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I crave the stain of tears, the aftermark of almost too much love

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Hotch tread on the floorboard as lightly as he could, but Spencer stirred as he reached for his tie.

"You going?" Spencer looked confused in the dim light. It was still dark outside.

Hotch hung the tie around his neck, forced himself to look at the man on the bed. "I promised Jack I'd give him a ride to school."

Still looking a little confused, Spencer nodded, pushing himself up. "Okay."

Hotch felt Spencer's eyes as he buttoned up his shirt. He glanced back. Spencer was sitting up, the covers draping just below the hipbones. He was studying Hotch, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

"You still don't get it, do you?"

Hotch felt exposed, his feet itched to run, but Spencer pulled at his hand and Hotch sat down. A little tug at both ends of his tie made Hotch look up.

Despite their dark surroundings, Spencer saw Hotch as clearly as he would if they were sitting in the sun. It didn't seem fair that the man almost twenty years his junior seemed to already embrace what was lying ahead while Hotch still couldn't begin to fathom how this had begun; how after all the things he'd done, after all those… crimes, this man was still sitting here, touching him, loving him.

"You remember the Blue Ridge Strangler case?"

The killer with amnesia. Hotch nodded.

"You remember what you said to Matloff when we found him after he'd escaped?"

"I talked him out of suicide, made sure someone paid for those girls' deaths," Hotch recalled.

"Yes, but you also saved a man, not innocent, but no longer a killer." Spencer said, hand caressing Hotch's arm mindlessly.

Hotch remembered the heating discussion about memory and identity between his team members.

"You gave him a new start, not a blank slate, but a chance at a life he understands," Spencer said. "And I knew how hard it was for you to do that, to give a killer that."

Hotch breathed.

"Despite what we do, despite what we've seen, you still believe in the good in people."

But don't we all?

"But so do you."

"No, I want to believe," Spencer corrected him. "But you do. Somewhere in there you just do." Hotch felt the fingers pressing against his chest. "And it's not something you grow out of. It's not something someone can take away from you." Not even Foyet, Hotch heard the forbidden word.

Somewhere in there Hotch knew Spencer was right.

"Was that when you…?"

"Fell for you?"

A shy smile made Hotch tingle.

"No, but that was when I stopped having doubts," Spencer said.

The face he was seeing was open, welcoming, waiting, and Hotch tried to find something, a response that would equal what Spencer had just given him, but he couldn't. He couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when it'd happened. It was a sum of all things that they'd gone through, small, big, good, ugly, and before Hotch had known it, he was already lovesick.

Hotch leaned in and sealed their lips. The kiss was chaste, silent, yearning. It was the kind of kiss that made his chest hurt. And he hoped it was enough, that it gave Spencer enough.

"I'll see you at the office."

Hotch remembered something Spencer had said after Matloff case. Something about closure.

'People's emotional lives aren't linear like that. To say that one single event can suddenly bring peace to a man, I don't think it's possible.'

Hotch hadn't disagreed with Spencer then; and he still didn't. But as he stepped out of Spencer's apartment, he felt this light filling him, warming his insides, making him feel lighter; then a thought came, one that hadn't occurred to him in a very long time:

Everything is gonna be okay.

And Hotch thought to himself,

Baby step.

Baby step.

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Finis

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Literary credits:

The summary was actually a psychiatrist joke. The full text was: "Psychiatrists like to joke that everything is about sex except for sex itself, which is another way of saying that just about every human behavior is permeated with hidden sexual meaning."

Robert Frost's "To Earthward" (used as section breaks throughout the story)

William Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (recited by Spencer, also used in "Tabula Rasa")