FIC: Finger Painting Sunshine (1/1); The Mentalist
Title: Finger Painting Sunshine
Disclaimer: I don't own The Mentalist. I'm lucky if I own my own muse, some days. :P
Rating: T/M. I think it just depends on you, personally. :)
Summary: She had to start healing somewhere.
Warnings: Kidfic, non-con situation, and major character death.
Written for: Reverse Big Bang (The Mentalist) 2013 and as a fill for a bingo square in Ladies' Bingo. (Square: kidfic).
Notes: Thanks to Tromana for letting me have free reign, even though I changed my idea like nine-thousand times. ;) I also want to thank the joys that are bingo cards for giving me a bouncing board. :D
When Dr. Sampson confirmed her fears, she asked for her options and steeled her emotions.
Alone, in a clinic reeking of sweat and blood, she wrapped her arms around herself and half-listened to him rattle off her options of adoption, abortion, or actually going through with the pregnancy.
Regardless of how it had gotten inside of her, abortion would never be the answer. She had learned the importance of a human life, no matter how the individual had entered the world; and the life growing within her was no different.
She knew she’d never be able to love it, but the five-week-old fetus within her still deserved a chance at life.
With shaking hands and tears in her eyes, she sent him a message.
I’m pregnant; he’s the father.
She didn’t bother to wait for a response, as she turned off her phone and slipped it into the glove compartment, because she knew it would never come.
After all, he was dead because of her and the thing growing within her stomach.
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When she opened his email, her breakfast found its way into the wastebasket beneath her desk.
Alone, hidden away in her office, she continued to vomit until her eyes watered, her throat burned and she trembled. How in the hell had he found out about her unforeseeable situation on death row?
Her eyes found his symbol again-vibrant, red and happy-and she wiped the vomit from her lips. Instead of telling anyone about the email, she simply deleted it from existence and plastered a fake smile on her lips as she stood from her desk.
She knew she’d eventually have to tell her team, but she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. She didn’t want their guilt or their pity; she just wanted a sense of normalcy, until she felt as if she had control over her life again.
However, the notions of normalcy and control flew out of the window after she stepped into the bullpen, her hands wrapped around her ceramic coffee mug. One look at her team’s faces and her mug tumbled from her hands, shattering-just like her world-into a million different pieces.After her rescue, she had refused all medical attention and had refused to make a statement on what had happened.
Director Bertram, always striving to make the media like him, had given her a two-week “recovery” period and she had spent those two weeks curled up into a little ball; mourning the loss of both her best friend and her sense of self. While she had still been breathing, the solitude had made her yearn for the chance to feel something other than the crushing guilt that weighed on her shoulders.
In bed, late at night for those two weeks of mourning, she had kept asking herself the same question.
How am I supposed to cope with it all alone?
His death was a mistake, an accident. He was supposed to have killed Red John and lived another day, but God had held a completely different plan for how his story of vengeance and redemption ended; and it had left her angry, bitter and resentful toward God for making her carry on alone.
After all, hadn’t she carried on alone enough as a child? As a young adult, when she was trying to raise her brothers?
He had ruined both of their lives with his darkness, yet she knew she was the only one who would face the consequences of their games.
How was that even fair?
It wasn’t, but then again, when had her life ever been fair?
It certainly hadn’t been fair when her father had killed himself, when a drunk driver had killed her mother, or when the vomiting had started exactly two weeks after she had escaped. Two weeks after Red John’s hands had explored her body. Two weeks after Red John had taken what hadn’t belonged to him from her.
Of course, that was her punishment for being naïve enough to believe him-to take the word of a serial killer, who had promised to leave him alone, if she just came alone and unarmed.
“How truly foolish of you, Teresa,” Ray Haffner had said, his lips inches from hers. With handcuffs around her wrists and his thighs straddling her hips, she could smell the coffee radiating from him. “You actually believed that I’d leave your poor Patrick alone, if you came unarmed. Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe, I wanted to spend some time with you?”
