I bet on losing dogs
I know they're losing and I'll pay for my place
By the ring
Where I'll be looking in their eyes when they're down
I'll be there on their side
She has no warning to prepare her for the swift sea of medical personal swarming around them. One moment she's folding Aaron's fingers over her own, using both hands to keep his captive between hers, and the next he's lodged free. Her own panic spikes and she can see his tired eyes snap open with alertness, shoulders moving as he tries and fails to move his body. His deep, rasped voice calling out to her muffled by the oxygen mask they'd pulled over his face. Any movement he manages is met with a hand, his left shoulder pushed back to the stretcher, and his wrist caught swiftly and held down. He stands no chance against them.
She's allowed to stand at the corner of the room. Left to watch as Aaron's nose starts to bleed again, he gives a low grunt as his head begins to pound. She steps forward, moving to point it out, but she stumbles into a nurse and is met with two more guiding her right back out. One stands by her side, a hand on her bicep to keep her in place and all she can do is stand and watch them cut his clothes away. She winces at the bruises, ones he'd managed to keep hidden from her, or maybe she just can't keep track these days there are so many. They stand out horribly- dark greens and blacks and blues against his nearly colorless flesh. Up and down his legs and arms and chest.
He gives a soft protest as his shirt is peeled open, both of his hands shaking where they lay at his sides. Painful goosebumps breaking out over his skin. He's lifted up, the head of the stretcher lifted so the blood pouring down his face won't slide back down the back of his throat. His weak protest is met with a pink bucket being thrown into his lap and he takes it wordlessly. A nurse moves the mask off his face, giving it to a woman behind her to be cleaned, and Aaron falls forward, caught by the swift-handed nurse, as he throws up. All this movement too much for his stomach to take.
The whites of his eyes are all Emily can see and she shouts, being held back by that nurse, as he slumps back against the stretcher. She watches them pass things between one another, doing everything but ignoring how cold he obviously is. She doesn't get a clear name of the drug they press into him, just watches it get passed to the woman standing over Aaron's shoulder. It's as if she's watching in lapsed time seconds behind every action that takes place. Having no idea what they're doing or what's wrong just that Aaron has stopped moving, laying still and calm while they manipulate his limbs. She watches the needle sink in and frowns, waiting for some sort of reaction. Watching for whatever is that they're waiting for. Hotch lets out a little kicked breath, leg twitching as he rasps something incoherently, and falls limp once again.
"What-" she never gets the chance to ask.
They start kicking the stretcher, forcing the wheels into motion as they scramble overtop one another. Placing machines on every side of Aaron and pulling the guard rail up. She's pulled back not allowed to follow.
"If you'll wait in here," she's left in a hall or something like one. There are some chairs thrown against a wall and two shitting vending machines with overpriced snacks in one and shit coffee in the other. "Someone will come out and speak with you shortly."
What's she to do until then?
"Da-Dave?" she hears his groggy reply. A slurred, panic not yet set in, mumbled "yea". "He's - We're in the hospital," she says, restlessly walking the cold hall of the waiting room up and down in slow lazy circles. "Pneumonia, they think. Probably, uhm, maybe caused by the radiation. Something to do with - with scarring." She pushes her hair back from her face with her palm, the messy ponytail she'd managed running out the door isn't cutting it anymore. The cold sweat dying off as her adrenaline goes with it. She wants a shower and to see Hotch.
"It's - It's not a big deal," she mumbles, speaking far too quickly for Dave to even get a chance to get something out in the way of conversation. "He'll probably be fine. Or, well, I guess I don't really know. They won't tell me anything yet. They just took him, Dave. They just took him from me and left me in here in this fucking room that's freezing." She motions up to the unapproachable white walls extended all around her, shaking her head. "I'm sure he's fine," she mumbles, frustratedly. "I just wish I could-"
She wishes she could do something, give him a kidney or a quarter of her liver so that this little game can come to its falling action and find them naive and drunk off winning. She'd return to them in a heartbeat and never go back to London. She's not sure she'll ever be able to leave Hotch again, can't spare the thought of what shit he'll get into if she's not around. Maybe she knows too much for him to want her to (or maybe they've developed a sort of codependency). But she's learned her lesson and she's not sure what Hotch's is but he's probably figured it out too. Certainly, that means they have just reached the climax of this awful story, she thinks around every turn it's here and finds herself pumping the breaks never hearing the right words.
