A Dragon Song
AN: Thank you to FestiveFerret for the beta! This story will have a spiritual successor next week in the form of a CHAPTERED version of it, much plottier and longer. This is the cute little taster, that doesn't have the casefic elements (in case people wanted dragons, but without the sad of the case they're involved with). Enjoy!
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The dragon arrived exactly one and a half hours after lunch, to allow time for digestion, as he would later explain. Dragons, above all, were unfailingly polite, and Spencer was no different in that regard.
"Good afternoon," said a voice as Hotch was busy filing budget requests for the coming quarter. "You were expecting me, I hope." The voice, when Hotch looked up to find the owner of it, had come from the chair tucked neatly against the front of his desk. The door remained closed, as it had been all day, and there was no one in sight. Incorrectly, it appeared as though he was alone.
"Huh," said Hotch and returned to the budgets.
"I'm down here," it continued, somewhat accusingly.
When Hotch stood and peered down onto the chair, a dragon looked back up at him. It was a deep navy blue from the tip of its tail, which it wore draped over one forearm much like a bride with a long train on her dress, to the pointed end of its long snout. It was, in fact, the exact shade of blue as Hotch's suit jacket, which hung neatly from the back of the chair the dragon was sitting upon and which made the dragon quite difficult to see. The only features that stood out on the slender creature were eyes that whirled a sedate grey with no noticeable pupils and its carefully knotted six-fold tie.
Hotch observed all these things in a very careful manner, taking note of each and every one. He then sat down, just as carefully, and reached for the phone to call his doctor to book an appointment before possibly calling Rossi to admit to him that he was seeing dragons.
"I am real," said the dragon, definitely petulant now, and turned a deeper shade of blue. "Look—I even made an appointment." And, with a short, tinny whistle, a card appeared on Hotch's desk, right underneath his still hovering hand. A card that, until this point, had been sitting at home on his desk after he'd found it half pushed through his mail slot. It was a very simple card—completely blank except for 'An Appointment with A Dragon for After Lunch (allowing time for digestion). Please & Thank You' written across it in a startlingly neat hand.
"This is Jack's," said Hotch, who'd made a rather simple but ultimately rash assumption about it.
"No, it's not." The dragon was now a pale blue and looking rather depressed. "I knew this would happen. I even put a stamp on it—the book said I should."
Hotch turned the card over. 'A Stamp' was written on the other side, in the same hand.
"Huh," he said again. "How did you get past security?"
"I asked," the dragon replied. "It's tremendously important that I speak with you, Agent Hotchner. I would very much like to join your team."
It was then that Hotch noticed the shouting, as though something alarming or very exciting had been noted several floors down and the news was slowly spreading upwards.
The door banged open, and Rossi barged in after it, bursting out with, "Hotch, there's a—" He stopped, eyes bulging worryingly. Hotch leaned back in his chair, relieved of the need to phone his doctor as Rossi stared at his guest.
"A dragon," Hotch said, matter-of-factly. And, now that procedure and sanity had both been verified, he had a job to do. "Excuse me, Dave, but I believe it—he?" The dragon nodded, eyes whirling: "—has an appointment." Rossi slowly backed out, blinking rapidly and closing the door gently behind him. "Now, you were saying, Mr.…?"
"Spencer," said the dragon, turning back to his original shade of suit blue and puffing his chest up. "Dr. Spencer Reid."
And, just like that, the BAU gained its very own dragon.
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Dragons, as they quickly learned, might be very polite but that didn't mean they were always easy to get along with. Spencer was startlingly intelligent, extremely awkward, and had no boundaries for his curiosity. Hotch requested access for their dragon to the FBI handbooks and manuals on every conceivable procedure, leaving Spencer alone with them for just a day and returning to find him able to recite them verbatim, once even correcting Rossi on a point Rossi himself had written. He rode about on Hotch's shoulder or his head, extending his sinuous neck out as far as it would go to examine each person Hotch stopped to speak to, no matter how uncomfortable it made that person, and occasionally practising his 'profiling' on whoever the poor person was.
After an encounter with Strauss that was profoundly mortifying for them all, Hotch decided that perhaps Spencer would enjoy being let loose in Archives for a little while. Thirty-five access and non-disclosure forms later, he delivered his dragon to the gated room filled with shelves and shelves and shelves of past cases and walked away, once again incorrect in his assumption that the dragon was dealt with.
He was wrong.
"I'm done," said Spencer, appearing with a pop by Garcia's head and almost startling her into dropping her coffee into Morgan's lap. It was two days later. "That was fascinating, thank you!"
"Huh," said Hotch, and decided he really needed to stop being surprised by him.
It was discovered at Halloween that Spencer loved candy, which was unfortunate, as dragons didn't appear to have any way of digesting food. An odd discovery, seeing as Spencer had a firm fascination with the digestive system that led to several awkward lunches where he would sneak under Hotch's desk and tuck his head against his stomach, listening to whatever it was he could hear. Hotch never asked. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. Instead, whatever Spencer ate—usually candy—was expelled as thick clouds of multi-coloured and scented smoke that he seemed completely unable to control, leaving trails of burnt sugar behind him as it settled.
