hotchnerundercover

The first time you met Aaron Hotchner you were eleven years old. He was a year younger than you, a quiet, dorkier kid, but lovable. You knew that the first time you saw him. And in those big brown eyes, you really thought that they hadn’t seen any evil.

Taking Aaron under your wing didn’t come with much thought on your end, it just happened. He enjoyed your company, actively sought you out, and you both got excited when you would see each other, even if it was only to sit and do homework or catch something on TV together.

And for the longest time, you thought he trusted you. You thought you knew everything about his life, he didn’t, after all, seem like he had something to hide. But as months passed into years and that dorky kid you knew became a teenager, you started to notice things, however small they were.

Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? That is what you wanted to ask, but every time even anything remotely close to his off behaviour was brought up, he’d deflect. Move onto another topic. Tell you that he kept parts of his life separate. Parts that you didn’t need to see.

But you wanted to see them because you really believed, deep down, you could fix him. No matter the problem, you could do it.

But oh how sweet and naïve you were to think such things. To think a little fifteen-year-old girl could possibly know what was going wrong in her friend’s life. Not when he stayed so quiet about it.

When he pulled away was the worst. A year of radio silence.

Off to boarding school, he went without another word. Rumours flew around as to why, but you weren’t sure what to believe was true. All you did know was that lately, he had been getting into trouble… big trouble.

And each time you even caught so much as a glimpse of a stolen cigarette or maybe something more, that look in those big brown eyes told a different story than they did four years ago. They’d seen things, something, but his mouth was sealed. No one knew what happened after hours in the Hotchner household and that seemed to be just how they liked it.

But when he came back, things slowly changed. Even though he was in a different school, he called every day, and you talked, and talked, and talked.

And you thought maybe, just maybe things were getting better. And your heart lifted, your soul soared because that boy, the boy you grew to love, the boy you knew deep down in the bottom of your heart you would always have a place for, opened up to you.

At least you thought he did.

Aaron never called past 9:30, so when you heard the phone ring at 11:00 you assumed it was someone else until your father, grumbling, told you to pick up on the other line.

“Aaron?” you frowned. “What’s going on?”

“A lot,” he whispered, his voice hoarse and thick with tears.

“Aaron?”

And with that, over the phone, he broke down. If you thought he had grown to trust you more in the past you were dead wrong. Now, hearing what had happened, what had been happening, from his own mouth was another kind of pain you couldn’t describe. One that gnawed at you while you laid awake, looking up at the ceiling. One that ate away at every sliver of hope you had while you tossed and turned in your bed. One that forced you to realize, maybe you couldn’t fix him. Maybe you couldn’t make him believe he was loved no matter what trouble he got into. Because even if you told him, even if you said it in the plainest of words, he would think of them to be lies.

The calls late at night became more frequent. And calls turned into sneaking out of the house, meeting him outside of the elementary school park where he’d sit on the swing set, nose dripping with blood onto his white pyjama shirt, knuckles red and ribs surely bruised.

And each time you saw him you wanted to scream, scream at the top of your lungs that he was hurt, your dorky little boy, the one that brought light to your world was hurting bad. But you stayed silent because that’s why he trusted you. He trusted you not to speak.

The times you would let a detail slip started to feel like a hit, instant relief. It was a drug and you couldn’t get addicted, you needed to stay sober and get back on track.

After holding all that in for him you thought the least that could happen, the least you owed yourself was to tell him how you felt. You weren’t sure what you were expecting from him, but you thought over five years of friendship could mean something more to both of you.

Turns out that wasn’t the case.

The way things were left so open-ended, acting like he hadn’t even heard what you had just told him. For the first time in ages, you went home numb. It was nice not feeling anything.

Everything almost became too much to bear one night when the police came knocking on your door.

You saw the flashing blue and red lights, immediately heading out before your parents could even wake up and notice that there was a problem.

“Officer? What’s the matter?”

“Are you (Y/N) (L/N)?” he asked and you nodded your head.

“Yes sir,”

“So you’re the emergency contact listed for Aaron Hotchner,”

“I-I am?”

The officer went on to explain that they had reason to believe he wasn’t safe at home so they weren’t informing his parents of the situation just yet, but you already knew that Mr. Hotchner knew very well what was going on.

The officer offered to drive you to the ER and he escorted you to one of the rooms where you saw Aaron, now almost seventeen years old, beaten, battered and bruised. But each time the doctors asked how it happened it was the same story.

“I fell down the stairs outside of the school on my way home,”

And those brown eyes looked dull and lifeless now as he insisted he was okay. And you watched him lie, you stood there, knowing exactly what had happened and said nothing.

It took everything in you that night not to break down into a sad puddle of nothing. So you just sat next to him with a quivering lip and held his hand. His broken, casted hand.

What you wouldn’t give to brush the hair away from his forehead and press a gentle kiss there, insisting that everything was okay even when it wasn’t because he deserved those white lies. Even if he could see right through them.

And you thought nothing would change. You thought you were bound to this wretched and cursed existence forever. But no one lives forever and that included Mr. Hotchner.

About a month after he died the calls became less frequent, and when he did call it seemed there was nothing to talk about.

And as he entered his senior year you watched from afar, a freshman in college while he fell in love with Haley, walking by a cafe and seeing them on a date, the way he held her like you always imagined he might hold you. She took all the steps you wanted to take with him, and you watched it passively from the sidelines. Like the worst cheerleader in history.

It was no secret you envied her, you figured if he called less and barely talked to you now, what was even the point of shoving down that ugly feeling.

Because after over seven years of staying silent, you hadn’t fixed him.