AN: Thank you to the ever-amazing, FestiveFerret, for the beta! She's a grammatical Queen.
This is the spiritual successor to A Dragon Song, and is longer, plottier, and sadder than that one. The plot will drastically diverse from that one in chapter two, and I do recommend re-reading chapter one even if you read A Dragon Song-the plot is set up in this first chapter in snippets of scenes and dialogue that were missing from the one-shot version.
Updates will be weekly, on Fridays (for me. Australia is in the future by some sixteen hours, so it will be Thursday for most of my audience).
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Chapter One: Intro
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~ Meeting a dragon ~ The story behind the tie ~ Catching nightmares ~ Impressing a dragon ~ The dragon decides ~
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The dragon arrived exactly one and a half hours after lunch, to allow time for digestion, as he would later explain. Dragons, above all, were unfailingly polite, and Spencer was no different in that regard.
"Good afternoon," said a voice as Hotch was busy filing budget requests for the coming quarter. "You were expecting me, I hope." The voice, when Hotch looked up to find the owner of it, had come from the chair tucked neatly against the front of his desk. The door remained closed, as it had been all day, and there was no one in sight. Incorrectly, it appeared as though he was alone.
"Huh," said Hotch and returned to the budgets.
"I'm down here," it continued, somewhat accusingly.
When Hotch stood and peered down onto the chair, a dragon looked back up at him. It was a deep navy blue from the tip of its tail, which it wore draped over one forearm much like a bride with a long train on her dress, to the pointed end of its long snout. It was, in fact, the exact shade of blue as Hotch's suit jacket, which hung neatly from the back of the chair the dragon was sitting upon and which made the dragon quite difficult to see. The only aspects that stood out on the slender creature were eyes that whirled a sedate grey with no noticeable pupils and its carefully knotted six-fold tie.
Hotch observed all these things in a very careful manner, taking note of each and every one. He then sat down, just as carefully, and reached for the phone to call his doctor to book an appointment and then possibly call Rossi to admit to him that he was seeing dragons.
"I am real," said the dragon, definitely petulantly now, and turned a deeper shade of blue. "Look—I even made an appointment." And, with a short, tinny whistle, a card appeared on Hotch's desk, right underneath his still hovering hand. A card that, until this point, had been sitting at home on his desk after he'd found it half pushed through his mail slot. It was a very simple card—completely blank except for 'An Appointment with A Dragon for After Lunch (allowing time for digestion). Please & Thank You' written across it in a startlingly neat hand.
"This is Jack's," said Hotch, who'd made a rather simple but ultimately rash assumption about it.
"No, it's not." The dragon was now a pale blue and looking rather depressed. "I knew this would happen. I even put a stamp on—the book said I should."
Hotch turned the card over. 'A Stamp' was written on the other side, in the same hand.
"Huh," he said again. "How did you get past security?"
"I asked," the dragon replied. "It's tremendously important that I speak with you, Agent Hotchner." It was then that Hotch noticed the shouting, as though something alarming or very exciting had been noted several floors down and the news was slowly spreading upwards.
The door banged open, and Rossi barged in after it, bursting out with, "Hotch, there's a—" He stopped, eyes bulging worryingly. Hotch leaned back in his chair, relieved of the need to phone his doctor as Rossi stared at his guest.
"A dragon," Hotch said matter-of-factly. And, now that procedure and sanity had both been verified, he had a job to do. "Excuse me, Dave, but I believe it—he?" The dragon nodded, eyes whirling: "—has an appointment." Rossi slowly backed out, blinking rapidly and closing the door gently behind him. "Now, you were saying, Mr.…?"
"Spencer," said the dragon, turning back to his original shade of suit blue and puffing his chest up. "Dr. Spencer Reid."
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The dragon told his story.
"I need your help," he said grimly, his colour changing and deepening, turning solemn and worried. "No one will listen to me. They're determined to pretend that nothing is wrong—that we aren't disappearing in unprecedented numbers."
Hotch listened to the tale. The dragons, he was told, were fading. It had begun with the largest, the oldest. The strongest. Now, others were succumbing. Older dragons were vanishing, never to be seen again. Often in pairs, always without noting. No young were being created. No one knew why, and the dragons, for the most part and despite the danger, were unconcerned.
"It's too swift," Spencer said. He was fiddling with the very tip of his slim tail in his paws, as though fretful. "We don't move fast, we never have. Dragons take their time to decide and time is something we don't have—we need to know now, before there's no one left."
