Aaron Hotchner woke up and did what he did every day.
He got dressed. He had breakfast. He went to work. Hotch was a man of routine. He didn't let the little things disrupt his routine.
He didn't let the big things disrupt his routine either.
His tie was impossible to knot. His fingers were clumsy, slow.
"Hmm," Hotch said, frowning at himself in the mirror. He ended up looping it around his neck and letting it hang loose. Close enough.
The milk was off. Soured enough that it was solid in the bottom of the container. He shook it. Something thudded against the edge of the carton. He put it down gingerly, and pushed his bowl of cereal away.
"Hmm," he said, frowning at the milk.
He stared at the car. Shrugged. Walked to work. The metro wasn't running anymore. It didn't really matter. He had all the time in the world.
He saw someone familiar on the way. It had been a while. He wasn't entirely sure how long. Others hadn't been as meticulous about him at keeping up the routine when everything had changed.
The man he knew turned and snarled in his direction. There was no recognition in his eyes. Hotch drew up next to him.
"Hmm," Hotch said to Derek Morgan, and the snarl turned to confusion.
He turned to begin walking to work again. Morgan hesitated for a second before following him as calmly as if he'd been there all along.
When a dog barked and Morgan froze for a moment, Hotch paused and waited. Patient. Morgan eventually shook himself and continued following.
A woman with one hand wandered past pushing a pram stained red. Neither Hotch nor Morgan looked at it. Hotch, because it made something nameless in his chest hurt. Morgan, because he was staring at the bloody stump of her arm, his expression hungry.
Someone screamed and Morgan veered away. Hotch sighed. Stopped. Waited until Morgan was almost out of earshot before calling out to him.
"Hmm," he said, with emphasis on the trailing mm. Morgan turned and came back, looking almost shamefaced. And hungry. Hotch glared. They began walking again.
It was noon before they got to work, but it didn't really matter. They had all the time in the world.
.
.
Very abruptly, Derek Morgan became aware of three things.
One: Hotch was here. He wasn't entirely sure when Hotch had stopped being there in the first place, but he had a slight suspicion it was around the time he'd lost two fingers and a chunk of his knee. He wasn't entirely sure how that had happened either. He remembered screaming.
Two: He was hungry. And it wasn't the kind of hungry that you got because you'd gotten caught up painting the walls and suddenly it was dinner and you'd missed the last two meals; it was the kind of hungry that made it very hard to concentrate on anything else. A dog barked and he thought of Clooney. Then he wondered who Clooney was. Then he remembered. The dog barked again. He got hungrier.
Three: He was pretty sure that at some point, everything had gone very wrong.
Hotch paused and looked back at him, frowning. He must have slowed down. Morgan looked at him, really looked at him.
"Oh," Morgan said, realizing. There was a fourth thing that he had become very suddenly aware of.
Four: He was almost absolutely certain that they were dead.
.
.
Hotch took Morgan to work because that was part of the routine. The elevators didn't work anymore. Neither did the lights. Hotch sighed at them. They made their way up the stairwell slowly, Morgan pausing every few steps to peer about looking bewildered.
The sixth floor was very empty and this was part of the new routine. Hotch hated it. Having Morgan at his desk would help. Anderson wandered past, waved half-heartedly. Wandered off again. He wasn't very productive these days. Hotch thought about writing him up for it.
Then he changed his mind. At least Anderson was here. The coffee machine didn't work anymore either. He couldn't expect miracles.
Morgan pushed past, suddenly more alive than he'd been the entire walk there. He stopped by the empty desks and stared at them for a long time. Hotch would have timed him, but the clock had long ago stopped making sense to him.
He looked up at it anyway because that was routine too.
Morgan picked something up and turned to face him. Held it out. A mug. There were words on it. Hotch peered at them. #1 NERD. He couldn't read anymore. He shrugged. Morgan shook it, scowled.
Oh. Someone had sat there. Someone else. Hotch's mind ticked slowly, struggling with the thoughts that he forced it to comprehend daily. He had almost gotten reading back, almost. It had taken a very long time. He could read his name now, on his door. Aaron Hotchner. That was him.
He thought of his name and he looked back at the mug. That thing in his chest hurt again.
There were words on the desk as well, near where the mug had sat. Coated in dust. Spencer Reid. That was a name, he thought. Not his name though. Someone else's. Someone important.
