They were what he cherished most.
Those brief, fleeting moments that passed as quickly as fine grains of sand through ones fingers.
A flicker of a smile in his direction, her bashful reaction to his rare words of praise, and her eyes. Oh, her eyes. They possessed a life of their own.
Those emerald green orbs that latched onto him like a starving parasite onto its host, draining the very life out of him with their simple beauty and utter purity.
He loved how they sparkled with satisfaction when they successfully closed a case, how they burned like a jade inferno when she was hunting down a suspect (or when she was glaring at him for one of his reckless, impulsive antics). How they twinkled, suppressing a smile as she feigned indignance at his teasing words.
And those rare moments when they captured his gaze like a powerful magnet, filled with compassion and enchanted him and reminded him that he was where he was for a reason. He loved those moments. He held them close to his heart tenderly, with the fingers of a child cradling a doll.
Through all he had faced, the years of relentless torture and frustration of an elusive Red John, the deaths he had seen that had preyed on his mind, the horrors that awaited him every night as he closed his eyes and surrendered to the nightmares that ensnared him, the times he had betrayed her and had had to watch realisation and revulsion dawn on his boss' face at his cruel deception.
Through all of this, he carried these moments with him.
The fragments and pieces of times they had shared together, snippets of cheerful banter and comforting words, shared emotions and feelings, all strung together like pearls on a delicate string. Ready to snap, scattering beads that would roll away to foreign, dark corners of his mind to be swallowed by oblivion.
But until then, he held on to these memories, and relived them over and over again in the confines of his own mind.