Maybe he had wanted to spend some time with her, but she hadn’t wanted to spend any time with him. She hadn’t asked him to place his hands all over her, she hadn’t wanted to feel his lips against hers and most certainly, she hadn’t wanted him inside of her.
“You’ll thank me one day, Teresa,” he had told her, his lips on her neck. “You’ll be alone and you’ll think back to this-to us-and you’ll immediately become aroused…”
No.
She had willed her body to stay still and to stay quiet, as he had continued his quest to send her into the deepest depths of hell. His cold fingers had worked at her flesh and he had forced himself into her, his length poisoning her insides. She had refused to moan, to show any form of pleasure, because letting him win had never been the option.
Not when he had been a serial killer, and certainly not after, he had become her nightmare.
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“Three months after, I stopped wearing my cross. If you were here right now, you’d probably be laughing at my decision to remove something so crucial to my identity from my person; but I just don’t think I’m that Teresa Lisbon anymore. My last confession was nearly four months ago, just after…” Pause. “I know you won’t respond to me, but I want to ask your forgiveness. I should have killed him when I had the chance, when I had that opening, but I didn’t. I didn’t, because…” Another pause. “Because…I let my fears get the best of me. I let him win, and you had to pay the ultimate price. I miss you so much. I don’t know how I’m going to live without you, how I’m going to survive without you.” Pause. “I could have kept you alive, and yet, I was too cowardly to save you. I’m not surprised everyone hates me. I’m not surprised I’ve been fired either.” Pause. “I think the worst part of this whole situation isn’t the child that’s within me, as I accepted my fate or punishment after the first pregnancy test; but it’s how fast everyone was to turn on me, especially when they learned how much I failed as Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon.” Silence. “Perhaps you knew they’d do that all along though; you always were good at predicting the actions of others.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When she held her son for the first time, she cried and named him Jonah.
She didn’t even try to blame it on the massive amounts of hormones still flowing through her body, or the fact that she had outright denied an epidural from the nurse. She merely attributed it to the fact that her newborn son, Jonah Patrick, had filled a void within her that hadn’t been whole in almost ten months.
To her, it didn’t matter if the circumstances around his creation remained unmentionable; it didn’t even matter that she would be raising Jonah by herself, with little support from others.
All that mattered was that he was alive and that so was she.
“I love you very much, my son,” she whispered softly, her voice strained, while she kept him close to her bare breast. “We’ll be okay, eventually. I promise.” Her lips found the soft spot atop his head and her lips upturned at the little boy, who had just become the center of her entire universe.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Jonah turned two, the nightmares of her demons returned in the form of a halted execution and she feared for her son’s life. She logically knew he couldn’t touch either one of them from behind bars, but her dreams-running, running, touching, touching, screaming, screaming, darkness, darkness-gave her unrealistic thoughts of him coming after Jonah. It didn’t matter if Red John, with the exception of Charlotte Jane, rarely harmed children as Jonah was also his son and Red John had once told her-in a collect call, six months after Jonah’s birth-that his acolytes would be rallying for their future prince to take the throne.
Most nights, she was able to calm herself down; she could bring herself to the bed and hold her son close. On those nights, she pretended the covers would protect her from the demons hiding in the shadows and she hoped Jonah would never ask who his father was; it was a harsh thought to tell anyone that their parent had been a monster, a killer of over thirty innocent women and men.
Some nights, however, she still screamed herself hoarse. She could still imagine the chill of his fingers on her skin, and she could still smell the strong odor of his aftershave and for a few moments, she imagined herself back with him-chained to his bed, a shock collar tight around her throat-and the thought of that sent her over the edge.
Some nights, she still found solace and salvation in the bottle. The tequila and rum blurred her thoughts together until she forgot about her son, her life and the events that had led to the both of them in a shitty, two bedroom slum in downtown Sacramento.
That night, though, she held Jonah close and cried. She cried for her past, her present and for her future; she cried for Jonah and for Jane and for all of the people that Red John had stripped from her.
