Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 21)

Rating: M for graphic violence and language

Fandom: The Mentalist

Summary: Patrick Jane has lived his life obsessed with the capture of Red John ever since finding his beloved wife and daughter slain by the maniac's hand. Now, 10 years to the day after that horrific night, a young woman appears in Patrick's life, someone who threatens to destroy everything his life has become in the interim... if not his sanity, itself.

Author's note: I hope you guys enjoyed the last chapter, and I hope it made this story and what is coming next more interesting, and not less so. We still have the show-down and Crazy Chicken Man and the summer of 1978 and a bunch more to get through. Please enjoy and keep the reviews coming! Thanks, guys. Happy Easter, btw. Oh yeah, for action fans, the next few chapters will be "action" chapters. If this story really was Terminator 2, then the next few chapters (after this one) would be the beginning of the T-1000 chasing John. Or... something like that. I originally said this story would be about 100 k. Shows what I know. We're looking at at least 6 or 7 more chapters at (on average) 7 K a chapter. Minimum. I more or less revealed RJ in the last chapter, and at the same time there is still so much to get into. Btw, I have long suspected that Jane's childhood would have to be really messed up for him to turn out like he did, even without the trauma of Red John and his guilt over his wife and child. Jane's father Alexander is described as "wicked", there is some talk of Red John being involved or known to the family for quite a while, Jane is not a sociopath but has learned certain traits which look like sociopathy at first glance and he is very, very good at playing a part. Also, this chapter is short, but it is what it is.

""Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart." - Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

"He had never regarded other men as anything but puppets of a sort, created to fill up an empty world. He divided them into two classes: those he greeted because some chance had put him in contact with them, and those he did not greet. But both these categories of individuals were equally insignificant in his eyes.― ("An Old Man")"― Guy de Maupassant

""He was six years old this time, and ancient."― Red Tash, This Brilliant Darkness

"Amnesia, which is a loss of memory, is a symptom of many different trauma and/or dissociative disorders, including PTSD, Dissociative Fugue, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Amnesia can affect both implicit and explicit memory."~ Ruth A. Lanius, Eric Vermetten, and Clare Pain (The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic)

"Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run,

Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run.

You better make your face up in

Your favourite disguise.

With your button down lips and your

Roller blind eyes.

With your empty smile

And your hungry heart.

Feel the bile rising from your guilty past.

With your nerves in tatters

As the cockleshell shatters

And the hammers batter

Down the door.

You'd better run." - Pink Floyd, "Run Like Hell"

Saturday, November 3, 2013 7:18 pm PST

Jane was driving the truck to Hermosillo, and then he wasn't. He was pulling off to the shoulder of the road, eyes wide and staring, brain pounded by sudden, impossible images, by memories that were razor sharp and fine and cut into his awareness of reality and who he was like a knife. His heart pounded so hard against his chest that for just a moment he thought maybe he was having a heart attack. Just a brief moment. His head was buzzing, like a hive of wasps had suddenly been dropped into the cavity that- moments earlier- had housed his brain.

"No, no..." Jane trailed numbly, fingers rubbing at his temples. "No. That's not possible. I refuse to believe that." He was staring out the window, into the black of the night, where the high-beams were showing nothing but road and dust and desert and the emptiness that was this ancient, mystical land. "No."

"Jane?" Lisbon asked concernedly. "What's going on?" Her brow creased in worry. "What's happening?"

"No," Jane said, and shut his eyes. Red John was playing with him. Somehow, in some way. Some hypnotic suggestion, some sort of sick mind control shit. Something. But the memories coming to him now were not real. They couldn't be. And yet...

...there was a chunk of childhood that was gone, fuzzy around the edges, like time and space had been going along just fine and then fallen into a black hole. The event horizons of those memories were blurred, distorted. And in the middle, blackness, nothing, where memory should have been. A chunk of months when he was ten. A span of time in the third grade. Blacked out, gone, like they'd never been. Nothing in his memory at all before the relatively late age of 6. And holes all through his adolescence, like worm tracks in an otherwise good apple.

He had never shared his missing time episodes with Lisbon because he hadn't had missing time episodes since he'd known her. Not at all as an adult, to be exact. And what adult remembered their childhood seamlessly, without distortion?

What he did remember had snags and terrors and uncomfortable not-nice things in the mix, things he couldn't change and that would only upset Lisbon, would only have upset Angela, too... and so he had pushed childhood into a box marked "over and done with" and stuffed it in some shelf in his mind, like a box of old photos and super 8 film reels tossed carelessly into a dusty attic, to be forgotten. Lisbon, he knew, hadn't had the happiest growing-up years, either. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. Better to move on.

