wildlyconflicted | [For Aaron]

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aaron

[For Aaron]

It was 1:05 AM by her watch when Pepper woke up in a strange bed next to the very tangible, sleeping body of Aaron Hotchner. The night was warm, and while they'd opened the shutters to let in a breeze, the sheets had been mostly habitual. Aaron was stretched out across the bed with the top sheet bunched low over his hips, and when Pepper sat up beside him, she spent a long time quietly looking at him, at the scars twisting pale over his skin in the moonlight.

By 1:15, she had slipped carefully from the bed and shrugged on his dress shirt, cuffs skimming her fingertips as she padded barefoot out onto the front porch. Leaning forearms against the railing, she peered up at the scatter of stars in the sky and wondered how complicated one life could become in just over a fortnight.

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He wakes and finds her gone. For a moment, a brief, split second, he lets himself think that it's a different bed, and that Haley must have slipped down the hallway to see to Jack.

And he knows that's not true. And it takes him a minute to get his breath back.

Pulling on his underwear, he pads out of the open door and finds her, leaning against the rail, the hem of his shirt brushing the tops of her thighs. He sits, settles himself in the chair on the porch, and looks up at her.

"What?"

"Just thinking."

Pepper turned her head and offered him a subdued smile, moonlight in her hair. "I'm sorry if I woke you. I tried to be quiet."

"You didn't," he says, looking back up at her, relaxed back in the chair (though he feels anything but relaxed). "I've never slept deeply."

He's barely slept at all since that day at home; he sees it all again when he closes his eyes.

"Aaron," she began, turning to look back up at the sky, "I don't want to give the impression that I'm not happy this happened, because nothing could be further from the truth, and maybe it's a little premature of me, but we've established that I like to be prepared." She glanced to him again and fixed him in a patient stare.

"I think that if this is going to be more than a one night stand, we should talk about some things."

She's so beautiufl, so dishevelled and lovely and, for a moment, he doesn't say anything. He scrubs one hand back through his hair and watches her for a moment and then he nods.

"Okay," he says.

"I come with…" She paused, tilting her head in consideration. "Baggage. And that baggage is named Tony Stark." It made her feel a bit bad referring to Tony as baggage, like something to be rid of, but she couldn't deny that he was a burden in his myriad ways even now, albeit a tolerable one.

Pepper shifted, turned to lean back against the railing so that she could watch Aaron better, bare toes curling under against the worn planks of the porch. "I worked for Tony for fifteen years before showing up here, and another year after that. For a very long time, he was the only person I really had in my life who was mine. Neither of us had any family, we just had each other, and as I'm sure you can imagine, that makes things between us kind of complicated."

Edited 2010-01-20 00:10 (UTC)

"I can imagine."

It almost sounds like himself, only with him, it was the BAU for years and he was asking Haley to live that with him. He studies her for a long moment. Patently, this is going to be more than a one night stand. Quite what, it's possible neither of them have really considered, but definitely something more.

"I don't think I ever envisioned this as anything other than complicated, Pepper."

"Oh, but wouldn't it have been nice if it wasn't?" Pepper replied on a breathy laugh, lifting her hands over her head for a long, languid stretch that hiked his shirt up her body. "Wouldn't it be nice for things to be simple for once? To meet someone you like and for it to be easy?"

He watches the way his shirt hikes up and it's a long moment before he looks back into her face. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, despite the lingering melancholy that presents as a tightness through the chest.

"I sincerely hope that it works like that for some people," he says.

Pepper heaved a softly melodic sigh, tipped her head back and marveled at the pattern of stars for a moment more. "I think it's your turn," she quietly prompted, and dropped her gaze to Aaron again. She didn't need to be an expert in psychology to know that he was carrying burdens of his own.

"I told you about my wife," he says, quietly, and it's been so long since he wore his wedding ring, which dosn't mean that he can't remember what it felt like to have one. "My ex-wife, Haley. We met when I was seventeen, and she...was murdered right before I got here."

He looks down for a moment, but then his eyes return to her face because he will not be that man. He won't be the one who can't make eye contact when he says this.

"Her killer was the same man who gave me these scars. A man named George Foyet. The Boston Reaper."

Despite what recent circumstances might have led you to believe, Pepper Potts was not the sort of woman who cried easily. She wasn't heartless, just extremely adept at composure, but there she was, half-naked and watching this man who had, just hours before, been inside her, and she had to blink back tears.

Saying she was sorry again seemed so trite, so ill-suited to the moment, and she shrugged off the impulse. She crossed to Aaron and gently insinuated herself into his lap, lean legs bent on either side of his thighs, and gathered his face in her hands. "What a pair we make," she quietly told him, because maybe she'd not been stabbed and maybe Tony was still alive, but he didn't know the half of it.

Then, he allows himself the luzury of not looking at her while he doesn't answer her. He swallows hard, and his hands come up to rest at her waist.

"I can do this if I don't let it become anything at all to do with that," he says, unsurprised by the rawness of his own voice. "Does that make sense?"

"Yeah," Pepper quietly replied, and pressed gentle kisses to his temple, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. "It makes perfect sense." Given that it was more fair to both of them that way, too, she certainly couldn't argue with it.

"I don't want you to think that you can't talk to me, though," she continued, rubbing the pad of one thumb over the rough curve of his cheek. "You don't have to, but you can. If we're really going to do this, let's do it right."

What Hotch isn't, and has never been, is a talker. He internalises and he compartmentalises, and he does his job to the best of his ability, and he keeps going. He knows that he has yet to deal with Haley's death. He knows that, as clearly as he knows that Pepper will not be there when he does.

He can be honest, though. He can do that. He turns his head and grazes the palm of her hand with a kiss.

"Do you want to go back to bed?"

"Come on," Pepper gently prompted as she slipped from Aaron's lap and extended her hand. "I'm not done with you yet."

There was a certain level of denial in soothing the raw edges with sex, but maybe she deserved that much. Maybe they both did and that was the whole point of being together in the first place.

"I wouldn't ever have considered that you were."

He takes her hand and pushes out of the chair. The night air is warm and still and it's easy to slip the mask back on. It's easy to be 'okay', to sink into being with this woman in this place, as though nothing ever came before.

"In the bed this time?"

"Mmm, I think so," Pepper agreed as she tugged him through the door and back to the bed with its cool, rumpled sheets. "Unless you had something in mind you're not sharing."

"Absolutely not," says Hotch, letting himself slip back into it, into this, which is infinitely easier. He tugs her closer, bending his head to catch her mouth with his.

"I'm subject to your whims."

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[For Aaron]

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