A/N: We're just two chapters from the end here. As always, co-written with Esperanta, world's most kickass editor. We own nothing but an OC or two and this odd little world we dreamed up.

Solitary 5.0

Chapter Fifty-Three

Saturday Night Fervor

The Hotchner guys were, face it, cute as three bugs, hunched over intently as they played a game of War on Aaron's bed. Jack sat at the head of the bed, his back braced against his daddy's pillows. Aaron sat at the foot, his left leg cocked up on the bed, his right leg on the floor. Sean had one of the small guest chairs pulled over between the two beds. JJ thought she'd seen WWE matches played with less attitude and determination. One thing was for sure, and that was that the game wasn't going well for Hotch. He was down to about three cards, and his son was on a roll.

A few minutes and a lot of laughter later, it was all over, at least for Aaron. As Sean took the last of his cards, Aaron said, "Well, that's it for me. Jack, I'm counting on you to beat your Uncle Sean for me."

Jack's eyes were like cerulean saucers, just huge. Scarcely breathing, he gasped, "I beat you, Daddy?"

Hotchner chuckled. "You sure did, Buddy. Good card playing!"

There was a quick, unmistakably significant glance from Sean, and although no words were spoken, JJ realized two things: Aaron and Sean's father had never been able to lose to his children, and up until that moment, Aaron had been much the same. JJ was neither shocked not surprised by this; she'd known several families where the father had to win at everything. In most of them, the dad seemed to feel that his kids would lose their confidence in him if they thought he could be bested. In a couple of them, it seemed to be nothing but parental ego.

She'd heard Jack on more than one occasion say, "Nobody beats Daddy!" as a point of pride, so she presumed that Aaron had been among those who wanted their children confident that they'd always be protected.

The game progressed, one on one now, but it didn't last long. Sean also held very few cards, and in a matter of minutes, Jack took his last card too.

"I won! I won!" Jack crowed, flinging his arms up in the air. "I get to be the Tickle Monster!" As Sean collected the cards and returned them to their box, Jack threw himself across the bed at his father with all the intensity of a linebacker bringing down the quarterback. "Tickle Monster!" he shrieked, and father and son rolled around at the foot of the bed, both laughing.

Hotch's laughter had to be forced; in a youth financed primarily by babysitting JJ had yet to meet a small child who knew how to tickle. They just dug their little fingers into your torso and you faked an appreciative squeal. She'd seen Aaron Hotchner's torso just three days ago, and she knew it to be a mass of bruises and rope burns.

Sure enough, he'd already pried his son's fingers out of his ribs. Now he lay flat on his back across the foot of the bed, repeatedly lifting the boy high in the air as they counted. When Jack got to "twenty-ten, twenty-'leven," Aaron stopped.

"Nope, nope," he gasped. "Twenty-nine, thirty. Like three-ty, Buddy, OK? We'll try it again in a little bit. See if you can remember that."

"'K," the boy said. "Cause you gotsa have your exercise."

"I do," his father assured him. "I'll do more Jack-lifts later, Buddy."

~ o ~

Shortly after 4:00 in the afternoon, Ted Hawthorne aimed the Fusion sedan into a slot at the back of the hospital's main parking lot. "Tell me again," he said nervously, "exactly what he said on the phone."

Bren gazed out the fly-specked windshield at the battered van in front of them. "I don't think this is a set-up to arrest us," she said. "He asked whether we could drop by the hospital this afternoon or evening. He said that there would be other people there, but he would prefer that we don't tell them that he'd invited us."

"That seems odd," said Ted. "Why would an FBI agent want us to mislead other FBI agents?"

Bren drew a long breath. The truth was that the notion troubled her, as well. On the other hand, no matter how often she gamed it, she saw no profit in withholding that information from the other agents. "I don't know," she said at last, "but he sounded friendly and straight-forward, Teddy. I think it's going to be OK."

'Your gut?" OK, maybe a little snarky of him.

"Look, he didn't order us not to tell anyone else; he just asked. Seems to me if this was some grand scheme to hold us accountable for—for—" She found that she still couldn't say it; she was still staggered by the alleged Joe McAfee's second life, his long-term mistreatment of the agent right there under their noses, staying in their spare room over the stable, breaking bread with them at least twice a week. "For everything," she concluded lamely.

