Serenity Swallowed [FanFic]
Title: Serenity Swallowed
Author: Tooks
Pairing: Hotch/Reid, Ethan
Rating: FRAO
Summary: In his desperate attempts to sleep Hotch both worries and angers Reid.
Notes: This is AU but there are Season 5 spoilers!! Piece 14 of my "Breaking the Bonds" series that occurs the morning after the last piece. There's cursing and some throwing up in this one and, as always, angst. Ethan was Reid's friend from Season 2's "Jones" and, apparently, he's sticking around in this series, haha!
Reid awoke in an empty bed and sighed. He wasn’t surprised not to find Hotch beside him, but he had a bad feeling that the man wasn’t going to simply be dozing on the couch. Things had gone too strangely last night and seemingly ended far to well for it to truly be the end of it. He pulled himself up to into a sitting position and found some pants and a shirt to toss on before heading out.
Hotch was on the couch, still in his underclothes with one leg dangling off and onto the floor and two empty bottles of booze out on the coffee table. Not a surprise. Not even a concern somehow. It wasn’t until the open cabinet door over the stove in the kitchen caught his eye that Reid grew worried. Worried to panicked.
“Oh, god, you didn’t,” he muttered as he ran past Hotch to it. “What did you take, Aaron? What did you take?” The younger man tore through the cabinet that held his supply of meds…everything from Tylenol and cough medicine to extras of his mother’s medicines just in case she were ever to visit and forget the meds herself.
A quick dash to his room for his cell, calling to Hotch to wake up and only getting a drowsy groan as he did, and Reid returned to the kitchen to line up the bottles so he could examine each as he speed-dialed.
“Pick up, pick up,” Reid muttered into the phone before exclaiming, “Pick up you drunken ass!”
As if on cue the phone clicked to life on the other end. “Too early,” a voice on the other end croaked out.
“Ethan, wake up!” Reid yelled in a panic.
The man on the line sat up at the tone. The last time his friend had this tone was…god, he couldn’t even remember. “What’s wrong?”
“Hotch…Aaron…he took something, I think.”
“What?”
Reid’s heart was slamming against his chest and he left short of breath, like he’d have a panic attack at any moment. This was all his fault. Hotch had come to him for help, to talk, and instead he’s allowed his own desires to get the better of him. “I don’t, I don’t know, Ethan! Soomething!”
“Call 911, I’m on my way.”
“I can’t!”
Ethan was already up grabbing the nearest clothing available. “What?”
“Call 911.”
“Why not?”
“You know.”
Hotch could lose his job. He could lose his son. The last things that made his life worth living for. After all this wasn’t a suicide attempt, just a new way to relapse because the drug of choice wasn’t an option. Right?
“Look, just try to get him up and talking. Moving, if you can. I’ll be right over.”
Ethan was worried, but not in the at least bit surprised or panicked. Aaron was a mess when he saw the man and there were hours between then and now…hours for the tightly wound man to unravel in a number of fantastic ways. He was just relieved it hadn’t been in an aggressive way towards Spencer.
Reid hung up and headed back out to Hotch. “Hotch?” he bent down and shook the man by the shoulder, “Aaron, wake up. Wake up!”
Aaron’s mouth opened and spilled out words Reid could barely catch. Sleep. Alone. Just. Bit. Then the man’s throat made a gagging noise, but whatever would’ve come up was swallowed back down an a grimace.
Reid got a bucket anyway.
He kept his friend and boss mumbling, groaning, as he went back to the pill bottles. Some pills he eliminated immediately. Hotch would have no reason to take old antibiotics or his mother’s Clozapine. Reid narrowed the field down to the drugstore over-the-counters and his mother’s emergency barbiturates; medicine he only allowed in his place the past year or so and the exact thing he’d nearly taken for himself a few times in his cravings after Haley’s funeral. He’d had one of those little pills in his hand when he last called Ethan.
***
Reid kept Hotch muttering for about twenty minutes before the knock finally came to his door. “Hotch, Ethan’s here.” He doubted the senior agent heard or understood, even with the grumble of a reply, but Spencer wasn’t going to stop talking as he went to get the door.
