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An Idiot Prayer of Empty Words (Part One)

Warnings: Child abuse, neglect, hoarding, canon-typical violence & death, this one runs the gamut.

Notes: Inspired by an ask prompt by @elliotlovescm for “rossi cheering hotch up after his first brutal case as a bau member”, and this part...has none of that comfort. Just the brutal first case. This is not going to be pretty. Stay tuned!

First day jitters.

Everybody got them at some point.

In kindergarten most kids would throw a fit, cling to their mom's leg, cry, beg, finally go inside only to have the time of their lives. Aaron couldn't remember throwing a fit when his mom dropped him off, though, he remembered watching the other kids in his class and wondering why they were behaving that way, why they wouldn't want to be in this new building full of unlimited potential for play and learning, to him it looked like a giant library and he lived for the library, even at five years old.

No first day jitters for Aaron, not then, and not ever for school.

In the years that came later, school was a refuge, and though he struggled and was picked on, it was still safer and more appealing to be inside of those walls than the ones he called home. In fact, he signed up for every extracurricular activity he could manage just to stay there longer. He had no jitters for college, not for law school. Just like any other day, miserable and filled with pointless, mindless tasks broken up by intense bouts of agony or self-loathing. If every day took it all out of you, if every single day was impossible from the moment you opened your eyes to the moment you shut them, then there wasn't anything to be nervous about he figured – you lived every day like it was the worst thing that could happen.

Being married to Haley was a blessing, but it didn't change him. Who he was at his core. He would open his eyes and immediately curse the fact that he hadn't died in his sleep, but then he would see Haley and that would make him smile, just for a moment. It was enough to get him out of bed. The rest was on him, but that fleeting sight of her sparked life in him that he hoped would carry him through the mundane tasks of showering and shaving and brushing his teeth.

This morning was no different – he rolled over, saw her sleeping figure all messy blonde hair and sweat and hot morning breath and he smiled, and that helped him get out of bed, feet bare on the cold floor boards shocking him back to the reality that was his life. He always kept slippers beside the bed, or wore socks, but he'd been in such a frenzy the night before packing and unpacking his ready bag for the first time, making sure every little thing was in his briefcase, checking off all of the boxes that he'd forgotten how much he hated bare feet on hardwood floors in the morning.

First day jitters...he had them, now, as a full grown man for the first time in his life. He cut himself shaving, sliced his finger cutting his English muffin open because the stupid thing wasn't cut properly already, couldn't get his bed head to play nice, couldn't get his tie the right length and had to re-do it no less than four times.

“Honey, where are my gray socks? They were right here last night...”

“Haley, where is my coffee cup? The big one?”

“Dammit, where did I leave my keys?!”

She kissed him on the forehead as he put on his socks and she handed him his big coffee cup, full of steaming life, and she dropped his keys into his lap and smiled and wished him luck on his first day at the BAU. He told her he was a wreck, he was going to screw it all up, he couldn't believe he was acting this way and she just smiled and said she loved him anyway, no matter how his day went, but that she knew it was going to be great because he was great and he worked so hard to get here and he earned this spot on this team. He wished that it helped, when she said things like that. He would have given anything in the world to believe her, for it to be real, just one time.

He found a parking spot on his third trip around the garage, disoriented and unsure what level he'd managed to park on but he left his car there anyway and listened to the clicking of his loafers echoing through the concrete walls of the structure. His first day as a prosecutor hadn't been so hard, it had been downright charmed compared with this. He'd even managed to win his first case, hard as it was. The BAU had a case, he'd received the call from Jason Gideon the night before telling him to be ready to travel, an apology that it would be a hard first day, and it had set him off. They weren't going far, but they would be on the road and in hotel rooms, and it was an ugly case so he needed to come prepared. He wasn't sure what that meant, how to prepare for the unknown, that wasn't how he worked. He asked what the case was, but Gideon said he'd hear all about it in the morning, they would have a quick debrief in the office and then hit the road. They would be driving, plenty of time to discuss.

“Welcome, Agent Hotchner!” said a young man as he entered the BAU, and he nodded and smiled and the man showed him to his desk. His desk. Right there, in the bull pen, surrounded by other agents from various other teams he assumed, but he was running late and had no time to meet everyone. No desire, either, but he wouldn't be so rude. He'd meet them all in time.