Jonah merely had held her cheek in his little hand, and peered up at her with his innocent green eyes.
“Mommy,” he said, yawning in his Mickey Mouse footsy pajamas. “My birthday! Don’t cry!” She tried to stop. She always tried to stop for him.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine that Ray Haffner had never existed, that Jonah wasn’t the byproduct of revenge and hatred and she tried to imagine that Jane was still with her…
Isn’t that what got you into this mess in the first place? She heard Haffner’s voice in her head. Your need to imagine life without the monster you created.
Anymore, she never questioned the voice. She just accepted what her stupidity had cost her, and what it had cost her son.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I lost everything for a while, especially after I lost my job. I was too stubborn to ask my brothers for help, so I sold my condominium and lived out of my vehicle for nearly three months.” Pause. “I didn’t drink while I was pregnant with Jonah, but I sure drank after Jonah’s birth. I don’t remember much from his infancy days, but years of doing the same routine things made me strive for something different. I wanted my baby boy to know I could be there for him, and I threw out the alcohol after he turned five. I haven’t had a sip since then. You’d be proud.” Laughter. “I miss you still, but the pain does get easier. I’m able to breathe again, and I’m able to smile again. I have you to thank for that though too.”
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When Jonah was five-years-old, he disappeared for exactly fifteen minutes; and those had been the scariest fifteen minutes of her life. Jonah had begged her to start his school shopping at the Sacramento Mall and she had reluctantly agreed, even though the thought brought a phantom pain to her upper shoulder.
Her hand had held tight to his little one the entire time, until they had stepped foot into the décor store for children and his hand had wiggled out of hers. She had watched him run over to the backpack wall with a brilliant smile, as he maneuvered through the pile of Hello Kitty and sport-themed backpacks to find something he wanted.
It still amazed her how quickly time had flown. It seemed like just yesterday that she had changed his diapers or that she had put him in timeout for pinching Director Bertram because he was “stupid” for making her upset. Jonah’s constant behavior was forever an amusement to her, because he was her exact carbon copy; of course, he had a few personality quirks that probably had come from his father.
(Days prior, she had recalled, Jonah had asked her about death. One of the neighborhood children-Hailey, if she went by Jonah’s blush-had apparently brought a dead bird to the park, and all of the kids had immediately taken to the injured bird. She had explained the concept of death and dying to him, only for his eyes to brighten in interest.)
His reaction had somewhat startled her, until she remembered that her brothers had asked the same questions of their mother and they had seemed interested in the concept of dying and death too. Maybe it was just a little boy thing?
Shaking her head, her thoughts stopped and she had glanced toward the backpack wall, only to find her son gone. Jonah, she had called repeatedly and frantically, but she had received no answer and her heart had thundered against her rib cage. How could she have been so stupid to let her son’s hand go? If Red John’s acolytes had him, they were probably long gone and already on their way to make him their prince.
The very thought of her Jonah being used for nefarious purpose had sent her body into tremors, as she wrapped her fingers around the cool grip of her weapon tucked into the waistband of her jeans.
Jonah kept her living, kept her going, and he was her light in the ever-so-present darkness. Without him, she knew she’d never survive and she wondered if Red John knew that too.
For those fifteen minutes, she prayed to God that her son would return to her. She knew she had absolutely no right in asking for favors, but her son was her son; and he was an innocent child. He deserved the chance to experience life without all of the darkness, death and decay that she had witnessed in hers and silently, she promised to toss all of the alcohol from their apartment if he returned to her, unharmed.
“Mommy!” The beautiful sound of her baby boy’s voice had made her spin on her heels to find Jonah clutching an Iron Man backpack in one hand and the hand of Grace Van Pelt in another. Grace had smiled in direction and she had eyed her old co-worker in contempt, as her son had thrown down the backpack and ran into her arms. “Mommy, Gracie helped me find a book bag.” His brilliant smile had made her kiss his forehead, and had calmed her heartbeat down almost immediately. “You look sad. Why, mommy?”
