pretending that involves his face.
His thumb moves, once, against your knee. Slow. Warm.
You exhale.
"It came on fast," you say. Your voice comes out rougher than you'd like, scraped and tired, like something that's been left out in the weather. "I was fine this morning. I had my—I took everything I was supposed to take, I wasn't stressed, I slept." A beat. The frustration that has been simmering underneath the fear, underneath the vertigo, surfaces now—a hot and helpless thing, the rage of a body that does not behave, that makes no promises and keeps fewer. "I was fine."
"I know," he says quietly.
"It doesn't make sense."
"No," he agrees. "It doesn't."
He does not try to make it make sense. He does not offer theories or silver linings or the particular brand of cheerful problem-solving that some people deploy in the face of chronic illness like it is something that simply hasn't been thought about carefully enough. He just says I know and no and lets the unfairness of it sit in the room with you, acknowledged and uncontested. Sometimes being witnessed is the whole of what you need, and Aaron—who once told you that he had spent years learning to let the people he loved feel what they felt without trying to arrest the feeling mid-air—understands this in his bones.
"I hate it," you say, after a moment. The words come out small, worn down to something plain and honest, stripped of all the elaborate ways you've learned to phrase this so it doesn't sound like self-pity. It sounds like self-pity anyway. You find, sitting here in the chair with your hands still faintly trembling and Aaron's thumb still making that slow, warm arc against your knee, that you do not especially care.
"I know," he says again. The same two words, but different—lower, softer, something in the grain of his voice that carries the weight of having sat with you through enough of these to understand the specific texture of this particular hatred. Not impatience with your body. Not despair, exactly. Just the deep and rightful fury at being subject to something that does not consult you.
He stays crouched in front of you a while longer. Neither of you speaks. The kitchen settles around you—the low hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of the street below, the ordinary sounds of a Sunday evening resuming their ordinary business entirely indifferent to the storm that just passed through you. The world has not marked the episode. It simply continued, as it always does, and you are always faintly astonished by this—by how comprehensively private the worst moments are, how completely contained inside your own skull and inner ear and tilting field of vision.
You sit back in the chair. The fog is thick behind your eyes, and the ringing has dropped to something bearable, a low persistent hum rather than the wall of noise it was twenty minutes ago. Your hands, resting in your lap, have mostly stopped shaking. You are tired in the specific, bone-deep way that follows bad episodes, the kind of tired that is not fixed by sleep so much as by time, by simply allowing the body to stop vibrating at crisis-pitch.
Aaron rises from his crouch. He moves to the kitchen with the quiet purpose of someone who has clearly already decided what he is doing and has no interest in debating it, and you hear the soft percussion of the hob being turned on, the particular sound of the good pot being lifted down from the cabinet.
"You don't have to do that," you say.
"I know."
"I'm—the worst of it has passed, I can make something myself—"
He looks at you over his shoulder. Not sharply. Not with impatience. With that slight lift of one brow, the expression that manages to convey I hear you and I am proceeding anyway with an economy of movement that you find, depending on the context, either charming or maddening. Tonight it is both. Tonight it is also a relief so enormous it sits in your chest like a stone, a relief so heavy it almost aches.
"You're stubborn," he says, and the warmth in his voice is unmistakeable, teasing you with the particular tenderness of someone who has memorised your rough edges and loves them anyway, who catalogues your stubbornness not as a flaw to be corrected but as a feature of the specific, particular person he has chosen. He turns back to the hob. "But so am I. Let me take care of you tonight."
He comes over to press a kiss to your temple before he goes back to what he was doing, and the touch of it—soft, unhurried, like a punctuation mark at the end of an argument that was never quite an argument—settles something in your chest that had been wound too tight.
You watch him.
This is one of the things you have learnt about Aaron Hotchner: he shows love through the physical, through doing. He is not a man of elaborate declarations. He does not make speeches. He makes soup. He finds the exact blanket you prefer and brings it without asking. He remembers the things a doctor said three appointments ago and builds them quietly into the architecture of the day. He shows up, and keeps showing up, in all the small calibrated ways that accumulate into something that feels, from the inside, like being held—not in the obvious, arms-around-you sense, but in the deeper sense, the sense of being known well enough that another person can anticipate what you need before you can name it yourself.
It occurred to you, sometime in the middle of your second year together, that Aaron had learned more about Meniere's disease than you had told him. Not from you—or not only from you. He had done it quietly, the way he does most things, researched it with the same methodical attention he brings to case files, cross-referenced symptoms and triggers and management strategies until he understood not just the broad strokes but the fine-grained specifics: which foods to quietly stop buying, which changes in barometric pressure tended to precede bad stretches, how long the postictal fog usually lasted and what it meant that you needed afterwards. He never announced this. You only realised it gradually, in the accumulating evidence of small adjustments—and when you finally asked him about it, he had looked briefly self-conscious, as though he'd been caught at something private.
I wanted to understand it, he'd said. So I could be useful.
You think about that sometimes. You think about it now, watching him move around the kitchen with the quiet fluency of someone who knows where everything is and does not need to be told what is wanted, and you feel something move in your chest that is too large and too layered to have a single name—gratitude, yes, and love, obviously, but also something rawer than either, something that lives in the specific ache of being known well and completely and without condition.
The smell of something savoury begins to unfurl into the kitchen, rich and slow, threading through the residual fog like something deliberate and kind. Outside, the light has shifted—the particular amber of early evening that turns the flat into something softer, something almost golden, the kind of light that makes ordinary things look like they're worth keeping. The ringing has retreated to a whisper. Your limbs are heavy, anchored, no longer braced against a world that won't stop moving. You can feel the grain of the chair beneath you, the solidity of the floor under your feet, the temperature of the room settling around you like something that means well.
Aaron is humming.
Quietly, probably without realising it—a low, tuneless fragment of something, the kind of humming that is less music and more the sound a person makes when they are occupied and contented and not performing either of those things for an audience. You have always loved this particular frequency of him. The unguarded version, the one that doesn't exist in the office or in the field or in any context that requires him to be Agent Hotchner, unit chief, the man with the titanium posture and the impenetrable composure. This Aaron—the one in the kitchen, humming without knowing it, sleeves pushed to the elbows, making you dinner with the focused attention he usually reserves for case files—this is the one you get to keep. This one is yours.
You feel something loosen in your chest, a slow release, like a knot that has been easing itself apart for hours and has finally, fully, let go.
The exhaustion is still there. It will be there tomorrow, probably—the aftermath of a bad episode has its own schedule, and it does not consult you about it. Your body will need time to recalibrate, to remember that stillness is available to it, that it is allowed to stop bracing. You know this. You have made a kind of peace with the knowing, the way you have made a kind of peace with many things about your body over the years—not the peace of resolution, not the peace of being done grieving, but the peace of coexistence, of carrying something difficult without requiring it to be fixed before you can live around it.
