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Title: Their Shadows Deep, Chapter 1/? Pairing: Morgan/Hotch pre-slash Summary: Aaron's dead. Foyet isn't. Neither of them, it seems, are going to leave Derek alone. Notes: Warnings in tags. I've been working on this idea of ghost Aaron forever and I'm not sure where it's going but here have a beginning and talk to me about it. Set in early season 5.

-

Aaron kills himself on a Monday.

Dave says it’s a Sunday night in his report, and Derek sends the report back with edits in red ink, scratches Sunday out until the pen goes through the paper and gouges a stripe out of his desk. Of course, Dave also says that Aaron died in the line of duty saving a young woman’s life, but Derek can’t do anything about that. For one, it certainly garners Haley and Jack a better emotional and financial legacy than what Derek might like to write. Also, Dave believes it’s the truth.

Everyone else at the Bureau, in the capitol, at the funeral – everyone else says that’s just the kind of man Aaron Hotchner was. A good man. A hero. Derek agrees with them. He shakes a lot of hands at the funeral, not because he was close to the Hotchners—though with Jack on his shoulders and safely out of reach of everyone’s pitying hands he supposes he’s close to at least one of them—but because Derek Morgan is now head of the BAU and he’s someone to know, and the fact that they’re standing beside a good man’s casket doesn’t deter them at all.

Jack’s only four. He’s too young to understand, and he and Haley had been in protective custody for months, the kid probably thought his dad was just away for work again. His tie is loose, and Derek thinks of being ten years old with his tie too tight and his mother’s fingers clenched like a steel trap over his shoulder, Sarah beside them and Desiree already six and too big to be clutched to her mama’s chest. Dozens of neighbors and uncles, officers and family friends had told Derek that his father was a hero. They’d told him he was the man of the family now. They’d shaken his hand.

Derek asks Jack if he’s ready to go, promises him ice cream if he says yes. He keeps Aaron’s little boy up on his shoulders until they reach the car. He doesn’t let anyone else talk to Jack besides Haley, who refuses to let Jess persuade her into all four of them leaving at once. He doesn’t let anyone clap Jack on the shoulder or shake his hand.

“Daddy likes butter pecan,” Jack informs him as they’re standing in line at the ice cream shop, and Derek accidentally snaps the sample spoon in two. He looks at Jack and thinks of Aaron taking off his kevlar vest and has to take several deep breaths before he can unclench his hand.

“Your dad had – has very … traditional tastes,” Derek replies, blinks and sees Aaron in the black suit and blue tie he was wearing when he died, standing behind the counter like he works there. He blinks again and it’s gone, the memory, leaves nothing but the afterimage of a camera flash and the tic in Derek’s jaw.

He offers Jack double fudge chocolate, but of course the kid picks butter pecan. Hank Morgan had always said there was nothing in the world better than his wife’s meatloaf, laughed and kissed his kids’ foreheads when Derek and Sarah gagged, Desiree shouting from her high chair so he’d give her a kiss, too. Every year after his dad had died, Derek’s mom had asked what he wanted to eat for his birthday. Meatloaf, he’d always told her. It was his favorite food.

Jess calls once she and Haley are home and Derek runs Jack by, doesn’t stay. Aaron might have thought he’d solved the problem by bleeding out in the woods in Tennessee, but Derek knows Foyet’s blood lust won’t be satisfied with that. He knows Foyet is coming and they’re all in the firing line.

“Monday’s child is fair of face,” Derek tells the freshly filled grave late that night, maybe early the next day. He’s sitting on the stone bench, leaning forward with his hands clasped and his forearms resting on his thighs. Sometimes you had to lean into a conversation with Aaron to get him to see things your way. When Derek had started, he or Aaron would roll their chairs across the bullpen, toss theories and suspects and sometimes obscure legal cases back and forth across the scant space between them, closer and more vehement with every volley until one of them got mad or started laughing or Gideon came down and gave one of their chairs a hard push, sent them careening away.