“I’m just happy to see you again, baby,” she had told him with a frown. Jonah had glanced at her, confusion written across his face. “You running off scared me. Don’t you ever leave my side again, young man, or else!” She had felt him bury his head in her shoulder and she glanced at Grace, feeling Jonah’s breaths against her neck. “Thank you, Grace.” The young agent-if she still worked at the CBI-hadn’t changed all-to-much, aside from the fact that she now wore maternity clothing.
Grace had offered her a sheepish smile. “I saw him wandering around, and I asked him if I could help him with anything. He asked if they had an Iron Man backpack, so I went to help him. I didn’t realize he was your son, until I caught sight of his eyes, bo…” Grace paused, hesitation in her posture and expression at the almost-slipped title. After Jane’s passing, after Red John’s arrest and her unfortunate news on Jonah’s conception, their entire relationship-much like the entire team’s-had fallen apart; Grace probably had never forgiven her for suffering in silence, especially with how often she had called them all a family.
Instead of running away or excusing herself from the conversation, she had offered Grace a small smile. “Call me Teresa, Grace. We’re no longer co-workers.” Grace had thrown her a relieved smile and she felt her son move against her, asking to be let down from her hold.
It was a start, she realized with a lurch, as she watched her son trot over to Grace and take back the Iron Man backpack with a soft thank you. Grace’s face had morphed into a silly expression, before her son had burst into a fit of giggles and the sight had brought a smile to her face.
She never did say anything against you keeping him, Haffner’s voice had popped back into her subconscious and she had shivered. So, what if she’s just waiting for the right moment to snatch our son…you never did trust her, did you? You saw how she reacted after Craig’s death, after the shooting. Can you ever truly trust someone, who almost allowed you to die?
She had blinked back her tears at Haffner’s voice. She didn’t want to be scared anymore. She didn’t want to be reminded of him anymore.
She had to start trusting again, for Jonah’s sake.
She had to start healing, for Jonah’s sake.
And repairing her relationship with Grace, it seemed, would be a perfect place to start.
Disclaimer: I don't own The Mentalist. I'm lucky if I own my own muse, some days. :P
Rating: T/M. I think it just depends on you, personally. :)
Summary: She had to start healing somewhere.
Warnings: Kidfic, non-con situation, and major character death.
Written for: Reverse Big Bang (The Mentalist) 2013 and as a fill for a bingo square in Ladies' Bingo. (Square: kidfic).
Notes: Thanks to Tromana for letting me have free reign, even though I changed my idea like nine-thousand times. ;) I also want to thank the joys that are bingo cards for giving me a bouncing board. :D
When Dr. Sampson confirmed her fears, she asked for her options and steeled her emotions.
Alone, in a clinic reeking of sweat and blood, she wrapped her arms around herself and half-listened to him rattle off her options of adoption, abortion, or actually going through with the pregnancy.
Regardless of how it had gotten inside of her, abortion would never be the answer. She had learned the importance of a human life, no matter how the individual had entered the world; and the life growing within her was no different.
She knew she’d never be able to love it, but the five-week-old fetus within her still deserved a chance at life.
With shaking hands and tears in her eyes, she sent him a message.
I’m pregnant; he’s the father.
She didn’t bother to wait for a response, as she turned off her phone and slipped it into the glove compartment, because she knew it would never come.
After all, he was dead because of her and the thing growing within her stomach.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When she opened his email, her breakfast found its way into the wastebasket beneath her desk.
Alone, hidden away in her office, she continued to vomit until her eyes watered, her throat burned and she trembled. How in the hell had he found out about her unforeseeable situation on death row?
Her eyes found his symbol again-vibrant, red and happy-and she wiped the vomit from her lips. Instead of telling anyone about the email, she simply deleted it from existence and plastered a fake smile on her lips as she stood from her desk.
She knew she’d eventually have to tell her team, but she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. She didn’t want their guilt or their pity; she just wanted a sense of normalcy, until she felt as if she had control over her life again.
