high & dry

Summary: Hotch & Jack's arrival in Chicago and the beginning of their WITSEC journey.

Pairings: none (future hotchgan)

Words: 1.6k

Warnings: none

AO3: high & dry

Notes: For Comfortember Day One: Safe. I am going to do as many of the prompts for this month as I can and I plan to set them all within the Chicago Times universe. A whole month of retired softies! I can't promise all fluff, some will be sad (like this one), but it's going to be as much comfort as I can possibly bestow on them. I am going to try and keep each story short and simple, divulging little bits and details in each instead of a huge word dump. Pray for me. LOL

Chicago. He’d been plenty of times, mostly for cases but a few times for pleasure. The city looked different looming on the horizon from the backseat of a vehicle with dark tinted windows. He was nodding off in a Dramamine fog, Jack had been asleep for hours. It was a ten hour drive without stops, and the US Marshals in charge of their trip were making it a point to stop as few times as possible. Once to fuel up at a station that they deemed safe enough to let their appointees out for bathroom breaks and snacks and once at a designated time check in. Hotch didn’t handle riding in the backseat well and they’d drugged him up nicely after the fueling stop, enough that he didn’t feel awake enough to be sick but not tired enough to sleep either.

His mind was racing, even with the drugs dulling his responses. Did he make the right call? (Did he even have a choice?) Were they really safe? He had so little faith in this system anymore. At one point it was all he believed in, and now it had been so eroded that it was barely recognizable.