Chapter One: 1995

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AN: For my amazing beta, Greeneyedconstellations,

Without whom I would have stopped writing months ago. She's an absolute inspiration.

Good luck with the next stage of your life you're moving onto, Green. I'm endlessly proud to call you my friend.

Fair warning that this story involves adult content and adult issues including adultery, references to recreational drug abuse, and our favourite characters at the crossroads of their lives where they weren't quite old enough to be sensible yet.

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"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

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January

It's a little thing that changes his life.

Miniscule. Inconsequential. As insignificant as a scuffed shoe, an invalidated bus ticket laying forgotten at the bottom of a person's bag, the tattered corner of a well-read book. Something so every day, so mundane, that it becomes absolutely all-important.

It's a broken coffee mug that changes his life.

Aaron Hotchner gets up one morning, dresses impeccably, kisses his fiancée goodbye on his way to his job as a federal prosecutor, and on the way out of the door, he breaks his favourite coffee mug. The one Haley brought him for passing his bar exam. The one he's drunk from every day since.

Aaron Hotchner, despite the complaints in his file and from his superiors that he can be reactionary, hot-headed, reckless, is a man of habit. And on this one day, this one insignificant day, he breaks one of his longest held ones.

"Never mind," Haley says, pulling a face at the splatters of coffee on the already-stained cream carpeting. He's staring at it, frozen with one hand on his suitcase, and he isn't sure why he feels so unsettled by the sight. "We can clean up the mess and buy another." She's looking at the carpeting too, that stained and threadbare carpeting, and he knows she's thinking about more. More than this. A nicer home, a nicer life. Something different. The wedding he owes her.

A change.

He kisses her goodbye, murmurs something conciliatory about the mug, and goes to work.

Later that day, a case hits his desk. The murder of a family, and entire family, and the suspect is smiling in the photo they have of him.

There's a broken mug by the mother's hand, the barest hint of '#1 DAD' visible against her painted nails.

He stares at that mug. A little thing.

He's twenty-four and reckless. This one small action leads to tears later that night, panic the next day, worry the next week, and, finally, a calm sense of having done the right thing when he fills out the application to become a field agent with the FBI. He'd already passed the academy, before he'd settled back into a desk job and mediocrity. But this is later.

Sick of cleaning up after mugs that have already been broken, he quits his job that day.

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February

It's the little things that make life bearable.

The burn of whiskey in the back of her throat or the bitter coating of a pill lingering on her teeth and tongue for hours after it disappears down her throat. She dabbles. She experiments. She flaunts with danger, the little dangers, because she can't remember how to be alive except to be reckless.

The little things like biting down on the cigarette just as it's lit, the filter resisting the pressure, straining the smoke through her teeth. Little things like the 69% she got on the exam the month before, followed by the 61% this time around. It's just a little slip. Not much. But it's enough.

She thinks she might be slipping herself, but Emily Prentiss has never been one to ask for help. Not after Matthew. Not after Rome. Not after the catastrophe she made of the man who held her hand and risked everything for her.

Little things like nameless men, nameless beds, nameless pleasures.

She might be slipping, but at least she knows how to be alive.

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March

His first posting is security detail to a US Ambassador. Ambassador Elizabeth Prentiss. It's a boring post, she's hardly a target, but the current talks she's involved in are making everyone edgy. And it's also a prestigious post. He's warned, over and over and over again, that his conduct is absolutely integral to his continued employment.

He has a gun at his hip, a badge on his belt, the power to stop the broken mugs from ever happening again, and he's giddy with it.

"I don't like that they're sending you away," Haley murmurs, standing in the middle of their battered living room with her hands tucked into the pockets of his jumper she's wearing, hiding her ring. "It's a six month posting, Aaron. What am I supposed to do for six months?"

"Learn to knit?" he teases, cupping her chin and pulling her close. It's not so long. Not so far. She'll be fine. He needs this, needs something, because he's twenty-four and feels three times as old.

The first week in DC, he's on his best behaviour. Same for the second. But he's here for six months – why not live a little?

The third week, on his off-duty night, the other men invite him out and he drinks them under the table. That, and his work on the firing range every morning when they meet up for practise, earns him their respect.

It's a heady feeling, being respected.

And he's good at his job, so he's sure he deserves it.

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April

She finds a boyfriend in March, and in April during a fight about something so small she can't even remember how it began, he grabs her chin hard enough to bruise. His mouth is inches from hers, his eyes hot and precarious, and there's a cold power to the fingers and the scratchy nails digging into her jaw that reminds her of her own mortality. For a moment, just a moment, Emily Prentiss goes quiet and still and remembers that she's human.

