Hello! So as I've officially PASSED high school (yay!) I find myself with much time on my hands, and as a result I had a ten-hour writing marathon and wrote this. Thanks ever-so-much to In The Name for the quote, and I'm very sorry it's not half as fluffy as I'm sure the quote suggests. I've decided I'm not very good with straight-out fluff, or any kind of fluff at all, actually. Also, thanks bunches to everyone who reviewed Chapter 8; I would have got around to sending you personal replies, but I've been extremely busy.

Disclaimer: If I owned the Mentalist, J+L would have been madly in love by now.

Chapter Nine

'You love simply because you cannot help it.' - Kim Anderson

The moment the engine died, Lisbon had wrenched the car door open and was running. No time for caution, a thought which she used to justify her lack of a gun; this wasn't, after all, a cold, faceless maniac whose limits she was yet to see him reach.

It was only Jane.

Only Jane. The knowledge was supposed to calm her, but the longer she knew it the less difference she saw between him and all the psychopaths she'd ever faced. And so Lisbon found it less painful to let her mind go blank, let the folds of the night carry her along and Bosco's voice rush to surround her from just outside the old barn where he stood.

'Thank God you're here, Teresa.' Bosco loaded his Glock as he spoke, shaking slightly with anticipation. 'We've got Agents moving to positions at every entrance, the negotiator's on his way just in case.'

'Any action from inside?' she heard herself ask.

'Not a sound, but Jane's definitely still in there. So's Italiaferro.' At the name, a chill ran down the length of Lisbon's spine and the memory of their most recent Red John case came rushing back. Jane had been so certain, so confident that Rosalin Harker's mystery lover was the man who'd destroyed his life. The rest of the world had been less sure; Bosco wouldn't hear him at all, and Lisbon wished so fervently that the world was wrong but lately, with all the evidence suggesting the contrary, she wasn't so sure. She had the horrible feeling that Sam was right.

That when they rushed inside, all they would find was a helpless Italiaferro and a Jane who only needed saving from himself.

She was pulled from her thoughts when Van Pelt approached. 'Perimetre's secure, Boss,' the redhead informed, and Lisbon nearly replied but realised with a start that she'd been talking to Bosco. Grace had called him Boss. The reality seared through her in that moment; there were no units and rivalries anymore, just one side against the other, good against bad.

And Jane was bad. Lisbon's stomach lurched and her throat tightened with something close to nausea. In the light skimming through the gaps in the barn door, Bosco noticed her face.

'You couldn't have done anything,' he assured her gently. 'He was a lost cause from the beginning, don't blame yourself.' As he spoke, the nausea faded and a sudden anger boiled underneath Lisbon's skin. It spilled out before she could make sense of it.

'No-one's a lost cause,' she said fiercely.

'Yeah, well, Jane isn't no-one…'

'You know nothing about him, Sam,' she almost snarled. Bosco only looked at her, not hurt but taken aback and she could feel the same surprise on her own face. It made little sense why she would want to defend the man they were here to arrest. Even if it was only Jane, wrapped in a few extra layers of rage…and then she realised. She wasn't protecting the Jane inside the barn, but the Jane who'd shot Hardy for her, who'd bought her a pony and looked so very sad when she told him she didn't trust him. The side of him that had lost custody over his body.

Before she could make proper sense of it, however, there came two gunshots from inside the barn. The sounds rocketed through her, clenching her heart so that she couldn't breathe… her eyes squeezed closed, she took a shaky breath and listened painfully for any sound, any sign of who had been shot. After a moment, a loud scream cut the night in half and she shuddered in relief. Jane was holding the gun.

An instant later, she heard Bosco speaking urgently into his transmitter.

'We go in on three,' he told the Agents positioned at each entrance. A sudden surge of panic replaced the relief, and Lisbon stepped forward before she could stop herself.

'Sam, don't.' In the shadow of the barn she could just make out his confusion, and she continued uncertainly. 'You go in with all those guns, and Jane like he is, and it's not going to turn out well for one or more of your Agents-or one of mine. He won't give a crap about whether he dies or not.' The thought saddened her.

