Work Text:
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
Alain de Botton
The gray business dress she wore on the trip to Ohio, part of her ill-fated attempt to replace JJ as press liaison, has been hanging on the outside of her closet door for the last fourteen days.
She had been fully determined to push it to the back of her wardrobe, with all the other black and white pieces she'd bought to make herself look business-like, and to forget as quickly as possible about her attempt to be someone she clearly was not. But already in the process of folding it up, she'd hesitated – remembered the way she had felt stepping onto the jet in that dress, all eyes on her, their expressions reflecting something she didn't find directed at herself all that often: surprise, awe, reference.
Still, she couldn't see herself wearing it again, so instead, she had put it on a hanger and on display, just across from her bed: It was the last thing she would see before closing her eyes at night, and the first thing she would see upon waking.
Not that she has spent a whole lot of time in her bed, recently. The first week after her return, she pulls three all-nighters to scan every case file stacked away in JJ's office, closed or active. The remaining nights, she takes work home with her to evaluate cases, and when her eyes start protesting, she practices presentations in front of her bathroom mirror.
She more or less coerces a bemused Erin Strauss into signing the request for six new tablets, and stops just short of forcing her to also sign a promise that she won't ever tell SSA Aaron Hotchner about the strategies she has employed to convince her of the necessity of going paperless.
Between all that and the new search algorithm she's been developing at the office, she barely finds time to sleep, much less to eat.
But that's alright. She is doing her job, she is working hard, she is taking on new responsibilities, and she's rocking it. And if she is going to lose a few pounds in the process, then so be it.
The important part is that no matter what happened in Ohio, she is going to prove to her boss once and for all that she has no intention of ever letting him down again.
"Garcia," someone says, from afar.
"Hngh," she makes, burying her head deeper into her pillow. Her bed is wonderful. She loves her bed.
"Garcia," the voice says again, closer now. The voice sounds a bit like it belongs to Hotch, except that is impossible, because it would mean that Hotch is in her bedroom, and that …
"Penelope," the voice says, and she jerks up.
Crap. That voice definitely belongs to Hotch, except he is not in her bedroom. She is not in her bedroom either, and her pillow turns out to be her left arm, stretched out awkwardly across the computer keyboard on her desk.
She has fallen asleep at work.
"I'm so sorry, Sir," she says in dismay, straightening hastily, brushing her hair away from her face, "I was just – I'll get right back to – whatever it is I was doing."
"Garcia," Hotch repeats, but he doesn't sound particularly annoyed. In fact, he sounds almost concerned. She turns her head. He is standing in the door to her office, looking down at her with unreadable eyes.
"Garcia, it's eleven at night."
"It's –" She pauses. Her brain is still feeling sluggish with sleep, and it takes her a moment to make sense of his words. "It is?"
Now that she pays attention to it, she does realize that the office is very quiet, none of the usual background noise floating in from the bullpen.
"So what are you still doing here, Sir?"
He raises his brows. "I often work late nights when Jack is staying with Jessica," he says. "But you don't."
She blinks at him, utterly confused, and his face softens a little.
"What's going on?" he asks quietly. "Reid tells me this is not the first time this week you've worked so late."
"Uh," she says, desperately trying to pull herself together, but she is still so tired, and her body feels so heavy that every movement is like dragging her limbs through sand. "I just wanted to finish …" She trails off, glances at her computer in the hope that it will give her a hint as to what she'd been working on. But the screen has long turned dark.
"Not tonight," Hotch says firmly. "Whatever it is, it can wait till tomorrow. Did you take the VRE to work?"
She nods slowly. That much at least she remembers.
"Good," he says, "then I'll drive you home."
She wants to protest – this is not how it's supposed to go, she thinks. She is supposed to be the best employee ever, and he is not supposed to be the one taking care of her. But she is simply too tired to resist, and so she allows him to put her jacket around her shoulders, allows him to sling her purse over his arm, and lets him herd her through the bullpen and into the elevator with a careful hand against the small of her back.
She falls asleep again in the car, only wakes to his hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her into consciousness.
"Get some sleep, Penelope," he says, and she wants to ask him how he does it, how he manages to sound so stern and so caring at the same time. It's a mystery. It's a puzzle she has been trying to solve for the last six years.
