Discover Top Posts Tagged with #hotchner

father figure

4 times hotch acts like a father figure and the 1 time he most definitely does not.

bet u wanna meet the reader! ── .✦ °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

pairing: aaron hotchner x sweetheart!reader

warnings: fem!reader, slow burn, age gap (reader is 20s, hotch is late 40s, iktr), dbf!hotch, power imbalance, boss/subordinate dynamic, mutual pining, daddy issues (reader... prob also hotch), fluff, hurt/comfort, touch starved reader, garcia sending dirty texts!!, reader having dirty thoughts!!, reader sending hotch a suggestive pic by accident whoops!!, they are sooooo down bad for each other

wc: 6.8k (shewww stfu already gurl)

1 THE NUCLEAR OPTION

Aaron Hotchner looks very, very out of place standing in your bedroom.

Not inappropriate. You want to be very clear about that. You are two fully grown adults with fully operational frontal lobes and a respectable understand of professional decorum.

There is nothing scandalous happening here beyond your own imagination, briefly supplying an image of him against your headboard before you swatted it away like a cat attempting to push a glass from a countertop.

It’s just… visually disorienting.

He’s all severity and slate-gray composure now in a room rendered in blush and cream and the kind of girlish optimism that suggests you refuse to let your job bleach the color out of you.

He doesn’t fit, to put it plainly. Not physically (the man has shoulders like a structural beam) and definitely not symbolically.

Despite this, he takes his time as he scans the space with a clinical neutrality that feels less like judgment per se and more like being positioned beneath an unforgiving forensic lamp, dusted for prints you didn’t realize you’d left behind.

Is he analyzing this? Is he building a psychological profile right now based on the chipped mug of pens beside your bed and the stuffed bear you can’t seem to get rid of? The half-burnt vanilla candle on your nightstand that, yes, you absolutely lit knowing he was coming — all of it suddenly looks childish.

Embarrassing. Juvenile.

This is how people die.

Not from shame, exactly, though that’s certainly trying its best, but from being comprehensively, devastatingly perceived by a man whose entire job is to see through facades.

He offered to wait by the door. Kindly. Considerably. With that quiet, unfussy courtesy that makes you sure, in the fullest sense of the word, he holds elevators open and always returns his shopping cart with solemn civic pride.

You should’ve let him. Really.

But no, instead of choosing the sensible option like someone who understands the boundaries of time, space, and self-preservation, you made a mistake. A fatal, irredeemable mistake.

You waved him in.

And now, instead of standing respectfully beside your umbrella stand and politely pretending that driving you to the airport isn’t already a favor beyond what his job requires, Aaron Hotchner is in your bedroom.

What did you offer in exchange for this selfless act of transportation? Not coffee or gas money. Oh, just full unfiltered access to the inner circle of your private life.

You shove another sweater into your suitcase.

“I promise I usually plan better than this,” you say, “but I got caught on a call with my landlord trying to determine whether my oven is gas or electric, which I apparently never clarified in three years of tenancy.”

You hesitate, already regretting the admission, because he is a man who knows the make and model of every government-issued vehicle he’s ever driven.

“In my defense,” you tack on quickly, “it functions. I press a button, it produces heat. We’ve maintained a very mutual, low-communication relationship.”

One of his eyebrow lifts, just enough to suggest that he has several thoughts and is choosing the kindest one.

“That’s the sort of thing you really should know,” he says, and there’s the faintest hint of dry humor threaded through the words, as if he’s allowing himself a single inch of amusement. “I can take a look when we get back.”

You let out a laugh that sounds suspiciously like nervous air leaking from a balloon you’ve been gripping too tightly.

“That’s — you don’t have to — you really don’t have to do that,” you rush out, tripping over your own politeness. “You are not responsible for my… appliance literacy. Or the alarming gaps within it.” You gesture helplessly at the room, at the half-packed suitcase. “You’re already doing so much. If I start assigning you household infrastructure, I’m pretty sure that qualifies as abuse of power.” You pause. “Not that I have any. Power, I mean. Very famously not in possession of that.”

He doesn’t bother disguising that same for of amusement this time that touches now his mouth.

“I’ve done worse favors.”

You squint at him.

“I feel like that says more about your life than it does about me.” You study him for a moment, then let your shoulders ease despite your best efforts. “Still. Thank you. I really do appreciate it.”

The words come out sincere, and for half a second the eye contact holds in a way that feels less professional and more… something else.

Which is your cue to flee into safer territory.

“Anyway, I am really excited about this conference. The keynote speaker is incredible. I’ve read three of her papers, and the case studies she’s presenting are the kind of things I used to read in grad school like they were campfire ghost stories.” You pause, reconsider. “More academic ghost stories. Less paranormal. Still pretty grim, though. Just… fascinating grim.”

