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- phoebe -
The moon was so bright. It was so much brighter lately than it ever had been. Or maybe she just noticed it more now because it was shining down on her like a spotlight. As if she ever wanted to be the star of anything, and now she felt like she was supposed to monologue about something. But she just took another drag from her cigarette instead—a habit she mostly broke, but sometimes fell back to when her world felt tilted in the wrong direction.
Fear and adrenaline brought them together in the first place, the sound of Cyrus’ fists on her skin still echoing between his ears when Aaron knocked on her apartment door barely an hour after landing back in DC, unable to rest without seeing for certain that she was okay. He wept at the sight of her bruised eye, even darker than it had been earlier, and she let him inspect her wounds, his fingers trailing lightly over her split lip and cracked ribs until a spark stole the air from the room and they could only breathe through the other’s lungs.
He didn’t stay the night, she would never have let him, but she let him in again a week later, and again and again after that. For months she tiptoed around the conversation about them because she didn’t want to break their bubble of solace, until the depravity of the Turner brothers in Southern Ontario lit a fire under her skin, and she told him they needed to figure it out and suggested dinner that weekend. A date that passed forgotten after Foyet desecrated his home and split his family. The beginning of their end.
Her birthday fell on a Monday that year, and it was the last time Emily remembered his real smile lighting his face. Penelope had begged her to come out with the team that night, a rare start to the week that didn’t have them flying to another part of the country for a case. All she really wanted to do was spend a quiet night at home with a bottle of wine trying to divert Aaron’s attention for an evening, but it was becoming clearer every day that she couldn’t do that alone anymore. She spied Rossi and Aaron out of the corner of her eye, no doubt the one convincing the other to come out just for a night, for the good of the team, so she relented, a small part of her awed that these people thought she was worth celebrating.
She should’ve expected the birthday cake at the bar, it was Penelope after all, but it still caught her off guard, a touching gesture from the people she relied on more than family. They sang Happy Birthday, voices off-key and out-of-sync from the buzz of too much liquor, and she blew out the candles. “Speech!” Derek shouted, but she looked up at Aaron and saw that his smile had reached his eyes for the first time in weeks, and she stuttered, forgetting how to speak, before lamely thanking everyone for the fun evening.
He knocked at her door again that night, and she could feel him trying so hard to be present as he revered her body with soft lips and gentle hands. Holding her close after, he traced his fingers through her hair as he asked, “What was your wish?”
She yawned and blinked lazily. “Hmm?”
“When you blew out your candles,” he added. “What did you wish for?”
“Oh,” she murmured, settling into his chest. “Just the moon.”
In her haze of near-sleep she could’ve sworn she heard him whisper, I’m trying, but she drifted into a dreamless night in his arms. He was long gone by the time she woke to the smell of fresh coffee, her favourite mug on the counter beside the machine that he’d programmed to her usual morning routine.
She’d realised the truth of her feelings while sitting at his bedside in the hospital, at the middle of the end — she’d give Aaron the moon if he asked for it. But he forgot to ask for anything, so consumed he was with keeping his promise to Haley that trying to hold onto the last good thing in his life became like trying to hold water in his hands, feeling it spill through his fingers. He didn’t knock at her door again after her birthday, and that was the end. Emily let him let her go, resigned to the life of not-quites and almosts that seemed to follow her wherever she went. Days later it was Haley’s bloodstained hair spilling through his fingers as he wept over her broken body.
And now she was here, after the end of them, like a postscript. Smoking in the moonlight on a balcony in Wyoming. The night was brisk and bright, the chill in the air a tonic after a long day of teenage suicide. Aaron’s room was a floor below hers, just to the left. She could see the lamplight from his room spilling out of his window, no doubt as he hunched over his desk with a mountain of paperwork and a bitter coffee to keep him awake, how she knew he was spending most nights lately. A quick burst of wind whistled by, and she felt acutely alone. After a final drag from her cigarette, she stubbed it out and glanced down to Aaron’s room once more, willing him to step outside and feel the night for a moment’s reprieve. Exhaling once more in the cold, she slipped back into her room, locking the sliding door behind her before curling under the covers.
The window rattled with the wind and Aaron looked up from file before him. The moon was so bright, brighter than he’d ever seen before. The night sky was clear in this sleepy town, and he got up from the desk to gaze at stars he hadn’t seen in months, years maybe. After a day of delving into the darkness of humanity, the moonlight felt like a gift. There is still light, fragments of hope scattered like the stars in the night, and the moon… the moon is always there.
- patty -
Aaron was leaving for Pakistan in just a few hours. Penelope had arranged a little goodbye party (“Not a goodbye party, Sir, that means you’re not coming back. It’s a see-you-when-you-come-back-from-Pakistan party, which is hopefully soon…”), but he begged off, saying he wanted to spend the evening with Jack before he left. In truth, he’d already said his goodbyes to Jack that morning, choosing to treat the secondment as if he were leaving for any other case to make it easier for the little boy to understand. He just needed to be alone.
Alone took him to a canteen not far from the military base he’d checked into earlier; he was on his third vodka tonic, the clean burn of the alcohol thrumming to his heartbeat. He felt stupid and hollow.
