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Hotch noticed it on the second day of the Sacramento case, the way he noticed most things about his team, not from anything Reid said but instead from everything he didn't.
It was small at first. Reid answered questions a beat too late, like he was surfacing from somewhere else to do it. He skipped lunch without the usual excuse about finishing a chapter of whatever he was reading. During the profile presentation to local PD, he gave his section flawlessly, the way he always did, and then went quiet again the second it was over, staring at a spot on the conference table almost like it owed him an explanation.
Nobody else seemed to clock it. Morgan was deep in victimology, Prentiss was chasing down a lead on the unsub's work schedule, and the case itself a father abducting his own children from foster placements, moving them across state lines, always one step ahead well it was ugly enough to explain a certain heaviness settling over the whole team without anyone needing to look for a more specific cause.
But Hotch had spent years learning the particularness of Reid's silences, and this one had a shape he recognized. Not exhaustion. Not the ordinary weight of a hard case. Something older, worn smooth by handling, the kind of hurt a person carried so long they'd stopped noticing they were carrying it, until something reached in and found it anyway.
He didn't ask. Not yet. Reid had a well-documented aversion to being asked directly what was wrong, a reflex that turned even a gentle question into something to deflect, minimize, or intellectualise past. Pushing rarely worked. Waiting, more often than not, did.
So, Hotch waited and watched and made sure without ever making a show of it that he was somewhere nearby whenever Reid looked like he needed someone to be close.
It got worse as the case went on, which didn't surprise Hotch once he let himself actually think about the particulars. A father. Children taken and hidden and moved through motel rooms and rented cars, ostensibly out of some twisted idea of protecting them, though the reality left every kid they found more frightened than the last. It wasn't a hard line to draw, once Hotch let himself draw it, between this case and the version of fatherhood Reid had grown up with, though this unsub was worse in every practical sense, Hotch suspected the ache it stirred in Reid wasn't really about the specifics at all. It was about the absence. About the particular complicated grief of a father who left, and the harder grief underneath of it, the part of a person that went on missing him anyway, against their own better judgment, for years after they should have stopped.
By the third night, Reid had gone almost entirely quiet outside of work necessities, and when Hotch caught him alone in the hotel hallway heading back from the ice machine, he decided waiting had run its course.
"You've been somewhere else the last two days," Hotch said, keeping his tone light, an observation rather than an interrogation. "Not on the case. Somewhere else."
Reid's grip on the ice bucket tightened almost imperceptibly. "I'm fine. It's a hard case. Everyone's a little off."
"Everyone isn't skipping meals and staring through walls," Hotch stated, not unkindly. "You don't have to tell me what it is. I just want you to know I've noticed, and I'm not going to stop noticing just because you'd rather I didn't."
Something flickered across Reid's face surprise at being caught out maybe, or simply tired of holding a door shut against something that kept pushing back and then it smoothed over again, carefully, deliberately blank. "I appreciate that. I'm okay, though. Really."
Hotch didn't believe him, and he suspected Reid knew that he didn't. But he also knew better than to force the issue in a hotel hallway at eleven at night with an unsub still out there and a case that needed both of them functional in the morning.
"Okay," Hotch said simply. "My door's always open if that changes."
Reid nodded, something almost grateful in the quick, unguarded look he gave Hotch before retreating back toward his room and Hotch let him go, filing the exchange away along with all the others, waiting for the moment when whatever this was would finally get too heavy to keep carrying alone.
They finally caught the unsub on the fourth day, a good clean arrest with no one hurt, the three children recovered and reunited eventually with the mother who'd spent eight months searching for them. It should have felt like a win. It mostly did, for everyone except Reid, who delivered his portion of the closing debrief with brittle efficiency and then excused himself before the rest of the team headed out for the customary end-of-case dinner, citing a headache that wasn't entirely a lie.
Hotch let the team go without him, Prentiss gave him a look that said she'd noticed too, and understood exactly why he was staying behind and made his way to Reid's room instead, knocking twice before letting himself in when Reid's voice, muffled and unsteady, told him to come in.
