Title: Almost Home

Pairing: Hotch/Reid, Criminal Minds

Rating: T, for adult content and one bad word (but it's a doozy)

Warnings: SLASH. That's a homosexual relationship, boys and girls, and if that's not your cup of tea, this is the wrong story for you.

Author's Note: Any of my returning readers know that I have long since ceased to be a truly active member of the fanfiction community. Real life has taken me away. However, I still write about whatever literary, film, or television interests I currently have. Most of these are just rough sketches that suffice to keep images and plots from rattling around in my head and distracting me. However, my DVR has recently been filled to the brim with Criminal Minds, and I noticed the other day that a few bits of writing somehow seemed to resemble a plot. I fleshed them out into a series of interconnected, Hotch/Reid vignettes. I like them, enough that I wanted to share them. So here they are.

Again, this is a story is slash, actually the first slash I've ever published. You have been warned.

"At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want." –Lao Tzu

They were in Florida, where seven children had been found in pieces, where it was too hot and their unsub was escalating too quickly. Cases involving children were always hard on the team, but for whatever reason - because these children had suffered more than most, because the team was no closer to catching the unsub after seven than they had been after four, because the locals looked at them with cold, hard eyes full of doubt and blame – this one was making them taut and fragile, like old glass.

Morgan was barely speaking to anyone but Garcia. Rossi spent hours in the conference room, staring endlessly at the names and pictures of the children they'd already lost. Prentiss was nervy and snappish, and JJ's eyes looked huge and hunted in her pale face. Hotch himself hadn't slept in nearly three days; he was afraid of what he might see if he closed his eyes.

Reid was the worst though, the hardest for Hotch to bear. He had been holding up better than the rest of them, muttering to himself perhaps slightly more than usual, his movements a fraction more robotic, his speech a bit more stilted than it had been of late, but otherwise mostly unbroken. Then, this morning, the father of victim number six had burst into the police station. Reid had been standing nearest the door, and had borne the brunt of the man's rage and grief. Hotch thought Reid would have stood there all day allowing the father to scream obscenities at him, but soon words no longer gave enough vent to his fury, and he managed to land a blow to the left side of Reid's face before Reid had him bent over the closest desk, his long, elegant fingers like vises around the man's wrists, his eyes flat and opaque.

And just like that, Reid jumped from the bottom of Hotch's list of worries to the very top. It was his hands, Hotch thought, that gave him away. Hotch had made something of a study of Reid's hands, of the play of sinew and bone beneath fragile skin, of their endless variety of tics and waves while Reid's extraordinary mind was too engrossed in making the connections no one else could to monitor the eccentric movements of his extremities. His hands had gone still now, limp on the desk as he read over the original case file again like it hadn't been neatly recorded, analyzed, and catalogued in his memory the moment he first glanced at it. Hotch was trying very hard not to panic.

Late in the afternoon, Reid got up from the slightly alarming pretense he was making of going back over witness statements to get more coffee, and Hotch seized his chance, following the younger agent into the break room from which the stale scent of too-old cop coffee wafted dispiritedly into the bullpen.

Reid stood before the coffee pot, pouring too much sugar into a cup that read "World's Best Grandpa." Hotch went to stand next to him, pulling a mug from the shelf that was a sunny yellow dotted with tiny violets. The colors made him vaguely nauseas.

Reid had not looked up when Hotch came into the room, but Hotch had seen the slight hunching of his shoulders, the carefully controlled shifting of Reid's weight to the balls of his feet. Defensive. Afraid. Ready to run. Hotch was not sure if Reid was afraid of him or of himself. He took a step closer to him, ostensibly to grab the pot that rested on the counter in front of him, and Reid barely controlled his flinch, could not quite suppress his need to lean away from Hotch's arm. The reaction still didn't answer his question.

"How's the eye?" Hotch asked finally, pouring coffee that looked like sludge into his daffodil-colored cup. Reid shrugged, and his shoulders were so tense Hotch wondered if the movement actually caused him pain.

"It hurts," he replied stiffly.

"Have you had it checked out?"