"Why us?" asked Rossi. The team—the dragon had refused to speak to anyone else—were gathered silently around the conference table, all eyes on the strange creature perched in the centre. Outside, the entire Bureau was left wondering what was going on; Hotch sighed inwardly as he thought of the stack of FD forms he was going to need to fill out for 'permission to consult with unofficial sentient being'. Probably FD-1000 through to 1200, knowing his luck. In triplicate.
"I think it has something to do with the magic," said Spencer simply. "It's leaking. Wherever it leaks, wherever I follow, I find your team cleaning up the damage the leaks do. You solve puzzles—you help people and save lives. Well, our lives need saving, and I'm asking you to help us, please. The others want to ignore it, but I don't. My partner doesn't. Most of us, the younger ones, we don't—we feel it, when they vanish. It hurts." He paused, his colour now a pallid white-blue and making him look ghoulish. Not just frightened: terrified.
"How do they vanish?" was JJ's question as she tipped forward on her chair like she wanted to reach out to him.
"They sing," said the dragon, "and then they're gone." With that, he curled small and covered his muzzle with his paws, so pale he was almost translucent, the tie around his neck stark against his softly scaled skin. Hotch looked to each of his team members, wondering what exactly they were going to do about this, and how they would go about investigating the disappearance of the dragons. He didn't think there was any protocol that dealt with magic, if such a thing really existed. It said something about his steadfast determination to simplify his complicated life that, when faced with a dragon, he still chose to believe in logic above whimsy.
"We'll need to speak to any witnesses," he said finally, falling back on well-learned procedure. "Other dragons."
"They won't speak to you," the dragon replied, his voice muffled by paws. Grey eyes, now a dull blue, whirled as he peered out from between spread toes. "The last time we spoke to humans, someone was eaten."
There was silence as they considered that.
"We can't help you if your people won't cooperate with us." Hotch used the same voice he used on any reluctant witness, scaly or otherwise. "That's if we take your case on at all. We have no proof of wrongdoing."
"You have my word," said the dragon, blinking. It was the first time any of them had seen him do that. "Why would I lie? I'm risking everything coming here. Unless I can prove that your people are those that my people would deign to speak to, I'll be ostracised for being so rash." He huffed grumpily, a small stream of smoke filtering from his nostrils to curl into the air above. "I was rash. I only took two years to choose your team."
"You've been watching us for two years?" Morgan exclaimed.
The dragon's neck snaked around as he peered at him without turning his body. "Yes, of course. How else would I decide? I couldn't speak to just anyone. I had to know that you all possessed certain qualities. Bravery, truthfulness, determination to do right." He looked at Hotch, adding, "Imagination," in what Hotch assumed he fancied to be a snide voice, Rossi's mouth twitching.
It clicked.
"That tie…" Hotch said slowly, recognising it. "That's mine."
The dragon nodded. "I knotted it myself," he said, puffing his chest out again.
"You're…" Hotch studied the dragon, as he returned to his former shade of navy. "You're imitating me?"
"I am taking upon the appearance expected for appointments," the dragon replied proudly. "I studied it in order to make the best possible impression. Your people's book on appointment making was very helpful, as was observing your daily routine."
"Our book?" JJ sounded overwhelmed, looking at a point between Hotch and the dragon as though for some kind of proof she wasn't hallucinating.
"Yes. 'How to be a Professional'. It assured me a well-fitting suit is integral for professional males, of which Agent Hotchner appears to be a supreme example." The dragon looked down at himself and tilted his head. "I needed to make the best impression, and I could think of nothing more well-fitting than my own skin. Was I successful? I hope I was, although I understand if you must all now deliberate over my request despite my professionalism. I do ask that you don't take any longer than five years though…"
He looked terribly, plaintively hopeful.
Hotch looked at his team members again and, correctly this time, read every face aimed at him. They ranged from JJ's 'please' to Rossi's 'don't you dare make this thing sad' to Morgan's 'why haven't you said yes yet' and, so, he sighed and made his own rash decision of the day. "No need for that," he told the dragon, his wrist twinging from the stack of paperwork he could sense already landing on his desk. "We'll help you."
The dragon turned a glowing, happy yellow, startling them all. "Yes!" he cheered, hopping a bit on the spot. "Oh, Emily will be so pleased!" And, with that, he vanished with a pop, leaving behind nothing but the smell of smoke and the tie, crumpling gently to the table.
