"Cases on the west coast always make me feel off kilter."

Alex looked up to see Hotch staring at her, the words he said only just registering with her. "I know what you mean. I feel out of sync at a time when I need my attention most. And this case is so bizarre and horrible. I told JJ that the death I thought would be the most painless would be from lava, but this is sort of like that, and it appears as if the people truly suffered before they died. I, I can't think of a truly more horrific way to die than to be set afire while still alive. To feel your skin crackle and split." She shuddered a little as she curled up in her seat and stared out the window.

"When Gideon was still with us, and Emily had just joined the team, we were called down to a case that was strangely more horrific than this one. The unsub was trapping families in their homes, their garages, and setting fire to it while dressed in protective gear so that he could watch them burn. The first victims, only the mother survived the initial fire by some awful miracle, though her body was covered in deep tissue burns, the sort that would take her life sooner rather than later. Gideon sent Emily and me to interview her while the others went down different trails to find more information."

"My god."

Hotch nodded. "The scent is enough to turn your stomach, and make you reconsider eating red meat for months afterwards. We had to dress in sterile gowns and wear gloves into her room, and Emily didn't think that it was right I lied to the woman, telling her that her family was at the hospital. It was the only way I could think of to calm her enough to get a tiny amount of information from her. That was how we discovered that the unsub was staying in the infernos and watching them suffer."

"My namesake would approve of your choice to tell a kind untruth, as the truth that you would have told her would have been with bad intent."

"Auguries of Innocence?" She nodded. "Haley quoted a few couplets from that poem at times. Anyway, it was soon clear that the woman wouldn't even survive the afternoon. Emily went to leave, and asked if I would follow. I looked at the woman in the bed and knew where my duty lay. So I stayed with her until she passed away, holding her hand until the end. You never forget the horror of what fire can do to a body, or of what humans are capable of doing to other humans."

Alex shivered as she nodded a little, turning her gaze to look back at him once more. "We are extremely good at hurting each other, it seems."

Hotch subtly tilted his head a little as his eyes bored into hers, and Alex knew that she had revealed something that she might have better kept to herself. "What has you so troubled?"

"That obvious?" she sarcastically muttered, and Hotch nodded. "I don't really open up to others, something that I've held onto from the Amerithrax case. It has become hard to trust after what Erin did to me."

"That was a difficult case, and difficult choices had to be made."

"She didn't have to cut my rope!" she hissed. Shaking her head a little as she fought to calm herself. "Sorry, I still have some rough feelings when it comes to her."

"Is that what's troubling you?"

"Maybe." She sighed as she rubbed her hands up and down her arms. "I think that there might be cracks appearing in the foundation of my marriage. It's harder this time around to be separated so much from James, because the time differences between us ebb and flow, and there's never really a good time to reach out to him, except for when we're home. And…"

"Yes?"

Alex looked around the jet to make certain that none of the others were paying attention to this conversation. While she could trust JJ enough not to tell tales out of turn, she wasn't certain of the others. Even Spencer, who she had known the longest, could comment on her marriage to the wrong person. "I feel like I'm making more of an issue of the midnight phone calls that I've been receiving while on cases. I, I've been developing feelings that run deeper than mere friendship, since the caller is now known to me."

Breaking off her words, she took a deep breath and waited for Hotch to respond. It had been so difficult to open herself up to him, since it was so personal to her. "If I might speak from the husband's perspective for a moment?" Alex gave him a fleeting smile before dipping her chin downwards. "Before Haley and I divorced, there was a case where I was technically on suspension and about to transfer to white collar crimes."

"Let me guess, Erin?"

Hotch chuckled as he nodded. "I can see now that she had a good point, Gideon was a loose cannon, for all that I respected him as a founder of the BSU. Anyway, Garcia gave me the file for the case the team was working in Milwaukee, the one that Erin would be leading." Alex snorted. "It would have gone better had I not been suspended and Emily not looking to transfer out of our department, but that wasn't meant to be. As I was looking over the case at home, Haley saw what I was doing, and we got into an argument. And in the course of that argument, our home phone rang. When I answered, there was silence on the other end of the line before they hung up, only to call Haley's cellphone moments later. I knew, in that moment, that the cracks in our marriage might be too great to fix."

"Was she…?"

