A/N: This story is a sequel to Death, Lies, and Videotape. If you haven't read that one, you might want to. I tried to explain things so it could stand on it's own, but still... you might want to read it anyway. Like the last one, this is not a 'ship' story. It's just a story. Everyone is trying to come to terms with the events in DLV. Everyone deals in his/her own way. I hope you like this story. So far, I do...

Disclaimer: I own nothing except the errors. Those are mine.

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For Every Evil

For every evil under the sun

There is a remedy or there is none.

If there be one, seek till you find it.

If there be none, never mind it.

--Mother Goose

One Month Later...

Grace Van Pelt sat at her desk, typing away at her keyboard just as she'd done her entire CBI experience before the horrible events that had happened to her one month ago. It was the same comforting routine she'd picked back up since returning to work a week before. Her physical wounds were healing. The massive black and blue bruise on the side of her face from where Red John, aka Simon James, had slammed it into the banister at her sister's house was fading to nothing more than a distant memory. Not even a sickly yellow mark remained. That's why it made no sense to her that when she touched her left temple, she could still feel pain radiating throughout her head. Her gunshot wound had healed better than even the doctors suspected. They had told her she'd been lucky. And she was, she guessed. The only scars she had on her body were the ugly red marks on her wrists courtesy of Red John's knife and the small pucker of skin on her stomach where his bullet had struck.

Emotionally, however, she was a wreck. She had her good days and her bad days she supposed, although she couldn't for the life of her remember when her last good day was. Probably, the day before she heard of her sister, Faith's, assumed suicide. She had been happy that day, content. If she was truthful with herself, she'd know that she had also been naive. Bad things like the murder of her sister and the torture of Red John didn't happen to her. Even that deep dark 'trauma' Jane so correctly identified hadn't been as massive as that. Nothing had prepared her for the total and complete loss of peace. The constant fear. The agonizing panic attacks. And the overwhelming sense that nothing was going to be the same again. She should have died twice in twenty-four hours. No one just bounced back from that one hundred percent.

But she did.

She came to work. She sat at her desk. She performed the mundane tasks that Lisbon gently instructed her to do. Lisbon, who tried to hide it, looked at her like she was a wounded bird every since it happened. It wasn't her fault, Grace decided. Lisbon was her friend and wanted to make things as normal and as easy as possible. The problem? Nothing had ever been normal and easy.

If anyone had noticed her blankness; her frequent use of the backspace; her inability to type two coherent sentences together, they hadn't mentioned it. For the most part, people just let her be. That included Wayne Rigsby who before the incident had been her frequent admirer. The tall, dark, and geekishly handsome man used find excuses to come and talk to her. But now he had his own burdens to bare. Allowing a man to die when you weren't even completely sure of his guilt ate at a person. That along with the fact that District Attorney Frank Copola was trying to build a case against both he and the consultant in the death of his son, Jason, had done it's own damage to the once jovial man. Grace had overheard someone saying that he'd resorted to drinking away his troubles. If that was the case, she'd rather he not come around her anyway. Drinking, drunkenness rather, wasn't something she would stand for. Not even for a man she had once cared about.

Truth be told, it had been Kimball Cho with whom she had spent the most time at work . Cho's greatest asset was his ability to not show his feelings. She knew he cared, they all did. But he hid it better than the rest. He would talk to her about facts from the cases and he didn't coddle her or smother her. She was so glad to have Cho with her at work otherwise she wasn't sure how she would handle it.

And then there was Patrick Jane.

Jane and she hadn't spoken much at the office since Red John had kidnapped and tortured her. At the time, Jane had, by both legal and illegal means, obtained the ability to be her legal guardian. He used his new authority to have her released from the mental ward of the hospital she'd been staying at. It turned out that she hadn't been crazy after all... at least not in the way the doctors thought. The corrupt cop Sam Dixon's wife had been a nurse on Grace's floor. Misty had also been working with Red John. She had drugged Grace into thinking she was losing it. One thing she hadn't been crazy about was the fact that the real Red John, not a hallucination as people were trying to make her believe, had indeed been in her hospital room, trying to strangle her. Red John had turned out to be Simon James. A man not even an inch shorter than Jane with dark black hair and eyes. He had been an actor on Jane's TV shows and had held a grudge over the phony psychic's involvement in the Red John case, his case. The serial killer had served his own kind of 'justice' and murdered Jane's family, leaving his wife and daughter brutally mangled for the corrupt man to see.

