as the rock bears the weather

thank you for requesting!! fem, 1.2k

Hotch has dark hair. He’s an older guy but he’s yet to grey, hair like the strands are soaked with coal pitch, even darker under the office lights. He braces his hand on the desk and ducks toward Spencer’s computer screen, pointing at a corner with patience. 

“This one,” Hotch says. 

“Why would they organise it like this?” Spencer asks, his voice bordering incredulous. 

“I’m not sure. You’ll remember where this is?” 

“Do you usually have to tell me more than once?” Spencer says lightly. 

“Ask your licence to carry.” 

You’d laugh, his wit quick and poor Spencer a good sport, but your head feels heavy with a forming upset. Like your mind has turned to thick porridge. You woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but you don’t feel angry, more magnificently empty. Nothing is touching beyond your surface level. 

“Thank you, sir,” Spencer says. 

You ignore the weight of a gaze on you while you click through your emails, prioritising what needs to be answered before the end of the day, the end of the week, and the end of the month as Hotch taught you to. You double click an email chain from a consult you’d been assigned from out of state and reread your response, nervous that your lack of confidence today might have shone through blunt wording. Hotch is looped into the chain —he can correct any glaring errors should you have made them. 

“Hey,” Hotch says when you don’t look up. He doesn’t use your name, and he doesn’t need to. “I’d like to talk to you. Let’s go up to my office.” 

“Can I have a half hour to work through my emails?” you ask apologetically.

“I’d prefer we talk now. Any overdue reply can be blamed on me,” he says. 

“I just want them to like me.”

“They will.”

You rest your face in your hand. “Nobody ever does,” you mumble, chin stuck in your palm, forcing your head to jump up as you talk. With a sigh, you press your fingers to your eye, your thumb to the other. 

It’s not completely and totally serious. You are anxious, but it’s more to do with the event itself than the idea of being liked. Now that Aaron likes you, you’re not so afraid of the world. That being said, you pull your head up and watch as Aaron takes off his suit jacket. “But you do,” you say. 

“Of course I do. More than anyone. And we don’t care if people don’t like us, remember?” 

“Yes, sir.”

Aaron does a half-laugh snort thing that makes you wanna kiss his scruff. He lays his jacket across the back of his chair and turns for his window, pulling the handle down and pushing it onto the latch. Cool air immediately begins to circle the room, but the day is hot, shadows of heat and sweat darkening Aaron’s shirt. You’d like to see the state of his undershirt, but he might call that an inside thought. Or a home thought, at the very least. One to share over text if you’re desperate. 

You tilt back in your chair. This is why people don’t like you. Why you’re lucky Aaron ever gave you a chance; you’re off-putting, though not obstinately, more through a helplessness that Hotch had no business combatting, and yet— Hotch becomes Aaron. Aaron becomes your bub, or whatever he’d like to hear least. He’s the embrace you crave when things go to shit, and he makes tight work of it, always. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t go. Like, together. I’ll just embarrass you,” you say. 

Aaron let’s put a grieved sigh. You follow his fingers as he takes the cuff links from his sleeves. “You couldn’t embarrass me. Nothing you do– honey, you’re not embarrassing, okay?”

He says it softly, threads and elastics of warmth. 

“I could be.”

“You’re having a bad day, you’re having doubts, but thinking something doesn’t make it true.”

“It’s objectively,” —Aaron slips a hand into the edge of his sleeve and begins tucking it upwards— “true– I’m not like you, I don’t– this is barely my world…”

“You don’t have the roots some people might have,” he agrees, pushing his sleeve up to the elbow, and then a little higher. Your eyebrows shift unbidden into a pinch. “That’s a good thing. You avoided the politics bit. It’s the worst part.” 

He rolls up his other sleeve, leaving forearms long and tan and green at the inner elbows where his veins are strongest. You can see the slight curve of his biceps, the memory of your lips to a scar flooding in and turning you feverish as he reaches for the pen he’d discarded a little while ago. 

“You’ll be perfect,” he says, or something like that, something something perfect, a bunch of words you miss as his arm flexes and his chin dips down. He sets the pen to his notebook. 

You don’t notice he’s stopped talking until he clears his throat. 

“I like you very much,” he says gently. “Okay? No matter what happens. It’ll all be fine.”

He’s taken your yearning quiet for nerves, and you have no choice but to let him believe it. How often does Aaron misread you? 

“Okay.”

He smiles, pleased. “Okay. Good, baby.”

His praise goes right to your head. You dip forward again into your hand and groan, and Aaron, unbeknownst to you, loosens his tie some. You’re easily distracted. He’ll use any advantage he can. 

“Do you want to come sit by me?” he asks. “I could use the second set of eyes.”

Last week, Clark stopped a skyscraper from falling onto a hundred helpless civilians using one arm. Tonight, he struggles to move from under your weight.

He is excited to have you asleep on him. This is a boyfriend’s job, to be your pillow, to have you take comfort in his presence so much so that you fall asleep in the middle of a movie you’d been excited to watch. You weren’t particularly tired, as far as he knew, which makes your little snores sweeter to have warming his arm. He feels similarly relaxed when you’re around.

