Work Text:
It was a Tuesday which was, Reid thought, almost insulting in its ordinariness. Nothing about the day had earned the mood that had settled over him there was no case, no anniversary, no phone call from a number he recognised and dreaded. Just a slow afternoon at his desk, paperwork instead of fieldwork and somewhere around three o'clock a quiet, familiar heaviness had crept in and set up residence behind his sternum without any invitation at all.
He recognised it for what it was faster than he used to. That at least, felt like progress as six months ago, he'd have spent the whole evening telling himself it was nothing, working late instead of going home, letting it curdle into something worse by midnight before finally admitting defeat. Now he caught it earlier, the too-quiet apartment waiting for him, the particular flavour of loneliness that didn't need a trigger so much as an opening, and the small, stubborn voice in him that still wanted to grit through it alone rather than ask for anything.
He looked at his phone for a long time before he did anything about it.
‘Not an emergency,’ he typed, then deleted it, then typed again. ‘This is going to sound stupid, but I'm having kind of a low afternoon and I don't really know why. I don't need you to do anything. I just wanted to say something before it turned into me not answering my phone for two days.’
His thumb hovered over send for longer than the message probably warranted. It felt almost worse, somehow, to ask for something when nothing was actually wrong when there was no fever, no nightmare, no unsub, no father's voicemail sitting un-listened on his phone. Just an ordinary Tuesday and a feeling he couldn't fully account for, which made it feel less legitimate, like he was asking for something he hadn't properly earned.
He sent it anyway.
Hotch's reply came back in under two minutes.
‘Not stupid. Thank you for telling me before it got worse. Are you home yet?’
‘Not yet. Leaving now.’
‘Come to mine instead of going back to an empty apartment. Jacks got a sleepover tonight, so it'll just be us. I'll order food.’
Reid read it twice, something in his chest slowly loosening at the plain, uncomplicated ease of it, there had been no interrogation, no what's actually wrong, just an open door. He typed back a simple ‘okay’ before he could talk himself out of it, and felt, for the first time in hours, like the day had a shape to it again instead of just a slow, formless slide toward something worse.
Hotch's house looked the way it always did in early evening, lived-in, a little cluttered with the ordinary debris of a household that included a nine-year-old, a stack of mail on the counter Hotch clearly hadn't gotten to yet. He opened the door before Reid had finished knocking, and something in his face when he saw him was so plainly, uncomplicatedly glad that Reid felt the last of his hesitation about coming at all quietly dissolve.
"Hey," Hotch said, stepping back to let him in. "I mean it. I'm glad you messaged."
"It's not, I don't even really know what's wrong," Reid admitted, toeing off his shoes in the entryway with the easy familiarity of someone who'd done it enough times now not to think about it. "Nothing specific happened. I just felt bad and I didn't want to sit with it by myself again."
"That's a perfectly good reason," Hotch said, and there was no doubt in it at all, no qualifier that made Reid feel like he needed to justify himself further. "You don't need a case file's worth of evidence to ask for company, Spencer. A bad feeling is enough."
Something about hearing it stated so plainly ‘a bad feeling is enough’ settled something in Reid that had been unsettled since three o'clock. He followed Hotch into the kitchen, where the mail sat waiting and a pot of coffee had already gone half-drunk and let himself simply exist in the ordinary noise of it, cupboards opening and closing, the low murmur of a baseball game playing quietly on the kitchen radio, the particular, unremarkable comfort of being somewhere he was wanted without having to be in crisis to earn it.
"Sit," Hotch said, nodding at the kitchen table. "I'm ordering Thai. You still hate the pad see ew here or have you finally come around?"
"It's objectively too sweet," Reid said, settling into the chair, some of the day's heaviness already easing at the sheer normalcy of being teased about noodles. "I stand by that."
"Noted. Getting it anyway, out of spite."
That won a real laugh out of him small, but real and Hotch's mouth curved upwards in response as he tapped through the order on his phone, entirely at ease, like there was nowhere in the world he'd rather be spending a Tuesday evening than exactly here, doing exactly this.
They ate at the kitchen table, easy and unstructured, Hotch filling him in on Jack's latest obsession which was a video game involving considerably more building and considerably less shooting than Hotch had initially feared and Reid found himself relaxing by slowly, the heaviness from earlier fading into something more like ordinary tiredness, manageable, survivable, no longer threatening to swallow the whole evening whole.
