Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 35)
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: Reviews are much appreciated. Sorry for the long delay, hope this chapter makes up for it.
"Sometimes I think we live through things only to be able to say that it happened. That it wasn't to someone else, it was to me. Sometimes we live to beat the odds. I'm not crazy even though they thought I was. I live in the same world as everyone else. I just saw more of it, as I'm sure you have." - Jack Starks, The Jacket
"Funny how secrets travel,
I'd start to believe if I were to bleed" - David Bowie, "I'm Deranged"
"Under blue moon I saw you
So soon you'll take me
Up in your arms
Too late to beg you or cancel it
Though I know it must be the killing time
Unwillingly mine" - "The Killing Moon" by Echo and the Bunnymen
Saturday, November 4th, 2013 3:53 pm PST
She was fighting her way up out of the grave and the hot, red earth in her nostrils and her lungs.
Her blood had boiled away to sludge, and panic and terror had boiled away into something surpassing both; a hazy, dissociative type of peace. Her soul was not entirely back in her body, and she could see herself in the dilated pupils of her body's eyes.
Her lips were cracked and a ghastly livid, her skin was covered in fine red powder. Her fingers were broken.
They were all askew, at weird angles, and swollen. Most of the skin on them was white, but there were bands of discolouration around the broken areas where the blood had pooled; purple, then blue, with black tinges.
Some of the nails were hanging from the sensitive skin, all but ripped out.
Still other nails were missing entirely.
The blood they had bled was dry as the red earth the body had been buried in, and had turned a dark brown colour as it dried. Charlotte stared. Her soul could almost feel the body again. It was near enough to her sense of reality that she felt the body- pitiful and cumbersome as it was- might survive a while longer.
Did she want to live in this body?
She had the sense that she had gone over the edge, in terms of sanity. She had been standing on the brink of insanity for years, driven inch by inch towards the void by repeated trauma and torture.
And her burial and death (had she died? She had the sense of having stopped completely for a while there) seemed to have unhinged something in her mind. What sort of life would she have in that body, with that traumatized brain? Was it even worth it?
Patrick was talking non-stop at the body that he thought was her; low and calming hypnotist words meant to calm her and bring her back to reality at the same time.
His eyes were focused on her face like laser beams, they were so intent. He was using is best therapist-slash-hypnotist voice. His pupils were huge, too, but not because he had died.
Because... he had been terrified.
Yes, he had been terrified.
Charlotte could see it in his pupils and the strain in the lines in his brow, the lines around his eyes and the way he was holding his own body so rigidly. His face was red with exertion and emotion and Charlotte could see tears that had dried on his cheeks.
She was aware of being in a car, and it was speeding and bumping over the land. It was moving fast. Patrick wasn't driving. Her head was in his lap and his face was over her face, and one of his hot, dry hands was stroking her cheek over and over, slowly and gently, as if that contact might bring her back to full awareness. To life.
He was saying silly and well-intentioned things, over and over.
That's it Charlie. You're doing really well. Just keep breathing. That's it. Look at me. Keep looking at me. I need you to stay awake for me, okay? Good job. Good job, Charlie.
She stared. She stared and had the sense of seeing his aura, bursts of gold and a haze of purple, the odd streak of truama-induced scarlet dancing around the edges.
Charlotte had the sudden impression that his eyes had changed.
Maybe an iridologist could see the difference. Maybe they could look at his eyes and see the strain of the last few days imprinted in the iris, in a sudden broken flash of colour in his irises. Yes. Maybe.
Charlotte looked down at her fingers and again noticed how swollen they were. How odd. Broken and blackened, swelling now that the body's heart was beating again. She blinked and her point of view changed and the fingers were gently folded over her chest.
It was hard to breathe.
Her breath sounded like rice krispies, with milk added. Her breath was sweet and sour and broken. She could taste, suddenly, bile in her mouth, and the iron-rich salt of blood. Tastes she hadn't ever tasted before, too.
The taste of sweat, the taste of dirt, the taste of death? Was that in there, too? Yes, it was! Death had excreted some blackish, brackish sludge into her throat. And it was choking her.
Death was choking her again.
Suddenly a swell of new anxiety was there, pressing past the dazed peace of shock. Jane saw it in her eyes almost immediately. He ducked his head and his lower eyelids raised a little, which was a look he got when he was analyzing another human being's facial expressions for clues.