"If?"

"Huh?"

"You started an if statement there," Mr. Logical reminded her. "Then you fell all over yourself trying to avoid mentioning the McAfee problem."

"I did?" She thought about that. "I did. Right. I—I'm not sure what I was going to say, but if he was trying to trick us into admitting something, wouldn't he insist that we not mention it, or maybe arrange to meet us when—"

She thought again. "I'm really not sure where I was going with that, Teddy. Let's just go with 'gut,' OK?"

Her husband snickered as they entered the glass double doors of the hospital. Sometimes she really hated it when he was right. He leaned over the desk and beamed at the receptionist. "Hi, Paula," he said. "We're here to see Mr. Hotchner in four-thirty."

"Go on up," she said with a chirpy smile. "He said you'd be coming."

"Do you think we should pick up something at the gift shop?" Brenda asked. "I hate coming empty-handed to visiting people."

"We were invited," Ted said. "It's our presence he wants, not another planter or stuffed toy or balloon."

She had no answer for that one. They rode the elevator to the fourth floor in silence, and remained silent as they walked down the hall.

Through the open door she could see the agent still had no roommate—the bed closer to the door still held no patient—but the room was a bit crowded. Two attractive blonde women, one with straight hair, one with a mad halo of curls, a young man, and a small boy filled the space around Aaron Hotchner, who sat on the bed but was fully dressed in jeans and a bright red shirt. The IV line was gone, she noticed.

Before Ted's knuckles could make contact with the door, the younger of the blonde women, the one with long straight hair and huge hoop earrings, saw their approach and stood up with an expectant look on her face. Hotchner caught the movement and looked toward the door as well. With some effort, he rose to his feet, ignoring the cane that was right beside him, and took two unsteady steps toward them.

"Doctor Hawthorne," he said, extending his hand toward Bren. "And Doctor Hawthorne. So nice to see you again."

"Bren, please," she protested. "It's good to see you up and active, Agent Hotchner."

"Aaron, please," he replied with a smile as broad as it was professional. He indicated the blonde with the straight hair and hoop earrings. "This is Agent Jennifer Jareau, and that's my sister-in-law Jessica Brooks. My brother Sean Hotchner." His smile morphed to pure sunshine. "And my son Jack. These people are Ted and Brenda Hawthorne—they found me and took me into town."

The small boy popped to his feet and held out a hand. "How do you do?" he asked each of them solemnly. "Thank you for finding my daddy."

"Pleasure," Hotchner's brother said, rising slightly from his chair and resuming his seat.

"Hi," his sister-in-law said. Brooks, he'd said her name was. Must have retained her maiden name. Or maybe not; she looks much older.

"Nice to meet you," Agent Jareau said. "I heard all about you, of course. You live up on Blue Bauman, right?"

OK, here we go, Bren thought, but all she said was, "Yes."

The little boy is just beyond cute though. He was born to break hearts.

Hotchner glanced around the hospital room. "I think, maybe," he began hesitantly, "it might be good if you took Jack down to play on the swings for a bit," he said to Agent Jareau. "We have some boring grownup stuff to talk about," he said to the child. He sat back down on the bed and the boy promptly flung his arms around his father.

"We'll be back soon," the boy assured his father. "We won't be gone too long."

"I know," Hotchner said, and planted a kiss on his son's forehead. "You keep Uncle Sean in line, you hear?"

"Yeah, I will," said Jack. "I gots muscles and brains."

"You certainly do," his father sighed, his pride shining all over his face. "We won't be long. I'll call Ms. Jareau's cellphone when we're done, OK?"

Once his other guests were gone, Hotchner gestured toward the chairs beside the window. Ted took the high-backed chair, the one with the arms. Brenda took the smaller of the two, keeping her eyes on Hotchner.

Whatever was going on, he didn't want his sister-in-law, his brother, his little boy, or the other agent to hear it. Hotchner sat down on the edge of the bed with his hands braced on either side of him as though he might lunge off the mattress and launch an attack—or fling himself through the window—at any second.