"Huh," said Rossi.
Hotch felt very much the same way.
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'Spencer' reappeared a month later, quite suddenly. Hotch only knew that he was there because the roomful of police officers he was delivering a profile to all went very quiet, eyes widening almost in unison. Hotch followed the eyes, finding the dragon sitting on top of the whiteboard with their case pinned to it, perched like a bird with his head craned upside-down to study what was displayed there.
"Don't mind me," said Spencer, rotating his head right way up and observing Hotch through one eye. "Please continue."
"Ah," said Hotch, reorienting himself before launching back into the profile without missing another beat, despite the room's fractured attention. When it was over, he thanked them, turned to walk back into the office they were working from, and determinedly didn't flinch as the dragon leapt from the whiteboard to his head and settled down comfortably with his tail wrapped around his neck. Like that, they walked into the office, finding more eyes to stare at them.
"There's a dragon on your head," said Rossi attentively.
Spencer, in response, puffed what Hotch fancied to be a happy plume of smoke from his nose, which was hovering very close to Hotch's eye. "See," he said, kneading his little paws into Hotch's scalp as Hotch refused to wince at the needle-y claws nipping at him, "I told them I'd picked well. You're all so clever."
Rossi raised an eyebrow, but Hotch was oddly certain that the dragon was sincere.
"We're in the middle of a case," Hotch warned Spencer, lifting him onto the table and watching him scamper over to JJ, studying the casefiles she was paging through. "We can't help you right now."
"That's okay," Spencer replied, blinking slowly. "The others aren't convinced that you're right yet. They've instructed me to remain silent until we can be sure."
"Sure of what?" asked Morgan.
"Sure that you're right," said Spencer firmly, tapping an unsheathed claw on the casefile, overtop a picture of a desiccated femur. "This bone is mislabelled. It's female, not male. Female femurs are wider—sexual dimorphism."
Hotch glanced at the bone, making a mental note to check that—it changed their profile if it was true—and asked, "How are you going to be sure?"
Spencer's eyes whirled grey again, before settling to a bright hazel as he circled once and curled up on the table. "I'll watch," he said cheerfully, "for as long as I have to."
And, just like that, the BAU gained its very own dragon.
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Dragons, as they quickly learned, might be very polite but that didn't mean they were always easy to get along with. Spencer was startlingly intelligent, extremely awkward, and had no boundaries for his curiosity. Hotch requested access for their dragon to the FBI handbooks and manuals on every conceivable procedure, leaving Spencer alone with them for just a day and returning to find him able to recite them verbatim, once even correcting Rossi on a point Rossi himself had written. He rode about on Hotch's shoulder or his head, extending his sinuous neck out as far as it would go to examine each person Hotch stopped to speak to, no matter how uncomfortable it made that person, and occasionally practising his 'profiling' on whoever the poor person was.
After an encounter with Strauss that was profoundly mortifying for them all, Hotch decided that perhaps Spencer would enjoy being let loose in Archives for a little while. Thirty-five access and non-disclosure forms later, he delivered his dragon to the gated room filled with shelves and shelves and shelves of past cases awaiting digitilisation and walked away, once again incorrect in his assumption that the dragon was dealt with.
He was wrong.
"I'm done," said Spencer, appearing with a pop by Garcia's head and almost startling her into dropping her coffee into Morgan's lap. It was two days later. "That was fascinating, thank you!"
"Huh," said Hotch, and decided he really needed to stop being surprised by him.
It was discovered at Halloween that Spencer loved candy, which was unfortunate, as dragons didn't appear to have any way of digesting food. An odd discovery, seeing as Spencer had a firm fascination with the digestive system that led to several awkward lunches where he would sneak under Hotch's desk and tuck his head against his stomach, listening to whatever it was he could hear. Hotch never asked. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. Instead, whatever Spencer ate—usually candy—was expelled as thick clouds of multi-coloured and scented smoke that he seemed completely unable to control, leaving trails of burnt sugar behind him as it settled.
After a disastrous day where JJ—who was unable to say no to the little dragon's pleading gaze no matter how often Hotch politely reminded her that Spencer's eyes were almost certainly bigger than his apparently non-existent stomach—gave him half of her tuna-fish lunch, a new form appeared on Hotch's desk. This one was a requisition form for a new sign for the bullpen, and he approved it with a sigh. The sign appeared three days later: Care & Feeding of the Dragon, it read in big bold black letters, containing only one tip underlined twice and written in red: Don't.