"It's aggressive, abnormal."
"It's spreading rapidly to his other organs."
"We'll combine the chemo and the radiation but all we can do is cross our fingers."
Where's the ringing of that bell that's downstairs in the treatment facility Emily drives him to? She knows what it's for and she's never heard it ring. Not once. Someone should get to, after all the people she's seen during those trips, and not a single one has done it yet. When does it end?
Because they've done the hair loss. She's seen him puke so many times and wondered how he managed to still bring something up. Watched him cry in the front seat of the car in pain and lay so still, sleep so deeply she thought he was dead. They do the walks the doctor said would help but unless she's supposed to be harnessing the sun to shoot into his veins alongside the poison they pump into him she's not sure what else to do. How much more do they need to take? She'll give them an arm or sell her soul but there has to be some sort of answer. A place, an option, some time, or someplace where they get to win. So Dave can make them a celebratory dinner Aaron won't eat but it's not about what pasta is chosen. It's about the giant, flared office chair that Derek will roll him out on a little too fast. Smiling no matter how propped up by pillows that he has to be and with as many blankets and layers of clothes that he wants until he's warm. So that he can rest his head against the side, curling into himself as he falls asleep to their laughter.
It's about winning.
Fuck, she just wants to beat this.
"Emily? You with me, kid?"
She snaps back to reality. To the hall. "What? Yeah, yeah." She walks over to the chairs along the wall, falling into one and folding into herself. Letting her head fall into her palm. "I'm here," she mumbles.
Dave is sitting up in his bed, working his body into motion. "I know you said he'll be fine," and honestly, he does believe her. "I'm going to come down there, okay? You don't need to be alone and I'll bring real coffee, don't drink whatever they have." The doctors have Aaron, he's in the best place that he can be. Emily is in the worst. "Okay? Does that work, Emily?"
She nods her head, humming, before pushing her hair back again and forcing herself upright. "Yeah," she rasps. "Yeah, that's okay." She wipes her mouth, moving up her face and drying the tears sliding down as best as she can. If not scoffing at herself for crying in the first place. "I'll see you in a second?"
Dave sighs, nodding. "Yeah," he replies. "I'll be there. Hang in there, kiddo."
She has two degrees, you know. A bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice and a master's degree from Yale. She's not stupid or oblivious but the ability to obtain a college education has never been a good determinant of intelligence. To compare her ability to compartmentalize her life recently would lend some light to her naivety. She might have gotten the grades to get into Yale (and more importantly the money) but here she is sitting at the hospital refusing to see what's right in front of her.
What good has college done any of them?
He could have owned Roy's old shop in town and raised Jack there instead of here. Where the local kids run around with no shoes or shirts and he greets each of them by name and exchanges good grades for candy bars. With a back porch that he stands on at eight-thirty calling Jack home for the third time until sweaty and breathless his son pops up with a grin and rushes right past him into the house for water. Where Haley watches him build swing sets and trampolines for birthdays and Christmas with a smile and a shake of her head because Aaron's the farther thing from handy but he's going to get this damn thing built.
He probably would have made it so much longer, cancer or not.
But he doesn't want that, no matter what she convinces herself. That life she just captured wasn't his, it wasn't a choice he's ever had. He'd never be okay there where his father's ghost could latch onto him, where it would follow him into his own grave, and, if he wasn't careful, Jack's too. He got away because it was the only way he'd be able to live and Haley decided she didn't want to live without him and after all this time he doesn't want to live without her either but he has. And, if he had a choice, he'd keep doing it.