After a disastrous day where JJ—who seemed completely unable to say no to the little dragon's pleading gaze no matter how often Hotch politely reminded her that Spencer's eyes were almost certainly bigger than his apparently non-existent stomach—gave him half of her tuna-fish lunch, a new form appeared on Hotch's desk. This one was a requisition form for a new sign for the bullpen, and he approved it with a sigh. The sign appeared three days later: Care & Feeding of the Dragon, it read in big, bold, black letters, containing only one tip underlined twice and written in red: Don't.
On cases, Spencer rode proudly on Hotch's shoulder, sometimes curling up on his head and, somehow, not really taking anything away from his stern countenance. It became apparent that Spencer had picked the singular person in existence who could still look imposing with a small tie-wearing dragon perched on his head like a hat. If Hotch tried to leave him behind, he'd simply curl up innocently wherever placed and then, usually at an incredibly inconvenient time, pop into existence back onto his established spot upon Hotch's head. This included one notable time when his appearance had startled an unsub so much the man had opened fire, earning a dismissive whistle from Spencer. Hotch, who'd gone to throw himself down with his arms wrapped around the unprotected creature's delicate frame, found that every gun in the room, fired bullets included, had vanished along with the whistle.
"I don't like guns," Spencer had said peevishly as Morgan had arrested the man, the dragon turning a grumpy green. From that moment on, he'd repeated the trick so often that the agents began to pull their sweaters down over their weapons before entering a room with him, in case he whistled and hid them. Hotch sometimes wondered where the guns went when he vanished them, but decided—probably wisely—not to ask.
On the other hand, interrogations became easier, with people usually so intimidated by the dragon puffing rings of irritating smoke at them that their guards were completely down. And, if they did try to lie around him, he called them on it every time.
"I don't know who that is," said the suspect on one particular day, wincing as Spencer's eyes flashed red.
"Lie," said the dragon.
"No, it's not!"
More red. "Lie," the dragon said, smugger this time, and yawned.
The man spluttered, handcuffs clinking on the table as he tried to pull away. "I-what-you—" he garbled, before screaming, "You're a lie! You're not even supposed to exist!"
They looked at Spencer.
"I don't think you need me for that one," he said, and went to sleep.
But no matter how much trouble the dragon caused, it was unanimous that his worth exceeded it. "The US Government is very interested in opening up lines of communication with the dragons," Hotch was told over and over again, every time he was called to yet another 'creation of a new bureaucratic form to deal with some unforeseen complication of having a dragon' consultation. "Since they have chosen you, Agent Hotchner, we implore you to act with dignity and in a manner befitting the spokesperson of the human race."
"I'm not entirely sure what he wants of us," Hotch retorted, feeling a bit like a butterfly pinned up with all the dragons peering in at him, wherever they were. "What are we supposed to do?"
"Impress him," he was told, and nothing else.
Winter brought snow, and Spencer becoming distracted every other minute to go out and chase it until he reappeared shivering and coughing snowflakes instead of smoke. Garcia, without hesitation, knitted him a tiny sweater-vest with holes for his wings, which he wore proudly from that day on. "Kindness," he said happily, the day he was presented with it. "You're all so kind."
The following month, he stopped a suicide bomber and saved thirteen hostages without a single casualty. He was awarded agent status the very next week.
"I'm the very first Dragon-Doctor-Agent," he informed Hotch as Hotch packed to go home that night, perched on his desk with his new ID pinned to his sweater-vest where everyone could see it. "Isn't that exciting!"
"How did you even get a doctorate?" Hotch asked, more thinking of home than he was his eccentric reptilian subordinate.
"My understanding is that they are awarded after a long period of study and demonstration of intelligence," Spencer replied. Hotch looked at him, always wary—after the pool noodle incident—of any sentence Spencer began with 'my understanding'. "I decided it would help with making you comfortable with me if I took on a human title of respect, so I did both."
"What did you study?"
Spencer replied, "Libraries," as though this didn't need further explanation.
"Which library?" Hotch prompted, a little confused.
The dragon peered at him, as though he was the slow one here. "All of them," he finally said. "I read very fast. Good night." And, then, he vanished.
As they exited the BAU, Hotch asked Rossi after explaining the exchange, "Do you think he meant he read every book in every library?" because, surely not?
"When it comes to that dragon," Rossi said wryly, "I try not to think too much at all."
And life continued on, mostly unchanged by the discovery of dragons. If, sometimes, Spencer ignored everyone in favour of staring off wistfully into the distance with his colour a woeful teal, they never asked, and he never told.
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Nine months after the dragon arrived, Hotch heard him sing for the first time.
Spencer hadn't shown up for a week, concern making it difficult for any of them to focus. They'd gone on a case, without their dragon, and returned four days later—still without their dragon.
"You will look for him, won't you?" asked Garcia, all worried eyes and a downturned mouth.
"Of course," Hotch said. When the others went home, he stayed behind and wondered where a dragon would go. And he wondered and wondered and wondered, until his wondering became drifting and the exhaustion of the past four days brought his head down to the desk. He dreamed of a song of no language, a rhythm that sung with his very heartbeat. It was wordless and intimate and, when he woke, his cheeks were wet. He was distantly aware that he'd dreamed of loss, of something less where there had been more.
Half-awake and shaken to his core, he followed that heartbeat down down down until he shivered himself conscious with his hand pressed to the gated door of Archives. It swung open. The room was silent. His ID was in his hand, the soft beep of the access scanner the only sound. There was nothing around but the narrow aisles, the dusty shelves, the fading boxes of broken lives.
