Yes, I am still here, but life has been a little crazy. This is just a little something I wrote when I had a study period (when I really should have been revising). Other new stories will be coming soon. Enjoy...

"You idiot." She said as she slid gently into the hard seat on the other side of the cold metal table. He sat opposite her in a bright orange jumpsuit and cuffs that clinked every time he moved. She felt a throb in her shoulder as she sat down, a harsh reminder of previous events.

"I know." He said, and then reverted back into icy red silence.

It had taken her a month to come see him. First he had been in the psychiatric hospital, then in the CBI interrogation cells, then finally here, in jail. He had seen flashes of her where ever he had been – dark raven hair in his room at hospital, pale white fists where she had punched Colepepper, bright green eyes staring accusingly from the other side of the glass.

Now she had finally come and all he had said to her were those two tiny non – quantifiable words. No 'I told you so'. No 'doesn't this jumpsuit make me look hot'. No 'I'm sorry'.

She couldn't take it. After all of this she just wanted to scream at him, to scream and scream at him. To watch the red haze that would descend on the room, to melt the ice in his eyes, to make him feel pain – her pain. The dark coils of red that slowly grew inside of her, that made sharp red tears fall down her face and her shaky small hands reach for the amber liquid that sat high on her shelf. She wanted him to feel it too; she needed him to feel her inner turmoil. She needed him to feel the sharp pins of emotional pain that perforated her body every single day. She needed for him to see that pain that she saw every day. She needed it to destroy him as well as her.

But she couldn't. She could never truly say what she wanted to. She could never truly hurt him.

So she left.

Once step at a time.

The red footprints she left behind her evaporating into thin air as soon as they were made.

"He said my wife was very clean. That she smelt like coal tar soap and lavender; and that my daughter smelt like sweat, and strawberries and cream. The same strawberries and cream from the expensive children's shampoo I used to buy her from the salon. It was the only thing she would ever use in her hair."

She stopped by the door, his words echoing in her head as a memory crawled slowly into her mind. A memory of green and brown and bubbles.

"I'm not using a girl's shampoo sis! It's all pink and strawberry and creamy!"

She turned and walked back to the table.

She knew that he would never apologize, no matter if it was right or not. He always thought that what he did was right. To him it made as much sense as origami frogs and ponies and beaches. Every cloud has a silver lining, and sometimes the silver lining is bigger than the cloud. But she was the responsible one. The one that should have stopped him. So, like always, she did what he could not do.

"I'm sorry." She said, "I should have been there. I should have stopped you. I should have stopped him. Yes, the bastard deserved to die, but he didn't deserve to take you life with his. I'm sorry Jane."

Still he didn't speak.

"Look, Jane," she said, "I know what it is to lose people, to lose family. Hell, I even know what it is like to want revenge so badly that it consumes you. You're lucky. You have something that you can fixate your revenge on. I had nothing to fixate on. I had no one but my father to blame for the alcohol induced abuse; but I couldn't, wouldn't, blame him. So I blamed every drunk in the world. Every stupid little drunk. Every stupid little abuser. And that's why I became a cop, Jane."

Her mind jarred before her mouth did, desperately trying to stop her from saying things that she shouldn't have.

Every drunk.

Every abuser.

Still there was nothing in his eyes. She should have known that he knew all this time. He knew about the pain of her past and said nothing. She supposed that she should have been grateful that he had told no one else about the red fists, the red hands, the red bottles. She should have felt indebted to him, but she didn't. All she saw was that red haze. He knew and didn't tell her.

"I know Jane; and that is why I hate you so much. You're arrogant and smug. A mad man dressed up in a suit, taking from the world because things were taken from you. Taking from me every time you put my ass on the line."

She saw something flicker in his icy red eyes. Something so small that she would have missed it had she not been looking for it. It seemed like a flash of recognition. A flash of remorse.

But she ignored it.

And kept pushing.

"I stand by you, every time you take from me because I have to, because if it's not me being hurt then who is it? I can't let you hurt anyone else because then you might get hurt. You love to play with powerful people, yet you don't understand the damage you can do to yourself! So I let you hurt me with everyone of your smug little antics."

And pushing.

"You may not believe me," She snarled, "or even trust me." Oh, how it hurt her to say those words. "But that is how life is."

He broke suddenly and quietly before her; and she watched as he shattered into a thousand pieces of blue glass before her eyes. She watched the red mist dispel before her, floating to the ceiling and darting this way and that before it disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Red John was now well and truly dead.

"I'm sorry." He said.

And that was all he needed to say.

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