Ethan slipped inside and glanced over at Aaron in his still half-dead appearance. “You figure out what he took?”
“Um…Seconal, I think.”
“Ah, so he’s not patty-caking around, huh?” Ethan commented simply as he headed over to the other man before looking back at Reid. “Last night didn’t go so well, I take it?”
“I…I don’t know.” It had. Then it didn’t, obviously, and Reid had no idea exactly when the change took place.
Ethan’s brows arched, unsure, but he let the comment go. He knelt down by Hotch’s head and shook him, hard, by the shoulder.
More nonsensical words bubbled up from Aaron before Ethan simply stood up and forced the man to sit up. “Wake up, Aaron!” he barked as he held the man up by the shoulders, shook him a touch. “Come on, open your eyes.”
Aaron heard the voice and, in his muddled mind, vaguely remembered it. He also remembered not liking the man attached to it. “Le’e me alone.”
Ethan turned to Reid, “Get a warm face cloth.”
Reid did as told.
“Wha’d ya take?” Ethan’s attention turned back to the other agent.
Hotch’s eyes opened slowly, with great effort. “Don’t like you.”
Ethan chuckled a touch. “Yeah, well, you sure ain’t my favorite person at the moment either, Aaron.”
His own name hit his ears wrong and suddenly Aaron hunched over and just made the bucket.
“Well, at least the pills came up,” Ethan commented softly to no one in particular.
Reid handed the damp cloth to Ethan upon his return and the man immediately set it to the back of Hotch’s neck.
“I’m fine,” Hotch finally groaned out. The pills flying violently out of his system seemed to snap him back into some kind of normalcy.
“What did you take?” Reid asked more cross than relieved. Knowing Hotch was going to be okay allowed his concern to fade into annoyance, anger even, at the stupidity of the man’s act.
“Just…” Hotch waved a hand off at them both, “a sleeping pill or two. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Really? Even after the three plus bottles of booze?” Ethan smirked out a touch as he called bullshit on the answer.
“Well I wasn’t trying to…” Food and bile retched up Aaron’s throat, but he forced it back down in a hard swallow. “To kill myself.”
“Then what was the goal?” Reid asked as he stood over Hotch.
Part of him wanted to take over Ethan’s current comforting role, to rub Hotch’s back and tell him it would all be okay. That he was forgiven, that everyone made mistakes. The other part couldn’t stand to be as close as he already was to Aaron. He’d had enough of this – of this “I’m sorry…It wasn’t intentional…I just wanted a moment’s peace” – bullshit with his mother and Nathan and Gideon and Amanda’s Adam (or was it Adam’s Amanda?) he didn’t need it from Aaron.
“Told you, to sleep.” Hotchner stubbornly insisted.
Reid glared, snapped bitterly. “You’re better than that.”
It was Ethan that stayed close as Aaron could hold the contents of his stomach no more. Ethan that rubbed the hung-over, drug-laden, back of the vomiting agent. It was Ethan who encouraged the act with a deep, gentle, voice. And it was Ethan that looked up first at Reid’s words.
“Hey Spencer.”
“What?”
“Can we talk in your room?”
Reid looked away, over to Hotch, and took a deep breath before nodding some. “Yeah, okay.”
A few more encouraging words to Aaron, and Aaron replying in muttering something akin to “fuck off”, and Ethan stood up and went with Reid to the bedroom. He shut the door behind them.
“Don’t even start, Ethan, I already know what you’re going to say.” Reid lashed out immediately. “And you know what? I don’t want to hear it.”
Ethan smiled faintly. “Good, saves me the effort of havin’ to explain all the ways this isn’t your fault.”
“Ethan.”
“Reid.”
“I…I did something.” Reid muttered, worry taking the place of his anger as he crossed Ethan to head towards the bed.
“Something?” Ethan’s eyebrows went up, he followed his friend to the bed. “Something’s pretty vague.”
“With Hotch, last night. He…he’d started…it, uh, it’s no excuse, I know and…and he seemed fine and all, but uh…”
“You slept with him?”
“Not exactly.”
Ethan opened his mouth a touch, tucked his tongue into the side of one of his cheeks, and raised his eyebrows a little.
