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It was so similar. Too similar to when he had needed to talk Lisbon down from a roof with a knife halfway to her throat.
"What are you doing up here?" He had asked, polite, reserved. Ignoring the bottle and knife gripped in her hands, he approached.
"When I die I want to see the stars," She gave by way of explanation. Her eyes were dry of tears as they gazed up at the night's sky.
He had no response to seeing his best agent broken on a rooftop with a knife in hand. How could he have a response? Teresa was so much younger than him but was already on the brink of death. Her eyes never left the sky, she hadn't even glanced at him when he walked through the door to find her, fully prepared to accept whatever fate whomever walked through that door might bring.
"Why don't you look at the stars another day?" The suggestion was small, quiet, hopeful.
"Why not today? It's as good as any other, and I may not get the chance again."
He only sat beside her, letting the bottle of pure ethanol and the knife go unmentioned. Hours drifted by and she fell asleep, having moved neither.
It wasn't hard for Jane to convince him to send the shrink to check on her, the leap to suicide, the vague reassurance that the CBI wouldn't come under fire if she did. Jane was treating suicide like the obvious choice for her, the clear next step. Minelli already knew- however reluctant to admit it he was- that Agent Lisbon was a suicide risk at the best of times and relied on her job heavily.
He couldn't take that risk, not after the outburst. The broken glass all to similar to the blood stained shards he had found scattered around her one night, he knew she had knives, blades, guns, an array of ways to harm herself even if she didn't fall as far as the stars. He had seen the scars before they were scars, she hadn't been as good at hiding the self destruction back then.
She was sat, dry faced, on the floor of his office. No matter what she always refused to cry, she would let him see her after she had torn herself apart, when she was tempted to stargaze until morning would never rise. The cuts were jagged, skipping around as her blood soaked fingers struggled to keep a hold on the larger shards of glass.
The shrink not signing off on her immediately for once was a good sign, a sign that maybe she was opening up on the things she didn't talk about. Maybe he'd started to get through to her in all the nights scattered with bandages, empty placations and a hopelessness that permeated long after her self inflicted wounds were cared for.
Lies, lies upon lies settled them here, in the aftermath. His office had always been the place she turned up to when she yearned to burn, to join the stars in the beauty of destruction. Now she found she needed to explain, to calm the nerves she had set alight.