"Joseph McAfee," he said. "That's his name, isn't it?"

"Yes," Ted said. His voice was tense, tight, but—typical Ted, it didn't occur to him to say anything else.

"We had no prior knowledge of what happened to you," Brenda said. "Joe called us when he fell, when he broke his leg. He told us to go find you before you died of hypothermia. That was the first we knew about any of this."

The FBI agent's brow furrowed. "He had a phone?"

"Not on his person," Ted replied. "There was no connectivity in the cavern. It was in his car, in the parking lot of—about half a mile from where he fell."

"Why did he call you?"

"He's my friend," Ted said, without apology. "I've known him since—well, we thought he'd just come here from Canada. Since '02. And we live on Blue Bauman."

"How'd you get Derek Morgan's number?"

"Whose?"

"The phone number I'm supposed to have given you," Hotchner said. "I know you didn't get it from me—"

God alone knew what compelled Ted to tough it out, but his first response was, "Of course you did, you—"

"I don't know Morgan's number," Hotchner insisted, his voice still low. "It's programmed into my phone, but I've never had a reason to memorize it."

Ted sighed and explained about the letter Joe—Norton—had left in his care, about how Joe'd called him and described the general area, how he'd begged Ted to find the agent and bring him to safety.

"He's told us all about it now," Brenda said. "We visited him in the hospital—"

"Which hospital?" The agent's eyes were sharp, alert, missing nothing. She decided that if she were in some interrogation room with him, she'd probably tell him everything he wanted to know.

Then she recalled the shivering, confused, half-naked creature who'd gotten himself hung up on a protruding root on Tuesday night. It was hard to believe that they were the same man, but, yes, the deep cut over the left eye, the bright hairless patches on his otherwise densely hairy wrists—this was the same guy.

"Nittany St. Luke's, in State College," she said. "He told us all about it, about being—about being someone named Norton Charpentier. About prison, about losing his family, and about holding you responsible. About how, all the time he was visiting us, he was keeping you down in the cavern. The bunker. About the flood—"

"How is he?" Hotchner interrupted.

"He's—he's recovering," Brenda said. "He had to have surgery on his one leg, it was broken in I think he said six places. He has pins and splints in it now. He fractured his skull and some ribs."

"In the fall," the agent said, his voice unexpectedly soft.

"Yes, sir," she said. "And he knows—we all know—that he's going to be arrested—"

"How did he get to his car with all that damage?"

Before she could reply, Ted said, "He crawled."

Amazingly, the agent winced. "When did he do that?"

"He isn't sure how long he was unconscious," said Brenda. "But when he did wake up, he called to you and you didn't answer. He didn't know whether you'd moved on, or whether you were unconscious, too."

"Tell me what kind of man he is," the agent broke in. "Or what kind of man you thought he was before he told you what he'd done."

"Joe was one of my best friends," Ted said. "Smart, thoughtful. Passionate about Puccini and Verdi. Hard-working. He trains therapy dogs and horses. Tutors kids on both ends, the bright and the failing. Devoted to Civil War history—we've been in the same reenactment group for, what is it, honey? Six years?"

"Almost seven," Brenda said. "This is all—it's like a bad dream. If there was one man in the world I'd trust with our house, our money, our lives, our anything, it would have been Joe. I trusted him more than—this is really embarrassing. But this is the important part," she added hastily. "He knows what he did and he's—"

"He isn't going anywhere," Ted said. "When your guys go to arrest him, he'll be—I think that he's at peace with it. He's kind of wondering what the holdup is, though."

Bren turned and stared at her husband.

"Well, he is," Ted said, his tone defensive. "He's getting impatient waiting for that shoe to drop—"

"Listen to me," Hotchner said, his voice low and controlled. "I haven't identified him to the Bureau yet. To anyone." He glanced around behind him as if ensuring that his family hadn't returned. "I want to see him. To talk to him. I can get a pass out of here, no problem, but the problem's getting free of my—my entourage. If I can, can you take me to see him?"

Brenda frowned. "When?"

The agent shrugged. "Tonight. Tomorrow. I don't know. I don't even know if I can swing it, but I want to try."