Grief is still present, even now. You would be lying if you said otherwise—if you claimed you had arrived at full acceptance, at the clean and final shore of having made peace with a body that runs on its own hostile logic. There are still mornings when you wake and the first thing you do is perform a rapid internal audit, testing your equilibrium with the careful anxiety of someone who has learnt that the ground cannot always be trusted. There is still a low-level vigilance that never fully switches off, a background hum of watchfulness that shadows you through ordinary days. You carry it. It is simply part of the weight.
But.
You are not less yourself in the kitchen chair, head beginning to clear, watching Aaron move around the hob with his sleeves pushed up. You are entirely yourself. Every version of you—the one who stood at the counter this morning making tea without incident, and the one who gripped the counter an hour ago while the world spun out from under her, and the one sitting here now, tired and grateful and a little undone at the edges—all the same person. Continuous. Whole. Not in spite of the Meniere's, not neatly separable from it, but the whole complicated living fact of you, the one Aaron crossed a room for and researched quietly and crouches in front of and calls stubborn with a warmth that sounds like home.
Aaron plates something without ceremony and brings it to the table, and sits across from you rather than retreating back to the other room, and when you catch his eye he just looks at you with that steady, undemanding gaze, the one that does not need anything back from you.
"Thank you," you say.
"Always."
The word lands simply, without elaboration. He means it the way he means most things—completely, without performance, as a statement of fact rather than a reassurance. Always. Not of course or don't mention it or any of the phrases people use to diminish what they've given. Just the word itself, quiet and total, a door held open.
Outside, the evening is deepening. The amber light fades at its edges into something softer, a bruised rose and grey, the kind of sky that feels like a held breath, like the day exhaling after a long and difficult shift. The flat is warm around you, warm in the way that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the two of you in it, with the accumulated weight of ordinary evenings and difficult ones, of soup made without being asked and kisses pressed to temples and silences that know how to hold you.
Aaron reaches across the table and covers your hand with his.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. His hand is warm and heavy and certain, a weight that feels nothing like burden and everything like ballast, like the kind of anchor that doesn't stop you moving but makes sure you know where the bottom is. The ringing is nearly gone now. The world is steady under your feet again, or as steady as it ever is, which is to say: for now, for this evening, for the length of this meal and whatever quiet hours come after it.
You turn your hand over beneath his. Palm to palm. His thumb moves against yours, that same slow arc, the same unhurried warmth, and you think about all the things this gesture has stood in for over the years—I'm here and I see you and you don't have to be fine and I'm not going anywhere. A whole vocabulary compressed into the pressure of a thumb. You are fluent in it by now. You speak it back.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: Aaron never rushes you—but tonight, when the tension finally breaks, he worships you slowly, thoroughly, until you're shaking beneath him and too spent to speak.
Tags: disabled!reader, chronic fatigue syndrome, depictions of chronic pain, reader is exhausted before and after sex, first time together, first time sex, slow sex, soft sex, oral sex (f receiving), fingering, penetrative sex, aaron is obsessed with your pleasure, mutual worship, multiple orgasms, aftercare, conversations around pacing, reader is not a burden, emotionally attuned partner, no use of y/n, fluff and filth, hurt/comfort with a heavy comfort lean, aaron hotchner is the softest man alive when he's in love, sex as a form of trust, soft dom!aaron, reader crashes hard post-sex, tender vulnerability, reader falls asleep during aftercare and that's okay, aaron stays, MDNI
Word count: 4k words
The tension has been simmering for weeks—barely contained beneath the surface, like the stretch of air right before a storm breaks. Lingering glances that last just a second too long to be casual. Fingers brushing under the guise of reaching for something else, only to linger as if reluctant to let go. Conversations thick with meaning, small silences stretched taut with anticipation. Every pause, every breath between you and Aaron has been a promise neither of you have dared to make. Yet.
You've built something careful—slow and soft, a foundation rooted in patience and understanding. He never rushes you. Never assumes. Instead, he learns your rhythms. He adjusts to your pace. When your body demands rest, he's the one easing your shoes off, pulling a blanket over your legs, pressing the gentlest kiss to your forehead as you melt into the cushions. He never makes you feel like you're a burden. He just stays. He stays through the fog and the flares, through the nights when you're too sore to speak and the mornings when you can't quite sit up without shaking.
Some nights, that's all you can give—those soft moments. The way his hand rests on yours while your body trembles with exhaustion. The quiet press of his lips to your wrist when even conversation is too much. You never have to explain, not with Aaron. He just knows. And he waits. Waits with the kind of devotion that scares you in its intensity. He's never once treated your chronic fatigue like a roadblock. He treats it like a part of you—something he's learned to navigate with tenderness.
But tonight... tonight is different.
The air is still, heavy with something unsaid. There's no ache in your bones tonight. No sharp twinges or dizzy spells. There's only a quiet hum of weariness in the background, easy enough to ignore for a while. Enough to feel present. Enough to want. Enough to need.
Aaron is here, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, shirt unbuttoned just enough to expose a sliver of his collarbone. His hair is slightly tousled from running a hand through it, his tie tossed on the back of a chair hours ago. There's tension in him tonight—contained, but barely. His eyes follow your every movement with the focus of a man trying to memorise you. And when you meet his gaze, something clicks into place. The storm finally breaks.
"You're staring," you say, your voice soft, teasing.
His lips curve into that slow, deliberate smile—the one that sends heat spiralling through your core. "Can you blame me?"
You tilt your head. "What do you see?"
He takes a step closer. "Everything I want. Everything I've wanted since the first night I walked you to your door."
Your breath catches.
The distance between you vanishes. He's warm, solid, and close enough that you can feel the tension radiating off his body. His hand reaches up, knuckles brushing your cheek. "Are you sure?"
You nod. "I want to. I feel good. I want you."
His restraint cracks like glass under a boot.
He kisses you with a hunger barely held in check—deep and slow, like he wants to pull every breath from your lungs and keep it. His hands cradle your face, his thumbs tracing the line of your jaw before sliding lower, exploring your body with reverence. When you reach for the buttons of your shirt, he stills you gently.
"Let me," he says, his voice dark and thick with desire.
His fingers make quick work of the buttons, but he doesn't rush. Each one is undone like it reveals something sacred. He peels the fabric away slowly, his knuckles ghosting down your skin as he exposes it. When your shirt falls open, he groans, low and wrecked.
"You're killing me," he mutters. "You have no idea what you're doing to me. I've thought about this for so long."
He sinks to his knees, trailing kisses across your stomach, murmuring against your skin. "So beautiful, every inch of you. You drive me insane."
He guides you to the bed, helping you down with practiced tenderness. You lie back, watching as he undresses you the rest of the way, leaving you bare under his gaze. He stares like he's seeing something divine, eyes drinking you in like he'll never get enough.
"I've imagined this," he breathes. "But it's nothing compared to you. You're better than every fantasy I've ever had."
When he strips off his own shirt, your breath catches again. His body is all lean muscle and restraint, every movement tight with tension. He's hard—painfully so, straining against his trousers—but he doesn't touch himself. His focus is still you.
"You've had me on edge for weeks," he says, crawling up between your legs, voice gravel and heat. "You know that? Every time you say my name, every time you touch me, I've had to hold back."