He found Reid sitting on the edge of the bed, still in his day clothes, staring at his phone like it had done something to him. It took Hotch a second to understand what he was looking at: a voicemail notification, the caller ID reading a number Reid clearly hadn't saved a name for, though something about his face said he knew exactly who it belonged to anyway.
"He called," Reid said, before Hotch could ask, his voice flat in the particular way that meant it was costing him everything to keep it that way. "Three days ago. I didn't answer. He left a message today. I haven't listened to it."
Hotch didn't need to ask who he was. He crossed the room and sat down beside Reid, close but not crowding him and waited quietly.
"It's the anniversary," Reid said, after a long silence, still staring at the phone. "Of the day he left. I didn't even consciously register the date until this case started, and then it was just there. Every family we talked to, every kid asking where their dad was. I kept doing the math in my head without meaning to. How old I was. How long it's been. It's been twenty-two years, Hotch. Twenty-two fucking years, and I still…" His voice cracked, and he stopped, jaw working, fighting whatever came next back down.
"You still what?" Hotch asked, gently.
"I still want him to call and actually mean something by it," Reid said, and the words came out raw, stripped of every careful, analytical layer he usually wrapped around anything this close to the centre of himself. "Not like this. Not some voicemail he'll forget he left by next week. I know exactly what I'd be signing up for if I called him back. I know the statistics on estranged parent reconciliation, I know what he is and isn't capable of, God, I've known it since I was ten years old. And I still sat in that conference room today watching some other broken family and wanted, for about half a second, to just be a kid who got his dad back. That's… that's not rational. I know that it's not rational."
"It doesn't have to be rational," Hotch said. "It just has to be true. And it clearly is."
Reid's breath hitched, the careful composure he'd been holding onto for four days finally starting to fray at the seams and Hotch reached over and gently took the phone out of his hand, setting it face-down on the nightstand, out of sight.
"You don't have to decide anything about that voicemail tonight," Hotch said. "Not tonight, not this week. It'll keep. What matters right now is that you've been carrying this alone since Tuesday, and you don't have to, not anymore."
That did it. Whatever miniscule thread that had been holding Reid together finally snapped loose, and he folded forward, face in his hands, shoulders shaking with the kind of crying that came from somewhere much older than four days, twenty-two years of it to be exact that finally given somewhere safe to go. Hotch didn't so much as hesitate as he reached across and drew Reid into his arms, one hand cradling the back of his head, the other firm and steady across his back, and simply held on while the grief worked its way out of him in long, wracking waves.
"I've got you," Hotch murmured, into his hair. "I've got you. You don't have to hold it together in front of me. Not tonight, not ever."
Reid clung to him, fingers twisted into the fabric of his shirt, face pressed to his shoulder and sobbed like something in him had finally been given permission to stop pretending it didn't still hurt. Hotch simply stayed, rocking him slightly, murmuring low reassurances that weren't trying to fix anything, just trying to be present for all of it, the twenty-two years, the voicemail, the half-second want that Reid had clearly spent his whole adult life being utterly ashamed of.
"It's not weak to still want that," Hotch said, once the worst of it had eased into smaller, quieter aftershocks. "Wanting a parent to show up for you isn't a character flaw, Spencer. It's one of the most human things there is. You don't have to apologise for still feeling it, all these years later."
"It just feels so stupid," Reid mumbled into his shoulder, voice tight with emotion and small. "I'm thirty years old. I have a career, a team, people who care about me, I shouldn't still need this."
"Need isn't something you age out of," Hotch murmured, "It just finds new shapes and there's nothing stupid about grieving something you never fully got to have."
Reid was quiet for a long moment, breathing slowly evening out, still held loosely in the circle of Hotch's arms. When he finally spoke again, his voice had dropped into something smaller, rawer, stripped of the last of its guard.