A serious, solemn sort of concern took over then and he re-positioned her head gently.
"Charlotte? Charlotte?! Hey, that's it, just breathe," he said, and each word was clear and hard like diamond so that she could focus on them from the depths of wherever she was fighting. Words like anchors.
"Just. Listen. To. My. Voice. Charlotte. Keep. Breathing. In. And. Out," Jane was saying.
But the black sludge of death was growing. Either that or her throat and lungs and the little grape-like cells inside hanging in bunches had shrivelled away and oxygen was getting harder to find. Her cells were screaming again.
She jerked her hands and her broken, askew fingers jangled harder than Jane was comfortable with and some fresh blood came up out of the worst of the breaks and stained her dusty t-shirt with fresh, paint-y blood.
"Charlotte, hey. It's going to be okay. You're okay. We're going to get you help. We're going to the hospital right now. Just hold on," Jane said, and both his hands moved to hold her ashen, broken hands so she couldn't move them so forcefully. Her fingers felt like tight, hot sausages in his hands and slowly, second by second, they began to scream with pulsing, neon pain.
Charlotte slit her eyes nearly shut and tears leaked out onto her cheek and she began to moan, low and from back in her throat, a sound of general fear and pain and misery. Her father held her broken fingers and continued to talk to her and after awhile he stopped speaking English and simply began to shush her gently, rocking her slightly, ever so slightly, trying his best to comfort her even though there was no real comfort to be had in the current situation.
Pain and terror and a dropping sense of having permanently lost her mind and damaged her brain were all battling for dominance.
Her head hurt and it felt crushed and broken.
Her throat was swollen and the air wasn't going in and out properly, of that Charlotte knew.
And even though Patrick was acting so, so calm Charlotte could tell he was still very scared, because she wasn't OUT OF THE WOODS just yet, and maybe mean old nasty Death would come back like a cartoon pest and snatch her away again.
She might be lying here suddenly one minute with fear-stricken eyes and the next be staring up at him with her mouth hanging open like an asphyxiated fish and all movement and recognition gone, only this time, Charlotte knew, if that happened he wouldn't be able to pound on her heart enough to make her soul come back.
She could feel terrible damage, she could feel it down in the cells and it left her with a numb terror and a sinking dread; a sort of existential vertigo.
"Can't breathe," Charlotte forced out of her throat, and tried to jerk her hands out of Jane's but he held onto her hands. "Can't breathe," she told him again, and moved her swollen, bruised head woodenly, as if looking for oxygen in the car.
She imagined asthmatics felt like this when they were having fatal attacks.
She sucked in a breath and her eyes bulged and her vision pulsed lighter then dimmer as her blood pressure rose.
Jane held onto her hands and her broken, mangled fingers and kept shushing her with his concerned, panic-buried-not-deep-enough eyes, rocking just a little, shushing and rocking and maybe inside his own head... praying? Yes, probably.
Charlotte could see the fear in the lines of his face, and he was doing a damned good job of playing calm, but he wasn't, not really.
Charlotte Jane had transcended time and space, multiple times. She could no longer be fooled.
But she had never died before earlier today, and the taste of it was only minutes old, really. Jane had turned his head momentarily and was calling something to whoever was driving the car about how much longer?
There was an answer back, but it came in a storm, a rushing of blood through her ears and through the gasps her throat was making, the odd and disturbing rice krispie crackle noises. The pops. The tortured wheezing. She wanted to say she couldn't breathe again, but she couldn't, the words were not coming out right anymore.
They sounded like the noise air made when it was leaking too fast out of a balloon.
Everything was getting dimmer again.
"Charlotte?!" Jane said, louder now, and he tapped her cheek just hard enough that light came back into her vision, like someone playing with the dimmer switch on a lamp.
She sucked in air and it made a sucking, suction-y noise and even Patrick heard it that time. A sucking noise; a deadly noise, a wet vacuum and air running out noise.
His own hands momentarily left her fingers alone and were gently feeling over her swollen, bruised chest, gently palpating as he searched for injuries. She saw a look of alarm come over his face as his fingers- through the fabric of her t-shirt- gently pushed down on a rib that had been snapped and was leaking air out of one of her lungs.
The rib made a nauseating grinding motion through the flesh of her body and the fabric of her shirt and he felt the sensation in his own fingers and released all pressure immediately, his own skin tone blanching just a bit with new fear.