Careening away turned out to be Gideon’s specialty. He’d run farther than any of them could reach. So had Aaron, Derek supposed, ever the eager protege.

“My mama used to tell us that,” he continues mildly, cracking his neck from side to side. “Sarah was Friday’s child, though I used to tell her she must be Wednesday’s once I knew what ‘woe’ was. Desiree was Sunday’s, though I think Mama fudged that a little.” He shrugs. “But since Des doesn’t work all that hard I guess ‘bonny and blithe’ is all right. And I was born on a Monday, early morning. Rossi would have said it was Sunday night.”

Derek’s hands clasp a little tighter. He leans farther forward, nothing there to meet him but the breeze over the churned earth of a new grave. He takes a deep breath, focuses on the sloppy print, Aaron Hotchner, where the headstone will be. Aaron Hotchner on a nameplate on the desk next to Derek’s, serious and hard-working as its owner arguing with Derek from his chair. Aaron Hotchner on a closed office door, lamp still lit after everyone else had gone home. Aaron Hotchner, who was gone.

“How dare you?” Derek snaps, leans so far forward that he would have slammed into Aaron if Aaron was there. But he’s not. “We’ve stopped dozens of killers, Aaron! It’s what we do. But one of them gets the drop on you and you decide, what, the world is better with you gone? We could have figured it out! We’re a team, you jackass, and you just – Fuck you, man. We were a team, you and me. We were a team.”

His knees hit the dirt above Aaron’s coffin and Derek pitches forward, slams his fist down and wants to punch something. He wants to kill Aaron’s killer for the second time, wants to murder him with his bare hands this time instead of with his gun. He wants to hunt Foyet down until the rat has nowhere left to hide. He wants to watch the bastard’s face when he realizes that this time there’s no escape. He wants to shoot Aaron himself, punch him in his fucking nose for thinking any of it was better this way, as if any of their lives could ever be better with him gone.

“Fuck you,” he says again, bellows it loud enough to shake Aaron’s casket six feet down, punches the freshly churned ground hard enough to feel it reverberate through his fists.

And maybe he’s drunk—though he hasn’t had more than a sip of whiskey in six days—because he’s kept his fury at the injustice of the world on a tight leash since he was ten years old, since he’d screamed that the only god who would take his father away was a god who deserved to die and his mother had reeled back as though he’d slapped her. He’d tucked his anger down deep, buried with the secrets he’d had to keep, tried to hide it even in his dreams.

Maybe he’s dreaming. That’s the only explanation for the grave dirt under Derek’s knees, under his nails. It’s the only explanation for the fact that he raises his head to scream and looks Aaron dead in the eyes.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Aaron replies, standing where his headstone’s meant to be, puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “I’m sorry,” he offers up, because in the eight years they’ve worked together Aaron’s always made himself smaller and humbler to calm the waters.

Aaron drops to his own knees, reaches out a hand toward Derek and -

Well, Derek’s barely slept in six days. He’s already dreaming, of course. He’s known for years that the only place to meet your dead is in dreams. So he allows it. He feels Aaron’s fingers brush against his cheek, an apology of a different sort, and he closes his eyes.

-

He wakes up a few hours later, still in the graveyard, damp from the mist and the earth and chilled beneath the thin material of his mourning suit. He hasn’t slept much the last few days: dreams shattered by gunshots, dreams saturated with blood, dreams of running and running and never once being fast enough to keep his partner alive. The few hours of sleep he’s gotten on Aaron’s grave are the quietest he’s had all week.

“We should do this again sometime,” Derek tells Aaron’s name, rising up to dust the grave dirt off his clothes. If it takes sleeping in a cemetery to dream Aaron quiet and apologetic instead of bleeding out under Derek’s hands; well, Derek’s done far worse.

“I don’t think your back could take it,” Aaron replies, and it’s the middle of the night at a cemetery in suburban Virginia, so no one is around to hear Derek scream.

