Chapter Text
Day one, Reid didn't wake up at all, not really; he surfaced twice, eyes half-open, found Gideon in the chair by the window both times, and went back under before anyone could decide whether to call it consciousness.
Day two, they reset the bones in his left foot. Hotch stood in the hallway through that part, arms crossed, jaw tight, listening to nothing, because Reid didn't make a sound. Afterward Morgan said that was the part that got to him most—not the bruising, not the IV lines, but that Reid had apparently trained himself somewhere along the way not to let anyone hear him hurting.
Day three, he was lucid enough to ask where Tobias's body had gone, and lucid enough, a few minutes later, to look like he wished he hadn't asked.
JJ came every day and sat with the guilt she wasn't going to talk about until much later. Garcia sent a card since she couldn’t bring herself to come into the hospital yet to see him, and nobody had the heart to tell her Reid hadn't opened his eyes yet when it arrived. Gideon brought a chess set on day three and didn't set it up, just left it on the table, the way you'd leave a door unlocked.
Hotch came every day too, later, after the paperwork, after the calls to Strauss, after he'd stood in front of the team and explained, clinically, the only way he could get through it, what the tox screen had found in Reid's blood. He didn't say much when he visited. He brought coffees for everyone and sat in whichever chair Gideon hadn't already claimed, and once, on day four, when Reid was awake and staring at the ceiling tile like it owed him an explanation, Hotch said, "You don't have to talk about it," and Reid had said, "Thanks," and that had been, somehow, an entire conversation.
By day five, the doctors were using words like remarkable and resilient, the kind of words people use about young bodies that have no business healing this fast, and Reid sat on the edge of the hospital bed in clothes that didn't fit him anymore—looser at the wrists, looser around his torso, looser everywhere—and signed where he was told to sign, and didn't ask a single question about the discharge instructions, which was its own quiet alarm bell. Spencer Reid not asking questions was, Hotch thought, somewhere on the order of a five-alarm fire dressed up as nothing at all.
Nobody discussed it out loud. Nobody had to. JJ and Gideon simply moved the team's return flight to match Reid's discharge. Six adults, fully capable of flying home separately, but not one of them so much as suggested it.
Reid noticed. Of course he noticed; he noticed everything, even half-aware, even on whatever was left of the hospital's last medication dosage working its way out of him. He just held his cane a little tighter and let JJ walk a half-step closer to his elbow than necessary, and got on the jet with the rest of them.
***
On the way home, Hotch had the case file open on his lap and hadn't read a word of it.
He told himself it was strategy; that he was running the timeline backward, looking for the moment they should have caught Hankel sooner, the moment that would let him stand in front of Strauss and say here, this is what we should have done differently, this is where we messed up, so it could never happen again. The trouble was, he couldn’t find anything that could justify what he had done: he’d sent his two least experienced members of his team to go talk to a witness who then turned out to be the unsub. Hotch never knew if he’d be able to fully forgive himself for the consequences of that decision.
And to top it all off, there was what Reid said to him: I knew you'd understand.
Not, I knew you'd find me. I knew you’d understand me. Reid hadn't bet his life on the team's competence, or even on Gideon, who'd spent three years building the kind of mentorship with him that came with a vocabulary for this—you're stronger than him, he cannot break you, the sort of thing Gideon knew how to say into a webcam without flinching. Reid had bet it on Hotch specifically knowing him well enough to catch a lie. On Hotch noticing what wasn't true with the statistics he spouted.
Hotch turned that over in his mind for the hundredth time since the cemetery and still couldn't decide if those words uttered to him as Reid collapsed in his arms were the most faith anyone had ever silently had in him, or the most tragic thing that had ever needed to happen. Maybe both. A twenty-four-year-old with three doctorates and total recall of the Bible had looked at the short list of people who might save his life and picked the one he trusted to read him correctly under pressure—and somewhere underneath that compliment was a much worse fact, which was that Reid had needed a code to ask for help at all.
Hotch glanced across the aisle. Reid was awake, barely, with his forehead against the window, his eyes open but unfocused on the cloud bank outside. He hadn't spoken since the gate. He'd let JJ tuck a blanket over his knees without protest, which from anyone else would be unremarkable, but from Reid, it was practically a distress flare.
