Steve Harrington x fem!reader
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word count: 8.2k
Warnings: canon typical violence, mentions of death and grief.
a/n: welcome to my season 5 au corner of the universe 🫶
also, i need everyone to know that writing these chapters has become increasingly difficult...not because i don’t know where the story is going, but because i never want it to end. i’ve been working on open arms in one form or another since 2019. how are we already here? where did the time go? 😭 anyways, enjoy the chapter while i continue pretending this story will last forever.
April 1986
The next morning, you wake up wrapped in Steve's arms.
It takes a second to remember where you are. The concrete floor. The concrete ceiling. The faint smell of dust and old cardboard and something electrical running too hot somewhere in the walls. The emergency light has dimmed overnight, leaving the basement in a gray half-dark that makes everything feel underwater.
But Steve's arms are around you.
His chest rises and falls against your back, his breath even and deep, and for one small, stolen moment you let yourself just lie there and feel it. The weight of him. The warmth. The way his arm tightens slightly even in sleep, like some part of him is still holding on.
It's a feeling you haven't let yourself have in so long it almost hurts to hold it.
You turn carefully, and his arm loosens just enough for you to sit up. You reach for his shirt on the floor and pull it over your head. It smells like him. You sit with that for a second, your knees drawn to your chest, and look around at the cinderblock walls pressing in from every side.
It's only been one night and you're already tired of being down here.
You wonder what the world looks like upstairs. How far the Upside Down has spread through Hawkins since yesterday. Whether the streets look the way they did in Vecna's vision or whether it's somehow worse, somehow more final, the kind of damage that doesn't reverse itself even when the threat is gone.
What used to live at the edges of your world, lurking in the dark spaces no one believed in, has crawled all the way in now. It has names and faces and it has taken people you loved. It has touched every part of Hawkins you ever tried to keep safe from it.
You look at Steve.
His face in sleep is younger somehow, all that careful vigilance gone loose. The bruises along his jaw have deepened overnight, purpled and ugly, and there's a cut above his brow you didn't properly clean and should have. You brush the hair from his forehead so lightly you're sure he won't feel it.
He doesn't stir.
You reach for your shoes.
The basement stairs creak under your weight no matter how carefully you place each step, and you wince with every one, glancing back over your shoulder. He doesn't move. You ease the door open at the top and slip through into the back hallway of the station.
The station looks the same as it did last night, untouched and dim. Gray morning light filters through the front windows, casting everything in that flat, washed-out color that doesn't feel like dawn so much as the absence of darkness. You move cautiously down the hallway, past the control room, toward the front of the building.
That's when you hear it.
A sound from the vinyl room, the small cluttered space off the main lobby crammed floor to ceiling with record crates and broadcasting equipment. Something shifting. Something heavy dragging across the floor.
You go still.
It comes again. A low, wet sound. Breathing that isn't right.
Your whole body understands before your brain does.
You press yourself flat against the wall just outside the doorway, heart slamming so hard you're certain it can hear it. You don't breathe. You don't move. You count the seconds the way you learned to, back when this was still something that only happened in the dark parts of Hawkins that most people never had to see.
That was before the dark parts became all of it.
Through the narrow gap where the door sits slightly ajar, you catch a glimpse of it.
A demodog.
It moves through the room with that horrible fluid ease, nosing along the base of the shelves, its head swinging low. It hasn't seen you. It's tracking something, a scent maybe, working its way methodically through the crates.
You ease one step back. Then another.
And then your stomach drops.
Your bat is in the car.
You left it in the backseat last night when you pulled in, too focused on getting inside, too tired, too relieved to think about what the morning might need. It sits out there right now, fifty feet away, on the other side of the station's back door.
Fifty feet might as well be a mile.
You look back toward the vinyl room. The demodog is still moving, still occupied. You have a window. A small one.
You move.
Every step down the back hallway is agony, each one measured and deliberate, your weight distributed slowly so the floor doesn't creak beneath you. The back door has a push bar. You remember the sound it made last night, a soft metallic click before the hinges catch. If you can ease it open far enough, slow enough—
You press the bar down by degrees.
The click sounds enormous in the quiet.
You freeze.
From the vinyl room, the dragging stops.
Your hand stays on the push bar. You don't breathe. You don't move. The silence stretches out like a held note, and you count heartbeats instead of seconds because that's all you have.
Seven.
Eight.
The dragging starts again.
You exhale and push the door open just wide enough to slip through.
The morning air hits you, cold and wrong-smelling, carrying that acrid, earthy undertone that you have come to associate with every worst moment of your life. The parking lot is empty. Steve's car sits exactly where you left it.
You cross the gravel as fast as you dare, wincing with every footfall. The back door of the car opens without a sound. Your hand closes around the bat.
The familiar weight of it settles something in your chest even as everything else keeps screaming.
You turn back toward the station.
And then you make your first mistake.
You go back in.
It seems like the right call. The demodog is inside. You have the bat now. Better to know where it is than to stand out here in the open with no idea which direction it might come from.
You ease through the back door, one hand on the push bar, and pull it shut behind you without a sound.
The hallway is empty.
Good. You take one step. Then another.
Then you reach the bend in the hall where it opens toward the lobby and the vinyl room beyond, and the demodog is right there.
Its back is to you.
It stands in the middle of the hallway not ten feet away, that enormous, grotesque head swinging slowly as it scents the air. It hasn't turned. It doesn't know you're there. But you are completely, utterly in the open, not a doorway within reach, nothing between you and it but ten feet of linoleum and your own heartbeat.
You watch the head swing left. Swing right.
And then, from behind you, from the direction of the basement, you hear the soft scrape of the door at the top of the stairs.
Your blood goes cold.
The basement door opens.
Steve.
You don't turn your head. You can't. If you move, the demodog moves. But you can hear him, the quiet shift of weight, one step into the hallway, and then absolute stillness as he registers what he's walked into.
He sees it.
He has to see it.
The demodog's head swings again. Its breathing changes, something catching, like it's found a thread of something in the air it wants to follow.
Very slowly, you turn your head.
Steve is pressed against the wall behind you, maybe six feet back, barefoot, in yesterday's jeans and nothing else, eyes locked onto the demodog with an expression that has gone completely, professionally calm. He's done this before. You both have. That's the only reason neither of you is dead yet.
His eyes cut to yours.
You look at the demodog. Look back at him. Mouth one word.
Bat.
His jaw tightens. He already sees it in your hand. His eyes move to the hallway around him, scanning. They land on the supply closet door just behind his left shoulder, slightly ajar, a mop handle visible in the gap.
Not ideal.
You shake your head once, tiny, urgent.
His eyes come back to yours.
You hold up the bat. Point at him. Mime a throwing motion so small it barely qualifies as movement.
Steve stares at you.
You do it again. More urgent.
His expression says everything he cannot say out loud, every version of are you serious and I hate this and okay fine compressed into a single look. Then he pushes off the wall with the slowest, most controlled step you have ever seen, closing the distance between you by half.
You extend the bat behind you without looking.
His hand finds it.
The demodog turns.
For one suspended, horrible second you are looking directly into its face. That ruined, blooming thing, all teeth and hunger and nothing behind it. It registers you. Its whole body shifts, orienting, and the sound that comes out of it is low and building and wrong in every frequency.
Steve steps around you.
He swings.
The first hit lands hard, the sound of it filling the whole hallway, and the demodog staggers sideways into the wall with a shriek that rattles the light fixtures. Steve doesn't stop. He swings again, pure muscle memory, the same focused brutality you've seen him use every time the world has asked him to be this version of himself, the one he never wanted to be and became anyway because someone had to.
It takes four hits and a stab from the blade attached to the end of the bat thanks to your modifications.
On the last one, the demodog goes down and doesn't get up.
The hallway goes quiet.
Steve stands over it, chest heaving, the bat hanging from one hand. He stares at it for a long moment. Then he turns around.
You're already looking at him.
Neither of you speaks for a second. The adrenaline is everywhere, a full-body hum that has nowhere to go.
Then Steve lifts his free hand and drags it through his hair, and the breath that leaves him is so long and controlled it tells you exactly how hard he is working not to say what he wants to say.
"Morning," you offer.
"Next time wake me up, will you?" He levels you a look.
"Sorry," you manage, and mostly mean it. "Really."
He turns the bat over in his hand, examining it properly for the first time. "I'm stealing this back, by the way." He gives it a slow, appreciative turn. "This thing is wicked."
"You didn't even use it right," you point out. "The chains need to come loose on the swing, and the blades work better with more of a jabbing motion. It's about the angle of impact, not just the force, because if you lead with the flat side you're basically just—"
He turns to look at the very dead demodog on the floor.
Then back at you.
"The thing is dead, right?"
You press your lips together. "Right." You step in and kiss him once, soft and quick. "Great job, baby."
The corner of his mouth pulls up. He looks at the bat, then back at you, and shakes his head slowly, like he is genuinely unsure how his life became this.
"How did it even get in here?"
"I don't know. But we should find out." You nod down the hallway. "Maybe you look for the entry point while I try to reach Dustin on the radio?"
"Yeah." A nod. "Good idea." He turns to go, then stops.
You wait.
He turns back, and the easy competence that carries him through demodogs and emergencies has gone slightly, endearingly sideways. He looks at you the way he did sometimes when you were younger, before either of you knew what to do with it.
"Last night…"
"Last night was—" you start, and then run immediately out of road.
"Did it feel—"
"Amazing," you admit, a little helplessly.
"Incredible," he agrees, and the word comes out flustered enough that it makes something warm turn over in your chest.
A small silence settles. Not uncomfortable exactly, just new. Like a room you've been in before that someone rearranged while you weren't looking. The bones are all the same but you have to relearn where everything sits.
"Was I—" you start, and find yourself scratching your arm without meaning to, an old nervous habit he definitely clocks.
"Perfect." The word leaves him before you can finish, quiet and certain, no qualification, no hesitation. "You always have been."
The bluntness of it lands somewhere it needed to.
"Thank you," you murmur, and feel the blush move through your face before you can stop it.
Steve watches you go pink and something in him visibly loosens, like your embarrassment is proof enough that this is still real, still the same, still the two of you finding your footing in something that started long before either of you had the sense to say so.
"It felt different," he ventures, quieter now. "Not bad different, just…" He turns the bat over in his hands once, something to do with them. "It felt like the other times but also nothing like them at all."
"New," you offer.
He looks up. "Yeah." A small smile finds him. "New."
He shifts his weight. You tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. It's almost funny, considering, that last night you were as close as two people can be and now there are six feet of linoleum between you and the morning light makes it feel enormous in the best, most terrifying way.
"Well." He clears his throat and rocks back on his heels. "You should probably try to reach Dustin."
"Right," you agree, and cough for absolutely no reason. "And you should find the entry point."
"Aye aye, captain." He raises the bat in a salute and the blade swings toward his face and your hand flies to your mouth.
"Steve."
He freezes. Looks at the blade. Looks at you. "Right." He lowers it with tremendous dignity. "Frankenbat."
He turns toward the door.
"Hey Steve?"
He stops.
You say it before you've fully decided to, the words coming from somewhere honest and unhesitating. "I'm glad it was you last night. I'm so glad it's still you."
He's quiet for a second. When he turns back, his eyes are soft in a way he stopped trying to hide from you a long time ago.
"It's always been you," he returns, simply.
Something in your chest pulls tight and then releases, like a knot finally given enough slack.
"I know," you tell him.
He holds your gaze one moment longer, just long enough for it to mean something. Then he turns back toward the hallway, bat in hand, and gets back to work.
The control room sits just off the main hallway, a narrow booth behind a long panel of switches and dials and sliding faders that you don't entirely understand but understand enough. Jimmy walked you through the basics during your intern visit, the transmitter, the receiver, the CB channels he used to monitor during storms. You pull the chair out and sit down, and for a moment you just look at all of it.
Then you find the CB and click it on.
Static fills the small room like white noise. You adjust the dial slowly, working through the frequencies until you land on the one you and Dustin agreed on before you split up. You press the handset.
"Henderson. You there? Over."
Static.
"Dustin, it's me. Come in. Over."
A long pause. Long enough that your stomach starts to tighten.
Then, through the crackle: "Oh thank God."
Rough and tired, and the most relieving sound you've heard since yesterday. Something in your chest unknots itself all at once.
"Hey." You breathe out. "You okay?"
"Yeah. We're at Hopper's cabin." A beat, and you can hear him recalibrating, relief making way for urgency. "Are you and Steve—"
"We're okay. We're at the WSQK station." You press the handset tighter. "We had a visitor this morning but it's handled."
"What kind of visitor."
"Demodog."
A hard exhale punches through the static. "How'd it get in?"
"Steve's working on that now. What happened overnight?"
The line goes quiet for a second. When he comes back his voice has shifted into something more careful, the register he uses when the news is bad and he's organizing it before it comes out.
"Okay so. The demodog wasn't random." A burst of static, then: "They were everywhere last night. Moving in groups, systematic patterns through the neighborhoods. Like they were mapping entry and exit points."
Your hand tightens on the handset. "Scouting for what."
"That's the thing." A pause. "There's military moving into Hawkins. Convoys. Not the evacuation trucks from yesterday, different vehicles, no insignia. They came in from the north around three in the morning and they're setting up a perimeter on the east side of town."
The hair on the back of your neck rises.
"Dustin." You keep your voice even. "Is it the lab? Hawkins National Lab?."
"I don't think so." Quieter now, like he's making sure no one else in the cabin can hear. "The lab had a profile. Marked vehicles, DoE contractors, a whole bureaucratic machinery behind it. I'd recognize the setup. This is something else." A beat. "I don't know who they are."
You sit with that for a second, staring at the panel of dials without seeing them. The lab, for all its horrors, was a known quantity. You understood its shape. Whatever this is has no shape yet, and that is its own kind of threat.
A sound behind you. You turn.
Steve is in the doorway, the Frankenbat leaning against the wall beside him, a long streak of mud up one forearm. He reads your face before you say a word and his own goes still and serious. He crosses the room and crouches beside your chair, close enough to hear.
You tilt the handset toward him.
"Steve's here. Talk to us both."
"Hey buddy." Careful and even, the tone he reserves for bad situations he is pretending are manageable.
"Harrington." Immediate, unguarded. "Never thought I'd be so happy to hear your voice."
"Don't get used to it." But his jaw has loosened slightly. You catch it.
Dustin fills you in on the rest. What the people who stayed in Hawkins have been told, what the official story has become in the hours you've been underground. The earthquake, they're calling it, deep enough to rupture geological gases buried under Hawkins for centuries. The demodogs some residents glimpsed in the night have been written off as fume-induced hallucinations, or feral mutants from the old lab. The red tear splitting the sky is atmospheric, they're saying, a reaction to the toxic release. Nothing to worry about beyond the evacuation already underway.
"Okay," you process slowly. "That is actually a really good cover story."
"Right?" Grudging admiration bleeds through the static, and you understand it completely.
"I'd believe it," you admit. "If I hadn't, you know. Been almost murdered by the Upside Down multiple times."
"Yeah, repeated near-death experiences really do ruin the plausible deniability." Dustin teases.
Steve shifts beside you, still but thinking, that particular contained energy he gets when he's already three steps ahead and waiting. You catch his eye and he tilts his head slightly.
"Dustin, hold on." You lower the handset and turn to Steve. "Entry point."
"Field out back." Low and even. "About sixty yards past the tree line. Ground opened up, maybe four feet across." His eyes stay on yours. "It feeds directly into the old tunnel system."
The tunnels.
You haven't thought about them in over a year. The vast, breathing network under Hawkins that the Mind Flayer used as its circulatory system, its highways, its roots. You burned them once.
Apparently that wasn't enough.
You raise the handset back to your mouth, then pause. An unknown military convoy with no insignia is exactly the kind of operation that monitors radio traffic. You have no idea who else might be on this frequency right now.
You choose your words carefully.
"Hey. How's Princess Leia doing?"
A beat on his end while he catches up. "Princess… oh. Yeah." You hear him recalibrate. "She's okay. None of the chatter I've picked up indicates they know she's with Old Ben. But it's only a matter of time before someone starts asking the right questions." Lower now. "We've all agreed to keep it all under wraps. As far as the Empire is concerned, Obi Wan Kenobi is dead. It's the only thing keeping her safe right now."
"She is our only hope, after all," you offer.
Steve leans in toward the handset. "The Empire will never find out where they are. We'll make sure of it."
A pause on the line.
Then all the careful tactical composure Dustin has been holding together for the last ten minutes goes completely sideways.
"I cannot tell you," he declares, with tremendous sincerity, "how much it means to me that you two just did that."
"Don't make it weird," Steve deadpans.
"It's already weird, it's always been weird, that's not the—"
"Henderson." You cut in before this becomes a whole thing. "Focus. Steve found the entry point to the old tunnels. If we can clear them out again, that's a way to move around Hawkins without being picked up by whoever's running that perimeter."
A pause. When he comes back, the sincerity has gone approximately nowhere.
"Y/N." A beat for effect. "Listen to me very closely. I love you. I have always loved you. Steve does not deserve you. Just wait for me to graduate high school and I am entirely yours."
Steve's expression does something very specific beside you.
"You're way out of my league, Henderson," you return.
"Statistically that is not—"
"Dustin." Flat. "Tunnels."
"Right." A pause. "Right, yes. Tunnels." A clearing of the throat. "Okay so if the tunnel system has re-opened, the patrol patterns last night make a lot more sense. The demodogs would be using the underground network to move. Which means anything coming up through those entry points isn't wandering. It's coordinated."
The word lands in the small room like something with weight.
"How soon can you get here?"
"If I come around through the Meadowbrook side I can avoid the east perimeter. An hour, maybe less."
"Do it. Stay away from the convoys."
"Copy that." The steadiness has come back into his voice, the determination of someone who is scared and shows up anyway. A small beat. "Hey. I'm really glad you're both okay."
You pause.
"Yeah," you tell him. "Us too. Over and out."
The static returns.
You set the handset down and the control room goes quiet. Outside, somewhere in the direction of town, Hawkins makes one of those low sounds it has started making, somewhere between a groan and a tremor, like the earth is still settling into whatever it has become.
You've stopped flinching at it. You're not sure when that happened.
Steve is still crouched beside you, forearms resting on his knees, looking at the dead panel of dials.
"Unknown military," he says finally. "No insignia, no introduction, setting up a perimeter at three in the morning."
"Yeah."
"Last time the government decided to manage a situation in Hawkins, people ended up in body bags."
"I know. And I'm tired of it, " You state.
Steve stands, picks up the Frankenbat, and holds out his other hand. You take it. He pulls you to your feet and doesn't entirely let go after, his thumb moving once over your knuckles in that way he has, the small unconscious thing he does when he's steadying himself as much as you.
He looks at you for a second. Not the tactical look, not the one scanning for threats. Just the one that sees you.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you squeeze his hand.
An hour until Dustin. A tunnel entrance sixty yards into the tree line. An unmarked convoy on the east side of town that knows more than it should.
You and Steve stand in the narrow control room in the early gray morning, hands loosely linked.
The world outside is unrecognizable.
But this, the two of you standing here, figuring it out together, this part is not new at all.
Dustin shows up fifty-three minutes later.
You can hear the familiar clatter of his bike on the gravel out back, and you're already at the door when he rounds the corner of the building. He looks rough. His hair is a disaster, there's a long scrape along his forearm that wasn't there yesterday, and he's got his backpack stuffed so full the zipper is straining.
But he's here. He's in one piece.
He drops the bike without braking properly and it skids sideways into the gravel and he doesn't even look at it.
You meet him halfway across the lot.
He crashes into you with all the subtlety of a freight train, arms going around your shoulders, squeezing hard enough that you feel it in your ribs, and for a second neither of you says anything at all. You just hold on. His breath comes out uneven against your shoulder, the kind of exhale that has been waiting since yesterday to happen, and you press your face into the side of his head and let yourself feel how relieved you are.
"Hey," you manage, when you can.
"Hey," he returns, muffled somewhere near your collar.
He pulls back and looks at you, red-eyed and trying very hard not to show it, and you reach up and squeeze the back of his neck once the way you always have, the way that means I know and you don't have to explain it and I'm here.
He nods. Clears his throat. Adjusts the strap of his backpack with great dignity.
Then Steve appears in the doorway behind you and Dustin's face does something complicated, cycling through relief and the very specific brand of affection he reserves for Steve that he would rather die than describe as such.
"Henderson." Steve holds the door open. "Get inside before something eats you."
Dustin looks at you. "He missed me."
"Desperately," you confirm.
Steve's expression suggests he finds neither of you particularly funny. He holds the door open wider.
Inside, Dustin drops his backpack on the floor of the back hallway and immediately starts looking around the way he does when something has caught his brain and it's already running three steps ahead of his feet. His head swings from the control room to the transmitter room to the hallway beyond, taking in the layout, the equipment, the dimensions of the space.
You recognize the look.
"Dustin."
