𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐟 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐞𝐫

sixteen

Author's note: This chapter contains details of the symptoms of a brain tumour that some may find distressing.

...

Lou was awoken to a shout.

Hotch's shout.

A cold sweat. A tight chest. Panicked breaths. She scrambled around in the dark, looking, searching, fumbling for him. Her hands found cold, empty sheets. Shit.

Lou often woke in the night: she was plagued with incessantly broken sleep and restless dreams. Lately, things had gotten a little better and, although she credited the thunderous ocean waves she listened to through her headphones, she knew it was entirely down to him. Lou had forgotten the utter comfort, the sweet bliss, and the rare and unfamiliar feeling of safety that came with sharing the night with someone. Instead of the melancholy madness that used to lie next to her, taking the form of Lou's shadow, she had him. He soothed her soul, slowed her mind and smothered all the bad thoughts that were prone to visiting her at night.

He'd brought Jack with him for the summer and they'd stayed for a week so far. Her small apartment threatened to feel cramped whenever tasked with accommodating more than one person but Lou found that, with her two favourite people in the world, it felt more snug than claustrophobic. But part of her couldn't help but think about the future and the space they'd need then. It was good for Lou to think about the future. It was a new and scary consideration but it made her feel less like a ghost.

For the past week, Lou had woken intermittently in the night to find Hotch right next to her. He was always there. Sometimes she felt his breath, warm and reassuring, on her shoulder or his arm draped lazily and instinctively around her waist, or she felt the comforting weight of his head on her chest. Sometimes, it was her breath on his shoulder, her hands or her legs around his waist, her head on his chest.

Sometimes, when she woke, it wasn't anything to do with her. Sleeping with him, in the purest sense of the term, brought such bittersweet comfort to Lou because it showed her that she wasn't alone in her turbulent sleep and restless, incessant, tumultuous dreams. It showed her she wasn't the only one who was broken. Perhaps everyone was. Fuck one in three, she'd been thinking lately, Human beings are not numbers, not statistics, they can't be confined to, or defined by, a label. To be human is to hurt. Lou was slowly understanding that she wasn't the only one in the world who was haunted. She was learning not to feel so sorry for herself. She was trying, trying for the people she had let into her life, to shift from that selfish mindset. But deep down, she'd always known that every single person —every single one— was in pain in some way or shape or form. It was just easier, more tangible, to believe that happy people existed. But that small, cruel, fractious hope was slowly but surely being crushed.

Hotch had such horrible dreams. Lou felt his fear, his despair, his agony whenever his violent tossing and turning woke her. He never once cried out. He had learnt his lesson to not cry, not show fear a long time ago. It had been burnt into him with such scarring intensity that he carried it with him in his dreams. He mustn't wake Sean. He mustn't wake his mother, not Jack, not Lana. In his dreams, the fragile divide between past and present would crumble and the two worlds, never meant to meet, would blur into one. He wasn't sure who he was protecting, his mother, his brother, his girlfriend or his son? He wasn't sure who he was fighting, was it his father? Was it Cane?

Was it himself?

They never spoke about the dreams. Lou never asked —she knew not to. She knew, from the murmurs in his sleep, that there were some things that to talk about was to relive what was meant to be repressed, to unearth what was meant to be buried, to burn wounds trying their best to heal. Lou never needed to speak. She just needed to stay.