They might hear the report of his gun, but the only people around aren’t the sort that ever wake up.

Except, apparently, Aaron Hotchner. Who is still standing there, frowning disapprovingly at Derek the way he’s always frowned when someone discharged their firearm without clear cause, the way he frowned when one of them got too close to a case and made arguments founded on emotion instead of facts.

It figures, Derek thinks, snorting a little as he holsters his gun, that Derek’s hallucination would be disappointed in Derek for hallucinating him at all.

Not to mention insulting him for getting old. Now Derek knows he’s hallucinating; Aaron hasn’t made fun of Derek in years.

Aaron isn’t making fun of anyone anymore, he reminds himself harshly, ignores the apparition in a burying suit standing a few feet away. Aaron’s dead.

“You’re right,” Derek agrees, and it doesn’t matter that it’s the fog and the exhaustion and the grief that he refuses to let loose, a rabid, feral thing gnawing at its chains, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t really Aaron standing once more at Derek’s side. “Guess it’s time to go commit suicide by criminal, now that my life’s gotten so bad.”

The hallucination reels back as though Derek has struck it, as if he could, and Derek thinks of his mother’s ashen face and he thinks of Aaron six feet underground, Aaron beside him for the best eight years of Derek’s life. He tightens the chains. He swallows the bitterness down, feels it lodge in his throat and wonders briefly how many more times he can take it before the acid eats through him from the inside.

“Sorry,” he mutters brusquely, because apologies have always been more Aaron’s forte than his, but Derek assumes there isn’t any harm in apologizing to a figment of his own mind. Maybe this Aaron he’s created can offer him a fraction of the peace that the real Aaron Hotchner offered when he was alive.

The apparition opens its mouth to respond, but Derek can’t stand it, suddenly, can’t stand there and stare at the mist wearing his dead partner’s face, can’t stand face to face with a partner he lost, a man he failed, can’t face the death of his friend.

He throws a hand up, but he doesn’t stay to see if the apparition obeys. He stumbles away, out of the cemetery, back to his bike, away from Aaron’s face and Aaron’s grave, away away away.

He sheds his clothes as soon as he gets home, dew and grave dirt and the lingering scent of dozens of perfumes from the wake. Clooney—who normally peruses Derek and his clothes for any new and interesting scents—sniffs them once and backs away, cocks his head and peers expectantly at the door.

Derek doesn’t notice. Derek digs under his sink for the sedatives the doctor had prescribed after his last serious injury. He swallows two of them dry, then falls into bed and refuses to think of anything at all.

-

Derek hasn’t needed an alarm in years. Clooney wakes him before six every morning, leash at his feet, ready for their morning run.

Of course, normally Clooney’s cheerful bark isn’t immediately followed by someone whispering, “Shh, boy, you don’t want to wake him. He looks like he needs his sleep.”

“We have a case?” Derek queries his pillow hoarsely, sleep-addled and exhausted and what other reason could there be for Aaron to be in his house at dawn, all of them barely recovered from the last case -

The adrenaline sends Derek to his feet—Aaron’s vest in the car, the sound of the gun, the blood pooling between Derek’s fingers, Aaron’s rattling last breaths—and kicks his brain into high gear.

Aaron is dead.

Aaron is standing next to Clooney, his eyebrows raised as he looks Derek up and down.

Derek’s gun is locked in the gun safe.

Derek’s knife is on his belt, which is in a pile on the floor with the rest of his clothes, because Derek went to bed completely naked. He went to bed naked because he was so exhausted that he thought he’d …

Well, because he thought he’d seen Aaron in the graveyard, standing tall instead of buried six feet under, cold as the loosely packed earth.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Aaron answers him, though the damned twinkle in his eyes indicates he’s perhaps aware that Derek’s mind has moved on to several hundred more pertinent questions than a case.

