Disclaimer: Red John is a monster, and he belongs to Bruno Heller.
A/N: Currently in a funk over the next chapter of Kindred, and needed to get this out of my head so I can go back to playing with Lisbon's family. Hope you enjoy this character study in three acts.
Rating: T bordering on M, depending on your personal sensitivities
Pairings: Red John/Lorelei, Lorelei/Jane, Jane/Lisbon
Warnings: Emotionally abusive relationship, brief mention of the canon killing of a character, consensual BDSM play elements (but in the context of abuse), and well – basically, everything Red John? I feel like he deserves his own personal warning.
The Small Things
This is not a love story.
She doesn't delude herself. This thing between them was always meant to be a business transaction – cold, dispassionate, deliberate. He uses her, and allows her to pick up what he leaves behind. She lets herself be used, and salvages from him everything she can.
(Perhaps it used to be different – perhaps when they met, all those years ago, she used to pretend his smiles were genuine, his eyes warm when directed at her. But that was before her life collapsed in blood and iron and anguish, before she learned that being alone was being invulnerable.)
They will never be equals. His intellect makes him unreachable, as distant as the sun of a far-away galaxy – the depth and brilliance of which she, from so far below, can only barely grasp.
They will never be equals, because he knows no equal. But being at his feet and looking up, she thinks, isn't such a bad place to be.
(Sometimes in the secret of her soul, she believes he sees the Other as an equal – that it scares him, this inverted image of himself. But of course she never says a word. She may not be as clever as he is but she's not stupid either, and far too cautious to voice such a statement.)
"Teach me," she asks sometimes, and sometimes he does.
But most times, he raises his eyebrows and turns his back on her, waiting for her to scramble behind him and learn by herself. So she runs after him and walks in his footsteps and sometimes stumbles on concepts she was meant to find in his wake – faith and devotion and sacrifice, things she can learn from him, things he could never teach her.
"Did I do good?" she asks sometimes, and sometimes he gives an answer – never the one she expects, never the one she wishes for, never the same words twice.
Most of the time he smiles coldly, and she's left to divine the answer by herself.
("Do you trust me?" he asks sometimes, and of course she wouldn't dare say anything but yes.)
He likes to express his satisfaction with extravagance.
One night, he uses her as look-out. She doesn't say a word as he kidnaps a man, hypnotises an ex-lover of his, and leaves them both broken for the Other to find – silently and efficiently carries his every command as he laughs and laughs and laughs.
She comes back home in the morning to find her bed covered in toys – knives and candles and ropes and blindfolds, him suddenly by her side, grinning sharply. They play, harsh and raw and real – and she hurts, and she feels, and he delights in her pain and screams.
"Good girl," he whispers, leaving her breathless and helplessly open to him.
The next evening, he whisks her away from the city, to a remote location where she can heal, quench her thirst for him and let him gorge himself on her body. They play some more, and when they're both exhausted, filled to the rim with each other, he laughs again.
"You will be the perfect gift," he decides, and it sends a pang the magnitude of an earthquake through her heart, makes her eyes water from the terrible honour of his trust.
He doesn't stay – he never stays – but it doesn't matter. He replaced enough of her with himself, dominating her mind and soul, that she doesn't need a physical connection to feel him close anymore. And when he leaves her bleeding on the moonlit mattress, alone to find her way back to the city, she stands up and walks on broken feet, aching with the desire to make him proud, because –
– because of the way his eyes gleam wicked when he smiles. The way he hums content over a warm cup of tea. The way he sighs sated against her body, seconds before hurting her again.
Because he uses grand gestures and showmanship to make himself larger than life, but the small things are what really get to her.
(They are not in love, but she does love him. Unconditionally.)
Theirs is not a love story.
They fall into this eyes wide open. It was obvious from the start – no delusion possible. They were always meant to use each other, cold and deliberate, both players and pawns in this terrible game they chose for themselves.
(They never had any choice, either.)
In this, they are equals.
She comes to him with sympathy and chicken soup – he comes to her drunk and sweetly broken. They do this with calculated abandon, dangling dreams and promises of blissful oblivion on a string – a bait too tasty to pass up.
She knows what he needs, and she offers herself tender and compassionate – he knows what she needs, and he takes her rough and breathless.
Still.
She closes her eyes, and pretends he's Him.
Still.
He keeps his eyes open, and avoids thinking of Her.
(They only exist together in liminality, in the spaces where the others do not.)
They meet later on the beach, standing quiet, side by side and apart.
There are no words left between them.