"What is that song?" he asked the silent air.
The air replied, in a voice like sorrow, "It has no name. It doesn't need it. What good is a name for it? That would be worthless to the majority of our listeners."
"I heard it," Hotch said softly, walking towards that voice. Down one of those narrow aisles to where the dust was disturbed and one of those fading boxes was knocked askew, smoke drifting lazily out through the lopsided lid. "I was listening. Are you okay?" He wondered, for the first time, if Spencer had family of his own. Who he returned to when he vanished with a polite 'good night'.
"Your species is outnumbered exponentially by beetles," Spencer said, his voice a dull grumble. He sounded miserable, almost angry with it, and his colour was a sickly maroon when Hotch slid the lid from the box and peered into what was clearly a drafty, dusty nest. "If anything, we sing for the beetles. They don't care to name things. Their business is far too important to waste their time with naming things."
Hotch couldn't tell, not at this angle, but he fancied the dragon was a little smaller than usual. He looked around, at the harsh lights and the silent room. "Have you been sleeping here?" he tried again, sensing the dragon was reluctant to talk. "Isn't it lonely?"
In response, Spencer made a sound—a high, clear note that trilled and then crashed, like glass shattering—and buried his nose under his paws. "A dragon never sleeps alone," he said miserably, his colour worsening. "And all I am is alone—I want to be here so very much, but I miss my Emily."
"You've been sleeping in a box?" Hotch didn't really know where to go with this.
"It's a lovely box," Spencer replied, always polite, even to boxes. "But…"
"Lonely."
"Lonely," he agreed.
Hotch looked around again, and he said, "Would you like to come home with me?" There was really nothing else he could say, his heart breaking a little at the sad dragon in the cardboard box.
And Spencer, flickering a hopeful yellow, replied, "Oh, yes please."
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"Can Spencer sleep with me?" Jack asked hopefully as Hotch helped him button his pyjama top.
"He's not a pet," Hotch answered. "He's staying in the guest room."
"Oh," said Jack.
"Oh," said Spencer, who had apparently been sitting on Jack's bookshelf watching them. "Which room is that?"
"Third down the hall." Hotch looked up as he spoke, finding no dragon peering down, Spencer having vanished off to poke around on his own. Jack wiggled in his arms, wanting to follow the dragon, but Hotch steered him to his bed. "Nope. You've had enough chattering at him tonight—bedtime for all of us."
"Do dragons sleep?" Jack asked, bouncing and continuing to bounce as he leapt into his bed. "Do they snore? Do they dream? Could I be a dragon? Is Spencer going to have breakfast with us? Can we have pancakes—"
"Sleep." Hotch tweaked the blankets over his head, smiling a little at the giggle that floated up from under them, and left the room. "Goodnight, Jack. I love you."
"Night, Daddy. Love you more and more and more, to infinity-always."
Spencer, when Hotch went looking, was sitting in the centre of the guest bed looking around the room with a bemused cast to his colour. Since his expression was exceedingly difficult to read—lacking lips or eyes that actually betrayed emotion—Hotch was finding that he was getting very good at assigning mood to colour. And it did look rather ridiculous, the tiny dragon sinking into the covers of the queen-sized bed, but what else could Hotch do?
"Well, goodnight," Hotch said awkwardly. "You should be comfortable in here."
Spencer looked around some more. "Oh, I'm sure I will," he said, laying down and stretching as far as he could go and still barely covering a fraction of the bed, even with his wings spread wide. "This will do nicely. In here…" He trailed off, watching Hotch intently as the man went to walk out. "…yes, in here…"
If Hotch was the type of person to fiddle, he'd have fiddled with his sleeve or worried his lip in that moment of awkward waiting.
"Good night, Agent Hotchner," said Spencer finally. And, with that, he slithered up the covers and vanished underneath them, only visible as a long line of movement that settled and curled into a tight ball in the very centre of the bed. Hotch turned off the light and left the door ajar, retiring to his own bed with the distinct feeling that this arrangement wouldn't last.
It didn't.
He woke with the swiftness and clarity born of a lifetime of waking suddenly to Jack shaking him. "Dad," he said, eyes huge on his shadowed face, "there's monsters in my room."
"We've talked about this," Hotch replied, heart sinking. "There's no such thing as monsters, Jack." This was a lie, and they both knew it. Haley's photo watched them both from the bedside cupboard, calling him out on his bluff.
But Jack shook his head, mouth set stubbornly. "Yes, there is," he said firmly. "Spencer's eating them."
He was right.
Hotch stared into his son's room as the dragon dived about with wild abandon into puddles of shivering black that swirled around the bedroom floor, trying to avoid the dragon's teeth and claws. When he dived, the puddles shattered into smaller fragments, smaller yet in his paws as he swallowed puffs of smoky black and spat smoke out in response.
"See," said Jack smugly, hiding behind Hotch's legs and peering around. "Monsters."
"Not monsters," said Spencer, grabbing another puff of black and winging his way to them to drop it into Hotch's hand. The puff was fluffy and blacker than black, with nothing within it except shadows and two singular glints of alive. "It's a nightmare, a big one."