"Oh," he said, realizing. Morgan smiled. They turned and walked to the door in unison, starting their slow progress down the stairs all over again.
Morgan brought the mug.
.
.
By the time they got to Reid's apartment, the sun had set and risen again. Morgan sighed in relief when he saw it. He was still hungry, but having a goal seemed to help with that. There was another faint scream and he didn't even pause. He felt proud of that.
They trudged up the stairs to the second floor. His hand slipped on blood on the banister. Morgan felt uneasy looking at it.
Reid's door. Morgan paused, thinking. He knew what came next. He knocked. The door opened under his hand, the lock shattered.
"Hmm," Hotch said, and drew a gun Morgan hadn't even known he was wearing.
They pushed the door open and walked in.
The person sitting on the couch looked over the top of the book she was reading and rolled her eyes at them. Hotch lowered his gun.
"About time," said Emily Prentiss, putting the book down and standing up.
.
.
Reid was in his bedroom. Hotch walked in and looked around in shock. The entire room was papered with notes covered in scrawly, scratchy writing that Hotch envied.
He peered closer at it and frowned. Poked it. None of it look anything like the clear letters on his office door. None of it said Aaron Hotchner, or even Spencer Reid. He didn't think it actually said anything. He turned his frown onto Reid, who finally looked up from the book he was carefully examining.
Old blood matted his curls to the side of his head. That thing in Hotch's chest hurt once more at the sight of the mangled mess of his youngest team member's shoulder. He stepped into the room, paper rustling under his feet, and reached a hand out towards it. Reid flinched back and looked suspicious.
He was holding the book upside-down. Hotch didn't know how to read anything that wasn't his name anymore, but he knew enough to know that trees didn't grow out of the sky. Reid glanced at it, and the suspicion turned to frustration.
His tongue felt thick and clumsy. He tried anyway. He wasn't the kind of man to give up when things got a little hard. Dying hadn't changed that.
"Come on," he said eventually, and turned to leave. He knew Reid would follow.
Reid followed, burying his nose back into the book as he shuffled after him.
.
.
Hotch and Morgan walked in, and for a split second Emily was worried she was going to have to shoot them. That would really suck. She hadn't kept Reid alive (kinda) all this time only to lose him now. And shooting her boss; that would kinda suck too. She couldn't exactly go down to the job fair and pick up a new one anymore.
Then Hotch lowered his gun and his eyebrow twitched slightly, and she relaxed. Looked like Reid wasn't the only one who'd gone on determinedly doing his own thing when his life had ended.
She was surrounded by stubborn, wonderful people, and in that moment she loved them all.
Hotch shuffled past and left her with Morgan. She tried not to look at the blood on his shirt, pretty sure it wasn't his. No judgement. She'd drunk out of toilets since the world had ended. She was in no place to pick on his fashion sense. "Nice shirt," she said instead, and then laughed.
She didn't want to look at his shirt, so she did a lot of staring at his arm instead, grossly fascinated by the bite marks covering it. He'd gone down fighting.
"Sorry about that," she said finally, pointing to his arm. He just blinked at her, slowly. She didn't mind. She kept talking anyway. It wasn't like Reid was the most lively (hah) conversationalist anymore either. "I should have come for you as well, but Reid was closer and well… Reid. And then I kind of got here and he was kind of gone, but not really, and I just… stayed." She trailed off. Morgan grunted and swayed slightly.
She may have gone a little mad in the unspoken interim, but that was okay. Hotch was apparently still wearing his tie even though civilisation had crumbled, Morgan was still communicating in grunts, and Reid was still dressing in odd socks every morning, even if he wasn't entirely sure of the difference between feet and hands anymore. She'd be crazy not to be a little bit crazy, right?
She laughed again at that, and Morgan stepped back, nervous.
It was fine. "This is fine," she told Morgan with a wide smile.
Hotch emerged and Reid followed and she was sorely jealous of that. She'd been trying to get Reid out of his bedroom for weeks. Months, possibly. She wasn't entirely sure of the timeframe anymore. It had been a while, anyway. The Aaron bloody Hotchner rocked up and he just toddled on out of there.
"Dick," she told Reid, putting her hands on her hips. He glanced up at her, looking hurt. The book dipped slightly. She took pity on him. "You have it upside down again, genius."