Derek rubs his hands over his face. He blinks. Aaron doesn’t even flicker, though he does wink exaggeratedly at Derek’s frown.

“I’m going to get dressed,” Derek informs the apparition, who has the gall to look disappointed. “And then I’m going to go for a run, and you are going to -” He flaps his hands outward, at the bedroom door and the ceiling. “- go wherever it is that you’re supposed to go. Capiche?”

Aaron chuckles, and that isn’t fair, god that isn’t fair; Derek has to bow his head to hide the tears building in his eyes, can’t quite stifle how sharply he inhales. How dare this figment of his imagination give him Aaron laughing when it’s everything Derek will never hear again?

Maybe the hallucination senses that it’s gone too far, because when Derek wipes his eyes and lifts his head the ghost and Clooney are both gone, Clooney’s paws the only sound on the stairs.

He throws on his most comfortable running gear, knows he’ll be pushing himself this morning, and heads for the door.

The door is beautiful old oak, borrowed from another restoration project and lovingly sanded and oiled and installed in Derek’s home. Clooney is prancing in front of it, his leash in his mouth, looking excitedly back and forth between Derek and … Aaron. Who’s standing in shorts and a t-shirt in front of Derek’s hand-carved door.

“How are you wearing different clothes?” Derek demands, though it seems stupid to start questioning his own subconscious when it hasn’t provided him with any answers so far, when every time this apparition opens its mouth it carves out Derek’s heart.

Aaron shrugs, the material of his white shirt pulling at his chest, the muscles in his arms shifting as though he was real. As though he hadn’t bled out almost a week ago under Derek’s shaking hands.

Derek learned how to hide his tears decades ago, and he blinks hard until it burns, then shrugs and says, “Well, let’s go, then,” grabs Clooney’s leash and his keys and hurries out the door. He doesn’t bother to wait for Aaron; he knows his own mind well enough to be certain he’ll see him again.

Sure enough, Aaron pulls even with him as soon as Derek finishes warming up and slides into the grueling pace he plans to maintain until his lungs give out and his vision darkens enough that he can’t see his dead partner when he looks to his left.

Aaron hums a little with exertion—Derek knows his current pace is rougher than Aaron’s usual six-minute mile, it’s rougher than Derek prefers—but sets his jaw and matches Derek’s stride. Aaron might have pretended not to be as competitive as Dave or Jason or the other superstars of the BAU, but he’d been Derek’s partner for years, had pushed himself to match Derek step for step on the track and blow for blow on the mats even when they both knew it would cost him the next day.

He’ll be feeling this tomorrow, Derek thinks, half smug because if Aaron can best Derek anywhere, it’s always been at running, and half indulgent, years of watching Aaron push himself past his limits and Derek’s just to smirk if and when he wins.

Then he remembers. Aaron won’t feel this tomorrow. Aaron’s body is six feet underground and can’t feel anything at all.

“I’m already dead, why are you trying to kill me?” Aaron pants, and Derek half turns to realize that even Clooney is lagging behind, that maybe it’s impossible to outrun his demons but apparently he can outrun his ghosts.

He doesn’t appreciate that his hallucination wants to joke about one of the worst moments in his life, but he’s already shot at it and ignored it, so there’s little left to do but glare.

Aaron looks appropriately penitent, and Derek might even be fooled if he didn’t know to look for the faint curl of Aaron’s lips, the challenging glint in his eye.

“Shouldn’t you be faster, then?” Derek retorts, a little sharper than he intended, but Aaron shrugs off the sting and shrugs again in answer, his shoulder cool where it brushes against Derek’s skin. “You’d think I’d at least hallucinate some decent competition,” he adds, attempts to modulate his voice for levity and almost succeeds.

Aaron doesn’t raise his eyebrows, exactly, but the look he aims at Derek is just as incredulous. “You think you’d bother imagining your dead boss into existence?” he inquires, says boss the same way he’d referred to himself as Derek’s drill sergeant years ago, the first time he’d tried to leave. Derek supposes he should be grateful that Aaron had only tried to quit the BAU then, and not the mortal coil.

