Title: There's No Place like Home
Rating: T
Disclaimer: The Mentalist and The Wizard of Oz aren't mine.
Summary: Falling couches, hungry scarecrows, and changing outfits was not how the movie went…but it works for Patrick Jane.
I wrote this as a Paint It Red Secret Santa 2011 gift for Kathiann, who prompted Wizard of Oz, but I'm only getting around to just posting it now! This piece is something really silly that reminds me of my earlier humor pieces within the fandom, so…I hope you all will enjoy reading!
Prologue: Over the Rainbow
"We've got to make a move on him now, especially if we're going to arrest him today," Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon commanded from behind the driver's seat of the state issued black SUV. She had her eyes focused on her team using the rearview mirror as Patrick Jane, who sat next to her, yawned, his own eyes trained out the window on a squirrel that sat not too far away from the vehicle. "Rigsby, Cho—take the front. Van Pelt and I will take the side."
The blonde-haired consultant waited for Lisbon to address him, while the entire team swiftly moved around to readjust their Kevlar vests and recheck their already loaded guns. Of course, they needed the lovely bullet-proof vests on but he was glad not to be one of them—especially, thanks to the sweltering (and very usual) heat wave that was currently being subjected upon the residents of Sacramento in the midst of December.
"Is Jane coming, boss?" Grace Van Pelt inquired, as he felt her eyes on his back making him want to turn around and flash the extremely thoughtful red-haired agent a bright smile. However, Lisbon interrupted his plans with the utterance of one sentence.
"No, he isn't." Jane glanced away from the curious brown squirrel to peer back at Lisbon with a pout. "No, Jane…we've been over this. You are a consultant. You do not have a weapon, and I refuse to have somebody watch your ass."
"When has that or one of your agents stopped me before?" he questioned her with a crooked grin. Lisbon only shook her head in response.
"Daniel Gates is a suspected arsonist. Do you get what that means?" Jane almost laughed. If Lisbon thought insulting his intelligence with her mightier than thou tone would make him stay, then she was obviously deluding herself. He wondered how she would react if he told her that but he stopped himself when she narrowed her eyes and huffed in response to his self-imposed (and reflective) silence. "He's dangerous. We want you alive, not off dead somewhere." Lisbon opened her car door before she unbuckled her seat belt. Jane was almost touched by her concern (or lack of, therefore) for him not ending up as some unidentified corpse, a victim of the latest pyro craze. "Jane, stay. Cho, Rigsby, Van Pelt—let's go."
One thing Jane couldn't understand was why it was such a large deal that he couldn't stand behind Lisbon, or even hide himself behind some large tree as he done many times in the past. Daniel Gates had plenty of towering, thick-trunked trees standing on his modest property that being noticed would never even happen. He was interrupted from his thoughts by the slamming of somebody's car door and he turned his head back to stare outside the passenger side window with an impish grin.
He'd count to twenty and then leave the vehicle!
Lisbon would be way too focused on delivering her own idea of justice (Jane scoffed. Lisbon's idea of justice to him, involved the two H's: hugs and handcuffs) to even notice that he had disobeyed her orders.
1…
A dog barked.
2…
Something buzzed by his ear.
3, 4, 5…
He swatted at that annoying something.
6, 7, 8…
He placed his hand on the door handle, when suddenly he heard gunshots in the near distance.
19, 20…
He threw open the door and abandoned his seat belt with a soft chuckle as he quickly crossed the empty road and found a not-too visible hiding spot, which just happened to be at the very side of the property. From around the side of the thick-trunked tree, Jane could spot Lisbon's hostile (if that was the best word for whatever was going on) exchange with Daniel, who had somehow managed to procure a shotgun.
Lisbon seemed to be trying to talk the shotgun arsonist down from doing whatever he was planning on doing, and though Jane couldn't hear their exchange or read their lips (as he certainly wasn't Superman), he reasoned that the irate man was either going to attempt to kill himself, especially from the way he continued to wiggle the nuzzle of the shotgun toward his face, or Daniel was going to try and shoot his own way out of an already helpless situation, which had slowly evolved to Rigsby and Cho slowly creeping up on him from the side. He pressed himself closer to the tree and braced himself for the inevitable kill shot, when he heard the soft yet distinct click of a trigger being readied, just behind his head.
"You don't want to do this, Caitlin." Jane didn't need to turn around to know that Daniel's slightly less sane girlfriend, Caitlin Winters, was the one standing behind him with a gun trained on his head. In fact, he thought with a blossoming smile, he had pegged her from the moment he had met her as being in cahoots with Daniel, particularly when he considered that the woman had exchanged heated words with all the victims before Daniel supposedly burned their bodies into ashes. "Think about your future…!"
"Shut up!" Caitlin slammed the barrel of her gun into the back of his head, and he winced. "Daniel is my future, you dolt."
"How do you feel about getting married in an orange jumpsuit?" Jane posed innocently, as Caitlin responded by allowing him to see spots in his vision via another hard shove from her gun. He knew he shouldn't taunt the woman holding the gun, but he felt confident that Caitlin was only stressed at the very idea of her love going to prison for life. "When you met Daniel, did you know he was a psychopath? Or did you learn that much later?" He heard Caitlin say something in a foreign tongue but he couldn't tell what tongue she was speaking in—or even what she was saying.