‘I should have taught him how to do this differently,’ Hotch thought with more force than he expected, close to anger, except the anger had nowhere to go because there was no one to aim it at except himself. Two years Reid had been on this team. For two years, Hotch watched him absorb every hard thing that came through that bullpen—bodies, profiles, the worst of what people did to each other—and turn it into research, into facts, into methods that could save lives. Hotch had let him. Had, if he was honest, valued it, because a Reid who processed horror by reciting statistics back at it was an easier colleague to manage than a Reid who needed something from him.
And now, here was the bill for that, sitting across the aisle with both ankles wrapped and a stare fixed on nothing, having just demonstrated, in the most extreme circumstances available to a human being, that he'd had to save his own life.
Hotch wasn't naive enough to think that sitting by his hospital bed for the past five days fixed two years. But somewhere over what he guessed was Tennessee, he made a smaller, more manageable decision. Reid was not going back to an empty apartment by himself, not tonight, and preferably not for several nights with everything that had been done to him. He needed to be watched closely, not only for his own safety, but also for the emotional impact that was bound to hit Reid’s numb state of mind within the next few days.
Even without Reid’s damaged mental and emotional state, the logistics of letting Reid go home by himself in his physical state popped into his head, because logistics were the part of his brain that still worked reliably under stress.
Reid's apartment was a third-floor walk-up with no elevator, and Reid currently could not reliably manage stairs—Hotch had watched him take four steps on that ankle in the hospital corridor before the resident insisted on the wheelchair, and even Reid’s pride had lost that argument fast, which told Hotch everything about how much pain Reid was actually in.
There was no one in that apartment to help him; no one to notice if the antibiotics and the pain medication were being taken on time, and no one to monitor whatever was still working its way out of his bloodstream from five days of IV drugs and Dilaudid that didn't sit right together. There was no one to hear him if he fell reaching for something on a shelf he shouldn't be reaching for yet…Hotch could build a case for taking him home on logistics alone, which was its own kind of relief, honestly. Reid would accept, ‘you can't manage the stairs on your own’ in a way that he would never accept, ‘I'm worried about what's in your head right now.’
But the logistics were never really the whole of it, and Hotch was too good at his job to pretend otherwise even to himself.
He thought about the fact that Reid lived alone and always had, by some specific arrangement of circumstances that had never quite been his choice—a mother across the country away in a facility he visited and called and worried over without ever once asking the team for help carrying that weight, a father who existed mostly as a blank space Reid didn't talk about, a sister-figure in JJ and a mentor in Gideon and, apparently, whatever it was Reid had decided Hotch was to him, but none of it adding up to someone who's there when the lights go off.
Another thing high on Hotch’s list of concerns was what it cost a person to kill someone— even someone like Hankel, even cleanly, even justified and in complete self-defense—and how that cost would make itself known in time. It could sit quiet for days, and then surface unexpectedly at 2 a.m. Hotch knew that one personally; they all did.
So, by the time the plane started its descent, Hotch had made the decision that Reid was coming home with him, and he would have to use whatever practical excuse would get him in the car without an argument.
He glanced across the aisle again. Reid had finally drifted into something like actual sleep, head tipped against the window, and for once, the tension in his jaw had gone slack.
Hotch let him sleep the rest of the descent, and started thinking about exactly how he was going to phrase this so Reid wouldn't fight him on it.
***
Hotch told Gideon first while Reid was still asleep, passing him on his way to the front of the jet.
"I'm taking him to my place tonight,” Hotch said quietly. Gideon looked at him for a second too long, not knowing whether to treat this as Hotch overstepping or Hotch doing something right.
"Good,” Gideon finally said after a minute. “He needs someone with him.”
The harder call Hotch made standing in the jet bridge after they landed, team filtering past him toward baggage claim, phone against his ear, watching Reid lean heavily on JJ's arm a few feet away.
"How is he?" Haley asked when she picked up on the first ring. She already knew from the news and from the one terse call Hotch had managed from the hospital four days ago.
"Cleared to fly. Not cleared for much else." Hotch watched Reid take a slow breath like the floor wasn't quite where he expected it. "Listen, I'm thinking about—"
"Bring him home," Haley said before he finished the sentence, and something in Hotch's chest loosened that he hadn't realized was wound that tight. "I've got the guest room made up already; I did it this afternoon when I heard he was being discharged. Jack's at my sister's through the weekend, and I have a conference tomorrow morning, so it'll just be you tomorrow. You won't have to split yourself in two pieces trying to do this and be a dad at the same time. Just — focus on him."