Hotch, looking down into those glints, had the unsettling feeling that he was looking into the dark itself, and the dark was looking back. "How about we sleep in my room?" he said, putting everything he was looking at firmly into the 'tomorrow' basket. Spencer, in response, turned yellow and swallowed two puffs of the wiggling nightmare whole, biting down with relish. Hotch just backed out, taking his son with him, and went to bed to wait for the dragon to finish his meal.
That night, with Jack cuddled against one side and Spencer curled on the pillow above his head, Hotch dreamed. He dreamed of dragons littering the sky like midday stars made of every colour, and he dreamed of Spencer singing happily to an audience of the world, and he dreamed of Haley.
"That nightmare was too bitter for one person," the dream Spencer told him between songs, his voice a whisper Hotch wouldn't remember in the morning. "Shared nightmares are always the ones with the sharpest bite—but don't worry. Nightmares are just dreams turned sour, and I can fix them." The nightmare which, when asleep, wasn't puffy and indistinct at all but choking and overwhelmingly hungry, listened to the song, and changed. Only a little at first, too big for one little dragon to consume alone, but other voices joined it, and Hotch listened.
Help me? asked Spencer.
Dragons never sing alone, said the other voices with every sound Hotch had ever imagined. We help.
The nightmare faded, and vanished.
When Hotch woke the next day, the picture of Haley seemed kinder, less recriminatory. And he hadn't had the dream he'd had every night since that night—the one painted with Haley's blood and Foyet's laughter and Jack screaming.
In fact, he rather thought that he hadn't dreamed at all.
And when he sat for breakfast with his son and their friendly dragon, Spencer said, "Would you like to come see my home?" as though the events of the night before had quite changed his mind about something. He was tucking his snout down and curling his mouth in just the kind of way that Hotch knew was his smile and turning a delicate pink, before adding, "It's time you met Emily."
Emily-the-other-dragon, Hotch decided, couldn't possibly be as surprising as her partner.
He was wrong.
.
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Emily, Spencer told them, was the biggest, the blackest, the most beautiful of all the dragons that had ever or would ever again live on this earth. The way he described her, they were quite certain that they were going to visit the Queen of all Dragons, resplendent with grace and absolute dignity. They were to be awed by her presence, to be honoured by her even deigning to speak to them. The entire time he talked of her—the whole five-hour flight to Las Vegas—his body glowed a deep pink shot through with gleaming yellow flickers of happy.
Hotch, recognising the gleeful rambling of someone who was utterly in love and blinded by that, wisely did nothing but agree.
"So, she's going to be approximately the size of a Labrador?" Rossi asked cheekily as they walked to the rental cars they were taking to the depths of a sandstone gorge outside of Vegas. Spencer was going to guide them from there to the home he shared with Emily, hidden by whatever strange magic that dragons seemed to possess.
"Maybe a Doberman," Hotch agreed, watching their small dragon fly in giddy circles overtop of the car as airfield staff stared at him.
They were both wrong.
Spencer's home was beautiful. It was also absolutely not what any of them had expected as they arrived, sweaty and panting after the sun-baked hike across bare sandstone painted in creams and pinks and reds. Instead of being flat, it was made of spires of rock intricately wound in with the outcropping yawning up to the sky behind it. All the hot colours of the surrounding sandstone wove throughout it, circling windows that shone so strangely to Hotch's eyes that he was sure they weren't made of glass as he understood it. The door that they walked towards seemed, all at once, made perfectly shaped for a small winged dragon with paws for hands and yet also sized comfortably for the bipedal humans walking behind him. The desert around them wasn't silent, not even close, with insects humming and the heavy sound of overwhelming heat pressing down, but, as they approached the dragonly home, they could also hear water and a steady throbbing beat of something living around them, sounds that overwhelmed all else.
"Emily's home!" said Spencer excitedly, standing so suddenly on Hotch's shoulder that he had to put his wings out and wheel them in order to stop from falling off.
"How can you tell?" Hotch said, when he'd recovered from his awe at the house—because it was a house, no matter how alien it seemed to his eyes—so suddenly appearing from the haze.
Around turned Spencer's head to look at Hotch, eyes whirling gold with exhilaration. "Can't you feel it?" he exclaimed. His claws were nipping Hotch's shoulder through his thin shirt as his rear end wiggled as though he was orientating himself ready to leap into the air. "Listen!"
They listened. Below them and above them and around them, the desert sung: a steady thump thump of something terrific in the biblical sense, inspiring both awe and terror in equal measures.
"What is that?" JJ asked, shifting her feet as though the sound was resonating through her boots.
"It's Emily," said Spencer matter-of-factly.
And Hotch clicked to what the sound was: they stood upon the stone listening to the fixed beat of a great heart. But that seemed insane, impossible. It must be something else. Once more, he sought safety in the arms of logic over the terrifying emptiness of the unknown.
But Spencer wasn't waiting for them to recover from this world-shattering revelation; he had finally lost all semblance of self-control and leapt from Hotch's shoulder to fly through the wavering doorway of the house, vanishing with an excited, "Emily!" as they hurried after him.