"We're going to have a little talk with your boss." Caitlin returned in English after a few moments of silence.
"I'd rather we not," he argued, before he carefully turned his head over his right shoulder to glance the spiny brunette, who wore a sharp sneer. "My so-called "boss" has no idea that I'm out here, so spoiling my…" In a split second, he watched as she pressed the cool barrel against the temple of his forehead, making him flinch slightly—he wasn't afraid of dying, as he had said so often before, but he was afraid of the pain…and so far, this woman was causing all kinds of pain to his person.
"We are walking. You are not talking, Mr. Jane." She pulled the barrel away from his temple, and he let out the collective breath he had been holding. "Turn your head around or I will pull the trigger now." He slowly turned his head around and Caitlin returned the barrel of gun to the back of his head.
"Okay, we're going," Jane muttered, as he pulled himself from beyond his hiding spot to start toward Lisbon and Daniel, who were still engaged in conflict, with Caitlin bringing up his rear. He quickly glanced around to try and find a simple way to defuse the situation but he had a feeling that if he accidently hurt Caitlin in his attempts to either escape or defuse the situation, Daniel would pull the trigger and Lisbon (if not dead) would be extremely pissed with him for not obeying her orders.
"Hello Agent Lisbon," Caitlin finally greeted, with the gun still aimed at the back of his head. Lisbon turned slightly, while her gun was still trained on Daniel to find him. "I think I found something of yours." Lisbon grimaced while Jane tried to smile in her direction but the gun was preventing him from doing such an action. Daniel, who stood behind Lisbon with the shotgun grasped firmly in his hands, stared at Caitlin perplexed.
"Let him go, Caitlin," Lisbon demanded with her gun still aimed slightly at Caitlin. "Nobody needs to die here." Jane wondered how well reverse psychology worked when several guns were being pointed at you all at once but Caitlin's hold on the gun never loosened and he didn't think it bothered her too much. "If you put the gun down, we can all talk reasonably…"
"You came after my fiancé, and you had no good reason!" Caitlin threw back in response. "What makes you think I want to talk reasonably to you or anybody else with the Californian Bureau of Imbeciles?" Jane snorted at her creative leeway but he immediately flinched as she readjusted the pressure between his head and her gun. "You all are playing a dangerous game and I have no problems shooting him dead."
"I have a problem with you shooting me dead," Jane interjected.
"Nobody asked you," Caitlin sneered.
"It's my life," Jane replied. "Excuse me for having an opinion." He readied himself for yet another reemergence of spots in his vision from Caitlin's gun but it never came. He sighed softly. Maybe, just maybe, she was finished trying to prove something to everybody. "Besides," he continued on with a soft grin, "If there was a list of unreasonable reasons to come after somebody, crazy pyromaniacs wouldn't even be on that list."
Caitlin pushed him forward and he landed on his hands and knees with a soft plop. "What happens if my fingers slip and the gun goes off? Would that be unreasonable?" She paused, and Jane felt her foot tap his ankle. "Would it?"
"It depends on what your definition of unreasonable is," Jane answered calmly. "Generally, most of the population finds murder to be unreasonable, not to mention illegal and unlawful." He shrugged from the ground. "Personally, murder isn't unreasonable if you have a perfectly good reason."
"So you do understand that they had to die!" Caitlin exclaimed.
"I'm starting to see why," he bluffed as he began to stand on his feet again. With a careful brush of his jacket, he turned to face her. "But Agent Lisbon doesn't and if you don't tell her, she will allow her gun-toting colleagues to move in on both you and your charming fiancé." Jane watched Caitlin's brown eyes flicker just beyond his shoulder, probably to acknowledge both Lisbon and Daniel. "I'm sure the last thing you want to do is splatter your rainbow wind chime with any blood."
Caitlin scowled and refocused her attention on Jane. "Danae Renfrew was a self-righteous bitch and everybody knew it." Danae Renfew, Jane remembered briefly from one of Lisbon's many debriefing sessions, had been a twenty-something college student and the first of four victims in Daniel's ring of fire. "She knew I loved Daniel, and yet she messed around with him behind my back. Danae was such a good friend, wasn't she?" Caitlin made a sweeping motion with the gun still in her hand. "I walked in on them and she apologized. I was a fool and I believed her. But I suppose apologies fall on the wayside when you're on your knees."
Jane chortled while Caitlin ignored him. "So yes…I hit her with a shovel." He raised his eyebrow in response to her choice in the method of death and Caitlin rushed to defend herself. "Daniel said…" She paused to bite her lip, and her attention was once again drawn to the still prone Daniel. "I mean I said that she was asking to be buried six-feet under and I just helped her along by filling the request."
"Did he watch you kill her?" Caitlin shook her head. "Did he make you kill her?"
