Chapter Text
1) Dad (that's Agent Hotchner to you) spoils our dog Inky like mad when he thinks no one is looking.
All I can tell you is that when Papi leaves on a case, Inky suddenly gets table scraps although Dad is sneaky about how he puts them into Inky's bowl. The 'no dog on the furniture' rule is also broken, because when Papi's out of town, Inky takes over the spot where Papi usually sits.\
But, it’s only when I'm not in the room.
Dad will shoo Inky from the couch the moment he hears me (which takes much longer than you would think) and the dog just gives Dad a look that clearly says, "Seriously?"
But I pretend to ignore it because Inky on the couch when Papi's not home seems to calm my dad down. Let me tell you, my dad does not like when Papi isn't home.
At all.
2) My dad is the best shot in the BAU, except when it comes to video games.
My dad taught me all about guns. The different types. The laws and the safety and everything like that.
My dad taught me how to shoot. I used Papi's gun at first, then graduated to Dad's Glocks.
And, when we're on the firing range, Dad totally smokes Papi every single time.
Yet the moment we are in an arcade? Papi is the King. No, seriously. King. People crowd around him to watch him take out everything from aliens from Aliens to zombies from House of the Dead 4. "Pattern recognition," he told me once, with that slightly dismissive tone which meant I should have figured it out sooner.
But I was six at the time, Papi was tearing through a boatload of the Undead, and Dad—who held all the BAU records for marksmanship—kept getting killed because, well, he wasn't good.
So I learned quickly that if I wanted the biggest and most obnoxious prize at wherever we were, I pleaded with Papi to shoot (not Dad) and, well. Let's just say that I have more than one four-foot tall Scooby Doo stuffed dogs in my room and all my friends would ask Papi to teach them when we were at the arcade.
3) Dad's hearing in his right ear is for shit, but he can read lips like nobody's business.
There are things around my household that just aren’t discussed. They're not the things you may think. My dad's scars? Yeah, I know the story. Papi's track marks? A story I totally didn't want to know but Papi wanted to make a really big-assed point.
My dad's hearing? I wasn't sure when I first noticed it. I mean, he's kind of jumpy to begin with. Given all that I know that he's been through? It's not surprising. But I don't think I fully understood just how Dad and Papi synced until the day I realized that, when someone spoke to my dad on his right side and my dad didn't respond right away, Papi tended to repeat what was said, but he used different words.
Being a rebellious teen (really, I wasn't all that rebellious compared to my friends but it was pretty rebellious for our household), I figured I could smart mouth my dad if I stood on his right side and muttered my words.
What I wasn't counting on was my dad being able to lip read.
"What did you say, young man?" Dad demanded. There's no way to adequately describe just how my dad sounds when he says that phrase, but it does send fear into my soul.
And fear? Fear makes me do stupid things, like lie to my dad's face about what I said. Dad just stared at me, so I scrambled for a better explanation. When I finished, Dad glared and then repeated what I originally said word-for-word.
I was toast. So were my privileges for two weeks.
"You really should know better," Papi told me later as I begged him to intervene and lessen my sentence. "Your dad spent years in SWAT. Lip-reading is essential in hostage situations." (For the record, I served the two full weeks.)
So the next time I muttered under my breath on my dad's right side and he asked, "What did you say, young man?" I looked at him straight in the face and told him, complete with the curse words.
Dad was pissed, gave me the speech about 'not using those words,' but at least he didn’t ground me.
4) You never want the 'just say no' speech from my papi.
You just don't.
Seriously.
Or maybe you do. He takes 'scared straight' thing to a whole new level.
You see, one night, I finally gave into temptation (and peer pressure) to smoke some weed and drink some real booze. None of this Miller Light or White Zinfandel crap. Nope. Jack and Coke. Tequila. 151. Vodka. The usual high school junior stuff (at least according to my friends).
I was aware enough to know there was no way in hell I could drive home in once piece, much less walk through the front door without my parents realizing just what I'd been up to. Knowing that Dad would go nuclear over the situation based on his past lectures, my best option was Papi. Papi, I thought, would launch into the whole 'teens experiment' thing and give me credit for being smart enough to call him before I got behind the wheel of a car.
Um. No.
Make that, hell no.
Yes, Papi picked me up from my friend's place. No, he didn't call the cops on my friends. He didn't even call the other parents. I passed out in the car shortly after he picked me up, but when I woke up, it wasn't in my own bed.
I had no goddamn clue where I was except that I was on a bed with stained, crunchy sheets and the room smelled like piss and mold. Oh, and Papi was sitting in the rickety chair, he was illuminated by some crappy floor lamp, and he was walking a coin across his knuckles.
I nearly pissed my pants. Seriously. Because the man sitting in that chair may have looked like my Papi, may have carried credentials identifying him as Spencer Reid, but he was no one I'd never seen before. He was seething. He looked at me like with such disdain that it was terrifying.
Papi didn't move from his chair. He just stared at me.
