hee has been rattling around my brain like a pinball…

“so be safe”

*immediately all crash into each other*

Okay, but imagine -

Haley knows it will be Morgan on the phone, in season 3. She knows. If the phone had rung at 2 am on a Saturday night and her husband had rolled out of bed, kissed her on the forehead, whispered, "work," and gone ... Well, it would have been Morgan then, too.

She knows because it's been Morgan for months by then. Or. It's been not Morgan for months. Aaron had called her and said they were flying out to Chicago for a few days to help Morgan out, and her husband had done his level best to never say Morgan's name again.

They came back from Chicago several days late. She thought they had, at least, and then Agent Prentiss had called and asked for Aaron and quickly backtracked when Haley had told her that he was still in Chicago with the rest of them.

(Maybe that was when Haley had started answering her own calls. Her cell had rung and she hadn't saved the number and she had thought of Prentiss's panic and hadn't pressed "decline".)

🎃 ᕼᗩᒪᒪOᗯEEᑎ ᗯITᕼ TᕼE ᕼOTᑕᕼᑎEᖇᔕ 🎃

You know, all these years and I never missed a Halloween. A couple of Easters and a Christmas and half of a birthday, but never a Halloween.

for: @ssahotchswife & @tinystrawberrysalad because you're always the sweetest kind of inspiration..happy halloween! 🎃

gif:@hqtchner

Hotchgan + ao3 tags (1/?)

Bonus, because I couldn't pick just one:

agent hotchner 🙈💕💕

Different

This isn’t the most polished or well-rounded but it’s been sat in my drafts for a while as a blueprint for an important scene in another fic so have the beta version, if you will. Still got some bugs to iron out + there’s a wider context missing, but I think it stands all right on its own.

Inspired by (surprise) the dialogue prompt do you wish I was different?

1.5k words. Hotch & Haley. Autistic!Hotch but neither of them know it yet.

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heredity

Summary: Hotch struggles to know what Jack needs as a new single father. Will helps.

Notes: There is no pairing here, it's just a short thing that has been in my WIP folder forever and isn't getting better or bigger. It just is what it is. Let the purge continue. (Aroung 1.6k words.)

Warnings: Depression, grief, pain medication

Hotch knows he doesn't come from good stock, not so far as fathers go. He's always been keenly aware of how little foundational knowledge he has, how he couldn't think of a single figure he'd want to emulate. At a certain point, and with great disappointment, he realized that his father wasn't the first emperor of heavy-handed corruption in the Hotchner line. No, his grandfather and his father before him all bore the mark, he could see it in the photo albums. Hidden in those celluloid smiles he could see it.

Sean might not ever think of it this way, but he knows it's why he won't settle down. Jack will probably never see Hotchner cousins.

“Take care of your son, Hotch.” Morgan might not have meant anything by it, but there was a sting in those words as he breathed them in. Poison gas burning his lungs. In Morgan's eyes he could see Jack's future, a boy forced to learn life with only one parent still breathing and it was up to him to make that somehow okay. He'd had two breathing, and both were worthless and at a certain point he had to hope that he was at least better than that.

I haven’t got it together enough to write anything real but I’m thinking about Hotch at his dad’s funeral, the last set of bruises still fading beneath his scratchy over-starched shirt collar. Sean, so small in his kid’s suit that people find impossibly adorable at weddings but unsettling at funerals, the miniature proportions an insult. He’s leaning back against his brother’s legs, trusting his strength won’t let him fall no matter how heavily he rests there. But Aaron can only stay frozen because if he moved he would run out of this place with these people talking about a man he’d never met. Not sure how they all ended up here at the wrong funeral talking about a stranger when he knows, he knows the coffin holds a monster finally felled.

The way Jack’s features would mimic Sean’s at Haley’s funeral and make it impossible for Hotch to look at him even though he knows the distance is damaging. A new set of bruises fading slowly as he recites words without hearing them, the mechanical act of speaking completely uncoupled from conscious thought. The way he’d look at the sea of faces and not recognize any of them. Not even someone as loved as Haley can be held once they’re gone, dissolving into a blur of standardized grief. This setting could be for anyone and their actions would be the same, he knows. There is nothing of her in their words, in their tears. How could it be that he’d gotten so lost that he’d found his way here again?

the powers of time

Summary:  Time parallel: Sean comes to stay with Hotch after Foyet / Hotch takes care of a monster in Sean's closet.

Warnings: post-Foyet pain, implications of past abuse, cigarettes, mentions of drug use

Pairings: none

Words: 3.7k

Notes: More Sean content! Let's do this.

Read on AO3: (soon)

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."

‒ Stephen King

Sean is six the first time he sees the monster in his closet. He's not really sure he sees it with his eyes, not at first. He's only six but he's not an idiot and he hasn't grown up in a house that encourages make believe. Any imagination he has is owed to his brother pulling him out into the woods and breaking branches off of trees to play pirates or cowboys. He's too old to be any good at the games, but Sean is grateful that he tries. All of this leads him to believe with all his heart that the monster he sees in his closet is real, very real. He knows better than to call out, to make a sound after dark, because there is more than one monster in the house, and he's not trying to trade the one in his closet for the one with the flaming whiskey breath.

“Aaron?” he whispers, entering his brother's room on the balls of his feet, careful to miss the floorboards he knows creak. That startles Aaron and he doesn't like to startle his brother. “Aaron? There's a monster in my closet...”

The room is silent for a moment, and then he hears a low rumbling hum come from beneath the mound of blankets on the bed. The fabric shifts and out pops a foot first, one arm flopping a moment later. He's gotten so much taller over the summer; he towers over Sean now and as he emerges from beneath the covers, he wonders at how grown up his brother is. He's the only person who can get rid of the monster in his closet.

“Not again...” he moans, running one sweaty palm down over his face. “I have exams in the morning, Sean.”

“I don't think it cares.”

Aaron grunts his disapproval but can't argue with that logic. “Okay. Okay. I'm coming.” He doesn't move, though, and Sean stands sentinel with his hands folded over his chest. Soon he hears the deep breaths and tiny snores that tell him his brother has gone back to sleep and he frowns. Aaron isn't coming and he doesn't want to go back to his room alone, so he does the only logical thing.

He crawls into bed with his brother, right under the covers that smell like sweat and something green and skunky, buries his face in the too thin pillow and tries to forget about the monster. It can have his room tonight.

reveals

– or in which emily reveals her relationship with aaron after a rough case.

read on archive of our own or below the cut!

IT WAS A QUIET, almost uncomfortably quiet, mood in the bullpen that afternoon. It had been a rough case for them all, the entire team being jumpy at even the smallest sounds that would echo through the room. Aaron had retreated into his office, the door closed and the blinds partially closed. Rossi had wandered off, no one really knowing where he was, or what he was doing. In the deafening silence of the bullpen sat the rest of the team; Morgan and Reid were sitting close by the latter’s desk, playing a round of chess ( which Morgan was loosing, something everyone could see ). JJ was lost in thought, her gaze fixated on a picture of herself and Will with their son, Henry. Garcia was somewhere in her office, every single screen mounted on the wall showing different videos of cats. Only Emily seemed to be partially in the present, scarily aware of the thumping of her own pulse as she tried to drown the case in the past.

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Rewatched Criminal Minds ✨