"I killed her, Jonathan Thomas, Lynn Quint, and Scott Cross," Caitlin admitted, after almost a half-a-second of hesitation on her part. Jane turned around to glance at Lisbon, who seemed slightly off-put at the lone confession. Sometimes, he thought, things are THAT easy.
"What about the arson?" Jane asked.
"I researched condemned buildings in the Sacramento area on Google," Caitlin explained calmly, although Lisbon raised her eyebrow in his direction. He couldn't help but quirk his lips into a slight teasing smile as Caitlin continued to talk. "I brought all the bodies into the building and then I let them burn."
Jane shook his head and turned back to face her. "I suppose I wasn't completely wrong about you, Caitlin."
"What do you mean, Mr. Jane?" she questioned in confusion.
"You are involved in the murders, which I could see from our first conversation," Jane responded, which caused Caitlin to appear even more confused than she had before. "Remember when I asked you about what attracted you to Daniel?" She nodded. "What did you tell me?"
"I said his intelligence."
"Exactly," Jane interjected. "Even now, as you stand here and continue to pointlessly argue with me, you take the rep for all these murders that you couldn't have possibly committed on your own and yet, the love of your life, remains completely quiet. Tell me why Caitlin." She glanced between him and Daniel, her eyes becoming overwhelmed with tears. "Would you like me to tell you and everybody else here why, Caitlin?" She shook her head violently while he calmly continued on. "You are only a scapegoat to Daniel."
Caitlin dropped her jaw in surprise and she moved her mouth to respond—when he felt a sudden pain course through his body. The last thing he noticed was the rainbow wind chime blowing in the breeze before everything went dark.
X.X.X
Jane twisted away from the bright light that had begun to disturb his first peaceful sleep in a long time and allowed his nose to be comforted by the familiar aroma of his well-worn couch. He hummed contently, as he snuggled back into the warm leather, while he listened to the happy birds chirping away in some type of celebration.
He would have eventually fallen back to sleep, if it hadn't been for the sudden atypical thoughts about the innocent creatures that held absolutely no place of existence within the California Bureau of Investigation. His hearing the "happy birds chirping away" meant he had either gone insane (which was really unlikely—especially considering he often enjoyed prattling to Lisbon about his infallible saneness and top-shape mental health), his couch had been moved outside the Serious Crimes Bullpen (which was an even more ridiculous idea—that couch had ALWAYS been his—and sometimes Lisbon's—sacred fortress), or lastly, the "couch" he had snuggled up to simply wasn't his "couch."
He drew a deep breath and pressed his nose into the leather—it smelled like his couch: the combination of old leather, the hint of spring lilac (he blamed Grace and her perchance for purple Christmas presents), and an overwhelming scent of fake lemon aerosol that somebody had used to mask their unwarranted presence on his couch.
Jane frowned. He had never exactly been a true-blue betting man but he had his suspicions on Rigsby. If it was Cho, he wouldn't have masked himself. Lisbon has an all-access pass to my couch, and Grace has hopefully learned her lesson from the last incident, he thought smugly, Wainwright wouldn't dare sit on my couch…so, Rigsby would be the only logical suspect left.
The little, or maybe even large, birds chirped away happily once more as he twisted his body around on the couch before he lifted his eyelids to find a robin blue egg sky above him, dotted with large, white fluffy clouds.
"I'm obviously not in Sacramento anymore," he murmured softly to nobody—Sacramento is a polluted pit of despair, he mused to himself, this isn't my beloved smog pit of despair.—He hadn't exactly wanted to move from his familiar couch, and he certainly hadn't wanted to explore whatever desolate land that had presented itself to him.—I wouldn't put this whole oddity past Lisbon, Jane thought. She WAS really bent out of shape about me disobeying orders earlier. – He allowed his face to break into a large smile. "Lisbon!" There was no response. "Lisbon, I said I was sorry!"
Something, other than the still happy birds, made a noise and Jane shot off his couch. "You didn't somehow leave me on a cannibalistic island…did you?" Silence was the answer. "Lisbon! This isn't funny!"
That something made another noise.
Jane took a step away from his couch.
He glanced down at his brown shoes, which were surrounded by the greenest grass he had ever seen—then again, he mused to himself silently, the perfect lawn is made of plastic. —Then he glanced up at the completely different world from his own: his bluish-green eyes met the large green trees that towered over him, the calm crystal blue lake that sat a few paces away from him under a white bridge, and the flowers…the flowers, which were a complete cornucopia of colors and types, hung around him.
"I must be dreaming," he said firmly as he watched one of a few white swans preen on the lake. Jane pulled his eyes away to continue to glance around the wide enclosure, when he heard an unmistakable giggle from somewhere within the green bushes and light flowers. He spun his head around wildly to see if he could catch the pranking individual, until his eyes caught sight of a shimmering translucent rainbow bubble in the sky which seemed to be floating closer and closer toward the ground.
Jane honestly didn't know what to make of it. "Or," he started as he slowly backward his couch, while the now pink bubble hit the ground and faded into a cloud of pink sparkles. "I'm…" He paused to take in the figure that had suddenly stepped through the pink, shimmering shield. "Lisbon?"
