For my dear friend Walts2012, whose birthday was last month. Happy (very, very belated) Birthday, m'dear!
SPOILERS for S2 finale.
Disclaimer: I don't own Mentalist or William Blake's poetry.
Of Tygers and Roses
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
-William Blake's The Tyger
The couch smells like old leather, spilled tea, and bitter words. Here, on this stained brown thing, this ugly thing, this thing that creaks and groans under the weight of a person, there have been tears. There has been pain. There has been love. There have been nightmares, and a refuge from nightmares, and the weight of the world on the couch.
But never once has there been silence.
But now, now the couch is hollow with the silence, echoing with it, laden with the sound of unspoken words and crushed underneath the weight of unvoiced fear and anger and grief.
The whole office is silent—it's like fung shui; when something is out of balance everything else is too. And the couch is most definitely out of balance.
And so is the entire Serious Crimes Unit. They're all different, changed.
Cho is quieter, and his quietness has a bite to it, like he's ready to explode, all his feelings kept in and shoved down and cooked under pressure, ready to burst at the seams and splatter all over the place.
Rigsby, in contrast, is louder. He laughs too much too hard at the wrong moments, his eyes too bright and his smile too forced. He's trying to hold the team together with his crazy-glue laughter, and they are falling apart around his ears.
Van Pelt is withdrawn, her bubbly, outgoing personality squashed. She no longer asks to go out in the field, and she can't look at the couch without flinching in guilt, her failure mocking her every time she sees the blond consultant.
Lisbon is nicer, her fire gentled, tamed. She smiles and says "please" and "thank you" and tries to act like she is strong, like the grief and guilt and pain trapped in the bull pen means nothing, like a little girl playing "Happy Family" even as her parents go through a messy divorce.
Jane is harsher, his words biting and vicious, his façade of friendliness abandoned in the dust of an old hotel room. He doesn't laugh much anymore, and his smiles are few and far between. He's brittle, glass broken and stuck together not-quite-right, the edges sharp and jagged and ready to wound.
And it's the cursed silence that has fallen between them that's causing it all.
"What did he say?" Lisbon asks, every morning. All eyes go to the couch and its inhabitant who no longer sleeps, who wears bruises under his eyes and pain in the lines around his mouth.
"Nothing." Jane replies and his lies are as blatant as the way his hand shakes around his wedding ring as he twists it endlessly on his finger.
Hightower only tries to get Jane to cough up once, and she leaves the office that day looking as if she is about to cry.
After that, she doesn't try again.
So the silence hangs, sleeps, the secrets and the pain and the emotion stuffed in between the couch cushions, out of sight but reeking like a dead thing.
I'm sorry I wasn't there, Van Pelt. Cho thinks, his face a mask. Maybe I could have stopped Kristina from leaving.
I'm sorry I can't fix us. Rigsby's eyes say, as he pushes his plate away. We're so broken and I don't know what to do.
I'm sorry I didn't keep a closer eye on Kristina. Van Pelt's face tells Jane. I tried and tried, but I'm only a rookie and I left her alone for just a minute and please, why won't you call me Grace anymore?
I'm sorry Red John got away. Lisbon groans, her head in her hands. I'm sorry he's killed so many and nearly destroyed us, and why can't I be stronger, I should be able to stop this?
I'm sorry. Jane's eyes murmur. I'm sorry I can't tell you anything, sorry that I'm so fucked up, sorry that I can't let this go, any of it.
Their silence is deafening, their unsaid words screaming.
I'm never there, I'm always too late.
I can't hold everyone together, I can't I can't, someone come and fix us.
Please call me Grace, just once, I'm so sorry, forgive me, it's my fault.
I'm not strong enough to do this job, I'm not, I'm not.
I want to tell you but I can't, these words are mine to carry, not yours, and God, I can't get his voice out of my head—!
Something will have to give, eventually, sooner rather than later. The emotion, supercharged, won't quit, won't go away, won't stop until it's broken free and ripped up them, the world, everything.
(Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.)
They are Red John's tigers, burning so brightly, so fiercely in their pain that everything else is cast to shadow—love, trust, friendship, hope, the will to go on, to fight on, to find their tormentor and tear him to pieces—and forgotten. Their fire is silent, deadly, and it burns brighter everyday, until eventually they'll all stumble around, blind, angry and bitter and silent, snarling with their bleeding teeth, slashing with their wounded claws, and Red John, the hunter, waits with his bait and traps, his bullets wounding and crippling until his playthings spin in broken circles, choking on blood and misery.
This silence, their poison of choice, has taken root. Each and every one of them has let it in, has let it fester and simmer and grow.
It came in after Cho, it was fed by Rigsby, Van Pelt watered it, the weeds that could have strangled it were trimmed by Lisbon.
And Jane tended it, fed it with his own blood, his lies and secrets, until it grew strong and healthy and it leeched away at the lives of the SCU.
And now, with Red John's words and cold, cruel voice and grotesque mask and bloody knife rattling in the silence, insistent, the poisonous rose blooms.
And they all feel it in the silence. They feel its thorns, its vines creeping, forming nooses and chains that bite and bind.
It's out of control, and no one is willing to step up, to stand in front of the thorns and get cut up so that the others might escape relatively unscathed.
Cho buries his nose in a book, his face stonier by the day.
Rigsby laughs awkwardly and pushes food around on his plate.
Van Pelt sits at her computer, cybernetically stalking the Missing Persons Unit, casting furtive glances at the couch.
Lisbon cradles her head in her hands and smiles, her polite words meaningless, her eyes haunted and dull.
Jane, with his bruised eyes and broken-glass smile, turns away from them all.
And the couch strains under the hollow weight of the silence, the grief, the unsaid things that slosh around the bullpen.
Every day, the same.
"What did he say?" Lisbon asks.
"Nothing." Jane replies.
Tyger, tyger. Red John says, and his smiling face drips blood.
The thorns grow ever sharper.
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
-William Blake's The Sick Rose