A/N: Hi guys :) This is just a quick little short that wouldn't get out of my head. Set in the pre-Ezra switch FFH universe, there is discussion of CP in a roundabout way, but no details. Mostly just Ezra having an introspective moment.
*.*.*
Sometimes, Ezra just needed to be held.
It was not something he had ever expected, but it was there, an uncomfortable truth that pressed on him more often than cared to admit. It was strange, a foreign sensation. Before Team 7 he didn't think he'd had such a need. His mother had not been overly affectionate, and was more inclined to stroke his cheek or clasp his hand in hers during those rare and precious moments in his childhood. The relatives he'd stayed with had varied greatly in the amount of affection shown him, and except for a few exceptions Ezra had often not known how to respond, how to accept it when it had been offered.
His time in the academy had been spent dedicating himself to his studies, to exceeding in every way he could, as well as to funding his education with his 'God given talents'. Ezra had believed he had no time for more than a few cursory relationships, had known already that he would be spending a lot of time making up for his mother's checkered past, and, if he were candid, for his own tendencies. Acquaintances were less complicated. Ezra's attitude had been virtually the same when he entered the FBI, except for the simple thought that perhaps here he might be able to build a life for himself. That he could at least earn the respect of those he worked with. Perhaps he'd hoped, in a throwback to early adolescent daydreams, that he would find a place to 'belong', but in the sort of idle, contemplative way that had left him scoffing at himself later. He'd wanted to be the best, and even as a rookie Ezra had started gaining a reputation as someone who could get in anywhere, find information that no one else could. Foolishly, he hadn't realized that the jealousy that sprang from that would grow so swiftly to suspicion, or how thoroughly rumors would disgrace him. It was funny how the minor slips of regulations that had been ignored, even encouraged, when he'd been, briefly, their golden boy had suddenly become capital offenses. The rest of his time there was not worth thinking on. Needless to say, Ezra had not been held in any capacity during that time, held down, but not held.
Here in Denver, in this place he was slowly accepting may actually be home, touch, once a rare commodity in his life was commonplace. Ezra had always seen it, the way friends leaned on each other, roughhoused and joked, comforted each other. Even the discipline that had so rarely been followed by more than perfunctory comfort for him seemed to be part of the bonding rituals most of the rest of the world regularly took part in and Ezra had rarely more than played at. For most of his life he'd thought it yet another example of his mother's early teachings that almost no one in this world appreciated either decorum or privacy. Or at least he'd told himself it was. Sometimes, Ezra thought his mother's most successful con had been on him, and that he would never fully learn the extent of it.
Here, even when Ezra had been doing his best to somehow earn these men's respect while keeping them at more than arms length, touch had suddenly become a part of his world in a way he wasn't sure it had ever been. Hands on his shoulder, both friendly squeezes and those with a warning hidden in them, once or twice a poke to his chest when Mr. Larabee felt he wasn't listening adequately, arms finding their way companionably across his shoulders, Mr. Wilmington ignoring his protests that his suit jackets really didn't appreciate such mussing, Nathan's fussing and scolding over injuries while his hands stayed infinitely gentle. All of it without so much as a by your leave from him and no regard at all for any complaints made about their lack of propriety.
Even more peculiar to him had been how those incidents where his new superior, or the team's profiler, whose equal status in such matters had not surprised him in the slightest, had felt the need to go farther than a poke to his chest or an almost too hard squeeze to his shoulder had been handled. Oh, the yelling or ground out demands for an explanation, the scolding admonishments and questions that could probe almost uncomfortably into his psyche, were not a surprise. He might not have Mr. Sanchez's uncanny ability to understand people's motivations even when they were unknown to themselves, but he read people for a living just as he did. Nor was he surprised that they were less harsh or unyielding in the punishments that were handed down. Even then he had known that his associates were not those sort of men. That they both expected to and insisted on giving him comfort of some sort at the end, comfort that wasn't the sort of unconvincing routine 'there, there' that his college professors had attempted, that however had astounded him. Not that he'd trusted it at first of course, and Mr. Larabee was more...neither cautious or reserved truly fit, but yet there had been layers of both in comparison to Mr. Sanchez, who had been free both with his disapproval and his forgiveness.
Really, Ezra was oversimplifying the situation, and he knew it, but in the end, it had led to the same thing. Ezra, despite the fact that he was a grown and independent man, would find himself craving the sensation, the closeness of being held. Not merely after the emotional roller coaster that was physical chastisement or during the stress of an illness or injury. No, the urge came at the end of long cases, after stressful phone calls from his mother, and sometimes, sometimes, for no earthly reason he could discern.
It had taken him awhile to admit to himself that was what it was of course. Despite what many said, denial was often a very useful tool.
Admitting it to himself, that he needed at the very least a hug, preferably of the bear variety Mr. Sanchez was so fond of, on a fairly regular basis had been an incredibly difficult, discomfiting, and ungraceful affair. The idea of actually voicing such a need aloud to anyone, ever, even these men he was coming to consider brothers was so unpleasant as to be unspeakable. So, somehow, Ezra found himself doing this.
Nagging. Picking. Smarting off. In the words of Mr. Jackson, 'acting like he thinks he's king, only I'm about to shove that crown up his backside.' It was not something he ever planned, but often when he felt that need Ezra found himself almost resigned to it.
He knew where it would lead. The first part he could have done without entirely...the second...
Sometimes, Ezra just needed to be held.
That a part of him found a possibly unholy glee in getting that vein in Mr. Larabee's temple to throb or the steady Mr. Sanchez to draw in a grating breath, temper close to fraying, didn't help in that respect, either.