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The case had gone sideways in the last twenty minutes, the way the worst ones sometimes did, not because the profile was wrong but because the unsub moved faster than any of them expected, and by the time they breached the house, the six-year-old boy they'd spent four days searching for was already gone. Hotch had been the one to find him. He didn't tell the team what that had looked like, and nobody asked.
The unsub hadn't gone quietly, either. He'd come at Reid with a length of pipe the second the team cleared the back room, and even though Morgan had him down in seconds, Reid took a glancing hit to the shoulder and forearm hard enough to leave him grey faced and favouring his arm for the rest of the scene, insisting through gritted teeth that he was fine, that it wasn't broken, that he didn't need the paramedics fussing over him when there was still a scene to process.
By the time they made it back to the precinct that evening, the whole team was moving through the debrief like it was underwater, flat voices, short sentences, everyone privately carrying some version of the same weight. Hotch delivered his portion of the closing report with brutal efficiency and then shut himself in the borrowed office they'd been using all week, the door not quite slamming, but closing hard enough that no one followed him in.
Reid knocked almost an hour later, when the bullpen had mostly emptied and his arm had stiffened into something that ached with every movement, worse than he wanted to admit even to himself. He knocked softly, let himself in when there was no answer and found Hotch standing at the window with his back to the door, shoulders rigid, a stillness to him that Reid recognised distantly, as the particular kind of controlled that meant something underneath it was anything but.
"Hey," Reid said quietly. "I know today was tough, I just wanted to check on you. And maybe…" He hesitated, cradling his bad arm slightly against his chest, an old habit reasserting itself despite months of unlearning it. "I could use an ice pack, if there's one around. My arm's worse than I let on out there."
Hotch didn't turn around. "I'm fine. Go get it looked at by the paramedics if it's that bad."
The words came out flat, tone clipped, nothing like the voice Reid had grown used to over the last several months. There was no warmth in it at all, none of the steadiness that usually met him whenever he came looking for it. Reid faltered, caught off guard by the wall of it.
"I don't need the paramedics, I just…" He tried again, softer. "I wanted to sit with you for a bit. You don't have to talk about it. I just didn't want you to be alone with today."
"I need you to leave, Reid." Hotch's voice was tight, controlled and something underneath it that Reid, even hurt and thrown as he was, could recognize as grief straining at its own leash but it didn't land that way in the moment. In the moment it just landed like a door shutting, sudden and absolute, the first one that had shut on him in longer than he could easily remember.
"Oh okay," Reid said, very quietly, and the single syllable carried more hurt in it than a longer sentence would have. "Sorry. I'll…" He didn't finish the sentence. He simply left, closing the door behind him with more care than it had been closed on him and Hotch didn't call him back.
Reid went back to the hotel alone.
He didn't call anyone. He didn't ice the arm properly, just wrapped it clumsily in a towel from the bathroom and lay on top of the covers in the dark, staring at the ceiling, running the exchange over and over the way he did with everything, searching for what he'd done wrong, what he should have read differently, what version of himself might have been allowed to stay in that room. Old patterns, worn smooth from years of practice, reasserted themselves with unsettling ease, the reflex to make himself smaller, to assume the rejection was earned, to decide that whatever this had been for the last several months, tonight had apparently been the exception that revealed the rule.
He didn't cry. He was simply too tired, too hollowed out by the case and the ache in his arm and the specific, quiet devastation of having reached for something and found nothing there to catch him, for the first time in a long while. He just lay in the dark, alone, the way he'd spent most nights alone for most of his life before any of this had started and told himself it made sense that it hadn't lasted.
Hotch had stood at that window for a long time after the door closed.
It took longer than it should have, longer than he'd be proud of later, when he made himself look at it honestly, for the weight of what he'd just done to fully register. He'd been so far inside his own grief, so consumed by the small, still body he hadn't been fast enough to save, that Reid's voice asking for an ice pack had barely registered as a person standing in front of him at all, let alone the specific person who had spent the better part of a year slowly, carefully learning that it was safe to ask him for anything.
‘I need you to leave.’
He heard it again, in his own voice, and felt something in his chest go cold with recognition. Reid hadn't asked for much. He'd asked for an ice pack and a few minutes of company after getting hit hard enough to leave bruising, on a day that had already taken enough from both of them and Hotch had answered that request by shutting a door on him, the exact door Reid had spent months learning wouldn't ever close, not on the good days, not on the bad ones.
He thought about all the nights he'd told Reid, in one form or another, ‘you don't have to earn this space with me.’ He thought about how it must have sounded, coming back around now, aimed the opposite direction, as though the promise had an asterisk on it after all, one that activated the moment Hotch himself had something too heavy to carry.
He left the office within the minute, taking the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator and didn't stop moving until he was standing outside Reid's hotel room door.
Reid opened it slower than usual, wary in a way he hadn't been in months, the towel-wrapped ice still pressed clumsily to his forearm and something in Hotch's chest cracked clean open at the sight of it, the careful, guarded distance in Reid's expression, so different from the easy trust that usually greeted him.