Red John had sent some photographs, now, and somehow, in doing that... the other photographs were coming out of hiding, zombies rising from their graves. The other memories. Ghosts summoned forth by a playful sociopath. Jane kept his eyes shut. If he kept his eyes shut long enough, he might wake up.

"I don't believe this. I refuse to believe this. This is not happening." His words were weak; bloodless, boneless. Whisper-quiet weak words.

"Jane?!" Lisbon said, louder now, more worried. She touched him gently on the shoulder and he flinched away immediately. Opened his eyes and stared at her like she might not be who she had always been. Lisbon watched him carefully, fearful for him. Something was very wrong.

"What's in my head right now, Lisbon, is impossible," he said starkly, with wounded eyes. His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. Please make it better, Lisbon. Fix this, please. Please fix this. Please, Lisbon...

"What's in your head, Jane?" Lisbon said softly, so carefully, like he might go crazy. Might lose his shit, to quote Charlotte. Charlotte was watching her father with careful eyes, too. Charlotte put her own small hand forward and touched Jane on the shoulder. He turned to her, immediately, like her touch was fire.

"Charlotte," he said, and his words were off. That was the only way Lisbon could describe them. Not shaky, not really. Not loud, not on the edge of tears or spacey. But off. Scared but detached, at once.

"Hey, Dad," Charlotte said in a voice that was probably meant to be soothing. "Are you okay?" It was the second time she had called him Dad since she'd "come back". Even in his distress, he noticed that. She was trying to comfort him, in her own, small way. That was kind of her.

"Charlotte, what does Red John look like?" Jane said and closed his eyes like he didn't want to see her answer, as if the words would somehow be visible, be an image. Charlotte shifted in the back.

"I don't know..." she said softly. A child's answer.

"Yes, you do. What does he look like, Charlotte?"

There was some sound that could have meant anything. Jane opened his eyes and turned his head, sought out his child's gaze. He smiled at her, gently. She watched him warily. With dawning awareness Jane knew that when Charlotte looked at him, she was seeing not only his face, but Red John's face, and that awareness made his intestines tighten in his belly. Fuck.

"Charlotte, does Red John look like me?" His words were tight and careful, too. Beside him, Lisbon was watching this scene unfold with worry etched on her face, eyes huge. She didn't know who to be more concerned for; Jane or Charlie. Both were wounded; both had huge, gaping tears in their souls where at least one monster had played around with their hearts.

"Charlotte?" Jane pressed. "Please answer the question."

"Not to me. He doesn't look like you, to me. I can tell the difference," Charlotte mumbled. Jane almost winced, but the corner of his mouth jerked up a rueful smile at her attempt to lessen the blow.

"I appreciate you saying so, but someone else? Who doesn't know me very well, or know Red John well? Might they confuse us?" He already knew what the answer was going to be.

"People are stupid. They are not very observant at all. One day I was talking to this woman on the street and she told me she couldn't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese people. Can you believe that, Dad?" Dad. The third use of Dad since he'd met her, and two of those times had been in the last two minutes. Very deliberately in the last two minutes. Charlotte's way of distancing Jane from Red John.

(Don't worry, Dad, I know who you are and I know who he is. And you are not him. He is Red John and you... you are my Dad)

"Charlotte," Jane said plaintively. "Please just answer the question, okay? No roundabout answers? Direct answers, only, right now... please?"

"Okay," Charlotte mumbled. Jane kept his eyes locked on her, angled his head so he could see her eyes better. She had a wary look on her face, wary and displeased, like someone who is asked to say something they know is going to hurt someone else, and who doesn't want to say the words. But has to.

"Okay, thank you. Red John. Does he look like me? By that, I mean, do we look close enough to be related?" Jane would ask this in stages, and phrase the questions so she only had to answer in yeses or nos. Maybe that would work better.

"Yes, I think so."

"Do we look enough alike to pass for brothers?" Jane spoke slowly, testing out the final word like it might detonate. Brothers. Lisbon was watching him with even bigger eyes, with dawning horror on her face. Was he getting at what she thought he was getting at?

"Yes."

"Charlie...could... might it be possible...for people to confuse us for twins?" There it was. The T-word. The clincher. Such a small word, but the implications were huge.

