Disclaimer: The Mentalist, its characters and universe belong to Bruno Heller and CBS. I'm only a fan, writing this for love of this TV show and personal pleasure.

A.N.: This is for 1x23 "Red John's Footsteps," the season 1 finale. I'm putting in a scene between them taking Maya back from the farm to her parents' house.

Loving Him was Red

Alive

"Thank you."

Jane had been sitting down in the hospital waiting room, his legs crossed and his hand poised thoughtfully on his chin as his elbow rested on the armrest. They were waiting as the doctors checked out Maya Plaskett so that they could take her back to her family. He'd been lost in his thoughts, his blue-green eyes looking out yet not focusing in anything in particular, and he snapped out of it as he heard Lisbon's softly spoken words and felt her sitting next to him in the adjacent chair.

"You saved my life," she added, a small smile forming on her lips.

He gave her a small smile in return. "Well, I told you I'd always be there for you, no matter what," Jane said, recalling the words he'd told her months ago now, when they'd had a talk about trust during the investigation on the case of Carnelian Inc.

A soft frown formed between her eyebrows even as she still smiled gently at him. "How are you feeling? I know how hard this is, especially given how important it was to get him talking to us about Red John."

"I'm okay," he said with a deep sigh. "I don't feel any deep moral conflict in taking the life of someone as evil and degenerate as he was. Besides, he was never going to talk to us," he said with a placating head gesture. "His father died in prison without saying a single word about Red John. I doubt he'd ever give us anything."

"You think so?" Lisbon raised her eyebrows at his words. She couldn't tell if he really believed that or if he was telling her this for her peace of mind (or maybe even his own).

"Yeah," he said with a nod, though his eyes were once more far away.

"So… I have to ask," she said softly and waited until he focused back on her face to continue. "You'd be willing to risk your own life to find Red John, but when it came to me you didn't hesitate at all in firing that shot. Why?"

"My life is my own. I don't care what happens to it," he explained and shrugged in a matter-of-fact manner. "But I'd never risk getting you hurt, not ever." He said it with so much assurance and a spark of determination in his clear blue-green eyes, it nearly sent a chill down her spine.

"Jane…" She started to protest, a frown of equal parts concern and exasperation emerging on her forehead.

"It's alright, Lisbon." He countered with a slight shake of the head and a dismissive hand gesture.

"No, it's not. You need to get this idea that you're somehow expendable out of your head. It's not healthy and it's not helpful," she pleaded with him. "How do you expect me to count on you if you're going to keep acting like this?"

Jane stared back into her eyes for a moment, sensing her urgency and desperation. "This is the only way I know how to act," he told her calmly. He sighed heavily as her alarmed eyes looked back at him. "After my breakdown, Sophie Miller helped me get my life back. I managed that by making it my mission to catch Red John, no matter what. This is why I'm here. It's what gets me moving day after day, and I'll never rest until I'm done. This is what it means to be alive to me. So if I lose my life but it somehow leads you to getting Red John, then…" He lifted his hands in a rather helpless but resigned gesture.

"God, Jane. You're an idiot," she told him softly, blinking her suddenly gleaming eyes. "I understand you have your reasons and your issues and this is how you managed to cope and how you've been operating for a long while now. But you're still an idiot." She finished by giving him a rather watery smile.

"Duly noted." The corners of his mouth also twitched up in a quiet smile.

"And you're lying," Lisbon said, speaking in the same soft tone as before. Jane raised his eyebrows at that. "Yes, I know you say you'll do everything to catch Red John, even sacrifice your life if it came to it. I know that. And maybe that's how you managed to pull yourself together after you lost your family. But it's not the only thing that moves you and that's keeping you alive now."

"Really?" Jane seemed somewhat amused by her words, wondering how they'd got to the point that she thought she knew so much about him.

"Yes. I know you, Jane," she told him seriously. "And I don't believe it for a second that all that's keeping you here is a sense of revenge. There's so much more to you than that. And I stand by what I said: If it ever came down to it, I think you'd choose life." They stared at each other for a few moments, almost as if it were a game and whoever blinked first would lose. "Or at the very least I hope you would." She added in a whisper, still maintaining eye contact.

"Well, hopefully, with you helping me along the way it'll never come to that," he answered then, a conciliatory smile upon his lips.

Lisbon kept looking intently at him, trying to figure out if he was only placating her to end this discussion or if he was being genuine. She knew she wouldn't be able to change his ways so easily, as he had been operating like this for too long, so it was probably the former. But she couldn't help but hope that some of what she said made its way to his head and affected him somehow.

"Yeah, hopefully," she said at last. Just then she noticed the doctor approaching them, bringing Maya along. It looked like her examination had checked out and they were clear to take her back to her family.

A.N.: I think that originally in the TV show Lisbon had already grasped at some of what Jane said here about how he operates (after all, she is a good detective and he hasn't exactly been concealing his motivations), but I still felt it would be nice if he said the actual words and she responded to it. There's also something of a shift in his mood from their talk down in the cellar at the farm when they first discuss this (before he shoots Hardy) to the closing scene at the Plaskett's family home (he walks away from the others and just strolls through the property, coming across a tree, serenely plucking an orange from a branch) that got me thinking how he'd gotten from A to B, so this came out.