Disclaimer: I don't own Criminal Minds
When she was younger she would sit on her father's roof and count stars. It was an escape from the silent tension at dinner and angry words hushed at bed time to spare her ears. She was only eight when she first climbed through her window and watched the stars blink against the dark. It was the summer of her parents divorce, the summer of long conversations and missing family dinners and extended business trips for her father. One day her mother was there: white pants, floppy hat, and the smell of vanilla mixed with wildflowers, and then she wasn't. It was the summer of her mother leaving and life skipping over the event, like it was just another moment that passes along into the next. It was as if she'd never been there. Sun burns and skinned knees and water fights with the neighbor boys, two bee stings and a summer cold that turned into four days of bed rest and a missed tennis game for her father. Life was still life. She watched the stars and sank into the routine of climbing to the highest point of the roof and missing her mother.
When she was twelve her father sold the only home she'd ever known and they moved into a bigger house three states away with a privacy fence and a lap pool that was useless nine months of the year. Her window looked out onto a pleasant garden twenty feet down that frosted over in the winter. A thin ledge was the only path onto the sloping roof. It took three weeks and an almost fall until she mastered the climb. Fall turned into a deep winter that brought more than a foot of snow and a kind woman who smelled of expensive perfume who'd become her step-mother.
It happened well into the winter four years later, the roof slick with ice and a soft snow blanketing the earth. She slipped.
She'd sliced her palms open trying to cling to the roofing and broken her left wrist in the fall. It took two therapists and a tearful 'new' family meeting for her father to believe it was just an accident. She'd finally told him how angry she'd been, how confused and sad and alone she felt from her mother leaving more than half her life ago.
But she didn't tell him the thrill it gave her, dangling off the ledge, or the rush when she stands so close to the edge. She feels as if a strong wind could whisk her away.
She feels that now, legs dangling over the side of a building. But this one isn't her fathers and if she falls off this time it will be far more than a broken wrist. She's only lived in the apartment complex for seven months, but living on the first floor feels trapping. Up here, twelve stories up and a giant against the coffee shops and local restaurants in the area, she feels free and alive.
Her body feels like its humming with energy, pulsing and fighting for more and her breaths are slow and deep. She wonders how anyone can be afraid of heights when it feels like this and then wonders briefly if she's addicted to the feeling.
She hears the door to the roof open and the surprise makes her head whip back to look for an intruder.
It's young a man, back-lit by shadows and tall enough to giver her a quick sense of unease.
"You don't have to do this," he says, palms up in what she assumes is suppose to be a non-threatening gesture. The first words out of his mouth are as surprising as his presence and they took a moment to register so she lets them float to the ground.
"Whatever you're feeling, whatever you're going through, you don't need to do this."
"And what exactly am I doing?" She asks, trying and failing to keep most of the incredulity out of her voice. He's closer now and the slowly descending sun brings out a red hue to his hair and a sharp shadow across the side of his face.
"Look, I know- I know how you feel. I know life can sometimes feel, feel impossible, but this isn't it. This isn't the way." He says it so forcefully, so passionately, that if she were on this ledge for different reasons she thinks he might have saved her life. Instead she leans her head back and laughs, a full body shake that kicks her feet out and rings loudly in the air.
It pauses him in his tracks and an anxious, confused expression pinches his eyebrows together and tightens the lines of his lips. He follows the ease of her body and the light grip of her fingers and he knows then that he's made a mistake.
"This isn't where I'd come if I felt the world too impossible." She tells him, the laugh still in her words.
Her response simultaneously piques his curiosity and confuses him further. He'd expect a quick denial or a flustered response, but she's relaxed and smiling and seemingly amused.
"I'm sorry- I, uh, I'm sorry, I thought that-" he begins to stutter, its an involuntary response to stressful social situations.
"I know what you thought," she smiles, she's still angled towards him but she's focused back on the view of lighted buildings and darkening streets.
"This-" she gestures past the ledge of the building "is where I come to feel alive."
It's such a personal statement that the air feels tight and there's really no proper way to respond for him.
"I saw your legs dangling and I just assumed." It fills the air and the deep personal moment passes with a breeze.
"Did you call 911?"
The Virginia police force is quick and she's half expecting to see sirens whirling up the street.
"I, uh, no. I didn't."
If she's surprised, it's not even half as much as he is.
"So you thought you'd run through the building and talk me from jumping?" She quirks a brow.
"Yes." He's still standing in the middle of the roof and he shifts uncomfortably under the truth of the word.
"Do you talk people from ledges often, then?"
He can't honestly say he's ever talked someone from jumping off a building, but he has talked eight people from committing suicide and fourteen more from killing others.
"Something like that." He chuckles. He finds it strange to laugh in a situation like this and it catches in his throat.
"I'm Lily."
"Spencer."
Another few seconds pass in a silence that's punctured by the sound of a passing car honking.