"Aaron Hotc-"
She stands, nearly zombified with her sluggish amble. The night has worn her down. After spending way too long sleeping in his office chair and managing to wake-up to every little bump and hitch into the night only for this to happen- she's on edge. "Yes?" she responds to the doctor. "That's me, I'm here for Hotch. For-For Aaron."
The doctor nods, "good, good. He's doing well. We're giving him steroids for the pneumonia. I'd like to give you a projected release time but I'm afraid I can't do that until I see how he takes to the steroids. The pneumonia will need to clear up a bit before I suggest sending him home again." The doctor flips Hotch's chart closed, tucking it under his arm and motioning with his head for her to follow. "I can take you back to see him if you'd like."
She nods, pulling out her phone to send Dave a text, and lets him lead her back.
They give him back to her worse than when she left him.
His dark blood is harrowing where it's pooled and splashed along his pale skin. They've managed to poke another hole in him, she's not sure what this one is for, but she sighs and prepares for his confused pain over it. He's attached to so many machines that it should be daunting but after sitting and watching chemo dribble into him for hours they are nothing. She knows they don't hurt, maybe emotionally as she watches his heart rate and knows the beat is too fast to be safe. They don't hurt him, though, and that's all that really matters.
They've been lucky, as lucky as they can be considering. They really haven't spent that much time in the hospital and even less time compared to when they're all active duty and not on varying levels of "in" and "out" of the field. Less time than when they're chasing serial killers around. Maybe they were taking it for granted or maybe luck is just sand in an hour-glass and it was really only a matter of time before it started pouring in the other direction.
With a sigh she slides into the chair they've left at his side. There's no doubt in her mind that this is the first domino, she's read about it plenty. The nosebleed a while back, the first one when he was still working, was what she thought would start them off and it terrified her to see it so soon. Having this time, though, has allowed her some naivety to believe the domino might never fall. That the things every blog she'd read had to say, every book, and pamphlet and article, was wrong. Not Hotch. That wouldn't happen to him.
But this hospitalization will end it all.
He thinks about death less than he had before. All he has is death, it's of little importance these days in its abundance. Experiences concern him a great deal more. Life often feels like an endless source, no matter how much you take when you return you will find it full and swelling with its richness. In reality, it's a stopped sink and they're scraping the bottom. Everything they have is numbered and he watches them find mindless reasons to be here. Reid with his endless facts, spending hours explaining, again and again, each element until Aaron's tired mind can understand. Never commenting about how these are all things Aaron had, at some point, understood. Maybe a matter of days ago, maybe longer but now he watches Reid silently, with little clarity. Garcia hides things around the room so that she can sneak in long after visiting hours are over under the disguise of getting something "oh, please, it's super important" to sit with him. He enjoys hearing her coming, smiling without even opening his eyes and knowing it's her. Her happy giggles as she greets him with a kiss to the temple and a soft retelling of her slick little plan.
He taught JJ to dance before her wedding, which feels like forever ago now. He remembers how hesitant she'd been to place her hand in his, anxiously messing up every move, and stepping on his toes so many times he'd started to think she might take them off. He convinced her to dance in socks for the sake of his toes and so that she could master the motions. It had given them both the perfect distraction, if not selfish, to have to think about what they knew Emily was planning to do. At her wedding, she'd made him dance with her again, beaming the entire time and he'd be lying if he said he was immensely proud of how far she'd come. She didn't step on his toes once and when they'd parted she'd kissed his cheek and thanked him.
Now she comes in here and forces him up and into motion. The doctor says he should spend more time trying to keep active, even if it's just a stroll up and down the hall or moving from the bed to the wheelchair and going outside for a moment. JJ makes him dance. He's clumsy now, lacking the control he'd had not that long ago. Now she's the one reminding when to step and she takes it far easier on him than he had on her. Pushing until he can't stand it and the two of them just lean and sway but this time she has no hesitation stepping closer to him. No second thoughts about wrapping her arms where she wants them and hiding her face against his shoulder when she cries.