"It's fine, Hotch," Reid ground out, his adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed hard around the anger he couldn't keep out of his voice.

"Let me see it," Hotch demanded quietly. Reid did not make any indication that he intended to comply. The rest of his body went as still as his unnaturally unmoving hands, clenched around someone else's coffee cup, someone who had a family and a life outside the job, who was probably one of the people whispering malevolent words about them out in the bullpen

Hotch turned to look at him fully, and Reid refused to meet his eyes, kept his head angled away enough that the injured part of his face wasn't visible to Hotch's assessing gaze. Hotch found himself reaching a hand up, grabbing Reid's chin and tilting it toward the light to inspect the darkening bruise. The blues, purples, and reds of the mottled skin were worrisome colors, but less so than the grayish stains of sleeplessness beneath his eyes, or the tawny shadows in the unshaven hollows of his cheeks.

"Get it looked at, Reid," Hotch told him, in a tone that brooked no argument, and the way Reid tilted his head made him look like a defiant teenager, despite the lines that had begun to fan out from the corners of his old eyes.

And then, for a long moment, Hotch did not release Reid's chin. He was acutely aware of each whisker beneath his hands, and of the way the color of Reid's eyes seemed to change as he stopped vaguely pulling back from the hand on his face, as his brows drew together the way they did when he recognized one of the few puzzles he could not solve instantaneously. Then Reid blinked and yanked his chin away. Hotch hadn't realized how tightly he'd been holding on until he heard the audible scrape of his fingers over unshaven skin.

Reid turned to leave, and Hotch watched until his awkward lope carried him out of sight.

Hotch had never wondered before how stubble would feel burning over the skin of his throat, or the crease between groin and thigh, but he wondered now.

Hotch was sitting at home, with Jack, watching a Charlie Brown holiday special and stroking his son's silky blond hair. It was so much like Haley's once was that it made his heart ache, and he thought what a small mercy it was that she was a brunette when she died. He was sure that if he'd ever seen her pale hair dark with blood, he would see it every single time he looked at Jack. It would be a torture he didn't think he could take.

Their doorbell rang, and Jack went tense beneath his father's arm and looked up at him with wide, worried eyes. Hotch could hardly bear that his child knew fear now, that he'd had a glimpse into the dark and evil part of the world that Hotch tried so hard to shield him from. He pulled Jack close to him and pressed a kiss to the crown of his head.

"Stay here, Jack," he said. "You have to tell me what happens while I'm gone, ok?" Jack nodded, turned back to the television but his arms banded around his knees, pulling himself into a tiny, defensive ball. The way that sight made him feel could not be dealt with right at this moment, so he closed that part of himself away for a while, to examine later.

He went to the door, wary, and peered through the peephole at the face on the other side. When he saw that it was Reid, he was both relieved and suddenly on edge. He shook the latter away and opened the door.

In the overhead light of Hotch's porch lamp, Reid's angular face was consumed by exaggerated shadows and highlights. He looked not quite real for just a moment, a surrealist's portrait of a young man and not actually a young man at all, but then he shifted his weight a bit, leaning slightly on the cane he still used when the weather was damp or a case had been long and trying, and he was just Reid again, gawky and squinting into the light.

"Reid. What's wrong?"

Reid blinked for a moment, looked surprised, as though it had not occurred to him that Hotch would ask such a question and he had to think of an answer.

"Oh, uh, nothing. Nothing's wrong," he spluttered. Reid used to splutter a lot, his words never as elegant as the thoughts they represented. That had been a long time ago, though, and now his speech was usually sure and confident, like his steady gaze and the way he sometimes moved. Hotch wondered why he was spluttering now, but tried not to read into it, tried not to profile. It was harder than it should have been.

"Then what are you doing here?" Reid's weight shifted again. Not favoring his bad leg, then. Nervous? Reid hadn't been nervous around him for years.

"Well, it's, um . . . " Reid mumbled. He pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and held tighter to the thing Hotch just now realized he was clutching in a white knuckled grip against one thigh. It shone silver in the shadows.

"Daddy?" Reid's eyes leapt to a spot beyond Hotch's shoulder, and Hotch turned to look at Jack, half-leaning into the hall, holding a blanket like a shield.