"It's a seventy minute drive," said Ted.

Hotchner nodded. "Then tomorrow." He looked at Ted, at Bren, and back to Ted. "Please? If gas is a prob—"

"Don't be silly," Ted said gruffly. "I was going to ask you about going out anyway."

Startled, Bren stared at her husband.

"Was thinking maybe if you could get yourself an off-base pass, I could show you where we found you, where the cavern was located." Ted looked up at the door quickly and his voice dropped. "Show you where Joe fell, maybe. You could even bring your, your entourage. We have horses, a couple dogs, I bet we could find that little boy something to do, too. We're no more than twenty minutes from the front door here."

Would have been nice if you'd told me about your plans, turkey, she thought at her husband, but she said nothing.

"We do that tonight, maybe your entourage'll be a little more likely to trust you on your own tomorrow," Ted continued. "What d'ya think?"

~ o ~

"Mr. McAfee?" a disbelieving voice called from behind him.

His colleague and friend Genie, who walked along beside him slowly, providing companionship and encouragement as he crutched his way back to his room, looked over her shoulder. "It's the other Brian," she whispered. "The one from Randall's department—the one who looks like an emo otter."

McAfee, who'd had about all the youthful enthusiasm he could handle for the weekend, made a slow and careful three-point turn in the hospital corridor. "Yes, Brian," he said, trying for tired but civil. The civil part was a stretch. "It's me."

The boy looked him over, taking in the swollen and blackened eyes, the facial sutures and bruises, and above all, the rigid left leg. "Wow," he said finally, and the weight of the word made it clear how inadequate it was. "I saw your car, and—you know, it doesn't really look all that bad, but you look like—wow. So not good."

"Yes," McAfee said with a weary sigh. "Consider it the flip side of those dreadful wrecks where everyone walks away with minor injuries."

The boy nodded. "Sure, yeah, I guess so," he said.

"Where'd you see my car? Strong's?"

"Yeah, I live over that way."

It was McAfee's turn to nod. "Good for you. Could I trouble you to continue to my room so I can get back there and off my feet? My foot," he corrected himself, since the folks in PT had warned him repeatedly not to let his left foot touch the floor. "It's the third door down on your right. Keep quiet; my new roomie just came up from surgery a couple hours ago."

"Yeah, sure, sorry," the boy blurted. "I'll, ah, I'll be waiting for you."

"Good lad." McAfee continued to stand there for a few seconds, watching his student make his way down to the correct room. Then he sighed deeply, refreshed his grip on the miserable crutches, and forced himself to close those last thirty feet or so to the comfort of his bed and his moaning, semi-conscious roommate.

And Brian does look like an 'emo otter,' he thought, and the chuckle he was unable to repress loosened his muscles and made the journey easier.

"What's so funny?" Genie asked.

"Life," he replied. Any warm fuzzies he'd been feeling vanished as he realized that very soon she would learn that he was a murderer and a—what would they call him? A maniac? A mad professor? Of all the women that he occasionally dated and (less occasionally) bedded, Genie was the one he felt closest to loving. Physically nothing like his Diana, nevertheless she shared his late wife's gift for seeing through the bullshit and expressing herself with acerbic wit. She was young, too—just thirty-two, far too young for the alleged Joe McAfee with his sixty-year-old's ID and his forty-nine year old's body and libido.

Stop it, Nortie. It's over. You no longer have any life. Not Norton Charpentier's, and certainly not Joseph McAfee's.

On the minus side, jail will have no on-demand morphine drip, no endless Vicodin. On the plus side, nobody'll make you crutch your way up and down the goddamned halls over and over again.

"Get a wiggle on, Joe," Genie said, and nudged him gently. "I'll walk behind you and watch your cute little ol' butt."

And that was the instant when he realized what he had to do. It had always been among his available choices, and the preparation for it was remarkably similar to preparation for going to jail.

The relief of certainty flooded over him with a clarity, an intensity, almost akin to an orgasm. Settle your affairs and end it already.

"You're right," he said in a mild voice. He gritted his teeth, took a slow, painful breath, and tightened his grip on his crutches.

