Aaron’s sixteen when he has the first dream.
He’s sixteen when he dreams of carrying a glass ball filled with organs out of a diner. Somehow, he knows the heart and nervous system is his father, just as he knows the moment the heartbeat starts to fail. He smashes the glass on the ground, because in order to perform CPR, he needs access to the organs.
He’s screaming for help, on his knees in the bright sunlight, the rough sidewalk biting into his skin. He’s on a street and there’s no one around. He feels the bare carotid artery for a pulse and finds nothing. He screams and cries and begs until two women show up on the bench beside him.
“Help me,” he pleads. “Call 911.”
“He’s already dead, sweetheart,” the first woman chides.
“ Help,” he insists. “God fucking damnit, why won’t you help me?” His father’s going to die and it’s all his fault.
The woman’s companion, who looks just like her and wears the same uniform-esque outfit, turns to her friend. “We should be a bit more gentle, don’t you think?”
“He’s gone,” the first one replies. “There’s nothing he can do to help.”
The organs dissolve into the sidewalk and Aaron screams bloody murder, standing and running and mourning for all the things he never got to do, for all the life he’s never lived and the grief he’ll have to endure every day after. He has to find his mother and Sean. He has to do something.
The grief is the worst thing he’s ever felt. It’s an all-encompassing rawness, covering his entire being and muting all other thought and feeling. He can’t outrun it. He can’t make it stop. He has to give in to it, let it eat him alive.
Then, a voice comes from nowhere. “Go to Sean,” it says. “This is worse for him than it is for you. He needs support.”
Of course, the voice is right. Not only is it right, but it’s inexplicably calming. He has a purpose now. Protect Sean.
He wakes up, heart pounding and eyes filled with tears and fingers twitching with the insane need to call his father right now, in the dead of night. He just needs to know it was all a dream.
It felt so real.
Of course, Aaron has to move on with his day. He wakes up, he goes to work, he drives home, but he doesn’t forget. Every time he returns to the memory of the dream, he feels cold and empty and lost, as though he’d returned from some far-off place and left a piece of himself there.
On the way home, he takes a detour, driving through a mall perhaps twenty minutes from his house. He’s been there before, albeit not often. Even so, he’s familiar enough with the are to find it odd when he drives past not one, not two, but three IHOPs. Really, it shouldn’t be that odd. It wouldn’t be, not to anyone but Aaron. Not outside of the context of his dream.
When he was fourteen, just before he found out about his father’s cancer, Aaron, Sean, and their parents went to an IHOP about an hour away as a sort of family outing. Really, it was an apology for the events of the night before and a threat not to tell anyone (See how happy Sean is, Aaron? See the way he smiles at me? You don’t want to change that, do you? Do you? ). Halfway through the meal, his father had stood up looking very uncomfortable. He’d said he wasn’t feeling very well, that he was going to the bathroom, and then he’d collapsed on the floor seizing. It was V-FIB arrhythmia. It took EMTs five and a half minutes to restart his heart.
IHOP. Dreams about his father’s death. Huh.
A raven flies overhead.
Now, Aaron’s not stupid. He’s read Jung, he’s read Henderson. He knows what dreams mean, how the mind creates symbols. Taking all of that into account, he knows what this should mean. He knows what his mind is trying to tell him. He also knows that the mind plays tricks, that sane people don’t predict the future or read too far into things that happen entirely randomly.
Still. His father is dying. The end can’t be too far off, so who’s to say it isn’t coming sooner than expected?
In the next week, Aaron’s anxiety steadily ratchets up. His dreams remain gory and surreal, but that’s nothing new. What’s new is the symbolism he finds in everything. Suddenly, a shattered glass is an omen. A dark sky is a warning. He develops a near-pathological fear of ravens. His teachers are worried about him. His friends are happy he’s changed his mind about smoking weed during class.
Really, the call that comes on Thursday afternoon is something of a relief.
The ringing of the phone makes him feel cold in the same way the first dream had, and he knows already what’s happened.
“Hello? This is the Hotchner house, Aaron speaking.”
“Aaron, honey, are you sitting down?” It’s his father’s secretary. She’s always liked him and Sean.
“Yes.” Here it comes.
“I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but…” She hesitates, seemingly at a loss for words. “Your father’s been very sick for a very long time.”
“How?” is all he asks. There’s a chip in the paint just behind the fridge. The floor is a bit chilly, not surprising considering it’s only April.
“He had a heart attack in his office. He- by the time I found him it was already too late. I’m sorry, honey.”
Aaron’s ears are ringing. His knees are weak, but that doesn’t really after because he’s fairly sure he weighs less than nothing right now. “Oh. Okay. I’ll call my mom.” Then he hangs up.
