hellooo angel! here with your request! im currently rewatching s7 and i was thinking about reader being upset with aaron about hiding emilys survival in the same way that spencer was mad at jj, except in this case him lying to reader for so long is a much bigger deal because theyre in a relationship, bau!reader or not, up to you! anywho i was toying with this in a spencer x reader angle and getting nowhere and this may already be a fic idk but id love to read your take on it! feel free to make it as angsty (or not angsty) as you like 😋😋
ty for the request babe! <3 i went angsty with it (also this fic assumes that hotch had some say in whether or not he went to Pakistan)
Aaron Hotchner x bau!reader ✩ 1.6k words
Your eyes are redrimmed as you stare at the steam twirling upward from your untouched mug. It's been a testing, tiresome few days. Working nonstop to the best of your ability to finish it all off.
Emily is alive. Aaron came home from Pakistan. Emily, your friend, the woman you’ve mourned for months, the woman you’ve buried over and over again in your mind, is alive. You should be elated and yet most of what you feel is a deep simmering hurt. A hand has gripped you, squeezing until it drains all the joy from you.
“I just–” you start with a sniffle. Aaron sits across from you, your dining table a physical barrier between you both. His face is neutral, he’s pragmatic as ever while facing down your sadness. Or is it anger? You keep flip flopping between the two. Either way he looks like a man ready to fix a problem as he has so many times before. You're unsure he can fix this one.
“I don’t understand how you could keep this secret– lie to me, like this. It seemed so easy for you.”
“It wasn’t.” he shakes his head with a calm voice. Aaron leans forward, one hand stretching across the table as though the extra few inches might somehow reach you. His fingers stop just short of yours. There's something pleading in his expression. A desperate hope that if you just looked at him long enough, you’d understand. “Honey, it wasn’t. I agreed to the assignment in Pakistan because I couldn’t stand it.”
Pakistan.
That’s an entirely different issue. One you think, eventually, you could have forgiven on its own.
It meant months of overworking yourself, trying your best to support Morgan as he tried to lead a team that essentially had its legs cut off. You had to watch Spencer retreat into himself as grief consumed him. Consumed you. You had to pick yourself up after a bad day because the one person you needed was 7000 miles away.
When the days ended, they never really did. There were more things to worry about than just the BAU, like the sweetest Hotchner boy. Your free time was spent helping Jess with Jack. You made sure she didn’t have to do it alone. Dinner and homework and soccer games. You were there.
To know now that he said yes to ease the pain of lying to you, that he left you in this mess alone, well, it reignites the flames of your anger.
“You got to escape from it!” you say, voice sharp. “You left.”
Aaron nearly flinches at your tone. Never once has he heard that type of anger from you directed at him.
“You got to leave while I stayed here alone.” Your voice trembles despite your efforts to steady it. “I had to live through every single day believing my friend, our friend, was dead.”
“I know.”
“No,” you cut in, shaking your head. “You don’t.”
Guilt starts to melt into Aaron’s features. It softens the set of his jaw, dims his eyes and drags his shoulders lower.
He’s been selfish. It’s a truth he almost never has to face. His entire life is built around sacrifice, his career, his family, the choices he makes everyday. But this had been for him. Watching you grieve had been unbearable and every lie had felt like another betrayal.
“But it doesn’t even matter, I don’t care about Pakistan.” You wipe impatiently at your eyes. “I–I care about the fact that I trust you. Always. And I have for a long time and I know you have reasons for everything you do but this one I can’t figure out. How could you hide this from me?”
“I couldn’t tell you. JJ–” His tone is pleading and his eye contact never waivers as he tries to explain. “-- is the only other person that knew. It had to be that way. We had to keep Prentiss safe and the fewer people that knew she’s alive the easier that was.”
“I know that.” Your voice is sharper than intended. “But you couldn’t have– have given me a clue?”
His eyes fall away from you, studying the grain of the dining table because this has suddenly become too much. Everything that has built up within you over the last few months is bubbling up to the surface. Aaron shakes his head with a heavy sigh.