On cases, Spencer rode proudly on Hotch's shoulder, sometimes curling up on his head and, somehow, not really taking anything away from his stern countenance. It became apparent that Spencer had picked the singular person in existence who could still look imposing with a small tie-wearing dragon perched on his head like a hat. If Hotch tried to leave him behind, he'd simply curl up innocently wherever placed and then, usually at an incredibly inconvenient time, pop into existence back onto his established spot upon Hotch's head. This included one notable time when his appearance had startled an unsub so much the man had opened fire, earning a dismissive whistle from Spencer. Hotch, who'd gone to throw himself down with his arms wrapped around the unprotected creature's delicate frame, found that every gun in the room, fired bullets included, had vanished along with the whistle.
"I don't like guns," Spencer had said peevishly as Morgan had arrested the man, the dragon turning a grumpy green. From that moment on, he'd repeated the trick so often that the agents began to pull their sweaters down over their weapons before entering a room with him, in case he whistled and hid them. Hotch sometimes wondered where the guns went when he vanished them, but decided—probably wisely—not to ask.
On the other hand, interrogations became easier, with people usually so intimidated by the dragon puffing rings of irritating smoke at them that their guards were completely down. And, if they did try to lie around him, he called them on it every time.
"I don't know who that is," said the suspect on one particular day, wincing as Spencer's eyes flashed red.
"Lie," said the dragon.
"No, it's not!"
More red. "Lie," the dragon said, smugger this time, and yawned.
The man spluttered, handcuffs clinking on the table as he tried to pull away. "I-what-you—" he garbled, before screaming, "You're a lie! You're not even supposed to exist!"
They looked at Spencer.
"I don't think you need me for that one," he said, and went to sleep.
But no matter how much trouble the dragon caused, it was unanimous that his worth exceeded it. "The US Government is very interested in opening up lines of communication with the dragons," Hotch was told over and over again, every time he was called to yet another 'creation of a new bureaucratic form to deal with some unforeseen complication of having a dragon' consultation. "Since they have chosen you, Agent Hotchner, we implore you to act with dignity and in a manner befitting the spokesperson of the human race."
"I'm not entirely sure what he wants of us," Hotch retorted, feeling a bit like a butterfly pinned up with all the dragons peering in at him, wherever they were. "What are we supposed to do?"
"Impress him," he was told, and nothing else.
Winter brought snow, and Spencer becoming distracted every other minute to go out and chase it until he reappeared shivering and coughing snowflakes instead of smoke. Garcia, without hesitation, knitted him a tiny sweater-vest with holes for his wings, which he wore proudly from that day on. "Kindness," he said happily, the day he was presented with it. "You're all so kind."
The following month, he stopped a suicide bomber and saved thirteen hostages without a single casualty. He was awarded agent status the very next week.
"I'm the very first Dragon-Doctor-Agent," he informed Hotch as Hotch packed to go home that night, the dragon perched on Hotch's desk with his new ID pinned to his sweater-vest where everyone could see it. "Isn't that exciting!"
"How did you even get a doctorate?" Hotch asked, more thinking of home than he was his eccentric reptilian subordinate.
"My understanding is that they are awarded after a long period of study and demonstration of intelligence," Spencer replied. Hotch looked at him, always wary—after the pool noodle incident—of any sentence Spencer began with 'my understanding'. "I decided it would help with making you comfortable with me if I took on a human title of respect, so I did both."
"What did you study?"
Spencer replied, "Libraries," as though this didn't need further explanation.
"Which library?" Hotch prompted, a little confused.
The dragon peered at him, as though he was the slow one here. "All of them," he finally said. "I read very fast. Good night." And, then, he vanished.
As they exited the BAU, Hotch asked Rossi after explaining the exchange, "Do you think he meant he read every book in every library?" because, surely not?
"When it comes to that dragon," Rossi said wryly, "I try not to think too much at all."
And life continued on, mostly unchanged by the discovery of dragons. If, sometimes, Spencer ignored everyone in favour of staring off wistfully into the distance with his colour a woeful teal, they never asked and he never told.
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Nine months after the dragon arrived, Hotch heard him sing for the first time.
Spencer hadn't shown up for a week, concern making it difficult for any of them to focus. They'd gone on a case, without their dragon, and returned four days later—still without their dragon.
"You will look for him, won't you?" asked Garcia, all worried eyes and a downturned mouth.
