Guilt with a drop of self-doubt.
He lay there, exhausted, in the quiet of the CBI office. It had been hours since the last of the cleaners had left the place deserted. He was re-reading the Red John case files again, trying to find new meanings from the words he already knew by heart. 'patience' , Lisbon had told him the previous week, 'we'll find him'.
If he did find Red John, if he did kill him, would the regret and guilt he felt over his family finally diminish? If he could just kill the monster who had haunted him for all these years, perhaps he could move on... perhaps things would be different with him and Lisbon. Would he be different if he didn't have this guilt hanging over him?
But as overpowering as that guilt had been for him these past years, he couldn't help feeling a drop of doubt. Red John, no matter how many times he imagined him as this terrible fiend, was just a man. A vile, twisted killer, yes, but he was just a man. Could he really kill another human? It was so much easier to imagine himself bringing down this phantom beast he'd turned Red John into in his head. But was Red John not this monster? He had killed so many people. So many deaths... too much death. Could he really add another to the death toll?
But his family, Angela and little Charlotte, had been innocent. They had been used by Red John to get to him, to hurt him. They had not deserved to die, no matter what he had said about the bastard. And there it was, his sense of purpose once more- he had to find some way of feeling better about their deaths, because no matter how much time passed, the guilt was still there. Still killing him slowly, eating its way out from the hole where his heart had once been.
My first Fan fiction, hope you like it!