"Good, Charlie, good. That's it. You just stay looking at me. You just keep looking at me. Lisbon? Drive faster! Floor it, Lisbon!," Jane said in a too-fast, hurried voice and his voice and the speed of his words brought home just how dangerous everything right now was, how precarious.
Charlotte felt another swell of panic coming, like a large wave and she imagined herself as a broken little surfer, just trying to ride the swells.
Just breathe through the swells.
She had never been surfing in her entire life despite spending her early years near the ocean, but had always used the image of a surfer riding waves when she had felt panic rising in her over the years. And right now, a big, big wave was coming and she didn't know... didn't know...
She was struggling. Everything hurt. Her eyes were bugging in her head, and Patrick was talking to her calmly and sanely, but she knew he was terrified. He was peeling up the sweat-and-blood stained shirt now, limp fabric of her t-shirt, peeling it up carefully and apparently no longer worried about her embarrassment or dignity.
Naked fear had blotted out such trivial concerns.
Her stomach was bloated with what may have been internal bleeding. He sucked in a calming breath for himself and his eyes scanned her chest, and what he saw seemed to frighten him visibly. He was calling back to Lisbon again, something about a needle and a pneumothroax and she was saying things back in a high, tense voice.
"Charlie, deep and calm. I know it is hard. We're almost at the hospital. We're almost there, and they can help. I think one of your lungs is in trouble, but the other one is okay. So you need to take long, slow breaths. Okay? I know it is scary. Just breathe in with me, okay? One... two..."
Jane was counting now, but the world was dimming again.
She wasn't sure if she was dying.
Quite possibly she was.
He was tapping her face. Her fingers were trying to move, but beginning to buzz and tingle. He was shushing her, and yelling at Lisbon to drive faster. Drive faster. Stroking her cheek.
Telling her Red John was dead, like that might fix her broken lung and her injuries. Telling her how proud he was of her. How proud he was, and how much he loved her.
He was saying over and over and over that he loved her, and Charlie realized it was because he was thinking she was dying and they might not get to the hospital in time.
She imagined oxygen leaking into her one good lung.
She imagined her blood cells binding with it, turning bright red with life. She imagined a peaceful ocean, of being cured, of a future free from trauma and pain.
And her awareness dimmed to almost nothing, almost nothing and then suddenly... suddenly there was movement, and more light and fierce, renewed pain.
The sharp scream of pain in her body, but she didn't know where it was coming from... Her body's mouth made a low, tortured shriek of anguish and Jane said something hurriedly which was meant to soothe her, but obviously couldn't.
She was being carried into a bright building with bright, rectangular lights casting their baleful, sanitized light down on the world from the ceilings.
A hospital, yes. Yes, this was a hospital.
She was suddenly on a gurney and could see someone putting a bag over her face.
Just like in the TV shows and Jane's face was over her face, hazy and worried, looking at her, talking to other people much faster than he usually spoke.
There was a streak of blood on his left cheek, somewhere between being red and the dead-brown colour blood went when it dried out. It was her blood, probably.
Wherever Lisbon was, Charlotte didn't know. She peered up at the white, rectangular lights in the ceiling and the pale yellow walls and worked hard to suck in breath.
Jane was following her, his face hovering over her's like an angel keeping watch.
He was speaking rapidly in Spanish and Charlotte could feel the panic receding, it was receding again and she wasn't sure why but she welcomed the sensation, the loss of terror and adrenaline.
She tried to turn her head, saw someone cutting her t-shirt off with those funny, snub-ended scissors hospitals used to cut peoples' clothing to shreds.
She knew she should be embarrassed that her father could see her in her bra, but she wasn't, because she was still not sane and present enough to care about such silly things.
Still someone else was at one of her arms, tying off the forearm with a rubber tourniquet and patting her dehydrated hand to make a vein stand up.
She felt a distant prick as a needle was slid into a vein in her hand and taped down, a saline drip was hung above her head from a steel pole. Someone- looked like a middle aged doctor now- was palpating her chest and then was yelling.
She still couldn't breathe, but the feeling of drowning was less, the anxiety and internal thrashing for air feeling was going away second by second.
There was a sudden pressure in her chest and rushing air noise as a small bore needle was plunged into her chest.
Light flooded Charlotte's vision again, the graying at the edges began to clear up. It was easier to breathe for a moment.