He sleeps well after her visits and the weary weight of his limbs, though painful, is solidifying. He can feel his body, take some sort of ownership of it before the night calls him home and he twists and turns and is lost to it once again.
The greatest joy he can obtain is not in a direct action so much as a lack of action.
"You have pneumonia, not an identity crisis, let me cut the beard."
After they cut what was left of his hair off he kept shaving for… autonomy reasons. A way to maintain the semblance of control over his life and his body. Mostly, though, because there's something about the simple, repetitive nature of shaving that soothes his mind. So he'd continued to shave, the one thing that started this whole mess.
"Look at that pretty boy," Derek jostles Reid the most about it. "Hotch can still grow a better beard than you!" And it's funny, it really is, and sort of astonishing. The doctors brush it off, it happens, they say, which is fine. The beard, though thinned, covers his gaunt cheeks and the sickening pallor of his face. In the right light, it does draw more than unnecessary attention to his poor color but they stick to seeing it as some sort of win. Some way in which Hotch has overcome… a way to ignore the ways he doesn't.
Plus, Emily hates it.
"Oh leave him alone," Dave always defends him.
He only keeps it because Emily hates it. It's the little things, you know?
Everything they do, everything he does, is just a tactic to ignore the pneumonia. Coping is, well, it's not going well for them.
The snow does not let up and it starts to complicate their days. A foot accumulates and it just keeps going and that love Emily had for it is starting to dissipate. She gets snowed in, too much snow falling and she can't get it cleared to leave her house. It's really not that big of a deal that he spends a single day alone but it does scare her about what could happen if no one is there.
She calls him but he's started this awful habit of not picking his phone up or forgetting to charge it. He doesn't answer.
He considers this perfect timing.
He doesn't sleep well that night at all. He can't get comfortable and maxed out on painkillers and his oxygen at a poor level but stable, each second feels like hours. A nurse comes in every so often, coaching him through breathing deeply and evenly, but he ends up with a nebulizer or a coughing fit. He does fall asleep for a few hours a little after one in the morning. Chest aching from the coughs, a sharp cutting pain across his ribs, he's too tired to stay away. He's vaguely away of people moving around him, the mask coming back down over his face.
When he wakes, just a few minutes before Emily calls, he's in a panic. Laid out on his back, sucking in weak, thin breathes around lung fulls of fluid. There's a moment, suspended, light-headed where he feels the hands of various staff members on him. They speak to him but he's moments behind, hearing their warning but not understanding until his brain is on fire and he's sitting more upright than he had been before.
He tries to pull in a breath and can't. On the right side of his chest, is a sharp pain that increases to stabbing when he tries to keep breathing. His chest tight like a vice, as if decreasing the size of which his lung can expand.
"Just keep breathing Agent Hotchner."
He watches the doctor pull out a needle, his vision swimming out of focus as he's reclined back.
"The needle aspiration isn't going to work-" It certainly doesn't feel like it's helping. "Hand me a scalpel."
His last thought, just as the scalpel breaks his skin and the doctor grunts as he manipulates the wound he's just created, is that Emily is going to be fucking pissed when she comes back. He's just not sure if that anger is going to be pointed his way or theirs.
Derek comes through and spends his day shoveling everyone's drive-ways with this wacky machine she's never seen before and hits her house first, freeing her. As grateful as she is, she sends him off with a rushed appreciative tap to the butt and leaves. Luckily most of the machines they brought in have been taken away. That doesn't mean they don't tell her what happened.
"We had to intubate-"
She can see him in the bed from here. His hospital gown just sort of thrown over his chest and loose, oversized material leaves him bare enough that she can see the tubes and wires sneaking here and there. Crossed and varying in color and size. Her eyes are drawn to the chest tube- a thin white thing that protrudes between his ribs, the gown raised to leave it easily accessible. Though she knows it's not life-threatening, it's a taunt just being here. For now, it's a wound easily fixable. It'll take longer for his body to heal but it'll go away eventually. It's just the beginning.