"Jack, say hello to Dr. Reid," Hotch told him, and Jack looked dubious but dutiful when he echoed the words.

"Hello, Dr. Reid," he said solemnly. Reid fairly squirmed where he stood, and Hotch knew suddenly that it was not Hotch himself who was making Reid revert to his old, fidgeting ways.

"Hello, Jack," Reid replied, equally somber. "I, uh, I brought . . ." He seemed to finally give up on his inadequate words and suddenly thrust forward the object he had been clinging to so desperately: a small present, wrapped meticulously in vaguely shining paper. "Happy Birthday."

Jack immediately abandoned his reticence and ran forward, snatching his treasure to himself and dropping to the floor where he stood to begin to rip to shreds the wrapping that had no doubt taken Reid's perfectionism hours to deem worthy. Hotch wanted to know what Reid would consider an appropriate present for a child unlike the kind he himself had ever been, but he could not drag his eyes away from Reid's face, much calmer now that his social interaction with Jack was complete.

"You remembered," Hotch said, though it sounded even to his own ears less like words than like breath. He thought to himself that it was a stupid thing to say to a man who could not forget. Reid did not seem to think it was stupid.

"Yes," he said simply. Reid was watching Jack open his gift, no longer looked tired, Hotch, thought. He looked older than he should.

"Thank you, Dr. Reid," he heard Jack say, and he looked down to see Jack hugging a magic trick set close to his tiny chest, staring up at Reid with vague uncertainty and complete adoration. Jack was too young for the gift, but Hotch would suffer pain of death before saying so.

"You're welcome, Jack," Reid told him seriously. He did not stammer, and his face was grave. "I'll help you learn, if you want." Jack was too awed to speak, but nodded vigorously. Reid turned to go, his task apparently complete, and Hotch found himself reaching out, stopping Reid with a hand on his shoulder. The touch was not rough, barely even an actual grip on the hollow beneath Reid's collar bone, but he stilled as if halted by a wall of steel.

The stammering, uncertain Reid who had shown up on Hotch's doorstep would have twitched under the touch, babbled out a confused and fractured question, but this Reid only turned his head to watch him with perceptive, unflinching eyes. It was Hotch who shook.

"Thank you, Dr. Reid," Hotch echoed his son, who had retreated to the living room with his prize. Reid did not say anything, did not even smile, but neither did he pull away. His hair was long enough to brush Hotch's hand, and it was coarse and bronze-colored against his skin, nothing at all like Jack's, like Haley's. There was no reason he should imagine it stained with blood, or sliding through his fingers. Still, he did both, and could not decide which was more frightening.

Finally, Reid broke Hotch's gaze, took a step out the door. Hotch probably imagined his head tilting downward as he turned, as though seeking even the faintest imitation of a caress from the hand resting on his shoulder.

A seventeen-year old having a psychotic break had held a gun bigger than his own arm to the head of his younger sister. Reid had a shot, and he'd taken it, and now another shattered young man was dead. Those cases were always hardest on Reid, seeing minds so like his own that had fallen to the wrong side of the thin line between genius and madness. He'd never had to kill one before, though. Hotch wondered if it had felt like suicide, like mercy, or like slaughter. He knew from experience that even a clean kill like this one never felt like justice.

After this kind of case, the team wanted nothing more than to go home and try to live like they hadn't seen a little girl's face spattered with bits of her brother, but storms were keeping the jet grounded. Hotch had spent the last two hours attempting to yell enough to make someone change their mind, but it was late and he hurt in places no one could touch, and he had resigned himself to the fact that the team wasn't going anywhere until the following morning.

He had been pacing under the awning of their hotel while he made his calls, unable to breathe in the confines of his faceless room. He smelled of rain and damp wool, and wanted a shower and the brief respite of sleep, wanted them so much he almost didn't see the hunched figure at the hotel bar. If it had been Rossi, Morgan, even Prentiss, he would have left them to their bottle and their thoughts, but it was Reid, and he looked battered and brittle. It had been a long time since Hotch had been capable of walking away from Reid when he was in pain.