"I don't know, I never asked her about that, because I loved her until the day she was murdered. But it did hurt to know that she was getting calls that she didn't want me to know about. You have at least told James about these conversations."

"Yes, and he is totally okay with them. He's been encouraging me to talk to her, and to bury the hatchet between us, even though I am so not ready for that to happen. I like holding on to the cognitive dissonance between knowing who she really is and talking to her as she presented herself to me."

"That's not cryptic at all."

"I have to be cryptic in order to keep my privacy. But I suppose that I wouldn't be the first person in the BAU to have a marriage break up."

He nodded. "Out of all of us, JJ has the most stable relationship. If you want to find out some more information about how to keep your marriage strong, I would ask her for advice. Even though she's so young, she has a good head on her shoulders."

"I am fast learning that, and I might have to do just that."

He smiled a little as he nodded. "And if you ever need to talk, my door is open to you. I know that it might be hard to come to me, but I try to make everyone feel comfortable enough to talk about things that are upsetting them."

A heartfelt sigh slipped from her lips as she looked up to see Rossi passing them by. Her expression flickered into something a little painful, and Hotch cleared his throat to catch her attention once more. "Sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry for, Alex. Or is there?"

"There might be. I know that I've been talking obliquely about who I'm talking to, because I want to protect this odd friendship that we've started to develop over the course of the past four months."

He nodded. "And do you think that this friendship you've developed with your midnight caller might start to affect more than just you on this team?"

That was the moment that Alex knew for certain that Hotch had put together all the pieces of the puzzle that she and Dave had been sharing, and she nodded quickly before turning her head to stare out the window of the jet. "I never intended things to get this far out of control, Hotch. I don't like not being in control of situations, because I've needed that sense of security."

He reached out across the distance between them, touching her knee gently in an effort to get her to look at him. It took a few moments for her to turn her face towards his, and she saw that concern in his expression. A part of her was quite glad to see that there wasn't any pity there, as she didn't think that she could bear to see pity from him. Alex respected him too much for that to be a good thing. "Security is a good thing, and we all crave it. But do you think that in the future, you're going to come to a decision that might create more tension in our team?"

"I don't want that to be the truth, but I wonder about how things will turn out, yes. My midnight caller is quite dear to someone else on this team, and I wish that life wasn't complicated."

Hotch chuckled as he shook his head, removing his hand from her knee before scratching at his face a little. "If life wasn't complicated, we would be out of jobs. But no, life is messy and rough, and we have to find our happiness wherever it might be."

"But I don't know where my happiness lies. I love James, but he knows that I also love Louise. And that is the sticky wicket, isn't it?"

Hotch nodded as Rossi passed them by once more, heading back to his seat, and they both sighed in unison. "I'll let you know that I'll try to be an impartial leader to us all when this comes to a head, which I know that it will at some point, but Dave is my best friend. It will be extremely difficult to set aside those feelings, even if I want to moderate things."

"I understand," she murmured in reply as she picked up the file that Garcia had given them before they left on this case. "I'm going to read through this once more and see if I can find us any way in that we haven't thought of quite yet."

"That sounds like a good idea. I'm going to go talk to Dave for a little bit, but don't worry, whatever is said between us is kept that way. I wouldn't be a good leader if I told tales out of turn."

"Thanks," she replied offhandedly, staring down at the pages in her lap. She truly did want to go over what to expect when they landed, but for some odd reason, the words began to swim on the page, and she found that she couldn't concentrate on what was there. A part of her recognized that she was nervous about what Hotch and Rossi were going to talk about, even though she knew that she could trust Hotch. Alex knew that she was in a fine kettle of fish, since this was quickly going to become quite messy, the one thing that she hated most in the world. But there was still the thought that she could somehow salvage everything before it went to rack and to ruin.

"So, sunny California. This should be an interesting case. I hope you brought your sunglasses, Blake," Rossi said as he sank down in the free seat next to Hotch.

"They are safely in my purse," she sang out as she fixed a cool smile on her lips. "Now, what do you say to us running through scenarios about who this unsub could be. I have a few theories, but none of them are very good, I feel." The man nodded as they leaned forward and began to confer about what they knew so far, and Alex used the closeness to try and push aside her growing unease over the fact that there was going to quickly come a time when they would all have to make some very serious choices about the way forward.