Disclaimer: Not real, not mine, not making money from this

My name is Tristan. I have a son. His father was a bum so I took off when my baby was two, who got sick and died when before his fifth birthday.

It's easy to mark out the outposts of one's life in two short lines and five sad looks cast at the grain of the rosewood table. The shopkeeper is a large woman who had, confirmed through superficial research, lost a child herself. She reaches across the table and offers an understanding hand and a job.

For the next five months and two days, Prentiss stacks cereal boxes, canned beans and sacks of flour in neat rows onto endless shelves from nine to five, and surprises herself by actually enjoying the mundanity of it all. Routine calms her, frees up space in her mind to think, as if serenity were a commodity she could barter for with Time.

Reid phrases and re-phrases what he needs to say. "Hi. Um. I'm Emily's colleague. I'm here for her cat,"

"Oh," the matronly lady turns her head and calls to the back, "Sergio!" She looks at Reid and frowns. He is too young; too skinny. "She never told me she—"

Sergio marches up to him and investigates his shoes, delighted by the mismatched socks he finds. Reid shifts his feet in a weak evasion, his eyes on the black ball of fur at his feet as he mumbles, "Oh, no. I'm just, um, picking up the, um, cat,"

"Emily knows?" The lady laughs (at him?) and scoops Sergio up.

"Yes, I mean, well, she—"

"Well then," she answers, convinced, and plonks the cat in his arms.

The door closes politely and Reid realises he'd forgotten about appropriate transportation.

"They tell me you have a ton of names,"

"An alias for every night," she teases.

The blonde girl laughs; she thinks it's a joke and Prentiss doesn't know whether to pity her or think her foolish. "Isn't that too many to keep track of, hmm?" A kiss now, at her temple, lower, lower, strawberry blushes at her cheeks so close they seem to be converging.

Nowhere near enough, Prentiss thinks, her lips curving into the model of a smile. "I have a catalogue. What's your pick for tonight?"

Sergio plays the keyboard. His paw reaches the third cluster of notes of a wobbly Beethovan Symphony No. 5 before Reid pulls out the electric plug while balancing a hot mug of coffee in his other hand. He frowns at the cat, wonders if he should say "No", and if he should, what sort of expression he should wear while saying it. If he doesn't say it, the cat might think it was all right. If he does so without the appropriate warning gestures, the cat might think he wasn't being serious. Already it seems strange to berate a cat for pitch-perfect curiosity.

Before he reaches his verdict, the cat bounds away into the dark. Reid considers calling after it, then decides against it, and leans back into the chair instead. He shouldn't worry too much about Sergio, though. As much as Sergio misses Emily, he adores the snug little corner between Reid's couch and his ancient, coveted bookshelf.

When she was released from the underground cult fortress JJ had pulled her close, the relief washing over them an analgesic dulling the horror of the past few days. JJ had touched the bruise at the corner of her mouth and cried and tried to hide it, then kissed her once, lightly, on the cheek, and it had tasted of the way rain wrapped itself around the world on a warm afternoon.

Yesterday, JJ had handed her three gateways to a new life. She had given her a short, cursory look created for outsiders to interpret as a coolly unconcerned glance. She had on a tight seam of a smile across her lips and her head had dipped ever so slightly as she wished her a perfunctory good luck.

The headache keeps him up at night and at 0215 Reid chooses to read in bed after many futile attempts of willing himself to sleep. The light is kept at a dim minimum and the pages are turned slower and slower till finally the book slides face down and he doesn't bother to pick it up. From beneath his lashes he spies Sergio exploring the girth of the bed with his little pink nose.

Morning catches up on him and he realises he hasn't slept at all.

Actually all that was just filmed for the TV. What really happened yesterday was that after handing over the parcel of passports JJ had reached across the table and touched the webs between her fingers one by one. She had traced the outline of her hand on the newspaper, drawing a chalk fairy with wings that made the words flutter. She had taken Prentiss's other hand below the table and wrote, over and over, an invisible 'E' onto her warm, dry palm of criss-crossed lines, just for both of them to remember.

Sergio prods the crackling bag of cat biscuits with an impatient paw.

In protest, Reid takes his willowy height to his advantage and lifts the package out of reach as he rattles some of the stuff out into the empty dish that he hopes is not too deep for Sergio to eat from. In the meantime, Sergio draws elegant swirls about his unclad feet.

Reid sets the untouched mug of cold coffee in the sink and swings his bag over his shoulder. He is going to be late for work.

My name is Jessica. I am single and I can report for work anytime.

Prentiss thinks of her son if he had lived, if she had let him live. He would be twenty-five now, a tall young man with dark hair and proud eyes reserved solely for hating her, and she wonders if being hated would feel better than being nothing. Somehow it doesn't occur to her that the baby might have been a girl, a made-up girl in a made-up dream of her baby dancing at the top of an imaginary insurmountable hill.

She herself is glad to be free from any emotion towards her mother, who is probably making a business out of grieving somewhere in a country-house at Naples.

There are many comforts to seek in being dead.

Reid gets used to the empty desk across from him. He gets used to not looking up and muttering witty Russian asides, not asking whether she wanted some more of the crappy coffee from the pantry. Seaver keeps the greatest distance from the table; she consciously avoids looking at the vacant spot altogether, although he'd caught her running her fingers over the circumference of the seat, twice, three nights ago, when she thought no one was looking. Then she returned to her own desk and drew her legs to her chest and stayed on the same page of the textbook for the next thirty-seven minutes.

It was a long time since Reid worked with anyone whom he felt was younger than himself. It's a strange feeling, the urge to protect someone more fragile than yourself. The strangeness originates from the sense of superiority involved in supposing yourself the stronger one of the two in the first place.

