Small Sacrifices
One monotone Thursday afternoon, Lisbon saw the news of Red John's arrest on television. She saw a glimpse of her former team: Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt. She desperately tried to look out for Jane, but there was no sign of him on the small screen.
"So they finally caught that bastard," Michael commented from behind her.
Lisbon tore her eyes away from the TV and looked at her partner of six months. "Looks like it. Hopefully he'll get the needle."
Michael smirked. "Thought you were against Capital punishment?"
Lisbon scrunched up her nose and give him a quick smile. "I'm making an exception in this case. Red John deserves the needle and much more."
Michael frowned a bit and then his face illuminated. "Oh, how stupid of me, I forgot about those people at the CBI Red John murdered. You knew them, right?"
Lisbon nodded curtly and then grabbed the first file on her desk. She quickly glanced at it to see which one it was. "You know I'm not sure the Keller kid robbed Mrs Asher. There's something off about the info we have on this case," she said, changing the subject.
Michael caught on and began to go over the case with her.
~o~
The offer had slipped out before she had actually formulated a thought on it. She couldn't believe she was hearing herself say those things. When she recovered, she began to take back the offer, when Donavan said:
"I could give you a fair amount of information if we made this arrangement a weekly thing."
The deal was too tempting. She couldn't say no. She didn't trust her voice to speak so instead she took her shirt off.
~o~
The Tuesday after, Lisbon stopped in her tracks when she noticed a car in one of the visitors' spaces in the parking lot. A Citroën DS. Jane's car. She was debating going back home, when she noticed Michael and Jane coming out of the building. They were both smiling, although Jane's smile wasn't quite meeting his eyes.
"Hey Teresa, you've got a visitor," Michael told her, indicating Jane. Sometimes Michael was really good at stating the obvious. "Patrick, here, was telling me about your days back at the CBI. Were you really a senior agent, in charge of your own unit? Why the hell would you come work here?"
Lisbon shrugged, her eyes focussed on Jane. She tried to size him up, to figure out why exactly he had come here. All she got was a blank.
"Tea?" she suggested.
This time, Jane's smile reached his eyes.
~o~
Donavan was good. The information was always on her desk within the next few days. It was always given in a different format. Sometimes, it looked like case file, other times it looked like a magazine page or a scribbled note. Every single time there was an ink stain somewhere. That's how she knew there was a code to crack and vital information to be found. He never gave her anything that could actually lead her to Red John, but instead he gave information that could help her gather evidence to find Red John.
Donavan was good. He was careful. His life was on the line.
~o~
She could feel Jane watching her as she poured milk in her cup. Unlike Jane, she didn't insist on pouring the milk first. It really tasted the same. She had pathetically switched to tea over the last few months. She still drank coffee from time to time, but she had found comfort in drinking a cup of English Breakfast with milk. Jane had remained silent since they had arrived, which unnerved her. She didn't know what to say. She hadn't been the one to seek him. Still, she felt that he was going to remain silent until she spoke. She sighed, giving up.
"I saw on the news that you guys caught Red John. I'm surprised he's still alive."
Jane smiled again. The smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, the ones he used to hide his emotions. She waited for him to respond. She wasn't going to do a monologue here.
"Change of heart," Jane simply said.
She raised an eyebrow. "I find that hard to believe. When I left, you were more determined than ever to have the revenge you desperately wanted."
"Things change," Jane said, infuriatingly mysterious.
"What? What changed? What made you change your mind?" She wasn't looking at Jane; she couldn't. She was turning the spoon on her tea, her mug still completely full.
"Something Red John told me."
She stopped turning her spoon. She was afraid to ask. She didn't want to ask. She was pretty sure she knew the answer. So Jane knew. She should have known Red John would tell him. Humiliating her must have been too tempting for him. Nevertheless, she asked. There was a microscopic chance that Red John hadn't told Jane.
"What did he tell you?"
"He told me who the informant was. Donavan. Ever heard of him?"
~o~
He wasn't a terribly bad looking man. Not that it really mattered. The whole thing was horrible, irrelevantly to Donavan's looks.
The first time had hurt. She hadn't expected that. She was prepared now. She had lubricant.
Sometimes she managed to completely shut herself out. Even though she let out the correct noises at the appropriate times, her mind was sometimes on a case she was working on or the list of errands she had to run the next Saturday.
Other times she thought of Jane. Not in a sexual way. There was nothing sexual for her about what was going on. She thought of him and how this was important, more important than what was going on with her body at that moment.
~o~
She looked at Jane, but couldn't hold his gaze more than a second. He obviously knew.
She had always known that this would be humiliating, but she had never thought it would be this bad. She had a hard time breathing and a huge knot had formed in her stomach. She suddenly felt something inside of her recoil and immediately ran towards the restroom. A minute later, she was emptying her entire stomach content in one of the toilets.