He lets your excitement taper off unanswered, glancing down into your suitcase before lifting his eyes back to you.

“It’s going to be cold.”

You frown at derailment of the conversation. “...Yes?”

“You need a coat.”

“I have a coat,” you reply, pointing to the quilted white thing draped over your desk chair.

It has gold buttons. It is elegant. It is, admittedly, constructed with more outer-appearance than insulation.

“A real coat.”

“It is real,” you insist, because it exists, and you have worn it outside, and therefore it satisfies the basic criteria of outerwear under the laws of physics.

“You’ll freeze.”

You want to keep arguing.

You want to explain that the coat you chose is mostly warm, that it performs adequately under reasonable atmospheric conditions, that packing the bulky, government-issued tundra shield he likely considers appropriate would have required sacrificing something essential.

Like your backup flats, the only pair that doesn’t turn conference halls into endurance trials, or your travel straightener, which is less about aesthetics and more about appearing competent in harsh lighting.

But the look he gives you — so mild on the surface, so pointed beneath — drains the rebellion right out of your lungs.

Suddenly, it’s not about fashion or function. It’s about the existential need to not disappoint him.

You cannot afford to lose even a sliver of the regard he has chosen to extend to you.

You hoard his approval the way a crow gathers bright scraps of tin and glass, tucking them into the hollow spaces inside you, convinced that if you collect enough of it, it might one day harden into something sturdy enough to stand on.

So you sigh, equal parts petulance and submission, and turn back toward the closet in search of something thicker.

You sift through your wardrobe and grab a soft navy peacoat. You smooth your palm over the fabric as if presentation alone might improve its chances, then hold it up with the careful hesitation of someone submitting evidence to the court.

You don’t speak, but your eyes ask the question plainly: Is this acceptable? Does this restore confidence? Does this prove I can anticipate basic survival?

He studies it for no more than a second before the verdict arrives in the form of a single shake of his head.

You exhale slowly, already holding a small, private funeral for your pride, and reach into the back of the closet for the final option.

The nuclear choice.

The coat you swore would remain undisturbed unless meteorologists began using phrases like “artic blast” or “polar vortex.”

It’s fleece-lined. Excessively practical. It is also deeply, almost maliciously unattractive.

It swallows you whole, reduces your silhouette to an amorphous mass, and renders you less woman-on-business-trip and more sentient sleeping bag with ambition.

He nods, once. “Atta girl.”

You hate how effortlessly those two words melt down the structural integrity of your independence liquefying into dopamine-slush.

He’s an asshole, you decide.

Because you are entirely certain he knows what it does to you, how his approval lands like a controlled substance you never consented to trying, let alone craving.

Sometimes you suspect he enjoys it, just a little, watching you attempt to maintain dignity while your internal self is spinning barefoot through a field of daisies, drunk on validation.

You duck your head quickly, hiding the smile that threatens to surface, and shove the coat into your suitcase as if you can compress the feeling along with it.

“You always this stubborn?”

You wrinkle your nose.

“I prefer the word… determined,” you say, keeping your tone light, flippant even. Then you exhale. “But yes. Probably.”

“I don’t want you getting sick.”

You freeze for a second before looking at him. He’s already watching you with that stupidly hot expression that means something, but never tells you what.

Your throat tightens around something inconvenient. “Okay.”

He nods once, satisfied, like the matter has been properly resolved.

Then, almost as an afterthought, “Wear it on the plane.”

You huff a small breath through your nose.

“You’re surprisingly bossy for someone who isn’t technically supervising me right now.”

“Think of it as preventative strategy.”

You shake your head, but the smallest smile slips through despite yourself as you reach for the coat anyway. Because if his concern is the motive, then anything else suddenly feels… unnecessary.

And maybe a little unkind.

2 FORTY-TWO AND FORTY-THREE

The hotel is… not what you prepared for. You’d braced yourself for something sensible. Industrial carpet in a shade of brown that exists solely to forgive stains. The smell of disinfectant doing its honest, blue-collar best to mask a thousand anonymous overnights. Clean sheets, sure. Functional plumbing, ideally.

Maybe a little plant in the lobby that some waters too enthusiastically out of obligation rather than love.

Instead, there’s marble everywhere. Gold accents. Furniture that looks as though someone fluffs it between guests on a strict hourly rotation.

It’s almost funny, the budgetary whiplash between “active serial killer in rural nowhere” and “please observe our institutional excellence.”

Apparently, when the FBI wants to project competence, it does so in chandeliers and imported stone.

“Did you manage to sleep on the flight?” you ask, hoping it sounds completely normal coming from your overextended mouth.

Which you are, to set the record straight. Normal. Very normal. A model of composure. The very portrait of workplace appropriateness.

