Summary: Hotch and Emily talk about having another baby; Sean has relationship troubles.

Warning: It gets a little steamier toward the end but it's not a full-blown smut scene so I left it at T.

Age Guide: Hotch: 48; Emily: 43; Sean; 33; Jack: 8; Henry: 5; Charlotte: 3; Ben and Ryan: 14 months

May 2014

Emily had the conversation all planned out. Well, she had picked the subject, anyway.

Just how it was that she was going to ask Hotch to get a vasectomy, she didn't know. But after a recent pregnancy scare and God only knew how much money spent on contraception, she had started to wonder why they hadn't brought it up sooner. Or why she hadn't brought it up sooner. She supposed Hotch hadn't brought it up for obvious reasons. She couldn't imagine that he looked forward to a scalpel going anywhere near his nether regions. And as a man constantly toting around a small child of some age, always buying diapers, heightening the pitch of his voice to soothe one of his brood of five, Emily figured that his ability to procreate—though they didn't plan on taking advantage of it anymore—was a piece of his masculinity he'd want to hold onto.

Emily knew she needed to say something, though. The twins were fourteen months old now. She and Hotch were lucky to fit sex into their lives once a week (more on nights when a friend or family member was feeling masochistic and asked to take some of the children). But they were even luckier that their occasional absentmindedness combined with foolhardiness hadn't gotten them in an actual pickle yet. Apparently there hadn't been enough missed pills or skipped condoms for them to have to learn their lesson together the hard way yet.

A vasectomy made the most sense. It was a far less invasive procedure for him than getting her tubes tied would be for her, and she reasoned that she'd put up with months upon months of discomfort. Getting his vas deferens snipped was the least Hotch could do.

Today was the day. Hotch was in a neutral mood—if he were in a bad mood, it would be suicidal to broach the subject. If he were in too good a mood, she wouldn't want to bring him down.

She walked through the gargantuan home she still wasn't used to—one that was nowhere fully unpacked yet—and found Hotch in the living room with both of the twins. At nine o'clock at night, the rest of the house was peaceful. Before finishing her silent trip down the stairs, Emily leaned against the wall and spied, a warm smile on her face. Hotch sat in the middle of the floor while Ryan bounced by the coffee table and Ben sat down and played with his father's outstretched hand. Neither baby had walked yet, but Hotch and Emily both thought it would be any day now. Ryan, the more adventurous of the two, would not surprise them if he walked first.

Hotch's attention was on Ben when it happened. Ryan spotted his mother up the stairs and let go of the coffee table. Before Emily's mind could register what was happening, Ryan had already taken his first two steps on his own. "Aaron!" Emily cried, rushing down the stairs to meet her youngest. She met Hotch's bright eyes for a moment before focusing again on Ryan toddling unsteadily toward her. She held her arms out wide open and scooped him up when he reached her, his own arms held out, too. She covered the mildly confused albeit pleased baby in kisses and praise.

"Wow," Hotch said with a chuckle, Ben on his hip, as he joined Emily and Ryan. "That came out of nowhere. We didn't even have the camera out." Hotch beamed from ear to ear and placed a kiss on Ryan's forehead. "Nice job, buddy…Just…Wow…"

"I know," Emily said with a sigh. "I might cry right now."

Hotch couldn't keep from laughing a little as he wrapped everybody up in his arms. "Congratulations, Mommy."

"And congratulations, Daddy," Emily replied with a peck on the lips. Neither of them needed to mention that this was the first time Hotch had seen the first steps of a biological child of his; he hadn't been home when Jack had walked for the first time, a fact to which Emily was privy. "All right, let's see if he can do it again," she said eagerly.

Hotch and Emily were just heading back to the center of the living room when they heard a key turn in the lock on the front door. It was Sean's familiar footsteps that sounded on the tile. "Hey!" he called.

"Hey, Sean," Hotch said jovially, letting Sean let himself the rest of the way in. Sean had moved into town just about a month ago to be closer to his girlfriend, and after two weeks of daily (and sometimes twice daily) visits, they had stopped feeling the need to go fetch him at the door. "What's up?" Hotch asked.

"Other kids asleep?" Sean asked anxiously, reaching into his pocket.

"Yup. And Ryan just took his first steps," Hotch said proudly.

Sean stopped in his tracks. "When?"

"Just a minute ago," Emily said apologetically.

"I finally move my ass into town and I still miss out. What gives?" Sean said playfully.

"If only you moved into town for your family and not for your girlfriend, then I might feel sorry for you," Hotch retorted.

Sean didn't react to his brother's negativity. Instead, his eyes lit up as he remembered why he had been so excited in the first place. "Guess what."

"What" Emily asked with a smirk, cutting any tension.