"Thank you for staying," he whispered. "For not making me say it first. I don't think I could have, if you hadn't come in here. Thank you, daddy."
The word came easily now, unremarkable in its own way after months of it no longer so much of a slip anymore so much as simply the name that fit, the one that had settled into place somewhere between all the nightmares and fevers and quiet hotel room nights where Hotch had shown up without being asked twice. Hotch felt it land the way he always did, warm and steady in his chest and pressed a kiss to the crown of Reid's head without a flicker of hesitation.
"You're more than welcome," he said. "I meant it the first time I said it and I mean it every time since. I'm not going anywhere, Spencer. Not tonight and not twenty-two years from now, either."
They stayed like that a long while, neither of them in any hurry to move, the room quiet except for the occasional hum of the air conditioning and the muffled sound of traffic outside. Eventually Reid's crying eased into something closer to exhausted stillness and Hotch coaxed him gently out of his day clothes and into something softer to sleep in, the same unhurried, practiced care he'd brought to every version of this over the past several months.
"I don't think I want to be alone tonight," Reid admitted quietly, once he was settled back against the pillows, looking younger and more unguarded than Hotch had seen him in days. "Is that… can you stay with me? Just until I fall asleep, at least."
"I was already planning on it," Hotch said already pulling the room's spare chair close to the bed the way he had a dozen times before, settling in with no intention of leaving before morning.
Reid reached for his hand and Hotch let him take it, thumb tracing slow, absent circles against his knuckles while Reid's breathing gradually slowed toward sleep.
"Hotch?"
"Yeah."
"I think I might actually listen to the voicemail. Eventually. Not tonight. But eventually." Reid's eyes were nearly closed, voice heavy with the pull of sleep finally catching up to him. "I don't know what I'll do about it. But I think I want to at least know what he said."
"Whenever you're ready," Hotch said. "And whatever you decide to do about it, I'll be here either way. That's not conditional on what's in that message."
"I know," Reid murmured, and for the first time since Tuesday, he actually sounded like he believed it. "That's kind of the whole reason I can even think about listening to it at all. Because I know I'm not doing it alone."
"You're not," Hotch said. "You haven't been, for a while now. I don't think you have to keep being surprised by that."
Reid huffed something that was almost a laugh, soft and worn thin but real. "Give me time. Twenty-two years is a long habit to break."
"Take all the time you need," Hotch said. "I'm not going anywhere."
He kept his word. Reid fell asleep within the quarter hour, hand slack but still loosely curled around Hotch's fingers, breathing slow and even in a way it hadn't been in days. Hotch stayed in the chair long after, watching the rise and fall of his chest, thinking about all the small, cumulative ways a person could be shown, over months and years, that they were worth staying for, how none of it happened in one grand gesture, but in a hundred small ones instead. A hand on a shoulder in a hallway. Tea brought up from a lobby. A story invented on the spot to ease someone toward sleep. A hallway conversation that didn't push, because pushing wasn't what was needed yet.
And now this, a voicemail left un-listened, a wound twenty-two years old finally given room to breathe and a word that no longer came with an apology attached to it because somewhere in the last several months it had simply become true.
In the morning, when Reid woke, the phone was still there on the nightstand, message un-listened, but for the first time in four days his face didn't look like a door barred shut against something trying to get in. He looked, instead, like someone who had finally set a weight down long enough to rest, not gone, not solved, but no longer carried alone.
"Morning," Hotch said from the chair, where he'd stayed since first light, watching him slowly awaken.
"Morning," Reid echoed reaching for his hand again before he was even fully upright, like it had simply become the most natural thing in the world to do. "Thank you. For last night. For staying."
"Anytime," Hotch said, and meant it exactly as much as he had every other time he'd said it. "That's not going to change."
Reid nodded, something settled and certain in his face that hadn't been there in days, and for a little while longer, neither of them moved to start the morning, content instead to simply sit together in the quiet, ordinary proof that some kinds of absence could, eventually, be filled by someone choosing, again and again, to stay.