"Hold on." He moves past you into the control room doorway and stands there, hands on the frame, studying the panel. His eyes go to the transmitter tower visible through the side window, then back to the CB setup, then up to the ceiling where the cable conduits run in parallel lines toward the front of the building.
Steve leans against the hallway wall and crosses his arms. "Is it going to take long?"
"Genius takes as long as it takes, Steve."
"Great."
Dustin turns around and points at you. "Okay. The CB. What are we working with?"
"Standard mobile unit, so three to ten miles on a good day," you explain. "But Jimmy hardwired it into the tower's base antenna to extend the line-of-sight range. Flat terrain, no heavy interference — we could push closer to fifteen, maybe more."
Dustin stares at you.
"He walked me through everything when I came for my visit," you add. "I paid attention."
"I know, that's — okay, that's incredible, you're incredible." He turns back to the panel. "And the broadcast equipment. It's all still live?"
"Powered down but intact. Generator's in the back utility room, about half a tank of diesel left."
"So we could theoretically transmit."
"On the FM band, yes. The tower's a standard local rig, fifty watts. Again, range is depending on what the Upside Down has done to the atmosphere between here and the edge of town."
Dustin makes a sound that is most accurately described as the noise a person makes when something confirms every instinct they had walking in. He spreads his hands. "Do you see what I'm seeing?"
"I see it," you confirm.
"This is—"
"I know."
"We could reach anyone still in Hawkins. We could monitor military frequencies, map their patrol patterns—"
"But that's the problem," you cut in. "The CB is vulnerable. If that convoy is scanning, any direct communication tells them exactly where we are and who we're talking to."
Dustin points at you. "Which is why we don't use the CB for sensitive contact."
"We use the broadcast as a decoy." You finish it before he can, and the look he gives you could power the generator on its own. "Normal programming on the surface. Coded messages buried in the show. Song dedications, weather reports, whatever sounds like a real broadcast running during an apocalypse. Anyone listening who isn't supposed to understands nothing. Anyone who is knows exactly what it means."
The silence that follows is the particular silence of a plan that is actually good.
"How do you guys feel about setting up base here?" Dustin ventures. "Running the place. Properly."
You turn to Steve and he shakes his head. "I can't live in the basement of this place."
"I, uh—" You pause. "I actually might have an idea about that."
You cross the hallway to the key holder mounted near the back door, a pegboard with a dozen or so labeled hooks. You scan them slowly, reading each tag, until you find the one you're looking for.
"Come on," you tell them, pulling it free.
You walk the long hallway and come up to a door labeled ROOF ACCESS. You unlock it and a narrow staircase appears, carpeted in a thick, slightly matted shag that has absolutely no business existing in 1989.
You look down at it.
"Nineteen seventy-four was a rough year for interior design."
Dustin crouches and presses a hand into it. "It's like stepping on a Muppet."
You start up the stairs.
"Jimmy," you begin, your voice carrying back down to them as they follow, "when he was talking to me about the internship, I mentioned I'd been looking for somewhere to live closer to the station. Less of a drive from town." You reach the top landing and find the second door, heavier than the one below, with a deadbolt that takes the key. "He mentioned there was a studio upstairs. Said he and his wife renovated it themselves a few years back. They were going to move in, make it their place." The lock turns. "Then they had the baby. And suddenly living above a radio station with a newborn didn't sound like the dream it used to."
You push the door open.
The apartment opens up in front of you.
It isn't large. But it is immediately, unmistakably someone's idea of a home. The ceilings are low and sloped on one side where the roofline cuts in, and the walls are painted a warm cream that has gone slightly golden in the morning light coming through two wide windows on the south side. There are plants everywhere, spider plants and pothos trailing from shelves, a tall ficus in the corner that has no business being as healthy as it is.
A bookshelf runs the full length of one wall, double-stacked, paperbacks tucked horizontally on top of the rows. A real kitchen, small but complete, with copper-bottomed pots hanging from a rack above the stove and a dish towel folded over the oven handle. A sofa the color of rust, with a quilt thrown over one arm. A small round table with two chairs. A record player on the low cabinet beneath the window.
It smells like cedar and old books and the particular warmth of a space that was made ready for people and then left waiting.
You stand in the doorway and feel something you haven't felt since the world cracked open.
Like somewhere exists that might hold you.
Dustin drifts toward the bookshelf and starts reading spines with the focused concentration of someone who cannot help themselves. You watch him for a second, then turn.
Steve is standing just inside the doorway.
He hasn't moved much since you opened the door. He's looking around the room the way he rarely lets himself look at things anymore, without the tactical overlay, without the part of him that is always half-scanning for the next thing that will go wrong. Just looking. Taking in the light through the south windows and the trailing plants and the record player and the quilt on the arm of the rust-colored sofa.
You watch his face.
He's been careful about the future for a long time. Careful not to want things too specifically, not to picture them with any particular detail, because the last few years have been a reliable education in what happens to the specific things you want. You know this about him the way you know most things about him, not because he ever said it plainly but because you were there, watching, during all of it.
But something in his expression right now is not careful.
He looks at the two chairs at the small round table.
Then at the record player.
Then at you.
"Well," you offer, with a small shrug. "Whaddya think?"
He steps inside properly now. You watch him feel the weight of his shoes on the carpet, the way the space receives him, the morning light falling across his face and catching the bruise along his jaw and the cut above his brow and all the other evidence of the last forty-eight hours that he is carrying without complaint. He turns slowly, taking in the bookshelves, the copper pots, the plants in their various states of thriving.
"I—" He stops. His shoulders drop just a fraction, the particular kind of exhale that isn't defeat but is the thing that comes just before relief. Like a person setting something down they've been carrying so long they stopped noticing the weight.
You close the distance between you, not all of it, just enough.
"I know we just started to figure things out again," you begin, keeping your voice even and honest. "And I know there's still a lot to talk about. A lot I need to make right." You pause, looking around the room, at the two chairs, at the record player, at all of it sitting in the morning light like it was arranged by someone who knew. "So don't feel pressured by any of this."
You take a breath.
"But when I was little," you start, and then stop, because this part is the truest part and it deserves to be said carefully. "I used to think about what it would look like. Having a home. A real one, not my parents' house, not somewhere temporary. Mine." You glance at the bookshelf, the copper pots, the trailing plants. "And even then, before I had the words for it, before I even really understood what I was imagining—" You look at him. "It was always you in it."
Steve goes very still.
"It was always your shoes by the door," you continue. "Your jacket on the hook. Your Farrah Fawcett spray in the medicine cabinet."
He laughs, low and surprised, and looks down at his feet. His jaw shifts slightly, his throat moving as he swallows whatever is rising in him, trying to give it somewhere to go.
You shake your head slightly. "But even when Jimmy first offered me this place, before I'd even climbed these stairs, the first person I wanted to tell was you." You hold his gaze. "Because I've never been able to imagine calling anywhere home if you're not in it."
Steve lifts his head.
He looks at you for a long moment, like he is still in the process of believing you are real and present and saying the things you are saying. The humor from a second ago has gone somewhere deeper, folded into something that has no name yet.
"You know what I used to do?" he admits, his voice cautious, like he's never said this out loud before. "After a bad day, or just a regular day, even a good one sometimes — I used to drive around. Not going anywhere. Just driving." He pauses. "And I'd think about where I was going to end up. What it was going to look like."
He looks at the two chairs by the table, at the morning light pooling between them. "I couldn't ever picture the details. The street, the house, the neighborhood. It was always just a feeling." He looks back at you. "And then I'd realize it wasn't a place I kept coming back to. It was you. It was always just you sitting across from me somewhere, and that was the whole thing. That was the whole picture."
You pinch your lip between your teeth, holding it together by the thinnest thread.
"You said there are things you need to make right," he counters gently. "Not in my book. We're right. We're us." He looks around the apartment, at the plants and the books and the morning light sitting in all the right places. "And this is a no-brainer. If this can be our little sanctuary — our one corner of this hellhole where we can just be us — then I am in. Completely, entirely, no-questions-asked in."
Your eyes fill before you can stop them. "Really? You really are?"
"Hey." He tips your chin up with one finger and looks at you, like he cannot believe the question still needs asking. "I am so in this with you. I've always been in this with you."
Your foreheads find each other. His hands settle at your waist. You breathe him in and feel, for the first time in a very long time, like the ground is solid underneath you.
Then you look around the apartment with fresh eyes.
"One problem though."
He searches your face. "What? Tell me."
You glance around the room with a small, thoughtful frown. "Where are we going to fit our six kids?"
Steve blinks at you. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. He looks at the apartment the way he looked at it when you first walked in, except now he is clearly performing some kind of involuntary square footage calculation against a number he was not remotely prepared to receive.
"Six," he repeats, very carefully, like the word might mean something different if he says it slowly enough.
"That's what you told me," you remind him pleasantly.
"SIX!?" Dustin exclaims from the bookshelf, The Stand apparently forgotten. "You want to bring six Steve Harringtons into this world? Voluntarily? With full knowledge of what one Steve Harrington is already like?"
"I forgot you were here," Steve groans.
"Clearly." Dustin closes The Stand with great solemnity, as though the situation has become too serious for recreational reading.
"They wouldn't just be Steve," you reason. "They'd be perfect combinations of both of us."
You reach up and pinch Steve's cheeks between your fingers. He goes pink in a way that is immediate and total and deeply satisfying, and you watch him try to school his face into something more dignified and fail completely.
"Look at this face," you tell Dustin. "Imagine six little versions of this face."
"I am imagining it," Dustin intones, pressing a hand solemnly to his stomach. "That's the problem." He gags, theatrical but committed. "Where is the bathroom in this place?"
"Downstairs," Steve instructs, extricating his cheeks from your hands with what remains of his dignity. He watches Dustin start toward the door and his expression shifts into something that is mostly smirk and slightly menacing. "Use the one downstairs specifically."
Dustin stops. Turns. Narrows his eyes. "Why specifically downstairs?"
"Because," Steve announces, with great patience, "I'm about to attempt to make the first mini Harrington."
The noise Dustin produces is genuinely distressed, the kind that comes from somewhere primal. "I don't want to hear about THAT—" Both hands fly to his ears, The Stand tucked under one arm, and he backs toward the door with his eyes squeezed shut. "I am a minor! This is not appropriate! Lalalalalalala!"
"Steve!" You shove him, laughing despite yourself.
"What?" He catches your hand and reels you back in, grinning now, the full unguarded version that you haven't seen enough of lately, the one that starts in his eyes before it reaches his mouth. "We've got the apartment. We've got the morning. We've got a Dustin who is actively leaving—"
"I AM STILL IN THE BUILDING! LALALALA!" Dustin protests from the staircase door, hands still over his ears.
By the time the station is locked down, the night has settled into something heavy and absolute.
Steve does the last walkthrough himself, testing every latch, every window, every access point he mapped this morning. You hear him move through the building below, methodical and quiet, the way he gets when he's keeping himself in his body by staying useful.
You reach into the breast pocket of his shirt, the one you're still wearing, and take out the photograph.
You've been carrying it against your chest since Wayne gave it to you. You forgot it was there and then remembered and forgot again, the way you do with grief sometimes, the way it hides in the body and surfaces without warning when you least expect it.
You look at it for a long moment in the low light of the apartment.
Then, without quite deciding to, you cross to the fridge and hold it there.
It needs a magnet. You find one near the base, a little sun-shaped thing left behind by Jimmy's wife, and press the photograph flat against the white enamel.
Eddie looks out at you from the photograph.
That grin. That ridiculous, uncontainable grin he wore like armor and meant entirely as joy. His hair everywhere, his rings catching the light, his shoulder turned slightly toward you even though he's looking somewhere else entirely, that unconscious lean he always had in your direction that you noticed and never said anything about and now will spend a long time thinking about.
Your finger finds the edge of the photograph and traces it carefully.
"Hey."
Steve, from the doorway.
You don't turn right away. You just press your fingertip gently to the photo, the way you might smooth a page in a book you're not ready to close.
"Hey," you return.
He crosses the kitchen quietly and stops just behind you, close enough that you can feel the warmth of him, and he looks over your shoulder at the photograph on the fridge.
A long moment passes. Neither of you fills it. That's always been one of the things about Steve, the way he knows when silence is doing more than words can.
"Is that what Wayne gave you?" he asks.
"Yeah."
He takes it in. The table, the faces, the ordinary brightness of it. All of you frozen there in some completely normal, completely vanished afternoon. His eyes move over it slowly, and you know he sees what you see. The way Eddie leans toward you. The way you lean back without seeming to know you're doing it.
"I'm so sorry he's gone," Steve murmurs, into your shoulder. "And I know…I know that some part of you went with him."
You turn at that.
"Steve—"
"It's okay." He says it before you can argue, understanding and certain. "Really. I'm not asking you to get that part back. I would never ask that."
You look at him for a long second. At the bruise along his jaw and the cut above his brow and the particular exhausted determination in his eyes of someone who has thought carefully about what he wants to say and has decided to mean it.
"He told me things," you begin, hesitantly. "At the end. Things he'd been carrying for a long time." You turn back to the photograph. "And I knew. I think I'd known for a while. I just—" You stop, press your lips together. "I never wanted to address it. I kept thinking there'd be more time, that I could figure out how to handle it gently, and then—" The sentence doesn't finish. It doesn't need to. "I guess thinking that way won't bring him back. I know that. I just…wanted you to know. No more secrets between us."
Steve is quiet for a moment. Then he lets out a slow breath.
"He told me too," he admits.
You turn to look at him properly.
He's looking at the photograph, not at you, his jaw working slightly. "When we were walking to the Wheeler house. Through the Upside Down." A small pause. "He told me how he felt about you. Said that all those months you two spent together, he would have let something happen if you had let it."
The breath goes out of you slowly.
"He said that?"
"Yeah." Steve nods once, still looking at the photo. "Shitty thing to hear from the guy your girlfriend has been spending a lot of time with." He scratches the back of his neck, a gesture you know means he is choosing honesty over comfort. "But he also told me you never let it go anywhere. That it was always—" He stops. Clears his throat. "Well anyways…that helped. A little."
Your chest aches with the particular complexity of it, the way grief and gratitude and guilt can occupy exactly the same space.
"Steve—"
"No, I know." He shakes his head gently. "I know it wasn't simple. I know you were dealing with something real, something you cared about, and I know things between us weren't great." He exhales. "I gave you reasons to pull away. I know that."
"That's not an excuse," you condemn yourself.
"I'm not making it one," he insists. "I'm just saying I understood more than I let on. Even then."
You hold that for a moment, the weight of it, the generosity of it, what it costs him to say and what it means that he's saying it.
His eyes are very bright now.
He swallows once. "He said—" His voice is rougher, and he clears it quietly. "He said, and this is a quote, because I've thought about it a lot: 'But if you're still wondering who's got more skin in this game? I'd stop. Because that dive? That was as unambiguous a sign of true love as these cynical eyes have ever seen.'"
The words land in the quiet kitchen like something that has been waiting a long time to be said out loud.
You feel them everywhere.
You close your eyes for a moment.
Eddie Munson. Telling Steve Harrington, in the middle of the Upside Down, while the world fell apart around them, exactly what he needed to hear about you. Carrying that for Steve when he couldn't carry it for himself. Being generous with something that must have cost him something to say.
That is so exactly him it breaks your heart all over again.
"God," you breathe.
"Yeah," Steve echoes.
Your hand moves to his chest, palm flat over his heart. You can feel it, rapid and real beneath your hand.
"Thank you," you tell him. "For telling me."
His arms tighten around you. "He'd want you to know. I think that's the only reason he told me. So that you'd know."
Then Steve shifts slightly. Something else crossing his face, like a man searching the back of a drawer he hasn’t opened in a while.
“There was one more thing,” he admits. “He said something else. I’ve been trying to remember the exact—” He stops. His brow furrows. “Mortar.”
“Yeah.” He nods, committing to it now. “He said he’d follow you to the depths of… that.”
You turn back to the photograph. Eddie’s grin. His rings. That unconscious lean in your direction.
“I know,” you whisper, and you mean it in every direction at once. You know he’d have followed you anywhere. You know the sacrifice and humility it took for him to say that to Steve of all people. And you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he went out exactly the way he would have chosen, for exactly the people he would have chosen, and that none of that makes it easier but all of it makes it true.
“I’m going to keep it there,” you say, after a moment, eyes still on the photograph. “If that’s okay.”
“It’s more than okay,” Steve returns, his thumb moving over the back of your hand.
You turn into him and he folds his arms around you and you stand there in the kitchen of your apartment, at the end of the world, held together by everything you've lost and everything you somehow still have, and you let yourself grieve and you let yourself be grateful and you let both of those things be true at the same time.
Above you, on the fridge, Eddie Munson grins at the room.
Like he knew all along how it was going to turn out.
soooo just a little heads up for the next chapter of open arms: i REFUSE to believe hawkins got split open by the upside down and everyone collectively went, “well, that happened,” then carried on with their day.
so before i throw my babies back into the meat grinder, i have to do a little world-building, some setup, some lore, and some aftermath 😌
i’ve been taking a few writing courses on the side recently, and i’m really excited about it 🥹 hopefully some of what i’ve learned starts reflecting in my writing over the next few posts.
Hey, so I just wanted to message to say how much I adore your work. But what I specifically love is how in character everyone is.
I regularly check for updates to your Moriarty series, of which you capture his personality perfectly and get the story to blend in so well with the series and I adore it. We, the reader, is a capable character without shining away from James and Sherlock and it is wonderful. Seriously I cannot stress enough how much I love that series. You’re doing a great job of it all.
And your Wake Up Dead Man series with Father Jud is beautiful. I LOVE how you have managed to alter it ever so slightly so it still suits his character whilst being open to relationships and carefully handling religion and faith. You are incredible at this and I am forever thankful you choose to share these amazing stories with us.
Thank you. May every good deed in life find its way to you❤️
this is such a kind message, thank you so much 🥹❤️ truly, hearing that the characters feel in-character is one of the best compliments you could give me.
with jud, i really wanted to respect his faith and not strip that away from him, while still exploring what love might look like in his life. and with james i never want to soften him too much or take away from that cynical, complicated nature. i just love the idea of him feeling things he doesn’t know how to explain and being deeply annoyed by it lol.
thank you for reading and for taking the time to send this. it really means more than you know!!!
aaron hotchner x fem!reader
Previous | The Purest Things Masterlist | Taglist Form
word count: 4k
Warnings: grief/loss, reference to character death, fluff overall
a/n: domestic lilbaddiexhotch content? healing? peace? happiness? in my fic? who would have thought 😭 rip haley, gone but never forgotten.
June 2013
Bookend: "Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys."
— Alphonse de Lamartine
A loud crash splits through the house, and you're already moving — down the stairs before you've fully thought about it, your hand catching the banister on the turn.
Jack stands frozen in the foyer beside a collapsed box, all his things spilled across the hardwood in one bright, tragic sprawl. Dinosaurs. Cars. Action figures. A plastic T. rex tangled with the wheel from some entirely unrelated truck like battlefield debris.
Aaron appears in the doorway before the echo fades, and Jack looks up at his father with the particular expression of a child who has been deeply wronged by an inanimate object.
"The bottom opened."
You're already on your knees beside the mess. "That's okay. We'll fix it."
You reach first for the things Jack loves most, handling each one with exaggerated gravity, lifting King Kong as though he's survived something dramatic. "These are obviously precious cargo. We should probably get them to your room before there are any more casualties."
Jack's whole face brightens. "My room."
You look up at him. "Your room."
Aaron takes a small step back and watches the two of you with that quiet, almost disbelieving expression he gets when life hands him something good and he hasn't quite figured out how to hold it yet. You can see it move through him as clearly as weather.
This is my life now.
It only lasts a second before he bends for the ruined box and the tape gun. "I knew I should've taped the bottom twice."
"You definitely should have."
"Helpful," he says, dry as dust.
You gather the toys into your arms while Jack carries the dinosaur sheets himself — this was non-negotiable, firmly established in the car — and the three of you head upstairs: Jack trotting ahead narrating the rescue operation, you following with an armful of plastic chaos, Aaron coming behind with the box and tape and that unguarded expression he doesn't realize he's wearing.
By the time you reach the room at the end of the hall, Jack is already standing in the center of it with his hands on his hips, taking stock of his kingdom.
He takes King Kong from your arms and places him on the dresser with ceremony. "This one goes here. And these go over there. And the dinosaurs need to be together because they're a family."
You set the last of the toys on the rug and smooth a hand through Jack's hair. "Sounds like a very good system."
"It is," Jack confirms. Then, pointing at Aaron with all the authority in the world: "Dad. You can put the books on the shelf."
Aaron nods gravely. "Yes, sir."
Jack drops to the floor, satisfied, and begins arranging his toy families with the intensity of a small general who has given this extensive prior thought.
Aaron places the books exactly as instructed and crosses to you, stopping close enough that his shoulder finds yours. His voice drops just below the sound of Jack's ongoing commentary to the dinosaurs.
"You okay?"