Charlotte sought to find her father. He was still talking rapidly and someone was telling him in Spanish to go to the waiting area and he was saying something about an International case and the FBI and the CBI and protective custody.
Charlotte began to feel fuzzy again then, graying out to nothingness again, as her gurney was being wheeled down some hallway and as the drugs she'd been given began to hit. She could smell the sharp tang of sterilizing cleaners, the smell of her blanket, feel the sterile white hospital light...
She was on a plane. She was drifting. There was a tube in her throat and she was strapped down to what she imagined was a gurney. Her eyes rolled in her head with drugs and exhaustion, looking, and she saw Patrick, sitting in a seat and looking at her and when he saw her looking at him, he smiled at her. His smile was like a 100 watt light bulb, it was so bright.
And then there was gray over her vision again, and then there was darkness again, a silky blue-black darkness that was like falling into a deep, soothing pond where nobody worried about breathing or dying or terror or broken, tree-branch fingers.
Saturday, November 4th, 2013 6:38 pm PST
"Jane, sit down. Come on, let's go and sit down," Lisbon said, somewhere between exhaustion and annoyance.
She had asked Jane multiple times over the last 30 minutes to sit down, and he was up and pacing again and it was wearing on her last nerve.
They were in a children's hospital in Tucson. When Jane had carried Charlotte through the front doors of the little hospital in Hermosillo, Lisbon had gone to find a phone and had put in a call to the CBI head office. After she had explained who she was and who she was with and what had happened she had been transferred- very quickly- to the California FBI office and patched through to their ViCap director, who then gave stern instructions to wait there and not let Jane out of her sight (obviously, it was too late to remedy that, since Jane had disappeared into the back of the hospital with Charlotte).
Within an hour, a medical plane had been there for them, to pick up Charlotte and to pick up her and Jane and Felix whatever-his-last-name-was and they had been on it and in the air within minutes, flanked by some Arizona state police and a few various alphabet soup agency agents. Lisbon had been too tired to properly memorize their names.
Charlotte was in rough shape, Lisbon could gather. When she'd been wheeled onto the plane she'd been intubated, unconscious, pulse rate bleeping away on one of those little boxes that let doctors know exactly what a patient's heart and lungs were doing. There'd been an automatic blood pressure cuff around her upper right arm, which inflated and deflated and ticked off her systolic and diastolic numbers, her blood pressure.
Lisbon felt by then like someone had ground up glass into a powder and blown it into her eyes. Her head was pounding and Jane, dogged and stubborn as usual, couldn't stop asking questions and the FBI agents were snapping questions at them and Jane was waving them off with childish answers and explaining that Red John was dead and he'd blown himself up and that, oh yeah, they happened to be twins and they'd be better off going back to Hermosillo and making sure evidence didn't disappear. Red John had "eyes" all over the place and they might "disappear" him lickety-split.
Even in her exhausted state, Lisbon realized he sounded completely nuts. Anyone who hadn't seen what they'd seen would assume he was having a breakdown of some sort.
Sometime during the flight Charlotte's body decided to scare the shit out of Jane when the monitors went crazy, when her blood pressure dropped too low. Lisbon had put her hand on Jane's leg (he had been sitting beside her and sort of half rocking with nervous energy in his seat) and squeezed his thigh as a symbol of support, but he was too adrenaline-crazed to respond to even notice. Charlotte's hands had been quickly but gently splinted in the air by the medics, with Jane's focus on each swollen, blue-black finger as the latex-covered hands bandaged her numerous injuries.
The finger tips had been carefully bandaged with gauze wrap and taped off. There'd been injections into the IV's port, all sorts of doctoring and tending and life-saving.
But she was more or less stable.
"I stay with my daughter the entire time or I say nothing," Jane said shortly before the plane landed in Tucson. He was pale and shocky, distant-eyed and on the verge of collapsing. When he smiled it had a distinctly Cheshire cat quality to it which made Lisbon worry about his mental health.
"Agent Lisbon, you might want to remind your colleague that the United States government doesn't take kindly to ultimatums offered by-"
"I believe he'll tell you nothing if he doesn't get to stay by her side," Lisbon cut in wearily, too tired to formulate something more cutting, too tired to play this particular game of Wendy to the sole and solitary lost boy who was one Patrick Jane.
She was just too damned tired. Jane would become childish and obstinate if they removed him from Charlotte, of that she was certain.