“Where do I find Agent Gideon?” Aaron asked, and the young man pointed him toward the cat walk, up the stairs and to the right. And to the left was Agent Rossi's office, he said. Aaron sighed, stared up at the two offices, side by side, and his own desk down below, and thought about the decisions he'd made to get here, hoping they were the right ones. In Seattle, he'd been top dog, everyone came to him, everyone hung on his every word, but here he was bottom rung again and granted, it was bottom of only 4 and it was an elite team, and he'd beaten out a lot of people for this one spot, but he still felt so very small. Maybe that was a good thing, he was small, he was insignificant and now, at his little desk in the bull pen with everyone else, he was where he belonged. He watched Agent Gideon come flying out of his office, watched him rush down the cat walk into Agent Rossi's office, and he waited to be waved up, to be invited, so he set his briefcase on his desk and shifted the stapler and the pencil cup and everything into the places he liked them.

“Agent Hotchner!” David Rossi called, following Gideon out onto the catwalk. He gestured for Aaron to join them, and that was his cue so up he went, climbing a staircase for the first time that would eventually become an irreplaceable part of who he was. Following them down to a small conference room, decorated only with a white board covered in marker that hadn't quite been wiped clean and a bulletin board that looked sorely out of date with postings for classes months old and lecture sign up sheets devoid of names. The table was too large for the mismatched chairs, some of which looked to be barely hanging on, duct taped instead of patched, extra screws in places holding the legs on. He felt a certain kinship with this room, those chairs, broken and patched up enough times that he no longer resembled the original product but he was still useful, and as he sat in a chair that looked particularly bad from the outside, he reveled in how very sturdy it felt beneath him. The three of them sat at the too large table, and Jason tossed case files out into the middle, hoping they'd land within arm's reach of their recipients but not overly concerned when either of them had to stand to reach them. Aaron set his down before him for just a moment, closed, and took a deep breath – his first case as a member of the BAU, and he could feel Dave and Jason's eyes on him as his fingers fumbled with the edges and he stared into the faces of two children paper clipped to the top of the page.

“Colton Gable and Grant Tillerson,” Jason said softly, eyes darting over the page. “Found dead one week apart in North Carolina. Colton was found in Lake Reidsville, Grant in Lake Hunt.”

“And we're sure this is the same guy?”

“Same guy,” Jason said, indicating the method in which the children were killed and left in the bodies of water. Aaron felt sick. He hoped Jason and Dave felt the same. They discussed the details like they were detached from it all, and Aaron found his voice and added a small amount to the conversation every so often before Jason said it was time to hit the road and they grabbed their ready bags and piled into the small car, Jason and Dave in the front seat, Aaron in the back seat with his knees crunched awkwardly at an angle to avoid the back of Dave’s seat. He was all legs and he shifted them to the side, trying to find a way to be somewhat comfortable but striking out and giving up, knowing he was just going to be miserable for the entirety of the four hour drive. He expected them to talk about the case, but they rode in silence, Jason driving along with no music and Dave scribbling notes in a small pad of paper, and Aaron didn't know what he was supposed to be doing with himself. Every so often a conversation would spark, based on something Jason thought of, and Dave would write furiously in his notepad and Aaron pulled out some paper and tried to keep up but the way the two of them worked together was throwing him for a loop.

“Max is already in Reidsville,” Dave said, craning his neck toward Aaron in the backseat. “He was visiting family in that area, that's how we got the case. They aren't convinced we can help but they invited us anyway.” Max barely worked in the office anymore, he had a desk but he almost never used it, preferring to work from home and on the road. He was so close to retirement that no one seemed to bat an eyelash at it.

Aaron was glad Max was already down there, otherwise the car would be just that much more uncomfortable. At least this way he could shift awkwardly and stretch his legs out across the floor in the back sat, rolling his ankles and wiggling his toes to get some sort of feeling back. His lower back was a ball of fire radiating thunderbolts down his legs and up into his shoulders by the time Jason pulled into the parking lot of a small roadside motel, the kind that always turned up in the news for all the wrong reasons.