Not, for example, someone who, five minutes ago at the front desk, briefly entertained the likelihood of an overbooking error and the subsequent moral dilemma of one room, one bed, and a shared look of well, this is unfortunate.

You did not, under any circumstances, imagine saying something graceful like, “Oh, I don’t mind the couch,” while secretly hoping there wasn’t one.

You are a rational human being, after all.

If your thoughts briefly detoured into logistical fantasy, that is simply narrative conditioning from too many romance novels dog-earred on your nightstand teaching you that proximity plus tension equals destiny.

It is not a reflection of your character.

Probably.

Although the fact that your first instinct in a crisis is self-sacrifice for the sake of optics is… interesting. Something to unpack later. Preferably never.

“Enough,” he answers. “I wanted to make sure you did.”

Your pulse somersaults. You can’t figure out why.

“Oh. I did,” you assure him.

“Good.” He inclines his head slightly. “Long day tomorrow.”

“Right,” you nod. “Can’t have me falling asleep mid-panel and drooling on a nationally recognized criminologist. That would be deeply damaging to the Bureau’s image.”

You tuck your hands into your coat pockets, hiding the nervous flex of your fingers, and lengthen your stride to keep pace with him.

He manages to walk with such an unrushed confidence that somehow never looks like an effort, and you fall into step beside him like you’ve been trained to it.

The hallway stretches ahead in muted tones and hotel anonymity, the carpet thick enough to swallow the sharp click of your heels as though it understands the value of discretion.

“I’ve reviewed your grad work,” he says calmly. “You’re more likely to correct the panel than fall asleep during it.”

You freeze.

“You have?”

It comes out before you can moderate the enthusiasm.

Of course he has, you remind yourself quickly. He does not tolerate blind spots. You are an allocation of federal resources, and he is meticulous about ensuring his investments are strategically sound.

Still, the idea of him reading your thesis — your painstakingly footnoted, cross-referenced, over-edited labor of love — feels intimate in a way you hadn’t anticipated.

You remember the nights you folded yourself around your laptop, hair twisted up, rereading paragraphs until the words blurred, muttering about theoretical frameworks and definitional clarity like they were moral obligations.

You rewrote the introduction twelve times because it didn’t sound authoritative enough. You panicked over whether your sources were recent enough. Influential enough. Impressive enough.

Did he think it was disciplined? Did he see how hard you worked to make it unimpeachable? Did he notice where you rushed the methodology section because the deadline was breathing down your neck? Did he recognize the case study you were secretly proud of, the one you worried might read as ambition masquerading as competence?

“Yes.”

He looks at you, and for one breathless, precarious second you’re convinced he’s going to add something more. A descriptor. An evaluation. Something you could cradle later in private.

A word like “impressive,” perhaps. Or even “solid.”

You’d take solid. Solid is dependable. Solid can be examined from every angle at midnight while you’re brushing your teeth, replayed and replayed until it wears smooth.

But he offers nothing else. He simply holds your gaze, and the silence lengthens until it becomes reflective, until you can see yourself inside it.

The flicker of expectation you tried to mute, the hopeful tilt of your expression, the subtle widening that betrays how badly you wanted confirmation.

You’re suddenly hyperaware of how readable you must be, how clearly you hunger for the thing he chose not to give.

He looks away first and keeps walking, and you’re left wondering whether the silence is mercy, sparing you from overinvestment, or leverage, something he’ll deploy when it serves him best.

You quicken your pace regardless, because composure feels optional and you are, inconveniently, invested in every unsaid thing.

You close the gap between you more quickly than necessary, nearly brushing his shoulder when he stops in front of two identical doors.

Forty-two and forty-three.

Twin thresholds to separate, responsibly partitioned realities, as if a number on a plaque is enough to define distance.

“Any preferences?” you ask, gesturing between the rooms.

As if you aren’t very intune with the fact that whichever number you take situates him precisely one wall away, separated by drywall, wiring, and the thinnest possible illusion of propriety.

“Take this one,” he says, already extending the keycard. Forty-three.

“Okay,” you say instantly, because apparently your default setting when he gives you direction is cheerful compliance.

Pavlov would have had a field day.

You glance toward his door, narrowing your eyes playfully. “Should I be concerned you’re assigning yourself the superior territory? Is it the presidential suite? Hidden minibar advantage?”

He nearly smiles, but it never quite materializes.

“Yours faces the main corridor and the elevators. Mine faces the exterior exit.”

You blink at him, confused by the specificity.

“If something happens,” he continues, “I want you between both access points. That gives me visibility from either direction.”

“You’re planning for something?”

“I always plan for something.”

“I suppose that shouldn’t shock me.”

And it doesn’t, not really, because this is a man who could probably draft a contingency plan for a power outage in a room full of generators, who once paused outside a crime scene long enough to reroute you around a thin patch of ice you hadn’t seen, hand hovering near your elbow, just in case gravity decided to make an example of you.

