Chapter Text
Carl Jung said, "The healthy man does not torture others. Generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers."
“What did he do to you, Aaron?” A touch ghosting across his collarbone, across the scar there. Hotch jerks away, lifts an arm to fight; But Peter’s still sitting in that chair.
It’s in his head, or his perception is so warped, so wrong and addled that he can’t keep track of how close the unsub is to him. Either option, Hotch hates, but he wishes he knew for sure which one it was. He’d be able to compensate for it if he did.
Peter could probably slit Hotch’s throat right now and Hotch wouldn’t have even realized the man had blinked.
“He broke into my home.” Hotch answers, swallows around his dry throat. “He stabbed me.”
Peter exhales slowly.
“How many times did he stab you, Aaron?”
“Nine.”
“Nine?” Peter repeats, sounding curious. “I only see the one.” Then, something tugs on Hotch’s collar. He catches the animal noise of panic midway through his exhale, tries to smother it alongside the panic. “Oh. Oh, I see now.”
“Don’t,” Hotch starts, but he can’t get the rest of the words out before they tangle together in his throat.
“Don’t what? Don’t touch them?” A gloved finger drifts along the inside of his shirt collar, right over the scar where it rises over his collarbone. “Did he touch them?”
Hotch nods, doesn’t speak, he knows he shouldn’t respond, shouldn’t answer, but it’s so easy when the muscles in his body all ache with tension and thinking is still foggy.
“Why would he do that to you?” Peter asks, so softly, but Hotch can hear the hunger under his words, the way he likes hearing every word Hotch gives him.
“Because… he wanted to prove he was special… He wanted to scare me.” Except maybe that’s not true, maybe Foyet did it because he wanted to punish Hotch for not taking his deal, but Hotch remembers his profile and he clings to it like a lifeline. “But I wasn’t,” Peter’s chair squeaks.
“Really?” Suddenly, the voice is too close, when his eyes open the room is a muddle of incoherent colors.
“Stop,” Hotch shifts, tries to push himself away.
“No, no, hey,” Peter says, still gentle, still soothing, like he’s consoling a child. He touches Hotch’s head, smooths his hair. He freezes. “I believe you. You must have been so brave.”
Hotch doesn’t answer that.
“Are you scared now?”
“No,” it comes out too shaky, unconvincing, throat closing momentarily in a betrayal.
“It’s okay to be scared, Aaron.”
“Stop it,” there’s no point trying to prove he’s not scared. Hotch’s heart is hammering in his chest hard enough to make his lungs ache, he knows, he knows he’s scared.
There’s quiet, a pause, a pipe somewhere in the house creaks. Hotch looks for the window, tries to gauge the position of the moon that he can’t see, but everything is too unsteady for him to make a good estimate.
The screen of his phone is dark.
“How did it feel?”
“What?”
“How did it feel when he stabbed you?”
“It hurt,” is the truth. A simple, unusable truth. “It hurt until I couldn’t feel it anymore. Then it hurt after.”
“I bet it did. Do you remember what kind of hurt it was?”
Sharp, intense, like a bruise that got deeper and deeper and— Hotch gaps on the phantom pain that blooms out from the center of his chest. He tries to reach for it, to soothe the pain, but his hands don’t find anything, just uselessly claw the fabric of his shirt.
“What did he say to you?”
“So tell me, would I use this?” Foyet hisses, too close, right in front of him, on top of him, pinning Hotch to the ground and stabbing into his chest. Hotch gasps, thrashes— he killed Foyet, he killed him, and he can’t even catch his breath before the blade is out of his chest, then back in, narrowly avoiding his diaphragm. Narrowly.
If Foyet wanted to kill him, he would have moved the blades to the side, into the gaps in his ribs where his lungs were. But Foyet didn’t want to kill Hotch, he wanted Hotch alive.
“Why didn’t he want to kill you?”
The power. Whiskey in his mouth, a headache spreading from the cut across the side of his head, carpet against his back, Foyet’s weight across his hips. Foyet wanted Hotch to feel it. Foyet wanted to see Hotch powerless.
Hotch winces when his head glances off the solid wood of the desk. For a moment, Foyet is gone, like he was never there. He wasn’t there. Not real.
He sucks in a breath, not bleeding, and he tries to focus his eyes on Peter. His head is tilted, like he’s intrigued by what he sees, face too shadowed and blurry to discern.
