A/N: So this was a short story that I had to write for my English at school. Being the avid fan that I am, I wrote about the Mentalist. It is completely terrible but I liked the plot ... sort of. Anyway. We had to write a story inspired by a line of poetry (we were given a list of poems we could use) and I already knew I was writing about Patrick, so the second I saw a William Blake poem I knew I had to use it. The line "Marks of weakness, marks of woe" is from his poem 'London'.
Disclaimer: I own neither the Mentalist, nor the poem London.
Breaking.
Silence filled his ears; nested inside is head. Expanding, always growing. Threatening to burst his fragile skull like a balloon. It should not be this quiet. Where were the little girl's elated tones, the ones that wafted down the hallway as she played joyfully? Where was the soothing hum of a woman singing along to the radio? Nowhere. Fragmenting the stilled noiselessness, the door creaked open at his gentle touch. He had no way of knowing that inside that room he would perish.
Falling, burning, crumbling … dying. Now he know that everything is interlinked in some way. A blameless conversation can cause the entire universe to just simply stop turning, life stands still. Of course people keep on moving, it's what people do. But his world had ended, its former grandeur torn to shreds in a violent black hole of tacky cardinal scarlet – blood on unblemished canvas. Naivety splattered in a massacre.
Belittled by the immensity of the horror, the young girl, barely six years old, lay sprawled at an unusual angle. Cadaverous with sleep; immobile, velvety tresses cascading out in mocking tangles, the flawless flaxen that was his own.
At first the tears did not fall. Grief so terrible that there was only one impossibility: the briny elixir of misery was unsuitable. A twisting, ravenous fire unable to reign free in a dried out forest. Then, as if the fragile glass jar had been crammed full of torment and had explainable shattered under the extensive pressure, screams echoed through the unnecessarily desolate residence, their twisted tenor hysterically yearning for his family.
Trembling jerkily from all his crying sobs, he hauled himself up wearily, surprised to have found himself on his knees.
He staggered sightlessly around the room, he was blinded by his pain. Pain and fear. The terror was the emotion that shocked him, he was not a man prone to showing how scared he was. Cowardice is weakness.
Guilt, remorse and disgust seared his sinful soul. This was on him. Hopelessly and entirely his fault. He might as well have savagely sliced his precious family into pieces himself.
Lord, have mercy upon him.
No matter how much he insisted that he was useless, worthless and completely, utterly murderous, she backhanded him with a retort and a promise to never believe his opinion of himself. Telling him what an amazingly, intensely powerful man he was became a part of their normal routine. Together, they spent twelve gruelling years rebuilding, remembering and forgetting themselves, not to mention silently letting themselves be consumed by the unforgiving abyss of insanity. Together …
… until the end.
… until he once more realized: life is hard, death is easy.
By the time she got there, the gun lay tauntingly in his lax hand, his body slumped tiredly against the wall, intelligence soaking the pale wall – blood on blemished canvas. Corruption splattered in a betrayal.
Broken.