Dear Erin

Disclaimer: I don't own it, wish I did.

A/N. You know it's Strossi Centric. Please visit the Forum You Give Me Fever A Rossi-Strauss Forum. Just click this link

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David has really missing Erin Strauss since she perished at the hands of the Replicator, John Curtis. One of the suggestions he received on how to deal with his pain was to write down his feelings and the things he wants to say to her. He buys a nice leather bound journal and begins to write to her when the loneliness gets too bad and the cases are more than any human mind should have to process.

In time, he does start to feel better. He writes in the journal every day, usually at night but some days he picks it up several times as there are just somethings that if he still could, he would pick up the phone, call her real quickly just to tell her about. There had been quite a few of those days lately but luckily after the last few years, it had been mostly good things.

Each entry is in the form of a letter. A good deal of the letters, were for the most part very dark and desolate, containing things like the horror and disgust from his yearly visit, on his birthday, to the prison that housed Tommy Yates and the trek afterward to extinguish the hopes of another family who had been praying to find their missing loved one alive and inform them that the body of their loved one had finally been unearthed and tell them how sorry he was but he hoped that they now had closure.

Thankfully for his mental sanity, the good, positive entries far outweighed the unhappy, negative ones. A lot of that was due to his BAU family going out of their way to make sure he was alright. Hotch and JJ were determined to make sure he didn't sit in the house and pine away. They knew that there was one thing he couldn't say no to, their kids, and they used that against him.

Hotch volunteered as a Parent helper, extra chaperone or coach for as many of Jack's activities as he could possibly make it to. Of course when he did, he always seemed to end up talking his former mentor into volunteering right along with him. Everyone including jack was very understanding when they couldn't be there as they knew the deal, that sometimes cases came up and took them out of town for long periods of time. Surprisingly they were still happy to have them as more than a few times he heard Hotch being told, he made it to a lot more events than a lot of parents that worked nine to five jobs.

Wanting to keep an eye on him is probably why Hotch went on as many cases as he did at the time. He couldn't go on every case and keep up with the duties of filling in until they found a Replacement for the position of Section Chief, but even when he wasn't physically with them, everyone knew that he was just a phone call away.

Rossi couldn't figure out when the man slept: Between the traveling on cases, paper work from his job as Unit Chief, extra paper work of Section Chief, spending time with Jack and at his activities. He understood what Hotch was doing and made a mental note to talk to him about slowing down and to offer to help with the dreaded paperwork.

JJ was just as bad as Hotch, when it came to keeping him so caught up in activities that he had little time to be by himself, brooding. Henry was in the school play, the school chorus, he was playing violin at the kindergarten concert, he wanted all his aunts and uncles to go trick or treating with him and Jack this year, he had a school project on Italy, they were learning Spanish and he was having trouble with some phrases and since I spoke five languages including Spanish would I help him with his pronunciations, were the creative ways she came up with to keep him on the go- so he couldn't fall too deeply into depression.

Morgan and Reid got in on the act too, it seems they needed a lot more guy bonding time than usual.

Knowing she was almost as hard to say no to as the kids, his Kitten took full advantage of it and kept him accompanying her to this event or that one. She doubled up on her cooking lessons he had been giving her, had him vette all her dates before she went out with them as per their agreement years ago, but, before hand she had been a lot less cheerful about it. She just had to have him there for the first two nights of rehearsal for her latest play and the dress rehearsal the evening before opening night; These were just a few of the multitude of excuse she came up with to occupy him.

After each event, she would talk him into dinner or a movie. One weekend she even conned him into staying in DC for an Italian Film festival, telling him she was trying to learn the language by reading the Italian Subtitles included for the Hearing Impaired and needed a person who spoke the language fluently to tell her if they were accurate as she didn't want to waste time learning phrases that were incorrect.

He wrote about all of these events in his Journal. Each time he sat down to record his thoughts he thought about how much he missed the woman he loved. It really did help to write these letters to her, he thought, even though they would never be mailed.

With that thought in mind he sat down to start his next letter just as he started all the others, "Dear Erin,".

The end for now (but you know I don't like to really kill off characters so I have a feeling one year sometime in this Millenium or the next, I will be told the next part or two. Rossi keeps saying he wants to talk about some of the specific letters, but then he gets quiet and goes away. Maybe a case came up or he is sneaking off to spend time with Strauss in her secret location.

CMGUYSGIRL