Chapter Text
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
--Stephen King
It is in darkness that memories seem larger than life, more threatening and more lethal. In darkness, fears become nightmares, and shadows lurk at the edges of consciousness, threatening our peace. If we have none, they seek then to steal our hope. If hope, too, has eluded us, the shadows have no further work to which to attend, for we welcome them in.
After the team has left, St Sebastian hospital falls dark. The LEDs that light up the machines emit a soft glow, and the fluorescents over the nurses’ station are kept on, just enough light to keep staff from tripping over themselves.
In the hospital rooms, the half-light throws shadows across the walls, and under the haze of morphine, he can begin to believe they move. He’s restless long after the others leave, desperation and loss itching beneath his skin like sandpaper despite the drugs, taunting him, mocking him. The day has left its mark; that it has been more than twenty-four hours since Foyet’s assault began does not matter in his mental stopwatch, especially because so many of those hours do not exist in his conscious memory.
There comes the fleeting wish that Foyet had simply shot him, execution-style, or even let him bleed out, for then he’d have been spared the memory of the look in Haley’s eyes as she stood at the foot of his bed and asked him why. He’d not had to have seen Jack’s quiet fear, the hesitance that said he knew something was wrong, just not what. The thought is banished as quickly as it arises, leaving him with a bad taste in his mouth and guilt heavy on his shoulders. He should be grateful he’s alive, and yet the bitterness remains, unyielding as adamant. He watched his life walk away that afternoon, and there’s a desperate fear he cannot give voice to that he will never see them again and Foyet will win.
David Rossi’s quiet certainty rings in his ears, and he wishes he shared the other agent’s conviction, because a lifeline would be a blessing. He has the best people in the country on his team, but if Foyet simply disappears, not even the best will be able to find him, and this frightens him immensely. His son is perhaps the one thing in his life he has done remotely close to right, and he can picture the vague, polite recognition ten, fifteen years down the line so clearly it makes his breath catch in his throat.
Finally—finally—the morphine overrides the hamster wheel his brain is struggling to run, and he falls into a restless, uncomfortable sleep.
He dreams, that night; he dreams of blood and pain and blunt force and shadows; he dreams of a looming darkness that threatens to swallow him; he dreams of his father.
He sees Foyet standing over him, knife in hand, blade glinting in the low light; he feels the heavy, booted foot slam into his ribs, feels the compression of air shoved from his lungs and the reflexive panic that comes with not being able to properly breathe. Then George Foyet turns into David Hotchner (this might well be why Rossi is always “Dave” and never “David”), and he himself is four again, struck across the face and given his first broken bone.
He’s seven, and his father is raining blows on him left, right, sideways. It’s been… at least a month since the last time he’d been hit, at least three since it was this bad, and when a calculated blow breaks his arm, he screams.
He’s usually silent.
His father screams back, telling him to suck it up, that real men don’t cry; it never occurs to his young mind to say that he’s still a boy, and he doesn’t understand what his father wants. It’s a day before they get him to the hospital, where they tell the ER staff he got into a fight walking home from school. They’re a hairs’ breadth away from having to re-break the bone just to set it, but this time he doesn’t cry.
He’s eleven, and he watches his father try to strike Sean. The man is drunk and just off-balance enough that Aaron can step between them. His baby brother is five years old and terrified, and Aaron stands up to his father for the first time, saying, “I just got in your way.” It blends with the alcohol to form a good distraction. He ends the night with two broken ribs and another trip to the ER (he fell down the stairs this time), but his father never goes after Sean again.
He’s fourteen, sprawled on the kitchen floor and trying to avoid his father’s boots. He thanks god they’re not steel-toed. David Hotchner calls him worthless, a failure, a pansy, a mistake—everything people think a parent should never call their child. Stoically, he takes it all, doing his best to block the worst of the blows (and they wondered why he pushed himself until he scored top of his class in hand-to-hand, determined never to be a victim again) and nearly biting through his lip in his effort to remain silent.
Not until the rest of the house is asleep and he’s in bed with the lights off does he let the burning behind his eyes become anything more. The tears are too hot against the cold of his skin (his father has adopted the practise of turning off the water heater after he showers, making his son shower in the cold), silent and humiliating, and he prays his father won’t find a reason to come in even though he doesn’t know why: in fourteen years, God hasn’t yet answered his prayers, and he has no reason to believe He’ll start now.
He’s sixteen, and his best friend makes a comment about how his father came home the night before, more drunk than he’s ever seen him. He’s openly amused, commenting that his father’s a bit obnoxious when he’s drunk, and Aaron glances at him in surprise.
“My father hits me when he’s drunk,” he says offhandedly, “but it’s worse when he’s sober.”
It’s the first time he’s ever bothered to mention it aloud to anyone, and it takes the horror on Greg Daniels’ face to make him realise that perhaps not all fathers beat their children. With this comes the half-desperate extraction of the promise that Greg will never tell anyone, and it’s obvious his friend is torn between saving his friend and saving his friendship. Finally, he agrees.
He’s eighteen, in a knock-down, drag-out fight with his father the likes of which they’ve never engaged in before. He’s been mercifully spared the psychological maladjustment that often accompanies abuse—he might be a little manic in his desperation to never be his father, but Greg is the only one who knows—but it’s never occurred to him to hit back.
He loses. Badly. He’d graduated high school a month later and moved out, seeing a psychologist at his university in his sophomore year after his father died, but the dreams refuse to acknowledge that. Instead, his father becomes Foyet, standing over him with hatred and not a little malicious glee in his eyes. He relives it even if he doesn’t consciously remember it, and the faces of George Foyet and David Hotchner flicker and blend together like a bad hologram.