“They’ll kill you,” Hotch croaks, the same thing he said to Foyet then, would say to him now.
“What happened next, Aaron?”
“They know I’m here,” Hotch says, because he doesn’t want to tell the story, isn’t even sure if he is telling it or if Peter is just reading from the way he reacts or maybe he somehow got that report already when he took down the Bureau’s tech. “They’ll kill you.”
“Tell me what he said to you next, Aaron. When he was stabbing you.”
Hotch doesn’t know if he’s pulled or if he falls, but suddenly, he’s on his back again, facing the ceiling of the study, the crown molding details too blurry to make out.
The third stab goes through his bicep and Hotch groans, not enough air in him to cry out, even if he hadn’t had that reaction beaten out of him decades ago. He closes his eyes, tries to tell himself the pressure of a body on top of his is fake, a memory, but when he opens his eyes again Foyet is there.
Foyet’s breath is in his face, hot, unpleasant, the droplets of Hotch’s blood dripping off of Foyet’s fingers onto his shirt, his throat. The pins and needles in his fingers, loss of sensation due to the blood loss.
He opens his mouth, but he can’t get anything out.
“Don't speak. You lost a lot of blood. You'll need your oxygen.” The moon casts that hungry, predatory look in Foyet’s eyes into stark relief. The prideful smirk, baring his teeth, so close to Hotch’s face that he can see how dilated Foyet’s pupils really are, darkness upon darkness. He can hear how Foyet breathes, barely under control, excited .
“Do you know how much you have to study the human body to stab yourself repeatedly and not die?” Do you know how long it takes to stab someone sixty-seven times? “I don't want to brag, but I'm somewhat of an expert.” Hotch would scoff, would laugh even, but he can’t . “Do you want to see my scars?”
Foyet gets up, leaves Hotch on the floor, because he knows he can’t get away, leaves the knife in his gut because he knows Hotch isn’t able to use it. He flips on the lamp, leaves Hotch to watch him strip off his shirt so that Hotch can see.
Peter sits in his chair, watching, eyes focused on Hotch, Focused on the way he tries to steady his breathing so it doesn’t hurt on the exhale, how he turns away from Foyet but then Foyet’s standing in front of him, in the light, so that Hotch can see every line of scar tissue. Peter isn’t looking at Foyet.
“Do you like ‘em?” Foyet asks, arms still extended, and he’s showing off to Hotch and Peter, rotating in a circle. Hotch looks at Peter, who is so much blurrier, harder to see than, Foyet whose pale skin seems to reflect the lamp light. “Yours are gonna look just the same.” Peter isn’t looking at Foyet.
He isn’t looking at Foyet because Foyet isn’t here.
“My team—”
“Your team,” Peter and Foyet say in-sync. Foyet doesn’t let him finish, leaps down, like a vicious dog about to rip Hotch’s throat from him. Hotch doesn’t even have the energy to flinch away from it. The weight over him feels too real, too genuine, and Hotch turns his head away.
He closes his eyes. If he doesn’t look at Foyet, Foyet isn’t there, if he doesn’t look, doesn’t look— “Your team didn't catch me until I wanted them to. You're not in charge, so don't be foolish.”
He clenches a hand into a fist, because he’s not bleeding to death in his apartment, or this study, there’s not enough blood loss, because Foyet isn’t really here. Foyet is dead. Hotch beat him to death in his old living room. His fingernails pinch into the skin of his palm, breaking skin despite their dullness.
“It’s over,” he whispers to himself, “It’s over, it’s over,” that’s what Morgan told him as he pulled Hotch away, arms splattered in Foyet’s blood and viscera. “It’s over.”
“It’s never over,” Peter says, whispers, like he’s right there next to Foyet, leaning over him. “As long as you try to forget, it will keep happening, over, and over. Every time you close your eyes. Every time you look at your scars, every time you look at my face, you will remember. You will remember all of this. ”
“So you should try to relax,” Foyet says, almost purrs, as he pulls the knife out. Hotch groans, hands twitch, he can’t stop the memory, the not-real, he can’t get it away from him, and maybe that’s because it’s not all fake. Maybe he is bleeding out on the study, maybe Peter took the knife, re-opened the scars like scissors on the dotted line, maybe “your whole body will go numb,” Foyet’s whispers are Peter’s.