Sean pulled a small box out of his pocket and opened it, the mouth facing Emily.

She let out a tiny gasp and put her hand over her heart. "Sean, that's gorgeous…but…I'm already taken."

"Funny," Sean said, rolling his eyes. "So, what do you think?"

Hotch reached out for the box. "It's a little…soon, don't you think? You just moved in together."

"Yeah, but it's not like we just started dating. We did the long distance thing for six months. I'm ready to…stop goofin' around, you know? I wanna settle down, have some kids…And things have been perfect between us."

"Are you sure you don't want to wait until the honeymoon's over a little and see what things are like when they're not perfect?" Hotch asked. "They're not going to stay this way forever."

"Aaron, come on," Emily murmured, swatting him secretly on the butt.

"Says the guy who proposed after a whole month," Sean said incredulously to Hotch.

"After knowing Emily for four years and living with her for one more, and being hated by her for a combined total of at least seven months, thereby understanding a much larger spectrum of our relationship," Hotch pointed out. He held up his free hand in surrender to his younger brother's icy glare. "I'm just saying, Sean. I don't wanna see you get hurt."

"Aaron," Emily said patronizingly, "I think if you don't stop talking, you're going to get hurt."

Hotch turned his unimpressed countenance toward his wife. "Whose side are you on, anyway?"

She pursed her lips in thought. "On whichever side gets me laid. Sorry, Sean, you're on your own." She didn't support Hotch's argument though; she simply walked away and set Ryan back down on the floor to see if he would give an encore performance.

"It really feels right," Sean said quietly to Hotch.

Hotch inspected the ring closely, pulling it out of Ben's reach when he tried to pluck it free. "Sean, I would love to see you happy with Danielle—"

Sean ripped the box from Hotch's hand and was half turned to storm out of the room when Hotch grabbed his arm.

"Would you let me finish?" Hotch asked, arching his eyebrows. "I was going to say, I would love to see you happy with Danielle. And I hope she says yes. I'm annoyingly practical sometimes. You were almost the more passionate one. Don't let go of that."

Sean grinned in apology for his assumption that Hotch would only have something negative to say. "I think I'm gonna ask her tonight. I can't stand waiting."

"Do you have a plan?"

Sean laughed somewhat maniacally. "No."

Chuckling, Hotch said, "Well, neither did I."

—

A downpour had started not long after Sean had left. Hotch and Emily sat out on the back deck, watching and listening to the rain. Emily hadn't had the heart to put the babies to bed, even though they both slept soundly already, so she and Hotch each held one. Suddenly, she couldn't picture letting them leave her side at all. All she could really think about was how small they had been when she had held them for the very first time, and how perfect it had felt to carry them, even if it had put her out of commission for several weeks.

She missed being pregnant.

And now that she and Hotch only had one child left in the house who hadn't yet taken its first steps, she knew she was soon going to miss having babies. Once the twins started tearing around the house, they wouldn't count as the babies she had in mind. She missed being needed, and with every step the twins took, she felt as if she would be less and less so.

"What do you really think about Sean and Danielle?" Hotch asked, making sure Ben was stable against his chest before slinging an arm behind Emily's chair.

"I dunno, it's hard to say. On one hand, yeah, it's kind of soon, but then again, you and I are king and queen of making up our own schedule. Even though we'd known each other a lot longer, getting engaged after a month of dating still felt crazy, even though it felt perfect, if that makes any sense. No matter what anyone else thought, we followed our hearts. As cliché as it sounds, I think we need to let Sean do the same thing."

"What about Danielle?" Hotch asked. "Does she seem like someone we want as a part of the family?"

Emily shrugged. "I don't know…she seems nice."

"That doesn't mean she'd fit in."

"Well, it's not up to us, Aaron. It's not our decision to make. We can't ask Sean to marry somebody else who fits in better with the family."

"We can't?" Hotch joked.

Emily found Hotch's hand behind her shoulder and entwined fingers with him. "I really hope he ends up happy. If not with her, then with someone. And soon. He deserves it," she said.

"Yeah, he does…he finally got a good job again and he gave it up for her. He deserves to be happy with her. Not just anyone."

"Hey, sweetie?" Emily said cautiously after not so much of a purposeful pause in the conversation as it was a lull.

"Uh-oh," Hotch said ominously. He looked down at the slumbering son on his chest. "Daddy's in trouble."

Emily laughed silently and slid an arm around Hotch's shoulders. "What would you think about having another baby?"

Until now, Hotch had been rocking to and fro in slight motions out of habit, since he had a baby in his arms. At Emily's question, though, he froze. "A what?"

"Another baby," Emily said with a lick of her lips. "I know it sounds crazy, and five is a lot, but what's one more?"