For a while, he has the movie on pause and waits for you to wake up. Then, when it’s clear you’re not dozing but truly sleeping, he changes the channel to watch a different movie and puts the other on record so you can watch it when you wake. He waits, and waits, but seven turns to nine turns to quarter to ten, and he realises he should’ve woken you up. Because now it’s rather late to be taking you home on a work night.

Well, darn, he thinks.

It’ll be alright, he decides eventually. You haven’t stayed the night before, but Clark knows you trust him, and he knows you won’t mind if he indulges himself and lets you sleep. He’ll wake you early in the morning to give you time to get home (hopefully accompanied by him, or one of his heavy coats) and it won’t matter that you stayed.

This, however, introduces a debate. Should he leave you here on the couch with a blanket, or should he carry you to bed? He decides pretty quickly you can’t stay on the couch, it’s just never a comfortable way to sleep. He’ll lay you out in the double bed in his room.

Clark can’t see you minding the cuddling that might happen in sleep, you’d been cuddling when you fell asleep.

How to move you, though. He sucks on his bottom lip while there’s no one to see him, brows pinched together. Slow and steady, an arm under your knees? The princess carry is his only gentle option, really. He can’t get you over his shoulder.

You sniff in your sleep, then comes a long, breathy snore. You make some really funny sounds. Clark’s smiling about them as he gets his hand under your knee and lifts, no effort required to have you against his chest. Your little hiccup sound when you’d first started dozing had been the cutest, but this mumbly whine now at being moved is a close second.

“Noooo…” Your hand screws up in his shirt.

“Let’s go to bed, honey,” he whispers.

You wrap your arm behind his neck, your face smushed awkwardly to his chest. Cords in your back go rigid as he stands up, but a few kind shushes have you relaxing and sniffling again, like you might fall back asleep in his arms.

The bedroom door creaks when he opens it, prompting another disgruntled mumble. “Clark,” you say, sounding annoyed now.

“I know, baby. Just taking you to bed, that’s all. You go on back to sleep.”

“Don’t wanna go home.”

You’re barely audible in his chest. Clark gathers you close in one arm, pinning you close so he can pull back his sheets and comforter. “You’re not going home, you think I could part with you now?” He lays you down in the bed. Your arm is steadfast behind his neck. “Not going anywhere,” he murmurs, kissing your forehead very, very gently, “I’ll get you some water.”

“Bed,” you murmur back. “Clark.”

He likes this side of you. He’s not sure he’s ever heard you whine before, and it’s pathetically soft while you’re too tired to act as you normally would. “Fine,” he says, chuckling, “move over then, my girl. Gosh.”

You actually smile at his teasing, wriggling backwards in the bed to make space. When Clark climbs in, you wrap your arm around him without hesitation, your cold nose pressing into his arm.

“Goodnight, bubby,” you mumble.

Clark giggles like a kid. “Oh, goodnight,” he says, reaching for the switch just to the side of the bed that’ll turn out the lights. Clark doesn’t need the overhead to stare at you. He’s got supervision. “Beautiful. Wake me up if you need anything.”

Look at this. 

Clark peers down at the notification on his phone screen curiously. He’s a little too busy arranging a bouquet at the moment to open it—he likes to buy a couple from the florists and hodgepodge them into behemoth, beautiful arrangements for you. You deserve them. The first time he made you one you got teary-eyed, and spent the night sitting under his arm like some dearly loved creature too happy to move away from him. 

The phone pings again with an attachment, a photograph. He abandons the pink sprig of teeny flowers and picks his phone up, the screen covered in green trimmings and splashed water. 

Clark opens the notification. It immediately displays your photograph full screen: it’s a selfie, sort of, with the majority of your face and shoulders and the soft valley of your chest, and just behind you there’s a butterfly caught in motion. 

Clark smiles. So beautiful, he texts back. 

Isn’t it! Blue wings, that’s an emperor butterfly? you respond.

Not the butterfly, you. You are so beautiful. Where are you? 

There’s a couple of seconds, and then, to his delight, another selfie, sitting in the same place with the sunshine on your skin. The only difference is the park now shown behind you. You’re out with friends, and must’ve stopped in Metropolis Park to enjoy the spring-to-summer heat. 

At the park. Do you want to come and get me? They’re all going home, but it’s so nice. 

Clark stares at you. It must’ve taken you half a second to capture a photograph of yourself, and you’ve never looked so beautiful. Smiling, eyes tired from an early morning, your lashes in a crush at the corners of your eyes. 

You’re perfect. I don’t know what I did to deserve you, he texts.

So you’re not coming to the park? you ask. Then, quickly, you don’t have to say stuff like that.

Clark sends off a last message that says he is absolutely coming, scooping the arrangement out of the vase and wrapping it in a scrap of wax paper. You deserve flowers now, right now, his heart practically racing as he thinks of you waiting for him in the grass. So pretty. He wishes you could read his mind sometimes, to realise the extent of his appreciation, and to appreciate yourself with more tenacity, but he does not mind doing the reminding.

When he finds you, he almost melts. “Here you are,” he says, the bouquet as big as his chest, flowers tucked up under his chin and at the bottom of his view, framing you where you’re looking up at him with delight. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I looked everywhere, but I finally asked someone if they’d seen the prettiest girl in the world and they pointed me to you.”