However, the notions of normalcy and control flew out of the window after she stepped into the bullpen, her hands wrapped around her ceramic coffee mug. One look at her team’s faces and her mug tumbled from her hands, shattering-just like her world-into a million different pieces.After her rescue, she had refused all medical attention and had refused to make a statement on what had happened.
Director Bertram, always striving to make the media like him, had given her a two-week “recovery” period and she had spent those two weeks curled up into a little ball; mourning the loss of both her best friend and her sense of self. While she had still been breathing, the solitude had made her yearn for the chance to feel something other than the crushing guilt that weighed on her shoulders.
In bed, late at night for those two weeks of mourning, she had kept asking herself the same question.
How am I supposed to cope with it all alone?
His death was a mistake, an accident. He was supposed to have killed Red John and lived another day, but God had held a completely different plan for how his story of vengeance and redemption ended; and it had left her angry, bitter and resentful toward God for making her carry on alone.
After all, hadn’t she carried on alone enough as a child? As a young adult, when she was trying to raise her brothers?
He had ruined both of their lives with his darkness, yet she knew she was the only one who would face the consequences of their games.
How was that even fair?
It wasn’t, but then again, when had her life ever been fair?
It certainly hadn’t been fair when her father had killed himself, when a drunk driver had killed her mother, or when the vomiting had started exactly two weeks after she had escaped. Two weeks after Red John’s hands had explored her body. Two weeks after Red John had taken what hadn’t belonged to him from her.
Of course, that was her punishment for being naïve enough to believe him-to take the word of a serial killer, who had promised to leave him alone, if she just came alone and unarmed.
“How truly foolish of you, Teresa,” Ray Haffner had said, his lips inches from hers. With handcuffs around her wrists and his thighs straddling her hips, she could smell the coffee radiating from him. “You actually believed that I’d leave your poor Patrick alone, if you came unarmed. Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe, I wanted to spend some time with you?”
Maybe he had wanted to spend some time with her, but she hadn’t wanted to spend any time with him. She hadn’t asked him to place his hands all over her, she hadn’t wanted to feel his lips against hers and most certainly, she hadn’t wanted him inside of her.
“You’ll thank me one day, Teresa,” he had told her, his lips on her neck. “You’ll be alone and you’ll think back to this-to us-and you’ll immediately become aroused…”
No.
She had willed her body to stay still and to stay quiet, as he had continued his quest to send her into the deepest depths of hell. His cold fingers had worked at her flesh and he had forced himself into her, his length poisoning her insides. She had refused to moan, to show any form of pleasure, because letting him win had never been the option.
Not when he had been a serial killer, and certainly not after, he had become her nightmare.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Three months after, I stopped wearing my cross. If you were here right now, you’d probably be laughing at my decision to remove something so crucial to my identity from my person; but I just don’t think I’m that Teresa Lisbon anymore. My last confession was nearly four months ago, just after…” Pause. “I know you won’t respond to me, but I want to ask your forgiveness. I should have killed him when I had the chance, when I had that opening, but I didn’t. I didn’t, because…” Another pause. “Because…I let my fears get the best of me. I let him win, and you had to pay the ultimate price. I miss you so much. I don’t know how I’m going to live without you, how I’m going to survive without you.” Pause. “I could have kept you alive, and yet, I was too cowardly to save you. I’m not surprised everyone hates me. I’m not surprised I’ve been fired either.” Pause. “I think the worst part of this whole situation isn’t the child that’s within me, as I accepted my fate or punishment after the first pregnancy test; but it’s how fast everyone was to turn on me, especially when they learned how much I failed as Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon.” Silence. “Perhaps you knew they’d do that all along though; you always were good at predicting the actions of others.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When she held her son for the first time, she cried and named him Jonah.
She didn’t even try to blame it on the massive amounts of hormones still flowing through her body, or the fact that she had outright denied an epidural from the nurse. She merely attributed it to the fact that her newborn son, Jonah Patrick, had filled a void within her that hadn’t been whole in almost ten months.