And when I began puking, he didn't help me to the bathroom. He just sat in that chair as I made a mess of myself, the carpeting, most of the bathroom, and the toilet. When I finished barfing, I watched as he wordlessly cleaned up after me. He even had a fresh set of clothes for me to change into.
"Where are we?" I ventured to ask as I huddled against the toilet, because my stomach wouldn't stop roiling.
"The Travelodge in Silver Spring," Papi answered.
Stunned, I stuttered, "Why here?"
"It's where I used to go to get high," he told me flatly. "And the staff doesn't look twice when a middle aged man hauls a strung out boy up to his room at one in the morning. Not everyone pays for drugs with cash."
Papi flipped the coin towards me. Somehow, I caught it. He held my gaze for what seemed like forever before he jutted his chin towards the door. "Let's go."
Strangely, Dad wasn't up when we got home (which was somewhere in the neighborhood of six in the morning). And when I finally crawled out of bed later that day, it was Dad who was sitting at the breakfast bar, doing paperwork.
"I screwed up," I told him, knowing that if I admitted my mistake outright, the less mad he would be.
Dad just sighed. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He dropped his hand down to pet Inky, who was (as always) by his side. "Spencer said he gave you a coin."
"Yeah," I replied, fishing in my pocket and pulling it out. How it stayed on me from the hotel through the car ride and then me sleeping, I have no idea.
"Read it."
It was a Narcotics Anonymous Ten Year token. Then I remembered Papi's crack about 'not everyone pays for drugs with cash.' The coin fell from my hands. Holy shit. Papi? An ex- junkie?
No. Way.
"We know that you're going to experiment," Dad said wearily. "It's natural. We get it." He looked up at me, more tired than I'd seen him look since he left the Bureau. "I didn't want him to take you to that hotel. I thought it was too dramatic. But he said that you called him so it was his choice on how to address the situation."
"I really screwed up."
"You really fucked up," Dad corrected, and my dad never just cursed to curse. "You were smart enough to call one of us to get you, and that does show maturity."
"I know I'm grounded."
"That's Spencer's decision, not mine," he said plainly. He shrugged. "You called him, not me." He checked his watch. "He'll probably won't be home until after dinner." He looked over at me again. "Don't try to talk your way out of it. If he begins to lecture, listen to what he has to say. Just so you know, the 'everyone was doing it' excuse it completely off the table."
"I guess next time, I should call you?" I joked and it wasn't until the words left my mouth that I realized how badly I erred.
Dad's glare was lethal. "There shouldn't be a next time, Jack. Period."
5 ) Officially, the reason my dad left the FBI was because of the car accident during a high-speed chase outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unofficially …
No one ever really talks about the accident, not even Papi, except to say that it was bad one and Dad and Papi were lucky to walk away. It was so bad that Dad took his early retirement without protest. It was so bad that my dad, the most successful and lauded profiler in the Bureau, declined the offer to teach at the Academy. He doesn’t write books like Uncle Dave does. He doesn't go on lecture tours like Papi does. He turns down all offers for television shows and consulting jobs.
He's a part-time law professor at Georgetown now. He says he's happy and Papi says that Dad's happy.
But there are ghosts that haunt him, and it's scary as shit to walk in to Dad's office and watch as he interrogates a bookcase.
Because Dad doesn't see it as a bookcase. He sees it as an UnSub that he has to break in order to save the victim.
It doesn't happen that often. When it does, Dad gets a new round of meds. He and Papi are open and honest with me, which may seem odd given how fiercely private they usually are about health-related things. Papi explained the clinical side of what was happening while Dad drilled me on what to do when he has an "episode."
But when it happens, Papi says afterwards, "It should be me."
Dad always replies, "It shouldn't be you."
For me? It shouldn't be either of them.
But that's not something I can control.
The one thing everyone knows: Spencer Reid is my papi. I call him that because I can.
The first time I remember meeting Elle Greenaway was at Mom's funeral, although Papi tells me that she'd been around a few times before. I don't recall much from the funeral, except Dad saying that he was "Sorry" to Miss Elle. Why is that such a vivid memory? Well, everyone was telling Dad that they were sorry for him so it didn’t make sense. So, yeah, I remember her.
She showed up at the house almost a year later when Dad wasn't home. Papi had just moved in and it was clear to me (even as a barely-five year old kid) that Papi and Miss Elle were really good friends. I was still wary of people back then. Hey, I just lost my mom, Spencer was a recent permanent addition to the household, so I was a bit possessive. Up until then, Spencer was always 'Spencer.'
So when Miss Elle called him, "Big Papi," I had a fit. Tamisa called her dad 'papi,' so for me, it was some stranger laying claim to my other dad.
I crawled on Spencer's lap, hugged him hard, and glared at Miss Elle. "He's my papi!" I declared. "My papi! Not yours!"
"Of course he is," she agreed.
"My papi!" I yelled. Apparently, I spent the next hour glaring at her and refusing to let go of Spencer.
Miss Elle never called Spencer 'papi' again, but for me? From then on, he was Papi.
He still is.
~~~~~ Finis ~~~~~