Author's Note: This isn't my regular fandom, nor am I writing this with any specific part of the series in mind. It just occured to me as a slash scenario and I wrote it as best I could. If there's anything wrong that you spot in this, please feel free to let me know. Constructive Criticism is always of the good.
Disclaimer: I own no rights to the television show 'Criminal Minds', or to the characters used herein. I mean no offence by it and make no financial gain by it.
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"What?"
"You've got a month's grace," his boss, not looking up in favour of the paper work, "I understand you're taking two weeks off on the fifteenth."
"Yeah," Reid said, and looked stunned.
"Then when you get back, you'll go straight to your new assignment." The papers were put down and Special Agent Hotchner leaned back in his seat, face grim and eyes hooded in that peculiar hawk-like stare of his. His mouth was the only place where the lines softened enough to show personal sadness. "I'm sorry, Reid. It was out of my hands."
"Yes," Reid said, "Sir. Thank you. I know you would have, er, done… something."
"There was nothing I could do."
"I know. I just, am a little in shock. I- I thought I was doing well in the BAU. My field of expertise is best utilized here. It seems strange to be reassigned. For no good reason."
He looked a little guilty, as if he were questioning what shouldn't be questioned. A quick look of enquiry with his eyes and Hotchner only looked more sympathetic but final.
"We'll miss you," he said.
And Reid knew it was a dismissal. Feeling decidedly unwelcome, he shot to his feet immediately and moved through the ritual of leave-taking. Nodding. Accepting Hotchner's last look of regret with a smile and a word of gracious thanks for the experience that would no doubt be of extreme help wherever it was he was being transferred.
Hotchner watched from his office as Reid went mechanically down the steps, already lost in thought and busy brain sorting out his shift in status.
It wasn't a promotion; that much was clear. Yet it wasn't a complete demotion either, though everyone who knew the score would know how to take it. It was, in best light, a move sideways.
And it made Hotch very angry. He would have fought, kicked and screamed at having his team torn into pieces by this invasion of the bureaucrats. He would have told Reid firmly and coldly that he could promise nothing but that he'd make a few calls. If not keep him in the team, then at least send him where his services were best suited.
Hotchner knew where people like Reid were sent, and he was not enamoured of the idea of Reid going there.
But his hands were tied.
He watched from his window at the show of surprise and concern, the anger and shock, muted by distance and glass into a rather tragically coloured silent movie. Morgan's face. Emily's face. Reid's back.
Rossi tapped on his door three hours later and said, "I heard about Reid."
Hotchner waved him in and handed him the file. Said nothing while Rossi read through it and digested quickly. After all, Rossi knew the way the bureau worked. And he estimated that Rossi, if anybody, could add up the sum of the elements.
"You could have gone to bat for him," Rossi commented, fixing him with a look. "You didn't."
"My hands are tied on this."
"Committed, then, Hotch?"
"Let's not play father-confessor, Rossi. I can't say a word to keep Reid from going wherever the hell they decide to send him. And neither can Reid. Even if he could, he's helpless. He's got as much sense of the way wheels are greased than a puppy. You, on the other hand, are well placed to do something."
"I, on the other hand, have no authority in this team. I can't decide who stays or goes." Rossi shut the file and slid it back onto the desk. Pushed it lightly towards Hotchner as a very clear denial. "Nobody's going to listen to me."
"You've got contacts."
The words were uttered as if they were thumbtacks on the tongue. A kind of haughty disgust.
Rossi didn't react, though his hackles itched to rise. The younger man in front of him was angry. That was obvious. And Rossi was not going to let himself be made the target of that anger, since it didn't rightfully belong to him in the first place.
"I can make a few calls," he said peacefully.
And watched the tight lines in Hotchner's face loosen a little. A glimmer of a cold smile was back, ruefully trying to show human warmth, and instead expressing only awkward relief.
"But," Rossi said, "I need assurances that this won't end up biting me in the ass."
The lines tightened just a little again but Rossi wasn't necessarily worried. He leaned forward. Lowered his voice. "You know the way they think, Hotch. If this comes out, and they know I pulled strings, I'm going to get my butt hauled up for it."
"There is no risk."
"I'm worried about the risk, I'm worried about the entire team being broken up because they think you're playing favourites."
"I'll keep my hands off." Hotch barely changed expression.
Rossi raised his eyebrows, smiling slightly. "I didn't say that. Just keep it out of the office."