Reid sips slowly at the cup and manoeuvres his way through backdated paperwork. There was a time when his headaches worried him. Now, the persistent throb in his temples merely bores him with its perpetual reminder of the inevitable.

Prentiss pulls her fingers through her hair (too short) and knits her eyebrows together. The coffee here is thick and composed of the deathly kind of sweet that makes your teeth hurt (just thinking about it) and her heart pull towards itself (just pouring it into one of those damn fine cups, which she does, before setting the saucer down in front of a man).

His body is an emaciated jigsaw of skin and bone. He raises his head to get a better view of her. "I've seen you before," he says.

For a moment she panics. Then calm kicks in like second nature and she shrugs, doesn't even bother to answer.

As she makes to return behind the counter, he says, "Wait." He catches her wrist painfully in a vice-like grip, from which she recoils immediately. She places her hands on her hips and tries to appear visibly annoyed rather than genuinely frightened. The band of skin around her arm tingles, a child to chiding.

Her name tag says, 'Isabel'.

"What are you," he says, tilting up to stare at her as if she were a site of curiosity at a carnival.

A glitch in time.

Years ago JJ had called him "birthday boy" and "Spence" in a single sentence and it had made him beam inwards. He can still feel it now, the pleasant twinge of embarrassment at being singled out by someone so beautiful. With this memory in hand he is safe on this end of the scale, and when he looks across at the other end he can see how she'd react if he'd confessed to her what he knows is happening to himself; he can imagine how her sad eyes would be turned away from him as she pulled him into a comforting, maternal embrace. That final pitiable image would be the only association left for him to hang on to, a dreadful alternative to the bright young treasure that he keeps brimming in the nebula of his heart.

My name is Francesca and I come from a poor village in the Mezzogiorno. I used to work as a milkmaid on the farm but I ran away because the fattoria proprietario beat all the girls and I didn't want to work there anymore. So I come here with a friend, find work, support myself.

She loves these preposterous stories she spins that she keeps off the records. Well, not the stories per se, because they are so ridiculous and Prentiss hates anything that is frivolous and does not have some kind of weighted impetus behind it, not the stories but the laughter she reserves for herself in secret when she tells them, almost like watching sitcoms of the other lives she has never had the chance to live. Sometimes it's almost as if she relishes getting caught, craving that spark of recognition in someone's eye when they pick up the ghost of her true self fleeting behind her thin, pale face. That someone might remember who she was and help her to keep track of how much she has changed, or how much she hasn't.

Prentiss' gaze sweeps across the row of shops and the baker on the opposite street catches her eye. He smiles amicably at her and she smiles back, a shy calculated smile. She wonders what they think of her, the Italien mademoiselle who speaks bad French and spends her evenings at the quadrangle feeding the stray cats on dry biscuits shaped like tiny brown fish.

She tours Europe in concentric spheres, circling the dimmer walks of life for any underground news of Doyle and his whereabouts. It is an allowance she rewards herself with for laying so dormant, an extravagant one where she's staked her life as collateral in exchange for some purposeful kind of thrill. At least that's how she has convinced herself.

It's a day off from work and Reid's alone at home. No he isn't; there's Sergio turning a corner, mewling a distressed kind of meow that is rather unnatural for a cat to make. Reid's head rolls back and his limbs snap and jerk to an unsteady swing rhythm. The world is dancing, he laughs, loud, unabashed. The world is dancing. The world is dancing.

He holds his left hand in his right, squeezes it till the pain brings tears to his eyes. His hands are clamped together and he tells himself, this is now, now, he tells himself. Shut up, he yells (in his head? aloud?) and is surprised when everything does fall silent and he collapses on the couch. He ticks off a column of little white boxes down a mental list of what he knows is true.

JJ calls him 'Spence'. Gideon is gone. The sun orbits the earth and Emily Prentiss is dead.

Every month she receives a different number which she dials. Someone picks up, a different person every time, and gives her instructions about whether she should stay put or be on the move to another nameless province in an equally nameless city. It's implied that she should obey; everything's done with her safety being the utmost concern, or so they say.

She punches in the number and waits. It rings for a suspiciously long time and Prentiss is about to hang up when she hears a familiar voice.

"Hello, I'm sorry but Peterson isn't here right now. I happened to walk by; would you like to leave a message?"

Prentiss doesn't speak; she's forgotten how to. Or perhaps she's afraid that the first sound she makes will be made unintelligible by emotion.

"Hello?"

"Yes, I, uh, no thank you, I'll—I'll call back—"

"Emily? Emily, is that you?"

She wants to reply so badly that she bites down hard on her lower lip just so she won't give voice to JJ's name the way one might cry a long-forgotten prayer. But it's highly likely this call is traced and what started out as a chance blessing may very well wind up as a curse on them all.

"Emily?"

Please, please, please.

The line goes dead.

There are 24 entries in the thesaurus for 'help' and Reid runs through them in his mind, from first to last and back again, skipping the one for informal usage, backtracking till he is lost in the list of words, now no longer words but hollow strings of letters in imaginary neon yellow highlighter, grinning at him but there still isn't one that fits just right in his larynx, he articulates, nasals, plosives, fricatives, but all that comes of it is those foreign noises he hears, what, is he making those noises, but how?, which drives him panic-stricken and as a last resort he calls out for Morgan, and it's like heaven, a gasp of sound he identifies, calling out, Morgan, Morgan, as though his name is also a synonym (of what?) in the dark.

I am Emily Prentiss and I am 40 years old.