Jane had a mental flash of the years rolling back behind this current moment in time like film. Of all his casework with Lisbon and the CBI. And then, afterwards, of Red John coming around, shaking the hands of people Jane had met and spoken with, "following up" on Jane's life. Sharing tea with the people Jane had chatted up, pretending to be his brother. Learning about Jane, sucking information from the unobservant masses so effortlessly.

Jane felt another twist in his guts.

From a distance, at first, before Lisbon knew him well... Red John... did Lisbon ever... ?

The thought wouldn't connect at first.

The idea of a killer with Jane's face, trailing around after him like a nightmare's shadow that has somehow managed to survive the waking-up process. A pod-person, a body snatcher, a duplicate waltzing his way into Jane's life, embedding himself in Jane's affairs. Killing when he was bored. Killing when he wasn't bored. Fuck.

Jane's arms felt suddenly weak and bloodless, and everything was spinning; a low, sickly vertigo. The mentalist moaned and rested his forehead gently on the top of the steering wheel and tried to remember to breathe properly. Oxygen was important. Slow and deep. In and out. You've been doing this all your life, Patrick. In and out.

There you go. Keep it up.

"You look different to me, though, Dad. Even when I was little. Almost right away, I knew he wasn't you."

Almost right away... almost right away...almost right away. The words looped in Jane's mind in his daughter's innocent, tortured voice.

He imagined the scene.

Little Charlie stumbling into her parents' bedroom, wide-eyed, not understanding.

5 years of age, and seeing the unfolding horror. The monster that looked like Daddy but wasn't Daddy, the Bach music, the similar voice. The slash of the knife, the arc-spray of arterial blood, the moans, the pleading.

Time running backwards and forwards, their dinner earlier seeping into the horror of the murder. Charlie's nightly bath and the smell of strawberry and cream soap still strong on her baby-fine skin as she stumbled into her parents' bedroom and saw her Mommy paralyzed in fear, recoiled on the bed. Her Mommy, for a moment in time, pleading with her Daddy not to kill her, before Mommy realized, before she realized... and... (did she realize? Did she figure it out before she died?)...

Her Daddy in his three-piece suit (would Red John have worn a three-piece suit?! Jane was suddenly convinced of it), smiling like the most wily of demons. Charlie not knowing, not understanding; little kid brain trying to make sense out of human evil. For however long that not-knowing was, it would have been Hell.

Worse than Hell.

There was a worse than Hell.

Jane blinked heavily and tried so, so hard not to scream, but he could feel the scream coming, in his guts and in his throat, wanting to break out of his throat and be born into the world, into the night. That scream deserved to be born into the night, it belonged in the night. He shut his eyes tighter, tightly, screwed them up against the realization of what Charlotte had seen, and what she had thought, for however long, to be reality. In and out, came his breath. In.

And out.

He wanted to scream. He was going to. Scream.

But no sound came out. Only his whistle-breath. Agonized breath.

Almost right away... The words would not stop looping. Almost right away.

Meaning, for a little bit of time, for some amount of time, she had thought her father was killing her mother, and going to kill her, too. There it was- THE TRUTH!- naked in all its horror, everything else stripped away.

Jane felt small arms around his neck suddenly. His eyes were still screwed tight. Charlotte was hugging him around the neck, her head pressed to his shoulder snugly, like a baby koala. She hugged him hard, pushed her face into the fabric of his hooded sweatshirt, and then Jane felt and heard, at the same time, a soft kissing noise as she kissed the side of his stubbly, shock-white cheek. He was stunned. Overwhelmed. The scream died in his throat, came out as a mewling whine instead.

"I know you are not him, Daddy. Please do not be sad. I know you are not him, Dad. I knew it almost from the beginning, okay Dad? You are you. I love you. I always knew you were not him. Please don't think that. Okay?" Like she was begging him to believe her. She was begging him, that was clear. Begging him to believe her, begging him not to change his core perceptions of himself and what he stood for, because the alternative, she knew, might destroy him. And she didn't want him destroyed. She loved him. He saw that at once.

Charlotte loved her father.

She needed her father. Her good father, her not-Red John-father. She needed him to be okay, because if he wasn't okay... what chance did she have?

He looked at her, saw her eyes, really saw the soul in the eyes. Her eyes were so, so sad. Sad for him, more than anything. He was pretty certain of that fact. Sad for herself, under it, but not on a conscious level. Sad for herself in the way that an abused animal is "sad" for itself. Selfless, really, but scared and sad. Sad for him, begging him to believe her. That she knew the difference. That she had (almost) always known the difference. His mind was whirling. He felt like he might pass out.

