Chapter Six: Scar Tissue
.
It is a scene of immeasurable, world appropriate, beauty that moves your characters. Describe it and how it makes your characters feel, but you cannot use the words heard, felt, saw, tasted, or smelled—or any permutation of them.
300 Words.
.
It might be macabre, but Hotch has never been quite as swayed by nature as he is when he takes a walk to clear his head and finds the path he's walking along thickly forested and woven through with fingers of fog that give the whole place a kind of ethereal air. He's worn out and carved thin. Another day, another case, and, despite having always been aware that there's never going to be an end to them, it wears on him today.
Silently, he stands in the fog and lets it surround him, appreciating how it dulls the world and hides all the rough edges of it. What's out there in this forest but creatures hurting creatures, of which humans are no different… his work has proven that.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" says Reid from behind him. Hotch's shields are down and he knows the man knows this too, shivering in the chill and wondering if the path they're on is as inevitable as it seems, the way ahead bumpy and rough and paved with both of their insecurities and miseries.
But a hand touches his arm, those same fingers that'd held him up all those months ago doing so again now. There are differences. No wedding ring on his finger, for one. No hesitation in Spencer's hand, for another.
And, this time, Hotch slips his arm free and takes the hand that's offered. There's nothing around him, not the trees or the fog or the cloudy sky above laying trails of dew on the ferns surrounding, that's as captivating to him as their fingers entwined. Those callouses on his. The work has marked them both, in their fingers and their eyes. When Hotch looks at Reid, he sees the same scar tissue there.
Not even the fog masks it.