"Genie, hon," he panted as pain lanced through his damaged ribs, "can you bring me my sleeping pills from the apartment? The crap they give me here makes me wake up feeling all hung over, and they don't want to change it. The sooner they're here, the sooner I can get a decent night's sleep."

"I don't know," Genie temporized. "It's only three more days till you get out of here, right?"

Don't argue with her; it'll make it seem like a far bigger deal than it is.

"I suppose you're right. Still, I've already told them I won't take any more of the sleep stuff they're giving me. It's OK, it's all PRN anyway. But I'm tired of waking up with my head full of cotton."

She made sympathetic noises. "How much of that's the concussion? You do have a busted skull, Joey—remember? You can't expect everything in there to be bopping along like nothing happened."

But that's what you love about her—she's sharp and she speaks her mind.

"Then why do I think perfectly clearly after I've been awake for an hour or so?"

"There's your solution," she said with a giggle. "Wake up an hour earlier."

He sighed. It was critical that he do it now; it'd be impossible once he was in police custody.

I can't exactly get myself shot while fleeing, can I?

"I can bring them tomorrow," she said finally. "I'm locked into taking the kids to Molly and Stoney's concert tonight. Will that work?"

He nodded, trying to look casual without looking as if it didn't matter, after he'd just gone to such an effort to explain that it did. "That'd help, yeah. Thanks, Genie."

He renewed his grip on the crutch handles. As he proceeded down the hallway he hummed the thumping percussive triplets Wagner had written for the entrance down into Nibelheim, bum-bada bum-bada, bomp-bomp-bomp, bum-bada, bum-bada, bomp-bomp-bomp, like the grim and trapped little cripple he felt like—hell, he was—at the moment.

~ o ~

When he was an undergraduate, while Haley was still finishing high school, she'd sent him a goofy greeting card that said, "We have a weird and wonderful relationship: You're weird and I'm wonderful." That summed up with fair elegance the sensations he was feeling right now, in the front seat of the Hawthornes' sedan with Ted at the wheel, Bren in the back seat, and some opera or other playing softly on their sound system. His so-called entourage, in JJ's Bureau SUV, trailed along behind them. His window was down and the glorious sunshine and warm breezes poured over him. It was wonderful—he suddenly understood why dogs poked their heads out the window and let their ears and tongues flap in the wind—and it was weird.

He'd signed four separate liability forms, but the key to his getting sprung for the hours of 5:00 to 9:00 PM was the strongly worded order from Mac Pearson, who'd been more than happy to accede to Aaron's request for unlimited passes out of the hospital. They'd removed the port from his right hand, but he still wore the hospital bracelet around his left wrist. Still, for these brief four hours, he no longer felt like a patient.

I haven't been in a car since Warden.

No, wait.

"Is this the car you brought me into town in?" he asked.

"Is indeed," Ted drawled. "Bren was at the wheel and you and I were in the back. You were wrapped up in three blankets." Before Hotchner could think of anything to say to that, the man added, "And you were fairly pitiful, son, if you don't mind my saying so." Ted glanced at him as if fearing that he'd offended him.

"I don't—I don't recall anything about it," Aaron said. "After Wa—after he fell, I can remember waiting for the next flash of lightning, hoping that he'd have moved, that he was all right, and after a while, I—he'd said, keep going up and to the right, and I remember turning away from the cliff. Remember that I felt like I was abandoning him. I had to stop and think which way was right; I was tired and pretty confused."

Something touched the back of his head and he almost jerked away. At the last instant he realized that it was Bren's fingers.

"You've come so far," she said in a soft voice. "I can hardly believe you're the same man. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to see you recovering."

"We understand that we—well, that I have a degree of complicity here," Ted said. "At least in the sense that I didn't speak up, didn't turn Joe in as soon as I knew what was going on. I don't know why I didn't do it," he mused. "I guess I just didn't believe it yet. There was so much going on—we'd just lost the back quarter of our property, had seen our stables slide away to nothing. Nothing felt completely real—"

"I have no interest in involving the two of you in this," Aaron said. "I can understand loyalty to an old friend." He glanced in the side view mirror and waved at his son in the car behind them. Jess in the front seat and Jack in the back both waved back vigorously. "You know what? I don't want to talk about that. I just want to enjoy being out. Out of the cell, out of the hospital."

