A/N: I wrote this for one of my open-askbox-sunday-request sessions over on tumblr; Sophia wanted some Hotch/Reid, and then cursed herself for not giving me a prompt when I veered off into angst. Read as much or as little into this one as you'd like.
they suffer the same heartbreak now
Hotch and Reid throughout the years; dinners together, cases to solve, drifting together and apart. And the tragedies that will forever bind them together, wanted or not. All Hotch ever wanted for Reid was a good life.
They have dinner sometimes.
The first one is post Chester Hardwick, when Hotch finally admits how much he's struggling with the idea of letting Haley go, how angry he is with the world. They pull into a diner and Hotch lets Reid guide him to his seat. Lets him order, too. Fresh, piping hot coffee poured into mugs. Spencer's gotten better at not turning his into treacle, but Hotch takes his as is. Food is placed on clean white plates in front of them.
(Only, that's not really how it starts. The first one, honestly, is when he comes over to Reid's apartment after the man takes a long weekend. He runs into a dark haired women on his way out. Her pigtails are distinctive, and Hotch knows he's seen her around somewhere before. Forensics, possibly? Gina chills with some weird people. He wants to check that Reid is okay. He knows about the addiction, even if he's never spoken of it aloud.
Reid looks like shit, but also better than he has in weeks. It's a strange dichotomy. They make small talk, as Hotch asks how Reid is. He tries to make his scouting round the apartment subtle, but fails. Reid mutters something about Abby tossing the place. When Hotch learns Reid has no food in the apartment, he takes him out to the little Italian place on the corner. Reid doesn't finish his plate, but he looks actively interested in his food. Hotch counts it as a success.)
The next one is Reid popping into his office after Texas. Hotch thought they'd made up on the plane, but Reid still looks a little nervous as he suggests there's a really good new thai place that's opened up a couple of blocks from him. He's flipping a coin through his fingers; a one year medallion. Hotch does the math on when he turned up at Spencer's. It was only ten months ago. He looks again. The coin is too worn to be new, anyway. Someone must have lent it to him.
(He finds out, a couple of years later. Or rather, puts it together when he sees the Deputy Director stop Reid in the hall and Reid only looks that way in response to a few, measured people.)
After that, it becomes a regular thing. Neither of them have anywhere else to be; they try and make it a fortnightly occurrence, but with their job, that doesn't always work out. It's good, and Reid is easy to talk to.
Sometimes it's takeout at the office – they are usually the last two to leave except Garcia, who is tucked away in her private hideaway and oblivious to the world when she's running code. Nice restaurants, tucked away in corners. Reid originally finds those, but Hotch finds an odd joy in scouting for places. Admittedly, the look on Reid's face when he finds one that the other man hadn't know about makes trawling obscure food blogs worth it.
Garcia never says a word about the google alerts and rss feeds she sets up to help Hotch be ahead of the game. She just, you know, lets them get on with it.
When Reid is hospitalised after the anthrax case, Hotch brings Korean food to his bedside. The jello incident is already reaching legendary re-tellings in the bullpen, and Hotch is starting to feel a little guilty that he still hasn't visited Spencer. Reid just smiles, says he understands that Hotch has other things which have to take priority.
That makes Hotch angry, because Reid should be someone's priority. And he never has been.
He doesn't give himself moments where he can think about this, where the line crossed between Reid the subordinate who'd never once been what he expected, to Spencer the man who deserved to be valued by someone, anyone.
It doesn't matter in the end. He gets attacked by Foyet. Spencer gets shot. His family is put in danger. Emily starts hovering like a mother hen. Hotch doesn't mind that, because he understands that Emily has maternal instincts that she's never quite known what to do with. She's a caregiver.
(He wonders, sometimes, why Spencer backs off quite so quickly. When he really thinks about it, there are a myriad of reasons. Whether Reid not wanting to be Emily's romantic rival is one of them, he'll never know.)
They have one dinner, in that intermediary period between Foyet's first attack, and well, what followed. It's a few days after they return from LA. The tension is wearing on, trying to track down Foyet. Spencer marches (limps, Hotch is exaggerating) into his office. He states he's put in an order for Vietnamese, and they can comb through The Reaper files once again. But Hotch is going to eat, and then he's going to go home and sleep, for once.
He manages to ask, when Reid has his mouth stuffed full of vermicelli noodles, what actually happened with Lila Archer. Reid chokes out a reply that they'd had a brief correspondence following the stalker case, but nothing much came of it. They lived in completely different worlds, after all.
(It's many years later, when he's asked to proof Lila's biography to check that the part where she discusses said stalker case isn't an embarrassment to the bureau, that he works out that Spencer had slept with her two weeks after that conversation. It's inbetween the lines, but Hotch has the corresponding time frame. He's more surprised than anything else.)
