Authors Note: Post ep to Red Herring. Just my thoughts on the last scene. SO needless to say, there are spoilers. Thanks to lgmtreader for the beta.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close.
She doesn't have a problem. She doesn't have to drink, no; she doesn't have to, but she wants to. She remembers reading somewhere that addiction is genetic, like her dark hair and short stature that she had inherited from her mother. She tries not to think about when she was eight and her grandfather came to visit. He father was furious with him for sitting on the porch and drinking the second day he was there. She still remembers the argument that they had; remembers like it was yesterday.
"I won't let you stay here and drink all day!"
"I came to see my grandchildren."
"How can you see them if you're drunk all the time?"
"I'm not drunk."
"Dad, I'm not stupid, you did this all while I was growing up, drinking like this, I won't let you—"
"It's not your decision!"
"Yes it is. Either quit, or get out."
That was the last time she'd seen her grandfather.
She remembers when her mother died and her father started drinking. She was 13 then, and knew it was going to be a problem. She tried to get her father to quit before it got too bad, but he wouldn't have it.
She remembers the time she came home from school early to find him passed out on the sofa, an empty bottle of whisky on the floor next to him and an almost full one of the coffee table. She didn't know what possessed her, but she'd poured the drink down the drain. When he'd woken up she'd had to endure one of the worst beatings in her life. She often wonders how her father had gone from loving and protective father to angry drunk.
She wonders if it was fate that the very thing that had killed her mother also killed her father. In an odd moment of lucidity just before her high school graduation he had tried to take them all to the movies, but they'd gotten to the mall and he'd realized that he'd left his wallet at the house. Two hours later when it became clear that he wasn't coming back, she'd cursed him, thinking that he'd left them there to drink, but no, on the way back to the house he'd been hit by a drunk driver, was killed by a drunk driver while stone cold sober. The irony wasn't lost on her.
Nights like tonight were hard. Jane had been a pain in the ass all day. Been a pain in the ass the whole time she'd known him, but today… He'd tried to frame an innocent woman, a pregnant innocent woman. It wasn't like he hadn't done that before, tried to frame someone for murder, but usually they had their cooperation. And then all the show with the pepper in the soup…
But really, it wasn't Jane's fault. She's been on edge since Sam died, since he came back into her life. Was it fair to blame a dead man for her urges? Probably not, but he wasn't here to defend himself. So she would keep the bottle in her desk, and keep fighting, because when she lost that battle, she knew there would be no going back.