He presses kisses to your thighs, slow and hot, working his way closer. "Been dreaming about this. Wondering how you taste. Wondering how many times I could make you come before you beg me to stop."
Your fingers curl in the sheets. "Aaron... please."
He grins against your skin, dark and feral. "Please what? Tell me what you need, sweetheart. I want to hear it."
"Touch me. Taste me. Just—slow. I can't go fast tonight."
His expression softens, the edge of hunger tempered by something deeper. "I've got you, I'll go as slow as you need. As long as it takes. I'm not going anywhere."
He kisses your centre, tongue slipping between your folds with unbearable precision. His groan vibrates against your skin.
"Fuck, you taste good. Sweet. Hot. Addictive. I could stay down here forever."
He licks into you, tongue curling just right, before pulling back to watch the way you writhe beneath him. Then he slips two fingers inside, slow and deliberate, while his mouth finds your clit. The dual sensation has your back arching, a strangled sound escaping your throat.
"That's it," he murmurs, voice thick. "Just like that. Let me make you feel good. Let me ruin you for anyone else."
His fingers stroke deep and steady, his tongue relentless. He watches you with that same intense gaze, like nothing else in the world exists but your pleasure. You feel seen, devoured.
"You're so fucking tight," he groans. "Gripping my fingers like you don't want to let go. What's it gonna be like when I'm inside you, hmm? Gonna lose your mind for me? Gonna scream my name?"
You cry out, thighs trembling, fingers clutching at his hair.
"That's it. Come for me. Let me feel it. Give it to me, baby. Let go."
Your climax hits like a freight train—sudden, blinding, shattering. You sob his name, body locking up and then melting into the bed. He doesn't stop until you push him away with trembling hands.
He presses kisses to your thighs, your stomach, your hips. "So fucking perfect. Want to keep you like this forever. All soft and wrecked and mine."
He climbs back up your body, pressing his forehead to yours.
"We can stop here if that's all you've got. Or I can make you come again. Just say the word."
You glance down between you—his cock still straining against the fabric, thick and aching.
"You haven't even—"
"Doesn't matter," he says, kissing your cheek. "I wanted this. Needed this. But if you want more—"
Your hand finds him through the fabric. He gasps, hips bucking instantly. "Fuck. You're gonna kill me."
He groans as you palm him, his lips dragging along your jaw, your throat. "If you keep that up, I'm not gonna last."
He slides his trousers down enough to free himself, and you both moan at the sight. Thick. Heavy. Flushed dark with need. You reach for him, but he catches your wrist.
"No, baby," he says roughly. "Let me take care of you. I'll stop if it's too much, just say the word."
He moves over you, slow and deliberate, the heat of his skin pressing into yours as he braces his weight on his forearms. The mattress sighs beneath the combined weight of your bodies, soft groans of springs giving way to the rhythm of your breaths, your heartbeats, your need. The room is dim, lit only by the soft amber glow of a lamp on the bedside table, painting your bodies in gold and shadow. One of his hands finds the side of your face, thumb brushing your cheekbone in a motion so tender it makes your chest ache. He watches you, eyes dark and unwavering, searching—always searching—for that final, silent permission. And when he finds it—your eyes wide and dilated, lips parted, body already yielding to him—he exhales like he's waited forever.
Even now, even here, he waits for you. For your word. For your comfort. It's never about control—it's about trust. About giving and receiving. About learning where to press and when to pause. With Aaron, it always feels like more than just the act—it feels like being seen, and known, and wanted in ways that burrow under your skin and stay there.
You nod, throat dry, hips already rising, legs parting wider in welcome. "Yes," you breathe, barely a sound. "I want you. I want this. I want you."
Aaron groans, deep and guttural, the sound vibrating from his chest into yours where your bodies already touch. He shifts slightly, guiding himself to your entrance, his other hand wrapped tightly around the base of his cock like he's restraining a force stronger than his own will. The first brush of him against you has your breath catching, and when he begins to press in—slow, careful, reverent—it's as if the world holds still.
You both gasp. The sound is almost identical, twin notes of disbelief and desire. He slides in inch by inch, slow enough to feel every stretch, every slick pull of resistance. The stretch is heady, toe-curling, something you want to melt into and run from at once. He goes deeper, deeper, the glide relentless but tender, until he finally bottoms out, hips flush with yours, and the air leaves your lungs in a ragged exhale.
"F-fuck," he chokes out, voice wrecked. His arms strain where they hold him above you, trembling not from exertion, but from the raw, shaking effort it's taking to keep his composure. His forehead drops against yours, and you feel his breath shudder across your lips. "You feel—God—you feel so fucking good. I don't—" he cuts off, swallows hard, kisses you like he needs your mouth to ground him. "I could die right here."
Your fingers curl around his biceps, anchoring yourself to him. Your body clenches instinctively, involuntarily around him, drawing a low growl from his throat. He doesn't move. Not yet. He gives you time—time to breathe, time to adjust, time to feel him fully before he begins to move again. He's already inside you, but you feel the way he's still holding back, every muscle tense with restraint. Like he's one sharp breath away from losing the rhythm.
"Tell me if it's too much," he whispers, voice gone hoarse.
"It's not," you murmur, lips brushing his. "Please don't stop. Just—just go slow. Like you said."
He nods, the movement slight, reverent. "Slow," he repeats, like it's a promise. "I can do slow. I can do anything you want if you keep looking at me like that."
His first thrust is almost too gentle, almost teasing—but it still makes your breath catch. He pulls back slowly, letting the drag of him burn deliciously, then sinks forward again in one smooth roll of his hips. You feel every inch of him, the way he fits, the way your body opens for him. It's too much and not enough all at once.
Aaron kisses you again, filthier this time. His mouth tastes like heat and want and reverence. He swallows your breath and gives you his in return, kissing you like he's trying to mark every nerve inside your mouth. Then he moves again—slow, deep, and deliberate. Like he's trying to worship every part of you from the inside out.
Each thrust is calculated, precise. He withdraws almost entirely before pushing back in, thick and hot and filling, his body perfectly aligned to hit just where you need. His thumb drifts between you, circling your clit with practiced, maddening control. The pressure is light at first, a slow tease, until you moan his name.
That cracks something in him.
His hips falter for a moment—just a beat—as his jaw clenches. "Say it again."
"Aaron," you whisper, again and again, until it becomes a chant, a plea, your fingers clawing at the muscle of his back, anchoring yourself to the solidity of him.
He growls, voice low and full of fire. "Fuck, that's it. Say my name. Let everyone hear it. Let the walls remember how you sound when you fall apart."
His thrusts deepen, rolling and sure, his thumb maintaining that perfect pace on your clit. Every drag of him inside you sends sparks through your core, the build sharp and consuming. Each stroke winds the tension tighter, your body already so close it feels like the edge has blurred.
"I'm close," you pant, your voice fraying at the edges.
"I know you are," he says, voice guttural. "I can feel it. You're so fucking tight. Pulling me in like you were made for me. Look at me—look at me while you come."
Your eyes meet his, and the intensity there shatters something in you. You come with a cry, your body locking around his, thighs shaking, back arching as heat explodes through your centre. He doesn't stop—he keeps moving through it, holding you, kissing you, murmuring praise against your skin.