"Of course," Hotch said. How could he say anything else to that expression, despite his worry that Spencer had taken too long to decide on whether they were 'right' and whatever was hurting the dragons had caught up to him? When the others went home, he stayed behind and wondered where a dragon would go. And he wondered and wondered and wondered, until his wondering became drifting and the exhaustion of the past four days caught up to bring his head down to the desk. He dreamed of a song of no language, a rhythm that sung with his very heartbeat. It was wordless and intimate and, when he woke, his cheeks were wet. He was distantly aware that he'd dreamed of loss, of something less where there had been more.
Half-awake and shaken to his core, he followed that heartbeat down down down until he shivered himself conscious with his hand pressed to the gated door of Archives. It swung open. The room was silent. His ID was in his hand, the soft beep of the access scanner the only sound. There was nothing around but the narrow aisles, the dusty shelves, the fading boxes of broken lives.
And loss.
"What is that song?" he asked the silent air.
The air replied, in a voice like sorrow, "It has no name. It doesn't need it. What good is a name for it? That would be worthless to the majority of our listeners."
"I heard it," Hotch said softly, walking towards that voice. Down one of those narrow aisles to where the dust was disturbed and one of those fading boxes was knocked askew, smoke drifting lazily out through the lopsided lid. "I was listening. Are you okay?" He wondered, for the first time, if Spencer had family of his own. Who he returned to when he vanished with a polite 'good night'.
"Your species is outnumbered exponentially by beetles," Spencer said, his voice a dull grumble. He sounded miserable, almost angry with it, and his colour was a sickly maroon when Hotch slid the lid from the box and peered into what was clearly a drafty, dusty nest. "If anything, we sing for the beetles. They don't care to name things. Their business is far too important to waste their time with naming things."
"Did someone die?" asked Hotch. "Another dragon?"
"No." Spencer curled tighter. Hotch couldn't tell, not at this angle, but he fancied the dragon was a little smaller than usual.
Hotch looked around, at the harsh lights and the silent room. "Have you been sleeping here?" he tried again, sensing the dragon was reluctant to talk. "Isn't it lonely?"
In response, Spencer made a sound—a high, clear note that trilled and then crashed, like glass shattering—and buried his nose under his paws. "A dragon never sleeps alone," he said miserably, his colour worsening. "And all I am is alone—I can't go home without proof that I'm correct, I can't disappoint Emily like that, and you humans move so fast. You're there, gone, there, gone, there—when do you ever have time to just think?"
"You've been sleeping in a box?" Hotch didn't really know where to go with this.
"It's a lovely box," Spencer replied, always polite, even to boxes. "But…"
"Lonely."
"Lonely," he agreed.
Hotch looked around again, and he said, "Would you like to come home with me?" There was really nothing else he could say, his heart breaking a little at the sad dragon in the cardboard box.
And Spencer, flickering a hopeful yellow, replied, "Oh, yes please."
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"Can Spencer sleep with me?" Jack asked hopefully as Hotch helped him button his pyjama top.
"He's not a pet," Hotch answered. "He's staying in the guest room."
"Oh," said Jack.
"Oh," said Spencer, who had apparently been sitting on Jack's bookshelf watching them. "Which room is that?"
"Third down the hall." Hotch looked up as he spoke, finding no dragon peering down, Spencer having vanished off to poke around on his own. Jack wiggled in his arms, wanting to follow the dragon, but Hotch steered him to his bed. "Nope. You've had enough chattering at him tonight—bedtime for all of us."
"Do dragons sleep?" Jack asked, bouncing and continuing to bounce as he leapt into his bed. "Do they snore? Do they dream? Could I be a dragon? Is Spencer going to have breakfast with us? Can we have pancakes—"
"Sleep." Hotch tweaked the blankets over his head, smiling a little at the giggle that floated up from under them, and left the room. "Goodnight, Jack. I love you."
"Night, Daddy. Love you more and more and more, to infinity-always."
Spencer, when Hotch went looking, was sitting in the centre of the guest bed looking around the room with a bemused cast to his colour. Since his expression was exceedingly difficult to read—lacking lips or eyes that actually betrayed emotion—Hotch was finding that he was getting very good at assigning mood to colour. And it did look rather ridiculous, the tiny dragon sinking into the covers of the queen-sized bed, but what else could Hotch do?
"Well, goodnight," Hotch said awkwardly. "You should be comfortable in here."