To her, it didn’t matter if the circumstances around his creation remained unmentionable; it didn’t even matter that she would be raising Jonah by herself, with little support from others.
All that mattered was that he was alive and that so was she.
“I love you very much, my son,” she whispered softly, her voice strained, while she kept him close to her bare breast. “We’ll be okay, eventually. I promise.” Her lips found the soft spot atop his head and her lips upturned at the little boy, who had just become the center of her entire universe.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Jonah turned two, the nightmares of her demons returned in the form of a halted execution and she feared for her son’s life. She logically knew he couldn’t touch either one of them from behind bars, but her dreams-running, running, touching, touching, screaming, screaming, darkness, darkness-gave her unrealistic thoughts of him coming after Jonah. It didn’t matter if Red John, with the exception of Charlotte Jane, rarely harmed children as Jonah was also his son and Red John had once told her-in a collect call, six months after Jonah’s birth-that his acolytes would be rallying for their future prince to take the throne.
Most nights, she was able to calm herself down; she could bring herself to the bed and hold her son close. On those nights, she pretended the covers would protect her from the demons hiding in the shadows and she hoped Jonah would never ask who his father was; it was a harsh thought to tell anyone that their parent had been a monster, a killer of over thirty innocent women and men.
Some nights, however, she still screamed herself hoarse. She could still imagine the chill of his fingers on her skin, and she could still smell the strong odor of his aftershave and for a few moments, she imagined herself back with him-chained to his bed, a shock collar tight around her throat-and the thought of that sent her over the edge.
Some nights, she still found solace and salvation in the bottle. The tequila and rum blurred her thoughts together until she forgot about her son, her life and the events that had led to the both of them in a shitty, two bedroom slum in downtown Sacramento.
That night, though, she held Jonah close and cried. She cried for her past, her present and for her future; she cried for Jonah and for Jane and for all of the people that Red John had stripped from her.
Jonah merely had held her cheek in his little hand, and peered up at her with his innocent green eyes.
“Mommy,” he said, yawning in his Mickey Mouse footsy pajamas. “My birthday! Don’t cry!” She tried to stop. She always tried to stop for him.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine that Ray Haffner had never existed, that Jonah wasn’t the byproduct of revenge and hatred and she tried to imagine that Jane was still with her…
Isn’t that what got you into this mess in the first place? She heard Haffner’s voice in her head. Your need to imagine life without the monster you created.
Anymore, she never questioned the voice. She just accepted what her stupidity had cost her, and what it had cost her son.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I lost everything for a while, especially after I lost my job. I was too stubborn to ask my brothers for help, so I sold my condominium and lived out of my vehicle for nearly three months.” Pause. “I didn’t drink while I was pregnant with Jonah, but I sure drank after Jonah’s birth. I don’t remember much from his infancy days, but years of doing the same routine things made me strive for something different. I wanted my baby boy to know I could be there for him, and I threw out the alcohol after he turned five. I haven’t had a sip since then. You’d be proud.” Laughter. “I miss you still, but the pain does get easier. I’m able to breathe again, and I’m able to smile again. I have you to thank for that though too.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Jonah was five-years-old, he disappeared for exactly fifteen minutes; and those had been the scariest fifteen minutes of her life. Jonah had begged her to start his school shopping at the Sacramento Mall and she had reluctantly agreed, even though the thought brought a phantom pain to her upper shoulder.
Her hand had held tight to his little one the entire time, until they had stepped foot into the décor store for children and his hand had wiggled out of hers. She had watched him run over to the backpack wall with a brilliant smile, as he maneuvered through the pile of Hello Kitty and sport-themed backpacks to find something he wanted.
It still amazed her how quickly time had flown. It seemed like just yesterday that she had changed his diapers or that she had put him in timeout for pinching Director Bertram because he was “stupid” for making her upset. Jonah’s constant behavior was forever an amusement to her, because he was her exact carbon copy; of course, he had a few personality quirks that probably had come from his father.