"Beautiful," he breathes. "Fucking beautiful when you break. That's my girl."
But he's not done. Not even close.
Even as your body trembles in the aftermath, Aaron's thrusts stay steady, his rhythm never faltering. His thumb doesn't leave your clit—just eases the pressure, coaxes rather than overwhelms. Every motion is designed to build again, to stoke the fire still glowing in your bones.
"You can take another, can't you?" he asks, soft but certain. "One more for me. You're doing so well. So perfect."
You nod, unable to find the words, the pleasure already curling again inside you. Your body's a livewire beneath him, nerve endings exposed and singing.
"Good girl," he murmurs. "Come for me again, I want to feel you milk my cock while I fill you up."
The filthy praise hits you like lightning.
He keeps going—pushing into you with slow, powerful thrusts, his body tight with the effort of restraint, his mouth never leaving yours for long. His words blur into heat and filth.
"You hear how wet you are for me? Fuck, it's obscene. You're soaked, baby. Dripping down my cock. You were made for this—for me. Every time you come, I swear I lose my mind. You're fucking perfect."
His thumb circles again—merciless and perfect. His cock still moving inside you, just enough to keep you teetering on that edge again.
You shatter a third time, this time with a broken sob, your body convulsing around him, waves of pleasure crashing and crashing again until you're limp beneath him, body boneless and buzzing.
And that's when Aaron lets go.
He thrusts deep once, twice, then again—and the sound he makes is pure filth and reverence, like worship through gritted teeth. He spills inside you with a groan of your name, hips jerking, body trembling as he pours himself into you. His breath stutters as his orgasm overtakes him, hips pressing flush, body curling into yours like he can't bear to be anywhere else.
"Fuck. There it is. There's my girl. You're everything. Everything."
His body collapses just enough to press against yours, one hand still stroking your side, the other holding your face like something precious. His breath is ragged, heart pounding against your ribs, the two of you locked together in the soft hum of afterglow.
He doesn't pull out right away.
Instead, he stays exactly where he is, still buried deep inside you, his body draped over yours in the softest, warmest weight, like a second skin forged from shared breath and the shimmer of spent heat. The room around you hums with stillness, like the world itself is holding its breath. The air is thick with the scent of sex and sweat and skin. His chest rises and falls against yours, shallow and uneven, his heartbeat thudding strong where it presses against your sternum. You can feel every inch of him still—where he's inside you, where he's holding you, where his forehead rests against your shoulder. He makes no move to leave. No move to rush the moment. Only lingers, like he doesn't want it to end. Like he wants to live in this pocket of time just a little longer, suspended between pleasure and peace.
He breathes you in.
His lips part against the curve of your neck, and you feel him exhale slowly, his breath hot and trembling. Then he presses a kiss there—featherlight, more breath than contact. Not a goodbye. Not even an afterthought. Something more like reverence. The kind of kiss that anchors you. That says, I'm still here.
His hands don't stop moving.
They wander in slow, absent-minded paths, as if his body refuses to lose the connection. One hand remains curled around your hip, thumb drawing slow, sleepy circles that lull rather than ignite. The other strokes over your stomach, then drifts lower, caressing the soft underside of your thigh, your skin sticky and damp with sweat and slick. It's not sexual anymore, not at all—it's grounding. Devotional. As if he's still learning the shape of you, still stunned that he's allowed to touch you like this. That he gets to know you in this way.
You're trembling now—not with pleasure, but with the first pull of fatigue settling deep in your bones. It spreads quietly, inch by inch, turning your limbs to lead. Your mind begins to float, warm and heavy, like sleep is reaching up from below to carry you under. You knew the crash was coming. It always does. The sharp drop after the high. And Aaron knows that, too.
He shifts slightly, easing some of his weight off you with the barest effort, never losing the contact. He kisses your jaw, then your temple, then presses his lips to the edge of your eyebrow like he can kiss your thoughts clean. When he finally lifts his head to look at you, his gaze is soft and open and impossibly tender.
You're already blinking slowly, your lashes fluttering, your body pliant beneath his, pliant with exhaustion and trust. He sees it in the way your muscles have slackened, how your breath has gone shallow and soft. The high has faded. Your body is pulling you toward rest whether you're ready or not.
But you look at him—truly look—and the corners of your mouth curve just slightly. Not a smile, not quite. Just a quiet kind of joy. Relief. A whispered thank-you only your eyes can say. And it lands in his chest like a prayer answered.
"Hey," he murmurs, brushing damp strands of hair away from your forehead. "You okay?"
You nod. Barely. Words feel too far away, and you know if you try, your voice might crack. But you reach for him instead, fingers brushing weakly along his wrist, and give him a squeeze too faint to count. He feels it. He always does.
"I've got you," he whispers, voice thick and impossibly soft. "You don't have to do anything else, sweetheart. I've got it. I've got you."
Carefully, with infinite patience, he begins to pull out, slow and steady. You whimper—small and pained at the loss—and he leans in right away, kissing your cheek, your shoulder, every part of you he can reach with his hands and mouth.
"I know," he soothes, voice cracking a little. "I know, baby. I'm sorry. I'm here."
He slides out fully, and it makes you wince, your body already sensitive, already aching in that deep, bone-weary way that has nothing to do with sex. He cups your face afterward, brushing his knuckles along your cheekbone as if to ground you in something gentler. He stays close, hovering just above you like he's unwilling to let the world touch you before he's ready to.
He sits back on the edge of the bed, one hand still on your thigh, thumb stroking slow, soothing lines into your skin. His gaze flicks to the bedside clock. Late. But he doesn't seem to care. Time feels suspended here. Sacred.
"I'll grab your meds," he says, his voice the barest murmur. "And some water. Then I'll help you clean up. Okay?"
You hum, but your eyelids are already too heavy to lift. The crash is full now, complete. It wraps around your body like a blanket made of fog. Your limbs feel too heavy to move. You hear his voice. You understand the words. But you can't make yourself speak. And you don't have to.
Aaron sees it. Understands it. He always does.
He watches you for another moment. Watches the way your lips part slightly in sleep, how your lashes settle against your cheeks. The way your breathing slows into something deep and rhythmic. He sees how far gone you already are. You gave him everything, and now you need to rest.
And so he lies back down.
He doesn't bother with clothes. Doesn't bother pretending he'll move right away. He shifts beside you again, moving gently, every inch of his body radiating warmth. He gathers you into his arms with infinite care, like he's afraid of waking you, but more afraid of leaving you cold.
You move on instinct—your body finding his in that unconscious way, like it knows him now, remembers the shape of him. You curl into his chest, your head under his chin, your back pressed flush against his front. He pulls the blanket over both of you and tucks it in, then tightens his hold just a little more, sealing you in the circle of his body.
One arm loops under your head, cradling it against his bicep. The other wraps around your waist, his palm resting flat against your stomach, fingers splayed protectively. His thumb strokes soft lines into your skin, a rhythm meant to lull. His legs tangle with yours, anchoring you. Cherishing you. Holding you steady even as your body begins to drift.