“The bureau doesn't want to pay for us to stay in a hotel, they seemed to think we could just make the drive back and forth each day, but I figured if we pooled our money would could manage a few nights here,” Jason said, and Dave sighed. Aaron shrugged, he'd stayed in worse, and at least if they were each paying their own way they wouldn't have to share rooms. He liked his privacy. “Eight hours of driving is a little much for me, and I suspect that's the bureau's way of saying they don't want us on this case but I already booked us three rooms, here's what you owe me.” Jason handed them post-it notes with his looping, scrawling numbers on them and Aaron reached into his pocket, handing Jason the money right away so he wouldn't forget. The last thing he needed was to be in debt to his boss. Dave shoved the post-it into his pocket with a huff and Jason didn't ask him for the money, they had a strange way about them that Aaron hadn't quite figured out yet.

The room was small and smelled like urine and cleaning products, it turned Aaron's stomach as soon as he walked in. Acrid and strong, bleach and some kind of air freshener that claimed to be cotton scented but it was sickly and he threw open the window to let the room air out. The cool autumn air rushed in, chilling the room, but it washed the air inside clean. He had ten minutes to get settled before he had to get back into that car, and his back was screaming at him not to do it and he thought maybe he'd be better off curled up in the trunk than that back seat again but he couldn't say that, they wouldn't find his joke funny he was certain, and maybe it wasn't funny at all. Haley didn't laugh at his jokes either. She laughed at him trying to tell jokes though, and it made him intensely uncomfortable but it also made him laugh because he knew it was probably a spectacle. Ten minutes wasn't long enough, but he got his suits hung up and splashed some water on his face and he left his window open to hopefully keep the room from smelling awful again and that was it. He shoved a granola bar into his mouth quickly, the only thing he'd eaten that day, and slipped the room key into his pocket before heading back out to the car.

He was the first one back, he'd beaten them by at least five entire minutes but they didn't seem to notice they'd run late. The drive to the police station was mercifully short, and Jason made a comment about Aaron's legs in the backseat but neither man made any effort to switch seats with him and he managed. The police weren't thrilled that they were there, but they found Max in a small room with a timeline already in the works and a third young boy's face on the board, missing presumed dead. Aaron wished he hadn't eaten that granola bar.

“Hotchner, we need you to go interview the victim's family. They're in interrogation room 2, down the hall,” Max said, not even glancing in the direction of the men entering the room. Aaron looked to Dave and Jason and they just nodded, so he shrugged and made his way to the interrogation room. It was too cold in there, harsh even for someone suspected of a crime but these were hurting parents and he thought it was cruel. He dove right in, with shaking hands carefully concealed in his lap, asking them questions as gently as he could. They didn't seem as distraught as he'd expected them to be for people whose only child was missing, and he was scribbling notes in shorthand as fast as he could but they weren't giving him much to go on. By the time he was finished, he wasn't sure he'd accomplished anything – these people didn't seem to know their child at all, couldn't tell him where the kid had been aside from school, didn't know what he was wearing, if he had any friends, nothing.

“What do we know about the other victims' families?” Aaron asked, walking back into the conference room. “These people were a waste of time. They don't know anything about their son.”

“We have addresses, why don't you go interview them at their homes?” Max said, and Dave nodded in agreement. Jason turned away from the bulletin board and protested.

“He shouldn't go alone,” he said, but Dave sighed.

“We have two dump sites and a geographical profile to work on – there are only four of us, we can't afford the time it takes to double up, not with a child still missing. These are victim families, not suspects.”

“He's brand new, Dave,” Jason protested again, and the look he was giving Dave made Aaron bristle a little, like Jason saw him as a child.

“I'll be okay,” he said, but Jason still looked at him with the strangest bit of concern and Aaron couldn't figure out where it was coming from but he squared his shoulders and did his best to assuage Jason's guilt. “Really. I'll be fine. I've done plenty of family interviews.” Jason didn't argue again, just tossed a set of car keys to Aaron and Max handed him a piece of paper with two addresses written in his almost too neat handwriting and he was off, on his own.

