Sometimes... the day just ends.

He's out of the car and already running, badge out and open, immediately looking for the man in charge. "I'm looking for Agent Hotchner. Aaron Hotchner." He doesn't, at this point, know that it's Hotch's car that blew up. But he's not looking for anyone else, and he's not taking no for an answer.

And it gets even better! He hears Hotch shouting, and for a moment he stops, listens, says, "Hotch," quietly. He's not talking to any of those men, not right then. He's locating exactly who he was looking for, a voice he can recognize over sirens, past a barricade in the dark.

He very nearly runs into someone's gun. Morgan--canonically famous for defusing tensions between local law enforcement and the FBI--shouts, "I don't care what your orders are!" at the man in charge in front of everyone within earshot.

Then he proceeds to profile him. He goes from "that's my boss" to "I'm not gonna let my man lay down there like that," and while it warms the Hotchgan heart to hear that, I assume he switched phrasing specifically to reference the "never leave a man behind."

And it works, though it seems to work partly because poor Warner's other option is to let his men shoot Morgan, who clearly isn't leaving.

Then Morgan sprints down the road shouting "Hotch!", because it's not enough to get there, no, he needs to answer Hotch's cry for help, he needs to let him know he's coming. And Morgan's not dumb. He knows what the orders were, and he knows why: he knows the area is still dangerous. But his gun isn't out and he isn't moving slowly enough to use it if it was, since he has to skid to a stop before he reaches Hotch and Kate.

He immediately defers to Hotch, despite the fact that Hotch is clearly in bad condition himself. Then Garcia calls and Morgan is half on his feet because he knows Hotch is going to send him after the bomber, but he still waits for the order. (Loyal. Semper Fi, Capt. Warner might have said, though he probably would have shaken his head as he did.)

(More baffling that Capt. Warner doesn't report the unauthorized ambulance? Very confusing.)

(Second side note: "Thank your partner, he did it all," is an amazing thing for a terrorist to say to the local head of the FBI when what he's doing is putting a giant bomb under a hospital. Love that. Hotch is definitely going to remember that line in his nightmares.)

Morgan strides into the hospital again, badge ready. (This badge he's used twice in a few hours to immediately direct everyone's attention to Hotch. This badge Foyet takes later in season four and uses to leave Hotch at a hospital. Imagine how Morgan feels, learning that.)

He doesn't ask about Kate (he already knows, as is made clear later). "How's Aaron Hotchner?" Then he hears Hotch being difficult and immediately heads toward the sound. Familiar with it, which brings up the delightful idea that he's dealt with an unwell and unmanageable Hotchner before. (You see it in 2x19, that one of the things Gideon and Morgan do is care for Hotch.)

Morgan deals with Hotch, "Stop, calm down," a hand out, and also tells the doctor to stand down, though his voice is softer, kinder when directs Hotch. Hotch immediately turns to Morgan with his questions. Morgan answers, and one suspects that he was the one who knew the clothes needed to be brought from the hotel post haste, because who else on the team would be worrying about Hotch's luggage?

He doesn't tell Hotch to stop thinking about the case, but it's clear from his short, calm answers, that he knows where Hotch is going with the questions: the profile is wrong. (This is what they do. And the beauty of Hotchgan and several years pre-canon, is one can assume they've done something almost exactly like this before.)

The team goes to the hospital, and Hotch is already dressed, tie on. Morgan stands back a little, but he's watching Hotch. He's right: one target. He keeps watching Hotch after he speaks, and Hotch looks back at him.

Also, somewhat hilariously, they realize the bomber is going to try to detonate the bomb manually and Hotch says, "Where's Morgan?" and Read says he went down to the ambulance. "Alone?" Hotch says, sounding shocked, but clearly Morgan told the team he was going to the ambulance and equally clearly no one else thought they needed to go with him. (And why would they? Morgan has been sent into absurdly dangerous situations alone the entire series.)