You look around the room — the half-made bed, the stack of books still waiting on the floor, the open closet, the little boy already at home on the rug — and then you look at Aaron.
"Yeah." Your voice comes out quieter than you intended. "I'm more than okay. It just all feels… strange too."
"Strange?"
You lean back against the dresser, folding your arms loosely. "After everything that happened a few weeks ago. The Replicator. Losing Strauss. Her family losing their mother."
The catch in your throat is small, but he hears it. He always hears it.
"I know Rossi is hurting right now. And it wasn't that long ago that we were the ones on the wrong side of timing — wanting each other, carrying all of it, still having to pretend otherwise." You look back at him. "So getting this now, getting everything we wanted…" You let out a breath. "It's beautiful. It is. But it's bittersweet too."
He steps closer, his hand coming to the side of your neck, his thumb settling just below your ear.
"It is bittersweet," he says. "But that doesn't make it wrong." His eyes hold yours. "You and I know better than most that grief and happiness don't take turns. They can happen at the same time. What happened to Strauss, to Rossi — that's true. And this is also true. Both things get to exist."
"I think one of the cruelest things this job does," you start, "is convince people they have to earn joy by waiting for the world to stop hurting first. It never does...does it?"
You reach for the front of his shirt and pull him closer, your forehead almost meeting his.
"We don't dishonor anyone by loving each other," his hand finds your waist, "or by building something good in the middle of bad things. If anything, I think we owe it to the people we've lost to hold onto what's still here."
"Aaron—"
"I spent too long believing the timing had to be perfect before I could choose you." His gaze moves briefly to Jack and then back to you. "I don't ever want us to make that mistake again."
Across the room, Jack holds up a small dinosaur and announces to no one in particular, "This one's in charge."
The laugh comes out of you before you can stop it and Aaron smiles too, something releasing in his face at the sound of it.
He draws his knuckles once along your cheek. "There. That's better."
"You really think it's okay?" you ask. "To just let ourselves be this happy?"
The tenderness that moves through his expression is almost unbearable. "I think it would be a tragedy not to."
That sits in you for a long moment. Then you nod, and he leans in and presses a slow kiss to your forehead.
You close your eyes and stay there for just a second — the grief still present somewhere underneath, the sweetness of this moment sitting right alongside it, not competing, not taking turns, just both at once, the way things you can't resolve simply learn to share the same space.
Later, when the last box is flattened and stacked by the mudroom, when the takeout containers are in the trash and the dishes rinsed and left in the sink, when the house has settled around the three of you in that particular way a place does when it realizes it is no longer waiting — it's time to get Jack to bed.
He is already drooping: dinosaur pajama pants dragging at the ankles, hair still damp from his bath, one sock inexplicably missing. He carries King Kong under one arm and a plastic triceratops under the other as though both are non-negotiable requirements for the night ahead. He stops in the doorway of his room with the expression of someone who still can't quite believe it belongs to him.
"This is the best room I've ever had," he announces.
He has said this at least five times. He means it every time.
He climbs in without being asked and settles back against the pillow while Aaron draws the blankets up and smooths them flat with that quiet, practiced efficiency he brings to everything. You sit on the edge of the mattress and brush the hair off Jack's forehead, and for a moment the three of you are completely still, held in something that doesn't have a clean name.
Jack looks from you to Aaron and back again with the solemnity of a child receiving important news. "So. This is for real now?"
Aaron glances at you once — just once — then looks back at his son. "Yeah, buddy. This is for real."
"So when I wake up, you'll both still be here?"
You answer together. "Yes."
He smiles into the pillow. "Good."
Aaron's hand settles at the back of your waist, and the three of you talk through Jack's plans for the room — the curtains change color schemes twice more, the shelf arrangement gets reconsidered, and there's a lengthy sidebar about whether King Kong should face the door or the window for optimal security purposes. By the time his arguments have slowed to barely a murmur, his eyelids are losing the battle.
Aaron reaches over and draws his thumb across Jack's temple. Jack's eyes find you first, heavy and peaceful. "Goodnight, Y/N."
"Sleep good, baby."
Aaron leans in, and his voice takes on that tone it uses only for Jack — each word set down carefully. "Goodnight, buddy."
"Goodnight, Dad." A beat, and then, from somewhere already half inside sleep: "Love you guys."
"Love you too," Aaron says, without hesitation.
You will never stop being surprised by the ease of it — the way Jack says it like it has simply always been true.
"Love you too, Jack."
He's asleep before either of you moves, and you sit there in the lamplight listening to his breathing settle into that slow, even rhythm children find so easily when they feel safe.
Then Aaron reaches over and switches off the lamp. Moonlight takes over in pale blue strips across the walls, across the blankets, across the small shape of Jack's shoulder.
You both rise slowly, carefully, and he follows you to the door. Jack shifts once — pulls King Kong a little closer — and then stills again.
At the threshold, you turn back for one last look.
Your first night. All together.
Aaron comes up behind you, one arm sliding around your waist, his chin brushing your temple. "Thank you," he says. "For making him so happy."
You lean back into him. "I love that kid like he's mine, Aaron."
His arm tightens. "I know," he says, and when you tip your head just enough to look at him: "And that makes me love you even more."
You pull the door to — not shut, just almost, leaving the hallway light spilling in — and when you turn around Aaron is still looking at it, like he's trying to make the reality of it stick.
Then he looks at you, and everything he's carrying — the love and the relief and the exhaustion and the gratitude, that quiet awe he wears when life gives him something good and he's afraid to blink too hard in case it shifts — all of it is right there on his face, unguarded.
You step into him, and he catches you the same way he always does now, one arm around your waist and one hand at the back of your neck, his whole body orienting toward yours the way it has quietly learned to do.
Home is not the house, exactly.
It is this —
you,
Jack asleep at the end of the hall,
the life the three of you have made real out of time and choice and love.
"Your first official night," you say against his chest.
A quiet laugh moves through him. "God, that sounds good."
You smile. "It really does."
His hand slides lower at your waist, warm and unhurried. "You can let me know when rent's due."
You tip your head back. "Maybe you can make a little advance payment now."
The look that crosses his face is immediate — amusement first, then something far less innocent.
"Is that right."
Not a question.
You brush your mouth once over the line of his jaw. "I have my own bills to pay."
He makes a low sound and then kisses you — slow, deep, the kind of kiss that belongs specifically to the end of a very long day and the beginning of something that is going to last.
When he pulls back, his hand gives your hip two subtle squeezes, that small private signal he never had to explain and you somehow learned anyway. Your pulse lifts every time.
"Come to bed," he says.
You glance once more at Jack's door, the thin warm line of light beneath it, the room on the other side that now holds some part of all of you, and then you look back at Aaron and lean in until your lips are at the corner of his mouth.
"Yes, sir."
You come back from the bathroom in his shirt and nothing else, skin still warm, hair loose from where his fingers were buried in it not long ago, and he looks up the second you step through the door with an expression he no longer bothers to hide.
Like it would take too much effort.
Like he has given up trying to look like a man who is not completely gone on you.
You slip into bed and tangle your legs with his, your cheek finding the familiar place on his chest, and his arm comes around you before you've fully settled.
"Hopefully that counted as a decent housewarming gift."
A laugh moves through him beneath your cheek, and his fingers find the hem of the shirt and trace up your side in one slow, absent pass. "It was perfect." A kiss pressed to the crown of your head. "You're perfect."
You smile against his skin, then lift your face to look at him. "Do you think Jack's happy? With his room?"
Something in Aaron's face softens immediately, the way it always does when the subject is Jack. "Are you kidding me? He was still smiling when his eyes were closing. I don't think he stopped once."
"Good." You breathe out and settle closer, and his hand keeps moving over your side, easy and familiar, the particular kind of touch that isn't asking for anything.
But the thought is already there, and you know yourself well enough to know it won't leave.
"I know it's probably—" You stop. Try again. "Hard."
His hand goes still. "Hard how?"
You fiddle nervously with the hem of his shirt that drapes across your hips. "Moving into a new home again. Seeing his dad every day with someone who isn't—" The words arrive carefully, each one placed down like something fragile. "Who isn't his mom."
Aaron goes very still, and you feel it and wish briefly you'd waited.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up tonight, I just—"
"No." His hand moves to the back of your neck, turning your face toward his. "You have every right to say it."
You search his expression in the low light. "I just don't ever want this to feel like I'm replacing her," your voice worn down to almost nothing. "The life you had. What she was to him."
The look on his face does something complicated — tender and a little overwhelmed but very certain, all at once — and he pushes your hair back from your forehead and keeps his hand there.
"You are not replacing anyone," he assures. "Haley is Jack's mother. She always will be. Nothing will ever change that." His thumb traces your temple, once. "But, what you are doing is loving him. Giving him another safe place to land. That is not a theft. That is a gift."
The sting behind your eyes intensifies.
"Jack is allowed to love you," he comforts you further, "and I am allowed to love you, and none of that diminishes her. Love doesn't work like that."
"I know that," you shrug. "In theory."
His mouth curves, just slightly. "I know."
The house settles around you, quiet and new, and then, lower, more deliberately: "And if I ever thought for a single second that this was confusing for him, or harmful — I would tell you. I need you to know that."
You nod tentatively.
"Do you know what I saw tonight?" he asks, and when you shake your head: "I saw my son in a room he already thinks of as his own, in a house that already feels safe to him, looking at you like you belong there." His hand moves back down your side, slow and sure. "That is what I saw."
A tear slips free before you can stop it, and he catches it without comment — just his thumb, simple as that.
"There will be hard moments," he states honestly. "I won't tell you otherwise. He'll miss her in new ways as he gets older, he'll have questions, feelings he doesn't have language for yet." A pause. "So will I. But I want to have those moments with you — not around you, not despite you. With you."
You press your face into his chest, and both his arms close around you at once. "I want that too," you mumble against his skin, and then you pull back just enough to breathe. "And I want Haley to still be part of our life. I want her to be honored. I want Jack to be able to say her name in this house like it belongs here, because it does."
Your hand finds his chest and anchors there. "If he wants pictures in his room, we put pictures in his room, in the living room, the dining room. If he wants to tell stories about her, we tell them. Birthdays, little traditions, things she loved — I want him to have all of it, Aaron. I mean that."
He looks at you in the near-dark for a long moment, too much moving through his face to name. "Y/N," he hums, and your name in his mouth sounds like something handled with devotion.
"I want the same for you too," you keep going, because if you stop you won't start again. "I want you to be able to miss her here, without feeling like you have to take that somewhere private, like it's something to be folded away out of sight. I don't need protecting from the life you had before me — I love you because of all of it, all the roads that led you here, everything that made you who you are." You look at him steadily. "You never have to choose. Not between me and her memory, not between who she was to you both and who I am. There is room. I am telling you there is so much room."
For a moment he is completely still, and then the sincerest smile finds his mouth — undone, a little broken, entirely real.
"I think," he wavers for a moment, "you two would've been good friends."
You hold him tighter at that, "I think so too."
The next night, the three of you sit on the living room floor with a bowl of popcorn between you, three sweating cans of soda on the coffee table, and a home video paused on the television — a little overexposed, the color a little washed, the edges frayed the way old recordings go.
Aaron leans forward and presses play, and his own voice comes out of the speakers first, younger, from somewhere behind the camera. "We're ready for you, Jack."
On the screen, Haley laughs from a hospital bed, one hand resting over the curve of her stomach, hair loose, cheeks flushed with exhaustion or anticipation or both. "If you could please hurry up," she tells her stomach, patting it twice, "that would be great."
Jack sits up very straight between you and Aaron. "I was in there?"
"You sure were," Aaron confirms, warm beside you, and Jack looks from the screen to his father and back again with the expression of someone encountering a plot twist of the highest order.
The video wobbles — Aaron laughing behind the camera, the picture tilting briefly toward the ceiling — and then cuts.
The next clip opens quieter, in a different room. Aaron in the hospital bed now, Haley's shoulder pressed against his, a newborn tucked into the crook of her arm in a small knit cap. They are both very young, experiencing a new form of life and love — the exhaustion and the awe and the specific terror of a thing you wanted so much it's almost unbearable to finally have.
Jack gasps. "I was so little."
"You were extremely loud for someone so little," Aaron laughs, and on screen Haley traces one finger over the baby's cheek without looking up. "He has your perpetual furrowed brow."
"What's a furr—furry brow?" Jack asks, and Aaron draws his eyebrows together in solemn demonstration, and Jack laughs — the sound of it filling every corner of the room. "Mommy was funny."
"She was," Aaron agrees, with no pause, no catch in it, just the simple warmth of something true.
Another cut, another room. Haley in the kitchen now, a fussy toddler balanced on her hip, stirring something on the stove with her free hand, and she turns toward the camera with an expression of magnificent long-suffering. "You are no help."
Aaron's voice from behind the lens, threadbare with amusement: "I'm documenting."
"You are documenting your own failure to assist me."
You laugh into your hand before you can stop yourself, and Aaron glances sideways at you — just a look, quick and content and entirely private — and you have to press your lips together to keep from smiling wider.
The footage shifts again to Aaron this time, holding a slightly bigger Jack on his hip while attempting to make a bottle one-handed, Haley laughing behind the camera so hard the frame shakes.
"You said you had this."
"I do have this," Aaron insists, with great conviction, as Jack pats his cheek with an open hand.
You look at him — the man beside you on the floor, shoulder solid against yours — and then at the younger version of him on screen, years away from knowing you existed, years from any version of this life, and something moves through you that isn't quite grief and isn't quite joy, something that doesn't have a clean name and doesn't need one.
The picture changes once more. Haley on a blanket in a park, Aaron lying beside her, baby Jack asleep between them in the afternoon light. The camera has been propped somewhere — a bag, maybe, or a folded jacket — because for once all three of them are in frame together, just existing, just a family on an ordinary afternoon that didn't know yet how extraordinary it was.
You sit with the quiet weight of it: the strangeness and the privilege of being trusted with a life that started long before you arrived, of loving people who were already deep inside their story when you found them.
Aaron glances over and catches whatever is on your face, a question moving through his eyes.
Are you okay? Is this too much?
You give him the smallest shake of your head.
No. I'm okay. This matters.
Something in him settles.
The video ends, the screen holding on Haley's face for half a second — caught mid-laugh, head tipped back, completely unselfconscious — and then goes dark.
Nobody moves.
Then Jack speaks, his voice small and very certain. "Can we watch more tomorrow?"
"Yeah," Aaron smiles. "We can watch more tomorrow."
Jack leans into his father's side, growing heavier with sleep. "I like hearing her voice."
You reach over and draw your fingers through his hair, once and then again. "Then we're never going to stop listening to it."
He seems satisfied with that, his eyes holding on the dark screen a little longer like he's waiting to see if it comes back, his hand still loose in the popcorn bowl.
Then Aaron's hand finds yours on the floor between you, his fingers closing around yours without comment, without ceremony, and you sit there in the dim living-room light — the three of you held gently in the space between memory and present, between what was lost and what is still here, between the life that came before and the one that is, quietly and stubbornly, still unfolding.
my favorite thing about aaron hotchner is that underneath all the profiler genius, intimidation tactics, and emotional repression is just some guy who desperately wants to come home to someone.
ok be honest with me… has anyone else ever had a fic that their brain just randomly decided to abandon???
because i swear i love my joel miller fic. i love joel. i love the story. i love the reader. and yet every time i open the document my brain goes “absolutely not ❤️”
i haven’t been able to consistently write for it since season 2 came out and i don’t know why. maybe the direction the show went killed my enthusiasm for it. maybe i changed. maybe my attention span got drafted into another fandom (but i don’t think so cause i still get sick hearing songs that remind me of joel)
and yes, i know engagement isn’t everything, but when my fic used to get people talking and theorizing and now it feels like i’m tossing chapters into the void… it definitely affects motivation a little 😭
anyway. this is me staring at my joel docs from across the room like we’re going through a divorce.
soooo i’ve officially finished my first ever completed fic, which feels insane to say. and now, because apparently i can’t behave, i’m thinking about dusting off my jack abbot drafts 👀 should i give them a second look? could i maybe pull off two age gap fics at once???
Jud Duplenticy x Wick'sNiece!Reader
Sanctuary Masterlist | Taglist Form | Previous | Next |
word count: 9k
warnings: religious themes, religious trauma, power dynamics, mentions of alcohol, discussions of death and dead bodies, implied murder, confessions of a killer, suicide (reader isn’t written with any specific beliefs beyond being raised in the church.)
a/n: you know, i’ve never actually completed a story on here… and this feels like the perfect one to start with. i love jud and reader so much, and i love the little world they’ve built together. i’m so grateful for all the support on this story. thank you, thank you, thank you. here’s to the last one…or is it?🕯️
Blanc texts you just before midnight.
Thanks to your warning, I intercepted Father Jud at the station and stopped him from surrendering himself to the wolves. We're headed to Doctor Nat's house. No time to explain. Meet us there.
You don't even think. You grab your keys and go.
By the time you pull up, Nat's front door is hanging half-open.
That alone is enough to chill you.
You step inside carefully, the house too quiet in the wrong way. A struggle has already written itself across the room — glass glittering over the floor, picture frames knocked crooked on the walls, a lamp overturned near the sofa. One chair lies on its side like someone left in a hurry or was forced to.
"Jud?" you call, your voice catching on the silence. "Blanc?"
For one awful second, nothing answers.
Then Jud appears at the top of the basement stairs.
Your breath leaves you.
His eyes are rimmed red, tears still clinging there. He looks like he's barely holding himself upright, like whatever is downstairs has reached into him and stripped away whatever composure he had left.
The second he sees you, he comes straight to you.
His hands find your waist first, like he needs the proof that you're real before anything else. Then his mouth presses to your forehead, lingering there, and when he speaks his lips are still against your skin.
"Don't go down there." His voice shakes. "Please don't go down there."
Your hand lifts instinctively to his face, thumb brushing the damp track beneath his eye. Relief and dread crash into each other so hard it nearly makes you sick.
"Why?"
His face twists.
"It's…" He swallows. "It's Wicks. And Nat."
The words take a second too long to make sense.
You stare at him. "Are they—"
He nods once.
"Dead."
The room tilts.
Jud pulls you into him before it can and holds you against his chest.
"He's dead," Jud whispers into your hair. "We know for sure now. He's never coming back."
And somehow that should feel like relief.
It should.
But all you can feel is the cold certainty that death has not finished taking from you yet.
Your voice comes out muffled against him. "What happens next?"
Jud's hold tightens.
And then, because he is who he is, because even now he can't stop dragging himself toward the blade, he gives you the answer he thinks he owes.
"This means," he says, sounding already defeated by it, "there was no one else who could have killed Samson."
You pull back so fast his hands nearly fall from you.
Blanc appears at the basement stairs just in time to see the shift in your face.
"Are you joking?" The panic rises so fast it sharpens your voice. "You still want to turn yourself in?"
Jud's eyes close briefly, like he knew this was coming and still couldn't stop himself. "I have to do this of my own free will or it won't mean anything."
"To who?"
He doesn't answer quickly enough.
"To God?" you demand. "To Geraldine? To your own guilt? Which one gets to ruin us tonight?"
"Y/N—"
"No." You step back. "Don't."
He reaches for you on instinct.
You flinch away.
It destroys him instantly.
"Please," he starts, voice fraying. "You know I—"
"Just go." The words come out shaking. "If you are so damn determined to suffer, then suffer."
His face goes white.
You move to the side, clearing a path to the front door. Not because you want him gone. Because if you don't move, you might beg. And you cannot survive begging him to stay only to watch him choose guilt again.
Blanc looks between the two of you, caught in the awful space where truth and damage overlap.
"Dear—" he tries.
But Jud is already moving.
He passes you slowly, like he's waiting — hoping — for you to stop him.
You don't.
He gets to the door, hand on the frame, then turns back one last time. Whatever he sees in your face is enough to make him stop trying to explain.
Blanc starts after him.
You don't even look at either of them.
Your eyes stay fixed on the dark mouth of the basement stairs. On the place where your uncle lies dead for the second and final time.
You shake your head once, the motion small and ruined and full of too many endings.
"Even in death," you say to the silence below, "you keep ruining everything."
No one answers.
Not Jefferson. Not God. Not the man walking out your door with martyrdom in his hands and your heart breaking open behind him.
Only the house does.
It settles around you with the faint, terrible sounds old homes make when they've witnessed too much.
Then Blanc comes back through the doorway, breath short, coat still half-open from turning around too fast.
"Where is he headed?"
You stare at the basement door and let out a long, exhausted breath. "The church. He's going to the church."
Benoit takes that in, jaw tightening just enough to show it's worse than he'd hoped.
Then he steps in front of you.
"You love Jud, right?"
That finally gets your eyes up.
You shake your head once, angry tears threatening. "I hate him. I hate him right now."
Benoit nods, as if that is not only reasonable but expected.
He crouches slightly, enough to catch your face without looming.
"You hate him right now because he is hurtin' you." His voice softens. "That does not mean you do not love him."
You turn away, arms folding tight across your middle like they might hold the pieces in place.