"Emily, the twins aren't even out of diapers yet—"

"By the time they are, it's gonna be way too late."

Hotch stared Emily down as calmly as he could. "Before Will and JJ passed away, we only had one kid between the two of us. Then suddenly we had three together, and that was overwhelming. We thought one more baby was scary. Instead of one baby, we had two. You're telling me that now you want another?"

Emily's heart broke at Hotch's rejection of her idea, but she had to remind herself that it was crazy, and she hadn't spent much time at all thinking about it. It was the baby fever talking. "I just…I guess I miss being pregnant, and I miss when they were newborns, I miss nursing them, and when I saw Ryan walking, I wanted to cry, like I said, but not just because I was happy. But also because once Ben starts walking, that's it. No more first steps. And already we have no more first smiles, no more first words…It just went by so fast."

Hotch breathed a troubled sigh and squeezed Emily's far shoulder, pulling her toward him. He pressed his lips to her temple. "Honey, that kind of mentality isn't going to get us one more baby. It's going to get us five more. You can't decide to have another baby just because you miss the process of it all. You'd never stop. You have to think about, you know, whether we can handle that many. As much as I love the twins and would never trade a second that we've spent with them, it was stressful. We still hardly sleep. You really want to put another baby in the mix?"

Hotch's words stung, but only because they were true. Emily fought back the tears as she looked down at Ryan, whose thumb was tucked in his mouth. "I don't know what I want. Maybe to rewind to when we found out I was pregnant and relive it all again?" she proposed with a sad smile.

"That's not too much of a stretch," Hotch said consolingly, his lips still by Emily's ear. "Between us and Garcia and your parents, we do have about fifty thousand pictures. We could put together a very long slideshow."

Emily laughed reached her hand up to her shoulder to entwine fingers with his. "I'm sorry. I must've scared the living daylights out of you. I know I'm being crazy. I just had a moment."

"You're okay, then?" Hotch asked. "We're in agreement? Five's perfect?"

Emily nodded. "Yeah. Five's perfect."

A clap of thunder sounded, threatening to wake one of the babies. "Let's get inside, head to bed."

"Speaking of bed," Emily said, walking through the sliding glass door that Hotch opened for her.

"Usually on a Friday night we're lucky to stay awake this late," Hotch remarked.

"Yeah, but we're awake now," Emily said, seducing Hotch with her very last word.

"Oh, I'm not saying no. Trust me," Hotch said as he hit the lights. "I will be inspecting the condom wrappers first, though, just to make sure you didn't go poking holes."

"Seriously, I told you. Baby fever struck when Ryan started walking. I haven't been upstairs since. I was actually on my way downstairs to ask you to get a vasectomy, to be honest," she said offhandedly.

Hotch almost tripped up the stairs. "Please, don't say things like then when I'm walking up the steps carrying a baby."

"Sorry," Emily said, giggling. "I was serious, though. Especially now that we've got it out in the open that we're done having kids, then we should be more careful. Vasectomy's easy…in and out in like an hour. You'd be back on your feet in no time and back in my pants not long after that. After they confirm you're sperm count is zero, no more condoms, no more pill. Total freedom."

"I'm…perfectly happy with the condoms, and you take your pill with your vitamins in the morning and our insurance covers it, so it's not an inconvenience for you," Hotch said.

"Okay, I'm gonna do you a big huge favor and ignore the fact that you just told me that taking birth control isn't an inconvenience," Emily said as they quickly put the babies down in their cribs and paused their conversation to kiss them goodnight. She waited until they were shut in her room before she continued. "And then I'm going to point out how much better you liked sex when we were trying for a baby and you didn't have to wear a condom. Hell, it was better for both of us. I felt a little, I dunno, closer to you. Plus we didn't have to deal with throwing it out and ruining the mood with a nasty used condom. We would just…fall off of each other and stay under the covers and pass out, but, you know, more romantically than that."

"Without a condom was nice, but so is my manhood."

"They're not chopping your balls off, Aaron. They're severing ducts that you probably don't even remember the name of."

"Fine," Hotch said as he tugged off his shirt. "Let's turn the tables. How would you feel if I asked you to get your tubes tied?"

"I wouldn't mind at all. And if it was a really simple procedure like a vasectomy, and if I hadn't already put in two months of bed rest and another however many months being chained to the house because the babies ate nonstop and my boobs wouldn't stop leaking, then I'd be all for it. But a vasectomy is so much easier. Please?" she asked with a pout, her clothes all gone save for her panties and bra. She reached behind her and toyed with the clasp to the latter. "I'm not above bribery."

Hotch rolled his eyes and fell into bed in his underwear. "Em, you don't get it."

