Thanks for all of the reviews/story alerts! This was finished a couple days ago, but then I couldn't post anything :( Thanks for the patience!
Disclaimer: If I owned the Mentalist, the new season would have started yesterday (has anyone seen the promo for season 2? I heard it was out, but I can't find it anywhere.)
Recap: Red John killed a child and a woman (who resembles Lisbon), and left a threatening note at the crime scene.
The car ride to the hotel had been silent. Lisbon had been tempted to give Jane the keys just to please him, but she was pretty sure he would start driving and not stop until they had reached the next state – and then only to refill the tank and keep going. The others were too shaken up from hearing the news to drive, and although she knew that after they had processed the information they'd be fine, she didn't want to wait around. So instead, she shoved her panicked thoughts aside and focused on the basically empty – thank god – road.
Jane had insisted on sitting up front, and spent most of the ride staring at her, as if she would disappear if he looked away. The only thought running through his head was a modified memory of the night when his world had been ripped apart. The clothes, the outfit, the talk show, the pink tricycle. And when he got to the door, the note was the same. But instead of his wife and daughter behind the door, there was a certain brunette agent, torn to shreds, with her nails painted crimson. It was enough to put him off sleep for a year.
"Blink, Jane," she ordered, glancing at him for a moment. Startled, he obeyed, and then frowned.
"This isn't funny, Lisbon." One point for getting him to talk, she thought proudly.
"Neither is having dry eyes," she replied, most of her energy diverted from focus on the road to keeping her mouth from twitching. "If you don't blink you could go blind." That was a lie, and she knew it, but it was the sort of thing a mother would say. The threats that had worked on her brothers might work on Jane, seeing as how he was an overgrown three-year-old most days.
He pursed his lips, "Did you even attend basic first-aid, Lisbon? Everyone knows you don't go blind from not blinking."
"Could too," Rigsby piped up. He was willing to start an argument with Jane, something he usually left for Lisbon to do (seeing as how she was the only one with a chance at winning), just to take his mind off the thought that a crazed serial killer had set sights on his boss.
"Do tell," Jane turned around to look at him, and Lisbon added another point to the tally. A smile spread over his face when Rigsby's face remained frozen.
"If you stared at the sun without blinking," Van Pelt jumped to Rigsby's rescue, "Or, uhm, a solar eclipse. Without glasses," she added as Jane's mouth opened.
"Okay," he conceded, reminding the team that he was still very much concerned about Red John – under ordinary circumstances, Jane never gave an inch. "But, I wasn't doing that." He refused to back down entirely, even if he wasn't his usual self.
"But I didn't say you were going to go blind. I said people in general."
"Nuh-uh," he protested, grinning, "You said 'If you don't blink you could go blind.' That sounds like you to me, doesn't it Cho?"
"I meant 'you' as in people in general, not 'you' as in you."
"But you didn't say that, did you?" his smile was even bigger. "Ah! Another 'you', properly used to refer to you."
"Pronouns give me headaches." Rigsby announced, leaning back into his seat.
"I win." Jane told him.
Three points for making him smile; four for getting him energized enough to care about winning an argument about pronouns.I win.
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