“Fuck you,” Derek mutters, not without heat, and garners a severe look from a woman with a baby who obviously can’t see the manifestation of Derek’s grief running next to him and probably wouldn’t appreciate his language even if she could. He spares a moment to be grateful that he put his headphones on, so he appears rude instead of crazy. “I figured I was imagining my friend.”

Aaron startles at the word, falls behind and has to sprint to catch up, though perhaps he fades out of existence once Derek isn’t looking at him. Despite feigning ignorance to annoy Jason, Derek knows his mythology, and he isn’t about to turn around no matter how desperate he is to find Aaron still there.

If Derek wasn’t already focused on the ache in his legs and the feeling of his feet hitting the pavement, he might have been mildly offended that even his subconscious projection hadn’t classified Aaron as a friend. It had been intentional, though. Derek had started at the BAU and immediately taken great pleasure in causing Jason to roll his eyes even as he emulated the older man’s tactics more faithfully than anyone else on the team. He had started at the BAU and somehow fallen in step with Aaron Hotchner, call me Hotch, without any effort from either of them. “We’re not friends,” had become a defensive measure whenever anyone looked too closely, whenever someone asked about Aaron’s space in Derek’s closet, Derek’s hand in every repair at the Hotchner home.

(Though no one knew to ask about those things, just like they didn’t know about the nights that Derek had woken up still on the sofa—Aaron’s or his—stretched out with his head on Aaron’s shoulder, or Aaron splayed half on top of him with Derek’s arms locked around his waist. He had woken a few times to find Haley throwing a blanket over them, staring at Aaron with a frown that was half affection and half grief for something long lost. He had woken once to find her looking at him, but her expression had been one that Derek tried hard to forget, and it hardly matters now, does it, he reminds himself harshly, now that Aaron is gone?

Instead, they used to ask about Derek’s gym clothes in Aaron’s go bag, Aaron’s hand on Derek’s back. Emily, still new to the team and traipsing lightly through Derek’s worst nightmares, had asked Spencer why Hotch had broken the law and let Derek out of the interrogation room. “He’d do the same thing for any of us,” Spencer told her, and maybe it was true, but Emily had seen something then that the rest of the team was too familiar with to notice: Aaron’s anger at Derek’s silence, Aaron’s shoulder brushing Derek’s back at the station, Aaron staying in Chicago for a few days to offer a much needed seminar on the limits of profiling and flying back with Derek after the funeral.

“That’s just Hotch,” the team told her, and it wasn’t a lie, and Emily lost sight of the tapestry she’d once seen woven underneath.)

“Maybe -” Aaron begins, and Derek waves the rest of Aaron’s words away. It’s not that Derek hasn’t been thinking it—of course he has, if his subconscious is saying it aloud—and one of Derek’s favorite parts of profiling is the science of it, testing and discarding different theories and retesting what they already believe they know. It was one of the reasons he’d loved studying law, arguments of theory and practice one of the first ways he and Aaron had communicated across the bullpen.

Maybe I’m real, Aaron would say, if Derek allowed it. It can’t hurt to test the theory.

He would be wrong. Part of being on the BAU is knowing yourself so well that a fellow profiler or unsub can’t exploit your weaknesses. Of course, that means admitting that you have weaknesses to exploit.

Derek knows that he hasn’t slept for days. He knows that he pressed himself to Aaron’s grave the night before, that he would have clawed through six feet of soil with his bare hands if he’d believed he would have found Aaron on the other side. He knows that Aaron appeared because Derek is desperate to keep him. (He even knows what Aaron would say first as proof that he was real, the thing that Derek had once tried to wish into truth.)

And he knows proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Aaron is merely a shadow of Derek’s mind will lay Derek so low that Foyet will glance at him in disgust and move on.