Planning is his default state, his resting pulse, his love language if he had one he’d admit to.

But you’ve started noticing, and you wish you hadn’t, how the calculations seem to grow sharper when you’re involved, how his posture adjusts if you’re nearest to a door, how he subtly corrals space so you’re buffered from whatever could go wrong.

It’s probably subconscious. It has to be subconscious. You are not the axis around which his vigilance rotates. You are a member of the team. A junior one at that. This is leadership, not preference. Protocol, not protectiveness.

“No,” he agrees calmly. “It shouldn’t.”

You lift the keycard toward the reader, already angling yourself toward the door, but he moves a half-step ahead of you. His hand closes around the handle before yours can, body stepping between you.

You look up at him. “What are you doing?”

“Checking.”

He says it like the answer should have been self-evident, like you’re the one lagging behind for needing clarification, and then he’s stepping into your room before you are.

You watch as he moves through the space.

The deadbolt is tested. The chain latch examined. He leans in to inspect the peephole alignment, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushes the doorframe, and you have the deeply inconvenient thought that this is what intimacy apparently looks like in your life — a man assessing sightlines and entry points.

His gaze tracks the ceiling corners next, scanning for blind spots. The bathroom door opens, lights flick on, the shower curtain is drawn back in one motion. Closet doors slide open and closed.

You hover near the entrance with your arms folded loosely, doing your absolute best impression of a person who is not secretly going, wow, okay, so this is what it looks like when a man is competent and terrifying and also, unfortunately, really, really attractive while doing the least romantic task imaginable.

You need to get a grip.

“It’s not exactly a cartel safehouse,” you offer.

“No,” he agrees evenly, checking the window latch. “But it’s still a point of vulnerability.”

He presses the window once more.

Satisfied with the resistance, he steps aside only then, as if you’ve been waiting for clearance.

“You can go in.”

You tilt your head. “Permission granted?”

“Recommendation,” he corrects.

“Right.”

He turns toward the hallway.

“Call me if you need me.”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? You could call him for a hundred legitimate reasons. You could call him because the lock jams. Because the heater rattles. Because the hallway feels too quiet.

You could call him for none at all, just to hear his voice confirm that the wall between you is only drywall and not distance.

3 EFFICIENT ENERGY ALLOCATION

You know something is wrong the second you open your hotel door. Or, fine, not something. Someone. More specifically, him. Hotch.

There are two small lines gathering between his eyebrows, deepening incrementally the longer he looks at you, like he’s sketching blueprints for a cathedral of disapproval.

You know that look. You’ve built a secret mental archive of his face, categorized and cross-referenced with devotion, the way other people collect vintage wine or heirloom china.

This particular arrangement means he’s thinking too hard. Which is either excellent or catastrophic, and with him, the margin between those two things is gossamer-thin.

It’s a tell, though he would sooner walk into oncoming traffic than admit he has any.

And you would never correct him on it. You are not nearly foolish enough to forfeit your single, fragile advantage in this — whatever this is.

Because in the market of Hotch, he is always running four moves ahead on a chessboard you're still trying to locate.

And the longer he stares, the more your confidence begins to dissolve like sugar melting into coffee until you can’t even remember it once existed in defined, crystalline pieces.

Your body, traitor that it is, moves to compensate: spine straightening without permission, vertebrae aligning themselves one by one, chin tipping upward a fraction as though the geometry of good posture might function as armor.

Your hand finds your hair. Smooths it back over your shoulder. Corrects, with careful fingers, a flaw that was not there a moment ago. That would not exist at all, actually, if his eyes hadn’t passed over you and invented it.

“Is there a reason you’re looking at me like that,” you ask, attempting breezy and landing somewhere closer to ambitious intern pleading her case before a tribunal, “should I be concerned?”

He doesn’t answer right away and the silence manages to gather density. It pools in the corridor between you, thickening by the second, and you hold out for what feels like a respectable amount of time before your mouth makes a unilateral decision.

“Did something smudge? I knew I blinked weird during mascara and I made a judgment call that it was probably fine and I think we're both seeing how that turned out. This is what I get for rushing.”

For a second, something almost like disbelief crosses his features, there and gone, a brief constitutional crisis behind his eyes, as though he’s carefully sorting through his available responses and selecting the least inflammatory one.

“Your mascara is fine,” he says finally, and the economy of it, the complete lack of reassurance beyond the bare clinical fact, is so extraordinarily him that you almost want to write it down.

His eyes move downward again before finding yours again, the crease between his brows intact and now, you think, accompanied by a friend.

“I’m trying to determine,” he continues, “whether you were aware of the temperature outside when you selected that outfit.” He looks toward the end of the hallway. “It’s fourteen degrees.”