He was pale and glassy-eyed and looked like he was repressing whatever emotions he was experiencing. A few times he had barked out half-mad laughter that she knew wasn't an act.
"They're not going to let you in the operating room, Jane," one of the nameless agents said diplomatically and Jane gestured for the guy to stuff it.
"They can and they will," Jane said, but his voice was drained almost to the point of wanting to collapse in on itself. The agent shut up, brow furrowing as he analyzed Jane.
"You have federal agents on the site, now?" Lisbon said when one of the agents looked over at her for help, and someone nodded at her. "People you trust? Evidence has a way of walking away in this case," Lisbon added stonily.
"I believe some of your own people are at the site, now," someone told her from far-away. "Your agent Kimball Cho? And a... Wayne Rigsby?"
"Okay, yes. Okay," Lisbon said, but the words were just words, and there wasn't much meaning behind them. She was too tired and too much had happened and if Red John's skeleton was going to pick itself up out of the ashes and dance its way out of the investigation like some ghoulish 1930's Merry Melodies cartoon, well then... there was very little she could do about it. The mental image of Red John's skeleton dancing away set to old-timey calliope music made her smile a vicious, exhausted grin and the agent seemed to shudder at her.
And then they were off the plane and by the mercy of God Jane hadn't punched anyone or gotten himself handcuffed and was allowed to follow Charlotte's gurney as she was quickly wheeled up to surgery.
Black-suited agents followed them to a large and ridiculously empty waiting area where Jane proceeded to get up out of his chair every few minutes and wander around in an aimless circle while a slightly more diplomatic agent asked them both questions. Lisbon did most of the talking, because when Jane tried his words ran together and he seemed to have trouble regulating his volume.
"Agent Jane, please, sit down," someone said eventually and Jane grinned manically at the gaffe and wiped his hands on his jeans and squinted his eyes (which had aged ten years since Charlotte had come back into their life) tiredly at the agent as if he was somewhat stunned.
"I'm not an agent, but you already know that, don't you," Jane said teasingly, and trotted over to the Pepsi machine where he pushed random buttons on the face of the soda dispenser. Sans money, nothing happened.
The fed who had called Jane an agent got up out of his chair and came over to the machine. He deposited a few coins into the money slot and they made a very decisive slinking noise before registering as electronic credits in red on the readout display.
Jane cocked his head and the agent nodded and even managed a small smile. Jane pushed a button and came back to his seat with a Dr. Pepper, slurping loudly, and sat down next to Lisbon.
Lisbon ran her "what is Jane doing and how worried should I be right now?" program through her head and determined that about 30% of his current behavior was a bullshit act to fuck with the agents who were pulling rank on him.
The rest was trauma and adrenaline and genuine fatigue showing their ugly faces. Jane flashed Lisbon a stressed out, jittery smile and she smiled back at him as reassuringly as she could. The agent who had paid for Jane's drink punched a button on the Pepsi machine and slowly retrieved a diet Dr. Pepper for himself. He returned to his seat, all GQ angles and brooding good looks.
His partner sat, still and silent as a statue, fingers interlaced in his lap, watching and waiting.
As serene as the Buddha under the bodhi tree.
"You two look a little like men in black," Jane told them after a moment of considering them. They ignored him. Lisbon exhaled slowly.
"Aspartame?" Jane said then, nodding with his head at the agent's drink. "That stuff grows brain tumors in rats, you know."
"I'll take it under advisement," the agent said good-naturedly and smiled an actual smile at Jane, who smiled back, a blaring neon I'm-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown rictus.
"How can it be that Red John was your twin brother, and yet you never knew anything about him?" The agent said, digital tape recorder on and recording everything for all future generations, positioned upright on the little circular faux-wood magazine table near his perfect G-man knees. "How can that be, Patrick?"
"We didn't grow up together. Plus, I thought he was dead. Died when I was a kid," Jane said speedily, slurping soda. His hands were shaking, Lisbon saw.
"And you never told Agent Lisbon about him, either? Red John being your twin?"
"I saw him," Lisbon said, voice rising. "If there is any question about that-"
The agent made a dismissive motion and half-winced to show that there was no doubt about Red John having actually existed. "We don't think Patrick was or is Red John. Of course not. Besides, we have a big file full of proof showing Patrick was with government agents at the times of various Red John killings. That is not even on the table."