He doesn't exactly know why he's still standing there, so he nods his head as if she can see him and turns to leave.
"You can stay if you want."
It's such an uncertain invitation that he doesn't know if she's being sincere or not.
"It's nice to share," she explains, as if that explained anything at all. So he shuffles closer and sits further from the ledge than she dares, even though he's not afraid of heights, but he's calculated the possibility of falling and the probability of surviving that and the odds are not in his favor.
"I assume you actually live in the building? You're not just some good Samaritan walking by?"
They're six feet apart, close proximity isn't something that he enjoys.
He knows the dangers of giving someone his home address so he just nods and tells her he's on one of the top floors.
"I'm one-oh nine." She responds without the obvious caution he maintains. "I'm not a fan of being on the first floor, but at least I don't have to lug my laundry up endless flights of stairs."
"I have my own machines so it isn't so bad." He also isn't a fan of germs and the idea of a communal laundry washing space sent him into the nearest appliance store and ordering the most sturdy of washers.
She whistles as if she were someone terribly impressed.
"Living the good life."
"It isn't so bad." He smiles.
It brings something to his face that sparks a moment of appreciation in her and she's very suddenly conscious of her ratty t-shirt and un-brushed hair. But it's useless now to worry about so she focuses on letting the height thrill her.
Already her heart is hammering and she feels light, so light she's just another gust of wind that swirls in the night. She looks over to Spencer and wonders vaguely what he must be feeling, if its the same or similar or nothing alike hers at all.
"So what do you do?" she still feels light and its somehow infused with her voice, high and airy and slipping thorough the air.
"I work with- I'm, I- I'm a profiler."
She assumes he is being vague intentionally so she lets that be that.
"do you like it?"
Its the subtle tilt to his mouth and the warmth that swims in his eyes that tells her, yes, he does. But she isn't a profiler and she can't read his body language like he can, so she needs his reply to know the answer.
"In the end, yes."
The conversation has been so strangely intimate and simultaneously guarded that she doesn't expect more information on the subject.
"And do you like what you do?" he asks in return. He's already profiled her down to the muted color of the polish on her toes and he doesn't need a verbal response to tell him yes, yes she loves what she does.
"Are you a painter?" He follows up with.
"Yes, at times." She's pleased that a stranger, who has known her only a handful of odd moments has guessed something that means almost as much as breathing to her.
Its in the callouses on her thin fingers and in the rainbow colored smears hiding around the collar of her t-shirt, probably from wiping off sweat with wet fingers.
"I'm a translator though, painting is just something else that I love."
He's surprised somewhat by that, and looks at her again a little closer.
She's thin, almost bony, with dark brows and darker eyes. He guesses she's somewhere around twenty-five, twenty-six, and what he assumes was years of orthodontia work has given her white, pearly teeth. She has a sort of symmetry that mathematically is pleasing to the subconscious so he focuses more on her knobby knees than the tilt of her chin. He doesn't do well in most social situations and even worse with pretty girls who have dark eyes.
"I know American Sign Language and few other languages, I do a lot of work with children."
He's impressed but it shows only momentarily on his face.
"How old are you?" She questions.
"I turned thirty last month."
"Hmmm."
Their attention is swallowed in the darkening night and the thin layer of night-time noise that crawls into the streets. It isn't long before he feels the ache in his knee and the heaviness of his limbs tells him just how much he needs sleep. He has an early day tomorrow and he needs to re-pack his go bag and scavenge his apartment for something to edible within its expiration date. He glances over to Lily, still absorbed in her view of the world beyond.
He gets up stiffly and the movement draws her attention back.
"So soon?" Its curious and if he didn't know better, sad.
"Long day." He explains and pauses as if unsure how to say goodbye. He settles on saying goodnight and murmurs the pleasantry before retreating to the door located in the middle of the roof.
"Thank you-" she calls after him. He pauses once again at the door.
"What for?"
"For trying to save my life, however unnecessary, and for the company. Either one, take your pick."
He doesn't have a response but he has a million things to say and they slip away as she returns to her star gazing. Then its too late and he pushes himself through the doorway and down four flights of stairs and finally into an empty apartment.
He feels a quick lump of regret but its an unreasonable emotion and its easily pushed away with thoughts of work and government reports and of the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, so when he finally climbs into bed he's sufficiently tired and only half thinking about the star-gazing girl on the roof.
The night slips deeper into the clock and the brightest stars fight to shine through the layers of city smog. Lily lets it all in, the sounds, even the cool taste of the wind. A cold blue soaks up the night and morning comes with an orange push against the horizon. She's stayed out all night, not a first, but not something common. Her eyes are gritty with sleep and her body cries for a warm shower and a real bed, so she obliges and leaves the roof with light steps and a lighter heart. She sets her alarm for late into the afternoon and she's asleep just moments before sunlight dances its way into the room.