Hotch didn't trust his voice for a second, so he just said, "Thank you," as sincerely as he could.
"Aaron," She waited until he made a sound to show he was listening. "You did save his life. You know that, right?"
He didn't have an answer for that one. He said he'd call her later and hung up before he had to try.
Reid was waiting by the gate when Hotch caught up, his cane in one hand, the other braced against the wall, looking like every part of him had quietly agreed to stop pretending the moment there was no one around him left to perform for.
"You're not driving yourself home," Hotch said gently.
"I wasn't planning to," Reid replied, his voice gravelly. “I can just take the metro—”
"You're not staying at your place tonight, either."
That got the smallest flicker of resistance to spark in Reid’s eyes. "Hotch—"
"It's a stairs problem," Hotch said, having already planned his little white lie. "You can't manage three flights right now, and I'm not leaving you to find that out the hard way at midnight. Haley's already got the guest room ready. Jack's with her sister this week, so it's just us. There's no decision here, Reid; I already made it for you on the plane. Come on."
He watched Reid weigh whether to push back, watched him not quite have it in him, and saw his expression flicker with relief, wearing exhaustion as a disguise.
"Okay," Reid said quietly. Hotch tried to hide his surprise—he’d expected way more of an argument than that.
"Okay," Hotch echoed, and placed his hand lightly between Reid’s shoulder blades to start him moving toward the doors, and didn't let go until they were almost at the car.
***
Hotch hung back at the car on purpose, keys already in hand, and let Reid try the door himself.
It was a small thing, but it mattered. Reid had spent the last five days having decisions made for him with a gentleness that was still, fundamentally, a string of people deciding things for him, and Hotch was self-aware enough to know that if he took this one too, on top of everything else, he wouldn’t be helping his own case later on when Reid would need to depend on him a little more.
So, he stood by the trunk, ostensibly dealing with the bags, and watched out of the corner of his eye as Reid reached for the door handle, got it open, and then tried to fold himself down into the passenger seat the normal way—bend at the knee, drop, swing the bad leg in after.
Except, it wasn’t that easy. Reid’s weight came down wrong on the ankle that couldn't take it as his hand shot out to catch the doorframe, and for one bad second, he was hanging there half-in, half-out of the car, his jaw locked tight in both frustration and pain.
Hotch appeared and got a hand under Reid's elbow, taking enough weight that Reid could balance himself again. As Reid slowly got himself situated, working on getting his bad ankle over the lip, Hotch’s other hand guided the door so it wouldn't swing back and catch him.
"I've got it," he offered quietly, helping Reid lift his bad ankle in, making sure to be careful around the brace, before Reid had to ask or refuse to take the help.
"Sorry," Reid whispered, staring at the dashboard, which was the wrong word and they both knew it, but Hotch didn't correct him. Some battles weren't worth fighting tonight.
"Seatbelt," Hotch said instead, gently, and reached across to help when Reid's hands didn't quite manage the buckle on the first try.
The first twenty minutes of the drive were silent, and Hotch let them be. He'd learned a long time ago that silence with Reid needed to be respected. So he drove and watched the road, letting the city slide by the windows.
It was somewhere on the interstate that Hotch heard a change in the rhythm of Reid's breathing that made Hotch's attention sharpen, but he made sure to keep his eyes on the road. Then, Reid let out a breath that caught and didn't quite recover. Then another.
Reid was crying, and making an effort to be as silent as he could about it with his face still turned toward the window. His shoulders were rigid as he tried to fight the emotions bubbling out of him like a shaken soda can, but despite his efforts, he as still crying all the same, and Hotch figured it had probably been building since Georgia…and if being in a dark car on an empty highway was enough of a secluded, safe space for Reid to finally let something out, Hotch would take it.
Hotch made it a point not to reach over, some instinct telling him that closing that distance right now would make Reid feel like being caught, and the last thing Reid needed was one more thing to brace against.
So, he simply moved his right hand off the wheel and set it down, palm up, on the console between them, just there. An offer with no pressure attached to it, the kind Reid could ignore completely if he wanted to.
Hotch left his hand there through three more exits, through Reid's breathing growing more ragged, and then, after a couple of minutes, Reid's hand found his in the dark. His grip was uncertain at first, as if he were checking if it was really meant for him, then closed his fingers around Hotch’s hand and squeezed, hard enough that Hotch felt it in his knuckles.
