Title: Fragments
Author: AlternativeRocker
Rating: PG
Characters: Lisbon
Summary: She would rather scream and cry than have to hide everything inside her.
Notes: Written for the Paint It Red ficathon. I know it's short but I felt as though I was just going in circles after a while.
Spoilers: Mentions of the end of 2x03 'Red Badge'
Prompt: Lisbon, "Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall." — Jodi Picoult (by ch19777)
She was supposed to have been acting when confronting Dr. Carmen but what she had said that night in her home was closer to the truth than she wanted to admit.
Ever since being left in charge of her life all those years ago she had make work the number one priority.
She had hardly any chance to be a teenager and as time went on the missing experiences started to take their toll.
People thought she had fixed herself a few years after her mother died but they had been wrong. Teresa Lisbon had never been anywhere near the same.
She was unable to pinpoint exactly what was different than in her younger self because it felt as though every single fragment of her being had been kept, but had moved around so she was like a totally new person underneath her familiar looks.
She did not understand how certain people could simply move on after tragedies, for her it had taken years to even tell others where her mother was if asked.
To this day she was unsure of whether the ones who acted calm were all merely pretending, that they were in fact a wreck internally like herself. Maybe they had learned to hide it a lot sooner.
The only person she had encountered who showed their hurt to the world was Jane yet she knew he was still secretive over his darkest emotions for the majority of their time together.
In the darkness of her own apartment she could be her true self whether the time included sobbing, talking to a mother who was no longer there or just curling up in her soft armchair and not moving until sleep took over. She never touched alcohol at these times, she hardly drank normally but she knew if she did while being depressed then it would be an unforgivable mistake. She knew what drink could do to a person, had watched it rip apart the home she once had.
It was all fine. Nothing was wrong. That was what she told herself daily at least. It didn't always help though, there were some days she would rather stay wrapped up in her own thoughts, not believing that there was anything for her to truly live for and that nobody would remember her name after she was gone. But then she would notice the team - her team - glancing over in her direction or trying to grab her attention, and know that some people - even if there were only four of them - that stood by her time and time again, took extreme risks to protect her occasionally and worries if she let too much of her deep emotions show through that they would not think as highly of her.
It was that which made her stronger for short durations of time and that caused her to believe she had found a group that was so dysfunctional that their personalities meshed together and when they argued it was never a case of if the rifts would heal but when. Lisbon prayed the cells in her body would one day do that.
Doubt took over and a wash of fear and panic crept in, she could never be sure that would happen. Years may pass and she might stay with these same weaknesses.
It terrified her; the idea of being unable to fix her own problems like she frequently did with the humans she came across in her job.
Meeting the eyes of openly depressed and broken people was one of the most difficult things she had to do because that was how she wanted to act. She wanted to scream and cry and desperately ask for a reason for why the good were usually who got the worst lives and endings.
There had been moments where she had been jealous of how Jane was over his tragedies, she had never wanted revenge for her past as much as when she searched Jane's eyes and saw his need for it.