Rebecca

It had been three weeks. Three weeks of waiting for the fog to lift, for the emotional storms to lose their fury. Instead, everything felt flatter, duller, but not in the good way that meant the medication was starting to work its magic. No, just… muted despair. Like your brain had traded sharp knives for a dull, persistent ache that pressed behind your eyes and settled low in your sternum, a weight with no name and no edges, nothing to push against, nothing to fight.

At least the knives had been honest.

At least the storms had been something you could name.

Hopelessness curled in your gut like smoke: thick, acrid smoke, impossible to fan away no matter how many times you tried to breathe through it the way your therapist had taught you. Name it. Don't fuse with it. You are not the thought; you are the one noticing the thought. The words felt like instructions to be used on a body that wasn't yours to control anymore.

Hotch would be home soon, you told yourself.

Or maybe not.

His job didn't promise "soon." It promised late nights, red-eye flights on the jet, and the kind of exhaustion that etched deeper and deeper lines around his eyes every time he came back home from a case.

Hotch spent his days steeped in the worst things people did to each other, and yet somehow he still came home and asked how your day was first.

How could you possibly fit into that without tipping the scales?

How could anyone carry monsters all day and then come home to more weight?

And there it was, the thought arriving fully formed, the way it always did, with the force of a truth being revealed rather than the uncertainty of a spiral skewing your view of reality.

Not, I wonder if I'm a burden, but I am a burden.

Not today is hard, but I am hard to be around, all the way down, in every direction, permanently.

The good days, the ones where Hotch laughed against your hair and said you made the job bearable, the ones where you believed him, those days didn't seem to exist right now. Sure, they still happened, but to you, they'd been wiped from every record you kept stored away in your head.

There was no in-between, no "today is just difficult." There was only the absolute: you take, and he gives, and that is the whole shape of what you are to him.

You pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes until the kaleidoscopic burst of white swirls appeared behind your lids, trying to find something to focus on besides the thoughts looping themselves tighter.

You're doing it again.

The thought was clinical, almost detached, observational in the way your therapist had spent two years teaching you to be: notice the pattern, name the distortion, you don't have to believe everything you think, but the noticing didn't stop the spiral, it just meant you got to watch yourself fall with your eyes open, instead of being blissfully unaware of what would happen next.

That was its own kind of cruelty. Knowing the mechanism and still being unable to stop the gears from turning, keeping you trapped in the machinery, even when you could see the emergency stop button.

It is right there!!

Your brain loved to weaponize love. It took the good things, the soft things, the things that should have felt like safety, and twisted them slowly, methodically, into proof of your unworthiness. Unworthiness of getting a happy ending. Unworthiness of being loved.

Hotch loved you.

You knew that on your better days, knew it the way you knew your own name. But today wasn't a better day, and on days like this, the knowing didn't transfer into the logic department; it stayed locked somewhere you couldn't reach, the key thrown away, stayed locked behind glass, visible and useless.

Today, the new medication had you convinced, with total and humorless conviction, that you were his warden and loving you was a death sentence for him.

You are a sentence.

Another burden on a man who already carried the world on his shoulders, who didn't need one more weight added by the person who was supposed to be his rest, be his home.

There was no gray in it. There rarely was, not when it got like this. Either you were good for him, or you were ruining him. Either this relationship was the safest thing you'd ever had, or it was the cruelest thing you were doing to someone who deserved better. The thought didn't ask permission to be absolute. It just was. And it had ruined more than one relationship for you in the past.

The key turned in the lock of the front door.

You didn't move.

"Hey," his voice carried down the hall.

Footsteps, then the soft clink of his keys on the table by the door, the small domestic sound that on any other night would have made something in your chest unclench, waiting for the kiss and his open arms when he saw you.

Tonight, it just registered as data.

He's home. He'll see you like this.

He appeared in the doorway, tie loosened, suit jacket already shed and probably left on a dining chair, like he always did.

The white of his shirt was slightly rumpled, perhaps from the nap he had most likely taken on the jet. His eyes found yours immediately as he entered the bedroom. That profiler gaze, trained on decades of reading people before they even spoke a single word.

That gaze softened the instant it landed on your hunched form. "Rough day?"