"I never told Lisbon about him because I didn't even allow myself to think about him, okay? It was a period of my life I buried a long time ago. I felt no need to dig it up again."
"And you had no idea, all these years, that Red John was your brother... Peter?"
"I thought Peter was dead. Burned to death. I... I thought he burned to death. When I was a kid."
"I know. I read the police report. You were in a fugue state for several weeks and had to be hospitalized," the agent said gently and Lisbon felt a chill race down her spine, curl up right over the dip just above her buttocks, spread over her belly like fingers of ice.
"Obviously I am not going to remember a childhood fugue state, am I?"
"What happened to you after that, Patrick? What do you remember?"
Jane sighed and darted a furtive glance at Lisbon. He let out an age-old sigh.
"I remember being in a hospital, treated for minor burns, and then in a boy's home for a while. Something like that."
"A youth psychiatric clinic. You stopped talking for almost six months," the agent said gently. The recorder continued to record. Jane drank his soda.
"I didn't have much to say, I guess," Jane said, a bit too eagerly, and grinned a bitter grin into the opened hole in the top of his soda can. "I really try not to think about that part of my life."
"We tried to interview some people who may have known you as a child. They've been either impossible to track down or not inclined to say much to us."
"That's the way of the wily circus folk," Jane said theatrically, voice falling into a familiar, theatrical cadence. His hands were shaking as he held his soda, though.
"You'd think they'd want to help you," the agent continued earnestly, glancing over at Lisbon for input.
"They don't trust authority figures," Jane added, and took another swig of soda.
"Do you?"
"Do I what?" Jane volleyed back playfully.
"Do you trust authority figures, Patrick?" Gentle, earnest, professional words. Non-confrontational.
Lisbon could see, immediately, that Jane wanted to say something sarcastic and playful. He wanted to joke around like he usually did. He didn't do well with people trying to analyze him; he never had. But he was exhausted, beyond his usual playing.
"No, not particularly," Jane said, and sighed. He stood up and walked his now-empty can over to a small plastic recycling bin and dumped it inside. Lisbon watched him with sleep-deprived eyes. Jane came back over to his seat, sat back down, shut his eyes.
"Any particular reason for that?"
"Yeah. In my experience... the types of people who tend to be drawn to positions of power often tend to abuse that power. So. You know..."
"A lot of theories are going around right now in ViCap around why Red John did what he did for all those years. Do you have any theories?"
Jane let out another ancient sigh. "Because he was evil, I guess. What do you want me to say?" His eyes were still shut. The lids looked purple, they looked almost bruised from lack of sleep.
"So Red John was the evil twin and you're the good twin?" the agent prodded.
"I never said that," Jane said, eyes still closed, voice irritated. "Don't put words in my mouth. Life is never that black and white."
"But you think Red John was evil?"
"Don't you?" Jane said, clearly exasperated. He looked over to Lisbon for help. "Lisbon?"
"Yes," Lisbon said, nodding. "Yes. He was evil."
"Patrick, I'm going to get to the point. Were you abused as a child?" The agent's eyes were intent, glittering, analyzing the great mentalist. Jane would have had the man jumping through hoops if he hadn't been so exhausted and stressed.
Jane slit his eyes open and looked over at Lisbon, feigning amusement. His eyes glittered dangerously back at the spook, a feral look that made Lisbon feel cold deep in her intestines, her womb.
"What? Besides the perfunctory 15 lashes thrice a month? Define abuse or get off the pot," he said, and his words were hurried and beginning to stack up, teetering on full collapse.
Lisbon sighed deeply. Her soul was aching for Jane. She stood up, a minor distraction to help out Jane. She walked over to the Pepsi machine, got herself a Dr. Pepper (what Jane would call a "mirroring" of his actions) and came back to her seat louder than she needed to.
Jane grinned at her, pleased.
"Red John wasn't raised by Jane's father," Lisbon interjected. She could feel Jane's turmoil, a sort of electricity around him, despite the exhausted grin. That grin wasn't fooling anybody. Jane nodded in agreement.
"I realize that's true for the most part. What interests us is why he was raised separately and what events lead up to that, led up to him being raised in a different household. What happened when he came back into Alexander Jane's legal custody and what sort of overlap there might have been between Patrick's childhood and Red John's. What early, defining childhood experience might be shared. Red John and Patrick weren't split up until almost three years of age..."