Hotch approached him carefully, the way one might approach a bird with a broken wing. He noticed that Reid's feet were hooked around the legs of the stool like a child might have done, and that the weapon that had blown a teenager's head to pieces that afternoon was still holstered at his hip.

"Did you know," Reid asked as he got near, without turning around, "that each molecule of alcohol is less than a billionth of a meter long?" He sounded more sober than he usually did, but his eyes looked fluid and unfocused, like pools of whiskey. Hotch took a seat at the bar, and was careful not to brush against one long, lean thigh as he did so.

"I did not," he replied evenly, and was about to say something else when Reid interrupted.

"Did you also know," he continued perhaps a bit more loudly than was strictly polite, "that Darren Weatherly was going to med school in the fall?" And no, Hotch hadn't known that either, but he was not going to say so, or to mention that it hardly mattered now that Darren Weatherly's brain had first been destroyed by psychosis, and then by lead and copper. It mattered to Reid, and if Reid wanted to talk about it, that's what they would talk about, because Hotch had recently come to the frightening realization that he could deny him nothing that it was within his power to give.

"You did well today," Hotch said instead of any of the other things he'd thought. "You saved her life, and probably the lives of others. It had to be done."

"I know it had to be done," Reid snapped, glaring down at the bar. "But sometimes I just wish we didn't have to be the ones who always do it." Hotch wanted to touch him, which was precisely why he didn't.

"We all wish that, Spencer," he said quietly. Reid sucked in a breath, perhaps more audibly than he would have done a few glasses of scotch ago.

"You called me' Spencer,'" he reported quietly. Hotch blinked in surprise, because he hadn't realized until that moment that he had done so. He had no idea where it had come from, because when he thought about Reid, he never thought of him by his given name, or even his surname. He thought of Reid as bones shifting beneath slim wrists and the exquisite split second that preceded a stutter and the scent of sweet coffee, never as anything so generic and universal as his name.

"Yes, I did," Hotch agreed, unsure how else to react. Reid lifted his glass and drank, licking the sheen from his upper lip in a terribly distracting way. He then held the nearly-empty tumbler in front of him and swirled it gently, studying the contents as if divining meaning from the pattern made of good liquor and dim light.

"I like the way you say 'Reid,'" he informed Hotch softly, with the faintest hint of admonishment in his tone. "When other people call me that, it sounds like a title. But when you say it, it sounds like . . ." He finally turned and studied Hotch's face, and Hotch swore he could feel a caress along his jaw as Reid's eyes moved over it. "Like a secret." He tilted his head to one side, like a bird. "Do you think I'm a bad person?"

Hotch was thrown for a moment by the abrupt non sequitur, but he soon followed. If the way he said Reid's name was Hotch's secret, than this was Reid's.

"Reid," Hotch said in his most solemn tone, and he did not imagine the way the pupils of Reid's eyes dilated when he did so. Hotch had studied human behavior too long not to know why that happened, but he also had found the exact curve of Reid's upper lip fascinating for too short a time to be mentally prepared to accept what that meant. "You're a good man."

Reid shook his head, turned his eyes back to the polished wood of the bar, and waved at the bartender for another round all in one fluid motion. Hotch had the absurd thought that, for all his gawky limbs and stilted movements, Reid would probably have been a beautiful dancer. When he spoke again, his voice was hard and unforgiving.

"See, I just don't think that's possible. Most of our unsubs, they kill people because they're sick. Their minds have betrayed them. They literally cannot stop themselves. I kill people because . . . Why? Because a higher authority says I can? Because I think it's right? How does that make me any better than the vigilante who thinks he's enacting God's will, or the angel of death who believes she's ending people's suffering? It makes me worse even, because I'm sane." He laughed bitterly, and when he smiled into his glass it looked less like a smile than like a wolf bearing its teeth at a threat. "Well, as sane as I'll ever be, I guess."

"That's enough," Hotch snapped, and Reid started, just a little. "What you did today you did because innocent lives would have been lost if you hadn't."

