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hogwartstoalexandria · 3 years ago

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Derek

1283w | General Audiences | Hotchgan: Aaron Hotchner/Derek Morgan

Additional Tags:

Established Relationship, Episode Related, Episode: s11e16 Derek, Angst, Breaking down, Proposals

Summary:

It's hard to pin down what exactly triggers him, why Aaron can't seem to walk into hospitals without collapsing around their nurses stations, but he does. It's safe here, where the fate of the man he loves is no longer in his hands, where waiting is all he can do. That, and shake with a relief that tears at all of his carefully stitched seams.

Read here on AO3, or under the read more.

It's hard to know what exactly triggers him, why Aaron can't seem to walk into hospitals without collapsing around their nurses stations. He doesn't fall as much as he stumbles, his legs giving out from under him and as much as he sees the nurses rush to him, he shakes his head, and shakes and shakes until a familiar hand curls around the back of his arm, gentle, yet firm. Dave's, Aaron realizes when the other man's face gets into his blurry field of vision.

Dave doesn't force him to his feet, he doesn't even talk for all that Aaron can make out, he just rubs his hands up and down Aaron's arms and kneels with him. Aaron gasps for air, crimson pain in his lungs as he blinks back tears. He won't let them fall. He won't put on even more of a show.

It's only when a man in scrubs makes his way to the lobby and Dave looks up and Aaron can hear the others behind him get up from uncomfortable plastic chairs that Aaron focuses his breathing enough to hear— "He's out of the woods." He keeps talking a while longer, his eyes warm with a relief Aaron can almost taste, together with the so particular smells of the sanitized hallways and misery of the world, his own.

Dave's hands around his elbows tighten, Aaron looks back at him. "One visitor," Dave tells him, "You go, Aaron."

Aaron is stunned. He remembers now. Remembers carrying Derek out of that house on a stretcher with steel both molten and ice-hard slipping into his veins. Days of trying to find him, turning over every stone he could, losing himself as he'd lost him. He remembers the thought that finally pushed him over, the same one that had been nagging at the frayed edges of his self-control the entire time. He couldn't fall apart when Derek needed him. He couldn't kneel under the weight of it when somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a team of six were hurting the man he loved on contract-sanctioned sadism.

He couldn't remember their last kiss.

The thought had gnawed at him, louder and louder the more dead ends they got stuck in, head in the door and bodies too square for the round openings. It had been a whisper, it had been a scream, and now it's stolen Aaron's balance. He can't remember their last kiss. Was it before work that day? In the car as they separated, Aaron going back to the office for a bit and Derek hitting the store in preparation for their night back home? Was it in the hotel lobby or was it all the way back in bed before they even got the call?

He wheezes as Dave finally pulls him to his feet.

"Come on, I'll get you to the door."

Aaron doesn't have the strength to pretend he doesn't need it. He doesn't have it in him to even look at the rest of the team. He never loses it like this in front of anyone but Derek, it's a luxury, vulnerability, and he doesn't have it. Not in front of these people who count on him to be the cool head in the storm, to be a rock nothing can crack when the world crashes and burns.

They get to the door of the room Derek is now resting in, and Aaron doesn't know if he can get in, until Dave repeats the words the doctor said but Aaron didn't hear— "He's awake, lost, in pain," and adds, "He needs you just as much as you need him, Aaron."

He tries, so hard, to pull this monster of fear and helplessness back in, where it's invisible, where it cannot get its claws back into his flesh under the eyes of his friends and the very walls of this terrible place. When he gets inside though, he knows it was no use. Even if his eyes weren't so bloodshot they feel puffy, even if his lips weren't so swollen he can feel them catch the cold hair, making him shiver, even if Derek was under even more drugs, he would still see this. He always sees.

"Come here," Derek asks and Aaron can hear the sob in his voice and that's almost enough to start it all over again.

He doesn't even consider the chair next to the bed, instead he falls at Derek's side, heavy and just narrowly missing the IV drips and wires. His hands fall to his lap for all of two seconds before they find Derek's face and Aaron presses their foreheads together. His eyes close with new tears. Keeping his touch gentle is the hardest part— that, and seeing Derek here at all. His rock, his unshakable ground, lying in a bed of bravery, proving he bested the six assholes of the apocalypse. Aaron cries and Derek doesn't shush him, he cries with him.