"You know, from extensive study, that psychopathy doesn't make logical sense. It's more than just abuse or brain damage, or we'd have a hell of a lot more Red Johns running around out there. You know that," Jane said, voice peppered with pain.
He got up, randomly picked up a magazine from the magazine table, flipped through it recklessly. Returned it a moment later without seeing anything in it.
"Jane, we're just looking for answers right now, that's all. Nobody's implying anything."
"Okay. Well. That's good. That's good that you aren't implying anything," Jane said, voice cracking, grin painful to look at. "Um, if you excuse me. I need to use the little boy's room," Jane said.
"I'll come with you," the agent said calmly and Jane visibly deflated a bit more.
"It's within visual range," Lisbon reminded the agent in a warning tone, and the spook finally nodded. Jane limped his way to the bathroom, peeled the door open, shut it with absurd care.
"Do you really have to get into all of this right now?" Lisbon said sharply, her protective feelings for Jane rising up despite her exhaustion.
"Agent Lisbon, all we want is answers. That's it."
"He's exhausted. You guys know enough about psychology to get a read on him. He's barely holding it together right now."
"I know," the agent said gently, eyes more kindly than Lisbon was expecting. "But his exhaustion makes it harder for him to bullshit his way through some of these questions. And we really need answers. Not bullshit."
Lisbon ran the explanation through her head. Nodded tiredly. As much as she wanted to deny it, Jane was great at bullshitting his way through whatever he decided to bullshit his way through, granted he had the basic energy to play games. Right now he was flagging and was on his last legs and his defenses were down.
"If he has a nervous breakdown anytime soon, it's going to be a lot harder to get your answers," Lisbon said wearily. "As you, yourself, just said: Jane has a history of fugue states and selective mutism."
The agent thought about this for a moment. Finally nodded.
"Look, I don't want to traumatize him anymore than he's already been traumatized. But the Red John case? It's not a small thing. Whole careers revolve around it, around studying Red John."
"I understand. And I give you my word as a field agent that he will answer your questions and this will be sorted out. I promise you. But please. Right now? Leave him the Hell alone."
The agent mulled over Lisbon's words. Finally sighed. "Look, we can't leave you two, but I can stop asking questions."
Lisbon nodded tiredly. The caffeine and sugar from the Dr. Pepper were making a dent, but it wasn't enough to stem the tide of exhaustion battering at her.
"He's lucky you have his back, agent Lisbon," the agent whose name Lisbon had forgotten said softly, and Lisbon nodded and thanked him and drank her soda because she didn't know what else to do.
Jane pissed into the toilet, eyes shut. His heart was racing. He shook himself off, zipped himself up, flushed the toilet and stumbled to the sink. He washed his hands, then turned the water to cold.
Jane ran his wrists under cold water and looked at himself in the mirror. He had been a teenager just yesterday, then a young man. His youth was long over and he'd entered middle age but could see the ghost of old age taking root already. Life was weird like that. More often bitter than bitter sweet, full of tears, full of regret. You had to grin and bear it and learn magic tricks and distract yourself or the sadness became too much and you didn't make it through.
Jane splashed cold water onto his face, smelled his arm pits and made a face. He needed a shower and a shave and a long sleep. He needed to know Charlotte was alive and okay. He didn't need to be answering ridiculous questions formulated by some behavioral analyst with a double digit IQ from Vicap who was pussy-footing his way around the interview like Jane was going to go off the deep end at any moment.
It was insulting.
The agent was asking questions which felt like needles in his brain and were utterly ridiculous. Red John was dead, and it was over. There could be no figuring Red John out using human logic, because Red John was beyond human scrutiny. In the end, he had died much like he had lived... a mystery.
A fucking insane, evil, perverted mystery.
To question his motives implied a complete lack of understanding about what Red John actually was, what he had been. Why did the cat play with the mouse and leave it half alive? Why did a virus duplicate? Why did a hurricane destroy?
Some things just were, they did what they did and there was no further analysis of the meaning behind their actions. Red John fell into that category. He had done what he had done because, even though he looked like a human being, he had long ago stopped being a human and had changed into something else entirely. His type of being did all sorts of cruel things, simply because the possibility for that cruelty to exist was a novel thrill.
When you stripped away all the theatrics and showmanship, the manufactured mystery and intrigue, you were left simply with an organism which destroyed others simply because destroying others made that organism feel pleasure.
Schadenfreude.
There was nothing more to it than that.