At seven years old, Spencer Reid had already surpassed his schoolmates in every possible way but one.
Sometimes he sat alone and instead of reading, he let his eyes sit motionless on the page while he thought of a friend.
Sometimes she was old and brilliant, sometimes young and daring, but the one thing that never changed was her serious eyes and long curtain of dark hair.
.
.
Emily Prentiss never lacked for friends, but when teachers would pull her aside and tell her to think of the future, she'd plaster a fake smile on her face and think that it was an impossible task.
What happened, happened. She'd have no regrets.
.
.
She knocked on his door that night. When he opened it his gaze fell on the bruises painted across her face, and he couldn't think for the guilt of it. Those bruises should have been on him. It should have been him taking Cyrus's boot, never her.
"Ugly, aren't they?" she teased, holding up a bag of take-away as a wordless request for company.
Reid smiled and nodded absently, but silently he thought to himself that nothing about her could ever be ugly.
.
.
It was a holiday they all desperately needed, and the sounds of JJ and Garcia laughing together cemented that notion. It was nothing fancy, a couple of cabins in the woods, and peace.
It was bliss.
Reid grinned sheepishly up at her from his tenuous stance in the creek, trousers rolled up to his knees and long feet bare on the cobbled stones, and she realized suddenly that she might be in love with him.
.
.
She'd been drinking, they'd both been drinking, and maybe that was what made it seem like a good idea. Or maybe it was serendipity.
For once in his life he let his brain turn off and just let it happen and when Emily gasped against him and murmured something into his arched neck that sounded a lot like 'love,' he was lost for words.
Afterwards, she looked at him with dark eyes that felt so achingly familiar he was lost in them, and all he could say was, "I don't know."
.
.
"I don't want kids," she told him one day when it seemed like they'd been together longer than they'd been apart, and he looked up from his report and peered at her with startled eyes over narrow glasses.
"Okay," he said, and it was almost a question.
They never brought it up again, but sometimes she wondered if he regretted that.
.
.
Rossi was the first.
Hotch spoke at his memorial and his hair was greying, eyes lined with years of stress and smiling. Jack stood there too, and said a few words about his Uncle Dave behind eyes that shone with tears.
As tall as his dad now, and as broad. Emily twined her arm though Spencer's and realized that the world wasn't theirs anymore.
Somehow, their lives had passed by without them noticing.
.
.
Spencer took to retirement with a sort of childish glee that had Emily suspecting he'd been living his entire life in anticipation of this moment. One week it was jigsaw puzzles and she couldn't walk through the house without finding five half done on various surfaces, or being accosted and asked if this was an elbow or a nose. The next it was gardening, and their house had never smelled so lovely or been quite so green.
His hair still long but paled with age; his skin now lined around his eyes and mouth. Emily knew she was the same and they both carried the weight of their years heavily, but when she looked into his bright hazel eyes, she was thirty again and sitting in the bullpen watching him do card tricks.
.
.
One day she woke up and told him that she didn't want to get up that day, her skin flushed and eyes worried.
He curled up next to her, tucked his chin neatly into her shoulder and said, "Don't be silly. We've got so much to do."
He knew she was smiling without looking at her face, it was an argument they'd had many times before. "I'm older than you," she teased. "Show some respect, kid."
They stayed in bed anyway until the shadows of night began to flicker across the walls. She didn't remember what it was like to sleep without him anymore.
He remembered, and it only made him cling harder to her.
.
.
One day he slept in and Emily was delighted with the opportunity to tease him about being the lazy one for once.
"Come on, JJ and Henry are coming around for lunch," she said to him, walking into the room and pulling the blinds.
He looked at her with an expression she'd never seen on him before. "I'm tired," he said softly, and she thought there was fear in his voice.
She climbed into bed next to him and pulled him close, her heart in her throat, unsure of why this felt so wrong.
She didn't even know why she was crying until JJ arrived and took her hand with a whispered, "Oh, Emily…"
They had so much left to do.
.
.
Every day she wakes in the morning, thinking for a moment he's still there and it's like losing him again every time.
Every night she falls asleep thinking of a child with her eyes and his smile and thinks maybe that's the only thing about her life she regrets.
.
.
Maybe her whole life was just a long singular moment of serendipity.