Ravens and IHOP and glass balls full of organs. Hmm.
Pancakes never really taste the same after that one.
After that, nothing happens for seventeen years. Aaron goes to college, passes the bar, marries Haley, and transfers to the BAU. He meets David Rossi and Jason Gideon and visits Sean when he can. He sees a psychologist once a month and takes forty grams of fluoxetine a day in order to keep his job at the Bureau and everything is fine. Everything is normal.
Actually, save for rare occurrences like leafing through a dream psychology book or driving past an IHOP, he forgets the whole affair.
Then he drives past three IHOPs on the way into a little town outside of Denver, Colorado. They’re on a case, and he’s talking to Dave the whole time, so it doesn’t really register. That night, he gets to the hotel at eleven, takes a shower, looks over the case files, calls Haley, and goes to bed.
He wakes up in a paralytic approximation of panic. He’s frozen, limbs locked in place by the power of some primordial part of his brain, likely the same one that conjured up the repeating image of his house burning to the ground over and over again ad nauseam. Sean and his mother were in there.
Oh, God.
He forces himself to move his hand and, when the motion doesn’t trigger any sort of lightning strike or attack or other deadly thing, moves his whole self to sit on the edge of the bed. He’s drenched in sweat and freezing cold.
He spends the rest of the night in the bathtub, wrapped in a blanket and trying to research the case.
The rest of the case, he’s distracted, rendered constantly on edge by a dizzying sort of deja vu. Surely, the first time was a coincidence. Surely, this is just stress. IHOPs and strange dreams do not an omen make.
Still.
Still, he jumps to pull Dave back whenever things get just a bit too dicey. Still, he calls Haley four times on the ride home. Still.
This time, it doesn’t stop after a week. This time, Aaron has dreams every night for a fortnight. He sees cards that say “I’m so sorry for your loss.” He feels cold. He drops things. He dreams of fire and very high mountains and two women in matching dresses.
Gideon notices. Awkwardly, he asks how Aaron’s doing, how things are going at home. Aaron says he’s just stressed, that it happens sometimes. He tries to go on with his life, but the tension is making his heart race and his head ache and his hands shake and it’s becoming very obvious very fast.
Things come to a head on one of the rare nights he spends in his bed sleeping beside Haley.
Aaron’s in a basement. No, he’s in a tree. No, it’s a basement. The tree’s coming up through the floor and the whole place is shaking.
He’s so scared.
He doesn’t know why, just that he is. Deep in his chest, in what he might call his soul were he a different sort of man, he feels a tightness quickly morphing into pain.
The image shifts, and he’s in a tree again, for real this time. Haley’s on a branch some distance away, hanging out over the water. She’s going to fall. He shouts for her, but she either doesn’t hear or doesn’t understand. Either way, she doesn’t react.
“Haley!”
Don’t bother, Aaron.
“What?”
“Don’t bother.”
Haley falls. Aaron screams.
“Aaron. Aaron, wake up.” He shoots upright, forehead connecting with something hard. “Ow! Aaron, Aaron, honey, it’s just me.”
He opens his eyes. It’s just Haley, clutching her nose in the dim light of their bedroom lamp. She’s sitting next to him, reaching out as if to hold him steady. Haley. Alright. Alive.
Alive.
He gets out of bed.
“Aaron, what’s going on? Come sit back down; you just had a nightmare.”
No, no, it’s not a nightmare, Haley, someone’s going to die. Something bad is going to happen, he’s sure of it. He just has to find out what and where.
“Honey, nothing’s going on. Everyone’s alright, it was just a dream. Come sit down.” Something moves in the periphery of his vision and Aaron jumps, moving towards the door. What’s happening? His skin is crawling and colors look… wrong. He’s between something and something else and his heart is pounding fit to come right out of his chest. Haley follows him out the door.
“Aaron?”
Who’s going to die? What’s going to happen? He was right about this last time; it can’t be a coincidence. Tree, IHOP, home, burning, home, burning, home burning tree falling home tree fire Haley-
“Mother.”
“What?”
“My mother’s going to die. I have to go to her.” Aaron’s sure of it now. He has to find his keys, but he’s getting very dizzy and Haley’s trying to grab his arm and nothing’s quite right. What’s happening? Is he sick?
Where’s his mother?
“She’s fine, Aaron, she’s fine, I promise you. Please sit down, sweetheart, you’re scaring me.”
No, no scaring Haley. He has to protect her. But he has to get to his mother first. Both of them at once? Should he bring Haley with him?