(Days prior, she had recalled, Jonah had asked her about death. One of the neighborhood children-Hailey, if she went by Jonah’s blush-had apparently brought a dead bird to the park, and all of the kids had immediately taken to the injured bird. She had explained the concept of death and dying to him, only for his eyes to brighten in interest.)
His reaction had somewhat startled her, until she remembered that her brothers had asked the same questions of their mother and they had seemed interested in the concept of dying and death too. Maybe it was just a little boy thing?
Shaking her head, her thoughts stopped and she had glanced toward the backpack wall, only to find her son gone. Jonah, she had called repeatedly and frantically, but she had received no answer and her heart had thundered against her rib cage. How could she have been so stupid to let her son’s hand go? If Red John’s acolytes had him, they were probably long gone and already on their way to make him their prince.
The very thought of her Jonah being used for nefarious purpose had sent her body into tremors, as she wrapped her fingers around the cool grip of her weapon tucked into the waistband of her jeans.
Jonah kept her living, kept her going, and he was her light in the ever-so-present darkness. Without him, she knew she’d never survive and she wondered if Red John knew that too.
For those fifteen minutes, she prayed to God that her son would return to her. She knew she had absolutely no right in asking for favors, but her son was her son; and he was an innocent child. He deserved the chance to experience life without all of the darkness, death and decay that she had witnessed in hers and silently, she promised to toss all of the alcohol from their apartment if he returned to her, unharmed.
“Mommy!” The beautiful sound of her baby boy’s voice had made her spin on her heels to find Jonah clutching an Iron Man backpack in one hand and the hand of Grace Van Pelt in another. Grace had smiled in direction and she had eyed her old co-worker in contempt, as her son had thrown down the backpack and ran into her arms. “Mommy, Gracie helped me find a book bag.” His brilliant smile had made her kiss his forehead, and had calmed her heartbeat down almost immediately. “You look sad. Why, mommy?”
“I’m just happy to see you again, baby,” she had told him with a frown. Jonah had glanced at her, confusion written across his face. “You running off scared me. Don’t you ever leave my side again, young man, or else!” She had felt him bury his head in her shoulder and she glanced at Grace, feeling Jonah’s breaths against her neck. “Thank you, Grace.” The young agent-if she still worked at the CBI-hadn’t changed all-to-much, aside from the fact that she now wore maternity clothing.
Grace had offered her a sheepish smile. “I saw him wandering around, and I asked him if I could help him with anything. He asked if they had an Iron Man backpack, so I went to help him. I didn’t realize he was your son, until I caught sight of his eyes, bo…” Grace paused, hesitation in her posture and expression at the almost-slipped title. After Jane’s passing, after Red John’s arrest and her unfortunate news on Jonah’s conception, their entire relationship-much like the entire team’s-had fallen apart; Grace probably had never forgiven her for suffering in silence, especially with how often she had called them all a family.
Instead of running away or excusing herself from the conversation, she had offered Grace a small smile. “Call me Teresa, Grace. We’re no longer co-workers.” Grace had thrown her a relieved smile and she felt her son move against her, asking to be let down from her hold.
It was a start, she realized with a lurch, as she watched her son trot over to Grace and take back the Iron Man backpack with a soft thank you. Grace’s face had morphed into a silly expression, before her son had burst into a fit of giggles and the sight had brought a smile to her face.
She never did say anything against you keeping him, Haffner’s voice had popped back into her subconscious and she had shivered. So, what if she’s just waiting for the right moment to snatch our son…you never did trust her, did you? You saw how she reacted after Craig’s death, after the shooting. Can you ever truly trust someone, who almost allowed you to die?
She had blinked back her tears at Haffner’s voice. She didn’t want to be scared anymore. She didn’t want to be reminded of him anymore.
She had to start trusting again, for Jonah’s sake.
She had to start healing, for Jonah’s sake.
And repairing her relationship with Grace, it seemed, would be a perfect place to start.