Fic: By The Beach, Chapter 9/9 (Criminal Minds, Reid / Morgan, Hotch Chad)
Title: By the Beach, Chapter 9/9
Pair: Spencer Reid / Derek Morgan,
Aaron Hotchner / Chad Christensen
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Feedback: Always Welcome
Criminal Minds Main List
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Interlude
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7 (NC-17)
Chapter 8
“I got a message from Hotch.” Morgan explained as they walked across the airport.
“Don’t tell me they need us to go straight to work….” Reid groaned. “And would you mind taking your own bag now? I’m not a mule.”
“I had to check my messages.” Morgan pocketed his phone and slung his bag over his shoulder. “They’re on their way back. Hotch is trying to get the whole team off for few days.”
“They had a rough case and we reap the benefits? That doesn’t sound fair.”
“It happens once in a century so just enjoy it. He’ll call me when he knows for sure.”
“So we don’t need to go to work in the morning?”
“Apparently. You remember where I parked the car?”
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“Okay,listen up.” Hotch raised his voice to get everyone’s attention. When they had returned to Quantico half an hour earlier, the whole building had seemed like a haunted house. The bullpen was empty, and the only other people they had seen were the few janitors and cleaning ladies who were roaming the hallways.
“Where’s Dave?”
“Gone.” Prentiss informed. “He grabbed his bag and told me to tell you that he`ll finish his report when he has time.”
“I made some calls and because this case took so long and we had to come to work on your scheduled time off, the whole team has the next five days off. E-mail me your reports tomorrow.”
“Great.” Prentiss took her back and marched to the elevators without looking back. J.J. gave Hotch a sympathetic smile.
“I’m sure that was nothing personal. Everyone’s just really tired right now.”
“I know.” He sighed. “Go home and get some sleep.”
“Yeah, I’ll just pack my stuff.” She headed to her office. “My travelling bag is not meant for this kind of cases. I ran out of clean clothes yesterday.”
“You’re bag is twice the size of everyone else’s.”
“But I was the only one who got a plateful of soup on my clothes.” She still shuddered at the memory. “Honestly, I’ve never seen a kid behaving like that.”
“You offered to baby-sit.”
“Because I thought it would be some nice, cute kid, not a miniature unsub. Twenty years from now we’ll be chasing that guy.” Her rant continued till she closed the door to her room.
“Welcome back.”
A voice from the dim bullpen startled Hotch. His hand went down to his gun before he realised who it was.
“You could have told me you were there!”
“I just did.” Chad stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in camouflage patterns and terrain boots. His cheeks were full of green and brown streaks of camouflage paint.
“I hate to tell you this, but that doesn’t really make you blend in to the background when you’re in the office.”
“Seemed to work just fine, you didn’t see me.” Chad grinned. “We’re running survival training in the woods for the newbies. I was playing the enemy.”
“With all that stuff on?”
“Yeah. I set up a little contest. If someone can spot me before I get within ten feet from them, they’ll get a day off from training.” The grin grew even wider. “I didn’t need to give a day off to any of them.”
“You’re good.” Hotch admitted, wearing an identical grin.
“I’m damn good. Ready to go?”
“Go where?”
“Home.”
“In a minute, why?”
“I’m driving you home.”
“I got my car on the lot.”
“And you said on the phone that you haven’t slept at all for the last two nights. You didn’t seriously think I would let you behind the wheel?”
“I’m fine.”
“And I’m not negotiating. I’m gonna go grab my bag and then I’ll come back to get you. And just to be on the safe side, I confiscated your car keys.”
“How did you get my car keys?”
“I took it from your desk drawer. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to convince the cleaning ladies to let me in….”
“So you charmed your way into my office to take away my car keys.”
“Yeah.” Chad glanced over Hotch`s shoulder to the lit window of J.J.`s room. He grabbed Hotch by the neck and pulled him close for a kiss. Hotch was too tired to remind him about workplace appropriate behaviour and participated as well as his exhausted body allowed.
“I’ll be back in a sec.” Chad said when he finally pulled back. He marched down the hallway, leaving Hotch to lean heavily on the nearest desk. The lack of air was making normal thought processes hazy. The slam of a door finally snapped him back to reality.
“I’m leaving now.” J.J. came down the stairs and froze. She stared at Hotch with his mouth hanging open. Her bags almost fell from her grasp.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I….” The stunned look on her face turned into a crooked grin. “Are you planning to join that survival training they got going on?”
“No.”
“Well… Do you mind if I give you a little bit of advice?”
“No.”
“This may sound girly.”
“What is it?”
“With your skin tone and colouring…. Green and brown don’t bring out your best features.”
“What does that mean?”
“Think about it. Good night.” She took her bags and left.
Hotch thought about it for a minute. Then his mind made the connection. He ran into his office and pulled out his shaving mirror from the bottom drawer. The mirror image confirmed what he had suspected.
Most of his face was covered by green and brown camouflage paint.
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“Five days.” Morgan reported. “Plus the weekend, so we got a week.”
“Where did you leave the car?”
“It was here... somewhere. And speaking of vehicles, we could do a little road trip on my motorcycle now that we got time.”
“What did I tell you about that thing?”
“That you’ll get on it when the national statistics of motorcycle related accidents show decrease in fatalities.”
“You remembered.”
“I tried to sweet talk you to get on it for weeks, and you didn’t even try it.”
“That thing is a death-trap. Besides, I’ve been on a motorcycle ride once.”
“You have? When?”
“Few years ago.”
“Just don’t tell me….”
“Yeah, with Chad.”
“You tried it with him but you don’t wanna try it with me?”
“He’s a good driver.”
“So am I!”
“Knees don’t get scraped on their own.”
“That was ages ago!”
“Can we just focus on finding the car?”
“Fine. I remember I parked somewhere close.”
“I think we should split up. You’ll search there and I’ll go there.”
“One more thing.”
“What?”
“Was it a good ride?”
Reid let out a long sigh. “It was a lot of fun, but I don’t want to try it again.”
“So you liked it?”
“But I don’t want to try it again.”
“With anyone?”
“I don’t want to try it with anyone, not even with you.”
“Alright.”
“And Chad has a bigger bike.”
Morgan gave him a suspicious glance.
“You better be talking about motorcycles.”