"I know I don't, which is why I'm trying to transcend your desire to…preserve your ability to make babies you'll never make. Using my body."

"You're not going to do that, because you respect yourself and your body more than that. I'm more than happy to make love right now, but no matter how many of my fantasies you try to fulfill in one night, the answer's still no."

Confidently, Emily let her bra fall to the floor as she approached the bed. "We'll see about that."

After some steamy foreplay that left Hotch more than ready, he reached to his side and into the nightstand drawer. Emily was currently working between his legs, apparently still trying to win him over, when his fingers scraped the bottom of the drawer that was empty save for a bottle of lube. "Shit," he said, panting.

"I know you like that," Emily said, giving her mouth a break to speak.

"No, I mean…we're out of condoms."

"Well, I think given our…firm decision earlier, it wouldn't be wise to tempt fate anymore." She still continued on him, though.

"This isn't quite fair to you," Hotch said guiltily, sighing and combing his hands through Emily's hair as his eyes shut without his permission. "Okay, the condom thing is annoying enough. I'll do it."

"I don't feel jipped, as long as you return the favor," Emily insisted, trying to hide how ecstatic she was with Hotch's answer. She'd never thought before that there would be a good time to run out of condoms.

"Still…what if we don't have the time or the energy the rest of the weekend? If I can prevent moments like this from stopping us, then I will. I hate when this happens. And I'm still not quite comfortable buying condoms in front of the kids, so one of us has to go to the store alone, and we have too much going on this weekend. Soccer practice, a soccer game, another soccer game, dinner with your parents Sunday, which always turns into an all-day thing, and this is every weekend—"

"Aaron," Emily said, crawling up to poise herself over him. It wasn't until then that he realized she'd had her mouth on him the entire time. "You know how you hate it when I mention your brother in bed?"

Hotch cringed. "Parents and oral sex don't mix, do they?"

"Not so much." She nibbled on his bottom lip. "By the way, I won't hold you to anything you say while I'm going down on you, so you can have time to think about the vasectomy."

"Don't say the v-word around the boys, please."

Hotch happily returned the favor when Emily was done. He wished more and more with every passing second, though, that could truly be together. He didn't need to extra time to think about it.

—

Late in the night, Hotch was roused by something stirring downstairs. Without a second thought, he removed his gun from the safe under the bed and crept to the hallway. He heard the jingling of keys hitting the counter, the fridge opening, the hiss of a beer bottle being opened. "Sean?" he said quietly down the stairs, also without thinking, after which he chided himself. It could have been anyone down there.

"Yeah, it's me. Sorry, I was trying to be quiet. I'm just gonna go hang out in the den."

Hotch put away his gun without waking Emily, then joined his brother, grabbing a beer along the way. "What's going on? It's two-thirty. Wait…did you ask?" Hotch asked as he settled into the matching recliner next to Sean's. They didn't have names on them yet, but over the years, the left one would grow to be Sean's, the right one Hotch's.

Sean tipped his beer bottle and took a long swig, then shook his head. "Didn't have a chance to."

Hotch furrowed his brow. "Did she break it off?"

"Pretty much so, yeah," Sean said, turning the big screen on.

Hotch sighed, leaning forward and propping his elbows up on his knees. "Sean, I'm sorry—"

"With her legs straight up in the fuckin' air, Aaron. She was fucking some guy I've never even met, right in our fucking living room. Our living room. Aaron. Who the fuck does that? After I gave up a stable job to be here, to be closer to her."

"Where've you been all this time?" Hotch asked after a silence that he prolonged so as not to be disrespectful to Sean.

"I went straight home after I left here. Then I went to the bar till last call, then caught a cab here."

Hotch sniffed the air. "Guess you did. Want some coffee?"

"Not done drinking yet," Sean said flatly. "Fuck women. I'm done. Never again."

"Don't say that," Hotch murmured, clapping Sean on the knee. "You might think now that you'll never find someone else, but I'm sure you will."

"Nope," Sean said stubbornly.

Hotch let it go and sat back in his chair. "Would hearing about my misery make you feel any better, or would it make me seem self-centered?" he asked with a wry grin.

"Both, but it's sixty-forty. So go for it."

"Emily talked me into getting a vasectomy."

Sean rose from his chair unsteadily, using Hotch for balance as he passed by.

"Where are you going?" Hotch asked.

Sean pounded his fist on his chest a couple of times. "To get you another beer."

The End

A/N: Please leave a review! I swear, their life doesn't resolve around oral sex. I swear!

This is as deep as I plan on delving into Sean's relationship with Danielle. I don't see a purpose in developing her character. This event is an important part of Sean's life, yes, but he is a secondary character. I am just putting this out there because I know some of you would've probably asked if we'd get more on this.

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