#is clooney hotch's therapy dog? yeah maybe

[masterwords]

a life spills into the flowers

Summary: After the events of "Mr. Scratch", Hotch can't find his keys. It's got him a little messed up.

Pairing: Hotch/Morgan (established, and it's only relevant at the very end because I live in a world where they're just together and that's that.)

Warnings: mind-controlling substances, panic, vomit, swearing, canon-typical stuff...if you've seen the Mr. Scratch episode you won't be surprised

Words: 2.5k

Notes: I don't know...I was going to save this for Whumptober or something but it's rambly and I sort of just wanted to post it now. I started thinking about how Peter Lewis took Hotch's weapons and he took his vest off, and Hotch was in that house for a long time semi-conscious...so of course his car keys would be missing and that might make him panic a bit. Anyway, I wrote this all in about an hour, it's just a rambly thing because I can't seem to write anything decent lately but I needed to do something with this idea.

Read on AO3: a life spills into the flowers

**

On knees that wobble like jello he wanders toward the house. Wind is whipping through the trees, whistling strange hymns through well-maintained gutters and over the silken petals of bright pink roses. He is acutely aware of each breath of wind as it gusts over his sweaty brow, each fleck of red and blue light that flickers and screams silent fury into the night sky.

“I need to find my keys,” he mumbles to JJ who is following, hasn't stopped following him since he stepped out of the ambulance with a headache that pounds like a jackhammer with each throb of his pulse. She's right on his heels.

“We can have it towed, Hotch, figure it out in the morning. You need to get home.”

He won't listen, though. Everything is so out of control, the entire scene his fault, and the only thing he can grasp with any firmness is this: his SUV keys are missing. On the front seat, all of his papers have been rifled through, his wallet is right there with his ID front and center, and he's in no frame of mind to take inventory though he's fairly certain nothing is missing. Peter Lewis wouldn't take anything, he would simply record it. Write it down, take a photo, doesn't matter. If he took it, they would know and have a lead, have an idea. This way...there is no way to track what isn't gone.

Except his damn keys. “Maybe Peter Lewis had them,” she says, speeding up to keep pace with his wobbly off-kilter stumbling through the yard and up to the front door. “Hotch, I'll call Derek and see if they find your keys on Lewis when they book him.”

He doesn't respond and she doesn't wait for it, she just makes the call while he enters the house. It's almost the same now as it was when he did it the first time, except he's not holding his gun now, his fists hang at his sides useless and trembling. Reid and Rossi have already gone back to Quantico, Morgan went with the Police as they took Lewis into custody, and JJ...well she said she'd drive Hotch home, but now they're stuck with no keys to the SUV. She's not nearly as concerned as he is.

“Hotch,” she called a minute later while he's arguing with an officer about looking under Dr. Regan's desk. That's where his gun had been, one of them anyway, after the fight and he suspects maybe the keys...

“Hotch, Will said he'd come pick us up. Come on. Let the officers do their jobs. They'll find the keys.”

His eyes are frantic and filled with tears, she can't stand seeing him this way. There is some part of her that wants to pull him in for a hug, tell him she'll help him find the keys because she knows...it isn't really about the keys. He's coming down from whatever drugs he was pumped full of and every bit of reality that seeps in brings more pain and more questions than answers. He was vulnerable for hours, at the mercy of a psychopath, and he has no real memory of it. She can see it all in the tears, but if she gives in now she might do more harm than good. “Come on,” she said, touching his forearm, his sweaty bloody shirt. “Let's go sit outside and wait for Will.”

It's going to be an hour, at least. Even if Will puts on his lights. “You want to walk?” It's a silly question to ask a man who looks like he's barely standing, but he doesn't look like he wants to sit down either. “There's a path through the estate over here. Guess this place has a nice rose garden.” He doesn't answer, he just follows her.

The roses almost glow under the moonlight. He knows they're pink, but they're more than that. They're breathing pulpy red and they're crying neon blue and they're bruise purple, all the same colors as he is. And then those deep green leaves cascade black like pools of blood in the moonlight. He can't stop thinking about his keys. No matter what path his mind tries to take him down it never winds far enough away from that one thought. Where are my keys? The keys mean freedom, they mean home. Without them he's trapped here.