Reid nodded at the signal.
“He was already trashed when he came here, Spencer.”
“Which is why I really should’ve, you know, stopped it. What if…what if he wasn’t, ya know, ready, and I just…that just…”
Ethan moved closer. “The shit people do is theirs, not yours.” He set a hand on his friend’s shoulder with a sigh. “And, honestly, this could’ve still been an accident.”
“How so?” Reid turned hopeful.
“He was already drunk, probably not that clear headed, so maybe Hotch really did just wanna sleep.” It was a stretch to be sure, but Ethan didn’t want Reid beating himself up over this. Over something that he wasn’t responsible for and couldn’t have controlled. “You know addicts, Reid, we think drugs and booze solve everything.”
Reid smiled almost reluctantly at the last bit, knowing it was meant as a joke.
Ethan slipped his arm all the way around Reid’s shoulders and pulled him closer. “Tell you what, I’ll watch Agent Hang-Over and you go grab us all some breakfast.”
“Well, I, uh…I could just make us all some, you know.”
“Nah,” Ethan dug into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a handful of cash. “I don’t want you doing all that work. Use this, grab some stuff from the pancake house down the road.”
“The one we stopped by yesterday?”
“Yeah,” Ethan smiled a little as Reid took the money, “get whatever you think Hotch’ll like.”
“What, uh, what about you?”
“You know what I like, Spencer.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
"Thank you, Ethan."
Ethan shrugged, smirked. "Notta problem. I've dealt with more than my fair share of hung-over folks who don't like me or want me around. What's one more, right?"
Reid gives a small, unsure, laugh.
"Friendship is not for merriment but for stern reproach when friends go astray." ~ Tiruvalluvar
Next Section:
Line in the Circle
Previous Sections:
Diagnosing the Disease
Breaking the Bonds
Shaky Control
Reality of Escape
Ill Judgment
The Memorial Nightmare
Painfully Numb
One Slip
Degrees of Sin
Dirty Clean
Avoid the Unavoidable
Reenact the Act
A Bullet and a Twist: Part 1
A Bullet and a Twist: Part 2
Author: Tooks
Pairing: Hotch/Reid, Ethan
Rating: FRAO
Summary: In his desperate attempts to sleep Hotch both worries and angers Reid.
Notes: This is AU but there are Season 5 spoilers!! Piece 14 of my "Breaking the Bonds" series that occurs the morning after the last piece. There's cursing and some throwing up in this one and, as always, angst. Ethan was Reid's friend from Season 2's "Jones" and, apparently, he's sticking around in this series, haha!
Reid awoke in an empty bed and sighed. He wasn’t surprised not to find Hotch beside him, but he had a bad feeling that the man wasn’t going to simply be dozing on the couch. Things had gone too strangely last night and seemingly ended far to well for it to truly be the end of it. He pulled himself up to into a sitting position and found some pants and a shirt to toss on before heading out.
Hotch was on the couch, still in his underclothes with one leg dangling off and onto the floor and two empty bottles of booze out on the coffee table. Not a surprise. Not even a concern somehow. It wasn’t until the open cabinet door over the stove in the kitchen caught his eye that Reid grew worried. Worried to panicked.
“Oh, god, you didn’t,” he muttered as he ran past Hotch to it. “What did you take, Aaron? What did you take?” The younger man tore through the cabinet that held his supply of meds…everything from Tylenol and cough medicine to extras of his mother’s medicines just in case she were ever to visit and forget the meds herself.
A quick dash to his room for his cell, calling to Hotch to wake up and only getting a drowsy groan as he did, and Reid returned to the kitchen to line up the bottles so he could examine each as he speed-dialed.
“Pick up, pick up,” Reid muttered into the phone before exclaiming, “Pick up you drunken ass!”
As if on cue the phone clicked to life on the other end. “Too early,” a voice on the other end croaked out.
“Ethan, wake up!” Reid yelled in a panic.
The man on the line sat up at the tone. The last time his friend had this tone was…god, he couldn’t even remember. “What’s wrong?”
“Hotch…Aaron…he took something, I think.”
“What?”
