AN: ...for everything that changes and everything that is lost, cannot change what once was had. Reviews much appreciated. Please enjoy X
She's ready to go, and yet knows this is a lie, knows she could never be ready for this.
Not long ago she stood in the place where she had spent the best part – and it had been the best part, despite all – of her career and had looked around her at the emptiness where there once had been such richness. Now this morning she has looked around her own home, emptied now too; had stood and looked around at the place she has made her home in this town, had remembered the good times and the bad spent here. Then she had closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock one last time.
Goodbyes have been said and bridges have been burned. They had had so much left to do here, and yet there's nothing left for them to do now. She supposes they got the main thing done. Red John is dead. It was just that no one had ever imagined it would cost them everything they'd been building up to the last ten years and more. He hasn't had the last laugh, Red John, per say, but he has still managed to destroy everything – everything – they have had in the fallout.
She had decided to drive to Washington from Sacramento, despite the long miles ahead of her. It felt right. She needed it to be an event. She needed to do it alone. She needed the time to herself, the space. She would have plenty of time and space to herself from now on, it would seem. She didn't know a soul in Washington.
It is a start, Washington is, she tells herself again and again, but she knows in her heart it is an end. She will split the journey over two days, will take her time. There's no rush, not anymore. There's not much of anything, these days.
She drives into town one last time in the very early morning light, parks across the road from their former CBI building and just waits. She's not sure what it is she's waiting for. A reason not to go, maybe. But there is none. Everyone is gone, and there simply is no reason to stay. She looks a long while at that building, nothing more than a shell now, and her eyes sting, tears burning with the unfairness of it all. She supposes it's caught up in the throws of paperwork for now, their beloved building, will be reclaimed for use at some stage in the future. She wonders does the door of her office still bear her name.
She remembers Jane, always hovering at that door, always wanting something. She remembers the first day she'd met Grace, how she had knocked quietly, cautiously on the door. How she had grown by the last time she left through it. She recalls Rigsby coming to her too, full of love at the joy of his son and remembers realising too how far he had come over the years. And Cho. Cho, as dedicated as her, as alone now as her. Rigsby and Van Pelt had each other, Jane had his curious mix of freedom from his years of self-imposed agenda of revenge and the restriction of his now self-imposed banishment and most likely a new sense of grief and loss, she suspected without anything else with which he could distract himself. She supposes, that is. Not that she knows. But she and Cho, they don' t have any of that, they must begin again. When they had said goodbye, he was still talking about the FBI, hinting to her – a hint from Cho being a blatant and explicit command – that she could do a lot worse than signing up. She knows he thinks a relocation to Washington is one such way of doing so.
She's not so sure. She loves Cho, loves them all, but to work with him now, without the others would just remind her every day of what has been lost. Did she owe it to herself to give it a go, she had wondered, because it had been so good? Or was it better to honour the time they had spent together, those glorious, tortuous years, by letting them die in peace and not dragging them out, grasping them back together, only a shadow of what they were, a constant reminder of everything that had gone so terribly opposite to how they had wished.
Before it had all went down, her one prayer every night was that they would make it out of this alive. Her prayers had been answered and she is grateful for that every day of her life, but she had never considered the fallout. She had only been worried for their safety. She could never have predicted what went down, none of them could have. It had been a dream, a non-reality when she had left her office for the last time, letting go of the handle not believing it was true.
That self same door had never stayed closed for more than ten minutes at a time, always someone coming, always someone going, needing a form signed, looking a favour, always rushing, always knowing this was special; and it is breaking her heart to know it now lies empty. The door has been closed one last time for good, but there is no good in it.
She spends a few more long moments looking up at that building, sees the window Jane had cracked with a diamond, what feels like a hundred years ago now. If she raises her head a little she can see the edge of the alcove where Jane had burned his files on Red John, another play, another infuriating situation he had put her in, that she had been left to pick up the pieces of. At the thought of him she closes her eyes briefly, wills him to be safe, as she always does.
One last look at the place where she had been most happy and one more sobering thought. She knows not the day or hour she will return, or if ever she will. Years and years of happiness and strife summed up now with a heavy, slowly-rusting lock on the outside gate.
She puts the key back in the ignition and pulls away.
There is one last stop she wishes to make.
The cemetery is quiet when she pulls up to park. It is still early morning and the sunlight is bleak and distant and makes this feel surreal. She pulls her coat a little tighter around herself, an uncharacteristic mist making itself felt.
It doesn't take her long to walk to the graves, though she takes her time. She is still unsure of herself being here; she hadn't known Angela or her daughter, but by God, she knows Patrick and she will do this for him. She stands a while at the grave, says a quiet prayer.
She knows relatively little about the two poor souls buried here, she thinks, as she clears a piece of ivy threatening to begin its ascent on one headstone, save for the little pieces Jane has shared with her over the years, a quiet murmur shared here and there and remembered carefully and dearly by her. She hadn't known Angela, but feels an infinity for her; they have both loved him, she can admit it to herself now, and both paid the price for it, one more than the other. She has respect for this woman, would have to respect anyone who could tame Jane into a settled, loving husband. The thought is still slightly bizarre to Lisbon, unimaginable in the most painful of ways.
She doesn't know them, hadn't known them, but she's been fighting their battle for the best, worst part of the last ten years of her life, and she owes them this. Jane had his faults, heaven knows, as well she does too, but she has no doubt as to the love he had had and still held for his two girls. She tries to picture him, as she has done many times before, not tortured and defeated as he has been all the while she has known him, but as the loving father, devoted and enthralled by his child. The thought makes her smile, and not for the first time she feels her own heart lurch with longing. Not for the first time, and not for the last, she puts away her own feelings and thinks of him and his.
She hopes he will find happiness once more, wherever he be.
She looks at each headstone, spares one last thought for each one, and for the poor man left behind, for herself now left behind from them all. She wonders who next will stand where she does and think of them. Again, as she always does, she thinks of Patrick, and misses him.
She takes a deep breath. This is it. This has been it. She places one hand softly on one headstone, and then the other. She closes her eyes and her hand falls away.
She is a lone, solitary figure as she walks slowly back to the car and gets inside.
Moments later, two lights appear at the back of her car as she turns the key, and she begins her long journey away from here.