You're asleep before the next breath.
He doesn't move.
He stays right there, his chin resting on your hair, his breath brushing the top of your head. He watches the rise and fall of your chest. He listens to the sounds of your breathing, the way your body melts deeper into rest with every passing minute.
He thinks about the feel of your fingers on his skin. The way your voice sounded when you whispered his name. The way your body welcomed his without fear, without hesitation. He thinks about every moment that led you here—to his arms, to his bed, to the kind of quiet he's spent his whole life chasing.
And then he whispers, so quiet you might think it was a dream.
"Rest, baby," he murmurs into your hair, voice soaked with love. "I'll take care of the rest."
And he will. He'll get your meds in a few minutes. He'll bring you water. He'll clean you up without waking you, if he can. He'll lay out clean clothes. He'll make sure you're warm, that you're held, that you feel safe. And when morning comes and the ache has returned—when the fatigue settles in deeper and movement feels impossible—he'll be right there.
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: The flare has passed, and Aaron is right there waiting, steady, warm, and not going anywhere.
Tags: disabled!reader, fibromyalgia, post-flare recovery, brain fog, chronic pain, hurt/comfort, soft!aaron hotchner, aaron being so unbearably gentle, he picked the grapes off the stem, reader guilt and aaron shutting it down immediately, touch slowly coming back, reader apologising for existing and aaron having none of it, the kiss that says everything, being held, slow circles on your back, amber light and quiet rooms, jack's at a sleepover so he's all yours, no use of y/n, fluff, intimate without being sexual, you are not a burden here, he was just out here waiting, fibro fog, post-flare exhaustion, tender and aching in every sense, love that doesn't flinch
Word count: 2.8k words.
The flare has passed.
You know it has because you can finally think in straight lines again—no more of that horrible fractured static, that sense of your own body being something foreign and hostile and too loud. The pain is still there, the way it always is, that low persistent hum beneath your skin that never really goes away, but the worst of it has retreated. The wave has broken. And you're left washed up against your pillows like driftwood, wrung out and hollowed and so, so tired in a way that sleep doesn't seem to touch.
You've been in bed for four days. You know this the way you know things in the aftermath of a bad flare—not with any real precision, but in that dim, approximate way, like reading a clock through frosted glass. Four days of the curtains staying shut because light felt like a personal attack. Four days of Aaron bringing you water and medication and sitting on the edge of the bed with that expression he tries to hide, that careful, quiet worry he wears like a second skin whenever you're like this. Four days of not being able to bear being touched, of flinching away from the warmth of him beside you, because even the gentlest contact had felt like something scraping against an open nerve. You remember, vaguely, him trying to brush the hair from your face on the second day, and the way you'd had to tell him not to, and how he'd pulled his hand back so carefully, like he was the one who'd been hurt.
The guilt about that part sits heavy in your chest now, in the quiet.
The brain fog is still hanging around, too, that gauzy, half-present feeling where words feel just slightly out of reach and you keep losing the thread of your own thoughts. It's better than it was—yesterday you couldn't have followed a conversation if you'd tried, couldn't have strung a sentence together without it dissolving before you got to the end of it—but it's still there, a dullness behind your eyes that no amount of sleep seems to shift. You've learnt, over the years, not to fight it. The fog lifts on its own timeline, and pushing against it only makes it worse.
You shift against the pillows and immediately catalogue the protest your body makes—the deep, diffuse ache in your hips, the familiar tenderness along your shoulders and the tops of your arms, the strange bone-tired exhaustion that has nothing to do with how long you've slept. Your joints feel like they've been packed with wet sand. Your skin is still a little sensitive, that particular fibro thing where even the texture of your own clothes can feel like too much, though it's fading now, the edges of it softening. But you can bear it. That's the difference. You can bear it now.
You hear him before you see him—the soft, deliberate sound of his footsteps in the hallway, that particular rhythm you'd recognise anywhere, and then the door opens slowly, the way it has all week, as though he's been practising not startling you.
Aaron comes in carrying a tray, and you watch him from under heavy eyelids. He's still in his work clothes, or most of them—dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, tie long since abandoned somewhere. He's got that careful look on his face that he always has when he's trying very hard not to hover, and it makes something in your chest tighten in a way that has nothing to do with pain. The tray has a glass of water with ice in it, a small bowl of crackers, some grapes that he's washed and picked from the stem so you won't have to, a couple of squares of dark chocolate. He always thinks of those small things. He always has. It used to catch you off guard, early on, that quality in him—that quiet attentiveness that never announces itself, that just appears in the form of a glass of water at exactly the right moment, or the crackers that are always the plain ones because he'd noticed, somewhere along the way, that strongly flavoured things are hard to manage when your stomach is off.
He sets the tray down on the nightstand with an almost exaggerated gentleness, and then he sits beside you on the bed, and his hand finds yours without him even seeming to think about it, just this instinctive reaching, like his body knows where you are even when he's not looking. He pauses for just a fraction of a second before his fingers close around yours, giving you a moment to pull away if you need to. You don't. His hand is warm and dry and solid, and you feel it like an anchor, something to press down against.
"Hey," he says, and his voice is soft in a way he reserves for moments like this, stripped of all the professional authority, just Aaron. "How're you feeling?"
"Better," you say, which comes out rougher than you intended, your voice still a little worn around the edges. "Like I got hit by a lorry, but—better. The edge is gone."
He nods, like this is exactly what he was hoping to hear, and his thumb starts moving in slow, lazy circles on the back of your hand, tracing nothing in particular. "I'm glad," he says. "I brought you some things. Nothing heavy—I wasn't sure what you'd be able to manage."
"The grapes," you say, because you can already tell he washed them himself, and something about that small careful act is almost unbearable. "You picked them off."
"Figured the stem would be annoying." He says it simply, like it's nothing, but you know he stood at the kitchen sink doing it. You know exactly how long that takes.
"Aaron."
"Mm."
"That was—thank you. That was really kind."
He glances at you and there's something shifting behind his eyes, something that looks almost like relief, like he'd been bracing for you to tell him it was too much, or for you not to notice at all. "It's just grapes," he says, and the corner of his mouth lifts, just slightly.
"It's not just grapes."
He holds your gaze for a moment, and then he looks down at your joined hands, and the smile softens into something else, something that doesn't quite have a name. You let yourself look at him properly for the first time in days—the lines at the corners of his eyes, the slight shadow along his jaw, the way he's sitting with his shoulders just a fraction lower than usual, like he's only now letting himself relax. He looks tired. He looks like he's been carrying something he didn't want to put down, like the steady face he's been holding for four days has cost him something, and now, with you looking at him again, he's finally allowed to let it show a little.
"You haven't been sleeping," you say. It's not a question.
He pauses. "I slept."
"Aaron."
"Not well," he admits, after a moment, and there's something almost reluctant about it, like he'd have preferred not to give you anything else to feel guilty about. "I kept—I don't know. I kept listening for you."
You don't know what to do with that exactly, so you just hold onto his hand a bit tighter, and he lets you, and for a moment neither of you says anything.