Reid’s heart was slamming against his chest and he left short of breath, like he’d have a panic attack at any moment. This was all his fault. Hotch had come to him for help, to talk, and instead he’s allowed his own desires to get the better of him. “I don’t, I don’t know, Ethan! Soomething!”
“Call 911, I’m on my way.”
“I can’t!”
Ethan was already up grabbing the nearest clothing available. “What?”
“Call 911.”
“Why not?”
“You know.”
Hotch could lose his job. He could lose his son. The last things that made his life worth living for. After all this wasn’t a suicide attempt, just a new way to relapse because the drug of choice wasn’t an option. Right?
“Look, just try to get him up and talking. Moving, if you can. I’ll be right over.”
Ethan was worried, but not in the at least bit surprised or panicked. Aaron was a mess when he saw the man and there were hours between then and now…hours for the tightly wound man to unravel in a number of fantastic ways. He was just relieved it hadn’t been in an aggressive way towards Spencer.
Reid hung up and headed back out to Hotch. “Hotch?” he bent down and shook the man by the shoulder, “Aaron, wake up. Wake up!”
Aaron’s mouth opened and spilled out words Reid could barely catch. Sleep. Alone. Just. Bit. Then the man’s throat made a gagging noise, but whatever would’ve come up was swallowed back down an a grimace.
Reid got a bucket anyway.
He kept his friend and boss mumbling, groaning, as he went back to the pill bottles. Some pills he eliminated immediately. Hotch would have no reason to take old antibiotics or his mother’s Clozapine. Reid narrowed the field down to the drugstore over-the-counters and his mother’s emergency barbiturates; medicine he only allowed in his place the past year or so and the exact thing he’d nearly taken for himself a few times in his cravings after Haley’s funeral. He’d had one of those little pills in his hand when he last called Ethan.
Reid kept Hotch muttering for about twenty minutes before the knock finally came to his door. “Hotch, Ethan’s here.” He doubted the senior agent heard or understood, even with the grumble of a reply, but Spencer wasn’t going to stop talking as he went to get the door.
Ethan slipped inside and glanced over at Aaron in his still half-dead appearance. “You figure out what he took?”
“Um…Seconal, I think.”
“Ah, so he’s not patty-caking around, huh?” Ethan commented simply as he headed over to the other man before looking back at Reid. “Last night didn’t go so well, I take it?”
“I…I don’t know.” It had. Then it didn’t, obviously, and Reid had no idea exactly when the change took place.
Ethan’s brows arched, unsure, but he let the comment go. He knelt down by Hotch’s head and shook him, hard, by the shoulder.
More nonsensical words bubbled up from Aaron before Ethan simply stood up and forced the man to sit up. “Wake up, Aaron!” he barked as he held the man up by the shoulders, shook him a touch. “Come on, open your eyes.”
Aaron heard the voice and, in his muddled mind, vaguely remembered it. He also remembered not liking the man attached to it. “Le’e me alone.”
Ethan turned to Reid, “Get a warm face cloth.”
Reid did as told.
“Wha’d ya take?” Ethan’s attention turned back to the other agent.
Hotch’s eyes opened slowly, with great effort. “Don’t like you.”
Ethan chuckled a touch. “Yeah, well, you sure ain’t my favorite person at the moment either, Aaron.”
His own name hit his ears wrong and suddenly Aaron hunched over and just made the bucket.
“Well, at least the pills came up,” Ethan commented softly to no one in particular.
Reid handed the damp cloth to Ethan upon his return and the man immediately set it to the back of Hotch’s neck.
“I’m fine,” Hotch finally groaned out. The pills flying violently out of his system seemed to snap him back into some kind of normalcy.
“What did you take?” Reid asked more cross than relieved. Knowing Hotch was going to be okay allowed his concern to fade into annoyance, anger even, at the stupidity of the man’s act.
“Just…” Hotch waved a hand off at them both, “a sleeping pill or two. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Really? Even after the three plus bottles of booze?” Ethan smirked out a touch as he called bullshit on the answer.
“Well I wasn’t trying to…” Food and bile retched up Aaron’s throat, but he forced it back down in a hard swallow. “To kill myself.”
