But time strips our illusions of their hue, / And one by one in turn, some grand mistake / Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake.
- Lord Byron
How pale she was.
He had seen hundreds of corpses: bodies ravaged by scavengers, flesh mutilated, girls with their glassy unseeing eyes boring into his skull, burning their way into his mind until they were all he dreamt of at night. Girls who reached for him with their torn nails (hands scrabbling at the padlocked door, throats aching from their screams) to close around his neck, suffocating, squeezing, holding on until he was theirs alone. A thousand times over, in his dreams, he paid for the sins of the ones who had hurt them. He atoned, night after night.
It would never be enough.
And yet upon viewing her lifeless form, he could only see her flawless, bone-white face, hands, neck. She was a newborn baby, leaving this world as she had entered it, snakelike, with a fresh skin as white as snow.
Like a snake, how easily she had shed him when the time came.
It was, he reflected, exactly the same way Kate had looked on the hospital table. The resemblance between the two women couldn't be denied; after all, that was what had drawn him to Kate in the first place. Both of them beautiful, even in death. He would remember her like this (for this was how he saw Kate): an empty shell, a forgotten snakeskin left to bake in the desert sun. A cruel snapshot of the person she had been, and now he hated her for it, for leaving him with only this.
Delicately, he traced the spiderweb of veins that spanned her forearm. She was ghostly in the unforgiving light of the autopsy table, lips parted slightly. Beneath the sheet lay the womb that had carried his child, where they had made life as they made love (their first time, sweaty hands fumbling at belt buckles with the rush of arousal – how different, how removed from the soft, detached thrusting of their final months together). He had claimed her that night, marked her with his seed, but she was no longer his. She had shed this life, and with it, him, in a single bullet, slipping perfectly away, going, going, gone.
"Agent Hotchner?"
"Yes, I'm ready," he said automatically, callously, closing his face. The words hung there, preempting whatever form of I'm sorry the baby-faced detective had been trained to offer up. Yes, the families would hold fast to this man and his apologies. He knew that in their storm of grief, they would grab whatever flimsy lifeline available. They would not want to see the snakeskin that was left of the person they loved.
Twenty years of marriage weighed heavily on him now, yoking around his neck, and those words were what defined them. Ready, always, for the next case, the next nightmare, the next girl he would not be able to save. Ready to slip out of his Aaron-skin and into the skin he perversely loved, the skin of murderers and rapists and sadists. It clung to him like his Aaron-skin never could, satiny smooth against him, only to come away with the metallic stickiness of blood, so much that he could drown in it. It had been sewn for him so snugly that to slip it on was to come home. The deliciously sharp edges of it, of taking the risk again and again to savor the sweet razor-fine release that came with the absolute knowledge of the monsters – but one mistake, and it would cut you to the bone. That skin took and took, and he had paid the debt in blood, nightmares, and eventually, her. When she left, ultimately the Aaron-skin shed him as recompense.
The other skin was the one constant in his life. She had left him, his sanity had nearly left him, but that skin welcomed him with open arms, caressing, soothing every time as a mother would do. And like a child, he ached for it, ached to escape in the minds of the insane (how ironic, that he should find solace in something that terrorized others).
He would never be able to shed her skin now.
A/N: There you have it. I'm not completely pleased with how it flows, but it's a start. Constructive criticism and reviews are terrific. Also, I have the seedlings of an idea for a longer spin-off of this one-shot....beginning with Haley's death and dealing with the fallout from that. Let me know what you think. At the very least, a oneshot from Emily's POV will follow. --mysticlake