There are whispered apologies and harsh, shocked rebuttals on both sides. Aaron pleads for forgiveness; he should have been with him, they should have gone to the store together, he shouldn't have left Derek alone, he should have found him faster. Derek's hands tighten on his hip and in his hair and he growls a no that is so much louder than their voices have been so far, louder than the terrible yet beautiful beep of the heart monitor Aaron didn't know he was holding onto until Derek's reaction cut through its music. He kisses him, split lips against bitten ones, brushing wet from tears more than saliva, painful in more ways than one and yet alive. So very alive.

"Marry me."

Aaron doesn't understand the words until Derek's hand in his hair slides to massage his neck, until he moves to kiss his cheek and his neck and lets him go when Aaron straightens up just enough to not go cross-eyed as he stares at him.

"Please, baby," Derek repeats, "Will you marry me?"

They've never even talked about marriage. It was like all the other ways other people used to tell their partners they loved them when they just knew, when words had never been necessary and yet Aaron doesn't even take another breath before he's answered.

"Yes," it comes out in the next exhale, and again as his sobs come back, terrible wrecks, tears in all of him, limbs and skin and psyche. "Yes, yes, yes."

They kiss again, Derek hissing when Aaron's arm brushes over the burn on his chest, yet pulling him closer anyway, despite Aaron's protests, glaring at him when he tries to pull his weight off the wound. They kiss, and Aaron commits each press, each slide, each suck to memory. He tastes Derek's lips and he licks into his mouth, he traces his teeth and he screws his eyes shut. He'll never forget another kiss.

"I love you," he whispers, raw, exhausted, and yet back to terra firma, because he's back where he belongs, because Derek's touch and warmth and gaze surround him once again. He repeats it, over and over, until He can feel Derek's energy winding down, the pain and the drugs pulling him slowly back under. He feels the drowsiness weigh Derek's arms down, until Aaron either needs to move away or commit and lie down next to him, the circle of their embrace undisturbed. He has no intention of moving away.

For the first time in days, Aaron closes his eyes and actually sleeps. It's a dreamless night, he drifts, he breathes, and more importantly, the movements of Derek's chest against his side carry him through the night. He's got him back. He's got him.

#aaron hotchner #derek morgan #mortch #hotchgan #aaron hotchner x derek morgan #criminal minds #criminal minds 11x16 #breaking down #hospitals #establish relationship #marriage proposal #lots of pain lots of relief that's how we roll #marie writes #marie posts

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cyn-00 · 5 years ago

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Moreid one shot, 11 - "hold on to that"

Season 11, episode 16 "Derek" (the one where Derek is abducted and tortured, and stays in a coma for 3 days - but we're gonna pretend it was a little longer than that ;)

Of course in the show Morgan wakes up to a pregnant Savannah and asks her to marry him, oof

This is fluffy. I usually can't STAND cheesy fluff with other ships, but this is what these two do to me,,, smh

Note: this is OBVIOUSLY medically inaccurate. Waking up from a 7-day coma and immediately talk/hug/smooch would be quite the challenge

Read it on AO3

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It was a gloomy, rainy late-afternoon. Reid had been sitting on that crappy, plastic chair for the past 3 hours and 11 minutes: he arrived at the hospital half an hour before the consented visiting hour - at 2:30 pm - during which he stood outside staring at the entrance with his umbrella in hand, under the pouring rain.

That had been his routine for the last 7 days: going to work to do some desk job - Hotch had made it possible for the team to not be busy in any new cases for a week after Derek's...incident - and coming to the hospital as soon as he got out, which, most of the times, was too late. Still, he persevered to quickly pass by every single day, regardless of the time, even if it was just to ask the nurse or Derek's doctor how he was doing. And the answer he received was always the same, along the lines of: he's stable, there's not really much way of accurately knowing when he'll wake up, but it could be approximately within a couple of weeks at worst. At worst. Like even just one, single day wouldn't be bad already.

In all of this, sleeping was obviously not involved. Only a couple of nights Spencer had managed to fall asleep, but he'd been woken up after 3 or 4 hours by the same nightmare: the doctor telling him that Derek was cerebrally dead.

It was more often during work, or during his endless hours of sitting in Derek's room, that he'd unconsciously fallen asleep, interrupted a few minutes later by a concerned JJ or Hotch, or by the fictitious sensation that Derek had finally woken up.

And that afternoon specifically, the weather wasn't contributing to making the sleep deprivation + almost complete loss of hope situation any better.