He doesn't walk her to the door, but he keeps the engine running on the curb until she's safely inside her house. She watches the tail lights of his car disappear down the street from the window in her bedroom, drops her jacket and her purse onto the floor where she stands, and lets herself sink into the bed, not even bothering to get undressed.
The gray dress is staring down at her, sharp, classy, professional. She closes her eyes and sleeps.
There is a dream. In the dream, Hotch doesn't stay behind in his car. He is in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed in his dark-blue suit, his black dress shoes sharp against the fluffy crème of the carpet. She is on the floor next to him, with her head in his lap. The soft fabric of his pants rubs against her cheek, and he is petting her head, gently and steadily. Idly, she wonders if he will let her stay like this forever.
"You've been really good today, Penelope," he says, his voice a low hum, and she can feel the vibration of his words all throughout her body, a low electrical current. "You've been doing such a great job."
She sighs in blissful anticipation, because she knows what this means. He moves her head to the side with a firm hand against the back of her neck, just far enough to be able to reach down and unzip his pants. She feels his fumbling fingers on her face, and then she can feel his cock, the heavy weight of it nudging against her jaw.
Her eyes are closed. Blindly, she turns her head towards his heat, opens her mouth searchingly, and he steers her, carefully, gently, guides her toward her target, until her lips finally touch the soft hardness of his cock. She opens up further to let him in, and as she swallows him whole, she feels the steady beat of his pulse against her tongue, feels it travel from there through her body, feels its echo between her legs, stronger and stronger, until it becomes too much, and darkness swallows her.
The next morning, she has a hard time looking her boss in the eye. Hotch, true to his impeccable, professional self, acts like nothing ever happened. He treats her like he usually does: with respect and a detached sort of kindness.
Still, she decides that a change in strategy is required. She only stays late on nights when the team is out of town and takes files with her on the nights she leaves work early to show she can keep a regular schedule. She goes heavier on the make-up: both because her team will write it off as part of her usual colorful appearance, and because it covers the dark circles under her eyes and the lines around her mouth.
Hotch does not say anything to her, and neither does anyone else, so she assumes that she has been sneaky enough to get away with it – that is, until she makes the mistake of blowing off Derek twice in a row when he suggests a movie night. Clearly, she has miscalculated the extent of his manly pride.
"Baby girl, are you going to tell me what's going on with you already?" he asks, leaning against her desk in the tech room. "Are you mad at me?"
"What? No!" she protests, because she isn't, she just does not have time for movies right now. She makes a shooing motion with her hands. "Go away," she says. "You are distracting me."
"Not until you tell me why you've been acting so weird lately," he says. "Are you and Kevin fighting?"
"No," she says again with conviction. It's not a lie, even if part of her feels guilty saying it nonetheless: if she hasn't had much time for Derek lately, she's had even less for Kevin, and the fact that her sweet and caring boyfriend has been nothing but understanding and patient does not make it any better.
"So what is it then?" he asks, crossing his arms in front of his chest, trying to stare her down. She stares back.
"Nothing," she says haughtily, "I just need to get this data processed by tonight, and your cross-examination is already setting me back by thirty minutes, Mister Super Secret Agent."
Derek looks at her for a long moment, then his expression shifts. "Is Hotch putting you up to this?" he asks suspiciously. "Is he making you do all this extra work? Damnit, I thought he realized that doing JJ's job as well was too much for you." He straightens quickly. "I'm going to go talk to him."
"No, wait," she says – shouts, almost. The last thing she needs is for Derek Morgan and Aaron Hotchner to come to blows over her work load. "Don't. It's not him, I swear. He isn't making me do anything."
Derek looks unconvinced, so she shifts gears, knowing that he has a hard time resisting her when she asks for his help.
"Please?" she pleads, "Hotch doesn't know about this. It's just – I've been developing this new algorithm and I got so wrapped up in it that I lost track of other things – you know what we programmers can be like." Of course he doesn't, not really, but that also means he can't argue with her about whether she's telling the truth. "I just want to get back on top of things, and then things will go back to normal. I promise. Cross my heart and all that."
His look is still doubtful, but decidedly less stormy. "Alright," he says reluctantly. "I won't say anything. But you've got to make it up to me, my lovely peach, and watch Pacific Rim with me next week. No excuses."
"No excuses," she nods earnestly. "Absolutely, most definitely, and I will even bring the popcorn, I swear."