Hotch gasped as they went through the door. Inside the home, it was the desert personified. Heat swallowed them, as though they'd stepped into the smoky innards of summer itself, the same overwhelming, stomach-churning heat of an oncoming wildfire. So hot that he could barely think to appreciate how human the décor appeared, with the walls of the great hall they found themselves standing in polished so smooth that they seemed made of some jewel, with nooks and alcoves set into the stone walls lined with shelves overflowing with books and papers and neat piles of glossy magazines. The lower alcoves spilled outward with what appeared to be every gun Spencer had ever whistled away, leading to a larger pile set against the wall. The back wall of the room was a gleaming, accented black, sheer and curved gently towards the ceiling, so dark that the light streaming in through the many strange windows seemed to be swallowed by its depths.
The wall opened a single, yellow eye.
"Don't 'Emily' me," it said peevishly, and moved. And moved. And continued moving, unfolding endlessly and then some more into the hulking shape of an enormous, pitch-black dragon, exactly what Hotch would picture if he'd been asked to imagine a 'dragon' before Spencer had rearranged his understanding of the word. "Where have you been?"
Spencer immediately turned a sorry shade of cream, shrinking down into himself on the polished floor with his wings tucked apologetically. "I got distracted," he said guiltily. "But, look! Emily, it's them!"
The vast dragon turned slowly, so slowly, to stare at the team, who stood transfixed by that predatory gaze. Unlike Spencer's eyes, this dragon had pupils, deep black and slitted like a cat's. When she leaned closer with the guns under her paws creaking dangerously, the air trembled, massive jaws opening ever so slightly as a forked tongue flickered behind fangs that stood almost as long as one of Hotch's forearms and almost as wide.
"Fascinating," she said, blowing a desert wind over them as she spoke. Morgan whimpered. Rossi appeared to be having a heart attack of some kind; JJ simply seemed frozen. "Seven months, Spencer. Seven months since you've come home! Not even a note! Not even a whisper—how could you?"
"Uh oh," JJ whispered. Spencer, on the other hand, was sinking even smaller as the other dragon leaned in close and dwarfed him with her snout. But, even as they watched with their hearts in their throats, he stood on his hind legs and reached with his paws to pull himself up onto her muzzle, scrabbling a little until he was perched neatly between her ridged nostrils.
"I missed you too," he said seriously, and bumped his smoky nose against hers, chirring sweetly and turning his previous colour of rose-pink.
The other dragon blinked, the action audible. "Cute," she rumbled, "but you're not forgiven yet. I needed you." And her head swung, dragon and all, around to stare in a recriminating fashion at a pile of shredded papers shoved up angrily against the wall. "My new comics came in, and I couldn't read them without you." As though to demonstrate, a talon that made Hotch's heart hammer just to see it stretched out to skewer an issue of Spiderman effortlessly and lift it into the air with one shake of her huge paw. In what was unmistakably a whine, the dragon muttered, "Not from lack of trying," and sadly watched the comic tear in two and fall to the pile.
"Oh no," said Spencer, flying down to the comics and picking one up. "Don't worry, my lovely song, I can fix it!"
"Don't call me that," Emily said with a huff. Spencer, busy whistling at the torn comic to make the pages weld back together, attempted to look as innocent as possible while a cheeky hint of smoke drifted from his mouth.
"What shouldn't I call you, oh rhythm of my heart?" he asked, blinking rapidly.
Emily, with a single louder huff, blew a thick plume of smoke down onto him, obscuring the smaller dragon with smog. Unlike Spencer's smoke, it was real and cloying and left grimy smears all over the polished floor and, when it cleared to reveal him, the thoroughly sooty dragon and his equally sooty comic book.
"Hymn of my life," he whispered, grinning dragonly as she rumbled at him.
"You're being an atrocious host to your guests," she said finally, looking at them. "If they were dragons, they'd have eaten you already for such conduct. Why do they look like that?"
Hotch winced back from the two sharp regards that turned to them. Rossi was making strange noises now, JJ turning a bizarre, red colour from the oppressive heat.
"They look normal to me," said Spencer, vanishing and reappearing on Hotch's shoulder. "Oh, wait. Why are you all damp, Agent?"
"It's a little warm in here," Hotch said carefully.
"Fuck warm," wheezed Rossi, who Hotch was becoming increasingly concerned about as his complexion somehow paled and reddened all at once. "It's hotter than Satan's ballsa—"
"Oh, oops." Spencer turned his 'sorry' colour, before flicking back to pink. "I can also fix that."
He opened his mouth and made a sound so strange to Hotch's ears that he would be unable to describe it after, a sound all jumbled and mixed and with hints of ice creaking and rain falling and a sharp breeze all twisted together. In a heartbeat, the temperature dropped to that of a brisk fall evening, leaving them shivering with the harsh contrast. The roof began to drip, Emily turning her head up with a sedate swing of her armoured throat to stare at it.
"The ceiling is precipitating," she said blandly, licking a water drop.
"Too much?" asked Spencer.
"Too much," Hotch said, and sneezed. Spencer repeated the noise, less shrilly, and the temperature evened out. Gratefully, Hotch breathed again, eyeing Rossi out the corner of his eye as the other man closed his eyes and sagged with relief, Morgan standing close to his side. Spencer watched them with fascination, his eyes ticking from Emily to the team and doing a strange tappy kind of dance as his front paws patted at the floor with his eagerness to, Hotch assumed, find out their opinion on his 'beautiful' girlfriend.
Spencer, he realised, was showing off, and it was delightfully human and also a painful reminder that, despite being a dragon, he was possibly very, very young.
