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 3x01 "Red Sky at Night". Sorry for the long wait! Picture the way I work much like a golden retriever: Here I am, running after my little ball and thoroughly enjoying myself when suddenly another ball crosses my path and I completely veer off after the second ball (the balls being fandoms and my obsessions with them ─ Damn Avengers: Endgame for completely wrecking me!). I still plan on completing this project, I'll just need to pace myself and all these balls I have bouncing around the room (the room being my overactive brain).

Loving Him was Red

Distance

Lisbon could feel Jane distancing himself from her─from everyone, really. Slowly but surely.

It didn't happen all of a sudden. Oh no, it was so subtle that for someone else it might've felt almost natural, but she knew better.

After they had found him in that abandoned hotel with an injured and traumatized Wesley Blankfein and the bodies of Ruth and Dylan, she'd been so relieved that for a moment she couldn't remember how to breathe. Amazingly, he was unharmed─or that was what she'd thought. Sure, aside from a blow to the head he didn't have any other physical injuries. But after learning what had happened she wondered if being gutted would have felt half as horrible as what he'd been through. Never mind the fear of being kidnapped and mortally threatened with a knife for a couple of psychos and their snuff film project, he then had to sit, immobilized, while the man he'd been hunting for years actually saved his life then left as swiftly as he'd come.

Their priorities at that first moment had been to take Jane and Wesley to the hospital and treat their injuries. Jane's testimony pointed without a doubt at who was the perpetrator, so the bodies and the crime scene were processed thoroughly. There hadn't been much to go on, as usual. No fibers, no footprints, no DNA; Red John was too careful for that. Yet after things had quieted down somewhat, Van Pelt had come to find her, saying the camera had been left rolling and recording the entire time. She watched, transfixed, once more unable to breathe, as she heard the shots, heard Ruth brokenly begging for her life and the slashing sounds as she was killed, and then the masked, hooded figure approached Jane's side and whispered something that only he could hear.

Before taking him to the hospital, when she'd first him asked about it he'd said Red John didn't say anything, only that he wouldn't tolerate other people copying his work. Afterwards, she asked him again and he lied right to her face. Not that Jane lying was something uncommon, that was probably as natural to him as breathing. And she wasn't as well versed in reading people as he was. But she was a good detective and they'd been working together for a long time now. She thought she knew him better. The fact that he lied so shamelessly, so quietly and assuredly was a bit disturbing. There was no trace of dishonesty in his face. Yet she knew he was lying. She wondered if he knew she knew.

And that's when he started pulling away. He'd been spending more time by himself, getting less involved in their cases. He actually took some time off during the summer. Not too long, only a couple of weeks. But he'd never done that since they'd started working together. He didn't say what he'd done, only that he'd needed time to think and recover from everything, which was reasonable and understandable enough.

They'd started spending less time together after work. His offers for getting dinner together came less frequently, as did their coffee/tea breaks. When he wasn't working he was either constantly writing in that little notebook of his or reading something. For some reason it looked like he'd gotten into poetry lately, which was not his normal choice of reading material. She thought that might be significant somehow, but she had no idea what it actually meant.

He still took his naps on his couch at the bullpen, but he'd been avoiding spending time in her office now and when he was actually working by himself he'd disappear. She'd learned he'd started using an old, empty room upstairs by the storage area with a little access to the roof. He liked he quiet, he said. Once, when she'd asked him about his constant naps on the couch at the bullpen instead of just going back to his motel, he'd said he liked it as the noise soothed him into sleep while the quiet usually kept him up at night. He needed the quiet to think yet he needed the noise to sleep. She suspected he was getting very little sleep lately, even less than normally.

So when he finally came out and said he didn't want to work on the Harvey Dublin case, she knew she needed to do something about it. Never mind the fact that Hightower and Director Bertram were right, he couldn't behave as if his contract as a consultant gave him such say as to which cases he did or didn't work. He was part of her team, like everyone else, and she was the one who decided on things like that. And she could feel this was just his next step on pulling away from them. Next thing he'd quit or take some other ridiculous measure and she wouldn't be able to reach him and help him anymore, and she couldn't let that happen.

She was glad when she managed to aptly manipulate him into working the case, and even if he did go out of his way to annoy her as part of his revenge, a part of her was glad that they were bantering back and forth once more. She'd missed this and hadn't realized just how much. But there was still something serious behind all of this, and she needed to get to the bottom of it before it got out of hand.

As they left Nadine Russo's house and talked about the case, she pushed on the matter, accusing him of pulling away from them, of pulling away from her, demanding to know what was going on in a tone that let him know she was not going to ignore this any further and they were going to talk about it, whether he wanted to or not.

She hadn't expected to get him talking so easily, maybe her words that she was genuinely worried about him reached him somehow, but hey, she wasn't about to complain that he was finally sharing what was bothering him when he turned to her and offered some sort of explanation for his behavior. "Anybody that gets close to me, bad things happen to them."

Of course, she should've seen that coming. She argued against his logic with one of her basic 'cop life' explanations (she had a feeling this would not be the last time they'd be discussing this). "A, that's not true. And B, even if it were, I'm a cop. It's our job to be in harm's way."

"You're not listening to me─"

"We're family," she insisted, interrupting whatever it was that he was about to say. "What you're doing is a kind of betrayal. A surrender, a defeat. You're letting Red John win."

She didn't know where that had come from, but it was true. Sometime in the past year she'd gone from "I don't want you inside my head" to "We're family" and she had no idea how that'd happened, but she'd realized that when she'd felt him pulling away from her and how much it hurt. In a way, it was sort of natural. She'd been living for her job for so long, and even though she'd patched things up with Tommy and her brothers over the last few months, this unit and these people who were with her every single day were as close to a family as she had here in California. So, in true Teresa Lisbon fashion, she was going to make sure she took care of them, whether they wanted or not, damn it!

Her provocation, even if it had been sort of a low blow, worked as she'd hoped, with Jane coming around and saying he wouldn't pull away anymore, trying to give her a conciliatory hug. She knew he didn't mean it right then and called it out to his face once more catching him by surprise and they almost naturally segued into one of their regular nonsensical arguments.

They still weren't quite back to normal, but as they walked down the street to her car with him calling her a liar and her sticking to the notion that she could read him so well now she was sure this had been the first step to get them there.