I've been wanting to write this since the spring. But I didn't get around to it because I had my novella for The Big Bang Theory I had to finish, and then vacation, job…you know, that darned real life that can really get in the way of important things sometimes. So yeah, here it is. This fic was inspired from a confession made on Tumblr saying that if Lisbon had kids, she'd probably be a great mother. I agreed, and then started thinking about how she's not likely to ever have that opportunity. So I wrote a situation where she would.
As usual, I don't own anything except for characters that I created.
Lisbon hung up the phone and rested her hands in front of her on the desk, feeling the cool desktop against her palms. The words of the social worker rang in her ears as if she'd just awoken from a dream that was refusing to fade from memory.
A fire, and unexplained fire, had destroyed nearly a thousand acres in Northern California. Lisbon had known that. But she hadn't paid much attention otherwise, her brothers and Annie didn't live there and there were too many victims for there to be individual news stories on each one. So she hadn't known that one of the fifty killed had been husband and father Dale Lisbon, a cousin that she'd met only once, when she was eleven. Dale's wife of nine years, Mara, had also perished. What the social worker was calling about, however, was that their seven year old daughter had taken to a local lake with one of her friends and the family's old dog. She had survived.
The social worker wanted to place Kara in her second cousin's care. "There is no other family in the area," she had told Lisbon. "The girl's maternal grandmother also perished in the fire."
"Oh my God," Lisbon had managed, putting her free hand to her mouth.
The worker was to the point. "If you are unable to take temporary custody of her, we will place her in foster care."
Lisbon wanted to ask what about Tommy? What about James? But she had a feeling they'd already checked into them as well. And she knew neither of them, or their other brother, was in a position to take on a child.
Of course, she wasn't exactly in that position either.
The agent drummed her fingers on the desk as she thought. She worked long hours. She barely slept five hours a night. She wasn't in a relationship and hadn't taken care of kids since she'd struggled to control her brothers a quarter of a century ago.
But, Lisbon reasoned, as she drummed her fingers on the desk, she did have some personal time she could take. And little Kara, the orphan that Lisbon had never seen, was family. More family than Jane was, more family than her team was, and she sure had done all sorts of things for them.
Lisbon knew what it was like to be an orphan and not feel loved by anyone. She firmly believed that every kid needed a responsible adult in their life. Every kid needed someone to care about them. And Lisbon was forty. She didn't have kids of her own and seeing Hightower's kids and Annie in the past few years had made her more and more aware that her chances to be a mother were growing slimmer by the day. She worked long hours. She wasn't in a relationship. She'd neglected her maternal side since her brothers were old enough to fend for themselves, and every time she thought she'd made peace with herself on this topic, Hightower's kids would show up unexpectedly at the CBI, or Annie would show up at a crime scene, or she would find out that her ex fiancé had kids and those feelings of longing would come up again. But she would always lock them down, the same way she did with anger or sadness. Maybe it wasn't healthy, but it was how she handled things. Because she didn't have any other choice.
But this time she did. This time there was a little girl out there, Kara, Kara Lisbon, who needed her. She was family, and she was alone. And when she got older she might try to find out if she had relatives. She might find that she had an older cousin living down state from where she'd spent the first seven years of her life. And maybe she'd wonder why her cousin Teresa, who was old enough and, as a cop, surely knew about her, had let her go into foster care.
And, of course, it might be Lisbon's last chance to let her maternal side do what she longed to every time she saw or spent any time with kids.
She knew there was some reason why, shortly before hanging up the phone, she had spoken into it the words "absolutely. I'm working a case, but I'll call you back after work."