'Boss?' filtered through from the transmitter, but Bosco's attention was on her.

'Fine, then,' he replied almost mockingly. 'What do you think we should do?'

The solution presented itself in such clarity that she was surprised Bosco couldn't see it too. 'I'll go in.' His jaw dropped, but she kept going. 'I've got more chance of getting through to him. He listens to me.'

'Sometimes.'

'Which is more than he listens to you.' Bosco stared at her for a long moment, evidently unnerved by what he saw but Lisbon only stared back, impatient. Aware that every second Jane spent alone with himself was another ounce of darkness she'd have to remove.

'Sam,' she pleaded softly.

'Boss?' Slowly, Bosco raised the transmitter to his face. 'Stand down,' he ordered, 'remain in position.' Then, to Lisbon, 'You've got five minutes and then we're coming in. Are you armed?' She shook her head and he pushed his Glock at her, but she refused to take it. A very large part of her screamed at this, but history told her that Jane liked to protect her when she was vulnerable. Maybe, just maybe, he'd remember.

'He won't shoot me,' she claimed, and hoped that she was right.

The barn's lighting didn't quite stretch its warmth to its corners, which left Lisbon more than a little unnerved as she crept forward. She saw no sign of Jane, but as she neared the centre of the barn Italiaferro made his presence blatantly known, his wide eyes almost ogling at her, his chest dripping red from the bulletholes. For a moment Lisbon stopped to regard the body, but then the hard barrel of a gun pressed into her back and everything else stopped.

'Jane,' she breathed.

'Hello Lisbon.' The voice, though his, was startlingly cold and brought with it none of the familiarity or warmth that it usually did. Her hands suddenly seemed so empty, so useless without some sort of weapon, and to distract herself from her own punishing naivety and from the gun at her back, she asked Jane, 'was it really him?'

'Yes.'

'You should have called me first, instead of just…' Lisbon cut her words short when he pushed the barrel harder into her spine, the gun trembling against her skin, her skin trembling against the gun. She took a quivering breath and considered her words more carefully this time.

'Can you…can you please lower the gun, Jane, I'm not going to do anything.'

He didn't obey or even answer her, but Lisbon felt the sweeping motion of him rotating around her like a planet in orbit. As Patrick Jane stopped directly in front of her she could have claimed that he looked no different, apart from the blood on his hands, but when she reached his eyes she had to stop herself from gasping. Their once pure blue had frozen into a hard, unforgiving ice, a hatred that sent the fear creeping up her arms to the tips of her fingers. She'd never seen him like this. Not this far gone.

'What's he done to you?' she whispered, and for the smallest instant the Jane she knew flickered on his face, brought to the surface by the sadness in her voice. He vanished as quickly as he came.

'How many Agents has Bosco got outside?' he asked, as if it were an everyday conversation they were having. Lisbon didn't know, hadn't thought to count the shadows in the dark as she'd arrived, and when she paused he stepped dangerously closer to bring the gun up to her neck. He threatened softly, 'answer me.'

Lisbon guessed with the first number to enter her head. 'About…eight, I think,' she stammered, and then, 'Jane, please…they're all here to help you. I'm here to help you.'

But Jane only laughed, the harshness making her wince. 'Is that what he told you to say?'

She tried again. 'I'm on your side…'

'NO!' he shouted, and she jumped violently at the sudden volume. Jane all but shoved the gun into her neck, bringing the tears to linger in her eyes, choking her. His own eyes were wild and barely inches from hers, and he spoke with a calmness that only scared her more. 'You were never on my side.'

'Patrick,' she pleaded as she had done with Bosco, 'please, don't…' Lisbon heard the helplessness in her voice, felt the tears-which had escaped to run subtle lines down her cheeks-and she hated it. But there was nothing left to do, except pray that Bosco's prescribed five minutes was very nearly up, and that any second his men (and hers) would come bursting through the door to save her.

