All Roads Lead to Nowhere (1/10)
All Roads Lead to Nowhere
Author: tromana
Artist(s): branquignole
Link to art: Here!
Word Count: ~20k
Rating: T
Summary: After O'Laughlin's death, she thought it would eventually get easier. Seems Van Pelt's family has other ideas...
Disclaimer: If it were mine, this wouldn't have been made completely AU.
Notes: This little thing was written before the broadcast of Season 4. So yes, it has been made AU since then, so I apologise. Thank you to branquignole for being the most awesome artist in the world and to miss_peg and lilsmiles86 for being wonderful cheerleaders. Finally, to the amazing, amazing diviniaserit for betaing despite everything she's been through of late. Somebody give that girl a pineapple. Or a round of applause, I suppose. Written for The Mentalist Big Bang 2011 at mentalist_bb.
Finally, welcome to me being ridiculously far out of my comfort zone. Van Pelt centric fic, what?
All Roads Lead to Nowhere
Part One
The cup of tea sat stagnating on her kitchen table.
Jane had once extolled the virtues of a nice cup of tea to her and thus, making herself one was the first thing she had done when she entered her kitchen. For some reason, nothing else made sense. All she wanted and needed to do was sit down, with a hot drink in her hands and try to forget everything else that had happened. However, that was easier said than done. This wasn’t going to be easy. Then again, when was anything ever easy?
It was the middle of the night and the world felt - was - deathly silent. Van Pelt didn’t like that. Then again, she didn’t much like the situation she found herself in either. It seemed like her entire world had been turned upside down and she would give anything for it to all be simplified once more. However, simplicity was something reserved purely for fairytales and myths, not real life.
Only problem was, her mom had brought her up on fairytales. Taught her that they could become reality, if only she worked hard enough to earn it.
While her father had constantly reminded her of the benefits of being strong and the best of the best, her mother had always been insistent that she stayed in touch with her feminine side. Her sister, too. Amos Van Pelt had loved his daughters to death, but part of him had always craved a son. So, when Grace had been born and her mother rendered infertile in the process, he had used all of his power to ensure that both his girls had a little bit of tom-boyishness in them. It led to them both being a little bit of a contradiction in terms. Van Pelt had appreciated that. Along with being blessed (and cursed) with good looks, it meant she kept the boys on their toes. They didn’t understand her and therefore, she found it easier to lure in those of interest and scare away those who she didn’t approve of.
It was just a shame that she hadn’t been quite as good a judge of character as she had always thought she was.
Why the hell hadn’t she been able to learn from her past? Dan Hollenbeck had been suave, charming, everything she had been looking for in a man and yet, he had only wanted her due to her connections with Jane. And now, exactly the same thing applied to Craig O’Laughlin. The man had even been willing to attempt to marry her in order to ingratiate himself with the CBI on behalf of Red John.
Red John.
The bastard.
He was the one to blame for all of this. If it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t existed, then she wouldn’t have been romanced by O’Laughlin and her heart broken all over again. She would never have killed a man she had loved, her prospective fiancé. The man, whom less than twenty four hours ago, she still believed she would marry and spend the rest of her life with. Lisbon would never have received a serious gunshot wound and had to be rushed to the ER for major surgery. Hightower’s kids wouldn’t have been traumatized and still be in shock hours after the shooting.
And Jane wouldn’t have let them all down. He wouldn’t have been arrested and thrown mercilessly into the CBI holding cells in preparation to be sent to jail. Jane wouldn’t have learned what it was like to willfully take a life, something Van Pelt could never imagine doing herself. The only times she had ever shot to kill were in self-defense, or to protect other people. Or both, for that matter. It was a fact of her life that was particularly painful, especially at this moment in time. If it wasn’t for Red John and O’Laughlin, there wouldn’t be any blood on his hands, his family would still be alive and he wouldn’t be the flawed, broken individual she had come to love, in an entirely platonic way.
Then again, if it hadn’t been for Red John, she would never have met Jane in the first place. Never learned some of his nifty little tricks, things that did make her a better cop. She wouldn’t have had her eyes opened to a world she never would have had a chance to believe in, despite having been spoon-fed fairytales by her mom.
The chair leg screamed as she roughly pulled it against the linoleum. Van Pelt remained almost oblivious to the noise. She didn’t care anymore; what was the point? Caring just seemed to lead to disaster and heartache.