He hadn't really spoken to anyone on the team about what was going on inside his head, even though JJ and Penelope had tried several times to make him spill it out, and had eventually given up. Let alone his mom - to whom he was used to write letters, telling her all those things he couldn't bring himself to tell the others - who didn't even know what had happened to Derek in the first place.

He shut down like he always did in situations like this, partly because if he started opening up to someone about how he was feeling, he would irredeemably fall apart, like a small breach in the tarmac that one day, out of nowhere, could cause it to completely tear in half; partly because letting other people know what he was feeling would make them in some way witnesses of things and concerns and scenarios that, until that point, had only existed in his mind, making everything "real". As if what had happened to Derek wasn't real already.

Almost every day, at a certain point, some other member of the team would join Reid at the hospital, mostly to check on him rather than on Morgan. Penelope would even talk to Derek, since the doctor had told them that he probably could hear them. Spencer had tried to do that the first couple of days, when he was still hopeful and trusting of "the process" and all that motivational, optimistic and quite questionable stuff that Penelope had fed them with all these years, everytime something bad happened.

But then he gave up. He didn't even know what to say to him: did it make any sense to ramble about his day, when there wasn't Morgan around to make it interesting? To make it worth living? No, it didn't, Reid answered to himself, trying not to give in to such cheesy thoughts, constantly failing and starting to cry over Derek's bedsheets.

But it was 5:41 pm, and nobody had showed up yet. Reid didn't even know whether he'd hoped for that to happen or not. It didn't make that much of a difference to him, looking at Morgan's unconscious body alone or with someone, except for the fact that in the first case he didn't have to worry about the embarrassment of bursting out crying and the other person trying to comfort him.

Spencer finally shifted his eyes away from the wall in front of him, and lifted his chair up to place it even closer to the bed. He stared at Derek for a while and gulped, trying to rehydrate his desert-like dry mouth.

"Just wake up." he simply whispered, like it was an order.

He sighed as his eyes started to fill up with tears - again. If he didn't know the physiological process behind the act of crying, he would wonder - like a kid would probably do - how someone's eyes could produce so many tears in such a short time period, multiple times, without running out of them.

"Wake up for me." he pleaded once again.

Spencer reached out for his hand, holding it tight, like if he squeezed it as hard as he could maybe he would trigger in it the muscular response of squeezing back. He didn't really believe that, of course, but he had been struggling to spot the difference between what was real and what wasn't, probably because of the sleep deprivation.

Feeling the coldness in Derek's hand made him let out a sudden cry he didn't know he'd been holding inside his lungs, screwing his eyes close until the first tear wetted his cheek and gave in to dropping his forehead heavily on the mattress.

At some point, Reid shot up from his seat abruptly, making the legs of the chair screech against the floor, and stormed out of the room, without even bothering to close the door.

He quickly headed to the restroom down the hallway, struggling to even walk straight because of the dizziness the combination of getting up so fast and the blinding light of the neon lamps was causing him.

"...Spencer?" he thought he heard a male's voice from behind, not able to identify exactly whom it belonged to. He didn't turn around, guessing that it was probably the umpteenth hallucination of Derek's voice calling out his name. He couldn't afford to believe that again. He would fall apart altogether.

He got in the bathroom and made his way to the first stall available, locking himself in.

Spencer stood there, leaning with his back against the door, and started sobbing like a kid. He tried to make less noise possible, even though he had noticed no one was there as soon as he got in. But most of all he didn't really care anyway, at that point.

After a couple of minutes, he heard the door of the bathroom open, but no steps followed that noise. He immediately tried to pull himself together, wiping off the tears from his face with shaky hands and taking deep breaths.

The unknown man started to walk exactly toward his stall. By the sound the soles of his shoes made on the floor ceramic tiles and the rhythm of his pace, it finally came to Spencer's mind who said man was, figuring he must have also been the one calling his name in the hallway a few minutes before.

Spencer turned around and looked down, seeing the man's feet from the gap between the floor and the door. As he had imagined, he saw a pair of Blundstones, black, worn out and still slightly wet from the pouring rain outside: they were Rossi's.

"Come on, Spencer. I know you're in there." David said softly through the closed door, breaking such cold silence and giving Spencer the final clue that, as a matter of fact, he had guessed correctly.