"An innocent life was lost," Reid whispered, and the way he said it made is sound like the words could not have been more painful in his throat if they had been formed of broken glass. The bartender set another full tumbler down in front of Reid. Hotch reached out, snatched the drink out from under Reid's hand, and downed it. The burn felt pleasantly like punishment, and the maneuver had at least succeeded in getting Reid's eyes back to him, oddly calculating though they may be.

"The fact that you can think that, that you can look at a killer like Darren Weatherly and see the boy he used to be and mourn for the loss of him, means that you are better than most of us. Better than me." Reid's eyes widened slightly, and it occurred to Hotch that Reid must be very drunk to have forgotten how young he looked when he did that.

"You're the best man I know, Hotch," Reid told him. If he had said it fervently, like a child in the throes of hero-worship, Hotch could have ignored it, but he had said it with an exhausted sort of sadness, as though he knew a great truth and also knew that it would never be believed. Hotch had faced down sociopaths with assault rifles and had never blinked, but now his hands were shaking.

"If you really believe that," Hotch began, and felt his hear race with the knowledge that Reid really did, "then I want you to do me a favor." Reid watched him motionlessly. Hotch thought he might be holding his breath. "It's a selfish favor, because it will cause you pain. I want you to promise me you will always grieve for the people we lose, even the ones we have to take. Knowing they are mourned makes it easier to be the kind of man who can do what we do."

"No, it doesn't," Reid argued shrewdly. Hotch felt his own mouth twist into a mockery of a smile.

"No, it doesn't," he agreed. "But knowing that you mourn them makes it easier to be whatever kind of man I am." Reid most definitely wasn't breathing now.

Hotch sighed, ran a hand through his hair. He felt very old. After a few more beats of silence, he rose from the stool, tossed a few bills on the bar, and made the kind of eye contact with the bartender that ensured Reid would be getting no more drinks tonight. He began to walk away, and made it about ten feet before Reid's voice stopped him.

"Does it get any easier?" Reid asked. He sounded impossibly young. Hotch did not want to turn around, but, as he had grown used to of late, he couldn't resist an opportunity to look at Reid when one presented itself.

"Yes," he answered, and it was not the answer he wanted to give and most certainly not the one Reid wanted to hear, but it was the truth.

"Goodnight, Hotch," Reid said finally, and Hotch turned to walk away.

"Goodnight, Reid," he echoed back, and tried very hard not make the name sound like a prayer, or to imagine those whiskey eyes going dark with want as he said it.

Morgan almost died. A little girl with Stockholm Syndrome and a steak knife managed to nearly sever his carotid when he'd leaned down to carry her out of a place so vile even Hotch could not help but stumble back from it. Six hours later, a trauma surgeon whose left check was still spattered with arterial spray ushered them into a room that looked like too many Hotch had been in before, and they had stood vigil while Garcia wept wrenching sobs of terror and relief over Morgan's gray hand while his chest lifted evenly with sleep.

With Prentiss's whispered reassurances that she'd stay alert and Garcia's fierce refusals to be any farther than two feet from Morgan's side, the rest of the team went home to soothe their own hurts. Reid followed Hotch to his car. Hotch was not surprised, though he thought he should be.

Hotch drove them back to Reid's place because he had never been inside it before, and he did not want this memory to intermingle with others, but to shimmer, bright and vaguely alarming, like the phantom aftermath of a camera flash. They did not speak on the way there, and Hotch was glad, because he didn't have the faintest idea what to say, or if he knew the words to say it.

Reid's apartment was cluttered, and the furniture was old and heavy and too big for the space. Books were piled on every available surface. A plant in the window was clinging valiantly to life, and it seemed to Hotch that the tiny kitchen's ceiling was low enough that Reid would have to duck to putter around in it, making tea or the strong-enough-to-walk-off-on-its-own brew that he claimed was coffee.

Hotch turned to study Reid in the half-light of an old-fashioned lamp by the door. He looked whittled away by the events of the past week, a wooden soldier carved too close by an inexpert hand. His vest was buttoned unevenly. His left shoe was untied. He still had Derek Morgan's blood under his fingernails.