No one needs to describe what happens next.
In the flurry of everyone around him rushing to help, Spencer and his cane get rather forgotten. Jessie almost moves in. Emily sleeps on the couch more than once. Dave suggests – Hotch thinks his friend is joking, but he's never been sure – that he and Jack and Jessie move into the mansion. JJ is never more than five minutes from his side.
He gets buried in his work and Jack. Dave tells him about Spencer in the Doctor's office on the Samantha Malcolm case, and Hotch is oh so proud. That is Spencer, grown up, living his life, being passionate and angry and most of all using it to be better at the job. Gone is the boy who walked out in front of Owen Savage and could have gotten himself killed.
So Hotch never restarts their dinners. Reid doesn't need him anymore; he's too busy with Jack to even think about needing Reid back.
And then that boy resurfaces in the wake of Emily Prentiss's supposed death.
Hotch thinks that it has to be a dead giveaway, that he doesn't press harder into making sure Reid's alright. The truth is, he doesn't think he can hold up the front. All his dinners with Spencer have revealed in the past is his ability to be frighteningly truthful in the other man's presence. He thinks about trusting Reid, letting him in, but his fragility at this current time means they can't rely on him to keep up the charade.
It's not his call to make, at the end of the day. It's JJ's. And JJ is the one who has Spencer crying at her house every week. He'd never pry into his team mates lives, but something had changed between Emily and Reid before she'd left.
Emily had changed. Or had she?
Hotch never examined the situation too closely.
He's not surprised about the backlash Reid unleashes, but he is surprised about its focus on JJ. Spencer's bitter and isolated. Hotch had considered turning the post in Pakistan down to stay and keep an eye on him, but Reid had waved him off with talk of a sabbatical and a collaboration with some researchers at MIT.
He worries. Of course he worries. But Reid isn't a scared kid anymore (he's never been that scared kid, ever, Hotch knows that.) But he's not using, which is Hotch's initial cause for concern, especially when Reid states it openly in the police station.
Then there's Beth.
And then there's Maeve.
Maeve is everything Hotch has ever wanted for Spencer. Or at least, she is from the way Reid talks about her. It's in his eyes.
It's only later, when he breaks out the bottle of scotch alone in his office, that he thinks of the parallels. Reid was prepared to deal, but had still lost everything. Hotch had never doubted his decision not to deal with Foyet, but it still plagued him. But he didn't draw any comfort from Spencer's loss.
Spencer locks himself away. Hotch figures its a stage in his grief, and not a surprising one. JJ and Garcia knock on his door every day to check he's still alive. Hotch takes to leaving takeout food with his neighbour; meals they've had together in the past. The little Italian place they'd had their first meal together in was now closed, but there's one in Hotch's neighbourhood that does remarkably similar food. If it gets too long, there are other people he knows who will forcibly drag Reid out of his apartment. An man called 'Ducky' has already been on the phone. As has the chief of the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal lab, though Hotch has no idea what the story is there.
He has no idea what to say to Reid, anything that could ever make it feel better. For the first time, he understands why Reid was distant in the wake of Haley's death. He'd not known what to say either.
Eventually he peels himself off his couch, out of his apartment, back to work. And that's good for him. Alex Blake is good for him, and Hotch realises how different things could have been if they'd all had an Alex Blake after they fell down.
He books him and Reid dinner in a quaint mock-english pub on the anniversary of Maeve's death. Reid is quiet at first. He has to know what Hotch is doing, but Hotch never pushes.
(He remembers being a mess when it came around for him. But he had to pull it together for Jack. And it had only been that front that kept him from breaking. Spencer doesn't have that.)
"Are you okay?" Hotch asks. His voice is serious, but carries a little shame at having not asked the question earlier. There was a bottle of supposedly authentic scottish whiskey on the table, but it had barely been touched. Reid has a glass in hand, but he keeps tracing his finger across the rim instead of being concerned with drinking the damn thing.
It takes a while for the response to come. "I don't know," Reid says. "Is that alright?"
"It's always been alright before," Hotch says. He's had a glass of the whiskey. He resolves that if they are going to make this a thing where they get drunk, they're going to do it at Dave's next time. The alcohol's better.
"I still dream of her," Reid admits. It's just the lighting, Hotch knows, but they're back five years ago when both of them were younger and less- "But it doesn't hurt as much."
Hotch is struck by how guilty Reid looks about the concept. "That's a good thing."
"I know."
Maybe he doomed Reid when he'd told him to spend the rest of his life making it up to her. Hotch isn't convinced that it ever helped Reid.
He pours himself another glass. Maeve needs someone to drink for her tonight, and the way Reid's regarding his glass means it ain't gonna be him.
"So, JJ tells me you want kids..."