You tried to smile. It felt like thin ice cracking beneath your feet as you ventured out on a lake that barely had started to freeze over, like your face had forgotten the shape of the expression and was forcing it through brittle material that might splinter at the wrong angle. "New med's... not great,” you managed.

Hotch crossed the room and sat beside you on the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours. His hand found your back, carefully rubbing slow circles across your lower back.

The touch didn't ask anything of you, didn't require you to perform okay-ness in return. And yet, perform was what you were fighting your body to do. He didn't push. He never did. That was one of the things that made it worse sometimes, in the warped logic of a bad night, his patience felt too good to be true, like a well that never ran dry, no matter how many times you came to it.

And you felt like a black hole waiting to swallow it whole. Like the very fact that he never ran out of patience was proof of how much you were taking.

"Talk to me," he murmured, the words pressed gently into the quiet between you.

You shook your head, but the words came anyway, spilling out in a rush that bordered on frantic, like a dam that had been holding for three weeks finally giving way all at once. And he let you speak, because truth be told, he had noticed you getting worse, hoping that you would come to him before it got even worse.

"I feel like I'm disappearing, Aaron. Not in a dramatic way. Just… I don’t know, fading? The meds were supposed to help with the intensity, but now everything's this heavy gray sludge that’s keeping me from breaching through the surface. Like I'm watching my own life through water." Your voice cracked, and you hated how small you sounded, hated that the woman who could usually hold a thought together, on a good day, was reduced to fragments. "And I keep thinking…" You took a deep and shaky breath. "I keep thinking about how unfair this is to you. Your job is nonstop. The cases, the travel, the things you see that no one should have to see. And then you come home to this. To me, swinging between too much and not enough. Clinging one day, pushing away the next. What if I'm just… adding to it? What if loving me is exhausting you in ways you won't even let yourself admit, because you're too good a person to say it out loud?"

The fear of abandonment was always there, it always had been, a live wire under your skin, humming at a frequency that never fully went silent even on good days.

But tonight it mixed with genuine guilt, the kind that whispered you should leave before he realized he deserved so much better than you could give me, before your episodes became the thing that finally broke the unbreakable Aaron Hotchner.

The thought arrived with its usual absoluteness: there was no version of this where you were simply having a hard time.

There was only the binary: either you were good for him, or you were quietly, slowly ruining the one stable thing in your life. Tonight, lying in the suffocating gray sludge the medication had left you in, you were certain it was the second one.

Not worried.

Certain.

He was quiet for a moment, but not distant. You'd learned the difference years ago, the specific texture of Hotch’s silences, how some of them were walls and most of them were him choosing his words the way he chose everything, with care.

His hand never stopped its gentle rhythm on your back. When he spoke, his voice was filled with the kind of love that had survived hell and chosen, again and again, to stay.

"You could never be a burden to me."

The words landed softly, but they hit like a lifeline thrown into churning water. You wanted to believe them. God, you did. Some small, quiet part of you, the part that remembered the good days, reached for them like a drowning hand reaches for the ring of life. But the voice that amplified every insecurity into catastrophe, that took a sentence of comfort and immediately began dismantling it for hidden flaws, screamed louder, drowning out the reach before it could close around anything.

"You say that now," you whispered, pulling your knees tighter against your chest, trying to make yourself smaller, like if you took up less space physically, you'd cost him less mentally.

Tears burned hot trails down your cheeks, and you didn't bother wiping them, too tired to fight that particular performance of composure you’d tried to uphold. "But what about when I have another meltdown at 2 a.m. because my brain decides you're going to leave? Or when the emptiness hits, and I can't get out of bed, and you're coming off a three-day case with no sleep? I'm supposed to be your partner, not another case file you have to manage. I see the way you look after the bad ones, Aaron. The weight you carry home with you, even when you don't say anything. I don't want to be part of that weight. I don't want to be one more thing you have to be strong for."

Your breathing quickened, the familiar sense of panic clawing up your throat, tightening around your windpipe like a hand squeezing the last breaths of life out of you.

Emotional dysregulation, your therapist would call what you were experiencing right now. One of the hallmarks, the textbook term sitting cold and clinical next to the very unclinical feeling of your chest caving in. You knew the terms. You'd read the books, sat through the DBT sessions, taking careful notes on opposite action and radical acceptance, swallowed the old meds and now the new ones, done everything you were supposed to do.