A different night, another dream: She is wearing the dress. It's too short to be kneeling on the floor like this, and she knows if she looks down she'll see that it exposes most of her legs, riding up high on her thighs. She doesn't look down. Her eyes are closed. She feels his hand in her hair, petting her gently. His suit pants are smooth and soft against her cheek. She buries her face in his crotch, feels the length of his cock through the layers of cloth.
"You look beautiful in this dress, Penelope," he says, voice low and steady and kind. "But it's time to take it off now, don't you think?"
She nods eagerly, without raising her head, without opening her eyes. She feels too hot, the dress suddenly too tight, and she cannot wait to lose it, feel the air against her skin. But it's not her turn to move. Instead, his hand smoothes down her hair, trails over her neck, a steady pressure, and finds the zipper of her dress. She shivers.
"Are you ready?" he asks, and she nods again, more desperately now, shaking all over, and then she can feel him unzip her dress, slowly, so slowly, laying her bare, exposing her to his eyes.
He looks at her, and sees everything.
"Do you want to tell me why Morgan laid into me this morning about working one of my most valuable assets into the ground?"
She looks down at her feet and wishes the floor would swallow her up. She feels like she is ten years old and being called before the principal. Except the principal at her school had been annoyed and casually cruel when he cussed her out; Hotch doesn't seem angry, but he does sound frustrated, and deeply exhausted. He looks tired, too, and that's not right, she thinks. He should not have to look so tired.
"I made him promise not to say anything," she says hastily. "I told him you weren't giving me too much work to do."
"I know," Hotch nods carefully, "and I believe we were able to clear the air."
He pauses, and his voice hardens, just the tiniest bit. Garcia notices. She has had a lot of practice reading the smallest alterations in Hotch's voice.
"That doesn't change the fact that his concern for your well-being trumped his sense of obligation to keep his promise, and I would think that means he believed it was necessary to act. I am inclined to agree with him. We are worried about you," he says, and now there is that soothing undertone to his voice, the one that always feels like a warm hand in the nape of her neck. "What's going on?"
She stares at him and really wishes she was a better liar. Not good enough to lie about something really bad, not good enough to hide a crime, just good enough to convince him that there is nothing to worry about here. Truth is, however, that even when they first met in an interrogation room, on opposite sides of the table, she realized that lying to Aaron Hotchner was a talent she did not possess.
"I was just trying to show you that I'm capable of handling my new responsibilities," she says quietly, resigned. "After I messed up in Ohio."
Hotch raises his brows. "Garcia," he says slowly. "I thought I had told you explicitly that you did a perfectly fine job in Akron, and that in no way had you let me down."
She looks at her shoes again. They are purple, with little bows. Reid likes purple, she thinks. Does Hotch like purple? Probably not. He doesn't seem like a purple person to her. She really should have gone with the blue ones today.
"You think I was lying to you?" Hotch asks, when it becomes clear that she isn't going to answer, and now he sounds almost incredulous.
She glances at him from beneath her fake lashes. "Not consciously," she says reluctantly.
He makes a noise, somewhere between a snort and a cough. "Not consciously?" he repeats.
She doesn't know what to tell him. He sighs.
"You think that despite me telling you otherwise, I was disappointed by your performance," he finally says. It's not a question, so Garcia doesn't answer.
"You think I was disappointed that you weren't capable of replacing JJ," he continues, but it's a bit more hesitant, as if he isn't sure he is still on the right track. That alone is a miracle that should probably be marked in a calendar. She might put it in her diary, she thinks. Maybe add a unicorn sticker, while she's at it.
"But you didn't just try and do JJ's job," he says carefully. "You made an effort to dress like her. Act like her." He tilts his head. "Why was that so important?"
This time, he waits for an answer. He isn't impatient, his hands are still on his desk, his face nothing but mild curiosity. It makes something ache in her chest.
"I just wanted the team to notice me," she says miserably, and then, more quietly: "I just wanted you to notice me."
"And you thought … being more like JJ would achieve that?" he asks, frowning. He looks – she isn't sure. Confused maybe. Almost stunned. "Why?"
He doesn't continue, she doesn't respond. The question hangs in the room, a dark, elephant-shaped cloud. She thinks of the last time she watched Dumbo with Spencer, and how she had tried to hide that the dream sequence had still haunted her: a parade of elephants in multicolor, menacing and distorted, a bad acid trip. That's what this feels like. Just without music playing in the background.