And then the end! I love the end. Hotch is outside with his all important duffel bag, and Morgan strides up going "uh uh uh uh." He's joking, playful. Canon doesn't explain why, so there are a few options: he knows Hotch is about to be irked that he's driving and he's trying to lighten the mood in advance. He knows Hotch is going to be irked and he's trying to make him more irritated just for fun. He knows they have a lot of air to clear and there's no point in starting out serious and angry? Could be anything.

"Don't you have something better to do?" Hotch asks, looking annoyed, though Morgan is perfectly honest that he's the one who had Agent Davis reassigned.

"Than annoy you for three hours?" Morgan replies, and there's the hint of a smile. "Hell no." And he arches his eyebrows just a little, waiting. "Give me the keys," Hotch says, and presumably this is what Morgan was waiting for, since there's absolutely no pause before he says no.

"Let's go," he says, gesturing Hotch forward, and Hotch goes.

Then he starts innocuous conversation about who the target was, but Hotch refuses to play nice. He shuts that down and instead says, "Quantico's requested that you transfer to run the New York office."

It's a challenge. It's a shove. And Morgan's response isn't to accept or deny: it's to bring up Kate. That she existed. That there should be respect for her absence.

Then, in a question it's hard to tell if both of them were expecting or not, "Don't I need your recommendation?" Hotch doesn't answer, and Morgan waits a moment before continuing, "You didn't give it, did you?" but--and this is crucial--he doesn't sound surprised. Makes it look like he brought up the recommendation specifically because he already knew or suspected that Hotch hadn't given it. (Makes you wonder if he already knew about the transfer request, too.)

Hotch claims Morgan still doesn't trust anyone, and Morgan replies that he did it for the team. (Both things can of course be true, though one can point out that Morgan was entrusting hundreds of New Yorkers' lives in Garcia's hands as he drove where he was told.)

"My opinion doesn't matter," Hotch says, turns away. I can only assume that Hotch learned this tactic from his Southern belle mother, because this is spot-on Southern belle. He just needs to flutter a fan and say, "But what do I know? I'm only your boss," long accent on that 'o'.

Morgan isn't having it. "Hotch," he says, sharper than he's said it all episode. "Your opinion matters to me." He emphasizes the "me" part, refuses to let Hotch hide behind "Quantico" or "we're at war," forces Hotch to turn and face him.

"My life matters to me," Hotch tells him, and it's honest, but it's also calculated. "And I have and always will entrust you with it." (It's the "always will" that kills me here. Hotch is like, "I'm going to refuse to recommend you for a promotion and try like hell to make you leave me on the side of the road here, but if someone shot at me after all this I would still assume you would stop them." It's better than wedding vows.) "Would you do the same for me?"

It makes Morgan pause. Work his jaw and look away, the way Hotch has been trying to look away. They both look at the SUV, the same make and model of the one that got Kate killed. "Still wanna drive?" Hotch asks, because again, he was honest but calculated, still trying to escape three honest hours in a car with Morgan.

It doesn't work. But it does leave the question of why Morgan doesn't answer. The implication is that he doesn't trust his life to Hotch, but anyone who's made it through three seasons knows that he trusts his life to Hotch all the time. Constantly. He has no problem deferring to Hotch's authority even when he already has his own ideas, and even in this episode, even after he openly questions Hotch's priorities, he still defers to Hotch and brings him information to let him make the calls.

(Except with the ambulance, but again, it's not like he sneaks off, and he only drives away when it's clear there's no time for anything else. The team is doing things like that all the time.)

Would you do the same for me? sounds like it must mean, "would you entrust me with your life?" but the answer is clearly yes. If that's the focus, one can only assume Morgan doesn't answer because he's spent years listening to Hotch complain about his trust issues and he knows that this is just how Hotch reacts whenever he's upset that Morgan almost died and also wants to make Morgan suffer, too. (This is totally an option. Morgan gets sick of it by season 7, but Hotch brings up Morgan's trust issues in season 2 and Morgan's lack of trust in Gideon is a hallmark of the first episodes, so one can only assume Hotch has been all about Morgan's trust issues since before episode one.)