But knowledge didn't stop the flood.

And underneath all of it, quieter than the panic but somehow louder than anything else, the thought that had been circling since you sat down on the edge of this bed three hours ago: if you really loved him, you'd make this easier for him. You'd let him go before he had to ask.

Hotch shifted, turning fully toward you, the movement deliberate, unhurried, like he had nowhere else in the world to be. He cupped your face with both hands, thumbs brushing away the tears with a tenderness that felt almost sacred, like you were something worth that much care even now, even like this. His eyes held yours. No judgment. No exhaustion.

Just Aaron.

Steady as bedrock in a landslide.

"Look at me," he said softly. When you tried to glance away, old reflex, the shame reached up to pull your gaze down before he could see too much. He waited patiently until your gaze returned on its own, until you gave it to him instead of having it taken. "I see you. All of you. The days when the world feels too bright and the nights when it feels too dark. The way your mind races ahead to every possible way this could end badly, because it's trying to protect you, not because it's broken. I know what your diagnosis means for you: the intensity, the fear, the way emotions hit like freight trains with no warning before the platform. I know it isn't a character flaw, and it isn't a choice. And I choose this. All of it. Every single day. You are not your diagnosis. You are you."

You let out a shaky sob, leaning into his touch despite yourself, despite the part of your brain still insisting this was temporary, conditional, a kindness with an expiration date. "But why? I'm a mess. The new med isn't working right, and I feel so… so hopeless. I'll never get stable enough to be what you need. Like you're loving some future version of me that might not exist yet, and stuck with this one in the meantime."

"Because you're not a mess to me," he replied. "You're the person who makes this apartment feel like home after I've spent weeks chasing shadows that don't sleep and don't stop. You're the one who remembers how I take my coffee on the bad days and who laughs at my terrible jokes even when the world is burning around both of us. Your emotions don't 'add to my plate', they're part of what makes you you. And I love every part. The loyalty. The empathy. The way you fight so hard, every day, even when your own brain is lying to you about whether the fight is worth it."

Hotch pulled you into his chest then, arms wrapping around you. You clung to his shirt, fistfuls of fabric clutched tightly in your hands, inhaling the faint scent of his cologne and old coffee, a smell that had become shorthand in your body for safe.

The tears came harder. They were ugly and raw, the kind you usually tried to hide even from him, but he held you through it. No shushing. No fixing. No urgency to make it stop, like he understood that some storms just needed to finish passing through on their own accord.

"I know the meds aren't perfect right now," he continued, lips brushing over the top of your hair, voice rumbling. "We'll call the therapist tomorrow. Adjust the dose, schedule a new appointment, or try something else. There's no rule that says you have to white-knuckle through a medication that's making things worse. You're not stuck here. You're my partner. My love. And I will make damn sure that you know that, every single day, no matter how bad you’re spiralling, even if I have to literally spell it out on the fridge in magnets before I go to the office. I love you."

Time stretched. The rain continued its pelting against the window. A sound that had felt so suffocating only an hour ago was now just… weather. Ordinary. Bad. Weather.

You pulled back enough to look at him. Hotch’s eyes were tired; you could see the case in them, the days he hadn't fully slept, but they were warm, oh so warm. Always warm when it came to you, even when there was nothing left over for anyone else.

"I'm scared," you admitted, smaller now, the splitting finally loosening its grip enough to let something more honest through the barrier.

Not I am unlovable, but I am afraid.

Which was a different, more survivable thing to say out loud. "Scared that one day the fear wins and I push you away for real. That I'll do it on purpose, just to prove the fear right."

Hotch pressed his forehead to yours, close enough that his next words were almost a shared breath. "Then we'll fight it together. Like we always do. You've survived every storm so far. Your track record is one hundred percent, as far as I’m aware. Even the nights you were sure you wouldn't, you made it through. And I've got you through all of them. That's not going to change because of bad medication or bad nights."

Later, as you lay tangled together under the sheets, his hand tracing slow, soothing patterns on your thigh, the hopelessness ebbed into something more manageable. Tomorrow you'd call the therapist. Tomorrow you'd try again, the way you always tried again, because trying again, getting back on the horse, whatever, was really the only thing you could do to continue living.

Tonight, you let yourself believe his words as he once again reminded you. "You’ll never be a burden to me.”