You frown and glance down at yourself, suddenly hyperaware of every seam and hem. Pencil skirt. Tailored, modest, entirely appropriate. Blouse tucked in neatly, sleeves buttoned to the wrist.

Tights, which are admittedly optimized somewhat more for aesthetic cohesion than for any serious confrontation with polar endurance, but which are nonetheless indisputably, demonstrably present.

And the jacket he chose. You draw it closed around yourself now, pulling the lapels together with both hands, turning just slightly toward him. Here. Look. Proof. You followed the parameters. You incorporated the feedback. You are, in this moment, the living embodiment of a person who listens and learns and shows up correctly dressed, and you would like that acknowledged, please.

“I was aware.”

“Then I’m concerned about your definition of the word.”

“I’m wearing layers.”

His brown eyes drop once again. Slow with the unhurried certainty of a man who has never once been rushed by another person’s discomfort, and comes to rest at the hem of your skirt, right where it grazes your thighs, and simply remains.

Every hair on your body stands at full attention, a physiological standing ovation for the specific quality of being looked at by him. Your hands want to move — to the hem, to the lapels, to anything that might constitute a defensive action — and you refuse them, one by one, with great effort and limited success.

No. Absolutely not. You will not flinch. You will not fidget. You will not give him the satisfaction of watching you fold, because the moment you reach for that hem is the moment you've lost, and you are already losing enough in this conversation.

He exhales slowly, the kind of exhale that has a whole paragraph in it, before he speaks. “The skirt is short.”

“It’s not —” you begin, warmth rushing up your neck before you can determine whether it’s indignation or something more humiliatingly self-conscious steering the ship.

“It’s appropriate,” he says, and his voice has shifted, gone quieter, the hard edge filed down like he's recognized he's overshot and is now carefully correcting course. “I’m not criticizing it. That’s not —” He stops. Starts over. “You look exactly as you should.” He presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose. Closes his eyes for just a moment. “I’d just prefer you not be miserable on the walk over.”

You stare at him, running a rapid internal audit of your available emotional responses and finding the inventory deeply unhelpful. Mortification is one option. Gratitude is another. They are not, as far as you can tell, mutually exclusive, which is its own problem entirely.

You shouldn’t have to feel both things simultaneously before eight in the morning, that seems like a violation of something, some basic covenant between a person and their day.

You are going to need significantly more caffeine before you can be expected to feel things correctly.

“I am aware of how temperature works,” you reply, gently defensive but not sharp, “and I do, in fact, possess the ability to identify discomfort before it becomes life-threatening.”

“I don’t doubt your ability to recognize discomfort,” he says. “I doubt your inclination to admit it when you’re experiencing it.” The brow tightens, just slightly, just enough. “You have a habit of tolerating more than you need to.”

There's nothing wrong with what he said.

That's the problem with what he said. You recognize yourself in it with the specific, sinking clarity of someone who has just been handed a mirror they weren't expecting.

You reach for your smile. The reliable one, the soft, deflecting smile you've been deploying since approximately the third grade, and let it do what it's always done. Cover the crack. Keep the walls presentable. Move things along before anyone gets a good look at the load-bearing ones.

“I wouldn’t call it a habit,” you reply carefully. “More like… efficient energy allocation.”

“Is that what we’re calling it.” It isn’t a question. A hint of dry amusement surfaces in his expression, not a smile exactly, just the suggestion of one, the ghost of one haunting the corner of his mouth, as he relents. “All right.” His tone softens. “I’ll defer to your… methodology.”

You beam at him with a brightness that is frankly disproportionate to the exchange. Wildly, embarrassingly disproportionate. You don't care even a little.

“Great. Perfect. Wonderful.”

He is, unfortunately, completely correct.

Fifteen minutes later, the wind finds you like it has a personal grievance, carving straight through your layered confidence, making a thorough and public mockery of your efficient energy allocation.

You keep your chin up and your expression neutral because you would genuinely rather fossilize in place than give him the satisfaction.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t point, doesn’t raise an eyebrow, doesn’t deploy a single syllable of the told-you-so he has absolutely, irrefutably earned.

He simply pauses mid-stride, unwinds the scarf from his own neck and wraps it around you with both hands.

You try not to kiss him.

4 HIS FLOOR OR YOURS

The conference has been going on for three hours and forty minutes, which feels less like a span of time and more like a psychological experiment designed to test how long a human being can remain upright while their soul quietly slips through their ears. Two hours and forty minutes beyond what your attention span contractually agreed to when you walked in with your notebook.

During the break, Hotch had taken one look at you, at the restless rotation of plastic between your hands, at the brittle way you were holding yourself together, and said, in the tone of a man who had already made the decision and was merely informing you of it rather than requesting your input, come on.