That can’t happen. Foyet is out there watching Aaron’s family and watching the BAU, but he’s trained his sights on Derek before, it was Derek’s badge he held in his hands, the badge he abandoned at the hospital with Aaron’s future corpse. Foyet will come for him next as long as Derek stands just a little taller than the rest. He will come for Derek, and Derek will tear him to pieces, because Foyet is the reason that Aaron is dead.

“Don’t,” Aaron says quietly, because they’ve always been able to read each other’s faces, because Aaron is a manifestation of the thoughts racing through Derek’s head. They’re moving too quickly for Aaron to stop and rub his scars, but Derek can read the urge as it flickers through his eyes, the quick clench of his jaw, the curl of his fingers into fists.

“Didn’t leave me much choice, did you?” Derek retorts, and a jogger coming from the other direction stares at him and then jogs through Aaron and yelps. Derek nearly yelps, though whether it’s in sympathy with the discomfited jogger or in concern that Aaron might disperse into thin air it’s hard to say. Aaron does not yelp, but he does appear extremely displeased to be sharing all of his personal space with a more corporeal human being.

Maybe that’s why his next words are: “Foyet raped me,” said in the same tone that he would use to tell Derek he enjoyed eating bland cereal for breakfast with 2% milk. His eyes give him away. He stares too hard at Derek, lifts his chin and then realizes he’s doing it and looks away, glances back and away and back to try to read Derek’s face.

Of course Aaron would test the theory anyway, of course he would try to confess something that Derek couldn’t possibly have known. He never listens to Derek when it’s only their safety on the line, though he would say that particular flaw works – worked both ways.

There’s just one problem with the test Aaron’s devised.

“I already knew that,” Derek replies softly, and it’s easy to offer Aaron what he’s looking for in Derek’s face, because Aaron is terrified of being seen as weak, as someone to be pitied, and Derek doesn’t have any pity to give.

“I’m good at my job,” he adds, reads the disbelief in Aaron’s eyes and knows that Aaron didn’t tell anyone, that he’d made certain it was left out of the official medical report, that he hadn’t been able to keep the violence a secret but he could keep that particular violation hidden from his team’s prying eyes.

And he is. Good at his job. But part of Derek’s job has always been to protect Aaron: from killers, from the team when need be, from himself. He failed in the end, but not because he didn’t know just how deep Aaron’s wounds ran.

Aaron doesn’t say anything after that, but he moves a little faster, and Derek sets his pace to match and wonders if it’s possible for a ghost to outrun their life.

-

They might not outrun the past, but they run until Clooney lays down and refuses to move, so Derek cools off and then flops down beside him and Aaron sits primly next to Derek on the grass. The grass doesn’t bend, but Aaron’s bare knee brushes Derek’s arm and doesn’t feel like anything but cool, sweaty skin.

“Shouldn’t you …” Derek trails off and waves his hand in a lazy circle to indicate the way Aaron had dispersed like mist around the jogger earlier, the way no one else seems to be able to see or hear or touch him.

(Probably because Derek is imagining him, but Derek has long practice building walls around unpleasant truths and shutting them away, and so he doesn’t ruminate on this option for very long.)

Aaron shrugs. His leg shifts as he does, and Derek thinks he could count each hair on Aaron’s knee as they brush against his skin. He thinks of Aaron, his knees and the rest of him rotting in the graveyard. He thinks of Aaron’s blood dark under his nails, warm as it welled up under his hands. He brings his hand down hard on Aaron’s thigh, curls his fingers until they press divots into Aaron’s skin, and hangs on until he can breathe again.

“I’m still new at this,” Aaron retorts dryly, his arid intonation and the tilt of his head and the barest flicker in his gaze because Aaron Hotchner is too well-bred to roll his eyes. It’s all perfectly, precisely Aaron, and Derek almost wishes that he didn’t know – hadn’t known Aaron well enough to conjure him up from the grave.