Just a moment.

Then she knees him in the dick and tells him to get the fuck out and don't come back. Surprisingly, he goes. He leaves a narrow line of yellow-green bruises along the line of her mouth, the scent of nicotine in her usually clean sheets, and a startling realization that she can't do this anymore.

She's not sure what, but something needs to change. Starting off small.

On the way home from a lecture, she stops at a different café for her coffee, one where no one knows her name.

It's a start. A small one. But a start.

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May

The posting is two months of dullness and Aaron (Hotch, the men call him Hotch, and he encourages that because it's a step away from being meek) grates with it. The tedium gets under his skin like a creeping fog, making him feel hot and edgy and a little impractical. One of the men offers to teach him to box in between shifts, and he takes up the offer and glories a little in the ease of it. Even the frequent phone calls with Haley hardly help, and he's tired of her monotony, her never-changing stories about her work, her nothing life, her small worries. He doesn't wear his ring and he's sick of being the same.

Elizabeth Prentiss is polite and watchful. He's always professional around her, always courteous, and he does his job. No one gets near her.

Then something changes. He arrives for his shift one day, at the Prentiss's home (mansion, really, it's ridiculous. More than the Ambassador title, this proves the family came from money, and he's a little disgruntled by this), and the air has changed minutely. A suitcase against the hallway door, crooked and battered and dropped without care. A coat across the usually spotless dining room table, and the sleeves are frayed. When he glances down at it on his way through, he smells smoke and a musky perfume he recognises from somewhere. Not Haley. Haley had never worn this particular scent.

It's not his job, this moving through the home, he's out of place. But it's something different in places where everything has been the same for over two months, and that edgy neediness is riding him now. He's interested.

He finds her in the kitchen, making herself a sandwich with a steak knife and far too much jam. There must be some noise, some small indication of him entering the room, because she cocks her head back to look at him. There's jam on her mouth.

"Who the fuck are you?" are the first words Emily Prentiss ever says to him, followed shortly by, "Oh, another fed." He's dismissed, for a moment, in favour of the sandwich.

Later he feels like a fool, standing there, saying nothing, staring at her hands on the bread and her bitten nails. Her clothes are dark, her gaze darker, and when she looks at him again, differently this time, and smiles, the expression is cocky and challenging and dangerous.

And they don't speak again until a week later when the perimeter alarm alerts him to a disturbance in the early hours of the morning. He draws his gun, draws his courage, and follows that alarm until he finds her sitting on the edge of the lawn, one foot hanging exactly where the alarm line sits, and she's smiling that smile again with a cigarette hanging loosely between her teeth.

"Aaron, isn't it?" she asks, flicking the cigarette between two fingers and leaving a red trail on his retinas for a heartbeat of time as she waves it. Blows out smoke in a slow stream, her tongue darting across lips that are dark in the moonlight, and he remembers the jam.

"Hotch," he corrects her, and holsters his weapon. Stands next to her, unsure, feeling unsure of his footing around this stranger that reminds him, somehow, of himself. He can see himself in her eyes. They're not easy eyes to look into. "You did that on purpose. Ma'am."

"Maybe," she murmurs, closing her eyes and tilting her head back. She's not dressed for bed, despite the hour. The move displays her neck, the long line of her throat, and curve of her jaw. There's a fading bruise on the line of her jawbone. He stares at that bruise and something instinctual, protective, growls in his chest and wants him to touch it, to ask what happened; as though she's Haley and he has the right. Then the moment breaks. Her eyes open, she offers him the smoke and smiles. "Maybe I wanted a chance to see if you're as interesting as you seem. The only interesting thing in this shithole."

He accepts. Beyond the nicotine bite, he can taste her chap-stick. The smallest flavour of her.

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June

He wears his suits like a second skin, so comfortably at home in them she wonders if he sleeps in them, showers in them. She even, snidely, wonders if he fucks in them. She bets he does. Bets that he takes those large, careful hands and that careful suit and brings his wife or girlfriend—or boyfriend, whatever—to whatever end he wants them to without even breaking a sweat or creasing his tie. Ma'am, I'm at your pleasure, she imagines him saying, doing up his zip and covering himself with an elegant twist of those hands. Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. He talks to her like she's her mother, perfunctory. Polite. His hands at his side, motionless.

She's beginning, dangerously, to obsess over those hands.

There was no missing his gaze that first morning in her mother's perfectly presented kitchen, the one she'd never cooked a meal in in her fucking life. It lingered, at first, on her mouth. Then lower, despite his clear attempt to hide the dip in his eye-line. She had wondered, at the time, if he liked what he saw, and then chalked up that momentary neediness to being lonely and the still-stiff crink to her jaw.