So now you’re walking to get lunch, which would have been entirely pleasant, almost restorative, even, sunlight, fresh air, the gentle reward of carbohydrates after too much bureaucratic endurance, if Garcia hadn’t chosen this exact moment to text you something that demands both your full visual attention and the majority of your remaining cognitive function.

The text reads, in its entirety:

how’s the conference bestie!!!!! followed immediately, without waiting by: and before you say “informative” or productive” or any other word that means you’re reflecting… i want to know about the OTHER curriculum. the one where it’s just you and hotch and a hotel and no rossi chaperoning.

Your face heats to 380 degrees, a temperature at which most metals would begin to warp. You type with your thumb as you walk, squinting against the glare on your screen.

garcia.

A breath.

GARCIA.

You delete that. Too much.

the conference is going fine, there is no other curriculum, we are colleagues attending a professional development event and i would like you to reflect on what you've said.

You pause. Add:

also rossi wasn't chaperoning he was just. present. there's a difference.

You read it back. Delete it because now you sound like someone with something to prove. Add it back because you do, in fact, have something to prove. Mainly your innocence. Allegedly.

Hotch shifts slightly closer to navigate a narrow patch of sidewalk and you physically rotate your entire torso away from him like a sunflower turning from the light, except the opposite of that, and hit send.

The response comes through in the time it takes you to exhale.

there's a difference !!! yeah the difference is whether or not you end up on his floor or your floor tonight babe

You read it twice. You read it twice because the first time your brain just skips, like a record catching on something, and the second time it processes it fully and that is infinitely worse.

Because now you’re thinking about it. Now the thought has a foothold and it is making itself at home, spreading out, getting comfortable, putting its feet up, and your imagination, which we’ve already covered is your most disloyal organ, starts filling in details you did not ask for.

Carpet burn. His chest pressed flat against your back, his rough breath against your ear, telling you what to do, how to do it, what to feel.

You guillotine the thought before it can finish forming. You do. You absolutely do. You are doing it right now.

You type back one handed, the response dissolving and reforming as your fingers fumble, something about how Garcia is clinically unwell and should be investigated by her own team, your attention fractured by the screen and the pavement you assume will continue existing beneath your feet.

You don’t see the curb.

You don’t see the car.

You don’t see anything at all until Hotch’s hand finds your arm and the world snaps back into focus all at once, as the vehicle tears through the space you’d been about to occupy.

The wind of it grazes your knees.

You look up at him because you don't know what else to do and immediately wish you'd looked literally anywhere else.

His eyes darken and move over your face with the rapid, assessing quality of someone running a systems check.

Pupils. Color. Responsiveness.

And when he’s satisfied that you are intact and present and not currently dying, something shifts.

Hotch doesn’t soften exactly, that’s not the right word for it, more like reconfiguration. A rearrangement of something that had gone momentarily, dangerously loose. The aftermath of relief rather than relief itself.

His thumb moves once against your arm. Small. Probably involuntary.

“Are you all right.” Once again not quite a question. The tone of a man who needs confirmation of a thing he's already determined to be true.

“Yes,” you say, which comes out smaller than you intended.

His hand finally releases your arm.

“Put your phone away.”

You do as you're told. Immediately, without deliberation, without the small internal debate you’d normally stage on principle.

It disappears into your pocket with the speed of someone who has just been reminded that the universe has consequences.

Garcia can wait. Garcia, in fact, has forfeited her right to immediacy, because Garcia and her terrible timing almost got you killed, and she is going to receive a text later when you are safe and stationary and no longer shaking slightly in a way you hope isn’t visible.

“You sound like my fa —” you start, because apparently you are constitutionally incapable of letting a silence exist peacefully, and then your brain catches up to your mouth approximately three words too late and the sentence just stops.

You don't finish it. You can't finish it, actually, because finishing it would require you to say out loud the thing you were about to say out loud, which was to compare hotch to your father, which you were apparently fully prepared to do two seconds ago and are now prepared to die before doing.

You swallow the rest of it. Redirect your gaze to the middle distance, to some fixed and blameless point that isn't his face, and devote every remaining resource you have to convincing your expression to do literally anything other than what it's currently doing, which is, you are fairly certain, everything.

You feel him look at you. There’s a particular quality of his attention when he’s already understood something and is giving you the grace of not saying it out loud.

He knows. He absolutely knows.

Neither of you says anything. You keep walking.

+1 FOR SCIENCE

The scolding had gone well, you think. You’d communicated the full extent of your feelings about Garcia’s role in the near-death-by-crosswalk incident with clarity, and she had said okay you’re right i’m sorry in the sincere tone she reserves for when she actually means it, and that should have been the end of it.

That was the natural ending. But then, approximately four seconds later, as if the apology had simply been a brief administrative detour:

but do you even own any lingerie just in case… this is a completely unrelated question, purely for science.