Hotch sighed and shook his head. "It's not what you think."
"I think you're compromised. You know the bosses won't listen to you because if you push too hard, and they find out, they'll think you've lost your judgement. In this business, you can't lose your judgement."
"I haven't lost my judgement. Will you make the call?"
Rossi looked at him, examining the twitches and tells as best he could, reading the depth of concern in the furrow between those brows. The man, he thought dispassionately, frowned too much.
"I'll make a few calls," he said.
And Hotchner nodded and he left.
Two days later, Reid was going on vacation.
"Where are you going?" Morgan asked, pausing at his desk before the mad dash to leave on a Friday night.
Weekend freedom was rare and welcomed. Something to be cherished. But Reid looked forlorn, sitting there as if he were still fretting and worrying.
"Nowhere," Reid said. And it was the short answer.
Morgan tried to entice him out. But in Garcia's absence, he just couldn't budge him. Spencer Reid wasn't stubborn, but his mind was simply incapable of focusing on two things at the same time. It was a childlike habit, now smoothed at the edges to fit the adult isolation.
Morgan gave up and wished him well. Two weeks off. Maybe they'd meet; most likely they wouldn't. And Reid would only come back to pack up his things.
Reid waited patiently, and then got obediently into the car. He stretched his legs out and didn't say a word. Stared absently out the window as the shop fronts whizzed past. Played tricks on his eyes with the street lights. He held his satchel on his lap and the worn leather was almost a security blanket under his fingertips.
He took the feeling in, acknowledged it, and then let it slide coolly out of his head.
No space here to contemplate. There was too much else to think of. Fear could wait until professional uncertainty was soothed.
"Spencer, we're here."
Short voice. Not a happy one. Tired. Awkward. Slightly abrupt.
All of that registered. The way the tie was already loosened- sign of frustration. The way the lips were thinned- a sign of stress. The way Hotch looked haggard. A sign of… what?
Reid's mind threw up a dozen different things wrong with Special Agent Hotchner, and then said plainly, "I don't really know what's going on."
Hotch only got out the key and unlocked the door. Said, "It's ok. I'll explain inside."
They shouldn't have left together. But Reid had needed something, some kind of assurance, some sort of verification. After all, he was going to be transferred. Except that Hotchner hadn't said anything more in two weeks and they'd been so busy, catching up on workloads and profiling relatively minor blips on the radar. Collating data and going over cold cases. Preparing whatever statements were due.
All Reid had had was the knowledge that Hotchner couldn't fight for him. The personal was too close to the professional. And Reid cared a little too much about both.
He couldn't ask Hotch to do anything because part of him wondered if he hadn't slipped a bit in his performance. There had been a couple of times when he'd not really paid as much attention as he should have. In which case, he couldn't ask for a courtesy that Hotch might feel obligated to provide for emotional reasons, rather than professional, and Reid really wasn't sure if he had pride enough to think that made any difference whatsoever…
"Stop thinking, Reid, I can hear you from across the room."
"Reid," Reid repeated, hands in his pockets and still standing by the door. He lifted his eyebrows in pointed emphasis. "Right. You know you only call me that when you're being Special Agent Hotchner, right?"
"What?"
"Well, you- you usually make it a point to call me Spencer when we're, er, like this."
Hotchner had the gin out. Never a drinker, but when he had the gin out, Spencer didn't like those days. Booze meant the day had been hard. And though he could objectively examine the impulse five ways to Sunday, Reid could never emotionally cope with his helplessness in the face of it all.
What could he do? Mere mortal that he was. That they all were. They could understand, but what was felt was felt. And he could change none of it.
So Aaron had to drink his gin and Spencer had to feel helplessness. And jealousy. Of gin. Because it appeased and calmed where he couldn't.
"Spencer, your case is back under review," Hotchner said abruptly. And put down his glass.
He took off his tie, balled it up in a fit of disgust and thought it was tragic that his job required him to wear a noose around his neck.
"What?"
"They're reconsidering your move. Apparently they feel the work you've done has been exemplary and the position you were supposed to take up wouldn't really be appropriate, given your success at the BAU."
The jacket went next.
Spencer took off his satchel, frowned in bewilderment and wondered if it was him, but the scattered logic wasn't ringing true.
"So I'm not being transferred?" he asked.
Hotchner paused at his buttons and looked at him. "It's not official. But probably not."
