Chapter 2: Home, Sweet Home
Three years later…
"Home, sweet home." I thought to myself and smiled.
After three long and exhausting years in the bustling hub that was New York City, helping to raise a baby no less, I was finally back. Ready to get back to my normal life. Only a few days ago Hightower had called me and said she had an early Christmas present for me. She wanted me back with the CBI. Obviously my intentions to return had reached her, and I didn't think twice about my answer now. I was replacing my own replacement – the poor soul was apparently dying to leave.
On the way to my old apartment, I passed the CBI building.
The familiar building with its warm brown bricks, the familiar faces of the gate guard and security guards standing outside.
I missed my team so much.
We wrote emails every once in a while and sometimes they even called me, but we were all busy. We never really got a lot of chances to catch up.
Well, we did catch up on the Red John case.
About a year and a half after I left, they finally found him. Cho called me the night after the inevitable showdown, from outside in the interrogation room. My heart jumped up into my throat and it felt like the entire world around me became fuzzy and unclear. I think everyone could have guessed my first question: did Jane kill him? The answer – after a terribly long, suspense-filled pause - was no.
He surely would have if he had gotten the opportunity to. But thankfully at the very time they caught Red John, Jane was in hospital. He had been shot in the shoulder while pulling off one of his stupid tricks. Didn't I always tell him someone would end up in hospital in the end? But on the other hand… did he ever listen to anything I was saying?
Cho also told me that Jane was furious as hell. I could understand that, of course. He had made it clear from the beginning that his intention was to kill Red John, and in the end he didn't even know when everything was going down. The hospital was apparently calling to inform them they had to sedate the furious man.
Red John was gone now. Rigsby hadput a bullet in his head; it was self-defence.
After that night, Cho called again to tell her some more upsetting news. Jane had disappeared. She felt so helpless over the phone, still digesting the shock of Red John's death. She remembers the anger that rose up inside her; she wanted to be there. She should have been there to stop him. If she had been there, would she have been able to? Here she was, on the other side of the country, while the closest thing she had to a family was suffering. Splitting apart.
He was gone for nearly a year but in the end he turned up at CBI again, walked in like nothing ever happened. She heard the news via email. The team said he didn't change a lot, except that the darker side of him - his craving for revenge – never surfaced as it used to.
He was still pulling off stupid pranks and he was still annoying the hell out of his co-workers - especially my poor replacement, who he couldn't stand at all.
My replacement was a young Scottish man called Hamish MacDonald – an amazing agent with a stellar reputation. But Jane kept calling him Ronald McDonald, teasing him about his accent and unusual colloquialisms. MacDonald was pretty much the Scottish stereotype- ginger hair, tartan shirts, polite. I fought the urge to ask if he wore kilts. Rigsby, Van Pelt and Cho, however, liked him a lot. But they always made a point to add that he was nothing compared to me.
Of course I felt proud. And flattered. But I never told them. I wanted to see them all so bad, but at the time of those emails returning to California seemed like a very faraway concept, with a nineteen-year-old mother and a screaming child knee-deep in its terrible twos in my apartment.
Now I was here; back home. I wanted to turn the car around and go right back to HQ, meet up with my old friends and co-workers and stuff my face with case closed (or in this case, welcome back) pizza. But I decided to go home first, shower and settle down a bit. My team didn't even know I was coming back yet. They wouldn't miss me for another few hours or so.
My apartment was exactly the way I left it, except that everything was covered in a thin layer of dust from standing empty for how many weeks since the new renters moved out, and all my personal stuff in boxes were gone. The moving van would only arrive a little bit later.
I collapsed onto the couch and got comfortable. I was home; tired and exhausted, but still home. I sat there relaxing for many more minutes until I heard the distinctive noise of the moving van parking outside and I went downstairs to help the movers carry my things.
After all the boxes were piled, I decided to start with the terrible job of unpacking – better start now than later.
So one by one I started opening the boxes and placed each thing on its place. The pots and the pans and all the crockery (many pieces chipped or even broken from the long trip back to California) in the kitchen, and then started with the living room, unpacking all of her books and CD's onto the bookshelf.
I found a cute photo of me, Holly and her son Ben in the bottom of the box. We were sitting in Central Park, having a picnic. It was Ben's first birthday then, and we were celebrating with cupcakes and Kool-Aid. That was a good day... Even though he was my brother's son, he looked a lot like me – big surprise there. The Lisbon kids all look exactly alike. He had the same nose and the same black hair as well; only the green eyes were missing. He had his mother's bright hazel eyes instead. Smiling I put the photo into my bookshelf and continued tidying up.
Few hours later, things were fairly in order. Pleased by my progress, I sat down on the couch again to rest after hours of working. I had a killer kink in my neck and rubbed the sore spot tiredly. My stomach growled; I should really find something to eat... but before I could make a decision, I had already fallen asleep.
AN: next chapter will reunite lisbon with the team. thanks a lot for all the reviews. special thanks to lysjelonken!