JJ knows she should use this opportunity to ask him questions and she has the time. It feels wrong, the way his skin is pale and gray and sweaty, the way his hands shake, to put him through more but he would insist if it were anyone else. Insist that now was the time. When clarity was seeping in, when adrenaline was fading. “I know you talked to Rossi in the ambulance,” she started, pausing to peer into a wide open rose. “Is there anything else you can remember? Do you want to talk?”

“No,” he whispered back, his legs coming to a full stop. He blinks back the tears and rubs his fingers against his burning eyes. Whatever Lewis sprayed him with made his eyes hurt, they were dry and burned like fire beneath salty tears. “I don't know. JJ, I don't know if anything I say is true.”

“Let me figure that out. Why don't you just tell me things. Anything you want. Empty it out.”

He lets out a chuckle and wipes more tears from his lashes. “It's funny. The way they described it in the interrogation room...it sounded like Lewis put the ideas in their heads. But that isn't...it's not...they were all my ideas. I think he just asked me questions knowing I couldn't lie to him.”

She couldn't hide her frown. “What do you mean he asked you things?”

“Like,” he stares vaguely into some distance but he isn't looking at anything she can see. His trembling hand reaches up and wipes the sweat from his forehead. “A therapist. He asked me about my life. He asked me if anything...” he can't finish the sentence. He can't tell JJ about Roy, but that's new, he couldn't remember that when he was talking to Rossi. Lewis asked him about recent problems he's been having. “Any problems at home?” It was so casual, like he had a right to know.

He told Lewis all about Roy and his dementia. He told him about the things that Roy said, and suddenly Roy was standing there in front of him with a gun aimed at his forehead. You took my baby girl from me. I gave her to you, and you promised to protect her and you lied. Roy's gun was cold against his forehead, smashed there, he could feel it. You killed her.

“He didn't make me see things. I did that. He just listened.” The revelation comes with wide eyes sparkling in the night. “He guided me through the images.” Before he can say anything else, he feels the cold of that gun again and drops to his knees, dry heaving painfully into the perfectly manicured grass. JJ stays back, she wants to touch him, to comfort him, but he's trembling like a scared animal and she isn't sure she can trust him yet.

He's not himself.

“Can you tell me what you told him?”

“No.” He can, but he won't. “It doesn't matter. He's in custody,” he gasps around wretches and pulls himself up to sitting, hands planted flat against his thighs. “I didn't hurt anyone. His plan didn't work.” He's not so sure about that, but he needs JJ to believe it. He needs her to stop asking questions. You don't know what I did to him...I win. She can't let that go, can't stop thinking about it. It was what made her stay behind with him, why Derek asked that it be her...they didn't want to tell anyone else what Lewis said or how it had scared them.

He thinks about Roy and the gun, about what Roy said to him over pizza just nights before and what the ghost of Roy told him with a gun to his head. Roy's eyes, so full of fury and hate, and he's not surprised to find that he wishes it hadn't just been a mirage. If that gun had been real, if Roy had the nerve to do what he wanted to do...

Derek walks up behind them and places his hand on Hotch's back, right between his shoulder blades, startling them both. “Hey,” he says, crouching. “Found your keys. They were in the bag with his personal belongings. Swears he has no idea how they got there. Dude's a lying sack of shit. You ready to get outta here?”

JJ looks at Derek warily and makes a face, a sort of back off he's being a little weird face, and Derek drags his hand up and down the ridges of Hotch's spine in defiance. He's not worried, he's pretty sure he could take Hotch in his prime and this is definitely not his prime. “Jessica said she'd stay with Jack tonight, Will just pulled up to get JJ...come on. You're stuck with me.”