Then he finds himself standing over a body in a hospital in Des Plaines, Illinois, ingratiating himself with their unsub (who’s not at this point unknown any longer, but his unconscious is willing to ignore these details) and pretending to enjoy throwing insults and injury both at his still-green agent. Only this time there’s no pretending, and Spencer Reid’s pleading is infused with genuine fear that makes the unsub laugh. At some point, it registers in the back of his mind that his agent isn’t moving anymore.
Before he has time to do more than be horrified, he’s somewhere he doesn’t recognise, standing over another body and shouting his father’s words, driven to the same actions by a will not his own. The body—the child—rolls over, and he realises with a jolt of horror that it’s Jack, begging him to stop and apologising for imagined offences. He ignores them, and both assault and pleading continue. It’s when he sees the blade flash in his right hand and the terror in his son’s eyes that he wakes himself up.
His breath is coming too fast, his cheeks damp, and he tries to slow his breathing as he brings shaking hands to his face; the last thing he needs is the nurses running in because he starts hyperventilating. Instinctively, he reaches for the phone, heedless of the hour, and then the realisation that he no longer knows how to reach them is insult upon injury. It serves only to solidify the breach, the hurt worse than Foyet’s blade slicing through his skin as it slips down his temples into his hair.
Drawing in an uneven breath that sounds too loud in the darkness, he reaches up to wipe his eyes. The movement hurts, but he’s grateful for the distraction of pain. While knocking himself out is a tempting option, he reaches for the water next to the bed instead. It takes effort, which takes focus, which means he can stop replaying the dream in his mind. It doesn’t last long, but he doesn’t bother trying to fall asleep. He doubts it will present much in the way of improvement.
Then movement outside his room catches his eye, and he freezes, wishing for a moment he had his gun. Since he doesn’t, he reaches for the call button, finger hovering over it like a metronome in its smallest arc. “Who’s there?”
The door slides open all the way, and someone says sheepishly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“What are you doing here, Emily?” he asks his agent in surprise, and he sees the silhouette of her shrug. “You should be home, sleeping,” he points out, and she shrugs again.
After all, she can’t very well tell him she tried and couldn’t because she kept thinking he was dead.
“I’m sorry,” she says awkwardly. “I’ll let you go back to sleep.”
Shaking his head, he gestures at the chair beside the bed. “It’s okay.”
Still awkward, she sits, slumping into it like the effort of sitting up straight is too much. She doesn’t speak, letting the silence run its course, but he can feel her eyes on him. This is, for them, uneven (uncharted?) ground; he’s well aware he doesn’t spend as much time with his team outside of work as he used to, and he knows she’s not certain how to act around him when they’re not on the clock. What he doesn’t know is why she’s there.
“Dave said you guys did well on the case today,” he offers finally, and again she shrugs (he thinks her shoulders will be sore in short order if she keeps that up), but he hears the wry smile in her voice when she answers.
“They did,” she says. “I spent most of it at your place, but aside from Reid getting shot, today was good.”
“Thank you for that.” His voice is low, sincere.
She nods. “Thank Garcia. She called every hospital in a ten-mile radius and then some.”
There’s a pause; then, “What did he do? Leave me in front of the main doors?”
In the dark, he can feel her surprise, and it laces her voice when she speaks. “No one told you?”
He shakes his head before it occurs to him she can’t see that, so he explains, “Amidst everything else, it never came up.”
She hesitates; he sees the shadows of movement in her lap as she twists her fingers together, but he doesn’t push. “He dropped you off as a John Doe with Morgan’s credentials.”
Closing his eyes, he bites back the instinctive response of, “Fuck.” Foyet had picked a brilliant way to get to the younger agent, and Hotch holds no illusions that this will help.
“He’s fine,” Emily says, reading the silence for what it is. “He knows what he’s trying to do.”
Lips quirk up in a bitter parody of a smile. “That doesn’t always help.” It’s a moment before he hears his own words, and he flinches away like they’re the singing lash of a whip. She didn’t need to hear that.
“Are you okay?” she asks hesitantly.
In the dark, she can afford the question she’d probably never ask him in daylight unless he was stretched out on the ground bleeding to death. In the dark, he can afford the answer he’d probably never give unless he knew they were the last two people on earth.
“I’m afraid I’ll never see them again.” The words are barely a whisper, blending in with the low-level hum of the machinery, but she hears them anyway, and he repeats his words to Dave that afternoon. “What will Jack remember of his father in ten years?”
Emboldened by the darkness and perhaps compromised by exhaustion, she reaches up almost reflexively, wrapping her hands around his larger one. He’s too startled to pull away.
“We’ll find him, Hotch,” she declares fiercely. Her voice is no louder than his, but she echoes Dave’s conviction perfectly even if she does not know it. “We’ll find him even if he stops killing.” Looking up, eyes a dark sparkle amidst the shadows, she finds his gaze and holds it. “He won’t do to you what he did to Shaunessey.”
He says nothing, neither trusting himself to speak nor wanting to hurt her by voicing his disbelief. In response, she grips his hand harder, until she can feel his pulse beneath her fingers. “Do you believe me?”
Sighing, he wishes he could shrug. Because he can’t, he forces himself to look her full in the face. “I want to.” His voice almost breaks; he refuses to let it. “I really do.”
She nods, recognising the words for what they are: all he can give. She doesn’t let go of his hand, and he’s grateful, because the contact grounds him and he doesn’t know if he’d be able to hold on if she pulled away—he’s learned the hard way not to try to keep things that wish to leave.
They sit there in the dark, and he doesn’t see the tears in her eyes; she doesn’t see the one that escapes his iron control to trail down his cheek. Neither of them move, trying to keep up the pretence of calm, and come morning he’ll be reminded of something an old philosophy professor once told him: “In darkness one may be ashamed of what one does, without the shame of disgrace.” Sophocles.
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