Spencer turned around with a sigh, closing his eyes and placing a hand on the doorknob but waiting a few seconds before coming out. As if a few seconds were enough to prepare himself for the kind of talk he was well aware was expecting him. Specifically Rossi's type of talk who, as the older member of the team, was kind of a father figure to all of them - besides from Hotch, to whom he was a best friend and an older brother at the same time. To Spencer, Rossi had in some way replaced Gideon, even if not completely - evidence of that was in his reaction to the latter's death, a year and a half before - and Gideon, in turn, had in many ways replaced Reid's actual dad.

So, the "Rossi talk" wasn't that much different from a dad talk; even though, much to his defeat, Reid had to admit he didn't actually know what a dad talk sounded like.

Spencer finally came out and saw him, a cup of coffee in his hand and an expression of deep concern on his face.

He immediately looked down at his feet, putting his hands in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie - which, by the way, wasn't actually HIS hoodie. It was Derek's. And that was the first thing Rossi noticed, since in 9 years that he'd known Spencer, he'd never seen him wearing a hoodie - and Rossi's memory was notoriously matchless. If one doesn't count Reid's memory, that is - of course. There was another thing that he noticed, about the hoodie: there were a couple of drops of something wet on it, clearly standing out on the light grey fabric. Tears, he figured - although to be fair he could've guessed Reid had been crying just by the swelling and flush of his eyes.

David affectionately put a hand on Spencer's cheek, interrupting the silence.

"Son," he sighed "You know he IS gonna wake up, eventually, right? You must know that." he paused, receiving no answer from Spencer, verbal or physical what so ever. "The doctor said he will wake up. You're too smart a kid not to understand that that's what you need to hold on to." he added.

Spencer raised his eyes to finally look back at him, trying not to get too affected by the worried and melancholic gaze the man was directing toward him.

"I-I'm trying-" he paused to clear his voice "-to hold on to that. But seeing him like that..." he gulped, feeling the lump building up in his throat again and his voice getting uncontrollably shaky. "Knowing that he is alive, but then I look at him and he seems-" he swallowed the word 'dead' before it could come out of his mouth. "...you know?"

"I know." Rossi replied. "But I also know that deep down you don't wanna give up, even if you feel like it." he gently patted on Spencer's cheek.

"You can't give up on Derek, kiddo." he concluded, making Spencer clench his jaw and his heart miss a beat when he mentioned Derek's name out loud.

"Yeah. I-I know that too." Spencer said, so low his voice barely came out steady, nodding like he was trying to convince himself of that more than he was trying to convince Rossi.

They stayed in silence for a while, Spencer still unable to look directly into the other man's pupils.

"Oh, by the way, this was supposed to be for you, but I guess it's disgustingly cold now..." Rossi said trying to lift up the mood a little bit, while handing him the coffee. There was no way of convincing Spencer that he needed to go home and get some sleep - not that he would've managed to, anyway - so David figured that, at that point, he might as well just help him stay up with caffeine, since that was Spencer's plan no matter what.

"Thanks..." Reid smiled shortly as he took the cup, trusting that Rossi would understand that he wasn't thanking him so much for the coffee, rather for his always pragmatical way of supporting him. Or everyone on the team, really.

"Let's head back now, shall we?" Rossi said checking his watch, implying that, maybe, staying in that cold and quite sad hospital restroom wasn't the best way of spending the last hour left of visiting time.

They got out and made their way back to Derek's room, through the empty hallway.

When they were 6 ft away, Spencer heard a voice coming from the room direction. Again, he thought he was dreaming of it.

But once he got only a couple feet from the door, he not only could hear the voice more clearly, recognizing it was the doctor's: he also noticed the door was now closed, recalling he did not close it.

"...am I going crazy or someone's talking in there?" Rossi asked from behind, frowning.

Spencer froze, staring at the door handle with goggly eyes and his mouth hanging open.

"Did- did you close the door?" he asked, without even turning around.

"What?- No, I never even got in in the first place." Rossi replied, quite confused by the question, wondering why it mattered.

Spencer finally opened the door.

He saw the doctor listening to Derek's breathing with his stethoscope, interrupting himself as soon as he heard the door opening.

"S-Spencer?" Derek mumbled with a hoarse voice, unable to see 100% clearly, partly because of the 7-day coma - of course - partly because the room was quite dark from the cloudy weather outside.

"Doctor Reid! Here you are." the doctor greeted, wearing a wide smile as he approached the two.