"He keeps choosing guilt. Over me. Over reason. Over every person standing right in front of him trying to tell him he didn't do this." You swallow hard. "He would rather suffer than be happy and I am so tired of losing to that."
"My dear," he says, and for once there is not a drop of teasing in it, "if Father Jud were in his right mind, I would permit him the dignity of his own bad decisions. But he is not in his right mind. He is grieving, exhausted, frightened, and tragically susceptible to religious self-sacrifice."
A weak, incredulous sound escapes you. "That's your comforting speech?"
"No. This is." He tips his head, waiting until you have no choice but to meet his eyes. "I need you."
That cuts through more cleanly than anything else has tonight.
"I need your beautiful brain," he says, with a gravity that makes the phrase land rather than sound ridiculous. "I need the part of you that sees patterns before the rest of us know there are patterns to see. I need every scrap you know about your father, about Jefferson, about the way this family hides things in plain sight."
You look away, swallowing hard.
"I am very good," Benoit continues, "but I am not omniscient. And Jud — God love him — is halfway to a confession booth with a death wish. If we do not catch him before he hands himself over, this thing calcifies in all the wrong directions. Geraldine stops looking. The town gets its tidy little villain. Jefferson wins again."
You close your eyes.
Benoit keeps going, quieter now. More careful.
"We are very close. I can feel it. Nat is dead, Wicks is dead, Samson is dead, and somewhere beneath all that blood is still the original sin of this story — your father. I do not believe those threads are separate." He lowers his voice. "Neither do you."
You look toward the open door. Toward the rain beyond it. Toward the church waiting somewhere in the dark, filled with dead men and secrets and the one living man you are not ready to lose to his own conscience.
"I really do hate him right now," you confess.
Benoit nods solemnly. "Excellent. Anger is marvelous fuel."
"If I come with you, we're not just stopping him."
A flicker of approval lights his face. "No, my dear. We are solving it once and for all."
You nod once, sharp and final. "Then let's go."
You stand in the shadows of the church with Blanc, watching as Jud walks in and drops to his knees.
Jefferson's loyal followers pour in behind him, eager in that awful, sanctimonious way — hungry for spectacle, hungry for ruin, hungry to watch a good man go under if it means preserving the story they've built around themselves.
And there he is.
The man you have, against all reason, come to love over the past year.
At his lowest.
Bent beneath the weight of a town that never deserved him. Beneath the damage your family planted long before he ever stepped into Chimney Rock. Beneath guilt he keeps mistaking for holiness.
It kills you to watch.
The doors open again.
Geraldine enters with two deputies at her back, each taking a side of the doorway like this is already over and all that remains is the paperwork.
"Father Jud," she begins, crossing the nave toward him, "I am here to arrest you for the murders of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks and Samson Holt."
Your stomach turns so hard you nearly sway. Blanc's hand closes around yours before you can.
"And," Geraldine adds, "you are a person of interest in the death of Doctor Nathaniel Sharp."
You let out a short, disbelieving scoff.
Jud rises slowly.
The stained glass catches him then, washing color across his face and collar and hands, turning him into something almost unbearably beautiful in his devastation. He looks like a martyr in a painting. The kind people light candles for after they've finished destroying him.
Geraldine stops in front of him.
"If you'd like to confess anything," she says, glancing around the sanctuary, "this seems like as fitting a place as any."
Jud drops his gaze to his hands. Starts working his fingers together the way he does when he's trying not to come apart.
"Yeah," he begins quietly. "Years ago, I murdered a man in a boxing ring. I killed him with hate in my heart. And last night, that same sin rose in me, and in a moment of fear and rage, I—"
"Blanc. Stop him."
He doesn't hesitate.
He peels away from the shadows and beelines for the organ like this is exactly the sort of intervention he was born for. A second later, his hands crash down on the keys and the church fills with the unmistakable, thunderous opening of The Phantom of the Opera overture.
The entire room jumps.
Including Geraldine.
Including Martha, who gasps like she's seen the devil himself rise from under the altar.
Even you can't stop the startled, half-hysterical laugh that escapes you.
Because of course Benoit Blanc would interrupt a false confession with Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Jud spins toward the sound.
And finally sees you.
You lift one shoulder in a tiny, guilty shrug.
"I'm sorry about him," you call over the organ's theatrical chaos. "He has a real weakness for dramatic entrances." Then your face softens, your voice dropping just enough to reach him. "But we really needed you to shut up."
His face moves through shock, relief, and exasperation so quickly it nearly breaks your heart.
"I was just about to explain to everyone that—"
"Nope."
"Please," Benoit adds, abandoning the organ as abruptly as he attacked it. "Allow the adults to handle this."
You cross the aisle and go straight to Jud's side.
That is all it takes.
The flock surges.
Cy first. Then Lee — all of them talking at once, trying to push him back toward the confession he nearly gave them. Their voices rise into a sanctified frenzy, demands and accusations and certainty dressed up as righteousness.
You step directly in front of Jud before any of them can get close enough to crowd him.
Jud's hand lands at your waist, trying to ease you aside, protect you from the incoming storm.
You glance back at him. "Rude."
Despite everything, his mouth almost twitches.
Geraldine moves toward Benoit, trying to cut him off before he can seize the room. "He was about to confess!"
"He was about to confess shit," you snap, turning and going toe-to-toe with her before she can get another word in. "Back up."
That startles even her.
At the pulpit, Benoit appears as if conjured there by pure theatrical instinct.
He lifts both hands and bellows over the uproar: "YOU SHALL NOT SILENCE THE VOICE OF THE LORD! BUT SIT NOW AND BEHOLD THE WICKEDNESS AND SHAME OF THE GUILTY LAID BARE BEFORE YOU ALL."
The church freezes.
Not because they understand what he means.
Because he sounds deranged enough to be obeyed.
You turn back to the room, spread your hands in apology, and glance toward Jud with the driest voice you can manage. "I told you. Flair for the dramatics."
One by one, the group sits. Reluctantly. Noisily. Like obedience itself offends them.
"What," Jud asks under his breath, "are the two of you doing?"
Blanc shoots him a look that suggests even he is no longer entirely certain.
"Trust us," you whisper, which is a ridiculous thing to say given the evidence.
You take hold of Jud's arm and guide him toward the chair at the edge of the stage. He lets you move him, still stunned enough by the interruption — and by your being here at all — that he doesn't argue. You sit beside him before he can think too hard about it.
Blanc clears his throat and begins addressing the room, picking up the thread at Jefferson's murder with the confidence of a man who has never once doubted his own timing.
Beside you, Jud leans in slightly.
"You should've let me—"
"No." You cut him off without looking at him. "How about you thank me for stopping you from doing the single stupidest thing you've ever considered."
That keeps him quiet.
At the front of the church, Blanc continues guiding the room through the anatomy of Jefferson Wicks's murder — reason, access, opportunity — each piece set down with a practiced inflection. One by one, the puzzle takes shape. Just enough that even Jefferson's most loyal followers start to shift in their seats.
Still, one question hangs there, heavier than the rest.
"What really happened?" Geraldine presses. "Once and for all."
Blanc smiles, but it's thinner now. "Yes. I suppose it is time to strip away this tawdry little pageant of miracles and resurrections and reveal what truly happened." He lifts a hand, almost grandly. "It is time for Benoit Blanc's final checkmate over the mysteries of faith."
Then he stops.
His eyes drift past the room.
You follow his line of sight.
Martha.
Your heart drops.
"Blanc…" Jud leans forward beside you. "Are you alright?"
Blanc doesn't answer immediately. He lifts his head toward the stained-glass windows, where the late light catches the dust in the air and turns it briefly holy.
"Damascus," he says.
Jud blinks. "Damascus? Like a road to… to Damascus thing?"
"Yes." Blanc exhales, the sound part revelation, part defeat. "Damascus."
Then, with far less poetry than the moment deserves, he adds, "Shit."
It hits you at the same instant.
"Shit."
Beside you, Jud turns, utterly lost. "Shit?"
Blanc looks at you then. Not as a detective. Not even as a friend. As if asking permission.
Your lips flatten. You nod once. "It's okay."
It clearly is not.
He clicks his tongue against his teeth, upset now in a way that isn't showmanship anymore. Upset for you. For Jud. For everyone in this room who has been shaped by the wickedness of this place without ever fully understanding the size of it.
Then he steps down and sits on the edge of the chancel steps like a man who has just realized that winning and telling the truth are not the same act.
You let out a shaky breath and reach, almost without knowing you're doing it, for Jud's forearm. Your fingers curl around the cuff of his sleeve.
He looks down at your hand. Then at you. Still waiting. Still trying to understand.
Blanc rubs a hand over his mouth.
"I…" He exhales. "I cannot solve this case."
You look away at once, fighting the sting in your eyes.
Cy is the first to seize on it.
"Are you saying," he asks, already lifting his phone, "that your conclusion, Benoit Blanc, is that Monsignor Wicks rose from the dead? That it was a miracle?"
The sheer opportunism of it makes you feel sick.
You sit frozen, waiting for Blanc to stop him. To say something clean and decisive and devastating.
Instead, he only repeats, quieter: "I am simply saying… I cannot solve this case."
"That works for me," Cy chirps, satisfied already, because the truth has never mattered to men like him nearly as much as controlling the version that survives.
He slips out of the church before anyone can stop him.
You sit back with a stunned groan, trying to process the reality of what just happened.
Jud sees it on your face.
He leans forward, voice eager, intent fixed entirely on Blanc. "If you know what really happened, you should tell everyone."
"Jud, stop…" You lift a hand over your eyes.
But he's already half-risen with it — too earnest, too wounded, too unwilling to let truth stay buried if he thinks it can still be named.
Geraldine cuts across the room before it can get any worse. "Everyone out. Show's over."
Within moments, the sanctuary empties.
Jud stands, then turns and drops to one knee in front of you, heedless of the altar, the police, the whole room, as long as it means getting your eyes back on him.
"Talk to me. Please."
You shake your head once, still trying to breathe through the hurt of it.
"I—"
"What the hell was that?" Geraldine snaps, turning on Blanc now that the room is cleared.
Blanc remains on the steps, elbows on his knees, eyes somewhere far beyond the church walls. "Road to Damascus," he replies, almost absently. "Scales fell from my eyes."
She stares at him. "So what? You believe in God now?"
"No. No." He finally looks up. His gaze moves first to Jud. Then to you. "My revelation came from them."
Geraldine folds her arms. "Explain."
"From Father Jud, the example of grace. From her…" His eyes settle on you with something like sorrow. "The example of patience. Of letting justice arrive in its own terrible time."
The words hang there.
Jud looks back at you like maybe now, finally, something is going to be named the way it should have been all along.
Then the church doors open again.
Martha enters.
Alone.
Jud shifts at once, beginning to stand. Your hand shoots out and catches the cuff of his sleeve.
He looks down at your fingers. Then back at your face.
Martha comes down the aisle slowly, hands folded so tightly they've gone white.
"Mr. Blanc," she begins. Then her gaze moves to you. "My dear girl…"
The endearment lands like a slap. She has never once called you anything but trouble.
Her eyes move between you, Blanc, and Jud. And then, with the quiet certainty of a woman who has spent too long praying not to be found out, she says, "You both know the truth."
Jud turns to you.
All you can do is nod.
Not the whole thing. Not yet. But enough.
Enough to know why Blanc stopped. Enough to know why Martha is here. Enough to understand that whatever happens next will not be tidy, or holy, or merciful.
Only true.
"Father Jud." Martha climbs the steps and drops to her knees before him, hands clasped beneath her mouth, eyes closing as if she can still choose reverence over consequence.
Jud looks at her.
Then at Blanc.
Then at you.
You stand, your fingers slipping from his sleeve to the center of his back, urging him forward.
"What do I do?"
The question is so naked it nearly breaks you.
"Be her priest, Jud." Your voice catches on the last word, conceding to the fact that the better half of your life is about to come to its breaking point.
Blanc steps closer. "Take her confession."
Jud kneels in front of Martha.
She draws in one shaking breath.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a week since my last confession." Her eyes stay shut. "I told myself it began with pure intent. But the truth is… it began with a lie."
Your mind races ahead before she can keep pace with it.
"My great-grandfather."
"Prentice," Martha confirms, opening her eyes at last. "I saw him take his final communion. He called me to his side, and that is when he showed me the jewel…"
"Eve's Apple," you whisper. "His fortune."
A strange little smile touches Martha's mouth, humorless and old. "Yes. He swore it would never again be plucked by evil hands. He took the jewel to his grave, and I swore I would protect that secret." Her expression darkens. "But Grace discovered he had bought the diamond. I still do not know how."
A hollow laugh escapes you. "She knew her luxury brands. What else comes in a custom Fabergé box worth twenty thousand dollars all by itself? Not a trinket. Not some plastic Jesus." You shake your head, grief and pride tangling in the words. "Something cut. Faceted. Worth a fortune. She was smart. Smarter than Prentice or Wicks ever gave her credit for."
"But she didn't know where he hid it," Martha counters, the old sharpness flickering back.
"So that's why she tore the church apart," you realize.
Jud looks from you to Martha, the pieces shifting in real time. "She didn't desecrate the church in anger."
"No," Blanc confirms from below the chancel. "She was looking for the jewel."
Your eyes sting.
"Her whole life," you say, "she lived in darkness and desperation. A prisoner to the shame her father placed on her and this town enforced. That jewel was her one way out."
"That poor girl," Jud says, and the grief in it is real.
He looks back to Martha. "What did you say to her?"
Martha's face changes. Some private shame finally surfaces, too late to save anyone.
"I told her I knew where he had hidden it," she says. "And that she would never find it." A beat. Then, almost as if reciting liturgy: "You harlot whore."
"Good God," you scoff.
"I kept the secret of Eve's Apple locked in my heart for sixty years," she continues. "My terrible burden. Until…"
Jud stops her, the realization already on him. "Until I challenged you to confess it."
Her eyes fill.
"I confessed it." Her voice thins. "To the wrong priest."
You step forward before you can stop yourself. "Did you know? That my father knew?"
Martha closes her eyes.
"I assumed Grace had told him. He never stopped searching for it. And he never stopped questioning me." Her voice drops. "Then one day, he did stop asking." She opens her eyes again, and there's fear in them now. "That was when I knew he had figured it out for himself."
Your knees nearly give.
"Then you knew his death couldn't have been an accident."
"I…" She exhales, beaten by truth. "Yes. Yes, I knew the timing and the secrecy around his death were suspicious. I knew about the fight between Monsignor Wicks and your father in the days before he died."
The room tilts.
"And you let this town believe I was crazy?" Your voice rises before you can stop it. "You let me believe I was crazy?" You take another step toward her, years of hurt finally finding its identity. "You let them shun me like they shunned my grandmother — for what? To protect the reputation of two godless, selfish, greedy men?"
Martha flinches.
Jud rises halfway — not to silence you, just in case your grief needs something to steady itself against.
Blanc does not interrupt.
Martha's mouth trembles. "I told myself I was protecting the church."
"There is no church in what you protected. There's power. Rot. Cowardice. But don't you dare call it church."
Tears spill hot down your face. You don't bother wiping them away.
"My father died with the truth in his hands, and you left me here with their lies. You watched me grow up under the weight of that. You watched them look at me like I'd inherited some family madness when all I inherited was the one thing nobody else in this town had enough courage to carry."
Truth.
Martha bows her head, and for the first time since you've known her, she looks small.
"I was afraid," she whispers.
That almost makes you laugh.
"You were afraid?" You shake your head. "Grace was afraid. My father was afraid. I was a child, and I was afraid." Your voice breaks hard on the last word. "You were just complicit."
The church goes very still.
Martha looks to Jud instead of you now, like she cannot bear the full weight of what she's done unless it passes through a man first.
"I did not know how to stop it once it had begun."
Jud's face hardens — not with anger, but with judgment. With sorrow. With the terrible clarity of a man hearing sin name itself plainly at last.
Martha folds in on herself.
You drag in a breath that hurts all the way down.
"Tell the rest," you insist, your voice raw but steady. "All of it. No more hiding behind prayer. No more protecting dead men."
"Time is of the essence," Blanc adds, leaning toward her when she falters. "Now would be the ideal moment for full and catastrophic honesty."
And so she tells it.
In fragments at first, then in terrible, gathering certainty. How she watched Jefferson hollow the church out from the inside with lust and greed and blasphemy dressed as piety. How the plan formed. How the choice was made to become what she had spent a lifetime condemning, because she could no longer endure watching him defile the sanctuary she'd given her whole life to serve.
You only catch pieces at first. The sound of your own heartbeat keeps crowding the words out. Jefferson. The crypt. Nat. Samson. Poison. Timing. Opportunity.
Then one sentence cuts through all of it.
"I was grateful your father was dead," she says. When she looks at you, there are tears in her eyes. "I admit it. Because my secret died with him."
The room lurches.
You stare at her. "How could you call yourself a woman of God and rejoice over a man killed by the very greed you claimed to be protecting the church from?" The sob tears out before you can stop it. "My father was trying to protect it too. From Jefferson's reign."
"All my life," Martha says — to Jud now, because she already knows no mercy is left for her in you — "I was not the bad one. I was the good one. The faithful one. The one who served and protected the church. If I failed in that…" Her mouth trembles. "Then what is my life?"
"I understand," Jud tells her, and of course he does, because he is too good for this place, because he always was. His voice is quiet and steady and devastating in its kindness. "I promise I do. I'm here."
"I didn't reckon the cost…" she breaks.
"Samson." The name leaves you like a wound.
And there it is — the cruel shape of it. Her blind devotion cost her the man who loved her. A twisted echo of everything Jud has been willing to suffer because he cares for you.
Blanc steps in, practical even now. "Did you know what had happened when you found Samson's body?"
"I had an idea," she answers. "But I had to be sure."
So she tells that part too.
How she went to Nat's house. How she realized he had also been corrupted by the promise of Eve's Apple. How he meant to remove her and Samson from the board entirely and frame everything on Jud — the young priest with a violent past, already under suspicion, already close enough to Jefferson's death for guilt to look believable on him.
"He had poisoned my coffee," she says. Her breathing roughens, but still she pushes on. "A lethal dose of pentobarbital. No remedy once it's in you. Just numbness in the lips. Then a little more time for your final prayer."
Geraldine stiffens.
Martha goes on as if she no longer sees any of you, only the road she's already started down.
"Then he begged me to understand why he was doing it. That the money would lure back his harpy wife, and on and on." A tremor passes through her. "I told him I understood. Because I did. I understood it all." Her voice grows hollow. "These things I did with hatred in my heart. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That is the story the crime scene will tell the world."
She looks down at her hands.
"But inside my heart…" A broken breath. "Inside my heart, I know. Vengeance is mine."
You reach for Jud's shoulder and squeeze.
He didn't do it.
You knew he didn't do it.
"These sins I confess to you, Father." Martha's breathing turns ragged now. "I have lied. I have killed. And now…" Her face twists. "Now I have topped it all off with a real doozy."
Then she collapses.
Jud catches her before she hits the floor.
"Oh my God," you gasp, dropping to your knees beside them.
"Father, quickly now," Blanc urges.
Jud looks between you and Blanc, still holding Martha's failing weight. "What's happening?"
The thought turns your stomach. You can barely force it into words.
Blanc answers instead, sharp and urgent. "I knew when I saw her lips. It was already too late. She took the pentobarbital."
Geraldine wheels and runs for the door, shouting for a poison kit that does not exist quickly enough to matter.
You and Blanc kneel beside Martha and Jud.
She's fighting for air now.
"Forgive me, Father," she rasps. "For all you have endured. Forgive me, Lord, for… for Wicks and Nat and… Samson." A sob tears through her. "My sweet Samson."
Then she turns her hand toward you.
"Forgive me… dear girl."
The phrase almost breaks you all over again, but you take her hand. You look at her through tears and grief and fury and the terrible inheritance of both.
"It's not me whose forgiveness you should ask for."
A tear slips from the corner of Martha's eye.
Her gaze drifts to Jud. Her fingers clutch weakly at his sleeve.
He nods, his voice mild and impossibly kind.
"Martha… the last person is Grace. It has to be grace. Don’t worry. You're safe now. Let the hatred go."
"Grace," she whispers.
Her hand begins to loosen.
"I see it now. That poor girl. Forgive me, Grace." Her eyes drift back to Jud, already dimming. "Father…" A faint, broken smile touches her mouth. "You're really good at this."
A small, aching laugh slips out of him.
And then he begins to pray.
He absolves her as she dies. Not because she deserves easy mercy. Not because any of this can be undone. But because this is who he is. Because even here, even now, with all this wreckage in his lap, Jud Duplenticy chooses grace.
Under his hands, Martha takes her final breath.
He stays with her after, his hand resting against her cheek. Her own drops slack to her side.
Then a hard metallic clink.
The sound is so wrong in the silence that all three of you look down at once.
There, fallen from her loosened grip at last, is the jewel.
Eve's Apple.