But! Hotch could have just said, "I trust you with my life, could you say the same for me?" But he doesn't. He starts out with, "My life matters to me." And maybe that's what keeps Morgan quiet. Because that's a different conversation. That's a conversation that underlies Morgan's response of "I did it for the team."

The implication is that Morgan has no problem stepping up for the team. Dying for the team. The conversation might be about trust, but it might also be that Hotch has lost someone he thought he could protect and he almost lost Morgan and Morgan thought that was acceptable. (Morgan could go to New York and Hotch could lose him. Morgan could storm out of Federal Plaza--take a walk, now--and maybe Hotch would never see him again.) You don't trust me, Hotch implies, but underneath that he says does your life matter to you?

Morgan doesn't answer. But he doesn't leave. Because, of course, that's the third thing. Hotch has aimed every word since this conversation began at convincing Morgan to give him the keys and walk away. It's a conversation aimed at losing Morgan. It's a conversation about losing Morgan.

Hotch's speech to Perotta has convinced most of us that his childhood was bad. Extremely abusive and violent. "Tortured," as Jung says. (It also explains--though does not excuse--why he's such an absent parent for the first several years of Jack's life.) But when Sean visits, Hotch groups himself and their father together as people to look up to and emulate, so Sean clearly saw none of the abuse, since he "lost his father at a young age."

Hotch's dad also had affairs, though also apparently cancer, and a heart attack. But--and I think this is important--Hotch's mom knows about them and Hotch feels like he has to do something because no one else is.

Where I think it gets interesting (it's been depressing the whole time, I can't fix that), is with Hotch's mom. "Hotchner" isn't an FFV name. (First families of Virginia, the movers and shakers of high Virginia society for hundreds of years.) But Hotch knows all about the Tidewater families in 1x11. He knows what a Sweet Briar vixen is. He knows the surnames. He says, "a lot of reputation to protect." He suggests that the woman cares more for the family's reputation than her son.

So my personal headcanon is that Hotch's mother is Old South. Old money. ("Auction block money," Morgan mutters, when Hotch reluctantly introduces him to the town where he was raised, and Morgan is right.) But that money is gone by the 1950s. She has the lineage, but she needs a husband who can add nouveau riche wealth to reputation, and Hotch's father needs a family name that will take him places.

("You still have the fucking plantation house?" Morgan says as they go up the long drive, though the house was built in 1924. "Jesus fucking Christ, it's like a fucking Morrison novel up here." They do not stay long. Hotch doesn't want to step foot in the house it took him twelve years to escape, and Morgan keeps rubbing his arms and looking around like the ghost of a child lost will curl around his ankle and tug him toward the earth.)

I think that Hotch and Morgan make a fascinating dichotomy, because they both endured years of abuse, but in very different contexts. Morgan had people who loved him, but he couldn't tell them. Hotch implies that everyone in town knew about the affairs, which makes me think that they also knew about the abuse.

But--whatever surname Hotch's mother has--between her family's reputation and Hotchner, Sr.'s ability to mow anyone down in court and the Southern willingness not to see things that are there, no one stands up for Hotch. Not publicly. There's the librarian who lets him stay late. The teacher who suggests boarding school, has a list of schools she knows his mother will approve. But no one is going to report Mr. Hotchner, Esq. No one is going to go up against both sides of Hotch's family and lose.

So I think Hotch's mother allows for the affairs. The abuse. I think she protects herself and her family's reputation above her son.

And it explains a lot of how the differences in their childhood trauma affect their outlook on life. Morgan can accept and give love easily, because he's always had it, but he divorces it from emotional vulnerability and trust. Hotch leaves his suffering out in the open because he believes that no one cares enough to speak its name, the same way he could walk out the door with a broken jaw his mother said came from "falling out of an apple tree, you know he's a legacy baby," and no one looked at the bruise. Hotch wants to know he's loved enough that someone would topple everything else in their life for him, instead of standing quietly by (even though Morgan keeps telling him that maybe it would be sanest to find a middle ground between those extremes).