There's no missing the way he handles a gun, almost obscenely lovingly. The weapon dark and deadly and fascinating, cradled in those hands that she has no trouble imagining around her hips or her waist. He'd lift her as easily as he does his weapon, but with half the amount of love. She can see in his eyes how much he covets the power the gun gives him, some misguided need to overcompensate for his masculinity by using it as an extension of self. She should mock him for that. The Emily of a month ago would have mocked him.

But behind it all, that insecure need for power and machismo, there's a kindness to his dark gaze and a nimbleness to his fingers that she delights, secretly, in. But she doesn't tell him this.

She bets he has a temper. Bets he's reckless. In fact, in the end, if Emily had ever actually laid money down on her assumptions about Aaron Hotchner, she'd have been eating beans for months. Because she was right about a lot of them… but she failed to factor in his inconsolable need to be a gentleman.

Her ex shows up one weekend, late June, and the weather is hot and her temper is small. She confronts him outside the grounds, sick of her mother's careful dinners and careful poise and careful fucking life. They fight, of course, but she kisses him first because she's not careful, not safe, and when they'd been going good, they'd been great together.

And because she craves her own destruction, she sees that now.

She kisses him, his hand sneaks into the waistband of her pants, and she wonders how far she wants to take this at two in the afternoon with the metal of a shitty station-wagon burning the bare leg revealed under the hem of her too-short-for-decorum-shorts. The hated shorts. Only worn to piss off her mother, and they'd done the job nicely, as did the top that showed off far too much skin, almost too much tit, and just enough stomach.

"No," she says, because she's not that destructive, and he'd almost hit her once. She steps away. They end up fighting, and she wishes she'd done this inside now, because she kind of wants to see her mother's face when the word cunt is juxtaposed against the perfect showroom set-up of the living room that they're not supposed to live in.

He raises his hand, maybe to gesture, maybe to strike, and she cocks her chin and stares him down. Do it. I dare you. Try it.

It's reckless. It's a small, small show of the lack of anything he has over her.

It's a worthless, powerless gesture, because she can see Aaron standing against the gate behind him, expression is cool and gaze is unwaveringly locked on her face. He has a gun and a temper and a chauvinistic need to play the hero, and she wonders what he'll do if her ex hits her.

The answer is nothing, because the hand never falls. When she walks over to Aaron, standing in the full light with no shame of spying, he raises an eye-brow at her.

"I can look after myself," she challenges him, and there's a single drop of sweat on his upper lip, brought on by the heat or the strain of standing by, she doesn't know which.

"I know, Ma'am," he answers mildly, and just like that her mouth is dry and her belly is twisting. She pushes by, and he smells clean, sharp. Real. He follows, too close, close enough that if she stops he'll be on top of her with his hands and his scent and that flick of sweat. "I was going to let you hit him first."

She stops. He doesn't crash into her, attuned to her movements, and looks down at her, unblinking.

He's a puppy, she realizes now, looking up into that expression. A puppy, so sure of himself, so sure of his world. Sure that she's good, a good person, that they're all capable of being better. Still growing into the gun-belt that's too big for him, the power that sits so strangely on his shoulders. Just a kid playing at being grown up.

But then again, she is too, really. And he fascinates her.

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July

It's a small thing. Her car breaks down. He helps her fix it. It's a late, lazy July evening, and the oncoming night is noisy with bugs and birds and the humming whine of a city taking a breath of relief after the stifling heat.

It's still warm. He's in his uniform, just off shift, so he puts his belt to the side and covers it with his suit jacket; covers his gun and his badge and for now, he's just Aaron and she's Emily. There's grease on his hands, on his pants, and she's laughing, smoking, seated on the side of the open hood with her shirt dark in places where the sweat has marked it, and hair tied back messily and stringy from the heat. Her skin is shiny-bright, and when she leans towards him to pass him a tool, she smells sharp, clean, good. When he kisses her, once, twice, the first time, she tastes of mint, of nicotine, of sweat and hunger and want. Tastes of danger and betrayal, and he's hooked from the first flick of her tongue.

It's a small mistake. A big mistake. Somewhere in the middle

All of the above.

He fucks her in the backseat of her car while the cicadas outside narrate their mistakes, and that's not right, because really, she's just as much a participant as he is. She keeps him guessing, keeps him gasping, and it takes all his concentration just to keep up with her, the way her body moves, what makes her grind or moan or choke. When he gets home later that night and showers, washing her from his skin, he finds red lines on his back from her nails and the dark bruising shape of her mouth on his hip.