Spencer looked around some more. "Oh, I'm sure I will," he said, laying down and stretching as far as he could go and still barely covering a fraction of the bed, even with his wings spread wide. "This will do nicely. In here…" He trailed off, watching Hotch intently as the man went to walk out. "…Yes, in here…"
If Hotch was the type of person to fiddle, he'd have fiddled with his sleeve or worried his lip in that moment of awkward waiting.
"Good night, Agent Hotchner," said Spencer finally. And, with that, he slithered up the covers and vanished underneath them, only visible as a long line of movement that settled and curled into a tight ball in the very centre of the bed. Hotch turned off the light and left the door ajar, retiring to his own bed with the distinct feeling that this arrangement wouldn't last.
It didn't.
He woke with the swiftness and clarity born of a lifetime of waking suddenly to Jack shaking him. "Dad," he said, eyes huge on his shadowed face, "there's monsters in my room."
"We've talked about this," Hotch replied, heart sinking. "There's no such thing as monsters, Jack." This was a lie, and they both knew it. Haley's photo watched them both from the bedside cupboard, calling him on his bluff.
But Jack shook his head, mouth set stubbornly. "Yes, there is," he said firmly. "Spencer's eating them."
He was right.
Hotch stared into his son's room as the dragon dived about with wild abandon into puddles of shivering black that swirled around the bedroom floor, trying to avoid the dragon's teeth and claws. When he dived, the puddles shattered into smaller fragments, smaller yet in his paws as he swallowed puffs of smoky black and spat smoke out in response.
"See," said Jack smugly, hiding behind Hotch's legs and peering around. "Monsters."
"Not monsters," said Spencer, grabbing another puff of black and winging his way to them to drop it into Hotch's hand. The puff was fluffy and blacker than black, with nothing within it except shadows and two singular glints of alive. "It's a nightmare, a big one."
Hotch, looking down into those glints, had the unsettling feeling that he was looking into the dark itself, and the dark was looking back. "How about we sleep in my room?" he said, putting everything he was looking at firmly into the 'tomorrow' basket. Spencer, in response, turned yellow and swallowed two puffs of the wiggling nightmare whole, biting down with relish. Hotch just backed out, taking his son with him, and went to bed to wait for the dragon to finish his meal.
That night, with Jack cuddled against one side and Spencer curled on the pillow above his head, Hotch dreamed. He dreamed of dragons littering the sky like midday stars made of every colour, and he dreamed of Spencer singing happily to an audience of the world, and he dreamed of Haley.
"That nightmare was too bitter for one person," the dream Spencer told him between songs, his voice a whisper Hotch wouldn't remember in the morning. "Shared nightmares are always the ones with the sharpest bite—but don't worry. Nightmares are just dreams turned sour, and I can fix them."
The nightmare which, when asleep, wasn't puffy and indistinct at all but choking and overwhelmingly hungry, listened to the song and changed. Only a little at first, too big for one little dragon to consume alone, but other voices joined it, and Hotch listened.
Help me? asked Spencer.
Dragons never sing alone, said the other voices with every sound Hotch had ever imagined. We help.
The nightmare faded, and vanished.
When Hotch woke the next day, the picture of Haley seemed kinder, less recriminatory. And he hadn't had the dream he'd had every night since that night—the one painted with Haley's blood and Foyet's laughter and Jack screaming.
In fact, he rather thought that he hadn't dreamed at all.
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The day came that Spencer decided. It took him almost exactly seven months, and it was finally because of JJ. She'd broken down on the flight home after a vicious case, out of sight of them, but they were aware. It was rough on them all. When she returned from the bathroom, reddened eyes and flushed cheeks betraying her, Spencer flew to her arm and perched with his eyes whirling gently. He whistled once, a long trill of sad happiness.
"Empathy," he announced, wrapping his tail around and around and around her arm to steady himself as she tickled his chin. "I told them your team wasn't changed by your cruel work. Yes, I think I've decided."
"Decided what?" asked Rossi, paused over the chess game he'd been playing with Spencer before he'd flown to JJ.
Spencer looked at Hotch and said firmly, "It's time I took you to my home." Suddenly, he tucked his snout down, curling his mouth in just the kind of way that Hotch knew was his smile and turning a delicate pink, before adding, "It's time you met Emily."
Emily-the-other-dragon, Hotch decided, couldn't possibly be as surprising as her partner.
He was wrong.