Hotch squeezed back, once, and didn't say anything at all, just kept driving.
***
The car didn't stay quiet for long. Somewhere past the next exit, Reid’s careful, contained crying broke open. Reid's breathing hitched faster and faster, and his hand clamped down hard around Hotch's. He curled himself forward against the seatbelt like he was trying to fold himself smaller than whatever was happening inside him.
Hotch's heart ached at the sounds Reid was trying to suppress, at how much smaller Reid sounded right now than he’d ever let himself sound at the office, at how long he must have been holding everything in. Hotch couldn’t even remember Reid crying in the hospital.
"Shh. Deep breath in for me."
Reid tried. It came apart halfway, turning into another broken sob.
"I know. Shh, it's okay—try again. In."
It took three more tries to calm Reid down before Reid managed to actually pull air in, and it came with a rough, startled cough at the effort.
"There we go," Hotch said, and something in his voice eased just slightly, relief disguised as steadiness. "Good. That's good. Let's go again."
"In—" Reid drew the breath himself this time, shaky, and Hotch matched his own breathing to it without thinking, slow and deliberate, something for Reid to follow.
"And out," Hotch said, just as slow. "There."
Hotch coaxed Reid through breathing again, and again after that, his low cadence just laying the same four words down over and over like stepping stones, close enough together that Reid never had far to reach for the next one. Somewhere in the fifth or sixth round, Reid's grip on his hand started to loosen, the white-knuckled need to hold on turning into something closer to just holding.
"In," Hotch said once more, quieter now that the crisis had mostly passed, and Reid wasn’t in danger of passing out on him. Reid breathed in.
"And out."
Reid let it go, slow and shaking. Hotch kept the rhythm of his own breathing going long after Reid didn't really need the coaching anymore.
***
By the time Hotch pulled into the driveway, Reid was mostly asleep, or close enough to it that the distinction barely mattered.
He'd gone quiet again after his breathing finally evened out, his head tipped against the window and his hand still loose in Hotch's until Hotch had needed it back to turn the wheel, and somewhere in that last stretch of dark road, exhaustion had simply won.
Hotch sat for a second after he cut the engine, just looking at him, weighing his options: bad ankle, dead weight, a porch with two steps, and a kid that currently had no interest in cooperating with any of it.
"Reid," Hotch said quietly. No response. "Spencer, come on."
That got a small noise, somewhere between a protest and a question, and Reid's eyes cracked open about a third of the way.
"We're here. I need you to wake up enough just to help me get you inside, come on.”
"'m up," Reid murmured, with the conviction of someone who was not, in fact, up, and made no move whatsoever to prove it.
Hotch allowed himself the smallest huff of a laugh before coming around to the passenger side. "You're not, but we'll work with what we've got," he corrected gently.
Getting Reid out of the car turned out to be its own small operation. Reid's legs worked, technically, but the coordination required to actually use them in sequence had apparently clocked out for the night along with the rest of him. He sat up with Hotch's hand braced under his arm, swayed once, and mumbled something that might have been an apology, and Hotch made the decision to stop trying to guide him and just get an arm fully around his back instead, taking enough of the younger man’s weight that Reid could mostly just lean on him.
“Easy, come on, there we go…”
"I'm walking," Reid informed him stubbornly.
"You are," Hotch agreed, steering him toward the porch steps one at a time, patient as anything, "mostly."
Hotch got the door open with his free hand, maneuvered them both through, and got them down the hall toward the guest room.
Reid went down onto the edge of the bed like something finally allowed to stop holding itself up, and Hotch knelt and got his shoes off, then unclipped the brace just enough to ease the swelling without disturbing the setting, careful around the worst of the bruising, while Reid sat there blinking slowly, not quite tracking any of it.
"Lie back," Hotch said, and Reid did, immediately, no argument left in him at all, and was asleep again, almost before Hotch had the blanket pulled up over him.
Hotch stood there a moment longer than the task required, watching him breathe, slow and even now, no catch in it anywhere.
Then he turned the light down, not completely off in case Reid woke up again, and left the door cracked open behind him.
‘This is going to be a long night,’ Hotch thought with a sigh, running a hand over his face as he made his way back down the hallway.