"Thank you for this," Reid said, once the containers were mostly empty and the kitchen had gone quiet again except for the soft murmur of the radio. "For not making me explain myself. I think that's usually the part that stops me from saying anything at all, feeling like I need a good enough reason."
"You never need a good enough reason," Hotch said, leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, watching him with the kind of steady, unhurried attention that had become, over the months, one of the most reliable things in Reid's life. "That's not how this works. I'd rather you text me on an ordinary Tuesday because you feel a little off than wait until it's a crisis and I'm driving across town at two in the morning. Both are fine. But this…" he gestured, faintly, at the two of them, the empty containers, the ordinary evening "this is better."
Reid looked down at his hands for a moment, turning that over. "I think I'm still getting used to the idea that I'm allowed to reach out for something small. It's always felt like I needed to save it for the big things. Otherwise I'm just taking up space that I haven't earned."
"You don't have to earn space with me, Spencer." Hotch said it plainly, without any drama attached, the same way he said most things that mattered most. "You've had that space for a long time now. I'd like you to start believing that applies on the ordinary days too, not just the ones that fall apart."
Something in Reid's chest went warm and a little unsteady at that, the particular ache of being told something true that he hadn't fully let himself believe yet. He got up, without quite deciding to and came around the table, and Hotch turned in his chair to meet him, arms opening easily, no hesitation in it at all anymore not after all these months.
Reid folded into the embrace, resting his head against Hotch's shoulder while Hotch gently pulled him down so that he was sitting sideways in the older man’s lap. Hotch’s arms settled around him, one hand coming to rest, warm and steady, against his back.
"I don't know why today hit like this," Reid admitted quietly. "Nothing happened. That's what makes it feel so unearned."
"Bad days don't need a reason," Hotch said, voice low, one hand moving in slow, familiar circles against his back. "Sometimes they're just weather. You don't owe anyone an explanation for the weather, Spencer."
Reid huffed something close to a laugh, muffled against his shoulder, and let himself simply stay there a while, held, unhurried, the ordinary hum of the kitchen radio filling the quiet around them.
"Thank you, daddy," he murmured, the word arriving as easily now as any other, no catch in it, no apology trailing behind it. It had stopped being something that slipped out of him months ago, now it simply came when it was true, on ordinary Tuesdays as readily as on the worst nights, because that was, in the end, what it had always actually meant.
"You're welcome," Hotch said, pressing a kiss to the top of his head, unbothered and warm as ever. "Anytime you need me. Big days or small ones. I'd rather have both."
They ended up on the couch afterward, some old movie playing that neither of them was really watching, Reid snuggled against Hotch's side with his feet drawn up beneath him, more relaxed than he'd been all day. At some point Hotch's phone buzzed with a text from Jack's sleepover, a picture of him and two friends mid-laugh over some elaborate blanket fort and Hotch turned the screen toward Reid without thinking twice about it, the same easy gesture he might have made toward anyone who belonged in that part of his life.
"He'd like you, you know," Hotch said, watching Reid's face as he looked at the photo. "Properly, I mean. Not just as 'one of Dad's coworkers.' I think it's about time the two of you actually got to know each other outside of a case debrief."
Reid looked up at him, something careful and hopeful crossing his face in equal measure. "You'd want that?"
"I've wanted that for a while," Hotch admitted. "I just didn't want to push you into something before you were ready for it. But I don't think either of us is quite so uncertain about all this anymore."
Reid was quiet for a moment, turning the offer over the way he turned over everything important, testing it gently for its edges. "I'd like that," he said finally, voice soft but sure. "I'd really like that."
"Then we'll figure out a weekend," Hotch said, simply, like it was already decided, already real not some far-off hypothetical but the next natural step in something that had been quietly, steadily building for months. "Nothing dramatic. Pizza, maybe a movie he picks badly. You'll hate it. It'll be good for you."
Reid laughed, a real one this time, easy and unguarded and settled back against Hotch's side, warm and unhurried, the last of the day's heaviness finally, fully gone.
"Okay," he said. "Pizza and a bad movie. I think I can survive that."
"High praise," Hotch said, and pressed another kiss, absent and easy, to the crown of his head, already thinking ahead, not to the next crisis, not to the next bad night, but simply to an ordinary Saturday with his two favourite people at a kitchen table, nothing more complicated than that.