Maybe Hotch has told him this story already.
He digs his heel into the carpet, until the soles of his shoes are digging into his skin, to try and ground himself.
“And it goes in so much easier if you relax,” Hotch’s hands spasm in reaction to the stab into his ribs, clench into fists, and he tries to focus on the pain of his bruising foot through the cloud of pain and blood loss and Lewis’s drugs, but he can’t. It feels just as real.
It all feels real.
“He was talking about the knife?” Peter asks. Hotch’s head jerks, but Peter isn’t near him, is still sitting in his chair that Hotch can see over Foyet’s arm.
“Yes,” Hotch pants as he feels the knife slice down, slow, steady, ripping a hole into his shirt.
“What else did he say?”
“The profile,” Hotch says, closes his eyes, focuses hard on what he remembers of delivering Foyet’s profile to the Boston police. The dozens of eyes, his team mates next to him, who said what, the buzzing of the lights overhead, the ringing of the phones. “He was talking about his profile.” It comes out in a pained gag.
“What part of his profile?” Peter prompts.
“The part about why he uses a knife,” Hotch continues, keeps his eyes closed, the mental image of the Boston PD’s conference room the only reprieve from his memory. “He focused on the women with them,” there was blood pooling in the creases of his palms. “That he was substituting.”
“What did he say ,” Peter says, more forcefully this time. Hotch shakes his head, he doesn’t want to repeat it, he doesn’t want the words to leave his head, but Peter continues with a new gentle urging. “What did Foyet say to you about his profile, Aaron?”
Now, I understand that profilers think that stabbing—
“That stabbing is a substitution for the act of sеx,” The knife is in Foyet’s hand again. He studies the way some of Hotch’s blood drips down the blade, how the other stab wounds ooze red through his white shirt. “That if somebody's impotent, they'll use a knife instead.”
The knife leaves Hotch’s vision, and he knows what that means, knows to prepare, and he grits his teeth when the blade sinks into his chest, over his heart, but not deep enough to puncture. Just enough to hurt.
“Is that what you think, Agent Hotchner? Maybe this will change the way that you profile.” Foyet is practically whispering into his ear as he sinks the blade in at the edge of Hotch’s navel. And then he pushes, moves the blade, sliding through skin and muscle as easy as paper.
Hotch grinds his teeth together, clings to the pain of his jaw, to the concussion, but it doesn’t help. He feels the burning of his muscles contracting around the stab wounds, the pain, the blood soaking into the back of his shirt, clingy and hot on his skin, the side of his head.
“What did he do next, Aaron?”
“He stabbed me,” Hotch says eyes squeezed shut. “He stabbed me again.”
There’s the clink of the knife blade against his belt buckle. It echoes, a bell in a church tower.
“Is that all he did, Aaron?”
“Yes,” Hotch says with vehemence.
“Then what did he mean, when he said you should change your profile?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
“I don’t know.”
“You know better than to lie.”
“I’m not,” he snaps back, shaking, because he knows. He knows what happened that night; he was stabbed nine times, concussed, and driven to the hospital by the Boston Reaper. Foyet used Morgan’s stolen credentials to hide his identity. He stole a page out of Hotch’s daily planner because he wanted to kill his family. “He broke into my home, stabbed me nine times, then drove me to a hospital.”
“Aaron,” Peter says, a hand cards through Hotch’s hair, and he jerks away.
“Stop it,” he says. “Stop it, you— you—”
“Then tell me, Aaron. Tell me what he did to you. How he didn’t just stab you that night.” A hand on his neck, gentle, a thumb running along the artery up to his jaw. Hotch shudders. He doesn’t even know if it’s real. “Tell me.”
“Stop.” The memory of Foyet’s hand on his hip, steadying his body as he stabbed him again. Thumb digging into the dip of his hip bone. “Stop.”
“He didn’t just stab you that night, Aaron. You said he got off on the power, on the bloodshed.” Peter says, and Hotch can feel the breath on his cheek. He lashes out, aiming for Peter, but his arm hits nothing. “He was excited , wasn’t he?”
Accelerated heart rate so hard he can feel it when Foyet’s hand pins one wrist, pupils blown so wide Hotch could hardly see the color, breath coming out in rapid, excited puffs, something solid against Hotch’s hip.