And somehow, through a conversational sequence that had felt, step by step, almost reasonable, that is how you have arrived at this.

Hotel bed. Nearly eleven. Cross-legged in your white lace pajames with your hair loose and your phone held aloft at an angle you’ve adjusted three times now, trying to produce a photograph that communicates see, I have perfectly good taste, this is both comfortable AND attractive for the benefit of a woman who treats every piece of information she receives as a potential future weapon.

Garcia had said prove it with the energy of someone issuing a formal declaration of war and you had, apparently, accepted the terms without reading them.

The fourth attempt is the one.

You know it immediately. The angle is right, the light is doing exactly what you wanted it to do, the lace sits exactly as it should and you look, if you’re being objective about it, genuinely pretty.

Soft and warm and settled in yourself in a way that doesn't always come naturally, in a way you don't always feel entitled to, and something about the photograph catches it, holds it still, makes it documentable.

You open the conversation. Tap the photo. Hit send. Set the phone face down on the duvet with the kind of pleased energy of someone closing a chapter, pouring yourself a glass of water from the sink, taking a sip, allowing yourself eight whole seconds of serenity.

Then you pick the phone back up because Garcia hasn't responded and this is wrong, this is factually incorrect behavior for Garcia, who has never in the entire history of your friendship allowed more than thirty seconds to pass without a reply, whose response time is frankly less a reflection of effort than of some innate physiological gift, and you look at the screen and —

The background of the conversation is wrong.

The contact picture is wrong.

Something is wrong with the name at the top of the conversation in a way that your brain, in an act of profound self-protection, declines to process for three full seconds.

Sits there cycling through increasingly implausible alternatives, searching for any exit ramp from the conclusion that is, despite everything, the only one available.

And then it arrives. All at once, the way bad things do, complete and total and horribly clear.

Hotch.

Garcia.

Recent conversations, right next to each other, because they would be, because why wouldn't they be, because the universe has a personal investment in your suffering and an excellent sense of comedic structure.

The photo is delivered.

For science sits beneath it.

And you sent it to your boss.

You make a sound that has no letter equivalent, something that exists purely in the register of visceral horror, and you are off the bed before the sound has finished leaving you.

Think, you need to think.

Option one: he's asleep. It's late. Hotch is a disciplined, regimented person who almost certainly has a consistent sleep schedule because of course he does, because he is Hotch, and maybe, maybe, he'd put his phone on silent and gone to bed and hasn't seen it and won't see it until morning at which point you will have already faked your own death and started a new life somewhere without extradition.

Option two: his phone. You could get to his phone. His room is right beside yours. You could be there in twenty-two seconds, and hotel door locks are — okay you don't actually know how to pick a hotel door lock but you could figure it out, probably, under sufficient duress, and this qualifies as sufficient duress —

A knock sounds at your door.

You stand in the center of the hotel room and you do not move, do not breathe, do not produce any sound or evidence of biological function whatsoever, because if you are very still and very quiet then perhaps the universe will lose interest and move on to someone else.

Maybe it's not him. Maybe it's housekeeping, at eleven at night, which, yes, is not when housekeeping comes, but hotels are unpredictable, stranger things have happened, you are not ruling anything out.

Maybe it's the person in the next room who miscounted doors, maybe it's someone who has the wrong floor entirely, maybe it's — your phone screen lights up.

Open the door.

You stare at it. It stares back.

You open the door and immediately wish with every fiber of your being that you hadn’t.

Not because of the expression on his face, though that’s — that’s a lot, that’s an entire situation, his jaw tight and his eyes doing something you’ve never seen them do before, moving over you in a way that starts at your face and doesn’t stay there and snaps back up with the control of a man making a conscious decision.

Not even because of the grey t-shirt. The sweatpants. The fact that Hotch, your Unit Chief, apparently exists in soft cotton after hours like a normal person, which is information you are placing in a box, sealing the box, and sliding the box to the very back of a shelf you will not be visiting tonight.

No. It’s the silence that does it.

He just looks at you. Says absolutely nothing, makes no move to explain himself or fill the space or give you anything to work with. It presses on you with considerable force.

“It was an accident.” The words come out before you've decided to produce them, falling over each other with the graceless urgency of someone trying to outrun a consequence. “I love this job. I'm good at it, I mean, I think I'm good at it, I hope you think I’m good at it, and I know this looks insane, it is insane, but please — please don't make this into something that ends my career, I was just trying to win an argument with Garcia about whether I owned ling — Uh, nice pajamas and —”

“Garcia,” he interrupts.

You blink. “What?”

“The argument.” His words are careful. Doing a great deal of structural work beneath the surface. “It was with Garcia.”

“Yes,” you say. “About whether I — yes.”