She's not Haley and she's not familiar, and it's gloriously human and so, so wrong.

And he realizes, halfway through, when he's buried inside her, hurtling towards the edge and she's already twice-over, that he could easily learn to crave this feeling of living, of life, of desperate, unstoppable recklessness.

It's their first time.

It's not their last.

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August

It's a six month posting, so she knows he'll be gone by the time she goes home again for Thanksgiving. That's life at her mom's. A constant rotation of staff, of help, of homes. Why should now be any different?

The last week they can feel time ticking away and a needy kind of desperation seems to take over them both. That last week is the first time they fuck around while he's on duty, and the only concession she lets him make is to holster and put aside his weapon before she drags him into her, her arse perched on the bathroom sink and his hands settled on her sides holding her steady. The whole time he's moving inside her, breath hot and ragged and becoming edged with need, her eyes are locked over his shoulder, on the dark shape of his gun on the rim of the bath. She thinks of his hands on the gun as he runs them across her skin and she think so his finger on the trigger as he slips them inside her, and she thinks of him tracing the cold-metal barrel across her collarbone as she comes.

She'll never admit it, but after that day every time she sees him armed, sees him in uniform, she can feel that coiling tension, like her skin is on too tight and something needs to give.

The last time, he fucks up. He's moving fast, hands bruising, just how she likes it, but when he's done and slumped against her, putting himself back together, his arms tighten around her for just a second. An embrace. And she lets herself be held as his mouth settles on her shoulder, a butterfly kiss, a trailing touch of lips to sweaty skin. It's touching. It's almost romantic. Her heart skips and he feels it do so with his mouth. It's a hint of something more.

It's the most dangerous thing they've done yet.

But they never speak of it, because he leaves that night and she leaves the next morning, and all she has left of him is the memory of his eyes, his hands, and a vague idea that somewhere he still exists.

Aaron. Hotch. That's all she knows. A cocky, arrogant, gentlemanly sonofabitch with hands that fascinate her and a filthy turn of mouth in bed. It's probably for that best that that's all she knows, because she also suspects he has a life somewhere else, a girlfriend maybe, and that this is going to haunt him. There's no guilt in her mind for that part of it. His life, his cock, and if he chose to betray some other woman, that's not on her shoulders. She's twenty-years-old, and the weight of the world is firmly on someone else's shoulders.

She figures that's the end of it.

She's wrong.

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September

He goes home and Haley is delighted. As soon as he sees her, the guilt is crippling. What he's done. What he did.

He tells her.

They fight. Not small fights. Big ones.

She leaves, twice. Comes back, both times. He doesn't deserve that. She cries, constantly. She doesn't deserve that.

He cries too, once, but the tears are hateful and he's glad she's not there to see. He wishes she'd hit him, just once, but she's not the type and they've never had violence in their home; this would be a shitty time to start.

Their home?

Not anymore. Gone as surely as if he'd taken a match to it himself, gleefully, maybe lighting it with the trailing remains of one of Emily's perpetually lit cigarettes.

"What's her name?" Haley says from the door of the bedroom, and he's on the bed, curled up small and heartsore, and he tells her. Tells her everything. The jam and the cigarettes, the reckless thrill of it, of Emily. His boredom, the needy edginess, the itchy feeling of everything being the same. Maybe he tells her too much. The arch of Emily's ankle, the shift of bones in her wrist. It's a confession, his confession. Haley is silent.

But she stays, and he doesn't deserve that. It hangs over their head and it's carved in every part of her posture. When she looks at him, he can see it in her eyes. She won't touch him. Her mouth twists if he tries.

But she stays.

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October

There's a man at his second posting, when he's one-month home and things are still wrong. A man with an arrogance around him that even Hotch at his worst has never worn, and a casual indifference to the opinions of others that Hotch is sorely jealous of.

"So," the man says, leaning over his desk and beaming down at him. His clothes are rich, his cologne richer, and he wears his status easily. Yes, I'm FBI, his bearing says. You've got nothing on this. "You're the hotshot we've been hearing about. Highest scores in your class at the academy, some bigwig prosecutor, and you've got the glowing recommendation of the Ambassador Prentiss on your resume. And how old are you? Twenty-four?"

Twenty-five now, but Hotch doesn't say that, just smiles and accepts an invitation to the firing range with the man. His name, he finds out later, is David Rossi. He's a profiler, from Quantico, specializing in human behaviour. He's married, his second, and he professes to 'dabbling' with writing. He's fascinating. He's different.