The two families were the same as the first, and Aaron understood as soon as he walked into their homes what he'd missed at the station. In the interrogation room, they just looked like a cold family suffering a loss, but if he’d met them in their home, he would have seen it. The homes of the first boys were different, incredibly so, but they felt the same. The first one he entered was pristine, the sort of place that didn't look like children were welcome even on the grass out front. The kind of lawn that required every blade of grass be measured with a ruler. The family sat on the plastic covered couch, a mother, a father and a young girl who looked to be around eleven years old. They appeared properly sad, but not grieving, not even the little girl. He shivered at the sight of them. The way the sat, backs ramrod stiff and straight, told him a story that he never wanted to read.

“May I see Grant's bedroom?” Aaron asked, and the mother and father shot each other quick glances and nodded. What he found was a room full of boxes, no childish things in sight. They were turning it into the father's office, they couldn't bear to see Grant's things anymore so they'd all been donated. They said all the right words, but they didn't show the right emotion to go with them. Aaron thanked them for their time and got out of that house as quickly as he could, feeling an icy chill slither up his spine as he crossed the threshold into the late afternoon breeze.

Colton's family was from the other end of town, living in a small house in a state of total disrepair. Everything smelled like animal urine, the house was filled with things, boxes, piles of dirty laundry and paths wide enough for a single person to walk through from room to room. Cats watched him move along the paths from their perches near the ceiling. There was nowhere to sit that didn't involve some sort of filth. When he asked to see Colton's room, he found it shockingly neat and tidy. There was nothing childish about the room, just a bed with dirty flannel sheets neatly tucked in at the corners and a dresser with corners chewed up by dogs. There was a litter box full to the brim and exploding just outside in the hallway, and he had to carefully step over a few cats to get inside. The room felt cold, like it was more of a hiding place than a place of comfort. Colton's father stood watching Aaron look through the room, a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Aaron thought he might be sick, maybe from the smell, or maybe from the feelings long since buried that were slowly creeping toward his carefully curated surface.

He didn't say anything else to the family, he didn't need to. And they watched him leave without a word.

Neither family begged him to find the person who took their sons away. Neither family asked how the case was going.

Aaron made it back to the police station with trembling hands and an upset stomach, desperately fumbling through his briefcase on the passenger seat for the Tums he knew would keep the sickness at bay, at least for now. They didn't help his twisted insides but he ate a handful anyway and walked inside like he owned the place because he couldn't possibly walk inside looking like he'd just been face to face with the ghosts that haunted him every night, with the decades old bruises no longer visible but somehow always tender, with the faded white scars and the smell of the floorboards under his bed and the dried blood and tear stains on the pillow and blankets inside of his closet that closed with a padlock that only he had a key to.

“Well?” Dave asked, looking up from the map he was toying with. Jason and Max were gone, at the dumpsites, leaving Dave to work the geographical profile on his own.

“I think we need to contact CPS,” Aaron began, and Dave raised an eyebrow in surprise. Aaron continued. “I have a feeling all three of these kids may have been on their radar at one point or another. And if they weren't...” his voice trailed off for a moment, his mind wandering back to Colton's bedroom, Grant's bedroom, his own bedroom. “They should have been.” His voice faltered, only for a moment, but Dave didn't seem to notice or care. Instead, Dave told him to dig in, get in touch with CPS, follow that trail and he went back to his map. He felt his insides twist again but he sucked in a deep breath, filling his lungs until his ribs threatened to crack, and he set to it. By the end of the day, he'd spoken with four different case workers, each of whom had dealt with the boys in question, and the body of the third boy had turned up at another lake in the area. They retreated to their hotel rooms separately after visiting the lake, looking at the body, and Aaron couldn't do anything but fall into bed and burrow into the blankets that smelled like cigarette smoke and detergent and squeeze his eyes shut against the horrors he'd seen that day. He hadn’t even changed out of his suit, he didn’t care. The classes he’d taken had prepared him for the gore, the torture, the pain, getting inside of the minds of some of the most evil humans out there, but they hadn't prepared him to stare into the mirror as hard as he had that day, and would upon waking the next day. They hadn’t prepared him to explore his own mind, his own darkness. He went to sleep like he did every night, wishing and praying not to wake up.

Next Chapter ->

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