"He's alright now?" Calm overcomes her and instead of seething with the anger that she feels, all she knows is this strange gratitude that it wasn't all somehow much worse. That she doesn't have to come in and see the tube, his head extended back and body motionless. Not even his breaths his own. That he's just beyond this door watching whatever daytime TV channel Reid left on last time he was here.
The doctor is expecting there to be more of a fight, there typically is. All he finds is a weary, tiredness. "He's doing much better. His oxygen has improved and we hope to move on from the mask this afternoon to something less obstructive like a canal."
She nods, "and the chest tube? When can you take that out?"
The doctor smiles, realizing his potentially hopeful news. "The fluid from his lungs is draining nicely, so with some luck and if he continues to react well to the treatment we're considering removing the chest tube and releasing him by the end of the week."
She knows better than to get hopeful, she nods. "Okay." She nods her head towards the door, "can I?"
The doctor nods and she leaves him there in the hall.
"I see you've been busy."
He means to nod but winces, moving his left hand over his chest to lightly touch the ribs the tube sits between. "Something like that," he says, pulling clumsily at the mask until he manages to pull it down under his chin. "Still enjoying the snow," he motions to her coat, a single finger and a grin pointing out the small collection she has of it still on her.
Her sigh is answer enough and she bats it away, flicking some at him for good measure. "I hate it," she puffs, falling into the chair beside him. Being here again, having him just a foot away soothes her nerves more than she thought possible. It makes her feel kind of silly for being so anxious in the first place but then she looks over and sees the tube and the deep angry wound around it and remembers why she was scared in the first place. "What're you watching?" she asks, standing back up. She goes to the little closet near the door, pulling down on the blankets the nurses showed her are kept there. It's nothing to her, all of this, and him it's all just so… normal.
Careful to spread one over him, she pulls the other around herself. Waiting a few hovering seconds for him to tuck himself underneath it and settle before she sits back down.
With a tired sigh, looking every bit as exhausted as she feels, he mumbles, "Judge Judy."
She glances at him, smirking because he'll never admit it but he loves Judge Judy. Loves the mindless drama. It is nice, though, and she soaks it in. She couldn't sleep last night and couldn't sit still in that house without him. She'd washed all the bedsheets, made the beds, washed dishes, and even mopped. All for the night to fall and for her to, once again, find herself stuck. Can't sleep and can't relax.
"I missed you yesterday," he admits, watching her eyes drop shut as she falls asleep.
She hums, squishing herself deeper into the chair. She's not ready to admit just how much she missed him- okay, maybe she's a little dependent on him but it's hard not to miss someone you see every day. "I'm sure you did," she sneaks a glance up at him, smiling. "Poor old Hotch, nobody here to eat his jello or sit around and watch Judge Judy with him."It makes him smile and that's worth everything. "I missed you too."
Her phone goes off and she spares it a glance before frowning. He raises an eyebrow and she shakes her head, "Reid." She answers it and hears exactly what she knew was coming. She nods her head along as he speaks and agrees to help him. "Okay, be there in a second. See ya." She pockets her phone. "He's a genius but he can't drive in the snow. He needs me to come pick him up." Leaning down she kisses Aaron's forehead and rolls her eyes. It's snowing hard still and she's driving Hotch's SUV so she can get through it and besides he wants to come here anyway so it's not that big of a deal. One ride isn't going to kill her. "Behave," she mumbles, poking his arm and she means and he knows it. "I love you but I will kick your ass when I come back, got me?"
He glances at her and moves his eyes back to Judge Judy, "I got ya." It doesn't occur to him to return the sentiment. This is the third time she's told him that she loves him and he hasn't said it back once. Not verbally and he's slacking in the "showing" it department. But he hasn't got the fear that she does, he doesn't think he'll run out of time to say it back to her.
That makes him just as naive as she is.