Then Jud, staring at the thing that has haunted your family for decades, says the only possible thing.
"Shit."
You let out a broken gasp-laugh. "No fucking way."
Blanc looks at the jewel. Then at Martha. Then at the two of you kneeling there on either side of the woman who carried the secret all the way to the grave.
His jaw drops.
He lifts both hands in complete surrender, gets to his feet, and starts backing toward the doors.
You blink at him through the wreckage of the moment. "You're leaving?"
"My dear," he says, already halfway gone, "some revelations require a witness." He glances between you and Jud, then to the jewel glittering at Martha's side. "And some require privacy."
Then he turns and exits the church.
Just like that.
Leaving you and Jud alone in the sanctuary with Martha's body and the jewel that ruined generations.
The silence that follows feels older than the building itself.
Outside, thunder rolls somewhere far off, low and slow. Inside, stained-glass light spills across the floor and catches in Eve's Apple, throwing fractured color over your hands, over Martha's still face, over Jud's bowed head.
Slowly, carefully, you reach for the jewel and lift it into your palm.
All that suffering for something small enough to disappear inside one hand.
Your fingers close around it.
For a moment you just stare at it — the thing that poisoned bloodlines, church walls, marriages, reputations, grief. The thing men killed for and women were punished around. The thing your grandmother was damned for chasing, your father died for uncovering, and Jefferson built an empire of fear around protecting.
You let out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh.
"This is what they ruined all those lives for."
You kneel there with the jewel in your hand and Martha at your side and the man you love in front of you, and suddenly you feel how absurd it all is. How small. How pathetic. The greed. The lies. The years of suffering wrapped around an object that cannot hold even a fraction of what it cost.
"It doesn't even look worth it," you say.
A tired, broken smile ghosts across Jud's face. "No."
You turn the stone once in your palm, watching the light shatter through it.
"My father died because he knew. Grace lost everything because she guessed. Samson died because Martha couldn't let go. Nat died because he wanted more. Jefferson…" You shake your head. "Jefferson built his whole life around having what he believed was his."
Jud lowers his eyes.
"And now it's just this."
You crawl the small distance toward him and place Eve's Apple on the stone between your knees.
Then you lift your hands and cradle his face.
He goes still instantly.
His eyes close, leaning into your touch with the kind of trust that is almost unbearable to witness. Like some battered part of him has finally stopped waiting for the blow that never comes from you.
When he opens his eyes again, your own vision has gone wet.
So has his.
"Is it really over?" The question leaves you like a wound. Small. Shaking.
His face breaks softly under your hands.
"It's over," he tells you. Then again, steadier, as if saying it for both of you. "It's over."
You let out a breath that breaks halfway through.
"He cannot touch you anymore," he promises.
A sob slips free before you can stop it, and you bow your head.
"You're safe." His voice is quieter now, stripped of everything broad or priestly. Not for the room. Not for the dead. For you. Only you. "He cannot hurt you anymore. None of them can."
Your forehead falls to his shoulder.
For one long moment you just breathe there in the wreckage of everything — with the jewel at your knees, the dead at your side, and the one living thing you still trust holding you together with nothing but gentleness.
"I don't know what to do now," you admit into the fabric of his shirt.
His hand moves slowly over your back.
"Now," he says, "you live."
The answer is so simple it almost feels cruel.
Then, little by little, it starts to feel like mercy.
You pull back just enough to look at him. "Just like that?"
A sad, knowing ease touches his face.
"In time," he tells you with a small nod. "Not all at once. Not neatly. But yes." His thumb brushes once beneath your eye. "In time."
Four Weeks Later
"Where is it? I know you know where it is!"
Cy surges up from the couch, voice ricocheting off the rectory walls.
You, Jud, Blanc, and Bishop Langstrom sit there and watch him throw what is, at this point, a very familiar tantrum.
His lawyer rises half a second later, trying and failing to look in control.
"This is your last chance," Cy snaps, jabbing a finger at the room. "Or I drag every last one of you into court."
You fold your hands in your lap and tilt your head with carefully arranged innocence. "Cy, we're family." A small, sweet smile. "Don't you think if I knew where our inheritance was, I'd want to use it? Share it with you too?"
You put just enough weight on our to make him twitch.
"Oh, you conniving bitch—"
"Mr. Wicks." Bishop Langstrom cuts in sharply. "Control yourself." His expression hardens. "We had hoped this mediation might resolve the matter with some dignity."
Cy laughs once, ugly and humorless. "They're hiding the jewel. I know Martha gave it to them."
"We have already allowed your representatives to search the church, the rectory, and Miss Wicks's home thoroughly," Langstrom replies, each word clipped and priestly and not to be argued with. "They found nothing. Mr. Blanc was present when Martha Holt died and has denied any impropriety. At this point, you are making accusations without evidence."
Cy opens his mouth again. Langstrom lifts a hand.
"This meeting is over."
He gestures toward the door.
Cy shoves past Langstrom, shoulders by Blanc, and stops only when he reaches you and Jud. His face is red with thwarted greed, eyes bright with the kind of obsession that has already ruined too many men in your family.
"Any sign either of you sold it," he warns, dropping his voice, "big charity donations, roof repairs, suddenly upgraded communion wine — I will notice. I will watch. I will find out."
Jud, to his immense credit, manages to look sincerely pastoral for almost the entirety of this threat.
"I really do hope you come back to church someday, Cy." The corners of his mouth threaten betrayal. "Your real inheritance is in Christ."
You look at Jud, then back at Cy, and lift your hands in surrender. "What he said."
Cy scoffs like you're both beneath language, then storms out and peels off in his absurd little Mustang hard enough to spit gravel across the drive.
Silence follows.
Then, from beside the window, Langstrom mutters, "Little punk bitch."
That breaks you.
You clap a hand over your mouth. Blanc coughs pointedly into his fist. Jud lowers his head, shoulders shaking with the effort not to laugh outright in front of a bishop.
Langstrom adjusts his cuffs like he's said nothing at all. "I trust that remains off the official record."
"Entirely," Blanc assures him, far too solemnly.
Jud finally loses the fight and lets out the smallest, warmest laugh.
Your eyes find his immediately.
Four weeks later, and that still happens. Like instinct. Like gravity.
Blanc clears his throat and rises, smoothing his coat. "Well." He glances between you and the churchyard, then back with something suspiciously gentle hidden under the usual performance. "Would you care to take one last little spin around the property with me?"
You slip your arm through his with a smile. "I'd love to."
Blanc escorts you out with all the ceremony of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and no shame about any of it.
Jud watches you go.
He doesn't mean to make it obvious, but he does. His eyes follow you across the yard, track the lift of your laugh when Blanc says something ridiculous, linger just a little too long when you glance back toward the rectory.
Beside him, Bishop Langstrom steps closer, folding his hands behind his back with the ease of a man who has spent decades observing people in pews and pretending not to.
"That," he notes mildly, "is not how a man looks at a parishioner."
Jud startles just enough to betray himself. "I'm sorry?"
Langstrom keeps his gaze on the churchyard. "You heard me."
Jud exhales through his nose, already bracing. "Bishop—"
"Let us not insult each other by pretending I'm senile."
That shuts him up.
Langstrom turns at last, one silver brow lifting. He studies Jud for a beat, and when he speaks again, the sternness gives way to something older. Sadder. Wiser.
"Is it serious?"
Jud looks down at his hands. Then back out toward you and Blanc moving beneath the trees, your arm still threaded through the detective's.
"It wasn't supposed to be."
Langstrom nods, like he expected nothing else. "I thought so."
Jud swallows. "I never meant for this."
"No one ever does." The bishop glances at him. "That has very little bearing on whether it happens."
"It started out so simply. Both of us were the outcasts in town, targeted by the same—"
"Abuser," Langstrom says.
Jud nods. "We found solace in each other." He stops, registers the implication, and adds quickly, "Please don't think any of this is her fault. She didn't entice me or guilt me into anything. If anything she tried to put distance between us. So did I. But it never worked — we always just needed each other."
"How far has it gone?"
Jud sighs. "We have kissed. Twice. Mutually. I stepped outside of my vows willingly, and whatever you see fit as a consequence, I'll accept."
The bishop looks back out at the churchyard, voice lower now, more thoughtful than probing. "Love that reaches beyond what we call agape is something men in your position are taught to fear. To name as temptation. To deny before it can grow teeth." He pauses. "And yet was it not the very thing God made the first humans to know before shame ever entered the garden?"
Jud's gaze drifts back to you.
You've stopped walking. Blanc is pointing at something in the grass with theatrical seriousness, and you're smiling in that unguarded way that still catches Jud off guard every time he sees it.
When he answers, his voice is rougher than before.
"She has already paid for the sins of too many men." His hands tighten once at his sides. "I could not bear becoming another one."
Langstrom studies him in profile — the window light cutting along Jud's cheekbone, the exhaustion in him, the fear, the tenderness he's clearly stopped being able to hide.
"And do you believe that loving her would make you one of those men?"
"No." The answer is immediate. "Not loving her." A beat. "Hurting her. Failing her. Making her carry one more man's confusion, one more man's guilt, one more man's unfinished war with himself." His throat works. "That's what I'm afraid of."
The bishop's gaze moves to you, then back.
"Does she make you less compassionate?" he asks. "Less faithful? Less truthful? Less capable of service?"
"No."
"You are gentler since she entered your life. Not weaker — milder. There is a difference." He folds his hands behind his back again. "You listen differently. Speak differently. You carry less need to prove yourself and more certainty about who you are. It has made you far better at your calling."
Jud looks down, shaken by the generosity of it.
"I keep thinking there must be something disordered in wanting both," he says. "God and… this."
Langstrom lets the silence breathe before turning fully toward him.
"The church will remain closed indefinitely. A year at minimum. Long enough for the storm to pass. Long enough for this place to be restored to what it was meant to be — a refuge. A place of solitude. A place of love, not spectacle." He studies Jud carefully. "What do you intend to do with that year?"
Jud blinks. "I'm sorry?"
"You heard me." The bishop's tone stays even. "For the first time in a very long time, this institution is not asking something immediate of you. No services. No flock. No performance. Just time." A slight tilt of his head. "What will you do with it?"
Jud looks back out toward you.
You and Blanc are moving more slowly now, stopped near the old fence line. Even from here he can tell you're listening more than speaking. Thinking. Carrying things the way you always do — quietly, completely.
"I don't know," he says at last. "I suppose I'd help restore the church. Stay nearby. Make myself useful."
Langstrom hums.
"Or," he continues, "you could take the year for what it is."
"And what is that?"
"A mercy." He says it plainly. "A pause. An invitation to discern whether your life is still asking to be lived in exactly the shape you once promised it would."
Jud straightens, not defensive exactly, but wary. "Bishop…"
"I am not releasing you from anything," Langstrom says. "I am telling you that vows made by a man drowning in guilt are not always the clearest measure of God's will for the man he becomes afterward."
Jud's voice lowers. "You think I became a priest for the wrong reasons."
"I think pain drove you to the altar. That is not the same thing as calling." He softens. "Sometimes God meets us inside the wrong reasons and makes something good out of them anyway. But that does not mean we are forbidden from reexamining the road once we've survived it."
Jud says nothing.
"There are provisions," Langstrom continues. "Rarely used. Deliberately so. A leave of discernment. A petition for laicization, if it comes to that." His tone stays matter-of-fact, as if discussing roof repairs rather than Jud's entire life. "The church has exceptions, Father. We simply prefer not to advertise them to men who are merely bored, lustful, or having a crisis of self-importance."
That startles a breath of laughter out of Jud before he can stop it.
Langstrom allows himself the smallest satisfaction.
"If, after a year, you find that your life still belongs here exactly as it stands, you return to it with clarity instead of punishment," he goes on. "And if you discover that what God is asking of you now looks different than what He asked of the man who first came to Chimney Rock…" He lifts one shoulder. "There are ways to honor that too."
Jud stares at him. "You're giving me an out."
"I am saying you are framing this as though the only faithful choice is sacrifice. As though the options are God or her. Collar or love. Church or life." He lets that settle. "I am not convinced those are the only doors available to you."
"What are you saying?"
"That there are other ways to serve."
Jud's brow furrows. "Without the priesthood?"
"Perhaps. Or perhaps not without it entirely, but not in the form you've known. A leave can become laicization. A year of discernment can become a petition. A man can step away from parish ministry without stepping away from God." He continues, gentler now. "There are chaplains. Teachers. Carpenters restoring old sanctuaries with their own hands. Men who do holy work without standing at an altar every morning pretending they were never made for ordinary love."
Jud looks away, out toward you again.
"I don't know who I am without this."
"No," Langstrom says. "But I suspect you are beginning to know who you are with her."
That one makes Jud close his eyes.
When he opens them again, the yard is unchanged. You're still there. Still real. Still smiling at something Benoit has said, your whole face in it, the way you do when you forget yourself enough to let joy show.
And for the first time, the possibility of not having to lose one thing in order to keep the other moves through him like light instead of temptation.
"I don't want to choose between God and loving her," he says at last.
"Then perhaps," Langstrom replies, "you should stop assuming God is asking you to."
"A year."
"One year," Langstrom repeats.
Jud's eyes stay on you. "And if she still wanted me at the end of it…"
The bishop glances sideways at him. "Father, unless I have grossly misread the last several months, that girl would walk straight into a storm if she thought you were standing on the other side of it."
A small, helpless smile touches Jud's mouth.
"She would," he admits. "She has."
As if summoned by the truth of that, you turn and wave toward the rectory.
"Jud! Oh — uh — Father Jud! Bishop Langstrom! Come join us!"
Langstrom's mouth tilts. "Shall we?"
Jud looks at him once, gratitude quiet but unmistakable. "Yeah. Thank you."
Dear Jud,
Thank you.
Even writing that feels small. Two words don't come close to carrying what I mean when I think about you and everything you've been to me. Your friendship. Your kindness. The way you protected me. The way you saw me when I had spent so many years feeling invisible unless I was being judged.
I was alone here for such a long time. Really alone. Ever since my father died, Chimney Rock has felt less like a hometown and more like a place I survived out of spite. Then one day, this young priest with a questionable past and a face that looked far too honest for this town showed up and changed everything.
Suddenly, I didn't feel so alone anymore.
I felt seen. Heard. Understood in ways I didn't know I'd been starving for. And maybe most dangerously of all, I felt wanted.
You made me think maybe God hadn't forgotten me after all. Maybe He hadn't turned His back on me the way this town did. Maybe every desperate prayer I ever whispered into the dark was answered when you came here.
You taught me how not to be afraid of my uncle before he died. I pretended to have that strength for years, but you were the first person who ever really gave it to me. You helped me stand up to people whose opinions had held too much power for too long. You made me feel less crazy for believing my father's death was wrong — that it was brushed aside too easily, buried because the truth was too inconvenient for too many people.
I do not know how to explain to you what that gave me.
I also don't think I'll ever be able to forget what belongs to you now. Too many drinks at Il Diavolo's. Hiding under tables. Sneaking out the back door like idiots. The look on your face when you saw my paintings in the kitchen. You refusing to let me spend my birthday alone. The wildflower you carved for me, which I still think might be one of the most beautiful things anyone has ever given me — because I know your hands made it when your heart was full.
And then there were the kisses.
I still don't know how to write about those without it sounding ridiculous or incomplete. I only know they did not feel careless. They did not feel wrong. They felt like something I had been missing the words for my whole life. For lack of anything better, I keep coming back to the same one.
Sacred.
I am so sorry for everything my uncle put you through. For the weight he put on your back. For the way caring about me became something that cost you. And I am even more sorry for what I'm about to say now, because the last thing I ever wanted was to become another source of pain in your life.
I'm leaving Chimney Rock.
I've gone back and forth on it a hundred times, but I think I've known for a while that I can't stay here and become another thing this town uses against you. This place is your home now in a way it never was mine, and I don't want to be the reason your suffering lingers longer than it has to. If I stay, people will keep talking. They'll keep watching. They'll keep making you carry what was never yours to begin with.
And more than anything, I don't want you to keep living as though caring about me is some kind of betrayal.
I heard what you said in the woods. I believed you. I still do. But how can I look at what you are, what you've given, what you've already sacrificed, and ask you for more? How can I stand there while you trade away your calling piece by piece just to keep me nearby?
Martha was right about one thing. You are very good at what you do.
You were my saving grace, Jud. And I think some part of me always will be yours too.
Please don't come after me.
If what we had was real — and I know it was — then let it stay something beautiful instead of turning it into one more thing this town can ruin.
js stopping by to say that i ADORE sanctuary it's everything i've been looking for in a fic esp one with jud aaaa!!! i have been converted by that movie and ur story is defo not helping me with the priest thing 😭😭😭 /pos THANK YOU FOR SHARING !!!
ahhh thank you so much!!! sanctuary has such a special place in my heart, so hearing that it’s everything you’ve been looking for in a jud fic means the world to me.
and PLEASEEE not the priest thing 💀 i fear i may have accidentally contributed to that problem and for that i can only offer my sincerest apologies (i am not sorry at all).
also perfect timing because the final chapter comes out tonight!!! i genuinely cannot believe we’re at the end already. i hope the last chapter gives them the ending everyone deserves
James Moriarty x Fem!Reader
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word count: 3.6k
warnings: fade to black intimacy (semi-public), consensual power dynamics, mild exhibitionism, gunfire/violence mention, institutionalization mention, family conflict, jealousy/manipulation, strong language
a/n: hi lovelies 🤍 sorry this chapter took a little longer than planned. i was out of the country last week and had almost no signal, so posting/writing was a lot harder than i expected. this chapter is a bit shorter, but i still wanted to get it out for you all. hope you enjoy!
You and James rush outside just in time to see Shou'an being hauled away, her wrists bound, her face looking more uncertain than you thought possible now. Men crowd the drive in a confusion of lantern light and shouted orders. The whole estate seems to pulse with the ugly thrill of danger only just contained.
For one breathless moment, all you can do is stand there and watch as they lead her off.
Then Edie appears at your side.
"Well," she remarks, drifting close enough that her shoulder brushes James's as though she has simply always stood there, "wherever you two disappeared to, I do hope it was worth missing the main event."
Something hot and immediate twists beneath your ribs.
Before you can offer anything properly cutting, Edie's gaze moves between you and James, alert and faintly amused, as though she has reached some private conclusion and intends to enjoy it in silence.
"You seem flushed," she adds.
James parts his lips, no doubt armed with something insufferably smooth, but you speak first.
"And you seem very eager to know where we have been."
Edie only smiles, completely unbothered.
"Professional curiosity," she replies. "Surely you cannot fault me for that."
You could.
Quite easily.
But before you can decide which barb to throw first, your father's voice cuts across the drive.
"Edie, please. I need you over here."
At once, your attention snaps toward him.
Of course it is her he calls for, with that same effortless expectation, as though she has long occupied a place at his shoulder — one he had never once thought to offer you.
Edie glances back, catching your eye before she goes, and the corner of her mouth tilts.
"I must go assist your father."
The words are innocent enough.
That only makes you resent them more.
You watch her cross to him through the lantern glow. Hodge does not so much as glance in your direction before drawing her into quiet conversation, already relying on her with that easy, practiced confidence — the kind you spent years trying to earn, and he gives to her without a thought.
Beside you, James leans a little closer.
"You are angry with the wrong person."
A laugh slips from you, though there is very little humor in it. "Am I?"
"Yes." His voice stays low. "She is useful to him. That is all."
"And is that what she is to you as well?" The question leaves you before you can temper it. "Useful?"
He turns to you at once.
"I fear her use to me and her use to your father are not comparable."
Heat rises to your face, though whether from embarrassment or irritation you cannot quite say.
"Are you quite sure about that?" you ask, your eyes returning to where Edie stands at your father's side. "It seems she is rather frequently employed as a pawn in you gentlemen's efforts to make me jealous."
That earns a change in him. Not quite surprise. Something closer to being caught.
"One gentleman," he corrects quietly. "Your father has no such ambitions on my behalf."
You cut him a look. "Do not be tiresome."
The corner of his mouth threatens at a smile. "I was only clarifying."
"And I am only observing," you return, "that Edie appears to spend a remarkable amount of time being useful to men who enjoy moving people about like pieces on a board."
His gaze drifts toward Edie and Hodge, then back to you, as though weighing how honest he means to be.
"I did not mean to use her."
"No?" You lift a brow. "Then the little performance in the drawing room was what, exactly? A lapse in your moral character?"
"That would imply I possess one."
You should not find that amusing. You nearly do anyway.
His voice softens when he continues. "I wanted to see whether you would care."
You blink at him.
There it is.
Plain at last.
The night around you seems to quiet, the shouting in the drive suddenly farther off, less immediate than the sentence standing between you.
"And?" you ask, quieter now despite yourself. "Were you satisfied with your findings?"
His eyes hold yours.
"Not at all."
Before you can decide what to do with that, he adds, quieter still, "I discovered I disliked seeing you angry with me far more than I disliked the thought of your being indifferent."