He doesn’t wish it, though. It’s been a week, and Aaron’s loss is still ricocheting through Derek like shrapnel from an explosion, slicing through every fragile organ and vein. Derek remembers grief like this, recalls the echo of it and not the blast, the way he can recall every second of his first gunshot wound: the impact and the trembling in his fingers and Aaron’s fingertips digging in hard against his ribs, the smell of black coffee on Aaron’s breath as he leaned in close and promised that Derek would be all right. He can recall everything except the pain. But he knows it now, feels it slam into him every time he opens his eyes and takes in the world and thinks that it all dares keeps existing while the person he – while Aaron is dead.

He would trade everything he had for one more second of Aaron’s infuriatingly sardonic face, but he wouldn’t offer the best seven years of his life up just to excise the shrapnel and dull his own pain.

Maybe Aaron has always been a dead man walking, but he had been the man that Derek knew best in the world, and Derek lets his hallucination rest a soothing hand on his chest and breathes through the ache.

“What if,” Aaron begins, looking down at his hand splayed against the damp fabric of Derek’s shirt, looks at Derek’s fingers pressed hard enough to bruise Aaron’s milky skin, “What if I told you that I -”

“Don’t.” Derek grips Aaron’s thigh vise-tight, would leave marks if Aaron were still flesh and blood and bone. This is the truth Derek knew Aaron would try to share, the one he would only exhume once one of them could take its place in the ground.

But—just like Aaron’s last secret—it’s a truth that Derek already knows. The difference is that he can’t let this perfect manifestation of his grief speak this secret out loud, not if Derek hopes to survive.

Aaron’s as willful dead as he was alive, and he gazes mulishly at Derek for a moment before something in Derek’s eyes must convince him not to lay him low in a city park after a grueling run only a few days after the worst day of Derek’s life.

It doesn’t mean that he’ll let the idea rest, though, and if that’s not Aaron Hotchner’s personality in a nutshell then Derek doesn’t know what is. No wonder he’s imagined Aaron haunting him instead of taking a well-deserved eternal nap.

“Then what about something Haley knows that you don’t know?” Aaron asks, because Aaron has the jawline and pugnacity of a pit bull. His skin is cool where the sweat is evaporating, and Derek rubs his fingers over the hair on the top of Aaron’s thigh until he shivers, and then he does it again.

Unlike Aaron, Derek was raised on the south side of Chicago, and no one ever taught him not to roll his eyes. “Sure. I’ll just interrogate your wife -”

“Ex-wife.”

“- about her ex-husband the day after she has to give the eulogy at his grave. ‘Hey Haley, sorry to bother you while you’re bawling your eyes out, but did Aaron wear orange socks the day you met, or is my hallucination lying to me?’”

“We should really interrogate your need to refer to me as a hallucination,” Aaron tells him, and Derek flips him off and gets briefly cursed at by a man with a frisbee on the same lawn. Maybe it’s time to lever himself off the grass before he loses his job at the BAU when they give him a psych eval for talking to himself in public.

There’s no question of passing the eval. Derek helped revise it three years ago, and seeing dead people is definitely on the “immediate removal from duty” side.

Actually, he doesn’t think he wrote that down. Maybe he should send a quick email to the head psychologist so that he amends the list.

Aaron follows him home, disconcertingly silent – Aaron’s a good profiler, but he’s a lawyer first, and Derek’s never seen him stop digging once he’s got a scent.

Well, that’s not quite true. Aaron had once sat on a stakeout with Derek and quietly, so quietly, murmured that Haley’s cell phone had rung and she had looked at him and looked away. He had glanced at Derek then, pursed his lips and swallowed and gave a small, uncertain shrug, watched Derek like he was waiting for something and didn’t say anything more.