"Can I come in?" Hotch asked. His voice wasn't steady and he didn't try to make it sound like it was.
Reid hesitated, just for a moment and that hesitation hurt more than anything Hotch had felt all day, more than the boy in the house, more than any of it because it was his own doing, freshly made, sitting right there in the doorway between them.
"Yeah," Reid said finally, stepping back to let him in.
Hotch didn't waste time. The second the door closed behind him he turned, "I'm sorry. What I did tonight, what I said to you, Reid that was wrong and it had nothing to do with you and I let it land on you anyway. I need you to know that."
Reid looked at him, careful, still guarded. "You don't have to…"
"I do have to," Hotch said, firmer now, cutting gently through the same deflection Reid had used a hundred times before to spare other people the trouble of his own feelings. "You came to me hurt, after a case that gutted both of us, and asked for almost nothing, you wanted an ice pack and a few minutes of my time and I shut a door on you instead. That's not the kind of thing I get to just let sit until you decide it's forgivable. I need to actually say it. I'm sorry, Spencer. That was never supposed to happen to you. Not from me."
Something in Reid's careful composure wavered, the guardedness cracking just slightly at the plain, unhedged apology. "I thought I did something," he admitted, quiet and small as he crossed the room and perched on the edge of the bed. "I kept trying to figure out what I said wrong."
"You didn't do anything wrong." Hotch moved across the room to sit beside him, close but leaving room for Reid to decide how close he wanted this to be. "I lost that boy today and I let it swallow everything else, including you, and that's on me, not on anything you did or asked for. You deserved better than a closed door tonight. I should have found a way to tell you I needed a minute instead of pushing you out entirely."
Reid was quiet for a long moment, turning it over, and then, slowly, some of the tension eased out of his shoulders, not fully, not yet, but enough that he let the ice pack drop into his lap and turned his uninjured side more fully toward Hotch.
"I know today was awful for you too," Reid said quietly. "I wasn't trying to make it about me."
"You weren't," Hotch said. "You were trying to make sure neither of us was alone with it. That's exactly what you should have done, and exactly what I should have let you do." He reached out, carefully, and took Reid's injured arm in his hands, eyes scanning and hands gently palpating over the bruising already darkening along the forearm. "Let me actually look at this. Properly, this time."
Reid let him, wincing slightly as Hotch peeled back the damp towel and examined the bruise with careful, practiced hands there was nothing broken, he judged, but it was ugly and tender, the kind of thing that would ache for a week. He got a proper ice pack from the small hotel freezer, wrapped it in a clean cloth this time, and pressed it gently against the worst of the bruising, sitting close enough now that their shoulders touched.
"I'm sorry," Hotch said again, quieter this time, meaning it all the way down. "For tonight, and for making you doubt, even for an hour, that this was conditional. It's not. It was never supposed to be."
Reid leaned into him, slowly almost as though he was testing it and when Hotch's arm came around him without hesitation, all the careful distance from the doorway finally gave way. "I was scared it was over," Reid admitted, voice muffled against his shoulder. "That I'd finally asked for too much."
"You could never ask for too much," Hotch said, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. "Not tonight, not any night. I'm the one who got it wrong and I'm not going to let one bad hour undo what we've built. I promise you that."
Reid was quiet for a while, letting the ice do its work, letting himself be held and slowly the guardedness that had crept back into him over the last few hours began to loosen, replaced by the same steady trust that had taken months to build and apparently, only a handful of hours to shake.
"Thank you," he said eventually, "for coming to fix it instead of just letting it sit until tomorrow."
"I couldn't have let it sit," Hotch said simply. "Not once I realised what I'd done. You matter too much for me to let a bad moment go unrepaired, Spencer. That's not how I want this to work, ever."
Reid nodded, something loosening fully in his chest now, and turned his face further into Hotch's shoulder, breathing slow and even for the first time since the office door had closed on him. "Thank you, daddy," he murmured softly, the word arriving the way it always did now when he meant something with his whole chest and had no better way to say it.
Hotch's arms tightened around him, warm and certain. "You're welcome," he said. "I'm sorry I made you doubt it, even for a night. I won't let that happen again."
They stayed like that a long while, the hotel room quiet around them, the case's ugliness slowly loosening its grip on both of them in the presence of the other. Eventually Hotch coaxed him into lying down properly, arm elevated on a spare pillow, ice reapplied at careful intervals and settled into the chair beside the bed the way he had so many times before proof, offered again and freshly, that tonight's rupture hadn't undone any of the months that came before it.
"I don't want today to be the thing you remember, when you think about tonight," Hotch said quietly, once Reid's eyes had started to grow heavy. "I want you to remember this part instead. That I came back. That daddy will always come back."
"I will," Reid murmured, already half toward sleep, his good hand finding Hotch's and holding on. "I already do."