You glance once more toward Edie, who still remains at your father's shoulder, composed and calm and infuriatingly at ease in a place that has never belonged to you.
"I still do not like her," you say, though there is less bite in it now and more honesty.
"No," he says. "I gathered as much."
You draw a breath, steadying yourself by force. "I must find Sherlock."
Sherlock tells you and James to meet him at Appleton Manor. He is setting off to retrieve his mother from the asylum, and whatever questions rise in you are brushed aside by the urgency in his voice.
So you do not ask them.
You and James simply climb into the carriage and set off.
The ride is silent for most of the journey.
You sit on one side.
He sits on the other.
The carriage rocks over rutted ground, lantern light slipping faintly through the curtained windows with every turn, throwing the two of you in and out of shadow. The wheels rattle. The leather creaks. Somewhere beyond the glass, wind moves through the hedgerows in long, dry sighs.
The confined space magnifies everything you are trying not to think about: the near-kiss in the hidden room, Edie at your father's side, James's infuriating ability to put words to wounds you would much rather leave unnamed, and the far more dangerous fact that each time he does, some part of you is relieved to be seen at all.
Across from you, he sits with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, outwardly composed, though you know him well enough now to see the strain in the stillness. One hand rests against his thigh. The other turns his ring once. Then again. He has not looked directly at you in several minutes.
He stays frustratingly quiet.
That should help.
It does not.
If anything, his silence is worse than his wit. Worse than the teasing, worse than the little smirks and carefully placed provocations. At least when he is speaking you have something to push against. Something to answer. Something to blame for the way your pulse misbehaves whenever his attention settles too fully on you.
The carriage lurches over a rut.
You steady yourself with one hand against the seat.
He glances up.
Only for a second.
Still, it is enough.
"You might at least attempt conversation," you say at last, because the silence has become unbearable and because you would rather start a quarrel than sit inside it another minute.
His eyes lift fully now.
"I had not realized you found my company so lacking without it."
You let out a quiet, humorless laugh. "Do not be smug. I am in no mood to endure it."
"That," he replies, "would imply you are usually in the mood to endure it."
The carriage rocks again, and lamplight catches briefly across his face, tracing the line of his mouth, the tiredness at the edges of him, the composure he is wearing like a dare.
You hate how easily he can sit there after everything.
You hate more that he is not easy at all.
He is simply better at disguising it.
"You are very calm," you observe.
His gaze stops near the curtained window, then returns to you.
"I am merely quiet."
A beat passes.
Then, lower: "There is a difference."
You study him in the wavering light. "And which are you usually?"
His mouth shifts, though not quite into a smile. "You know very well I am rarely either."
"No. What I know is that you are impossible when you speak and intolerable when you do not."
His fingers still on the ring. For once, he does not answer at once.
The carriage dips, rights itself, and the silence stretches again between you, taut as wire.
At last, he says, "You are still angry."
"Perhaps."
"With me?"
You laugh again, more softly this time, though there is still no humor in it. "Do not flatter yourself. I am angry with everyone."
He leans back slightly, watching you now with that stupid, patient focus that makes it feel as though he is waiting for the truth to emerge whether you mean to give it or not.
"An admirably broad stance."
"Oh, do be quiet."
A faint curve touches his mouth. "Forgive me, but did you not just ask me not to be quiet?"
"For God's sake." Your temper snaps clean through the last of your restraint. "Are you truly going to sit there and pretend none of what happened in that house — or over these past days we have spent together — has happened?"
His eyes narrow slightly. "I had been under the impression that pretending was your preferred method."
That does it.
You move before sense can intervene.
One moment you are across from him, furious and breathless and sick to death of your own thoughts. The next the carriage jolts beneath your knees as you cross the narrow space between you and catch him by the front of his coat.
He barely has time to look startled.
Then you kiss him.
His breath catches hard against your mouth.
For one astonished second, he does not move at all.
Then he is kissing you back.
One hand catches your waist. The other braces against the seat beside you as the carriage sways beneath the sudden shift of weight. The kiss is hot and immediate and stripped of every last civilized pretense. It is anger and relief and wanting — the ruin of every clever thing left unsaid.
You feel the sound that leaves him before you fully hear it.
Feel the way his fingers tighten at your side.
Feel the helplessness in his answer when your hand slides from his coat to his jaw, holding him there as though you mean to punish him with it.
The carriage lurches again, and the movement sends you more fully against him. His arms gather you in, dragging your skirts up just enough to keep you close as his hands find the curve of your ass and hold there, firm and unashamed.
You bite lightly at his lip.
He groans.
The sound goes through you like flame.
When your mouth leaves his, only to find the line of his throat, his head tips back against the carriage wall. His breath comes uneven now, his composure in tatters beneath your hands.
"Do…" he gasps when your lips brush the pulse there, "whatever you please to me."
You draw back just enough to look at him.
His hair is already disordered, his mouth flushed, his eyes too dark to mistake. There is something in his face you have seen glimpses of before and never this plainly — something that wants not merely to take, but to be undone. To be at your mercy and glad of it.
It strikes something equally dangerous in you.
Your hand slides into his hair, not gentle now, and tilts his head back the way you want it.
He lets you.
More than that — he gives himself to it with a shuddering willingness that nearly steals your breath.
"You do like surrendering at the worst possible moments," you murmur against his throat.
A strained laugh leaves him. "Only when the terms are agreeable."
"You think these are agreeable?"
"I think," he says, his voice rough enough to fray at the edges, "that if you mean to ruin me, you need only continue."
Your fingers slide down his waistcoat, freeing the last of the buttons, while his hands find the hem of your skirts and gather the fabric slowly — almost reverently — until it pools at your hips. You lean in and kiss him once, hard, before guiding his hand to your thigh. He reaches for his trouser fastenings; you help, urgency turning careful movements careless.
Buttons give. Silk rustles. Breath tangles.
When at last there is nothing left between you, you claim the space you have been circling for days. The closeness wrenches a desperate sound from him and shatters whatever composure either of you had left.
"Use me," he whispers, the words tearing loose between shallow breaths. "Take whatever you need."
You do exactly that.
You set the rhythm — deliberate, unrelenting, a silent insistence that every ounce of your frustration will be spent here and now — and he meets it without protest. His hands splay across your hips as though he means to hold on or willingly be held hostage; you cannot decide which, and find you do not particularly care.
The carriage creaks around you, leather and wheel and rutted road conspiring to keep time, while the world beyond the curtains remains a distant, irrelevant blur.
Then the carriage rocks to a stand-still.
A timid yet, professional knock lands against the door.
“Miss Hodge? Mr. Moriarty? You have arrived.”
You freeze. Still straddling him, both of you desperate to catch your breath. His forehead drops to your shoulder in mute, incredulous torment.
He lifts his head. “How,” he asks, in a voice entirely unsuited to polite conversation, “did he know we both…arrived?”
Your fingers are still tangled in his hair. You tug once, not gently. “Behave yourself. Ugh. Fool that I am. I hadn’t even noticed the carriage stop.”
“Sir? Ma’am?” the driver calls again. “Shall I open the door?”
You scramble off him. He muffles a groan at the loss of contact, “Fuck.” In the dim light you both tug clothing toward some semblance of order, buttons and ribbons and whatever scraps of dignity remain within reach.
“One moment,” you manage, smoothing your hair and skirts with hands that are not entirely steady. “I’m — ah — looking for an earring I dropped.”
“That,” James starts, fastening the last button of his trousers, “is the best you can devise?”
“Have you something better?”
His answering grin is wicked and still breathless. “Nothing fit for a coachman’s ears.”
“Ma’am?” The driver again, sounding politely concerned.
“Found it!” you call, your voice cracking very slightly on the lie. “We’ll be right out.”
James leans forward, lips brushing the shell of your ear. “Another moment and he’d need neither torch nor imagination to know exactly what transpired.”
You turn, catch the lingering heat in his eyes, and refuse to blush. “Then we had best compose ourselves.”
“Compose,” he repeats, tasting the word like a secret. “You may try.”
He offers his hand to help you from the seat. You hesitate only a heartbeat before taking it, your pulse still unsteady from what was nearly — perhaps inevitably — left unfinished.
When the carriage door swings wide and cool night air rushes in, you step down first. Spine straight. Gaze fixed ahead. Every inch the picture of a woman to whom nothing whatsoever has happened.
James follows, just a pace behind, and for once he keeps silent.
It is the quiet of two people who know they have crossed a line that will not be uncrossed, and who intend, at the earliest possible opportunity, to cross it again.
Sherlock pushes open the front door of Appleton Manor scarcely half an hour later, guiding his mother gently across the threshold.
You and James stand in the foyer a deliberate pace apart — close enough to suggest composure, far enough to keep from combusting. Your hair is freshly repinned; his cravat has been retied with suspicious haste. The space between you still hums with everything the carriage left unresolved.
Sherlock's eyes sweep over you both the instant he steps inside.
"Good Lord — are you two all right?"
"Why ever wouldn't we be, Sherlock?" James replies, rocking back on his heels with the serene expression of a man keeping a very good secret.
You clear your throat. "Perfectly fine. A long ride, that's all."
Your hand drifts to your collar, as though a fingertip could conceal the small bruise blooming where James’ mouth clearly was.
Sherlock takes in the details with that quick, merciless attention of his: the slight disarray of your skirts, the uneven rise of your shoulders, the way James radiates satisfaction like a man who has recently won something significant and intends to go on winning it.
"You look…" He hesitates, as though searching for a polite diagnosis. "Dishevelled."
James's smile widens — the expression of a cat who has not only had the cream but has secured the entire dairy. "Blame the road. Terrible ruts."
"And the wind," you add, a beat too quickly. "Very blustery."
“Flustered, my dear—that’s the word,” Sherlock’s mother chirps from his arm, eyes bright with unfiltered observation.
"An excellent diagnosis, Mother," Sherlock says instead, with the weary diplomacy of a man choosing his battles. "May I present Miss Hodge and Mr. Moriarty — my friends."
"Friends!" Mrs Holmes slips free of Sherlock's arm and catches your hands in hers, examining you with vivid blue eyes that miss nothing. "My son never had many companions growing up. Any…really," she adds in a stage whisper grand enough to reach the rafters.
Her appearance startles you. Pale gold hair in soft waves, a gaze that is focused and warm in equal measure. Nothing like the broken figure you had imagined after hearing of a grieving mother confined to an asylum. She looks disconcertingly vibrant, as though sorrow has merely sharpened her rather than hollowed her out.
"It is an honour to meet you at last," you say, managing something close to a steady smile.
She turns to James next. He takes her hand and brushes a polite kiss across her knuckles. "The pleasure is entirely mine, Mrs Holmes. You are radiant."
"Nonsense," she laughs, cheeks colouring. "Compared with your lovely companion, I am positively drab." Her eyes move between you with the satisfied air of someone assembling a puzzle she already knows the picture of. "You make such a handsome couple."
Heat climbs your neck.
James straightens, an elegant bow half-formed on his lips. "Thank—"
"Oh, we are not a couple," you say, rather too quickly.
A fractional pause. Sherlock's expression sharpens with dry amusement. Mrs Holmes tilts her head, entirely undeterred.
"Not a couple?" she echoes. "Mm. Perhaps not yet."
James's smile turns wicked — the look of a man who has just received unexpected encouragement from the universe itself. "Hope springs eternal, Madam."
You press your elbow into his ribs, subtle only in the loosest possible sense. He coughs out a laugh, delighted.
Mrs Holmes pats your joined arms as though bestowing a benediction. "I shall look forward to seeing which of you is right."
"Yes, well." Sherlock clears his throat with theatrical volume. "Mother, let me show you to your chambers before this devolves any further."
He steers her toward the staircase. She casts one last, sparkling glance over her shoulder as they go, the look of a woman who has already made up her mind and is simply waiting for events to confirm it.
When the hall quiets, you exhale.
James leans in, dropping his voice until it settles against your ear like silk. "A gracious guest indulges the hostess's fantasies."
You summon your sharpest glare. It only seems to feed him.
"I should hate to disappoint her," he adds, smugness polished to velvet.
"You already disappoint me enough for she and I."
It is meant to sting. It lands breathless instead, and you hate that he hears it.
His gaze drops briefly to the mark at your throat, half-hidden by your collar. When his eyes return to yours they are dark with the particular memory of how it got there.
"You did not sound disappointed twenty minutes ago."
Your breath falters. The silent carriage, the heat of him, the way you had dragged each other well past the point of sense — it is all still too close to the surface, too warm beneath your skin.
"James," you warn, though it comes out nearer a plea than a threat.
"Yes?" He steps closer, his voice dropping further. "You know…I have just noticed that we are, quite tragically…unsupervised again."
"Sherlock will return in moments," you manage.
"A lifetime," he seductively whispers, "compared with what I could do in one."
Your pulse hammers. You tell yourself to be sensible — to step back, to cool the heat he keeps fanning so effortlessly — but the space between you seems to be shrinking entirely on its own.
"Do not go forming any daft ideas," you whisper.
He dips his head until his lips brush the curve of your ear without quite kissing it.
"Too late," he breathes. The single exhale turns your skin to sparks. "Haven't you noticed? Daft ideas are my specialty."
Footsteps sound on the staircase — Sherlock's tread, brisk and unerring. James straightens at once, smoothing the front of his coat with a magician's unhurried ease, composure settling back over him like a well-fitted glove. You manage a step back, your heart still rattling.
Sherlock appears a moment later and launches immediately into his next plan, and you nod at the right intervals, making all the right noises of attention, while the ghost of breath hit with desire and a whispered promise lingers at the edge of everything…patient, certain, and entirely unwilling to be ignored.
One minute, he had said.
You are beginning to suspect he would make it feel considerably longer.
taglist: (if i have missed anyone, please let me know!)
@mischiefmanaged71 @skys-writings @cipheress-to-k-pop @weathergirl01 @13ariaa @mellenniumfalcon44 @tendersolstice @dobby-is-a-fr33-elf @sihtricswife @a-sunflower-in-bloom @mentallyillbartender @wafflesncream @veselaliska @wolfiemarley @noodle582 @para-nora @bert123445 @callsign-rusty @callsign_rusty @eyukkie @nenelysian @elsisenta @xoxoishu
Porch Light by Noah Kahan is also good for a devestating fic
okay see i’ve been needing to get into noah kahan…i’ve listen to his song call your mom a lot when writing the emotional chapters of my aaron hotchner fic!!!
The Purest Things: My Life with the Hotchner Boys (Brothers Hotchner)
aaron hotchner x fem!reader
Previous | Next | The Purest Things Masterlist | Taglist Form
word count: 10k
Warnings: references to drugs, alcohol, and overdoses, non-graphic intimacy, family conflicts, references to character deaths
a/n: before anyone panics LOL yes, this chapter is a pretty significant time jump 🫶 but i promise i’m doing it on purpose!! from here on out, chapters will clearly state the time frame they take place in, and the masterlist will reflect where everything falls in the overall timeline. i made a separate post explaining the format a little more in depth here :)
May 2013
Bookend: "Cruel is the strife of brothers." — Aristotle
"Okay, I have to know," you ask, laughing as you swipe the key card and shoulder open the hotel room door. "What was your favorite part of today?"
Jack tears past you with all the momentum of a seven-year-old who has just been handed Manhattan and told to enjoy himself. Shopping bags bounce against his legs, toy boxes thump onto the carpet, and his sneakers squeak as he skids to a stop in the middle of the room.
"The giant whale. No—the huge dinosaur. No, no, the super giant lions," he announces, dropping to the floor and immediately tearing through the small mountain of things the two of you absolutely did not need to buy him.
Aaron shuts the door behind you and takes in the chaos with dry affection. "I think New York may have been a little too underwhelming for him."
You smile and slip your arms around his waist, tipping your face up to his. "We're monsters, really. Dragging him all over the city like this."
"Look at him," Aaron says, all sarcasm as he gestures toward Jack, who is currently making a King Kong figurine climb an Empire State Building replica while roaring at full volume. "He's barely holding up."
You laugh against his chest, and the sound settles him the way it always seems to. A year later and he still folds around you the same way — one hand coming to your back, the other settling at your hip, like keeping you close has stopped being something he thinks about and become something he simply does.
Jack yawns so hard it nearly knocks the next roar out of him, then rubs at his eyes with the back of his hand.
"He's getting sleepy," you say, your cheek resting briefly against Aaron's shoulder.
"Mhm." He steps away just enough to cross the room, then kneels beside Jack. "Why don't you say goodnight to Y/N, and then I'll help you get ready for bed."
Jack nods, all drowsy obedience now, and gets to his feet. Then he launches himself at you, arms wrapping tight around your middle with all the wholehearted force of a child who has never learned how to love by halves.
"Thank you for the best day ever," he says into your sweater. "I love you."
Your eyes fly to Aaron.
He's still kneeling where he was, but he's gone completely still. Not frozen exactly. More like the moment has caught him in the ribs and held him there. His face shifts in that quiet, devastating way it does when he's feeling too much to speak right away.
Then a smile starts, slow and helpless, as he looks at the two most important people in his world.
"I—" You have to stop and steady yourself. "I love you too, Jack. So much."
You bend and kiss his cheek. He answers by throwing his arms around your neck and pressing a loud, wholehearted kiss back onto yours. You can't stop smiling, even through the tears already threatening.
Aaron rises and comes toward you both, one hand smoothing over Jack's hair. "Go brush your teeth. I'll be in there in a minute."
"Goodnight!" Jack shouts, scooping up as many toys as his arms can physically manage and staggering toward the adjoining room like a tiny, determined pack mule.
The door swings shut behind him.
You turn to Aaron, still looking a little stunned yourself. "He said…"
"I know." His arms come around you at once, and he kisses the top of your head like he can't help himself.
"He's never said it before."
"He's said it to me plenty," Aaron admits.
You pull back just enough to look at him. "Really? You never told me."
"I wanted him to say it to you when he was ready." His thumb brushes beneath one of your eyes, catching the tears before they fall too far. "I didn't want it to become something he thought he was supposed to do."
You let out a shaky laugh and wipe at your face. "I'm going to start crying the second you leave the room and this actually processes."
He smiles, softer now, and there's so much love in it that your chest aches. "Then I'll stay until it does."
Your breath catches.
He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, fingertips lingering at your cheek. "Happy anniversary."
You smile through the tears and slide your arms around his neck. "Happy anniversary."
When you kiss him, it starts sweet. It never stays only that.
His hands settle at your waist, grounding and warm, and he leans into you with that same steady certainty he gives everything he truly means. Outside the hotel windows, the city keeps moving. Inside, the room has gone hushed and golden and full of the kind of happiness that still feels a little unreal.
When he pulls back, his forehead rests against yours.
He nods once toward the door Jack disappeared through. "I'll need ten minutes to get him into bed." Then his gaze comes back to yours, deepening just enough to send warmth skimming down your spine. "After that, I'm all yours."
You smile, brushing your thumb along his jaw. "I'll be right here."
His expression eases into something almost boyish. "Good."
And when he finally steps away to go tuck Jack in, you stand in the middle of the hotel room surrounded by shopping bags, toy dinosaurs, and the bright glittering pulse of New York outside the glass — and think that for all the spectacular things the city gave you that day, none of them came close to the feeling of being loved by both Hotchner boys at once.
You both collapse into each other afterward, half tangled in sheets, half tangled in each other, still catching your breath while your mouths wander lazily over skin that already knows where to go. His kisses land wherever he can reach — your shoulder, your throat, the corner of your mouth — each one quieter now, gentler, the kind that feel less like hunger than wonder.
Aaron's fingers drift down your spine as you lie against his chest, boneless and warm.
"That was…" He lets out a slow breath. "Incredible."
You smile against his skin and press a kiss to his chest. "I still can't believe it keeps getting better every time."
"Practice," he says, with all the gravity of a man offering professional analysis, "makes perfect."
His hand slides lower and gives your bare backside a light tap.
You laugh and push yourself up just enough to grab the water from the nightstand, then tug on the black T-shirt he abandoned at some point in the evening. It falls halfway down your thighs and smells like him, which feels deeply unfair.
"So," you begin.
That one word is enough to make him look over.
He props himself up beside you, one arm settling around your waist as the two of you lean back against the headboard. "That tone usually means I should prepare myself."
You take a sip of water, buying yourself a second. "I know we said no gifts on this trip."
His mouth twitches. "We did."
"And I am aware that you paying for the whole trip already qualifies as a gift, which sort of violated the spirit of the no-gifts agreement in the first place, but that's not what I'm talking about."
He laughs softly. "I'm glad we're making ethical distinctions."
"I'm trying to stay focused."
"Mm." He turns a little more toward you, hand warm at your side. "And how is that going?"
"Poorly." You let out a breath. "But that's beside the point."
"And what," he asks, "is the point?"
You look down at the glass in your hands, suddenly much more nervous than you were five minutes ago, which feels deeply unfair considering what the two of you were just doing.
"I've been thinking."
He goes still in that way he does when he knows something matters. "Good thinking or bad thinking?"
You glance up at him, helpless. "See, this is the problem. You know me too well."