As she cleaned up, she saw in the mirror the door open and someone walking in. Jane. She ignored him and she continued to rinse her mouth.
"Why would you do something like that?"
She glanced at him in the mirror. "It was priceless information," she explained.
Jane chuckled bitterly. "Priceless," he repeated. "Even the price of your body?"
"You got Red John."
"And you," he countered, "what did you get?"
She threw away the paper towel she had in her hand and walked around him, leaving the restroom.
~o~
She had known right away how she was going to proceed. She asked Cho to come to her office and told him to shut the door. She gave him the info on Red John and told him to give it to Jane. Cho looked puzzled when she forbade him to tell Jane that she was the one providing the information. It was obvious that Cho wanted to ask her where she had gotten it, she could tell, but he was too respectful to ask. He followed her instruction to the letter.
Cho had always been reliable.
~o~
She didn't see or hear from Jane the rest of the day. They had taken her car to go to the diner so she wasn't too sure how he had gotten back to the office, but knowing Jane, she was sure he had managed. She had called the sheriff to tell him she was feeling sick, and had gone to a beach about 30 miles north, just to be sure she wouldn't run into anyone she knew.
When she finally got back to her apartment around 8pm, she saw that Jane's car was parked across the street. She sighed. It had been too much to hope that he had gone.
When she walked in her apartment, the smell of something cooking hit her nostrils. On her way to the kitchen, she noticed her table set for two. Jane was pouring tomato sauce on two plates of pasta. He smiled when he saw her standing there.
"Good, you're right on time."
"I'm not really hungry," she whined.
"Nonsense. You haven't eaten since this morning and you regurgitated your breakfast at Mel's Diner." He set the plates on the table and took a seat. "Come on, Lisbon, it'll get cold."
Despite her best efforts, she couldn't resist a hot plate of homemade food. As she sat down, she said, "I don't want to talk about it."
Jane nodded and began to eat.
She was eternally grateful.
~o~
Pounding, pounding, pounding.
After this was all over, she was never going to let another man touch her again.
~o~
When the plates had been cleared, Jane made tea for both of them and set a cup in front of her.
"My blood ran cold when he told me what you had done."
So much for not talking about it.
Jane went on: "At first, I didn't believe him. You couldn't have done that, I thought. It was too much against your character. Or at the very least, I would have seen it."
Lisbon couldn't find the strength to stop him. It suddenly hit her that he needed to talk about it. Even though he hadn't been there when it happened, it concerned him.
"The more he was telling me about it, how you found Donavan, how you approached him and the kind of information he gave you, the more I realized that it was true." She glanced at Jane. He wasn't looking at her. Instead his eyes were focussed on his untouched tea. "You two fooled Red John for quite a while. Four months. It took him four months to find out what was going on. He was furious about that; furious that you outplayed him for so long." Jane sighed. "When Red John was going on and on about those four months, all I could think of is that every week for four months, a man was raping you."
She interrupted him. "He wasn't raping me, Jane. We had an arrangement."
Jane looked at her square in the eye. "It wasn't consensual, Teresa. That's rape."
"Not according to the law. Prostitution may be illegal, but it's not rape," she clarified.
"The law is wrong." Jane shook his head. "Why did you do it? I told you I wasn't worth it."
"No, you're twisting things. You said your life was worth sacrificing for Red John."
"So was your body?"
She held his gaze and said in a determined tone, "so was my body."
~o~
Donavan's body was found three days after she had seen him last, a bloody red face painted on the wall.
She packed everything she owned, gave her resignation and left Sacramento. She hadn't made it very hard to find her. She had used the bureau as a reference when she applied for a new job and had left a forwarding address.
She had received news from her team sporadically, but not a word from Jane.
~o~
"Why did you leave?"
"I couldn't face you anymore. Besides, there was no point in staying. I had done what I could for you."
"That was too much. You should have never done that."
"You love your family, Jane. You were willing to sacrifice everything to avenge them. Surely, you understand where I'm coming from." She saw the slow realization on his face. As perceptive as he was, he had never guessed this one thing, this one small thing. That was her cue to exit. "I'm going to take a shower now. Please be gone when I come out."
She got up and left without looking at him. She managed to walk to the bathroom without running. She let out a deep sigh when she had closed and locked the door, relieved to be in the sanctuary of the bathroom.
"I'm not worth it," she heard Jane say through the bathroom door. Thirty seconds later, she heard her front door open and shut.
As she stepped into the shower and let the water wash away her tears, Lisbon wondered if one day the pain of unrequited love would subside.
~o~
The End
Author's Notes:
1. I wrote this with two prompts in mind: 'tea' for mentalistprompt and 'ink stain' by chizuru_chibi
2. Possibility of sequel.