Hotch had apparently stared too long at the slim, tapered fingers and the brownish stains under bitten nails, because Reid suddenly lifted those fascinating hands to study them himself. Hotch knew the moment when Reid understood what Hotch had seen, because his expression suddenly changed, and he looked at his hands as though he had never seen them before.

Hotch took a step forward, hesitated for a moment, and then closed his own hand over one of Reid's. Reid's hand was considerably longer, slightly broader than his own. Hotch didn't think he'd ever held a hand larger than his before. It was not unpleasant.

He went into Reid's tiny kitchen with Reid behind him, never far enough away for Hotch to feel resistance. He wondered if Reid was doing that on purpose, to avoid even the barest suggestion of uncertainty, or if he was simply taking comfort in the nearness, like Hotch himself. They stopped before the small sink, and Hotch ran metallic-smelling water until it flowed warm over his fingers. Then, very gently, he brought their intertwined hands under the stream.

Hotch drew his fingers over the tips of Reid's, carefully pulling the skin away from the nail so the water could run between them and wash away the rust-colored stains beneath. Hotch didn't mean for the touch to be anything but cleansing, and Reid did not seem to take it as anything else, did not respond to it as Hotch was wont to respond to even the most innocuous contact between them. He was glad, though; anything else would have felt blasphemous, with the light in the room filtered through stained glass and the water running red with blood spilled by one who did not recognize a savior.

However, he could feel their bodies swaying gently towards each other, like a tide to the moon, and even as he scrubbed slightly at a stubborn smudge along the edge of Reid's ring finger, he began to
wonder. The water was flowing clear now, but Hotch kept moving their hands beneath the faucet, if for no other reason than because he wasn't sure suddenly if he was ready, if he ever would be. Finally,
Reid turned one long hand over, so that Hotch was no longer holding so much as being held. With his free hand glinting in the faint light, Reid turned off the water.

The apartment was suddenly silent, apart from their breathing, which Hotch noticed was very fast, slightly uneven on both their parts. He thought with vague panic that he had no idea what to do, but simultaneously had never wanted to do anything more in his life. They stood there for a long time, simply breathing, until Hotch didn't think he could stand another second of it, and then Reid finally,
finally moved.

Hotch had only kissed one person for many, many years. It was not the way he remembered, and he had no idea if that was because Reid was not Haley or because he was not female, and decided it didn't matter. Reid kissed like what he wanted was about to be torn away from him at any moment, and if it was overwhelming, it was also comforting, because it made Hotch feel less alone in his own desperation.

Soon, Reid's hands, still warm and damp from the water, were on Hotch's skin, encircling the base of his neck, curling around his wrist, and this was so different from everything that had ever happened to him before. He could feel his heartbeat pulsing against the places where Reid touched him, and if it was this good already, surely they would not survive the rest.

Reid was unpracticed, but not shy. Hotch wondered if his way of skimming his tongue over every ridge and dip of Hotch's mouth was some sort of technique or if it was just one more of Reid's instinctual ways of knowing, as if he could read tongue and tooth like Braille. He wondered who had taught him how to bite just hard enough on the juncture between neck and shoulder, and if that person found the way Reid's breath hitched in his throat when the skin beneath his jaw was kissed as unbearably erotic as Hotch did.

Reid's bedroom was spartan , a bit dusty, and Hotch didn't know who trembled more: Reid, while Hotch slowly undid each of his vest buttons, or Hotch himself, when Reid loosened his tie and licked his way into the exposed hollow of his throat. It felt dream-like, surreal, because only in a dream could clothing simply disappear so quickly, or anyone shine like Reid did, standing willow-slim in the stretching band of light from the hall.

Hotch was momentarily stilled by complete and utter terror. He was operating purely on fantasy and instinct rather than actual knowledge, and doubted Reid had any more experience in this particular area than he did. In a situation already wrought with pitfalls, he was suddenly sure their inexperience would make this awkward, embarrassing, even impossible. But then Reid moved forward, fused their mouths together as though he couldn't bear to be not kissing Hotch even one moment longer, and he suddenly could not remember why he'd thought this could be anything but sublime.