"I do." His fingers sweep once along your waist. "So?"
"I think it's good thinking. At least to me." You pause. "It might be terrifying thinking. Jury's still out."
"Sweetheart."
The word alone nearly threatens what remains of your courage.
He takes the glass gently from your hand and sets it on the nightstand, then tucks a piece of hair behind your ear. "Tell me what's on your mind."
You swallow.
"A year ago," you start carefully, "I gave you a key to my house."
His eyes hold yours. "You did."
"And I've loved it." Your voice steadies a little as you keep going. "I love that you can come over whenever you want. I love that I can show up at your place and it already feels normal. I love that Jack walks into my kitchen like he owns part of it." A small smile slips out. "Honestly, I think he might."
That gets a quiet laugh from him.
You glance down for a second, then back up. "A few months ago you mentioned your lease is almost up. And I guess that got me thinking. Actually, no, that's a lie. I'd already been thinking about it before then, I just…" You exhale shakily. "I needed something practical to hide behind."
His hand tightens slightly at your waist. Not to stop you. Just to hold you steady.
"And?" he asks, gently.
Your pulse is hammering now. There is no graceful way to say this. No elegant path through it. Only the truth.
"I think you and Jack should move in with me."
The words leave the room and hang there.
Aaron doesn't move.
Not in alarm. Not exactly in hesitation either. Just in that deep, stunned stillness that means you've said something big enough to strike him speechless.
You rush to fill the space, because apparently self-preservation has abandoned you entirely tonight.
"I'm not saying tomorrow," you add quickly. "I'm not trying to ambush you. I just…" A nervous little laugh slips out. "I love you. I love Jack. You're both there half the time anyway, and whenever one of us leaves the others place it just feels…" You shake your head. "Wrong. A little."
Still nothing.
You wince. "You see, this is why I was spiraling. Because now you're doing the silent processing thing and I can't tell if I've just made the most romantic suggestion of my life or completely detonated the room."
That finally gets something out of him.
A laugh. Involuntary and helpless.
Your shoulders drop half an inch in relief. "Okay. Good. Laughing is good."
Aaron looks at you then and there is so much feeling in his face it almost stops your breathing.
"You think," he says slowly, "that I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to let you down?"
"I don't know what you're doing," you admit. "You're very unreadable for a man who was significantly less unreadable ten minutes ago."
That gets another laugh, fuller this time. He drags a hand over his face like he needs a second to get himself together.
"No," he says. "I'm sitting here trying to comprehend the fact that the woman I love just asked me and my son to come home to her."
He reaches for your hand, threading your fingers together with his. "Do you have any idea what that sounds like to me?"
You shake your head once.
"It sounds like everything I've ever wanted."
Your eyes sting instantly.
"Aaron—"
"But." He catches your hand a little tighter. "I need you to let me finish, because if I don't say this right, it's going to bother me for the rest of my life."
You nod.
He shifts closer, angling toward you fully now, expression open in a way that still feels rare enough to treasure. "I have thought about it. All the time, actually. You in bed with me, not just sometimes. All the time. Jack doing last-minute homework at the table while we make breakfast. Your shoes by the front door. Me coming home and knowing you're there." His mouth curves faintly. "I want us to stop leaving at the end of the night and pretending we're not already a family in every way that matters."
His gaze softens. "I think about the three of us building something that feels peaceful. Consistent. Ours."
The ache in your chest turns sweet.
Then the look on his face shifts again. Still tender. More serious now.
"But," he continues, and now you really do stop breathing, "I couldn't walk into your life and assume that loving you gives me the right to plant myself — my son, my entire life — in your home." His hand squeezes around yours. "And if I'm honest, there is a part of me that feels like I should be the one making that space for us. Not because I think you need me to. God knows you don't. And not because I think what you've built isn't enough. You have made the most beautiful home and life for yourself. It's more that…" He exhales, searching for it. "Jack's my responsibility. My job is to make sure his life feels stable. Safe. I don’t want to mistake being wanted for being entitled."
Your heart breaks a little in the warmest possible way.
"Aaron."
He gives you the smallest look, like he already knows you're about to argue with him.
"I already have the home," you say quietly. "It's paid for. It's mine." Your hand slides over his chest, anchoring there. "And I'm not leaving it."
That catches his full attention.
"It's what I have left of the people who raised me," you continue. "Every room in that house still feels like them in some way. Their things, their choices, their love. I'm not ready to let that go, and honestly, I don't think I ever will be."
Something in his face gentles immediately.
"So this isn't me asking you to move into my space while I graciously allow you and your son to exist there," you continue. "This is me telling you I already have the home, I love the home, I want to stay in the home… and I want it to be yours too."
His hand shifts on your waist.
"And for the record," you add, "I am not asking you to move in for free."
His brows lift.
You sit up a little straighter. "You absolutely have to help with the bills, because with you and Jack practically living there half the week already, my utilities have skyrocketed."
That startles a laugh out of him.
You point at him. "I'm serious."
"I know you're serious."
"The water and electric bills alone, Aaron. The number of waffles and showers happening under that roof—"
He bends, laughing into your shoulder now. He tries, visibly, to pull himself together. Fails. "I'm sorry."
"You're not sorry."
"No," he admits, mouth still twitching. "I'm really not."
You narrow your eyes. "Good. Then take this seriously."
That sobers him — not fully, because the amusement is still there, but enough. His hand slides back to your waist, thumb resting there in a slow pass that says he's with you now. Really with you.
"I am taking it seriously," he says. "Very seriously."
"Good."
He studies you for a second, then nods once like he's settling something in himself. "Then yes. We do this properly."
Your breath catches. "Properly?"
"Bills. Groceries. Repairs. The practical things." His fingers tighten gently at your side. "I'm not moving in as a guest. If Jack and I are living there with you, we contribute. We take care of it with you."
Something in your chest goes warm and unsteady.
You smile, small and helpless. "Okay."
"And," he adds, because apparently he's not done devastating you, "I'd like for us to actually sit down and go through it. What you need. What would make it feel fair. What would let it still feel like home to you." His mouth softens. "I don't want to disrupt something sacred to you. I want to fit into it the right way." His eyes hold yours.
"So this is really happening," you whisper.
His mouth curves. "Unless you've changed your mind in the last thirty seconds."
You climb straight into his lap before he can say anything else, and he catches you automatically, one arm braced around your waist, the other beneath your thighs.
"The first thing I want to get clear," you say, cupping his face, "is that you and Jack are not living there with me."
He tilts his head.
"We are all living there together," you correct him. "We make it our home. We make him a room that feels completely his. We decorate in a way that feels like all of us."
Something eases in his face at that, like being hit with the full weight of what you're offering.
"Our home," he repeats.
"Yes." Your thumbs brush along his jaw. "Our home."
His forehead drops to yours. "I've spent so much of my life bracing for the next loss that sometimes I still forget I'm allowed to want things like that." One hand slides up your back. "You say our home like it's the easiest thing in the world."
"It should be."
That gets you the smallest, most wrecked smile.
"It should," he agrees.
You kiss him then, slow and sure, and he answers like he's already memorizing the shape of this decision on your mouth.
When you pull back, you smooth your fingers through his hair.
You press your face into his shoulder for a second, laughing once under your breath because otherwise you might cry. "This is very annoying."
His hand glides down your back. "What is?"
"How much I love you."
He turns his head and kisses your temple. "I'm having a similar experience."
Then his phone rings.
You stay where you are, curled in his lap, while he reaches for it one-handed. The second his eyes flick to the screen, something in his face shifts.
"It's Sean," he says.
You pull back just enough to look at him. "Your brother Sean?"
The concern in your voice is immediate, because Sean never calls unless something is wrong.
Aaron answers. You lean away a fraction to give him room, but his hand tightens on your thigh, keeping you exactly where you are.
"Sean."
A beat.
His expression goes still in that particular way it does when he's bracing himself to hear bad news.
"What happened?"
You let your hands drift lightly over his chest, grounding him where you can, even while you watch the change in him happen. The hopelessly in love, anniversary version of Aaron doesn't disappear exactly. He just recedes, making room for the one who knows how to move in a crisis.
"Sean, if you witnessed something, you need to stay where you are." His voice stays calm, even. "I'm in Manhattan. I'll come to you. Where are you?"
He listens, then leans forward, his forehead dropping briefly to your shoulder. Your fingers slide into his hair at once, combing through it slowly while you try to read what his silence won't give you.
"Alright," he says after a moment. "I'm on my way. I'll text you when I'm close."
He ends the call.
For a second he doesn't move.
You press a kiss to the side of his head. "That didn't sound good."
"With Sean," he says quietly, "it usually isn't."
You ease back enough to look at him. "What's going on, baby?"
He shakes his head once. "I don't know yet." His hand stays on your waist, reluctant now, like he already hates having to let go. "Look, I'm sorry. I know this is a terrible time to cut our anniversary short. Especially after…" His mouth twitches faintly, humorless and warm all at once. "After everything we just decided."
You kiss his forehead before he can keep apologizing. "No. Don't do that."
His eyes lift to yours.
"He's your brother," you say. "This matters." Your hand slides to his cheek. "And for the record, we've already had a pretty spectacular anniversary."
That earns you the smallest trace of a smile.
"I mean, genuinely," you continue, brushing your thumb under his eye. "Best day. Best night. Very hard to complain."
Some of the tension around his mouth eases.
You tilt your head. "Also, if we're being honest, I think I can spare you now that I've thoroughly used you."
That gets a real reaction. His hand squeezes your hip. "Used me."
"Completely."
His forehead drops to yours for one second, and when he laughs this time it's quiet and tired and grateful. "I love you so much."
You smile and kiss him once, soft but sure. "I love you too. Go be a good brother."
He looks at you for another beat, like leaving you here in this bed, in his shirt, after everything that just happened feels vaguely impossible.
Then duty wins, because it always does with him.
But not before he kisses you again.
Longer this time. Deeper. The kind of kiss that says he already misses you and hasn't even stood up yet.
When he pulls back, you slide off his lap and onto the bed, watching as he rises and starts getting dressed with the clipped efficiency that always returns when something is wrong.
You follow him with your eyes while he reaches for his shirt, buttons it with quick, practiced movements, and drags a hand through his hair.
"At least let me make you coffee before you go," you offer.
He glances over at you while fastening his cuffs. "You don't have to do that."
"I know." You push yourself off the bed and cross to him, still wrapped in the sheet, then smooth a hand over the front of his shirt where he missed one button in his hurry. "Hold still."
His hands settle automatically at your waist while you fix it.
"There," you murmur. "Now you can go save your brother while looking devastatingly competent."
His mouth softens. "You make it difficult to leave."
"That is very much on purpose."
He bends and kisses your forehead. Then your nose. Then your mouth one more time, because apparently neither of you is ready to stop.
When he finally steps back, you catch his wrist. "Keep in touch, okay?"
"I will."
"And Aaron?"
He pauses at the door.
"Be careful."
Something shifts in his face at that. He nods once. "Always."
You smile faintly. "Liar."
That pulls a huff of laughter out of him. "As careful as possible."
"Better."
He reaches for the doorknob, then stops and looks back at you one last time — barefoot, hair mussed, wrapped in his shirt and still glowing from everything you just shared.
The expression on his face goes soft all over again.
"We're moving in together," he says quietly, like he's testing the shape of it one more time before he walks out into whatever waits for him.
You blink.
Then you smile. "Go help your brother, Aaron."
His mouth curves. "That's a yes."
"It's a yes," you confirm.
He looks at you like that is what he's taking with him out the door. Not the interruption. Not the worry. That.
Then he nods, squares his shoulders, and heads out.
You stand there for a long moment after the door closes, wrapped in the echo of him, already missing him a little, but with his shirt still on, the bed still warm behind you and the promise of a shared home now sitting bright and certain in your chest.
The next day, Aaron calls to give you the rundown on everything that's unfolding.
"I'm sorry this is happening on our anniversary weekend," he says without preamble.
"It's okay, babe." You reach over and pat Jack's head where he's sprawled across the hotel carpet, fully committed to a game that appears to involve King Kong scaling a souvenir Empire State Building while Lady Liberty attempts to fend him off with a plastic dinosaur. "We're in the middle of King Kong Fights the Statue of Liberty, and at the moment Kong is winning by a landslide. We're going to grab barbecue in a bit and take a walk through Central Park after."
That earns you the faintest exhale on the other end, something just shy of a laugh.
"I miss you both," he says. "I wish I was there."
Your chest tightens at the sound of it, at the fatigue underneath it, at how much he means it. "We miss you too." You glance down at Jack. "Do you want to talk to him?"
"Please."
You hand the phone over, and Jack immediately lights up.
"Dad! Kong just knocked over a taxi!"
You smile and let them have their moment, half listening while you straighten the room a little, gathering shopping bags and abandoned toy packaging into one corner. Then, on the muted television across the suite, a red banner flashes at the bottom of the screen.
Six Young Adults Dead After Suspected Overdoses at Late-Night Rave
Your stomach drops.
You turn up the volume.
The anchor keeps talking — location, timeline, symptoms, witness accounts — and every detail sounds horribly familiar. Too familiar. Exactly like what Aaron said Sean described.
By the time Jack hands the phone back, your pulse is moving too fast.
You take it from him and force a smile. "Give me one second, okay? Keep Kong alive."
"I knew you were rooting for him," Jack says solemnly.
"Obviously."
You walk into the little kitchenette and lower your voice the second you're out of earshot.
"Aaron."
His tone changes immediately. "What is it?"
"Turn on the news." You look back toward the TV, heart thudding now. "They're reporting that six young adults died from overdoses at a rave last night. The symptoms they're listing sound exactly like what you said Sean saw."
There's a beat of silence on his end.
Then, sharper now, all focus: "What are they saying?"
You repeat the details as clearly as you can — the number of victims, the symptoms they're naming, the timing, the setting. By the time you finish, you can practically hear him thinking.
"I'm sending Reid and Morgan over now," he says, already moving in his head, already five steps ahead. "Keep your phone on you in case I need you to come in. You can bring Jack."
"Okay."
A pause.
Not long. Just enough to let something quieter pass between the two of you under the shift in his voice.
"Be careful," you say.
His answer comes low and immediate. "You too."
You close your eyes for half a second. "I love you."
"I love you too."
He hangs up.
For one second you stay there in the kitchenette, phone still in your hand, breathing through the sudden change in the air — the way an anniversary weekend can become a case in a single television headline, the way Aaron's voice can turn from soft to clinical in an instant, the way loving him means learning how quickly the world can pivot.
Then you square your shoulders, turn back toward the room, and find Jack still deep in battle on the floor.
"Kong alive?" you ask.
He looks up, beaming. "Barely."
You smile, though it doesn't quite reach all the way. "Sounds about right."
The next morning, Aaron texts and asks you to come in with Jack. Strauss can keep an eye on him at the office while you help Aaron get through to Sean.
By the time you make it upstairs, you can feel the case humming through the bullpen. Phones ringing. Agents moving fast. Too much fluorescent light. Too many people pretending caffeine counts as sleep.
You approach the office where Aaron and Sean are standing.
You have never met Sean before.
The resemblance is strange at first because it isn't obvious in the way you expected. He's younger, blond, blue-eyed, beard rougher around the edges, posture looser than Aaron's ever is. Then your gaze drops for half a second and you nearly betray yourself with a smile.
Well.
There's at least one very clear Hotchner family trait.
You knock lightly on the open doorframe, and both of them turn.
"Sean," Aaron says, "this is Agent Y/L/N."
Sean's eyes move over you once, quick and unapologetic, then his mouth curves. "One thing I'll say about the BAU — you people really do hire the most beautiful women."
You glance sideways at Aaron and lift one eyebrow.
The muscle in his jaw shifts.
Interesting.
You step forward anyway and offer Sean your hand. "It's nice to finally meet Hotch's brother."
Sean takes your hand with a grin that suggests he enjoys being exactly this irritating. "Is that all I am?"
You tilt your head, playing along. "At the moment? Yes."
"At the moment," he repeats, amused. "That sounds promising."
"Well," you say, sliding Sean a look before tossing a smirk toward Aaron, "that really depends on your brother."
Aaron's eyes cut to yours immediately. He knows exactly what you're implying.
Sean looks between the two of you. "Okay, you lost me."
You fold your arms. "So profiling doesn't run in the family?"
"Apparently not," Aaron says dryly.
You shake your head, smile fading as you pivot back to the reason you're here. "I heard about the parents who died last night."
Some of Sean’s swagger drops away.
Aaron steps in before Sean can answer. "That's why Sean is now offering to wear a wire and see what he can get out of his boss, Thane."
You look back at Sean. "Have you ever worn a wire before?"
"No." His grin returns, because of course it does. "Want to teach me?"
"Sean…" Aaron warns him.
You bite back a smile and step farther into the office. "I can walk you through it."
Sean brightens immediately. "Great. Does that mean you get to put it on me too?"
Aaron's stare could sand paint off a wall.
You let out a theatrical sigh. "God, what is it with you Hotchners and trying to get me to undress you?"
"What?" Sean's face drops.
You cross to Aaron, rise onto your toes, and plant a quick kiss on his cheek. "I'm going to be with JJ and Blake if you need me, babe."
"Babe?" Sean goes a little pale.
Aaron looks at his brother with a calm that is suddenly much more satisfying than the jealousy from thirty seconds ago.
Sean stares at him. Then at you. Then back at Aaron. "You introduced her as Agent Y/L/N."
Aaron shrugs once. "Professionally, that's what she is."
Sean squints. "And personally?"
"We're together," Aaron nods.
Sean looks mildly betrayed. "You're telling me I flirted with my brother's girlfriend in front of my brother?"
Aaron's brow lifts. "That is exactly what happened."
A strangled sound leaves Sean. "Why didn't you stop me?"
This time you answer. "Because it was funny."
Aaron's mouth twitches.
Sean shakes his head. "You really call him babe?"
You look at Aaron, then back at Sean. "Among other things."
Aaron gives you a look that promises this conversation is not over.
You smile at him like you know it.
Then you lean in one more time, fingers brushing his wrist as you pass. "Come get me when you're ready."
His expression softens in that tiny, nearly invisible way only you ever seem to catch. "I will."
You end up being the one to sit down with Sean after all.
Aaron gets pulled away for a minute by a call from Morgan, leaving you in the conference room with a wire kit, a lukewarm cup of coffee, and Aaron Hotchner's younger brother staring at you like he still hasn't fully recovered from the word babe.
You pull a chair out across from him and set the transmitter on the table between you. "Alright. Focus."
Sean blinks. "I am focused."
You pick up the wire and hold it up. "Okay. Here's how this works. The microphone sits here." You tap your own shirt near the center of your chest. "It needs to be secure enough that it won't shift if you move, but not so obvious that someone pats you down and finds it immediately. The transmitter gets clipped at your back or waistband. Somewhere natural. Somewhere you won't keep touching."
Sean glances at the equipment, then back at you. "And if I panic?"
"You don't panic." You say it simply, not harsh, just firm. "You breathe. You answer what's asked. You don't volunteer more than you need to. You do not try to sound smarter than the person you're talking to."
He lifts a brow. "Was that personal?"
You ignore him. "If Thane starts pushing, don't push back harder. Don't get clever. Stay boring. Boring is safe."
His jaw shifts a little at that.
You soften your tone. "Sean, your job isn't to crack the case. It's to give us enough to do that for you."
He nods once.
"If he says something useful, don't jump on it. Let the silence sit. Guys like that usually fill it themselves. If he gets suspicious, back off. If he asks why you're there, keep it simple and real."
"Real," Sean repeats.
"Real enough that you won't trip over it. Not the full truth. Just something you can say without thinking too hard."
He leans back slightly. "And what if I can't think fast enough?"
"You can." You glance down at the file in front of you, then back up. "But if you freeze, fall back on what you actually know. You're upset. You saw something bad. You're scared. Those things are all real. Use them."
Sean nods again, slower this time.
You reach across the table and adjust the wire in his hand. He looks down at the equipment like it might explode.
You let a beat pass, then set the wire down. "What's wrong?"
He blinks. "What?"
"You haven't heard half of what I just said. What's wrong?"
Sean looks at you for a second, then lets out a breath. "Why have we never met before?"
The question catches you off guard.
"I don't know. I guess the last time we really should've been in the same place was…" You stop.
"Haley's funeral," he finishes.
You wince. "I didn't mean it like—"
"No, I know." He shakes his head. "You're right. I should've been there. For Aaron. For Jack."
You glance out through the glass wall toward the bullpen, where the team is still moving around the case like one living thing. "It's okay. We were all there to help pick up the pieces."
Sean follows your gaze, then looks back at you. "Some more than others, huh?"
You roll your eyes, but there's no real bite in it. "It took a very long time to get here."
"How long?"
You fiddle with the pen beside the file, suddenly shy in a way that feels ridiculous after everything. "This weekend was our one-year anniversary, actually."
Sean goes still. "Oh. And you're here instead."
You nod once. "Taking care of family."