Rossi knocks against the doorframe. "Aaron, we are ready to meet in the conference room," he says, and then pauses and tilts his head. She thinks he must see it too, the kaleidoscope of evil-looking dancing elephants over Hotch's desk. "Am I interrupting something?" he asks.
"No," she says quickly, before Hotch can even think about opening his mouth. "No, you are not interrupting at all. I was just going to leave and do – stuff," she says, already heading for the door. "Very important stuff," she says and squeezes past Rossi on her way to escape, away from dancing elephants and complicated feelings and Hotch's speculating gaze.
"Is she alright?" she hears Rossi ask, bemused. She is too far away to hear Hotch's reply.
They are back in his office. She is looking down at her feet. She is wearing the purple pumps, but as her gaze wanders higher, she realizes that she is not wearing anything else.
It should be embarrassing, standing naked in front of her boss, but there is no mockery or amusement in his eyes as they travel down her body and back up: his gaze is dark and heated and she can feel it on her skin almost as if he was touching her.
She shivers.
She –
She twitches and groans as she blinks at the panda bears wandering across her screen – the screensaver must have switched on while she was distracted. "Fuck," she murmurs.
She shakes her head and hits the Enter key, watching the panda bears make space for the images of a crime scene. At least it's Sunday afternoon, which means no one will be at the office but her. Thank god for small favors.
Except, as she continues to tag the images, she cannot quite shake the feeling of Hotch's eyes on her, that sense of being on display. You are finally losing it, honey, she tells herself, get over it and move on. Another image tagged, and she still has that prickling sensation in the back of her neck. One more image filed, and then, just to reassure herself, she spins her chair around to check the space behind her.
And flinches violently when she sees the shadowed figure in the doorway.
"I didn't mean to scare you," Hotch says as he watches her struggle to draw in a breath. He is wearing a suit, even on a Sunday he is wearing a suit, because it's what he does, and he looks completely restrained and put together in the face of her panicked flailing.
"With the work you do, you really should know better than to sneak up on girls like this," she finally forces herself to say, even manages to make it sound like the joke it is, despite the shakiness of her voice.
His answering ghost of a smile is rueful. "I'm sorry."
"What are you doing here?" she asks, rubbing her palms against the cloth of her skirt to hide how damp they are. "Shouldn't you be out there enjoying your weekend?"
"Jack has a playdate," he replies, as if that explains everything, and maybe for Hotch, it does. "I'm more interested to hear what you are doing here, Garcia. Didn't we have a conversation about this?"
They did indeed, but she has been trying her best to forget that exchange. She figures if she keeps pretending that the conversation didn't happen, that she didn't give away far too much, he might eventually believe it as well.
"I really was just filing some images," she says. "I was practically about to leave."
He raises his brows skeptically.
"Honestly," she adds, but he doesn't respond. Instead, he walks toward her, leans across the back of her chair, and reaches for the mouse next to her keyboard before she can save it from his grasp.
"How do you turn this off?" he asks conversationally, as if he isn't threatening to switch off her computer without saving the data, as if he isn't far too close, so close that she can see every dark hair on the back of his hand as it curls around the mouse, so close that she can smell a hint of his aftershave when he moves.
"Oh nonono, don't do that," she begs, on the verge of hysteria. She reaches for the mouse without thinking and only when her hand covers his does she realize her mistake. She pulls it back quickly, but it's too late.
He glances at her briefly, and slowly releases the device, setting his hand carefully down on her desk. He doesn't move away, and she thinks she can feel the heat radiating from his body while she flounders to take command of her computer again.
"You have done enough work for today," he says calmly, "shut it down."
She feels his gaze on her while she saves everything and puts the machine to sleep. When the screen goes dark, she sets her hands in her lap and doesn't move, cannot move with him still leaning over her, and she does not know what he wants her to do.
For a moment, he is completely still, and it's quiet enough that she can hear the sound of their breathing, not quite in synch. Then he turns his head toward her, and he is close enough that she thinks she can feel his exhales against her ear, imagines that he must be able to feel her hair tickle his face.
"I always notice you, Penelope," he says. Then he retreats.
She draws a shuddering breath. He knows, she thinks, he knows, he knows …
"Are you coming?" he asks, and when she turns to look at him, he is standing in the doorway again, looking down at her with dark eyes. She cannot tell what he is thinking.
"Get your things," he says, as if there is really no doubt that she is going to obey.
"I'm going to give you a ride."