"Please, Dad, do you believe me? Please be okay, Dad. Okay?!"

He got himself together then, fast. He was a mentalist. He was a master manipulator of human behaviour, and he was capable of controlling his emotions. He was capable of things ordinary humans were not capable of. If Charlotte could forgive him and try to reassure him, hug and kiss him while he wore the face of a monster, then the least he could do was get his act together, get it together... get it together, damn you.

"Jane," Lisbon was speaking now, slow and uneasy. Jane turned in his seat to see her face. She looked at Jane with compassionate, uneasy eyes, then over at Charlotte. Her eyes scanning back and forth in the night between the eyes of her partner and her partner's until-recently-dead child. "What are you saying? Red John is...what?! Your brother? What are you saying, here? Is that... is that what you're saying? He's your brother?" Lisbon was scared and full of compassion and empathy and grief and confusion. All at once. Stunned.

"Red John is my twin brother," Jane said in response to her question. He felt like he was floating. This moment was utterly surreal. He let out a bark of stressed laughter, what the scream had turned into. Lisbon's eyes widened. It took a mind some time to adjust to the idea of something so huge, with so many levels and layers and dimensions, so many bells and whistles. A psychological Rube Goldberg machine from Hell!

Red John was Jane's twin.

Red John... wore Jane's face.

As far as most people were concerned, Red Jane... was Jane. When he wanted to be, of course.

"How... how is this possible?" She was looking at both of them now like they'd both gone off the deep end. Time to call the Funny Farm handlers. Time to get the head shrinkers with the white coats and the butterfly nets to come scoop up the looney-toons, the fruit-loops, the nutcases, the psychos, because they'd escaped and were running around wild and scaring the natives...

"Jane, how can Red John be your brother? You don't have a brother. You have never mentioned a brother to me." Her words were measured and controlled. Clearly, this could not be reality.

Clearly, Jane and Charlotte were having some sort of mutual crack-up session.

The stress was getting to all of them, but Jane and Charlotte were both much more traumatized by Red John than she, herself, was, and they were having some sort of mutual nervous breakdown, a folie à deux à la Red John. Surely something not-this-horrible was going to be reality. Had to be.

"I have holes in my head, Lisbon. Childhood... holes." Jane taped on the side of his scalp, tap, tap, tap. "Never really focused on them much, because how do you analyze holes? So I left them alone and hoped for the best."

A million thoughts rushed into Lisbon's mind, battling to be voiced. "Did you ever speak to anyone?" She sounded more strident than she intended, fought to pull her emotions back in. Keep it together, Lisbon.

Jane shrugged. "I am not the therapy type, Lisbon. You know that. Also. Who could help me? I know more about hypnosis and memory recovery techniques than most clinicians. Physician heal thyself, and all that."

Lisbon was silent. She finally let out a deep, shaky sigh. Tried to put on her best supportive, compassionate face. Jane didn't seem to be his usual self, he seemed scattered. She'd never seen him look so shocked before, so pale. Not even after facing Red John in the past. She'd never seen him like this. Like he was white-knuckling his way through the seconds to keep in control.

"Okay," she said simply. Blinked. Her face was pale in the night as she looked at her partner. "Okay, Jane."

"Okay?" Jane asked softly, eyes on her face, scanning her expressions, her microfacial gestures, everything.

"What do we do now?" Lisbon said, eyes hard and determined as she thought of Red John, thought of his sick legacy of destruction and pain. "What... what do you want to do now, Jane? About Red John?"

Jane looked back at Charlotte deferentially. Charlotte's eyes were impossibly fatigued. Like she was ready for a nap.

"Charlie?" Jane asked kindly. He felt sudden shyness, sudden guilt, having his face. Like his very presence would further traumatize his kid. His face was Red John's face, after all...

"I think there are fruit roll-ups back in the trailer, Patrick," Charlotte said drowsily. The apparent stress of Jane realizing where he had come from- and who he had come into the world with- had worn the kid out. Or... or she was just batshit nuts. Maybe both.

"Fruit roll-ups?" Jane repeated dully. Way to keep it topical, Charlie.

"When I am stressed out, I like to eat sugar. The brain requires glucose to function, that is what it needs; glucose, oxygen and water. Not fructose, not lactose, not sucrose; glucose. Only glucose. And fats. The brain requires 25% of the body's oxygen, even though it is only about 3.3 pounds on average. It requires a whopping 20-25% of all the calories a person ingests, too."