The words settle between you.
"Jack and Aaron are my family now," you say. "By extension, that means you too."
Aaron steps back into the room at that exact moment. "I'm sorry about that. How's it going in here?"
Sean looks from you to his brother, something warmer settling into his expression now. "You've got a good woman here, Aaron."
You let out a soft laugh. "Flattery is not going to get you out of wearing the wire, Sean."
Aaron's hand comes to rest on the back of your chair, fingers brushing lightly over your shoulder as he stops beside you. "I happen to agree with him, for once."
You glance up at him, and the look on his face is enough to make your pulse skip even now.
Sean leans back with a grin. "Well. Today just keeps delivering surprises."
Aaron's mouth twitches. "Don't get used to it."
"Oh, I don't know," Sean replies, looking between the two of you. "I'm starting to enjoy this version of you."
You smile and reach for the wire kit again. "Great. Then let's keep the mood going by making sure you don't screw this up."
"He what?" you snap into the phone, already halfway out of your chair. "I told him not to screw this up."
Across the bullpen, a New York agent looks up at the sharpness in your voice. You turn away, lowering your volume, but your pulse is already climbing.
"Can you have Garcia run background and financials on Sean?" Aaron asks.
You stop.
Not physically. Just internally.
"Aaron…" You press your free hand to your forehead. "Are you sure?"
"He ran for a reason." His voice is controlled, but you know him too well not to hear the strain under it. "I can't rule out the possibility that he's more involved than he's admitting."
The words land hard.
You close your eyes for a second, taking one slow breath before answering. "Okay."
"Thank you."
There's a pause. Too brief for anyone else to notice. More than enough for you.
"Aaron." Your tone softens. "Are you okay? Be honest with me."
Silence hums down the line. Not empty. Just tight.
Then: "No."
Your chest tightens.
You step into the empty doorway of an unoccupied office and close the door partway behind you, shutting out some of the bullpen noise. "Talk to me."
He exhales, and it sounds like he's been holding it for too long. "I don't know what I'm looking at yet. I don't know if he panicked, if he saw something, if he's lying, or if I'm about to spend the next six hours investigating my own brother."
You let him say it.
"And I know that's where my head has to go," he continues. "I know that. But…" He breaks off.
"But he's still your brother."
"Yes."
You let that sit for a second instead of rushing to fill it. "Okay."
He lets out a faint breath. "Okay?"
"Yes. Okay." Your voice stays even, grounded. "You do not have to be some perfect machine about this. You can be angry and worried and suspicious and still want him not to be the person he's making himself look like."
You hear him swallow.
"That doesn't make you bad at your job," you add. "It makes you human."
"I can't wait for this to be over," he says. "So we can move forward with our plans."
A small smile touches your mouth despite everything. You sink into the chair by the desk and curl one leg under you. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"And then," you say, because if he needs something to hold onto you can give him that, "we're going to tell Jack about his new home and his new room."
The line goes quiet again, but not in the same way. This silence is full.
"I've been thinking about that," he admits.
You smile, softer now. "Me too. I haven't stopped thinking about it actually."
"Y/N."
"Yeah?"
Another pause. Then, low and honest and so very Aaron it aches: "Thank you for answering the phone like that."
You blink. "Like I was ready to kill someone for you?"
A tired laugh slips out of him. "Exactly like that."
You smile into the quiet office. "Anytime, Hotchner."
His voice softens on the next sentence. "I love you."
You lean back and close your eyes, letting it steady you too. "I love you too. Go do what you have to do."
"I will."
"And Aaron?"
"Yeah?"
"No matter what Sean did or didn't do, you don't have to carry this alone."
The silence that follows is small, but it matters.
Then: "I know."
He hangs up.
You stay there for one more second, phone still in your hand, staring at nothing.
Then you rise, square your shoulders, and head back into the bullpen to call Garcia — because if Aaron is about to investigate his brother, then the least you can do is make sure he doesn't do it without every possible fact at his back.
You find Aaron alone in one of the offices, case files spread open in front of him, every page arranged with the kind of rigid order that only ever shows up when he's trying to impose it on his own head.
You pause in the doorway. "Care for some company?"
He looks up at once. Some of the strain in his face eases just from seeing you. "Hey."
You step inside and take the chair beside him. Your hand moves to his back without thought, gliding slowly up and down between his shoulders, not asking anything of him, just there.
"Still no word from Sean?" Rossi asks from the doorway as he steps in.
Aaron shakes his head once. The motion is small. Tired. More defeated than angry now.
"We'll find him," you say, keeping your touch steady. "He's not disappearing on us."
Aaron leans forward, elbows braced on the table, one hand pressing briefly over his mouth before dropping again. "How does someone with everything in front of him make one self-destructive choice after another and never seem to learn from it?" His voice stays level, but it costs him. "And then, every time it looks like he might finally get his act together, it all falls apart again."
Rossi watches him for a second before asking quietly, "Were you two ever close?"
Aaron gives a humorless little breath and leans back in the chair. "He was in first grade when I got sent to boarding school. By then…" He shrugs. "I was the screwup. I was the one making bad choices."
That catches in your chest.
You lean down and press a kiss to his shoulder, then leave your cheek there for a second, your hand still resting on his arm.
"But at some point," Aaron goes on, eyes fixed on nothing now, "I realized I could keep going that way or I could get my life together." His jaw shifts. "That realization doesn't seem to occur to Sean."
Rossi nods slowly. "I know he didn't show up to Haley's funeral."
Your fingers tighten gently around Aaron's arm. You don't move your head. You just stay there with him.
"Right." The word lands flat. "And that was the point where I decided I couldn't keep making him a priority anymore. I was done."
The silence that follows is heavy, but not empty.
You lift your head and look at him properly. "You're a good brother, Aaron."
He glances over at you.
"You still show up when he needs you," you continue, keeping your voice low and steady. "Even when he doesn't know how to return that kindness."
His hand covers yours where it rests on his bicep, thumb brushing once over your knuckles.
Rossi studies the two of you, then exhales quietly through his nose. "For what it's worth, I agree with her."
Aaron gives him a look that is half resignation, half gratitude.
Rossi steps farther into the office, one hand in his pocket. "And for what it's also worth…" His eyes flick between the two of you, the faintest smile touching his mouth. "Happy anniversary. Terrible timing for a family crisis, but still. Happy anniversary."
"Thank you," you say, smiling despite yourself.
Aaron's mouth twitches faintly. "Thanks, Dave."
Jack fell asleep in the car on the way back to the hotel and barely stirred when Aaron carried him upstairs, one small arm slung around his neck, shoes half untied, hair sticking up in the back. He is fully out by the time the blankets are pulled over him in the adjoining room, one hand still curled around the plastic dinosaur he refused to part with.
You stand in the doorway with Aaron for a second, both of you looking in.
Then Aaron eases the door almost shut and leans his forehead briefly against the frame.
You don't say anything right away. You step in close behind him and rest your palm between his shoulder blades.
He exhales.
"Hey," you say quietly.
Aaron turns, and whatever expression he was wearing for the day falls the second he sees your face. "Hey."
You slide both arms around his waist and press your cheek to his chest.
You tilt your head back. "How bad is it?"
His hand comes up automatically, smoothing over your hair once, then again. "I'm tired. I'm worried. I just want to go home. To our home."
Your heart aches for him in that old, specific way.
So you don't push. You don't ask for more. You just let your hand travel slowly down his back. "Come here."
You take his hand and lead him into the bedroom, where only one lamp is on and the sheets are still slightly rumpled from this morning.
You stop beside the bed and turn to face him.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
Your fingers go to the first button of his shirt. "Taking some stress off you."
His eyes darken immediately. "That sounds deceptively innocent."
"It is not innocent at all."
You unbutton him slowly, not because you're trying to be dramatic, but because he needs slow tonight. Needs something asked of him that isn't impossible. Needs to be looked after for once instead of looking after everyone else.
You slide the shirt from his shoulders and let it fall behind him.
He watches you the whole time.
You smooth your hands over his chest, over old scars, over the solid rise and fall of his breathing. "You know," you say softly, "for someone so bossy, you're being very obedient."
His hands settle at your waist. "You sound surprised."
"I'm pleased, actually."
He smiles a little. "Good."
You kiss him then. Enough to feel the shift when he lets the weight of the day slide, even if only for a minute. Your mouth lingers at his, then drifts to his jaw, to the place just below his ear, to the line of his throat.
One of his hands slides up your back.
"You don't have to do this," he says quietly.
You pull back just enough to look at him. "I know."
"I mean it."
"I know." Your fingers brush his jaw. "But I want to."
He nods once.
You kiss him again, slower this time, and begin guiding him backward until the backs of his knees hit the bed. He sits, eyes still fixed on you, and for a second you just stand between his legs with his hands resting loosely on your hips and that dark, exhausted intensity trained entirely on your face.
Then you reach down and take his hands off you.
His brows lift.
"Tonight," you tell him, "you let me take care of you."
You kiss your way down the center of his chest, over the old damage he rarely thinks to protect from you anymore, lower, unhurried and deliberate. Every pass of your mouth seems to pull something else from him — tension, anger, restraint, all of it unraveling a little more each time.
His hand comes to your hair.
You take your time with him the same way he did with you, because he deserves at least that much. Because you know how rarely he lets himself have anything without earning it first. Because tonight, more than anything, you want him to feel what it means to be wanted without having to perform strength for it.
His hand tightens in your hair when you finally give him what he needs.
"Jesus—"
The word breaks out of him before he can stop it.
You glance up once, and the look on his face nearly undoes you. His head tipped back, throat bared, jaw gone slack with effort and disbelief, like he cannot decide whether to pull you up and kiss you or hold still and survive it.
You choose for him.
Keep going.
His other hand braces on the mattress. The muscles in his stomach tighten under your fingertips. A rough sound escapes him when you press a little closer, and then he's looking down at you again with that same stunned, almost wounded awe he gets when you love him in ways he didn't let himself expect.
"Y/N," he says, strained now. "Baby—"
There it is.
The stress, the anger, the endless control of the day, all burning off him piece by piece until what's left is only this. Need. Trust. You.
"Guys, I found something even stranger than a time-traveling police box," Garcia announces over the video chat.
You smile immediately. "I appreciate the Doctor Who reference."
"I knew you would, my dear." She winks, then pivots back to business. "I ran financials on everyone employed at Franklin Airport."
She shares the records on-screen.
"There's a baggage handler named Mike Spires who's been making absurdly large cash deposits into his checking account every week." Her expression sharpens. "Here's the fun part. He's been dead for the last four weeks."
Blake leans forward. "So how is he still making deposits?"
Before Garcia can answer, Aaron's phone starts ringing.
He glances at the screen, and something in his face changes. He rises immediately and gives you a slight motion with two fingers to follow him into the hall.
You do.
The bullpen noise dulls as the door swings shut behind you.
Aaron answers on the second ring. "Sean."
He listens for a beat, jaw tightening.
"No, listen to me. You need to come in." His voice stays level, but it has that harder edge now, the one that means he's not asking twice. "We think you may be in danger. He's targeting Edinburgh employees."
A pause.
Aaron looks down the empty hallway for a second, all stillness and calculation. "I know that. And I know why you ran."
Your head snaps toward him.
On the phone, Sean must say something defensive, because Aaron's mouth flattens.
"No. Enough." His voice drops lower. "Just come in so we can protect you. It's time to stop running, Sean."
Then he hangs up.
You study him. "You know why he ran?"
Aaron turns his head and looks at you.
That is answer enough.
"I'm glad it's over," you say, sinking into the hotel room couch.
Jack immediately climbs into your side, all sleepy limbs and trust, and you wrap an arm around him without thinking. Aaron lowers himself to the floor in front of you both, one forearm draped across his knee, looking as tired as you feel.
"Me too," he says.
You run your fingers through Jack's hair and lift your eyes to Aaron's. "I understand more every day how protective a parent is. How fierce that love is." Your gaze lingers there for a second, because he knows better than anyone how far a father will go for his child. "But hurting innocent people out of revenge…" You shake your head. "I'll never understand that."
Aaron exhales slowly. "No matter how long I do this job, I don't think I'll ever understand innocent people paying the price for someone else's pain."
The room goes quiet for a moment.
Then there's a knock at the door.
Aaron looks up. "It's Sean."
He gets to his feet and crosses the room. When he opens the door, Sean is standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets, looking cleaner than the last time you saw him, but not entirely settled.
"Hey," Aaron says. "Come on in."
Sean steps inside. Aaron shuts the door behind him and turns back toward the room.
"Jack," he says, gentling his voice a little, "do you remember Uncle Sean?"
Sean drops into a crouch so he's at eye level with him. "Hey, Jack. It's been a long time."
Jack studies him for a second, then smiles. "Hi."
Something in Sean's face shifts at that. Softens.
You squeeze Jack once, then glance at Aaron. He gives you the smallest look — the one he warned you about earlier, the one that says he needs a little time alone with his brother.
You nod.
"How about," you say to Jack, pushing yourself off the couch, "we go check on how King Kong is recovering from his very serious injuries?"
Jack perks up instantly. "Okay."
He hops off the couch and tears into the other room.
You stand and look at Sean, offering him a small smile. "It was really nice to finally meet you."
Sean huffs a faint laugh. "Likewise."
Then his eyes flick to Aaron, then back to you, and his mouth curves just slightly. "Welcome to the family."
The words catch you off guard in the best way.
You smile, softer now, and step toward Aaron long enough to rest a hand against his chest. He covers it for one brief second, thumb brushing your knuckles, a silent thank-you passing between you.
Then you follow Jack into the next room, leaving the brothers behind with the door still open and the first real chance they've had in a very long time to talk.
For a minute, neither of them says much.
Then Sean breaks first.
"So," he says, rubbing the back of his neck, "how did you know I took the wine?"
Aaron stands near the window, hands in his pockets, studying his brother with that steady, unreadable look that only ever means he's feeling more than he's showing. "I know what it sounds like when you lie."
Sean gives a short, humorless laugh. "That's comforting."
"You said something to Thane about the wine," Aaron goes on. "And I could hear you trying to settle yourself afterward. You always do that when you're lying. You start talking like you're trying to outrun your own pulse."
Sean winces. "In my defense, she told me to calm myself down."
"She also told me to calm myself down with the truth," Sean admits. "So I guess that's where I went wrong."
Aaron exhales through his nose. "That would be the part, yes."
Sean drops onto the edge of the couch and drags both hands over his face. "Look at that. My brother the profiler."
"It had less to do with profiling than it did with being your brother."
That lands.
Sean lowers his hands. "Yeah."
Aaron moves a little closer, not crowding him, just closing some of the distance. "What did you get for the wine?"
Sean looks down. "A hundred bucks."
Aaron's jaw tightens. "Sean."
"I needed rent," Sean says quietly.
Aaron nods once, but the disappointment is still there.
"Sean," he says after a second, "you and I need to do better."
Sean looks up at him then, all the loose humor gone. "I want to do better, Aaron."
Aaron believes him. You can see that from the next room, where you're half listening while Jack crashes toy airplanes into the hotel pillows and narrates their heroic recovery.
But belief, with Sean, has always come with bruises.
"The life that I'm lucky enough to be getting a second chance at…" Aaron pauses, choosing the words carefully. "I want you in it. She wants you in it. And Jack deserves to know his uncle as someone who shows up."
Sean looks away for a second, swallowing hard. "I'm really happy you're happy."
Aaron says nothing.
Sean gives a faint shake of his head. "She told me you two spent your one-year anniversary chasing bad guys because of me."
A small sigh leaves Aaron. "That wasn't exactly the plan."
Sean lets out a humorless laugh. "No kidding."
"But we handled it."
From the other room, you and Jack laugh at something loud and ridiculous, the sound carrying easily through the suite. Sean goes quiet at that. Aaron can almost see the pride leaving him in pieces.
He looks down, then back at Aaron. "I know what I have to do." A beat. "You know any good lawyers?"
Aaron nods once. "I made a few calls."
Sean lets out a breath through his nose. "Of course you did."
"There are two officers waiting downstairs," Aaron adds.
Sean's mouth shifts. "Yeah. I saw them on my way up."
For a second, neither of them says anything.
Then Aaron steps closer and lays a firm hand on the back of Sean's shoulder. "I'll walk you down."
Sean looks at him, really looks at him, like he still isn't used to his brother being there when it counts.
"You don't have to do that."
"I know."
Sean glances toward the other room, where Jack is now loudly insisting King Kong deserves a medal. "Tell them I said goodbye?"
Aaron follows his gaze. "I will."
At the threshold, he hesitates just long enough to glance sideways at his brother. "And, uh…" A crooked smile pulls at his mouth. "Invite me to the wedding."
That catches Aaron off guard just enough to show, but then he smiles. "I will."
You wait for Aaron to come back, and the second he steps through the door you go straight into his arms.
He catches you without hesitation, holding you close in that quiet, full-bodied way he does when he's tired enough to stop pretending he doesn't need the contact.
"I'm proud of you," you whisper against his shoulder.
His hand slides up your back. "Thank you."
You draw back just enough to look at him. There's still heaviness in his face, still the strain of the day, but something has eased now that Sean is no longer running. "He'll be okay."
Aaron exhales slowly. "I hope so."
You brush your thumb over his jaw. "I know he will." A small smile touches your mouth. "He's got us now."
That makes him pause. Not because he disagrees. Because he feels it.
From the other room, Jack's voice carries out, complete with sound effects, narration, and what appears to be a very dramatic King Kong recovery arc. Aaron listens for a second, then looks back at you.
"I want to tell him."
Your brows lift. "About… about our plan?"
He nods once, and now the smile really starts, quiet at first and then brighter. "Yeah."
You laugh softly, a little stunned by how quickly the moment has arrived. "Tonight?"
"Why not?" His fingers thread through yours. "Let's end the night on something good."
Your heart stumbles at that.
He takes your hand and leads you toward the small adjoining room where Jack is sprawled across the carpet, one sneaker off, one still on, fully committed to narrating a scene in which King Kong appears to be receiving both medical treatment and a hero's parade.
Jack looks up the second you and Aaron step in. "Dad, he's alive."
Aaron nods solemnly. "I'm relieved."
Aaron glances at you once, then crouches down in front of Jack. You kneel beside him, your shoulder brushing his.
"Hey, buddy," Aaron says. "Can we talk to you about something?"
Jack narrows his eyes the way he always does when he senses seriousness. "Am I in trouble?"
You laugh softly. "No, baby, you're not in trouble."
Aaron shakes his head. "No trouble."
Jack relaxes a little. "Okay."
Aaron looks at you for half a beat, then back at his son. "You know how we spend a lot of time at Y/N's house?"
Jack nods. "Yeah. She has better snacks."
You laugh under your breath. Aaron's mouth twitches.
"She does," he allows. "And you know how sometimes it already feels a little like home there?"
Jack nods again, slower this time.
Aaron's hand finds yours where it rests on the carpet. "Well… we've been talking, and we wanted to ask how you'd feel if we stopped going back and forth so much."
Jack blinks.
You lean in a little. "What your dad means is…" Your smile softens. "How would you feel if you and your dad moved into my house with me?"
There's a beat of total silence.
Then Jack sits up straighter so fast King Kong falls over.
"Really?"
Aaron nods. "Really."
Jack's eyes go huge. "Like… live there live there?"
You smile. "Yes. Live there live there."
He looks between the two of you, still trying to make sense of it. "I'd have a room?"
"You'd have your own room," Aaron says.
Jack looks at you now, almost suspicious of how good this sounds. "Could I bring all my stuff?"
"All your stuff," you promise.
Aaron adds dryly, "Within reason."
Jack ignores that completely. "Like… my dinosaurs?"
"Naturally," you nod.
"And my books?"
"Yes."
"And my bed?"
"If you want," you tell him. "Or we can get you a new one."
Jack's face lights up all at once. He launches himself forward, straight into both of you, throwing his arms around your neck and Aaron's shoulder with all the force of a seven-year-old who has just been handed the best news of his life.
"Yes!" he shouts. "Yes, yes, yes!"
You laugh and catch him as best you can while Aaron steadies all three of you.
Jack pulls back just enough to look at you. "Can I paint my room green?"
Aaron glances at you. "Here we go."
You grin. "It can absolutely be green."
"With Star Wars sheets?"
You glance at Aaron. "Thoughts?"
He looks at his son, then at you, then lets out one helpless laugh. "I think," he says, "we may have made a terrible mistake."
Jack lights up. "Dad said yes!"
"I did not say—"
You laugh and lean into Aaron's side. "Too late. He heard what he needed to."
Then Jack looks up again. "So when do we move?"
You laugh.
Aaron kisses the top of your head before answering. "Soon."
Jack nods once, like that's perfectly reasonable, and goes right back to his game.
You turn your face toward Aaron. He's already looking at you.
And in that look is everything — relief, love, exhaustion, joy, the quiet disbelief of a man who once thought this kind of happiness belonged to other people.
He brushes his thumb once over your shoulder. "Happy note," he says softly.