"He's stable and perfectly fine, as you can see. He woke up about 10 minutes ago and called me with the button..." he gesticulated, turning his head around to smile reassuringly at Derek "...since no one was here. We still have to periodically visit him and run some blood tests before determining when you can bring him home." the doctor paused, seeing that Spencer was frozen in spot and staring at Derek with an empty expression, while Rossi was the only one actually listening.

"...but we can discuss all this later, anytime. Now we're gonna leave them alone, right agent Rossi?" he concluded politely, patting his hand on Spencer's shoulder.

"Absolutely." David answered, with his phone already in hand to call Hotch, affectionately waving at Derek while the doctor held the door open.

The second the men shut the door behind them and left the other two alone, Spencer felt his eyes tingling again, his breath shaking; attempting to gather all his self control not to drop the coffee on the floor and run toward Derek to hug him.

Instead, he somewhat managed to almost composedly make his way to sit on the bed, beside him, putting the cup on the nightstand.

"Derek-" he called out his name, whispering, like he couldn't believe it was really him. Finally, he got to wrap his arms around the other man, who was still laying down on the bed; squeezing him so tight he could've broken his ribs and sobbing loudly against his neck.

Derek shut his eyes close, feeling his bottom lip slightly trembling and the tears run down his temples to sink into the pillow, as he held Spencer's head close to him with his fingers tied in his hair.

"I-I'm so sorry, kid- I'm so sorry" Derek whispered between sobs.

Spencer let go of - probably - their longest hug ever, wiping away the tears with his sleeve and cupping Derek's face in his hands.

"Don't. This was never you fault. I'm not mad at you." he comforted him, sniffling, while wiping Derek's his tears too, once again with "his" hoodie sleeve.

Spencer leaned closer again, this time to finally kiss him.

"W-wait" Derek stopped him a second after, when his lips were already brushing against Spencer's, having a hard time breathing properly in that position. He pulled himself up to sit, adjusting the pillow behind his back with a slight grimace of pain on his face.

"Better" he said, taking Spencer back in his arms, being able to finally kiss him the way he wanted to.

He put his hand behind his neck to get deeper, and as soon as he allowed his tongue to find its way into his warm, comforting mouth, he felt the slightly salty taste of Spencer's tears spreading into his.

Derek broke the kiss way before he'd wished to, due to his short breath - it took him a few minutes of inhaling and exhaling heavily against Spencer's damp lips to steady it out.

Once he'd managed to get a hold of his breathing, he leaned back on the pillow to take a better look at Spencer with heavy eyelids and a hand on his jaw, stroking his chin with his thumb.

Spencer stared back at him with big eyes and a silly smile on his face, for something like 3 full minutes, until Derek's voice finally breached through the homely silence of the room.

"Alright, you're looking at me like I fell from heaven. I just got out of a 7-day coma, this is not my best shape, just so you know" he said jokingly, while straightening up with his back.

Spencer giggled and looked down.

"Sorry. It's just- I feel like I'm dreaming..." he replied.

Derek's contagious smile gradually turned into a more serious expression. Now that his vision had cleared out, as the sky outside had, after the rain - "what a fucking cliché", he thought - he could see how exhausted his boyfriend was. His lips were dry - but that, he'd already noticed when his tongue had brushed past them - his hazel eyes had lost that "glow" they always had, not to mention the already dark circles around them had never been that dark, very much visible in comparison with the rest of his skin, paler than usual.

Derek leaned closer to him again, lifting Spencer's chin up with his finger.

"About that..." he sighed, his voice getting deeper. "...you haven't been sleeping much now, have you?" he asked, gently.

Reid's weakest spot was his sleeping pattern, so everytime he was going through a rough patch, that was the first thing that got messed up. Everyone on the team knew that, but Morgan in particular played a big role in it, willingly or not - even before they were a couple. Another symptom of Spencer not being well, that was maybe a little less obvious to the others, was a massive increase in his already above average consume of caffeine, instead of actual food.

As that, too, popped into Derek's mind, it seemed to him that Spencer's cheeks were almost imperceptibly more hollow, if it was even possible for someone to get visibly thinner in just a week - like he wasn't skinny enough already, as his mom always pointed out.

Spencer gulped nervously, adjusting his hair - also messier than usual - behind his ears.

"H-how could I sleep?" he asked rhetorically, his smile fading away as he was having a hard time bearing with the sad look Derek was giving him.