Hotch hadn't been with anyone since long before Foyet's attack, and he hadn't considered how having the snarled and twisted skin of his torso exposed to someone else's eyes would make him feel until Reid moved him into the spill of light and studied him as if burning the sight into his extraordinary memory. If it had been anyone else, that person would have either avoided the scars at all costs or kissed them as if they were precious. This was Reid, though, and when he touched them, it was because he was fitting his fingertips into the valleys of Hotch ribs, skimming his lips over the jut of a hip bone, resting his forehead on the part of Hotch's stomach just beginning to go soft with age. When Reid touched them, it was because he was touching him, and the scars were part of that. Hotch had never felt more wanted, or better understood.

Hotch soon learned that the scrape of stubble over thin skin was even better than he'd imagined, almost too good, and that Reid's long hands were nimble and clever and unafraid. He learned that Reid's usual eloquence and aversion to profanity made it that much hotter when he choked on words like "fuck," and "more," and "please." He learned that no matter how much he had longed for this, no matter how many dreams he had awakened from, sweating and aching, he was not prepared for the enormity of feeling Reid move beneath him, of being to free to touch what he had barely even allowed himself to want.

Afterward, Reid fell asleep with his long limbs twined through Hotch's like vines, pressed against him in every place his angular form made possible. Hotch anchored one hand in Reid's thick hair and splayed the other across his back, and he finally felt like he was touching enough of him. He lay in the dark, with Reid's breath ghosting over his collarbone, and prayed to whoever might be listening that this, at least, could be his.

They were on their way home from Oregon, where twelve people had died but two had lived, and where their unsub would never be able to hurt anyone again. It was a victory, and Hotch had done this job too long to be anything but grateful for that.

The jet was very quiet, as was usual on a return trip. Prentiss was reading Kerouac in the seat next to Morgan, who was ostensibly listening to music while he stared out at the darkness through the window. Reid was asleep, his stiff leg stretched out in front of him, an empty tea mug on the floor next to one trailing, long-fingered hand. His team looked tired, but satisfied. So often, they walked away from a case with one or more of them slightly broken by it. Hotch did not take for granted the small miracle that was their wholeness tonight.

It had long been Hotch's habit to begin his seemingly endless post-case paperwork on the jet home, and tonight was no different. However, it was a more recent if no less ingrained habit to intersperse expense reports and case logs with careful study of the angle of Reid's thigh to his hip, of the flutter of a lock of hair that had fallen across his face, of the graceful contours of muscle and sinew in a forearm exposed by a rolled up sleeve. These studies were instantaneous, no more than a blinked glance in Reid's direction that he could then turn over and over in his mind. They kept him sane, kept him grounded, at least until the next time he could feel Reid's moon-pale skin beneath his lips and tongue or hear Reid chant his name over and over and over again in his ear, like a mantra.

Perhaps it was because of this slight distraction, or because Hotch had lately been feeling something that vaguely resembled peace like he had not known for years, if ever, that he did not notice Rossi gazing at him with profiler's eyes until it was too late.

"How long?" Rossi asked suddenly, and though his voice was quiet enough that no one else could have possible heard, it sounded like a gunshot to Hotch. He glanced up from his paperwork for only the briefest of moments before returning to it, but it was long enough to know that there was no point in attempting to pretend he didn't know exactly what Rossi meant.

"A while," Hotch replied finally. Reid shifted slightly, somehow favoring his bad knee even while unconscious. Rossi glanced over at him, but Hotch didn't. He didn't need to know what Reid looked like moving restlessly in sleep, because he had felt it against his body and under his hands and would never, ever forget it.

"If it were any other two people in the world, I would say that you were letting your emotions get the best of you, but . . ." Hotch had known Rossi long enough to hear the smirk in his voice, and the affection. "Aaron," he said after a moment, and it was enough to get Hotch to look up and meet his serious gaze. "I can't help thinking this might be the wrong choice."

"It isn't," Hotch said quickly and with certainty, going back to his work. "And there wasn't a choice." He looked up at Reid, and thought of six different ways to soothe the furrowed line between his eyebrows. He took in the rumpled pants and mismatched socks, and the too-sharp angle of his jaw, and the hands that were like poetry whether they wrote out mathematical formulas or grasped a revolver or raked along the skin of Hotch's back. "I'm not sure there was ever a choice, Dave."