They ride home in silence. It's a long ride with only the purr of the engine and the roar of the tires turning over slick rainy asphalt. Hotch rests his temple against the cool glass window, lets his eyes close and sees Roy who becomes Sean in a faded blue jumper blaming him for not getting him out of his charges, getting his sentence reduced. I'll die in here and it'll be your fault, Sean said to him and it freezes his veins to ice. My best years behind bars because you care more about your job than my life. My brother's a FED, you know what they're gonna do to me? Sean wouldn't say that, it's only his guilty conscience, he knows that. Probably why that one faded so quickly, even Peter Lewis could see through it. But Roy, that one stuck. That one came back, and when Roy became Jack but the words were the same...you killed her, it's your fault she's dead...he figured it out. That was when he realized how in control of these visions he was, even under the influence. He'd allowed Roy, but he wouldn't allow Jack to be part of the game.

“I forced myself to see you guys,” he whispers, his lips barely moving. His stomach flops, and he thinks he's going to be sick again. “When I realized what he was doing. I knew what he wanted...and I thought about the victim who killed himself instead of his child...and I...” Made myself see you guys? See you all be killed one by one? It sounds awful, and he's not sure how to say it so that it sounds any less terrible than it is. But he watched that bullet sink right into Derek's throat, tasted his blood, he saw it all and couldn't shake it.

“I knew it,” came Derek's reply, one hand fluttering like raven wings away from the steering wheel and coming to roost on Hotch's thigh. “I knew you figured it out. Rossi's story, it didn't make any sense. Why would us dying be your worst fear? Your deepest fear? Nah, I knew there was more to it...”

“I am afraid of that,” Hotch counters, quieter, almost too quiet for Derek to hear over the white noise of the car. Defensive and breathy. Still hovering so close to tears. “I'm always afraid that I'll make a mistake and it'll cost one of you your lives. It wouldn't be the first time. Roy said it himself. I make a mistake, people die. It was an easy fear to conjure...”

“Yeah, but,” Derek starts, but he's well aware that he's treading in dangerous waters and he stops. He squeezes Hotch's thigh instead. “I get it.” He does. He does get it, he'll never stop blaming himself for what happened to Haley. It was on his watch, not Hotch's, no matter what anyone tries to tell him. They don't talk about it.

Derek's street is dark, the lamps pale and muddled by overgrown oak trees. It's quiet, serene, none of the city sounds dare step into this peace. The shadows melt and move and shift beneath his feet and Hotch is mesmerized as his shadow slides like oil slick into the shadow of a tree and for a brief moment they are one. “You hungry?” Derek asks in a casual tone, as if this is a social call. As if it's date night. “I'm starving.”

He's not sure if he's hungry or if he could eat, he just follows Derek up the steps to his door and slides inside with uneasy steps. Clooney meets them at the door and Hotch crouches right away, just drops to his knees and wraps his arms around Clooney's neck and scratches behind his floppy old dog ears. There are tears in Clooney's fur, it sticks to his cheeks. Clooney moves slow these days, he's old and arthritic but he still likes to trot along beside Derek every morning before they eat breakfast, he still makes sure to greet Derek every time he comes home with his tail whacking the wood floor loud and thumpy. Hotch and Clooney's relationship is something Derek hasn't ever really understood but he leaves them to it and heads right for the kitchen. They know what they're doing. So does he.

He needs a beer and some food. When he's finished slapping together a quick sandwich and popping the top off of his second bottle of beer (the first went down a little too easy after the day he had), he makes his way out to the front room to find Hotch and Clooney sleeping on the couch. Hotch, still in his clothes, arms folded tight across his chest and hands tucked in tight. His feet still in shoes hang off the end of the couch (always polite), and Clooney snores curled up behind his knees.

It's a sight. One he's still not tired of, even after all this time.

He turns on the TV and kicks his feet up on the coffee table, eating his midnight dinner all alone to the quiet jokes and explosions of M*A*S*H

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour...” Derek says under his breath, raising his bottle to the television. He knows the quiet of this moment isn't likely to last, but the frosty foam of the beer in his bottle is worth savoring.

#aaron hotchner #derek morgan #jennifer jj jareau #criminal minds #hotchgan #criminal minds fanfiction #clooney the dog #is clooney hotch's therapy dog? yeah maybe