Hotch scowled at her. She could almost hear his voice. Telling them to stop bickering, just like old times…
"Stop it," he grunted, and her heart forgot how to keep beating. Just for a moment. Unlike the rest of the people in the room, it started again. A little shakier than before.
Holy shit.
"Hotch?" she asked uncertainly, stepping carefully towards him. Reid had never seemed inclined to bite but… Reid had never seemed inclined to talk either.
Hotch ignored her and walked out of the room, Morgan trailing after him like nothing had changed. Reid stopped and looked up at her, smiled crookedly. Held out a hand. She took the book out of his other hand first, and turned it right way up. Passed it back.
Took his cold hand and let him lead her out the room, following the rest of her team.
Yeah. She was definitely fucking crazy now.
.
.
David Rossi had had time to do very few things when the world had ended.
He had stocked up on wine. Which didn't really matter now, because he was pretty sure he couldn't get drunk anymore.
And he had tried to get everyone he loved into the one place. This one had failed. Everything had gone to shit way too fucking quickly for that to happen. Maybe if it hadn't, things would be better. Not that they were bad. Really, he shouldn't complain.
He would complain though, because no one could hear him anyway and he was dead and Italian and complaining just seemed like the right thing to do in uncertain circumstances. Plus, house work was a bitch when your circulatory system no longer functioned.
Besides, he had vague memories of getting JJ to safety and with JJ, two smaller boys with blonde hair that he couldn't remember except that he loved them.
He also had vague memories of coming back for someone else he loved, but that was when it had all gone to shit. Or multiple someone elses. People, just in general.
He missed people. Sometimes he knew who. Sometimes he didn't. He usually remembered JJ because remembering her made him feel okay, but most times, he just remembered that there used to be others. People other than the two of them. He noticed that remembering got easier the more time he spent around Garcia.
He found books with his face on them. He guessed he must have wrote them.
He kept trying to write. It didn't really work. He tried anyway. He kept the pages with his scribbles tucked into the books with his face on them. Penelope read anything he managed to put out.
Well, she pretended to read it anyway. It didn't actually say anything. They did a lot of pretending these days.
Penelope was good company. Well, when she wasn't wandering around the neighbourhood and returning with random baubles pinned somewhere around her person. Rossi had put up with it because it was nice to have a bit of colour in their unlives that wasn't red.
Oh, he knew they were dead. It was an active kind of dead. He was okay with it, mostly. He wasn't sure if Penelope knew. He didn't tell her.
He drew the line when Penelope tried to pin butterfly clips in his hair though. He wouldn't be caught alive in them.
Well, alright. Maybe this once. Because she looked sad and it wasn't like this was three fucking months ago when you wore one baggy pair of sweatpants out to the shops and everyone you knew was there gawking at you like they'd been summoned by sweat pant magic.
Which is how he ended up standing in his backyard dragging a pool cleaner through water thick with algae for no real reason, and with pink glittery butterflies on his head.
When he turned, Hotch was watching him with one eyebrow turned up very slightly. Emotive as always.
"Fuck me," Rossi said, dropping the net, because he'd be damned twice over if he let being dead take his voice away.
Emily peered around Hotch and stepped out from behind him, tugging Reid after her like some kind of demented kite wearing blood stained corduroy. "Have you bastards always been able to talk and this idiot just didn't feel the need to tell me?" she demanded, shaking Reid's arm. Reid didn't even look up from the book that he was inexplicably holding sideways. There was a picture of ham on the front.
"Fuck me," Rossi repeated, because Morgan appeared as well and there was a shriek and a whirlwind of very slow, excited Garcia shambling over to hug him. This was exactly like wearing baggy sweatpants to the shops. He remembered who was missing now.
He smiled.
Hotch walked up to him and poked one of the butterflies cautiously. Its wing fell off, showering Rossi's shoulder in glitter.
"Hmm," he said, and his mouth twitched slightly.
"This is fine," Emily said loudly, to no one in particular.
.
.
Reid thought a lot these days.
It was hard at first, but it had gotten easier.
Then Emily arrived and that made it easier again, because now he had a reason to keep thinking. So he thought and he thought, and eventually he came up with a plan. It took a month. That was a lot longer than it would have before this.
A lot longer.
But he was pretty adaptable.