"I'm sorry," you say then, and you didn't intend to say it quite like that, without preamble, but it comes out anyway, and now it's just sitting there in the air between you. "I know the past few days have been—I know I've been hard to be around. Not being able to be touched, not being able to talk very much. Not being able to even let you near me, half the time. I know that's—I know it's a lot."
He looks up sharply, and his brow pulls together in that way it does when you've said something he wants to immediately correct. "Don't," he says, and his voice is firm but not harsh, the way he can be firm without ever making you feel small. "Don't do that."
"I'm just—"
"You have nothing to apologise for," he says, and his hand tightens a little around yours, not much, just enough to make the point. "Not for any of it. Not for needing the curtains shut, not for not being able to talk, not for not wanting to be touched. None of that." He pauses, and when he speaks again his voice is quieter. "You were in pain. You were managing it the best way you could. That's not something you apologise for."
"I pushed you away," you say. "I know what it looks like from the outside, when I go like that. I know it's not—easy."
"I wasn't looking for easy," he says, very simply. "I was looking after you. That's different." He says it in that way he has sometimes, where there's no argument available because he's already considered the argument and dismissed it. "And I can handle it. I'd rather know what you need and be able to give it to you than have you white-knuckle through it for my benefit. You know that."
"I know, logically, I know that," you say, and you do, you do know it, but logic has a habit of losing ground to the particular kind of guilt that comes with being ill, the grinding sense of being a burden, of taking up too much space with your body and its limitations. "It's just hard not to feel like—like I disappear, when it gets bad. Like I go somewhere you can't reach and I leave you out here by yourself."
He's quiet for a moment, just looking at you, and then he reaches up with his free hand and cradles your cheek in his palm, his thumb brushing just below your cheekbone, so carefully, checking first whether you flinch. You don't. You lean into it instead, and feel him exhale.
"You don't disappear," he says. "You're still here. And I'm not—I'm not out here by myself, I'm out here waiting. There's a difference." He holds your gaze steadily, making sure you're taking this in. "I'm not going anywhere. You know that."
"I know," you say, and your voice has gone a little rough around it.
"Do you?"
"Yes," you say, and you mean it. You do mean it. That's never the part you doubt. "I just—I miss you too, when it's bad. I miss being able to be with you properly. I miss being able to reach for you. It's like being trapped on the other side of glass, being able to see you and not—not being able to do anything about it. That's all."
Something moves across his face at that, some complicated mixture of things he doesn't try to name out loud. He just leans in, instead, and kisses you—slowly, carefully, the way you'd approach something fragile, his lips just barely meeting yours at first, like he's asking a question. You answer it. You bring your free hand up to rest against the side of his face and feel him still for just a moment, and then he kisses you properly, and it's—it's all the things he hasn't been able to say. All the worry he's been carrying quietly, all the missing, all the wanting to help and not being able to, all of it poured into this one careful, unhurried kiss. You can feel it in the way he holds you, in the way his hand slides up to the nape of your neck with this impossible gentleness, cradling the base of your skull, and you think that this is one of the things you love most about him, that he can pour the things he can't quite say into the way he touches you instead. That he always finds a way to say it somehow.
When he pulls back his forehead drops against yours, and you both just breathe for a moment.
"I missed this," he says quietly, and his voice has gone rough at the edges. "I missed you."
"I'm here," you tell him.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, you are."
He shifts on the bed, carefully, rearranging so that his back is against the headboard, and then he draws you in against his chest, settling your weight against him, one arm wrapped around you and his other hand finding your back, rubbing slow, easy circles. You feel him exhale the moment you settle into him, this long, quiet release of tension, like he's been holding himself together at a particular pitch for days and he's only now allowed to come down from it. You know that feeling. You know exactly what it costs him to be steady for you when you're like this, to hold all his own worry in at the edges so there's room for you to take up as much space as you need.
"Your back," he says, his hand still moving, not a question exactly, just checking.
"It's okay right now," you tell him. "The pressure helps, actually. Don't stop."
"Good." His hand keeps moving. "Tell me if it changes."
You nod against his chest. He smells like the end of a long day—that faint trace of his aftershave gone soft with wear, the warmth of him underneath it—and it's one of those things you didn't realise you'd been missing until right now, this specific, particular closeness, the smell and the sound and the solid reality of him. Outside the window the light is doing that late-afternoon thing, that slow golden thickening that turns everything amber and quiet, and the room feels warm and hushed, like the world's agreed to hold still for a little while.
Your hips still ache distantly, and your shoulders are tender where the flare's left its footprints, and your body is tired in that fibro way that has no bottom to it, that pervasive, systemic exhaustion that doesn't shift with rest. The fog is still there at the edges of your thoughts, that gauzy in-between feeling, like you're not quite all the way present yet. But Aaron's hand is warm and steady on your back, and his heartbeat is solid under your cheek—slower now, you notice, calmer than it was when he first sat down—and you can feel the tension draining out of him increment by increment as he holds you, and there's something that feels almost like peace in that.
"You should eat something," he says, after a while. "When you're ready. The crackers are plain—I wasn't sure what your stomach was doing."
"Still a bit off," you admit. "The crackers sound okay, though. In a minute."
"No rush." His hand doesn't stop moving. "We've got time."
"You don't have to stay in here all evening," you say, though even as you say it you're pulling him closer, which rather undermines the point, and you think he notices because there's a quiet almost-laugh against the top of your head.
"I know I don't have to," he says. "I want to." He shifts slightly, getting more comfortable, pulling you more securely against him. "Jack's at a sleepover. There's nowhere else I need to be."
Something loosens in your chest at that. You hadn't realised you'd been holding onto the low-grade worry that you were keeping him from something, from the normal rhythms of the evening, from being somewhere useful. You should have known better. Aaron doesn't do things he doesn't mean.
"Okay," you say, quietly.
"Okay," he echoes.
You close your eyes, and let yourself be held, and feel the last of the flare's residue beginning, very slowly, to loosen its grip. Your body's still not your own, not entirely—it'll be a few more days before the fatigue fully lifts, before the tenderness fades back to its usual baseline, before you feel like you're back inside yourself again. You know this. You know the terrain of your own illness well enough by now to know what the recovery looks like, how it goes at its own pace and can't be hurried, and you're not in any rush. You'll get there. You always do.
But Aaron's here, and he's warm, and his hand is still moving in those slow steady circles, patient as anything, and his heartbeat is even and solid under your cheek, and for right now, that's everything. That's the whole world, contained in this one quiet room in the amber light of late afternoon.
"You don't have to say anything," he murmurs, into the top of your hair. "Just—let me hold you. Okay? Just this."
Pairing: Aaron Hotchner x Disabled!Reader
Summary: A cruel comment at the dinner table sends you spiralling, but Aaron sees what no one else does—and chooses you, always.