"Refreshments for your guests," Emily said to Spencer, in what was clearly supposed to be a whisper but also made Hotch's head ring a little still. "And you can introduce us properly?"
"Oh, yes!" Spencer leapt up, bounding away and calling back, "I think I remember how to make tea!"
"Oh no," said JJ.
.
.
Emily, proving to be a gracious host once alleviated of her irritation with her partner, seated them on small cushions she plucked from the nooks on the side of the home—Spencer's, Hotch assumed, since she could barely reach a talon into them—and spoke to them while Spencer fetched refreshments for the parched agents.
"I told Spencer he should go to you," she was saying in her booming voice, watching them unblinkingly. "He's always been fascinated by your work, and he could help in so many ways. What does it matter that he's a dragon?" Now, Hotch fancied he heard something else in her tone: the same pride and joy that Spencer voiced when he spoke of her. "He's the most brilliant dragon there's ever been, so clever and quick. Did you know it only took him two years to decide upon you guys?" She made it sound like such a small time, her eyes slipping half-closed as she spoke.
"This might be rude," Rossi began, which Hotch knew meant it was almost certainly going to be incredibly rude, "but how old are you?"
"Four-hundred and three," Emily answered promptly. "Spencer is three-hundred and twenty-four—we're barely out of the egg."
"Emily was sung by one of the only dragons left of the Old Guard," Spencer explained, appearing with a tray of tiny tea-cups with handles clearly made for paws, not hands. "Her, um—your equivalent is 'mother', I guess—was an ambassador for the dragons to the human race, back when such things were needed."
"Before they realised that eating makes for much faster diplomacy," Emily added, baring her fangs. It was a disturbing grin, very, very toothy, dangerously wide, and completely out of place on a dragon's face.
"Sorry." Spencer glared at her, eyes flickering. "Emily has a terrible sense of humour. Emily don't laugh at them like that."
Emily blinked, tail whisking. Not a single other muscle on her face twitched. Hotch heard Rossi swear, very softly.
Hotch, knowing the dragon well enough by now to know that he hid important things in the middle of endless inane chatter, zeroed in on what he saw as pertinent to the matter at hand: "Your people sing to reproduce?" he asked. "Is that what you mean by 'Emily was sung'?"
Spencer nodded. Morgan, who'd picked up one of the delicate tea-cups and was about to sip from it, snorted. "I'd wondered how you do it," he said, too loud. JJ closed her eyes, mouth thinning. Hotch just sighed inwardly.
"Do 'it'?" Spencer asked, head tilting curiously. "Do what?"
"Yeah, Morgan, do what?" Rossi wasn't going to let this go, ignoring Hotch's glare.
"You know…" Morgan trailed off, stuck between Spencer's unrelenting stare and Hotch's intimidating glare. But, of course, he powered on: "…sex. Because Emily is… large. Er. Than you." He coughed, and not because of the smoke, adding, "But very beautiful," as JJ covered her mouth.
Emily silently stared him down, emotionless.
"Oh, ah," Spencer said, "we're not biological, as such. Not as you understand us to be—our reproduction is less… creative." Judging from his rapid-fire blinking, Hotch had the distinct feeling that Spencer's 'research' had covered the act of human procreation. "It's simple, really. When a dragon wishes to be born, it sings, and we answer. Then it becomes."
Silence followed this.
"Simple?" Rossi asked wryly.
Spencer seemed pleased that they'd gotten it so easily. "Yeah!" he chirped.
"We give ourselves completely to our songs," Emily murmured. A flicker of movement in the corner of Hotch's eye distracted Hotch momentarily, finding Rossi fishing a leaf from his teacup and staring it—a cursory glance down into his own cup showed that his was filled with soggy leaves as well of some kind of flower.
"Can you say no?" JJ asked curiously, watching Emily bump her nose affectionately against Spencer. "If you don't want a child?"
"No," Spencer said again, shaking his head adamantly. "You don't understand, Agent Jareau. If a dragon sings to be born, whoever is chosen must answer—every dragon is born for a reason. We could no more deny that dragon the life it requests than you could deny the need to breathe or Agent Hotchner could deny his son the love he requires to thrive. It's innate. Emily and I, we're too young to have ever sung for a child before—"
"But not so young anymore," Emily cut in. "We've flown together for two hundred years now—our melody is known. It could be any decade now that we're chosen."
"Or never at all," Spencer said, frowning in a very human fashion. "Do you want a hatchling?"
"Do you?" Emily retorted.
Hotch had the distinct feeling they'd stumbled onto a personal conversation, clearing his throat to remind the two dragons that they were there. "You'd make wonderful parents," he said weakly, as they both looked at him.
"Of course we would," Emily said, settling back from where she'd risen slightly in place. By Hotch's side, Morgan had gulped his tea down and—evidently—regretted it, trying to hide his spluttering. "We're fantastic." She nudged Spencer again, laying her head next to him so he could nuzzle against her with a soft purring hum. "My Spencer will have clever hatchlings. And mine will be fierce."
"I am yours," Spencer said happily, turning yellow again. "And they will be the fiercest. The very winds will tremble with fear at their song! What wonderful dragons we shall make."
"Spencer," Rossi grumbled, holding his teacup up. "Are these rose leaves?"
"Yes! I'd wondered if you'd like them!" Spencer seemed pleased, even as JJ winced and sipped at her cup with a carefully focused expression. "The book said tea is made by boiling leaves, and humans seem ever so fond of roses. Do you like it?"