“-No, Dave, I need you over here now. I have no idea what’s happening. This has never-”
Aaron doesn’t really remember this part.
He wakes up on his couch with a splitting headache and Dave and Haley watching him with no small degree of concern. He asks them what happened and they say he had a dream and a panic attack, but it was over and it was fine now. Then, they say with twitching fingers and darting eyes that Sean had called and that his mother had died of pneumonia very suddenly about three hours ago.
Aaron takes Haley’s hand and closes his eyes for a very long time.
The next break doesn’t last as long as the first. Why would it? Why should it, now that Aaron knows that something is up? Really, it’s the anxiety of waiting for the dreams to start that gets him this time.
He gets stress dreams when Haley leaves for witness protection, pale imitations of true omens only decipherable from the real thing because of their occurrence apart from any other signs. Dreams are malleable. So is experience, but Aaron would like to think that it’s less so.
(That’s not true at all)
It gets bad quickly. Aaron sees ravens and worries. He checks his phone and worries. He sees pictures and worries. He’s always worrying. More and more, he’s also hyperventilating in the single-stall bathroom at the end of the hall, but that’s fine. He goes to the psychiatrist and she ups his fluoxetine to 60mg. He goes to his apartment and stares at the walls until he sees shapes in the beige paint.
Months and months pass and the first of the real dreams comes. He dreams, late one night on the plane home from a case, of a movie theater empty of everything except the chairs. Where the screen should have been was the apartment he and Haley had moved into right out of college. He watches as Haley goes about her day.
After a few hours, passing like moments and little eternities, Haley turns to him and says, “You were always right, you know. You just didn’t quite get it in time.”
Aaron tries to answer, but she can’t hear him. Instead, she turns around just in time to see a man in dark clothes with an obscured face drive a knife into her heart. Aaron screams.
“Hotch! Hotch!”
Aaron jerks awake with a start. Morgan and Dave are leaning over him and for a moment, he’s not sure where or when or who he is. “What?”
“You were having a nightmare, man. You good?” Morgan leans back, straightening and extending a hand to Aaron. He doesn’t take it, just lies there and tries to catch his breath and calm his racing heart. Haley is going to die, he thinks. The dark, cold certainty sinks into him like a rock into deep water.
“I’m good,” he responds. He doesn’t want to sit up yet, doesn’t want to make himself more claustrophobic than he already is, but looking up at everyone from on his back is making him panicky. Dave must see it, because he says something in Morgan’s ear and he backs away, leaving Dave to sit down across from him. Aaron pulls himself upright. “What, Dave?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Dave folds his arms on the table between them, leaning forward.
“I had a nightmare,” Aaron says.
He sighs. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Aaron.” Dave fixes him with a flat look. “I know you. I know you’ve been nervous. I was there that night with your mother, and I know the kind of stress Haley and Jack have been putting you under.”
It’s Aaron’s turn to frown and turn away, picking at his nails. “Dave-”
“Aaron. I’m worried.”
“I know.”
Aaron tries to relax, he really does. He looks through photobooks of Haley and Jack. He goes for runs. He takes his medication, he talks to Dave, he talks to Emily. He keeps a routine and he stays on top of his work. He does everything he possibly can to stay as sane as he possibly can, but the dreams keep coming. So do the symbols.
Some of the dreams are taking on a strangely lucid quality, floating in the space between conscious and subconscious. He rereads Jung and it makes everything worse. He stops knowing if he wants to get better. Is there something to get better from?
Aaron knows, logically, that this must be some form of stress - some extension of the anxiety he’s had all his life, but he can’t make himself believe it. Not really.
One night, he starts to lose it. He can feel it on the way home from work. He can feel something give deep inside his head, and things become so much brighter. He’s dizzy. He might crash.
He gets home and changes into sweatpants. He gets halfway-ready for bed, but then something comes to him, words and music ringing through the silence of his bathroom, and he lies down on the floor.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. We’ll make it work. College, law school, theater, everything. We’ll make it work.”
“Aaron, I’m pregnant.”
“Honey, thats- oh, my God, that’s amazing.”
“Jack, please don’t start a new game right now. You need to be getting ready for bed.”
“But Mom…”
“Sweety, please?”
“I miss Dad.”
“So do I, Jack. So do I.”
A strange, echoey sound like water through a cave rebounds around his head. He’s very dizzy again, in a way that pushes his skull down into the tile and seems to lift his legs in the air, inverting him. Time is very strange right now.
Something terrible is going to happen. He feels it everywhere, a creeping dread wrapping his bones in decaying vines and pulling up the oldest memories he has, memories which never belonged to him in the first place. Inherited subconscious. Hmm.
The phone rings.