“About the pajamas.”

“About whether I owned any.” You are aware you’re not improving the situation. “Nice ones. She implied I didn’t and I — it was a matter of principle.”

He looks at you for long enough that you become acutely, specifically, inventory-level aware of every square inch of white lace currently within his line of sight.

And the awareness moves over you in real time, square inch by square inch, because he is. He is doing exactly that. Looking at the neckline and the hem and everything the light is enthusiastically illuminating and then looking at more of it, and you stand very still in the doorway of your hotel room and breathe very carefully and wait for him to say something, and he doesn't, and the looking continues, and it has a temperature.

“You’re not losing your job,” he says. His voice has done something you can't quite name. The professional remove still present but thinner somehow, like fabric that's been washed too many times. “That was never —” He stops. Edits. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I really am sorry,” you say, which is true, which is entirely true, which is also complicated by the fact that he’s standing in your doorway and you have now run out of layers to hide behind, literally and figuratively.

“I know.” He says. “I came because I wanted to make sure you were —” a pause, brief and loaded, “ — all right.”

“I’m glad you did,” you say, which comes out quieter and more honest than you intended, stripped of the deflection you’d normally wrap around something like that. “Come, I mean. I’m glad you came.”

You become very interested in a point just past his shoulder and then make yourself look back.

“For the record,” he says, “you won the argument.”

“Hotch —” His name comes out barely a whisper.

“You did.”

“That’s not —” you start, “I don’t need you to —”

“I know you don’t need me to,” he says. “That’s not why I said it.”

“Why did you say it?”

He moves first.

Or maybe you do.

Or the wanting does, finally, after months of being firmly managed.

Later you might look for the beginning and find only that the distance was there and then wasn’t. His hand comes up to your face with that steadiness, that particular Hotch steadiness that you have been watching without permission since the day you met him, the kind that says I have considered this and I am not afraid of it, tilting your chin up.

And then his mouth is on yours.

And here is what you were not prepared for: that it would feel like being returned to you. Not given, returned.

Like something you’d been missing your whole life without knowing what it was called, without having a word for the specific absence of it.

Your father’s approval delivered at arm’s length, your college boyfriend who never quite saw you, every authority figure you’ve ever rearranged yourself for in hopes that this time, this time, it would be enough.

And Hotch, who has been watching you with those eyes for months, who has noticed the necklace-tugging and the over-apologizing and the way you look at him when you think no one’s looking, who has known, who has known —

It is nothing like what your imagination built. Your imagination was not working with sufficient information.

It is exactly like the thing you've been most terrified of wanting, because wanting things this much has historically been the setup for not getting them, and you are so tired of not getting them, and for a moment, for this moment, there is only his mouth and yours and the feeling moving through you in waves you can’t name and don’t need to.

Finally.

You lean into it with everything you have. Every feeling you've filed under inadvisable. Every careful professional distance you've maintained. Every time you looked away first. You stop looking away. You give him all of it, and he makes a sound low in his throat, vibrating through you.

Then he stops.

Goes still first, and then pulls back by degrees. Slow, almost reluctant, like something being peeled away rather than removed.

His forehead drops to yours just for a moment, his eyes closed and his breath uneven and his hand still at your jaw.

You don't move. You barely breathe. You are terrified of breaking it and equally terrified of what exists on the other side of it, and so you stay very still in the small sacred space of his forehead against yours and try not to want more than you're being given.

What comes next is his eyes opening. Finding yours. And in them, underneath the want that he’s no longer quite managing to conceal, something older settling back into place like sediment after a disturbance.

You can see it.

Something that was always going to come back. Responsibility settling through him like silt after a tremor, like a tide reasserting itself, the accumulated weight of everything he is and everything he thinks you deserve and every reason he has been filing this under don't from the very beginning.

You can see exactly where it lives. In the careful way his jaw sets. In the incremental straightening of his posture, degree by degree, a man rebuilding his architecture in real time, becoming your Unit Chief again by visible effort.

His hand leaves your face last.

“I’m sorry.” His voice has gone hard again, a professional distance reassembling itself word by word. “That wasn’t —” a pause in which several things clearly occur to him and are discarded — “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It's okay,” you say, which is both completely true and completely insufficient. “I'm — please don't apologize, I —” you hear yourself, recalibrate, attempt something in the vicinity of normal. "I'm sorry too. For the photo. For all of —” another vague gesture, this one encompassing roughly the last hour of your life — “this.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“Okay,” you say, because what else is there.

You both stand in it for a moment that lasts too long.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says finally.

“Yeah.” Your voice is remarkably steady. You’re proud of it. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

You stand in the doorway until the corridor is empty and then you close the door and press your back against it and stare at the ceiling of a hotel room that feels entirely different than it did an hour ago.

You don’t sleep.

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