Then Hotch arrived with Morgan, who was for some reason holding his favourite coffee mug. Time to leave apparently. He followed, pretty sure he knew where they were going. He was right. Sometimes on the way, others got a whiff of Emily and trailed close. It only took a growl from Hotch for them to decide to veer away. There was also their guns. Reid smiled reassuringly at Emily every time it happened. He didn't want her to be scared. They'd keep her safe.
Then they were at Rossi's and everyone was there, except for JJ, but that was okay because Reid was pretty sure JJ had escaped. He remembered a phone call. He remembered Rossi, vaguely.
He remembered waiting for Rossi and then he didn't remember anything else.
He thought maybe he should tell the others this, because sometimes Hotch looked tense, and Morgan kept punching things for no reason, but he wasn't done thinking yet and they couldn't go get her until he was done thinking.
He could still think at Rossi's. Actually, it was easier to think at Rossi's. It was comforting to be around everyone again. His brain knew how to be around them. It wasn't so good at being alone.
Emily kept turning the book around. He sighed silently and turned it back upside down when she wasn't looking.
He wasn't an idiot. He knew it was upside down. Speaking might be beyond him, but only because unlike them he was busy thinking.
He studied the book, the shape of the words.
He picked up his pen. Soon.
By his calculations, he'd be done in another twelve hundred and thirteen hours. It really did take him a lot longer to learn new things these days.
But he was meticulous.
.
.
They settled into a routine of sorts. Hotch eventually worked out how to knot his tie again. Emily helped.
Rossi kept the butterflies in his hair and did a lot of gardening. He tried to clip the hedges into shapes and ended up losing a finger. Hotch sighed when he wandered in holding it and looking amused. The finger ended up in strange places around the house for a while before Emily got sick of being haunted by it and threw it over the back fence. Hotch was pretty sure a crow had eaten it.
Reid kept reading and scribbling the not-quite-words, and occasionally he'd wander out of the house and vanish for days. He'd come back with armfuls of books and smile blankly as Emily shouted at him for scaring her.
Emily did a lot of talking even though she still didn't seem entirely certain any of them were listening. Sometimes she didn't even talk to them. She talked to JJ a lot. Sometimes she argued with her mother. Hotch caught her telling Strauss once that she was pretty sure she needed to take some personal time.
Hotch tried to listen. He sat near her and made reassuring noises and nodded along to her conversations, but she always ended looking slightly weirded out and walking away.
Sometimes strangers smelt Emily and came looking. Morgan chased them away with glee. It became almost comforting to hear groans followed by sudden running footsteps and a startled yelp from whoever had just gotten tackled. Eventually they got the message and avoided them. Hotch took Morgan searching for food with him. They didn't need it, but Emily did. And every time Morgan kicked down a door, he smiled.
Sometimes Hotch would wait until Morgan wasn't looking and prop the door back up so Morgan could kick it down again. Morgan never seemed to notice that he was doing it. And it was nice to see him smile more.
Garcia brought home various electronics and stared sadly at them, occasionally plugging them all in carefully and tapping at the keyboard wistfully. As the months drew on, he was interested to note that she seemed to be regressing in the advancement of the technology. Her last acquisition was a CV radio.
He was startled to notice that he knew things like that now. His mind flowed better. He wasn't sure if it was because he was using it more, or because he wasn't alone anymore. He figured maybe it was a bit of both.
Reid emerged from his books and picked up the radio, wandering away with it. Garcia sighed and let him go.
He came back, set it down, and it turned on. Music blared. Classical. Morgan looked disgusted, reached over and turned the dial down. Smacked Reid's hand away when he tried to turn it back up again. Reid pouted.
"Holy shit," Emily said, walking over to it and staring at it hungrily. "Reid, did you just fix this?"
Reid walked away. The front door banged behind him. He probably wouldn't be back for a few days. Emily looked at Garcia and smiled shakily. Garcia beamed back.
"Good work," Hotch said eventually, and Emily looked confused. Then pleased.
Okay, so it may have taken him two days to say it, but he'd got there in the end. They were all a little slower these days.
Reid came back and bolted into his room. It was the fastest he'd moved in months. They stared after him.
He came out and held out a piece of paper with a shaking hand. Hotch could see splotches on ink on it. The scrawling was different, somehow more… significant.
"Finished," Reid said quietly, and smiled again at Emily. It wasn't his blank smile, like his mind was somewhere else. It was a real smile. A Reid smile. She took the paper, and looked at it for a very long time. Didn't say anything. There were tears in her eyes.
