DECODE → AARON HOTCHNER (c.s)

decode

YOU HELD   YOUR PRIDE
LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE
HELD ME

Humans, intrinsically thinking, are not meant to be monogamous. Not necessarily in relationships (that's a place where monogamy is often celebrated but it's not required either), but humans by nature don't like to be held down to one thing for the rest of their life. It's why there's such a large statistic for people who are unhappy with the things they are doing in their life. People who find their job boring and monotonous now compared to what it was like when they first started. And for some people, their job offers them the chance to see different things every day. That sense of burnout doesn't occur rapidly (and sometimes, it will never occur). Others find themselves wasting away in a life that was never fit to be theirs, one with days that blended seamlessly into each other. Where days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and soon enough they blink and find that years have past. Any they're exactly where they used to be, the farthest thing from what they used to tell themselves they would be.

Change is good, right?

People are supposed to thrive with change. Uprooting themselves from things they once knew like the back of their hands, getting placed in a new area. Somewhere that they could grow new roots with. Violet Lancaster thought that was the case — she thought that starting over was going to be good for her. Breaking free of the chains that her (now) ex-husband had put her in, finally feeling confident in the work she was doing. She thought things were looking up, that despite being uprooted, she was going to find it easy to come back. All it took was one watering of her tree for everything to come right back up to the surface. Every fear, every lost thought of not being good enough, it all came bubbling up with nothing to stop it. Putting down roots is hard, trying to put them down a second time is nearly impossible. Even after she moved half way across the country with her daughter, Violet Lancaster found remnants of her old life still attached to whatever roots she had left. Roots that were seemingly still attached to the old life, gripping on as if it was the only thing they could do to stay alive (and in many ways, it was). It didn't matter what she did, some things bled through.

So, outrunning the past isn't possible, it seems.

Aaron Hotchner might have been a damn good profiler, capable of reading even the smallest of emotions on a persons face, but he had never been good at dealing with his own feelings. Handling his own emotions — he was the type of person to bury them, six feet under to where he wouldn't need to see them anymore. It's what he did with his family problems, God knows he had his fair share of issues stemming from that sector of his life. If it wasn't his absentee (and then dead) father or his mother who never seemed to care (though, he knew now she was dealing with more than he could have imagined), it was his brothers who wanted to be just like him. Except, now Sean couldn't be any more different from the type of person Aaron Hotchner became. He did what he had to do in order to survive, even if it meant ignoring any call he got from his family. Especially if it meant ignoring any call he got from his family. And Eli? He was doing better than any of them, at least from the outside looking in. The only time Aaron felt a tinge of guilt hit him were because of his sister, seeing her grow up way too fast (a genius intellect would do that, but he still wished that she could have had something normal to look back on), it made him realize everything he left her with. Everything Sean and Eli (and even Declan, who, to be completely honest, Aaron had no idea about who he had become) had left her with when they escaped too. That guilt weighed heavier after Jack, a small thing that only began to grow as time moved on. Until suddenly, burying his emotions got the best of him.