Tags: disabled!reader, chronic fatigue syndrome, ableism, family tension, someone makes a cruel joke and no one stops him, aaron notices everything, reader disappears into themselves, emotional withdrawal, breakdown, quiet care, comfort after a social crash, jack is soft and sweet, found family, hurt/comfort, no use of y/n, reader is not fine but she is loved, domesticity as a balm, cinnamon apples and soft silence, aaron knows how to hold you without crowding you
Word count: 3k words
Aaron sees it unfold in slow motion, the way a wine glass slips from the edge of a table and spins once in the air before it shatters. One moment, laughter is bubbling around the dinner table, the clink of cutlery on plates and the clatter of too many conversations tangled together like fairy lights. Jack is giggling at something your younger cousin said, his cheeks flushed with warmth and sugar. Someone reaches for the mashed potatoes. Someone else opens a new bottle of wine. A toast is raised about birthdays, anniversaries, something nostalgic and tender and steeped in the glow of family. And then—like a needle scratching across a favourite record—it changes.
A careless comment. A half-laugh. A joke from someone who doesn't mean to wound but does anyway. Your cousin, maybe. Or your uncle, the one who prides himself on his wit and never notices the damage he leaves behind. It's offhanded, a lazy, flippant jab about people who "milk" their illnesses. Who fake being tired. Who use words like "fatigue" and "brain fog" to wriggle out of responsibilities. He even chuckles when he says it, eyes sweeping the table, expecting approval. It lands like a feather, light and insidious. No one calls him out. Not really. Just a few murmurs. A few polite smiles. Someone even laughs.
Harmless, they'd say. Not personal. Just a joke. Not about you.
But Aaron sees the way your spine stiffens, barely perceptible unless you're watching for it—which he is. The way your smile freezes in place, too tight around the edges. It looks like you're still part of the conversation, still present and pleasant, but Aaron knows better. He knows the signs, has learned the map of your silences, your grace in withdrawal. You don't say anything. Don't defend yourself. Don't correct the record. You simply go still, retreating so far into yourself it's like watching someone fold a letter in half and hide it in a drawer. You disappear inside yourself so quietly, so invisibly, that only someone who knows you would notice. And Aaron does.
You laugh—just barely. It's a brittle sound, sharp-edged and painful in its effort to be light. You mumble something about needing the loo and rise from your chair. It makes the softest scrape against the floorboards as you push it back, an unnoticed exclamation mark on your silence. Your head is down. Your shoulders are locked in tight. And then you're gone. You don't even take your drink with you. You walk as if carrying something fragile and invisible, like each step might crack the surface you've been standing on.
Aaron counts to one hundred and eighty.
Jack is still laughing, bright and oblivious, trying to fit as many roast potatoes into his mouth as possible. Your brother is talking about his latest DIY disaster, waving his fork for emphasis. Your mother is pulling a trifle from the fridge with a triumphant flourish, and someone makes a joke about how many layers it has. The conversation flows. The moment has passed for everyone else. No one notices the fracture. No one sees the shattering. They're all still caught in the golden glow of shared memories and wine-soaked nostalgia. But Aaron isn't.
Aaron sees the crack spreading across the surface. He sees the ripple effect under your skin. He hears the silence you left behind, the shape of your absence pressed into the air like a ghost.
He gets up without speaking, without apology or performance. He leaves his napkin by his plate, gives Jack's shoulder a brief squeeze as he passes, and moves down the hallway with quiet, deliberate steps. The noise of the dining room fades behind him like fog burning off glass. He knows exactly where you've gone—knows the way your retreats look, how the veneer cracks when you think no one's watching. He's watched it happen before, held space for the aftermath more than once. Every footfall carries certainty.
He pauses outside the door for a moment, listening. Not for sound—there isn't any—but for the heavy silence that follows a quiet exit. Then he knocks once. A gentle sound, more breath than touch.
"It's me."
Silence.
So he eases the door open.
The light is dim, casting soft shadows across the tiled floor. The smell of lavender soap lingers faintly in the air. You're sitting on the edge of the bathtub, legs pressed together, spine bent inwards like a question. Your hands are clenched tightly in your lap, fingers pale and rigid, nails carving little crescents into your skin. Your eyes are staring somewhere past the tiled wall. Somewhere far beyond this house and this evening and this moment. Your shoulders are trembling—not from sobs, but from the unbearable effort of staying upright. Of not breaking. Of not becoming a burden in a place that has no room for the weight you carry. Your breathing is shallow and erratic, as though each breath costs more than it gives.
Aaron closes the door softly behind him and crouches down in front of you. The floor is cold under his knees. He rests his hands gently on your thighs, grounding you. His palms are warm, steady, the heat of them a quiet promise.
"Hey," he says, voice barely above a whisper. "You want to leave? Or do you want me to handle it?"
Your eyes flick to him, then away again. You shake your head, just once. "I don't want to make a scene," you murmur, voice thin and frayed. "I'm fine. It's fine. They didn't mean anything by it."
But you're not fine. Not even close.
Your breathing is quick and shallow, each inhale catching like your lungs can't quite fill. There's a flicker of panic beneath your skin, under the tightness of your jaw and the stiff line of your shoulders. Your fingers twitch like they're reaching for something—stability, understanding, anything solid to hold. Aaron watches you carefully, studying the subtle tremors in your frame, the invisible collapse that no one else in that dining room would see.
He doesn't tell you what he sees. He just takes your hands in his, folding them gently between his palms like something sacred. Your skin is ice cold, and he cups it like he can warm you through sheer will. He leans in slightly, not crowding you, just close enough that his presence fills the space around you like a blanket. Warm. Steady. Familiar.
"I'll make whatever scene you need," he says, his voice a steady thread through the stillness. "You don't have to sit through this to make anyone else comfortable."
You finally meet his eyes. There's so much in your gaze it's almost unbearable—humiliation, frustration, exhaustion that runs bone-deep. You look like you're about to apologise. For reacting. For feeling. For existing in a body that someone else dared to mock. You open your mouth and close it again, lost in the thicket of emotion. You press your lips together and shake your head.
"I can't ruin this," you whisper, barely audible. "It's my family. They just… they don't get it."
"They don't have to."
His tone is calm, unwavering. Like bedrock. He shifts one hand to brush his thumb across your knuckles, slow and deliberate. The way he always touches you in moments like this—like you're fragile, yes, but never weak. Like he wants to remind your body that it's safe now. That you're not alone. His hands never flinch.
"You don't have to educate anyone tonight. You don't have to sit at that table and swallow the hurt. You don't owe them that performance."
You breathe in, trying to steady yourself, but the inhale stutters and falters. You press your lips together tightly, willing yourself to hold on. Your eyes flutter shut, just for a second, like you're trying to keep something inside.
"I hate that it still gets to me," you confess, voice cracking. "I hate that one stupid comment can undo so much. That it still has that power."
"I know," he says, and he means it.
He doesn't offer platitudes. Doesn't try to spin silver linings. He just stays with you, his hands wrapped around yours, anchoring you in the quiet. Outside, the hum of voices drifts in. Jack's laugh cuts through the noise like sunlight. Someone raises a glass. The world outside keeps turning. The party continues. Time moves. But Aaron stays rooted in place.
You end up leaving early.