That was another lesson she should have learned years ago. Clearly, she was just a glutton for punishment. Doomed never to bloom and grow, to always make the same mistakes time and time again. She wondered how other people did it, to move on, to accept their faults, to make them work for them, somehow.How Lisbon, with her tragic history, had made something of herself. The way that Cho had channeled his childhood angst into something far more positive. How Rigsby had grown to become a decent human being with a despicable lowlife for a father.
How Jane…
Well. Maybe he wasn’t the best of examples. Especially not now.
Grabbing her cell phone, not that she had any reason to, she left the kitchen and stalked straight to her bedroom. She didn’t even bother to look at the time; all she knew was that it was definitely one of those hours that her dad would call ‘inhumane’.
The tea remained on the table, waiting to be dealt with come morning. Or when she chose to drag herself out of bed, whichever came first.
xxx
Van Pelt slept fitfully, waking every couple of hours. In all honesty, she was grateful that she had managed to doze off at all; a little sleep was better than none at all. With her mind whirring at a frenetic pace, she had half suspected that she would spend the night tossing and turning. Besides, her bed was empty and cold, something which she wasn’t used to anymore. It felt… lonely, being alone. Even more so knowing that the person who was supposed to be sleeping on the other side of the bed was never going to be there again. There had been times when they had been separated overnight due to work, but that was different. It always was. The sense of security that sooner or later, O’Laughlin would be back in her arms was gone.
Instead, it had been replaced with the unsettling notion that he had never really been in love with her in the first place. That their whole relationship had been based on deceit and lies. That she had been naïve enough to believe that everything they had, everything they’d shared had been real and really, all he had been doing was pulling the wool over her eyes.
She was grateful that the Medical Examiner had allowed her access to the body. Van Pelt wasn’t quite sure why she needed to see him again, not when she, along with Hightower, had been the one to gun him down in the first place. Still, the woman was kind and accepting, despite the fact that she had arrived at the morgue at the crack of dawn. She had been engaged to him, after all. Even after all of the revelations, it was hard to make feelings like that just vanish, evaporate, as if they meant nothing at all. It wasn’t as if there was a button she could press to turn them off, however much she wished she could.
Instead, it would take time. Time to accept that she had been living a lie, that she had been willing to trust her heart with a cold-hearted bastard like O’Laughlin. That everything she had believed, everything she had stood for had been whisked away from underneath her feet. She had always told herself that she would never fall for the wrong guy, that they weren’t worth getting her heart broken over. And yet, three times in a row, she had done just that. When was she going to learn?
O’Laughlin’s body was just how she expected it to be. Pallid under the harsh lighting and slightly cool to the touch. He was still wearing the band she had given him on Valentine’s Day on his pinkie finger, even. Obviously, the Medical Examiner hadn’t done her job quite as thoroughly as she should have done; had forgotten to remove it and bag it up for the next of kin, for herself. Part of her wanted to believe that he was sleeping and she was waiting for him to wake up and give her a warm embrace. That he would tell her that it was all an elaborate joke he’d cooked up with Jane and that she had fallen for it hook, line and sinker. Of course he hadn’t been a mole for Red John, why would anyone believe that? He was a member of the FBI, an upstanding citizen and all around good guy. Not a lowlife criminal who was easily swayed by serial killers. Instead, as her eyes were drawn bitterly to the gunshot wounds on his chest, she remembered that it wasn’t possible. That he had done what he’d done and meant what he said. And she would just have to accept that, sooner or later.
She stared at her left hand. The engagement ring was still there; she had gotten to the stage where she was so used to wearing it that she barely noticed it all. Van Pelt twisted it around her finger before slowly tugging it off. There was no point in wearing it, not any more. The problem was, she wasn’t even sure what to do with it now. Their whole relationship had been a lie and the ring signified exactly that. But still, it was a beautiful piece of jewelry and she didn’t want to just cast it aside. That would have been such a waste. Instead, she pocketed it. It was something she could decide later, when her mind was less jumbled up.
As she left the state morgue, she inclined her head slightly at the ME in gratitude. There was only so much hanging around dead bodies someone could do with their spare time. Now, she had to remind herself that there were things she could still be grateful for, even if it didn’t feel like it right now.
To Part Two