“Then what was the goal?” Reid asked as he stood over Hotch.
Part of him wanted to take over Ethan’s current comforting role, to rub Hotch’s back and tell him it would all be okay. That he was forgiven, that everyone made mistakes. The other part couldn’t stand to be as close as he already was to Aaron. He’d had enough of this – of this “I’m sorry…It wasn’t intentional…I just wanted a moment’s peace” – bullshit with his mother and Nathan and Gideon and Amanda’s Adam (or was it Adam’s Amanda?) he didn’t need it from Aaron.
“Told you, to sleep.” Hotchner stubbornly insisted.
Reid glared, snapped bitterly. “You’re better than that.”
It was Ethan that stayed close as Aaron could hold the contents of his stomach no more. Ethan that rubbed the hung-over, drug-laden, back of the vomiting agent. It was Ethan who encouraged the act with a deep, gentle, voice. And it was Ethan that looked up first at Reid’s words.
“Hey Spencer.”
“What?”
“Can we talk in your room?”
Reid looked away, over to Hotch, and took a deep breath before nodding some. “Yeah, okay.”
A few more encouraging words to Aaron, and Aaron replying in muttering something akin to “fuck off”, and Ethan stood up and went with Reid to the bedroom. He shut the door behind them.
“Don’t even start, Ethan, I already know what you’re going to say.” Reid lashed out immediately. “And you know what? I don’t want to hear it.”
Ethan smiled faintly. “Good, saves me the effort of havin’ to explain all the ways this isn’t your fault.”
“Ethan.”
“Reid.”
“I…I did something.” Reid muttered, worry taking the place of his anger as he crossed Ethan to head towards the bed.
“Something?” Ethan’s eyebrows went up, he followed his friend to the bed. “Something’s pretty vague.”
“With Hotch, last night. He…he’d started…it, uh, it’s no excuse, I know and…and he seemed fine and all, but uh…”
“You slept with him?”
“Not exactly.”
Ethan opened his mouth a touch, tucked his tongue into the side of one of his cheeks, and raised his eyebrows a little.
Reid nodded at the signal.
“He was already trashed when he came here, Spencer.”
“Which is why I really should’ve, you know, stopped it. What if…what if he wasn’t, ya know, ready, and I just…that just…”
Ethan moved closer. “The shit people do is theirs, not yours.” He set a hand on his friend’s shoulder with a sigh. “And, honestly, this could’ve still been an accident.”
“How so?” Reid turned hopeful.
“He was already drunk, probably not that clear headed, so maybe Hotch really did just wanna sleep.” It was a stretch to be sure, but Ethan didn’t want Reid beating himself up over this. Over something that he wasn’t responsible for and couldn’t have controlled. “You know addicts, Reid, we think drugs and booze solve everything.”
Reid smiled almost reluctantly at the last bit, knowing it was meant as a joke.
Ethan slipped his arm all the way around Reid’s shoulders and pulled him closer. “Tell you what, I’ll watch Agent Hang-Over and you go grab us all some breakfast.”
“Well, I, uh…I could just make us all some, you know.”
“Nah,” Ethan dug into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a handful of cash. “I don’t want you doing all that work. Use this, grab some stuff from the pancake house down the road.”
“The one we stopped by yesterday?”
“Yeah,” Ethan smiled a little as Reid took the money, “get whatever you think Hotch’ll like.”
“What, uh, what about you?”
“You know what I like, Spencer.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
"Thank you, Ethan."
Ethan shrugged, smirked. "Notta problem. I've dealt with more than my fair share of hung-over folks who don't like me or want me around. What's one more, right?"
Reid gives a small, unsure, laugh.
"Friendship is not for merriment but for stern reproach when friends go astray." ~ Tiruvalluvar
Next Section:
Line in the Circle
Previous Sections:
Diagnosing the Disease
Breaking the Bonds
Shaky Control
Reality of Escape
Ill Judgment
The Memorial Nightmare
Painfully Numb
One Slip
Degrees of Sin
Dirty Clean
Avoid the Unavoidable
Reenact the Act
A Bullet and a Twist: Part 1
A Bullet and a Twist: Part 2