Derek didn't answer: there was no way he - or anybody - could blame him for not being able to sleep. He wouldn't have managed to sleep either if the same thing that happened to him had happened to Spencer. God, he couldn't even THINK of such a thing happening the other way around.

"Derek uhm- even though the doctor told me you were going to wake up, that- that's just not how I actually processed it." Spencer continued, now that his voice had got steadier and he'd found the courage to finally look him in the eyes, albeit with a frown.

"I knew that you would wake up eventually, not just because the doctor told us, but because I knew the physical damage you went through wasn't severe to the point- anyway, I knew that. Deep down." he explained further, trying to break down for Derek what he had gone through the past week, but ending up rambling like he always did either when his brain was working faster than his words could keep up, or - as in this case - when he was uncomfortable and upset.

"In spite of that, at some point my mind took for granted that you were dead." he added, pausing to catch his breath and lower his voice. "...so I started functioning as if you were dead. And to be honest it was one of the scariest things I've ever experienced." he concluded, trying with all his strength not to start crying again.

All those things that Spencer was saying, made Derek feel like his heart was being shattered with a hammer, and his stomach was being tied in a tight knot; a rising sensation akin to flat-out guilt. He rubbed his face with a palm, trying to wrap his mind around what Spencer must have gone through.

"I-I can't even begin to imagine what you had to go through, Spencer, but I'm here now and-" he shook his head vigorously, as if forcibly attempting to cut himself off mid-phrase, shutting his eyes. "this is- this is all my fault, I'm so, so sorry Spencer I don't know how to make it up to you I-"

"Nonono, no, that's not what I'm saying" Spencer interrupted him immediately, taking his hand - the one not bandaged - and entwining their fingers together securely. "That's the OPPOSITE of what I mean. I am the one who's sorry, f- for- for giving up on you so quickly... I didn't do it on purpose though, it's like a defense mechanism that my mind employs to numb itself, I- I lose hope to try and get closure, you know that's what I do- I just don't want you to think that I did that out of not-" Spencer blurted out, almost choking on that last bit. He shifted his eyes down, stroking the back of Derek's hand with his thumb as a way of calming himself.

"I- I didn't do it out of not loving you. Because I do- I love you. You know that- a- at least I hope you do." his chin was trembling visibly by the time he had concluded.

Derek stayed silent throughout Spencer's whole speech, not knowing how to phrase that he had absolutely no fault in all this, what so ever. In actuality, nobody did, beside the people who hurt him - who hurt all of them.

"I know." he finally answered, simply. "And you don't owe anybody any explanation. Especially me." Derek told him gently, his eyes watery. "and- and I love you, too. So much."

Spencer nodded, smiling lopsidedly.

After a moment of silence, enough to lift some of the weight resting heavily on their hearts, Derek spoke up again.

"You can keep the hoodie, by the way. There are probably more of my clothes in your closet than in mine." he said, smiling a little.

"Yeah, It's enormous for me though!" Spencer giggled, pulling at the fabric of the hoodie to show him how loose it hung on his skinny torso.

"...but it has your smell..." he added, shrugging timidly.

Derek grinned even wider and cocked his head. What the hell did he do to deserve such a precious human being?

He shifted closer to place soft, smiley pecks on his boyfriend's temple, and cheek, and chin.

"It looks real good on you" kiss "pretty boy" kiss "if you ask me" yet another kiss, as his fingers ran through Spencer's hair and caressed his nape, making him slightly ticklish.

"O-okay-" he answered, chuckling and wishing he didn't stop.

But they heard a knock on the door. Spencer gently pulled him away looking down at his watch: visiting hour would be over in 20 minutes - of course the others were coming. He turned his head around, looking at the door over his shoulder; still feeling his heart beating like crazy in his chest.

"Hey you guys, we're coming iiin!" JJ's joyful voice got louder as she slowly opened the door, followed by Penelope, Rossi, Hotch and Tara.

Now that they were all inside, greeting him cheerfully, Derek saw Penelope was holding a bunch of colorful balloons in her hand - not surprisingly, if he had to be honest. Nonetheless, they needed her exactly as she was.

"Look at my boys! So pretty and happy!!" she squealed, wearing the biggest smile ever and walking toward them with her arms spread open, ready to snuggle them both in one of her signature bone-crushing hugs.

Spencer turned his head again to face Derek briefly, before they could be squeezed into said hug.

They stared into each other's eyes, smiling like two kids.

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