“Aaron,” Derek had whispered, couldn’t speak any louder into the fragile silence, their borrowed car shrouded in darkness, Aaron’s face half lit by a distant streetlight. He had reached out then, stretched his hand past the gearshift and rested it on Aaron’s knee, and Aaron’s fingers had immediately slipped past the cuff of Derek’s shirt and curled, cool and a little clammy, around Derek’s wrist. “What are you gonna do?”

What do you want me to do? he’d meant, but it was Aaron’s family, it was Haley, and that wasn’t something he could say.

Aaron had looked away, then. He’d looked down at his hand, at Derek’s hand, and shrugged again. “Maybe it’s nothing,” he’d breathed, and two months after that the phone had rung and he had answered without breaking Haley’s gaze. Derek had called and Aaron had flown to Milwaukee and maybe Haley had taken her own calls, but since she’d slipped away before Aaron’s return—since Aaron had never asked, never pushed, never demanded to know—it was impossible to say.

It’s only ever happened once, as far as Derek knows, can imagine Aaron gawky and pimpled at sixteen interrogating the whole damn town about his daddy’s sins, and sure enough they’re barely through the door before Derek’s haunting is at it again.

“I hardly think it would bother Haley, just one question about … how I proposed?” Aaron suggests, and Derek glances away as he chucks his sweat-drenched running gear into the laundry basket and steps into a cold shower, doesn’t bother telling Aaron to leave. Doesn’t want him to go, not really, and anyway it’s not like Aaron would obey.

“I already know how you proposed,” Derek says, raises his voice to be heard over the shower spray. “Haley told you to man up -”

“That’s not -” Aaron manages to interject, before Derek cuts him off, scrubbing at his skin until it hurts. Maybe enough water will wash the last week away, will fill the gaping hole in Derek’s chest until he drowns.

“- politely,” Derek amends, and continues, “and you bribed the hostess at that Italian restaurant she likes, the one we went to, what, five years ago, after that case? Loved their red sauce. You bribed her for the good table on the balcony and proposed at sunset, knelt down and spouted Yeats -”

“How many loved your moments of glad grace,” Aaron quotes, almost inaudible over the rush of water, the sound Derek’s breath makes when it catches in his throat. “And loved your beauty with love false or true,

“But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,” Derek says with him, “and loved the sorrows of your changing face.”

And how Love fled, he adds silently, but he doesn’t say it aloud, and Aaron trails off without pacing the mountains overhead, without hiding his face amid a crowd of stars.

“Not the proposal then,” Aaron finally agrees, after Derek has stood for too long under the spray without moving, after he finally turns off the water and steps out and takes a towel handed to him by his own loss, though Aaron seems to drop it at the last moment, straining to place it in Derek’s outstretched hand. “What about -”

“What?” Derek snaps, toweling off his face. “You want me to call and ask her about how she met the man she loved and left and lost? You’re going to tell me I don’t know that story, with the yearbook and the pirates and the smile that could light up a room? Or maybe I should ask her about the miscarriages she had, before Jack, the Christmas ornaments with the names of babies that never were that she bought and you hated, the ones you said were like headstones in glitter and gold? Should I ask about the fertility treatments, Aaron? Should I ask about the calls?”

They stand in silence for a beat. Two. A droplet of water Derek missed runs down the back of his neck.

“If not Haley,” Aaron begins, and it’s a concession, but barely, Aaron’s voice too level. It’s the careful, monotonous tone he takes when interrogating victims who might be dangerous, unsubs vulnerable enough to merit the faintest hint of Aaron’s grace. “Then what about -”

“Stop,” Derek commands, but his voice cracks on the word, and he’s never once ordered Aaron to do anything, not a single time in eight years. “Aaron. Just – just give me a minute, man. Just leave it alone.”

Aaron opens his mouth to answer—to argue, undoubtedly, to win his case—and Derek throws up a hand to stop him, freezes when it goes right through Aaron’s chest. Aaron’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t have time to do more than glance down at Derek’s hand embedded in his chest before he flickers once like the picture on a crappy hotel television set and disappears.

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