Rossi's eyes widened slightly, but he did not otherwise react. "So, it's like that, is it?" he said finally, and his tone was different, as if he understood something now that he hadn't a moment before.

"Of course it is," Hotch replied quietly. "Did you think we would risk it for anything less?"

"No," Rossi agreed, and his voice was solemn. "I don't suppose you would." He tilted his head and squinted just a little, as if a slightly different perspective would somehow make Hotch look the way he thought he should. "You should tell the team. They would never betray you. Either of you. We're family."

Hotch winced, because it was true, and he was being unconscionably selfish. He and Reid had never discussed revealing their relationship to anyone outside themselves, as if no one else actually existed to tell. Like so many things about him, Hotch did not know why Reid was content to hide what they had. On the other hand, he knew precisely why he himself guarded their secret, and it was not for any of the obvious reasons having to do with their genders or their jobs or their various deep-seated issues. Hotch was keeping Reid to himself because he had never had anything so precious belong only to him before, and there was a part of him that was ready to shelter the knowledge of it to his last breath.

"I know," Hotch agreed, pulling his glasses off his face and pinching the bridge of his nose. "I know. It's just . . ." He stared at his paperwork, because it was easier than looking at Rossi and less distracting than looking at Reid. "How can I say it to them when I can't even say it to him?"

"Hotch, your team consists of the best profilers ever assembled, perhaps the best students of human behavior who've ever lived. Who said you had to say anything?" Hotch knew the look he sent Rossi was interpreted by most people as one of anger or disapproval, but really it was the only way Hotch knew of setting his features that did not give away the emotions beneath them. He was pretty sure it worked on almost everyone, except probably the man across from him. He let his eyes alight briefly on Reid, felt a muscle in his jaw flex, and realized that only a coward would sit in this chair a moment longer when the need to cross the cabin and breathe the same air he breathed felt like the pull of gravity. Aaron Hotchner was many things, but cowardly had never been one of them.

He did not move hurriedly, but gathered his case files together in an orderly fashion. As he stood up, Prentiss looked up briefly, then returned her eyes to her novel, watching him in her peripheral vision as only she could. As he walked toward the nose of the plane, Morgan pulled a bud out of his ear and watched his movements much less subtly than Prentiss, but then subtlety had never been his strong suit.

Hotch sat down in the empty seat next to Reid and began to spread his work across the table in front of him. Their upper arms pressed together, and Reid's outstretched legs invaded ever so slightly on Hotch's space. Hotch experienced a sensation similar to the first gulp of air after holding his breath too long, and could feel the tension leave his body so quickly and completely it had to be visible. He heard Prentiss actually gasp.

In his sleep, Reid frowned and stirred, beginning to wake. "Hotch?" he mumbled without opening his eyes, throwing one slender arm over his face like he was shielding himself from the light of suddenly-opened curtains. Hotch slipped his reading glasses back on.

"Go back to sleep, Reid," he admonished softly. Reid twisted slightly toward him as if by instinct, like the face of a flower to the sun. His grip on consciousness seemed tenuous at best, but he managed one more murmured question before he let it go.

"Are we almost home?" he asked, the end of it fading as he returned to sleep. Hotch looked up at his team, and saw them gazing at him with surprise and concern, but mostly with understanding, and unwavering faith. Hotch did not smile, because he hadn't felt the need to smile at anyone but Jack for a long time, but he did allow them to see the way his breath hitched just a little when Reid's forearm fell away from his face and over to Hotch's side of the armrest, so that the backs of their hands brushed and the bones of their knuckles fit together like the tumblers and teeth of a lock and key.

Hotch picked his pen back up, Morgan replaced his earbuds, Prentiss returned to her book, and Rossi sent a small smile up at the ceiling. The plane did not crash. The world did not end.

"Yes," Hotch replied, though Reid could not hear him. "We're almost home."

"Home is not where you live, but where they understand you." – Christian Morgenstern