A/N: I'm back! Isn't that just brilliant? Yeh anyways this is a response to the finale i hope you all like it. Now i've got this as a one-shot however i've got some thoughts on how i could continue this so if you're interested let me know or i'll probably leave it as it is. Regardless enjoy everyone, C.D.
Disclaimer: No it isn't mine and it's quite easy to see that i don't own 'The Mentalist' because i never would've written the confrontation playing out like that nonetheless don't sue me i recognise i'm just borrowing the characters etc.
Warnings: SEASON THREE FINALE SPOILERS READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
She'd kidded herself that this day would never come, that in this one instance Jane wouldn't achieve the desired aim. He had of course proven her wrong and the self-delusion was ended nonetheless.
The price paid in full as she was left with the cruel all-encompassing feeling of it being outside of her control and that she had failed him in some way in not stopping him.
In not even having been there in the first place.
She'd not entertained the idea of how she would react if he'd succeeded and now, now she didn't know what to feel.
It scared her.
So she blocked it out. She went through the motions because she had to and pulled herself together.
A few days before his trial Cho and the others asked her if she wanted to come with them to see Jane and she mumbled something about case files and declined.
So they left and her focus went with them as the writing on the documents blurred into a mass of incomprehensible blackness.
She pushed it aside a whirl of frustration and dissatisfaction. The paperwork would have to wait.
Through all the confusion and the endless questions of whether she should be coming back to work so early after being shot (even when she wasn't doing any field work) she knew one thing for certain.
She still cared about Jane and that wasn't about to change.
He'd gotten under her skin and even as part of her muttered that he'd killed a man and deserved what he got, another urged her to go see him, check if he was alright.
She wanted to punch him and hug him all at once for making her feel this way. Lisbon knew right from wrong and yet there sat Jane waving happily at her in the grey divide.
Try as she might she couldn't imagine the couch without him dozing (or pretending to at least) stretched out and relaxed upon it. Somewhere along the way he'd become part of the team, part of the family and even now her protective side urged her to go nag at him.
He might have shot a man but that man as far as he was aware was also Red John the murderer of his wife and child. Some would ask how that wouldn't leave you an emotional mess obsessed with revenge.
He was as much a victim as he was a killer.
His years of misery and guilt had been punishment in themselves.
Yet she couldn't shake the fact he'd intended to kill Red John had even told her that with madness abundant in his eyes.
Even then it was difficult to reconcile the childish consultant with the man who had shot a man three times in a row making it more than apparent he didn't want the risk of him surviving.
The same man who had placed a gun in his pocket in preparation for a meeting with Red John.
Everything about the deed was cold and yet when she thought of him she saw only warmth.
It confused her and she just didn't know how they could ever get back to where they had been before this. That was the clearest objection to her visiting him.
He had changed things incontrovertibly and it unnerved her, the knowing that if she went to see him she might not even be able to talk to him, look at him as if he were the same man.
She knew of course that he was the same man, that he was still Patrick Jane and that hadn't changed.
She just didn't know if she could see him how she had before.
That was the saddest part of the whole affair.
So maybe staying at the office not even doing the paperwork she was planning to do was her avoiding confronting the situation.
Well, alright, that was precisely what it was.
All she knew was that if she sat here not going along to see him with the others she could still imagine Jane as that annoying loveable rogue of a consultant and she liked that image.
She liked it a lot.