"Yes," lied JJ bravely. Hotch didn't answer, just pretended to sip, retaining his dignity.
"Okay, I gotta ask," Morgan burst out with, "if you guys don't have sex, do you even have genitals?"
"Morgan!" JJ's hiss was a little more shocked than Rossi's gleeful one, but they were both just as forceful.
"No," said Spencer, unconcerned. "Why would we need them? We're made of magic." Duh said his tone, despite his even words.
"So your size determines your biological sex?" Morgan continued, clearly fascinated. Hotch didn't ask him to stop, a little curious himself. "Or are you just tiny?"
"Sexual dimorphism in dragons is pronounced." Spencer picked up his own cup, drinking from it without a qualm. "Males such as myself are small—but we're highly magical. Emily's abilities are limited since her resources go into supporting her great size and flight, but I can do so much more. Both sexes are integral—we complete each other."
"What makes you male?" Morgan pressed.
Spencer seemed nonplussed. "What makes you male?"
"Huh," said Morgan.
Rossi rubbed his eyes. "I need a drink," he muttered.
Spencer brightened. "I can fix that!" he chirped, and whistled, two more cups of tea appearing in front of Rossi's feet. "There you go!"
Hotch, wisely, decided to drink his own without further comment, gratified by the happy glint of gold in their host's scales.
.
.
The shift from dragons being creatures of myth and legend to them being a part of the modern world was so bizarrely smooth that Hotch wasn't even sure he could pick out the transition. It wasn't realistic nor understandable; there wasn't a part of him that was optimistic enough to think that it could have gone this easily without outside interference. By all accounts, it had simply happened because one dragon had gotten bored with dragonly pursuits and decided to make a difference. And both Spencer and Emily were adamant that it was just meant to happen, Spencer becoming an FBI agent, that it was important.
Spencer, when asked, merely said, "It's magic. Just enjoy it," and continued on with whatever he was doing, seemingly not understanding that the FBI having a dragon agent was a big deal, actually. Even if that dragon was small and strange and hoarded books and ties, and even if that dragon's girlfriend slept on a hoard of guns instead of gold.
Then came Mr. Scratch. It could have destroyed Hotch's career, or his life. It very nearly did.
But, just like they'd told him, the dragons had arrived for a purpose. As it turned out, that purpose could be big—reintroducing the concept of magic to a world too choked up with logic to dream anymore—or it could be small—saving one boy and his father from a monster.
Both purposes seemed to be of equal importance in the eyes of dragons.
When Hotch considered that he'd have to leave the FBI, leave his life, in order to keep his son safe, it wasn't much of a consideration at all. Jack was worth more than any job, and this was what he explained to Spencer. The dragon seemed nonplussed, listening with his tail over his foreleg and his wings tucked tight, eyes a sedate grey.
"Well, of course, you have to keep Jack safe," he replied with certainty, and Hotch sighed a little in relief. He still had to tell the team he was leaving, arrange a replacement… but Spencer was still speaking: "and, of course, you need to stay somewhere safe. There's only one place that I can think of."
"Oh?" asked Hotch.
And that was how Hotch and his son came to be living in a dragon's home.
"This is probably the coolest thing ever," Jack informed him as they looked around their new—and strangely human—surroundings. It was a tucked away corner of Spencer and Emily's home, smaller than the rest and furnished just as Hotch's apartment had been back in DC. Spencer had clearly gone above and beyond to make his guests comfortable. "I'm still mad at you, Dad, but this is really cool."
"I know, Buddy," Hotch said glumly, throwing his bag on the bed and wondering who he was now he wasn't an FBI agent or a team leader, just a man running from a nightmare too sour to eat. "I'm pretty mad with myself too."
Life settled into a weird rhythm of what Hotch supposed was normality now. Spencer, still working at the BAU, was rarely home, but Emily kept them company. Jack argued, mostly unsuccessfully, that the travel-time to school was far enough that he should get a ride on dragon-back, which Hotch nixed and Emily just grinned toothily about. Hotch did very little but read the endless series of research journals and academic texts that seemed to appear whenever he needed new material—he'd never admit he almost wished for a paperback novel at some points, since he knew Spencer would be puzzled by the idea—and help teach Emily how to cook, a difficult task since her kitchen made no sense to him on a functional level and the one that Spencer had created for them was too small for her to get even her nose into. They also spent a lot of time talking.
Emily, Hotch discovered, was a very lonely dragon.
"I wanted to go, you know," she admitted one night, three months into his exile. Spencer was tight-lipped on how the search for Scratch was going, and Hotch's dreams were starting to turn dark and worrisome and linger into his waking hours. "With Spence, to Quantico. I could be an agent. I'd be a wonderful agent, but I'm too damn big… Spencer as an agent is an interesting novelty, but me? I'm terrifying. There'd be riots in the Capitol."
"Spencer's never been a novelty," Hotch said, laid out beside her on the cool floor of their main hall and gazing up at the stars through the vaulting windows. "He's an asset to our team and the Bureau."