"Stress taxes the human mind out to an incredible degree; uses up a shitload of calories and glucose, both. I like fruit roll-ups to recharge when I am drained; I like to wrap them around my finger like a giant E.T. finger and suck on them, it soothes some oral fixation thing I have in my brain which is tied in to my sense of comfort and safety and security. This is why little kids like to suck on pacifiers. I'm a bit behind in some ways, developmentally, ha ha. Some people say Fruit by the foot are as good, but no, I don't think so. Fruit by the foot have a grainy, fruit-leather sort of texture that doesn't appeal to me at all, but fruit roll-ups are smooth, like a plastic. They remind me of a doll's face. Like a nice, smooth plastic candy skin. I like the texture and my brain needs the glucose. The fact that they are ultimately a Monsanto product gets on my nerves, if I think about it for too long, but those fuckers have taken over the entire world, you know, with Agenda 21 and Codex Alimentarius..."

Jane caught Lisbon's eyes. Lisbon had a tender smile on her face. This was how Charlotte dealt with stress. Random, weird comments. It was funny and sad and all Charlotte, and Teresa Lisbon could think of much worse things then hyper, impertinent rambling.

"So you want a fruit roll-up right now? Is that what you're telling me?" Jane asked congenially, cutting off the hyper little rant, darting another grin out to Lisbon. The strain was terrible, and yet, in this moment, his crazy child was still somehow managing to make him smile, and that had to be worth something in the big picture.

"I only like green and yellow fruit roll-ups, if you can believe that. I will eat other flavours, but they are not nearly as enjoyable for me. I read once that artificial strawberry and raspberry flavour comes from the castor sacs of the North American beaver. Castoreum, it is called. The castor sacs are in the anus. Don't ask me who thought to use exudate from a beaver's ass glands as a food additive, but somebody did. Ha-ha. Used in artificial raspberry and strawberry flavours, but not the green and yellow ones, I don't think. Ha, ha, ha."

"What about strawberry poptarts?" Jane said, smiling mischievously, skin still pale. Slowly picking himself back up, now. They were all pale and tired and drained, all three of them. Red John wasn't even physically present, and yet they were all sucked dry.

"What?!... no! Can't be..." Charlotte trailed, apparently highly disturbed by the thought that strawberry poptarts had been corrupted. Jane shot Lisbon a careful look, an "are you okay?" look. Lisbon nodded dully. He nodded his head towards Charlotte, the smile still on his lips. He could be strong, when he had to be. If Charlotte could be strong, he could be strong for her, too. He would be.

"Okay, would you like to come with me and see if there is anything you want to eat in the airstream?" Jane needed to get out of the truck and stretch his legs anyway.

Charlotte nodded at him. Mumbled something about leaving her mp3 player in the trailer. And the truck was hot. She blinked tiredly. Jane got out, pulled his seat forward, and Charlotte stumbled out into the night, on to the road. Lisbon stayed in her seat, tired.

"You okay here for a bit, Lisbon?" He said, ducking his head to check out her response. She nodded, tapped her holstered side. He nodded back, and walked his kid over to the trailer for her snack.

He'd planned to drive them into Hermosillo, and they were here, now. Still on the outskirts, but he could see the red brick buildings, low, nothing more than three or four storeys to block out the sky. He glanced at his watch. Impossibly, it was quarter to 8. Time was getting away from them.

The city seemed well planned, clean, electric lights blazing in the distance like a sea of yellow eyes. The air smelled warm and fresh and like the night, like a painting Jane could remember seeing as a boy; Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy". A dark-skinned gypsy woman asleep on a red rock landscape under a prussian blue moon-lit sky. Standing over the sleeping gypsy woman was a male lion engaged in nothing more than inspection... a night-time sniff of a woman. That painting had unnerved Jane, the idea of a large, meat-eating cat sniffing a sleeping woman, deciding, deciding... will I have a taste?

That was Mexico, and that was Hermosillo in particular. If that painting had a smell, it would be the smell of this city, of the rock and the iron in the soil, of the ancient scrubby bushes holding on to dear life and the fig trees with their broad, green leaves; the backyard lemon and lime trees growing their limbs and precious fruits over sun-baked, terracotta brick dividing walls and cobble-stone alleyways.

Somewhere in the maze of low brick buildings and church spires and deciduous trees gleaming green in cloudless, bright sunny days and black in the ancient nights, there was a lion lurking around. A lion lurking around, smelling the sleepers and sniffing the fleeting scents of night; a lion wearing a human face, possessed of an endless, unnatural appetite...