"Suit yourself," said Ted. "Meanwhile, in about three minutes, we'll be coming up on a set of barriers to our right where a road's been blocked off. There's a tire store there, I'm gonna pull in and go inside so you and Bren can take a good look. Up at the top, that's pretty close to where you came out of the mine. Walk around a bit, over to the other side, it's maybe half a mile's walk, you can see where there's a narrow little waterfall—that's what happened to the stream y'all came out into."

"That's—that's where I damn near slid down the hill?" Hotchner asked, wonder in his voice.

"Didn't know about that," Ted replied tersely. "Big chunk of this little lump of land, it doesn't have a proper name, but it runs—ran up along Blue Bauman, it got lost in the flooding, too."

Another place I could've died.

"How far is the landslide from where the, uh, the mine entrance was?"

"Wasn't a mine entrance, not in any serious sense of the word," the retired engineer said. "It was a product of erosion over the years; every time the crick swelled over, it ate away at the little aperture that was already there."

The flake of fish food hanging in mid-air.

"So there were two mudslides this week?"

"Three," said Bren. "Blue B. was the biggest, this was almost as big. A smaller one about a mile from here. Remarkable how much they've got cleaned up already, although I don't think they're gonna try to dig out the road that got buried here. Nothing at the end of it but some abandoned farm buildings; not worth the effort."

Hawthorne's car bounced into the gravel parking lot of the store—which appeared to be more an auto parts place than a tire store—and the SUV followed them. Ted climbed out of the car, and after a few seconds, Aaron followed suit, only instead of following Ted into the store, he started back to the SUV.

JJ had her door open and was standing beside it, the engine off. "What's up?" she said.

Aaron made his way carefully over the uneven ground, his cane digging into the gravel at odd angles. "Ted needs something, I guess," he said calmly.

He stopped a few feet from the SUV and jerked his head slightly, beckoning her to come over to where he stood. When she got there, he nodded toward the barriers with their flashing yellow caution lights and the large and unnecessary signs warning Road Closed Ahead.

"Near as we can tell," he told her, keeping his voice deliberately low, "that's where we came out. That's the only slide that happened well after the main slide."

JJ turned her own head and squinted into the late afternoon sun at the massive wedge of clay and earth blocking the road to a depth of at least twenty feet. "So—Warden's somewhere in there?"

"It's only a guess," Hotch said. "I lost so much time wandering around, I don't know that we'll ever know for sure."

~ o ~

When her mobile went off, Jennifer Jareau felt almost guilty. "Hey, Morgan," she said to the agent who was now chasing the Wisconsin creep who buried girls. "How's it going?"

"This is one of those times Hotch would sum up as 'less than optimal,'" he said. "It's starting to look like we have another copycat, like we need more of his kind. How's the Boy doing?"

The Boy? JJ shifted in her lawn chair and looked at Aaron Hotchner by the light of a trio of tall lawn lamps. "He seems just fine," she said. "We're out at the Hawthornes' place, the sun just went down, we grilled steaks and rode the Hawthornes' horses and we visited the place down the hill where they found Hotch. Right now, 'the Boy' is drinking beer and playing some kind of card game with Ted Hawthorne. Sean's talking cooking with Brenda. Jessica and Jack are playing with the Hawthornes' Wii."

"Wait, you're not at the hospital?"

"No, Hotch's therapist OK'd him to leave the grounds as long as we were with him and he was back by nine. We'll be leaving in about forty minutes." She snapped a couple pictures and hit Send. "We're doing fine. You want to talk to him?"

There were a few seconds of silence, then Morgan said, "Nah, that's okay. So what do you think, Jayje? Will we get our fully functional Unit Chief back any time soon?"

JJ watched the lean man in the red shirt, his torso already starting to fill out a little, an open and unforced grin on his face as he did something with his cards.

"I think we're well on our way," she said, overwhelmed by a sense of satisfaction. "You know, Morgan, I think we finally have our miracle."