Scars

this is a useless wip that i'll never finish but it's decent and I like it too much to scrap it so... it's just about hotch having a facial scar and I never said why or decided why either

Alex taken up painting in the final year of Ethan’s life. She anticipated bright bruising tulips and delicate little baby’s breath to stain the canvas, a final testament of love. A mother’s love. What she found instead was anger. No soft hues, no loving memories painstakingly borne from the great devotions and tribulations of her motherhood. She left each canvas a murder scene – harsh browns and reds, coagulated misery to gauke at in shock and horror. Not love. Not devotion. Her agonizing pain, her premature grief, and the ache deep in her bones that the child she loved, she nurtured and nursed through colic and fever, would die. Before her. Before James. Ethan would just die and she would be expected to carry on as if it never happened. 

Early in that last year, while he was still mobile and still in the resemblance of a child, Ethan had come across her work. He seemed neither shocked nor alarmed, just curious. He’d touched one of them, ran his hand clumsily through the wet paint. Alex had been angry at first, frustrated by the sight of ugly red paint staining Ethan’s hands and angry that she’d been found out. That the source of her anguish had found her failure to cope. But what she found, once Ethan was distracted and elsewhere, was that in all the places his little hands had smeared wet paint, underneath the images were still ridisudally in place. 

She could still make out the patterns and shapes she had originally made but now they were less clear. The brush strokes were still there. The meaning there but now distorted, like muddy lake water. 

The other thing that Ethan’s death had taught her was how curel people could be, even the most wellmeaning. Gossip, in any office, spreads like an influenza. One cough, one sneeze and it’s over. News of Ethan’s ailment, his declining status, and even his death had kept Alex’s coworkers busy with things to think about. She received cards wishing Ethan a speedy recovery and cards with suggestions on how to get through chemotherapy. Though, Ethan would never get better and Ethan never had chemotherapy or cancer.