And he's sorely interested in what Hotch can offer him. Hotch makes a call, a risky, reckless call, and he saves eight lives. Rossi watches it happen, and when the adrenaline has faded and Hotch looks to the man for feedback, all he does is nod.

"We don't have a team, just me and Gideon," Rossi says, three days before he's due to leave, his consultation almost over. "But if you ever skip on over to Quantico… look me up, Hotshot. We might have a place for you."

Kid has ambition, Hotch knows his superiors say about him. Probably too much. Cocky. Too sure of himself. Reckons he's gonna get a foot in a Unit Chief position by thirty-five.

They're wrong.

He's sure he'll have it by thirty.

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November

It's a small thing.

Smaller, in fact, than even Emily realizes. Except, not small for long, and not small once she notices.

Far too big when she notices.

She suspects. The test costs a dollar, in a gaudy pink and blue box, and buying it feels like conceding to the possibility of a nightmare returning. She's on the pill. This isn't possible.

But it absolutely is.

There's a panic attack whispering in her breath as she sits in the waiting room at the doctors, and the receptionist knows. She's brought water, a consoling hand, and the lady whispers that it's okay, love, you're okay. Whatever it is, it isn't the end, which feels almost mocking to be saying in a doctors of all places. And wrong. Because this will be the end of her, this second mistake, because she doesn't even know his real name, and Matthew isn't here to catch her this time.

And it is the end.

Sixteen weeks, they tell her, and she has to ask them to clarify twice. That night she strips naked in her bathroom, in front of the full-length mirror, while her roommate argues with her boyfriend over the phone outside the door. Stares at her body, at the lines and curves of it; the shape of her tits, the bony point to her hips, the coltish awkwardness of her bare legs, the smooth flat expanse of her abdomen. Turns to the side. Impossible. She'd know.

The slightest misshape. The smallest curve.

Impossible.

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December

She does something reckless, because she's scared and alone and she doesn't know his name, and she can't do this again. It's crazy. Insane. The Emily of three months ago would have hated her for it. The Emily of this month is rugged against the cold, the bitter cold threatening snow, and her thick coat hides what can't be hidden. It's in her posture, her movements, her hands always moments from darting to her belly, to the life she's unwillingly carrying but even more unwilling to cease carrying, the nervous twitch to her eyes and throat.

There was a mobile on Hotch's belt, a chunky, bricklike thing, but she'd never bothered to find out the number attached to it. Never thought there'd be a point.

Her mother, on the other hand, could recite the name of every staff member, every security detail, every cook or cleaner or maid, for the last damn decade. A terrifying skill. One Emily had scoffed as useless, as small.

In this moment, it's anything but small.

"Aaron?" her mother says, one eyebrow raising, and they're eating meatloaf and the smell of it makes Emily uneasy. "Whatever for, Emily?"

And Emily is staring at her plate, at the meatloaf her mom didn't cook for her, and she's horrified to feel her eyes burn, her face itch, the unwanted life in her reacting to that distress and moving about uncertainty. She won't be able to hide it much longer. She can barely hide it now. But she's small, the life is small too, and that protects her.

"Oh, Emily," Elizabeth says, her fork clattering, and Emily had always thought her mom was clueless about her, but she'd apparently been wrong about that too. Her mom was attuned, so painfully attuned, and she knew from the tears and the shake to Emily's shoulders and the terror, the utter terror, of being alone in this moment.

"I don't know what to do," Emily says, her hands touching the shape of her stomach, and Elizabeth does nothing but hold her tight for the first time since she was a girl. It's unfamiliar. New.

It's not small.

And Elizabeth is anything but useless. It takes three hours and she has a phone number, an address, and if Emily had given her a little longer, she'd probably have his blood type and fucking social as well. She gives her the options. She doesn't give her the answer. This is your call, she says and, but I'm here if you need me and she doesn't point out how badly Emily has fucked up.

It's a week before Christmas, the flights are clogged, and he lives in Seattle of all places. But a phone call is too much, an email not enough, and the Prentiss's have no trouble getting on a plane.

It's a week before Christmas and her winter coat hides her stomach when she raises a knuckle to the peeling paint of a shabby apartment door and knocks three times, low and slow. He opens it, smiling, with paint on his chin. There's a ring on his finger she's never seen before. From inside the warm apartment, a woman is laughing. Music plays. She can smell roast, perfume, something sweet and childlike. He has a family, a life, something of which she has neither.

She lives in a mansion with a mother she doesn't understand, and he lives in a shithole with the life she suddenly realizes she coverts. And she's going to destroy it for him, just like Matthew. Just like the girl she used to be.

"Hi," she says simply, and he says nothing.