"I know," Emily rumbled, her eyes lightening to a glum off-white. "But I miss him. I'm too big for anything useful—Jack dreams of flying, you know, and I can't even do that. I'd hurt him, or he'd slip off me. And I can't go with Spencer, because what could I do? Roar profiles at him while law enforcement went for their guns? It just doesn't make sense—we were born and named to live alongside humans. Most dragons have utterly dragonly names, not Spencer, or Emily. And yet, here I am…"
"I'm sorry," said Hotch. He'd been saying that a lot recently. And Emily was right—she would have made a fine agent; she knew just as much about profiling as Spencer did, with a mind that dived straight to the crux of a problem.
Emily just shrugged, and began to sing. It was the same song Hotch had heard once before, all those years ago when he'd traced the source to a lonely nest made in a box in Archives.
She sang alone, and Hotch couldn't do anything to change that, because he didn't know the words.
.
.
Things came to a head, as things usually did, with a confrontation. They never really understood, after, how Peter Lewis had found out where Hotch was hiding, or what had possessed him to try to reach Hotch despite the fact that he was living with two dragons in the depths of a sandstone home. Hotch suspected, but never confirmed, that Spencer had told him where to come. After all, there was only one way to end the sadness that was creeping through Hotch with every passing day—he'd never been the kind of man who was comfortable doing nothing. But there came the day that the fractured nightmares Hotch was having were brought to life. He sat up in his bed and found Lewis himself standing over him with a knife and the bottle containing the sage-laced hallucinogen, looking to the side where Jack still slept.
"Take me and leave my son," Hotch said immediately, wishing he had a gun, a knife, anything but the distant knowledge that he could shout and Emily would certainly hear, if she hadn't already. "Don't hurt him."
"I'm not going to hurt him," Lewis said calmly, and Hotch's heart sunk. "You are."
Behind him, the walls shifted, becoming pooling sprites of nightmares that dropped to the ground and clustered closer, invisible to the man who stood amongst them but so frightfully real to Hotch himself. Closer and closer they came, and Hotch prepared for a fight he wasn't sure he could win.
The nightmares fractured. From the dark of the room, there was a low hiss.
Spencer appeared on the sleeping Jack's legs. He wasn't any colour that Hotch had ever seen before, his scales no longer anything recognisable as mortal or mundane. They were night. They were darkness and shadow and everything frightening in the world, a nightmare more personified than the startled puffs of fear trying to huddle in the corners of the room away from those midnight eyes.
"You're in my home," Spencer said, tail flicking, "hunting my guests."
Lewis didn't move, his eyes locked on the small dragon as though he was weighing up his chances in a fight. Hotch shifted upright, trying to get in a position where he could lunge—he'd never seen Spencer in combat and didn't wish to, terrified of how small and fragile their little dragon was. But Spencer shrilled, a noise like rock cracking together that made Hotch's head ache and his gut pinch painfully.
The walls around them vanished.
"Hello," said Emily, looming overhead. Hotch couldn't tell where her body finished and the night sky began, the same flickers of starry light dancing across her great body as she twisted her head down and yawned her jaws wide, blowing hot air down upon them. Somehow, despite the noise and the heat and the sound of Lewis screaming, Jack slept soundly. And Emily said, "I've never eaten a nightmare before," and snapped down.
Hotch closed his eyes. When he opened them, the walls were back and the lights were on, Spencer his usual navy blue. There was no sign of Lewis, or of the nightmares surrounding him. And Jack slept on.
"Did any of that happen?" Hotch asked suspiciously, wondering just how much power the dragons held over his mind. "Or was it a nightmare?"
"Why would it being a nightmare make it any less real?" Spencer asked sensibly and curled up tight. "Go to sleep. It's done. I'm tired and my bones itch—too much magic in the air, I suspect."
Hotch, despite being wide awake, was asleep before he'd finished speaking.
.
.
He dreamed of a song. It was a song shared between two, but not two alone. There were multitudes of other voices singing with them, the chorus to their duet, until a third voice joined them. Hotch listened quietly, not knowing the words to express what he was hearing. He woke to Jack shaking him: "Dad, Dad, Dad," he was chanting, "wake up—look at this."
Hotch groaned, remembering the night before and wondering which was the proper form for 'unsub was eaten by a dragon', before sitting upright expecting the walls to be gone and the floor to be marred by teeth marks. Instead, Emily was peering through the doorway, her eye taking up the full expanse, and Spencer was asleep on the bed, curled around a great, blue egg with his entire body gleaming gold. "Oh," said Hotch, startled. "Where did that come from?"
"We sung it," Emily said proudly. "She says she's a girl."
Apparently, it was just as simple as they'd made it sound.
"Can we keep her?" Jack was asking, bouncing with the excitement he couldn't hide. Hotch winced, about to explain that you didn't really keep other people's children and, besides, they didn't even know her yet, but Spencer opened one eye and yawned.
"Sure," he said sleepily, curling tighter around the egg. "She's decided that she's going to be an agent too. She needs the best teacher." And, as he said this, he looked straight at Hotch.
"Ah," said Hotch. "How, uh, fast do dragons grow?"
Emily rumbled a laugh. "Don't worry, Aaron. You've got at least five years before she outgrows you, and at least ten before she won't fit in your home any more. Plenty of time for hatchling-sitting."
She was the first dragon born to follow the path that her father had paved. She absolutely wasn't the last. And Aaron Hotchner, as he was informed, would be tasked with teaching them all. This, it was decided, was his purpose.
And, just like that, Hotch gained his very own dragon god-daughter.