“Not even when I was crying in your arms, falling apart, night after night, before you left?”
Aaron remembers those nights all too well. Nights where you were inconsolable, mourning your friend who was gone and would never come back. You wouldn’t sleep and you barely ate, the only solace you seemed to find was in him.
It all broke his heart, watching you, his love, become a shell of yourself. Especially, when he remembered that he held the key to stop your pain and he couldn’t use it. All he could do was sit like a guardian, telling you lies, telling you it would be okay, telling you you’d get through all of this together. All while knowing you were carrying a grief he could have lifted.
“No,” he says softly, sadly. “I couldn't."
Silence creeps back in, and you watch the steam curl into the air. You’ve never heard Aaron sound so defeated. The anger that had burned so fiercely only minutes ago gutters beneath the weight of it leaving behind something far worse. Your inescapable sadness.
Aaron feels it too, overcome with helplessness. This isn't a problem he can solve and fix as easily as he’d like, he can’t see the path forward that helps you rather than hurts you. He doesn’t want to hurt you or for you to be hurt any longer.
“I know,” you shrug, tears collecting on your lashline. “It still hurts, though.”
“I’m sorry, honey, that it had to be this way.”
You’re nodding your head before he finishes, sniffling as your nose starts to run and the sting behind your eyes becomes more noticeable. You know he had his reasons, you know why he did it. Knowing doesn't lessen the sting.
You give Aaron a sorry excuse for a smile, the corners of your mouth barely lifting as you formulate your next sentence carefully. You don't want to hurt Aaron, there's no part of you that could ever want that, but there are things that need to be said that you think might.
“After all this…” you clear your throat. “...This big secret you kept, how am I supposed to know that you won't keep something from me in the future?”
“Unless I absolutely have to,” he says, immediately. “I won’t.”
“How can I believe that?” His mouth opens and closes as he searches for words. “Where do you draw the line for things you can and can't tell me? How am I supposed to know you’re telling the truth?”
“You just have to trust me.” Aaron replies resolutely.
“I could before,” you whisper. “I don’t know that I can now.”
Aaron slumps back in his chair, as if your words are a physical blow. He is the picture of defeat as he rubs a hand over his face. Maybe if he does it hard enough the last ten minutes will have never happened or maybe he’d find some magic words to fix this mess. He loves you and you love him, so how have you got here?
His eyes are sad and impossibly tired when he drops his hands into his lap, you can hardly look at him. You feel sick.
“Tell me–” he starts, unsure and clumsy. “Tell me what to do, honey. Tell me how to fix this and I will.”
The twisted thing about it all is you don't think there is anything he can do. Can’t think of a single thing Aaron can say or do that would make any of this easier. They say time heals all wounds and you hope it mends this one.
“You should go see Jack,” you can’t look at him as you speak, eyes fixed on the table, unable to watch as defeat and heartbreak start to fill his eyes. You’ve never seen him this way, it’s awful. “He’s missed you so much and, I think, I need some space.”
There's a second where Aaron doesn't move, frozen in place, he can’t even tell if he’s breathing. He’d already planned ahead, asking Jess to have Jack for one more night so he could speak with you. Maybe he expected something easier than this. He’d imagined tears and anger, but not this quiet defeat.
The idea of leaving you here, upset and miserable, kills him. But what gives him the right to pick and choose when and how he’s going to be there for you. He’s already taken enough choices away from you. In your shoes, Hotch doesn’t think he’d want to be around himself either.
“Okay.” he says in a tone that suggests all of this is anything but okay as he stands. “Let me know when you're ready to talk, sweetheart, please and I'll be here.”
He doesn't move towards the door until you look at him and nod. The walk away from you feels longer than it ever has. Once he has a hand on the door handle he turns to look at you where you sit unmoved at the table.
“I love you.” For the first time since he’d spoken those words to you, Aaron doesn’t wait to hear them returned. He can’t take the chance that you might not say them back anymore.
The door clicks shut behind him and you're left sitting at the dining table with tears wetting your cheeks and a cooling mug of tea.
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