Forever the Other to each other's mind – an inverted, distorted version of those they long for. Their association was always tainted by a sense of wrongness, and together they could never be balanced and completed and home.
Friendship had been an option, until heads and fingers came into play. It isn't possible anymore – both being so utterly loyal to opposite causes.
They only have tentative trust left, and uneasy companionship.
That will have to do.
(Then that too becomes tainted by secrets and lies, tricks and betrayal – and she could kill him on the spot, until he uproots her whole world and turns it on its head, and then she doesn't know anymore.)
The last time they meet, her space shifted in this four-variables equation they embody. The game is changing – and she goes from devoted queen to rogue bishop, moving across the board with terrifying speed, so quickly he fails to follow.
She kisses him one last time, before she disappears.
She betrays him one last time, before she falls to her end.
And though her grand gestures, her showmanship are what his angry and disquiet mind remembers most easily, one day – when this will finally finally finally be over – one day, it's the small things he'll remember her by.
(They were never in love with each other, but the way she once sighed fragile and vulnerable against his chest will forever haunt him.)
Theirs was never meant to be a love story.
He doesn't delude himself. When he came to her torn and raw and bleeding all those years ago, she didn't take him in out of misguided feelings of love or attraction. There must have been a dollop of pity somewhere to tip the balance – but for the most part she accurately guessed he had the potential to cause trouble, and made a rational decision to keep him close so as to harness his skills and thwart him whenever possible.
This was not meant to be anything else than a business transaction, and sometimes he still finds himself confused as to how exactly things started changing between them.
(Except, not really – his memory holds an image of her asleep at her desk, pen still in her grasp as she drools over uncompleted forms, and the tiny bubble of affection and longing bursting in his heart when he finds her in early morning. This was barely a year into knowing her.)
He used to think himself without an equal. The smartest person in the room – in any room – with enough brilliance to compete with the sun. And though this still holds true, she taught him not to discount compassion, and hard work, and loyalty. Something he knew, but forgot years ago when his father loomed vicious and threatening and full of avarice.
He used to think himself without an equal, until she came around and called him friend, called him family, called him partner.
(The Other will never be his equal. For all his apparent cleverness, in the end he's nothing but a rabid animal.)
She never asks to be taught.
Sometimes he turns around, finds her peering over his shoulder, watching and learning without a word. There's amusement when she tries – and fails – to use them on him. There's a sense of pride under his indignation when she succeeds.
Most of the time, she uses her own ways, walks her own path to get there – and it's always a pleasure to meet her at half point, facing each other in the middle of the road with matching grins and teasing banter. Never mind that at half point isn't always geometrically exact.
She never asks if she did good.
She doesn't need to be told. He still tells her, sometimes, and she rolls her eyes at him. But when he smiles, she smiles back, and when he teases her, she rolls her eyes again.
("Do you trust me?" he asks sometimes, and though the words coming out of her mouth are uneasy, her eyes are warm and always say yes.)
He likes to express his gratitude with extravagance.
There was a pony, once, and expensive emerald jewellery.
But though he collects her taken aback, rapt with wonder, surprised expressions like others collect pictures of kittens and rainbows, those are not gifts she keeps for herself. Those are self-serving gifts for him, moments in time to revisit when he gets tired of anguish and blood and inhuman cruelty.
The gifts she keeps are those he wraps in layers of tangled ropes, webs and trickery, those he reveals only after days of hard work – those who scream and protest and curse as she handcuffs them, while he watches one step removed as satisfaction bloom onto her whole being.
"You go, girl," he whispers – and she raises her eyebrows at him, a not-quite smile on her lips before walking out chin held high, features frozen in a fierce expression that raises goosebumps on his skin.
Then again, there are other moments – underrated moments he wouldn't care for if he was the same man he used to be, before his heart was torn apart, left to bleed out cold and bare on a hard mattress under the Other's moonlit smile.
Quiet moments.
The peaceful glint of her eyes meeting his over a shared cup of ice cream.
The curious arch of her eyebrows in an old Mustang, undeterred from her questioning by his admission of missing her.
The faint surprise in her own voice as she returns the feeling.
The flickers of worry on her face as he boards an ambulance and holds a three-ways conversation with a ghost.
The generous curve of her lips as she smiles, ravishingly confident, over a handful of jelly dinosaurs.
The trust they share. Unrelated to a specific moment, but permeating them all.
And he uses grand gestures and showmanship to show his appreciation, but he's starting to realise the small things – those small things – are what really get to her.
They definitely get to him.
(They are not in love – not yet. They'll get there, eventually.)
(But they do love each other.)
(Unconditionally.)
Thank you for reading. =)