Red John showed back up to stop another officer Jason Copola, Sam's partner, from slandering his name by staging suicides of women who had been touched at Jane's show. After a bizarre and hard to follow series of events, it turned out that Jane shot Red John who in turn escaped from the hospital with the help of Misty Dixon who had been in on the plot to murder her abusive husband, Sam, from the beginning. It was indeed a tangled web that was hard for Grace to follow. All that mattered to her, and she knew Jane as well, was that Red John was still out there and that he, or rather they, were going to catch him and make him pay.

While in the hospital again for the gunshot wound sustained at the hands of Red John, Grace had been found sane. The doctors thought she was making great progress to recovery. She had to laugh at that upon reflection. She wondered how they could have been so wrong.

So, she had convinced her parents that she was fine and that they should go back to Iowa. She felt so bad for the pain that they were going through. One daughter beaten, the other dead. She knew it was horrible, but looking at the sadness in her mother eyes only made things worse for her. She was glad when they left on the day she'd been released.

"It's Friday. It's 5 o'clock. Go home, Van Pelt." Lisbon ordered, walking by her desk with folder in hand. Even with make-up and concealer, the senior agent could see the dark circles under Grace's eyes. Grace worn conservative black slacks, a gray button-up, and her hair down around her shoulders with just enough natural wave to let Lisbon know that she hadn't put forth much effort into fixing it. Since she'd been back, Lisbon had noticed that her friend hadn't worn one bright color. Not one flourish of jewelry. She could tell that Grace was holding on and holding on tightly, so she never mentioned it. She had been back a week, and in that week, Grace hadn't been asked on any crime scene or information gathering jobs. Lisbon didn't feel comfortable doing that to Grace or any other member of the team. Her team. The team that had been ripped nearly to shreds by Red John and his latest trick, and the team she was desperately trying to hold on to.

Lisbon wanted Grace back to her full potential, but truth be told, no matter what the doctors said, her gut told her to not let the junior agent back out on the field. Not yet. Either she or someone else could get hurt. She couldn't take that chance.

"We'll do, boss." Grace smiled at her as brightly as Jane did. A definite telltale sign that there was much deeper trauma going on behind her pretty greens than she was letting on. Maybe even more than she knew herself.

Grace started packing her things as Lisbon walked away. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that her boss had passed the couch which had been vacant since Jane had left an hour before, and was making her way toward Minelli's office. As she gathered her purse and keys, she idly wondered what she was going in there for.

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It was dark by the time she made it to the house with black duffel bag in hand, just as she had done every night since from being released from the hospital. It had been that first night, at home, alone, that showed her that she wasn't fine. That she didn't want to be alone. That she couldn't handle the thoughts running rampant in her mind. That she needed someone.

She knew she should feel embarrassed, a grown woman... needing this, but she didn't. She couldn't feel anything positive, much less embarrassment. In fact, embarrassment would have been a blessing if it replaced the fear, the anxiety, the uncertainty.... the scariness of her new life.

As she did every night, she knocked twice on the dark wooden door. She didn't know if there was some deeper meaning to the fact that she always knocked twice. She really didn't care. It was just a nervous twitch. Something to let him know that she was here... as if it would be anyone else after all of this time.

The door opened and he stood silently. A hint of a smile ghosted his lips as he wiped his free hand on the apron tied around his waist. He was dressed in the same clothes as he had been at work: white button-up only now with sleeves rolled up the elbows, light blue vest, and gray pants. Without a word, he stepped aside and let her enter. Just as he had done every night.

His house had became her safe haven in the dark. And none of the team was the wiser.