It's not dramatic. No slammed doors, no angry glances or hastily whispered apologies. Just quiet goodbyes at the edge of the conversation, Aaron's hand resting at the small of your back as you murmur that you're not feeling well, that it's been a long day, that you're just tired. Only a few people even register it—your mum frowns, gently concerned, but doesn't ask questions. Jack hugs her goodbye. Someone calls out a half-hearted "feel better!" as the front door clicks shut behind you. The sound echoes slightly in the silence that follows, as if the house itself knows you're gone.
Outside, the night is cool and still. The air carries the scent of damp leaves and the distant echo of someone's music down the street. A wind chime clinks somewhere in the distance. The hush of suburbia settling into sleep drapes itself over the neighbourhood like a blanket. Porch lights flicker softly in the dark. You press your forehead briefly to the window of the car before sliding into the passenger seat. Aaron doesn't speak. He just opens the door for you, waits until you're settled, and then gently lays his jacket across your lap. You hadn't asked for it. You don't need to. It's already warm from his body. It smells faintly of his aftershave, pine and something earthy, grounding. It's heavy in a comforting way.
Jack climbs into the backseat with a quiet thunk, pulling the door closed beside him. He doesn't speak either. He just buckles in, tucking his arms into his hoodie sleeves. Aaron starts the engine, and the three of you pull away from the curb like a ship leaving harbour—silent, slow, safe. The headlights wash over the pavement in pale gold, cutting through the dark as street signs blur past.
The drive home is slow and quiet. The hum of tyres against asphalt. The rhythm of your own breathing. The faint hum of the heater through the vents. The occasional flicker of passing streetlights paints golden stripes across your skin. Your eyes are closed, but you're not asleep—just folded in on yourself, your head resting against the window, the weight of the night curling around you like fog. Your thoughts drift in slow, half-formed loops—what was said, how it landed, how much effort it took to swallow your reaction and smile like you hadn't felt anything at all. Aaron reaches over at a red light, his hand finding yours without looking. He squeezes, once, and doesn't let go until the car begins to move again. The pressure of his fingers, the calm of his skin—it's not a fix, but it's something. It's the reminder that you're not alone in it.
From the back seat, Jack's voice comes soft. "Are you okay?"
You open your eyes, just enough to meet his in the rearview mirror. His brow is furrowed, eyes wide and careful.
"I will be," you say softly. "Thanks for asking, sweetheart."
He nods, but keeps watching you. You can feel his attention, quiet and present. Like father, like son. The gentleness they both wear so effortlessly—it makes your throat ache. It holds you gently even when the words fail.
When you reach home, Aaron helps you out of the car without a word. You walk slowly, each step deliberate. The kind of tired you carry now isn't just exhaustion—it's hollowing. You move like your bones have grown heavier, like gravity is stronger tonight than it's ever been. Aaron unlocks the door and nudges it open with his shoulder, flicking on the light. The hallway is warm and dim, familiar in a way that lets your shoulders fall just a little.
"You want to go straight to bed?" he asks, already toeing off his shoes.
You hesitate. "Not yet."
He nods. Doesn't ask. You've already given enough of yourself tonight.
You sink into the couch, curling up beneath one of the soft knitted throws you keep around. Your limbs ache in that echoing way that comes after adrenaline drains, your joints humming with fatigue. You close your eyes, not to sleep, just to rest. Just to exist without performing. The silence in the room is gentle, padded, as if the house itself is trying not to disturb you. You hear Jack setting down his backpack, slipping off his shoes with a practiced thud, and padding across the floor.
Aaron disappears into the kitchen.
"Hey, Jack," he says, tone light but not forced. "You up for dessert?"
Jack perks up. "What kind?"
"Cinnamon apples. With ice cream."
"Yes, please."
You hear the sound of the fridge door opening, the soft thunk of apples being set on the counter. The peeler is drawn from the drawer. The warm clink of the saucepan pulled down from its hook. It's a symphony of domestic quiet, familiar and steady. Jack helps, hands a little clumsy with the peeler, his soft "ow" followed by Aaron's gently amused "careful."
"I got it," Jack insists, determined.
"I know you do."
Aaron's voice carries that tone he only uses when he's guiding, when he's teaching and affirming all at once. Not patronising. Just present.
From the couch, you listen to the two of them talk. Jack's day at school. The book he's reading. Aaron asking questions that lead somewhere, that encourage him to unfold. There's no mention of earlier. No circling back to the dinner table or the silence that followed. But the air holds a different kind of care. Not avoidance—just space. Like leaving a wound uncovered to breathe.
You let yourself drift in and out. You hear Jack describing a science experiment with wild hand gestures. You hear Aaron's low hums of interest, the way he says, "Tell me more." You catch words like "volcano," "baking soda," and "we made a mess." You smile, just a little, without opening your eyes.
The smell of warm cinnamon fills the house, comfort curling into the corners of the room. Vanilla ice cream scooped into bowls, the sizzle of apples cooked until soft and caramelised. The light in the living room is golden and low, casting gentle shadows across the carpet. It smells like safety. Like warmth. Like childhood. Like home.
Aaron brings over two bowls and hands one to you without a word. Jack plops onto the floor in front of the coffee table with his, legs crossed. You take the bowl in both hands and let the steam hit your face, sweet and spiced. You take the first bite.
It tastes like safety.
Aaron settles next to you, thigh brushing yours. "Too much cinnamon?"
You shake your head. "Perfect."
"Good." He takes a bite of his own, then looks over at Jack. "Still your favourite?"
Jack shrugs, spoon in mouth. "Second favourite. Warm cookie dough is first."
Aaron chuckles. "Noted. Cookie dough moves to the top of the list."
Jack beams, a smudge of ice cream on his chin. He scoots a little closer to the table, tapping his spoon against the bowl in a rhythm that makes your lips twitch. Aaron stretches his arm behind you on the couch, fingertips brushing lightly against your shoulder. A simple, wordless touch.
You lean your head against Aaron's shoulder, letting the warmth of him and the food and the quiet moment wrap around you. Jack finishes first and starts stacking the bowls without being asked. You can hear the soft clink of ceramic and the running tap as he rinses them before placing them in the sink. Small things. Kind things. The kind that root you in place when the world feels too big.
"Thanks, buddy," Aaron says.
"You're welcome."
The three of you settle into the soft hush of the room. Aaron switches off the overheads and leaves only the lamp on, a warm pool of light in the corner. You shift slightly, stretch your legs, and he adjusts without needing to be asked. Jack pulls a blanket over his lap and yawns dramatically.
"Think you can make it through one episode?" Aaron asks him.
Jack shrugs. "I can try."
You chuckle softly, the sound small but real.
He puts on something familiar, the low sounds of a cartoon filling the room without demanding anything of you. Aaron's arm rests along the back of the couch, his hand brushing your shoulder now and then. Jack slowly leans sideways until he's half-dozing, head resting on a throw pillow. There's no rush. No expectation. Just presence. The warmth of your shared breath, the soft flicker of the TV screen, the knowledge that you are held here.
And somewhere deep inside your chest, the knot begins to loosen. Not all at once. But enough to breathe. Enough to exhale. Enough to remind yourself that this is your life, not something to survive, but something to belong to.
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