Authors Note: To now there have been no spoilers, but there are now, tiny ones for Throwing Fire. This is an alternate to the alternate endign that I've got. This chapter is specifalclyl dedicated to Eve215, MentalistLover, and HOUSEM. D. FanForever who's reviews got me thinking, which any one how knows me, knows is a bad idea. This chapter will not be everyone's cup of tea, and if you're not wild about character death, don't read it, wait till the next chapter.
Disclaimer: Is there still even a question of this at this point? I didn't think so.
It almost seemed fitting that the day they put him in the ground it was sunny with storm clouds on the horizon. That's the way it had always been, it seemed. He seemed always and perpetually happy and cheerful, while always in the background had been a darkness that none of them had fully realized until it was too late.
The morning of their intervention hadn't gone as planned, and when Lisbon had shown up and Van Pelt was distracted for just a minute from searching for the wayward consultant it was all the time he had needed to end it. It had hit Lisbon the hardest, though she wouldn't tell the rest of the team why.
How do you tell the people that you work with, that you see every day, that you consider your friends, that it was your fault that someone killed themselves? No, not directly, but in its own way it was her fault. If she hadn't flaunted Simon in front of him, if she'd just pressured him a bit more about that 'mistake' from a year ago… She had seen him growing distant, seen all the same signs that her father had shown in the beginning right after her mother died… But she had fooled herself into thinking that it was nothing, that it was her imagination. And now they were standing around his grave.
He had no family, no one to speak on his behalf besides her; it was in the will that they found in a file in his desk. Changed just after he had joined the team; although Lisbon suspected that he had changed it thinking that it would be her or Red John that would do him in.
So she had planned the funeral. Her fiancé couldn't understand why it was so hard for her to bury a guy that had meant nothing to her, who had simply been a colleague; but how was she going to tell him that she had loved him, and that because of that she had let him slide into the depression that had prompted him to end his life. She wondered what it had been that finally pushed him to take that swan dive off the building. She doubted that it had been the intervention; it had to have been something more. As she stood staring at his casket, above the empty pit that would keep him forever, she wondered, and not for the first time, if he had somehow found out about her engagement. She wondered if that bit of information had pushed him over the edge.
She knew that her relationship with Simon had hurt him, but she hadn't thought anything of it. He had been the one to call it a mistake, hadn't he? And in a childish sense of punishment for him she had gone out of her way to show him that she didn't need him… how wrong had she been.
Cho stood staring at the casket. He had flowers sent to the funeral home, which had brought them to the graveside for the service. No church for him, he wouldn't have wanted it. Just his friends, standing there looking at the representation of his earthly form.
He gotten there too late, just seconds too late. He had gotten to the roof in just enough time to see Jane plunged over the edge, head first. He tried to grab him, but it was too little, too late. They were all a bunch of idiots. They knew that he was on edge, that he was in a fragile state, but that didn't seem to matter, they pushed ahead anyway. Even if it had been Van Pelt who had insisted on that sham of an intervention, there were things they could have done. They should have had more people there; they should have had the department shrink there -- anyone who could have seen what he was planning. They should have had Lisbon there.
His death had hit her the hardest; it was like she blamed herself, like she felt responsible. Cho couldn't figure it out, but figured it had something to do with that case a year ago. Jane'd been changed after that; Lisbon too, but in a different way. Jane had sunk back in on himself. Lisbon had pushed out, gone out of her comfort zone, that's how she'd met what's-his-name… the guy who was standing beside her now at the grave, unaware of her body language that was screaming 'leave me alone'.
He shook his head. It had to be that relationship that pushed him over the edge at last. He hadn't seemed suicidal when they'd been talking to him, irrational maybe, but that's not the same as suicidal. They'd screwed up. And now they'd lost him forever.
A condolence card of sorts had shown up at the CBI just days after Jane's death. It had been all over the news; of course it would be, he jumped off the roof of a building housing government employees. That's always good for the ratings. The card had been… it hadn't been what anyone had been expecting. From Red John and including just a few words, but the ones that got the team the most were right below the platitudes of "I'm sorry for your loss." In blood red ink Red John had pinned the words "I win" before his signature mark. That had been the moment for Van Pelt when she realized that it would never be the same.
Red John was a monster; he'd mocked Jane in his life, and now in his death. She knew firsthand what someone taking their own life could do to a family group, and was determined not to let that monster add to the pain they were all suffering. She'd been the one to go to Jane's house to see what needed to be cleaned up when Lisbon had been planning the funeral. She'd had no idea that he'd kept the house that the murders had happened in until she got there and walked up those stairs. That smile on the wall, that symbol of his misery. No wonder he'd always seemed depressed just below the surface.
What pushed him over she didn't know, but whatever it was, she felt slightly responsible. She'd stopped looking, just for a minute, when she'd seen Lisbon show up with that ring, and it hadn't been until Cho raced past her to the stairs that she remembered what they were doing. They were looking for Jane, because she'd had the idea that he needed to be stopped. From the first night that Jane had called Rigsby to get a ride from that bar she knew he'd been falling, but she hadn't done anything to stop it.
She knew it wasn't really her fault; it was just survivors' guilt – that's what the shrink had told her after her sister's death. That it was natural to feel like there was something you could have done. But this time she really thought there was something they could have done. They knew he was practically living at the CBI, that he was drinking; they had watched him deteriorate slowly and then more quickly over the past few months, and they could have stopped it. They could have confronted him in a different place in a different time, but they didn't; they chose to do it then and there, because she had said that's when it was best.
She had just started looking again when she'd heard Cho's yell and screams from outside. She looked out the window to see Jane there, on the ground…a sight she would never forget. She shuddered at the memory and Rigsby pulled him to her, but she shrugged out of his embrace, she didn't want to be comforted right now. She wanted to feel the pain; she needed to. It was her fault really, and because of her Red John thought he was home free. Well, she was going to prove him wrong. She was going to do what Jane hadn't had the time to finish; she was going to get Red John.
Rigsby was still shell-shocked. He didn't know what to think, really. Van Pelt was withdrawing from him, the boss was acting like she'd lost a lover, and Cho was distant and angry. And here he was, hopeless and helpless. He hadn't wanted to have the intervention, and went along with it because Van Pelt suggested it; he'd done pretty much everything she said to do. And now to see her hurt because of this man… he felt the anger bubbling up inside. He wanted to yell, scream, do anything, but he didn't. There was a time and place for that, and this was not it. He needed to get away from here. He'd always hated cemeteries, they reminded him of death, and he couldn't have that.
He was the first to leave that day, to walk away, but he was always the one to come back, yelling and screaming at the stone reminder of the man lying below. Every time Van Pelt shut him out to chase a lead on Red John; every time the boss ended an out of town case, unfocused and distracted, looking around as if lost; every time Cho sat and stared at that brown leather couch. Rigsby came back, if for nothing than because he couldn't let his rage out any other way.
Van Pelt only came back once, the day she put a bullet in Red John's head in 'self defense.' She had to let him know that his quest for vengeance was won. Had to let him know that Red John had, in the end, lost.
Cho, Cho never did come back. He just went up to that roof whenever a case got too much, whenever he thought that one of Jane's insights would go a long way to solving a case. He'd go up there and remember the man that was and the way things could have been.
Lisbon didn't let anyone know, but she was there every week. Talking to him the way a widow would talk to her husband's grave. She stayed with Simon because she felt she needed to, and by some miracle he didn't leave her; but every week she was there, rain or shine, telling him about cases and about how sorry she was that she hadn't done more for him when he had been there, hadn't done more so that he didn't end up like everyone she had loved, six feet under and always to be longed for.