There was a cold look on that face. Reid would have preferred a celebratory smile; Hotchner smiled so rarely and it made him so much more approachable when he was smiling.
It was what had done it in the first place. A smile. Which sparked a wondering of the private life that never got mentioned unless it was going down the toilet. The son Hotchner never really saw. The wives he always mourned. But, Reid had wondered, there must have been times when he had smiled at them. And from there it had been a hop, skip and a jump to imagining times when it was appropriate to smile.
And sex had been a random situational hypothesis that Reid dismissed because no man who wasn't slightly unhinged would be grinning like a lunatic during sex.
Though, Reid clarified, some would. And those would be the kinds who took sex lightly, without the intensity that seemed to wrap itself around Aaron Hotchner like a cloak that could be used to keep the rest of the world at a discreet distance.
The team all knew him, but few approached him for a drink.
Reid had. Because he felt in some small way that he pitied Hotchner for being the responsible one, the one who had to be intense and distant.
It hadn't been a raging success. It had been awkward, and intense, but they'd talked about Gideon for a little while and Reid had relaxed and let the words flow. Easy to talk about the various things he'd learned and discovered under Gideon's paternal wing.
And then they'd done it again, two days later, and that one hadn't lasted at all because there'd been a case that interrupted almost immediately, before the first beer was finished.
That, Hotch suspected, was what had really done it. The unfulfilment, the adrenaline rush, the rose-tinted glasses of 'what if'- those had painted the episode with a haze of smoke and allure. Spencer Reid, who'd spent god knew how many days and nights in various states of highs and lows around him, suddenly took on a mysterious presence. A kind of soft halo of potential.
Hotchner could dissect it in twenty different ways but the truth was that it was convenient and it was easy and, more to the point, it had been reciprocated.
They didn't really want anything from each other. Or at least they didn't ask. Hotchner didn't ask for Reid to ever be there when he was finally dead on his feet and ready to go home with anything warm and vaguely human. Reid hadn't even asked for Hotch to plead his case.
Reid waited until he heard the shower and sat down. Stretched out his spindly legs again and mused on the bottle of gin and half-finished drink left on the sideboard. The house was empty and silent. It was tidy. It was homely. It smelled good. It felt warm. But it had an undercurrent of dejection in it.
The balled up tie almost out of sight behind the gilt frame of a sunny child's grin?
Hard to believe that grin had been fathered by Aaron Hotchner. Hotchner rarely smiled.
Aaron came out in jeans and a t-shirt. An indeterminate grey colour. Hair slightly damp and falling forward onto his forehead. Gestured to Spencer.
"Drink?"
"Yeah. Thanks."
Spencer accepted the beer. Cracked it open and drank, felt the liquid ripple wiry muscle in his shoulders as the alcohol seeped into his pores and began to bleed out the tension. Knots uncoiled and untangled. The whole world receded. The door was firmly locked against it, and the moon was a sufficient disguise.
They ate, drank a little, and said nothing. Went to bed and Aaron, though Spencer could never figure out how or why, proved he wasn't as tired as all that.
Spencer wrapped his fingers in the sheet, held on for dear life, and let it wash into him and over him and around him, the rhythm echoing in his heart and the steady force pummelling out the thoughts in his head.
The copper-musk smell and the sound of Aaron's voice telling him he was okay was a heady brew. The staid, steady, measured tone was gone, replaced by something deeper and softer. Smoky at the edges but jagged with need when it reached climax.
A hiss as the teeth unfastened themselves from his shoulder.
Who'd have thought, Spencer sighed wordlessly, that Aaron was a biter? The first time had almost made the top of his head screw off.
Marking territory? Or just… claiming. Blindly. For the moment. Because, after all, the marks would fade. As they expected whatever was happening would fade.
"Rossi made a few calls," Hotch said unexpectedly in the dark, "I wouldn't mention it to him, but you should know."
Reid contemplated that in silence, busy brain suddenly finding that the world made sense again. "You asked him to." It was a statement, not a question.
"I refused to let them break up my team. You do good work, Spencer." Hand in his hair, gently playing with the strands. "You didn't deserve to get shunted off to some basement somewhere."
"That's where they were sending me?"
"They're fuckwits."
The term was so incongruous, so flatly delivered, that Spencer snorted on laughter and hid his face in the pillow to keep from braying in good humour.
Satiation settled in their blood. Their hearts slowed down. And they took respective deep breaths and drifted further towards sleep.