That thing in his chest hurt again, and he realized with a sharp spark of something that it was his heart.
"Hmm?" Hotch asked eventually, because even they were a little quicker than this.
She didn't answer. So he leaned over and peered at it. The scrawls rearranged themselves. Words. They were words.
He could read it, he noted.
So he did.
.
.
Emily took the paper from him because he was looking at her in a way that was so familiar it almost made her want to cry. He was looking at her like it was last year before the world had ended; before she'd ended up living out some sort of bizarre George R. Romero type sitcom with her undead co-workers.
She took the paper and she looked at it. She expected to do the usual, 'lovely, very lovely,' as though he was a particularly slow child, or a somewhat clever zombie, but instead she found herself staring at it as though everything had led to this.
Some of the ink was splotched. But not too badly.
Some of the letters were backwards. But they were letters.
Some of it was grammatically incorrect. But… it said something.
She read it once more and looked up and Reid smiled again, slightly unsure now. "This is… more than fine," she said finally, and burst into tears.
"Ahh," said Hotch, a note of discovery in his voice.
.
.
JJ and her team were on scavenger duty when they got separated from the supply trucks by a bunch of stiffs. Swearing angrily, she took her team the long way. They had enough ammo that they could, if they wanted to, tear right on through the group of undead to safety, but she didn't really want to do that.
After all, it was becoming increasingly unclear whether or not the zombies were actually sentient underneath all that hunger. Some scientists said yes, some said no, and some said it didn't matter.
JJ hated the last lot. Like it didn't matter. Like their friends and family didn't fucking matter. Like Jack crying himself to sleep because his dad had never come home didn't matter. Like Henry asking for his godparents didn't matter.
She hated them.
Oh, Spencer. She missed him. She missed them all. But that was the past and for her son (her sons now, because Jack was alone), she needed to focus on the future.
They turned a corner and a small group of stiffs stood watching them. JJ paused, but the stiffs didn't seem the aggressive kind. Some weren't. Some just kind of… existed.
One of them had wild brown hair that reminded her of Spence. She looked away before it could hurt even more.
As they walk past the quiet group, the one she'd noted stepped out towards them. Guns lifted and there was a tense moment where it could have all gone really wrong, really quickly.
Then Emily was there, in the middle of the group, holding up her hands and telling them to lower their weapons. Emily Prentiss in the flesh; filthy, skinny and a little bit crazy looking, but human. Human and alive and it was only then that JJ let herself recognise the stiffs with her.
Reid grinned at her and shook hair out of his blank eyes, and she almost gasped with the pain of it.
Morgan had his arm looped around Garcia's shoulders and she was, inexplicably, wearing what looked like the entire contents of a dollar store. She rattled when she moved. It was wonderful. It was her.
Hotch watched her with the same solemn expression he'd always worn, as though he was about to deliver a profile. Maybe he was. She smiled unevenly at him, stepping out of the group of scavengers. He hummed slightly and his mouth twitched.
Rossi was leaning against the wall, watching them and smirking. A butterfly gleamed in his hair, and he winked when he saw her.
"They're copying behaviours they remember from living," one of the scavengers said quietly. "They're not really there, Jennifer. They're just echoes."
Emily shoved Reid forward and when he shot her a familiar puppy-dog expression, she glowered at him. She seemed more zombie than human at this point, communicating wordlessly with them while stumbling over the words to explain herself to the humans. Reid walked up to JJ and held out a crumpled piece of paper.
Her fingers brushed his hand when she took it and he was cold. "What's this?" she asked Emily, because she couldn't ask him. She didn't want proof that he was nothing but an echo. She wanted to believe he was in there just that little bit longer.
"He wrote it," Emily replied and the space behind her erupted into shocked accusations.
"Liar!"
"They can't think!"
"They're dead – they're fucking dead you crazy bitch! Dead people don't write!"
She stared at the paper, ignoring them. Looked at Emily. Scanned her old team. They looked back at her, waiting.
"Did you write this?" she asked Reid finally, touching his hand. He watched her from under his fringe, unblinking. Her heart felt like it had stopped. Finally, he nodded. Slipped a hand in his pocket, and pulled out a pen.
She let him take her hand and carefully run the pen over her skin. And when he let her go, she read it out. No one could deny it.
It changed everything. Three little words.
The world began again with those words, different, but still okay.
"We're still here."