He’d known something was up. They may not have been sleeping together anymore, but Aaron still knew every one of Emily’s tells, and she was not okay. Late three times in a week, a tiredness to her eyes that concealer couldn’t hide, she was jittery but she wasn’t drinking more coffee. She ate TicTacs like M&Ms and she changed the little scented tree in her car more frequently, telltale signs of someone masking a smoking habit. But he didn’t push her, he couldn’t. He waited for her to come to him, but she never came around at all.
Knowing now her history with the CIA, it was no wonder she was so skilled at keeping secrets. It didn’t stop him from hating how long it took him to figure it out, just minutes too late. He followed her to that warehouse in Boston where her lifeblood oozed onto the concrete floor. He followed her into the ambulance, blind to the rest of his team. He followed her into the hospital, as far as the surgical staff would let him. He followed her until someone higher up pulled the plug on Emily Prentiss, until she was nothing more than a faked death lost in a sea of bureaucracy and paperwork.
A bureau-mandated inquiry into the “Prentiss-Doyle situation” as they called it resulted in a two-week paid leave and a month in Quantico spent on consultations rather than on scene. He’d slogged through that time, endless meetings and infinite paperwork dulling his mind. He jumped at the opportunity to leave the country, incapable of feeling much guilt about leaving Jack behind for weeks, maybe months, while he was drowning in his own shame for failing Emily again and again.
He could’ve told her that he regretted breaking up. He almost did, when a shortage of rooms in Alaska put them together. She’d insisted it wasn’t a big deal, they could share the bed, she was always cold anyways. He nearly fell asleep, but then she curled right into him, clutching his shirt like she used to, and it took all of his willpower to not tuck the hair brushing her cheek behind her ear.
He swallowed the last of his drink, unaffected by the bitter burn in his throat, and dropped a few bills on the bar, grabbing his duffel as he left the canteen to catch what little sleep he could before boarding the long flight. It was a clear May night, and the moon shone brightly behind him as he walked towards the bunkhouse. It surprised him, seeing how much light there was, and he paused for a minute at the door, turning to gaze into the moonlit night. The moon glowed down on him, the same as it ever was. How could something be so far away and yet make the midnight radiate with light? Perhaps the same way she was across an ocean and still in his thoughts every second. Tonight, before the long journey ahead of him, it felt like the moon followed him home.
On a balcony in Paris, a wisp of smoke curls into the early morning air. The last of the stars are winking out but the moon clings to the periwinkle sky, dawn only moments from breaking. Another day feeling stupid and hollow as she numbly goes through the motions of her cover. Her only reprieve is watching the moon disappear into the early morning light, finding comfort in knowing that when it leaves her sky, it follows its path around the Earth to his. She keeps her eyes on the moon until the very end, until the sun’s rays spraying out from behind the old city block in front of her erase it from the sky, hidden again until the evening’s twilight. She takes one last drag before stubbing out her cigarette, sparing one more glance toward the sun as it rises.
- norah -
On a Saturday morning, they counted the marshmallows in his Lucky Charms. The rule was she could have four of any of them except for the rainbows, his favourite. She always took three hearts and a moon. “A heart for you, a heart for Daddy, and a heart for Sergio,” she says.
“And a moon for you!” Jack chimes in, having indulged in this ritual with her nearly every weekend for several months now.
“And a moon for me.” She watches him fondly as he sorts his marshmallows by type, arrayed in as close to a rainbow shape as he could, another part of the ritual. Six months ago she had a bad day and Aaron invited her over for breakfast the next morning. She hasn’t missed a week of marshmallow sorting since.
“Where does the moon go?” Jack asks, popping a red balloon into his mouth.
“What do you mean?”
“Where does the moon go?” he asks again, sorting horseshoes into their pile. “I know it comes out at night and goes away in the morning, but where does it go?”
She scours her memory for grade school science. “Well, it keeps orbiting the Earth…” she trails off, remembering a sunrise in Paris. “You know, I’ve seen the moon disappear before.”
Jack looks up. “Really?” he grins. “I want to see! How can we see it, Emily?”
“Well, I’ll have to ask your dad, but we could have a sleepover in the backyard—oof” Jack flies into her arms, and she grunts.
“Oh please Emily, please! I know Daddy’ll say yes if you ask him! He always says yes to everything you ask.”
Emily hugs the little boy close to her, stunned as always over the love he gave so freely. “I’ll ask him, don’t worry!”
-
And so it came to be that they were in a tent in the Hotchners’ backyard, a house in the suburbs he’d promised for Jack when he’d returned from Pakistan. Jack fell asleep between them, curled into Emily’s side like a little bug. He’d been adamant he’d make it, that he’d stay up the whole night to watch the moon disappear in the morning, but she was under strict orders to wake him, just in case. And she would, she would give that boy the sun, the stars, the moon if he asked for it. Anything to make sure this moment, this life she found herself in, was real. Was hers.
She turns toward Aaron, sleepy but alive, and sees him looking at her, a soft smile on his face as he rubs his thumb along the hand he holds. Maybe it’s just the way the light catches, but she swears she sees the moon reflected in his eyes. And he was hers.