He left that out of his report. It wasn’t relevant, hadn’t been relevant, didn’t need to be remembered . But he remembers.
“I’m not—” Hotch swallows down nausea, feels the weight shift, swallows again. “I’m not some child, you can’t—”
“He stabbed you,” Peter says slowly. “He broke into your home, he pinned you down and stabbed you and stabbed you. Why would he stop there?” There’s a quiver to Peter’s voice, not one of anxiety, or fear, or anger. “He was aroused by what he was doing to you.”
Hotch swallows again, shaking his head, his body still spasming around the phantom pain of the knife wounds. He sucks in a breath, tries to find the smell of sage burning in the corner, but all he gets is whiskey, blood, sweat, Foyet’s breath as the knife digs into the leather of his belt.
“No,” As far as Foyet went, his knife was his tool, his substitute, he didn’t need anything else. It was the blood, the pain, the control and power. His hands and his knife. Hands and knife. Hand at his waist and the knife clinking against the buckle of his belt. “He couldn’t. He couldn’t.”
“But he could. He could,” Lewis repeats, almost mockingly. “You felt him, didn’t you?”
The pressure moves, purposeful this time in how it presses into the junction of thigh and hip, Hotch hears Foyet’s tongue drag over chapped lips, and he wants to scream. He doesn’t.
“He liked power, he liked having power over you. Why wouldn’t he do that to you?”
“Stop,” Hotch almost begs. He knows, he’s seen enough crime scenes, enough witness testimony, enough cases— the violation of a safe space by breaking in, the violation of his body with a knife, violation of—
“You remember, don’t you, Aaron?”
Yanking, pulling, no tenderness, all hunger. No care for the wounds left, no care for how Hotch is only moving because Foyet is making him. How the moment Foyet lifted him off the floor to get him to the car, Hotch was unconscious.
“Stop,” Hotch opens his eyes, all he sees is a spinning room, the pale horror of Foyet’s face framing his dark, horrible eyes. “Stop it, he didn’t—”
“He did, Aaron. He did. ”
It’s so cold now, the blood loss sapping the heat from him, his skin breaking out in goosebumps.
“He didn’t—” the word is losing its meaning.
“Didn’t what?” Foyet asks, teeth grazing Hotch’s neck, over the artery. It’s not real. Foyet never bit any of his victims, it wasn’t something he’d be interested in, it was all knives and blood and the pain and power. The power of Hotch’s life in his hands, the fact he knew exactly how much time he’d have, the power and the control was what got him off. The blood and the power.
Hotch’s limp body on the floor of his apartment. Incapable of fighting back, bleeding, helpless.
“No,” is the plea.
“Close your eyes, Aaron.” Peter says and Hotch can’t fight it, can’t convince himself that the sensory hallucinations won’t go away if he can’t keep his eyes open. “You must be so tired. Your eyes must hurt so much.” And they do, Hotch is . “Close your eyes.”
Closing his eyes frees the tears that had been forming at the corner of his eyes.
“It must have hurt so much.” A button comes undone, a zipper is pulled, and Hotch gags on mucus and saliva, chokes back the sound, preserve your oxygen . “It must have scared you. You could feel it, couldn’t you? Everything he did to you. The blood loss wasn’t enough, was it?”
Leading questions. Leading questions, Hotch can recognize leading questions, but he can’t even answer them. He can’t open his eyes.
The drag of callouses on clothing, rough fingernails draw over skin, the way his legs tremble from tension and blood loss, the way Foyet’s weight shifts from his hips.
“You couldn’t have stopped him from doing it. You couldn’t have stopped him from touching you, from hurting you, from taking advantage of you.” He speaks like an echo. Hotch can’t bring himself to think of who Lewis is echoing. “You remember, don’t you?”
You will remember.
A thumb dipping under the waistline of his slacks, fingers pressing into the meat of his side, hard enough to bruise. The knife blade, gliding across the skin, taunting him to exhale, to suck in a breath when he cries, enough for it to cut into his stomach. Foyet’s knees digging into his legs.
“Stop,” the one word breaks in his throat.
“It goes in so much easier,” Foyet echoes. “If you relax.”
“No,” Hotch chokes out. He doesn’t know to what or to who.
All he knows is it doesn’t do a goddamn thing.
Now I know what scares you.