A/N - Do not read if you are triggered by self harm.
...
"Don't touch me," she whispered to the older man, batting his hand away as she tried to see in front of her, those rare tears clouding her vision.
It hadn't even been a day since her dam finally broke and their family tore itself apart, and here they were back in the doctor's office to make sure they could piece everything back together.
Jack had been dealing with depression for - as long as his parents knew - the last two years. Everything had just happened so fast:
he had broke up with his first girlfriend because she was moving across the country, Hotch's mother who Jack had been closest with had passed away, and he had been the savior of his school.
A shooter had come onto the campus, critically injuring two students and a teacher before walking into the cafeteria where the majority of students were hiding. While everyone cowered away and hid under the tables, Jack followed his math teacher up to the doors to talk the shooter down.
When Hotch and Emily had gotten the call that the fifteen year old had been shot, it took everything they had not to break down in the car on the way to the hospital. The bullet had gone straight through his shoulder, a scar forming after months of physical therapy.
Just like his father.
After all their son had gone through, the Hotchners weren't surprised when he started having nightmares. He wouldn't talk about them, after waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and yelling out for his parents, he would say he was fine, pretending to fall back to sleep so his parents would leave his doorway.
His Foyet nightmares had surprised him. He had gotten over that entire situation before he'd turned ten.
In his dreams Haley still died, but after he watched his mother's body fall, sometimes Emily would be stabbed. Other times, his father threw him self in front of a bullet and ended up dead beside his mother.
And once, his parents had offered him up as the victims.
Everything scared him, everything was personified and felt as if he couldn't breathe.
It only seemed logical to take his father's gun.
Emily sat herself beside her husband and moved her chair right up tot he doctor's desk. "What did he tell you?"
Jack's doctor looked to the younger woman with patient eyes.
"Why did he do it?" She could hear the beg in her words and the crack in her voice. Jack wouldn't confide in them. How could they know he was in so much pain if he never spoke? "Did he tell you why?"
"In your field, I assume you both know the warning signs of a suicidal teen?"
Hotch, unable to hold his wife's hand without throwing her into a tailspin, clenched his fists. "He wouldn't speak to us."
"We tried to get him to see a doctor but he never listened," Emily interjected.
"And you didn't force him?"
Emily paused. Slowly sitting back in her chair, the brunette met the eyes of her husband and wiped the tears on her cheeks.
Hotch turned to look at the doctor. "He got violent." He could hear his wife sniffle as she tried to stop her tears. "We threatened to ground him when he acted out and he pushed his mother into the wall."
Emily huffed, wiping her shaking hand down her face. "He was horrified," she acknowledged, remembering the fear in her son's eyes. "After that he stayed with Aaron's brother for a week."
"And are you ok?"
The brunette woman couldn't stop her forehead from scrunching as she glanced down to her hands. She had cried enough to fill the Atlantic, her tears warmer than those icy waters but just as salted. "He scared me," she admitted, "but we tried to get through it."
"Did you both try to get through it?" the doctor asked, never once picking up his clipboard, "or did you just try to help him through it?" He watched the agent almost wilt in front of him. "If you can't help yourself first, how can you help your son?"
Emily looked up to meet those intimidating blue eyes. "Are you blaming me for Jack's attempt?" She had blamed herself enough already, she didn't need anyone else joining in.
His head shook. "Absolutely not." Watching as Hotch tried to take his wife's hand and Emily refused, the psychologist sat up in his chair. "I'm saying that you can't forget about yourself in this situation."
"What do we do?"
Emily turned, not surprised to see her husband shedding those rare tears.
Hotch could hear the break in his voice. "This is our son. What can we do to help him?" They had dealth with this situation with victims before, but never had it been their own son. "We can't just sit here."
"But that's exactly what you have to do?"
When the doctor pulled out the tape recorder, Emily was the one to reach out for her husband's hand, her heart clenching when he took it.
"Jack gave me permission to let you listen to our last session."
Jack's voice cracked through the room as the tape recorder was turned on, the Hotchners with their eyes glued to the device.
He couldn't stop crying.
"Jack, I need you to calm down."
Emily's hand reached up to cover her lips as the trembled, her tears falling again at the pain she heard in her son's voice.
"They don't get it."
"Who doesn't get it?"
There was a small hiccup. "My parents." When the doctor asked what it was that his parents did not understand, the sound of Jack's chair moving against the floor echoed. "I can't tell them."
Listening to this now, both Emily and Hotch knew some of what had gone on with their son, but his dreams were something that were never spoken about. His dreams were what had sent him over the edge.
"They've done everything for me and I can't even talk to them about it."
"About what? Your dreams?"
What the Hotchners couldn't see was Jack rubbing his hands down his tear stained face before nodding his head. "And my thoughts."
"What are your thoughts?" The doctor paused for a moment to give his patient some time to take a tissue and blow his nose. "What is so terrible, in your mind, that you can't tell your parents?"
Jack's breath was hard. "I just want it to end."
The recording ended and the only sound left in the room was Emily hyperventilating, her husband getting as close to her as he could in their chairs so he could wrap his arm around her.
Leaving the doctor's office, husband and wife didn't hesitate to rush back up to their son's hospital room and beg the doctors to be able to see Jack. After he had been brought in and examined, he had been administered to the psych ward.
Threatening to call their superior got them into the hallway, walking past every room until they reached their son's.
Jack sat back in his bed, tears running down his face and a bandage over the hole in his cheek the doctor's had stitched up.
Just as he had pulled the trigger on his father's gun Jack backed away, second guessing his move. If he hadn't, his parents would have been three floor's down in the hospital's morgue.
Emily let her husband in before her, watching with flooded eyes as he sat himself down next to their son and took his hand.
"Dad?" Jack's eyes slowly fluttered open, fighting the morphine overloading his body. "Mom?"
The brunette woman rushed over to the teenager's bedside and took his other hand. "We're right here, baby."
Not trying to fight his tears as he met the eyes of his parents, the teen laid back in his bed, his body shaking as he sobbed. "I'm sorry," he tried to apologize, his mouth sore. He let his mother take his hand and hold it against her face and his father try to figure out how to feel. "I'm sorry."
It wasn't his fault, but like everything that had happened to him, it sure felt like it.