'Give me a reason,' Jane muttered. Words which sent a sharp chill through Lisbon when she realised what he meant: he wanted a reason to pull the gun away, to keep her alive.

'Because I helped you find him,' she offered weakly, but knew instantly from his unchanging expression that it wasn't enough. Jane was too stuck in the past to consider debts he owed to people in the present. Too blind to see, in his new life, anything that could possibly compare to the old, anything worth saving, anything that could drag him out into the light and keep him there…

And suddenly, she found a reason. It was a lie she would hate herself for telling later, but a lie that needing telling if there ever was to be a 'later'. Lisbon only hoped that she had the courage to make Jane believe it.

'Because I love you,' she uttered.

She saw the shock immediately in his eyes, bringing back with it just a little of the light, shrugging off just a little of the darkness to the point where she no longer saw just one man. There was the Jane she feared-the raging, ugly mask that had taken him over-but underneath she could also see the Jane she knew, soft and warm, desperate to get out. Both Janes were staring at her in complete disbelief, most likely too unstable to read her properly but Lisbon decided that she looked the part nonetheless.

'Why?' he eventually asked, his voice dripping with disgust, and Lisbon bleakly wondered whether he was disgusted that it was her that loved him, or that she could still love him after seeing him like this.

'Because…I can't help it.' She took a shaky breath and the words fabricated themselves. 'Because right now, and whenever you talk about him'-she couldn't quite bring herself to say Red John-'you're a…a monster, but I still…I can still see you.' Quietly, she said, 'I don't want you to fade away.' Lisbon didn't think it wise to add that it was an undeniably dead and arguably innocent man on the ground behind her, and so he would fade from her life whether he shot her or not. Jane, horribly, was condemned. His future would be spent either behind bars or waiting for the fatal currents of a chair to take him away.

She felt the skin of her neck vibrate as his hand began to shake, even more uncontrollably than before, his eyes wide and unmoving. Lisbon saw nothing beyond the tremble of his finger against the trigger and so closed her eyes to pray, waiting almost patiently for her life to end, for the sound of gunfire to send her into nothingness.

It was a sound that never came. After a moment, the pressure of the gun left her neck and when she opened her eyes Jane was slowly backing away, his gaze still on her but now one of utter horror, the gun lowered but still high enough to shoot her ankle, should he accidentally pull the trigger. He was mouthing something to himself, and it was only when she concentrated on the movement of his lips that she realised he was repeating her own word, 'monster', over and over. Jane stopped a few steps away, the same time that his murmurings fell silent, and he looked at her through the fear ablaze in his eyes.

With a deep breath, Lisbon began to edge forward, keeping their gazes locked, making no sudden movements, all-too-aware that dark, terrifying Jane could return as easily as he had disappeared. When she was near enough to touch him, she stopped, and spoke in the softest tone she had.

'I'm going to take the gun away now, okay?' Jane didn't speak, only nodded as if he'd like nothing more, and a long moment later Lisbon had gently prised his fingers away from the trigger. One flick of metal and the bullets fell into her hand; noticing the blood now on her fingers but not caring in the slightest, she tossed both the gun and the bullets aside, and they hit the ground with a series of clatters. When she next gazed up at Jane, her vision went misty with relief; he was familiar Jane again, his eyes no longer cold but the purest of blues, and bordering his own tears as he inhaled shakily.

'Lisbon…' he began, his voice barely breaking the silence, and she tried to shush him gently but he kept going. 'I'm sorry…I didn't…I never meant…'

'It's okay,' she whispered, and her words seemed to break something deep inside him. Lisbon pulled him gently to her and felt his arms wrap naturally around her frame, his skull resting against hers, his curls tickling her neck as he cried. He was heavy on her shoulder, almost to the point where she couldn't support him but Lisbon refused to deny Jane the comfort of human warmth, a feeling he had been devoid of for so very long. 'It's okay,' she repeated through the gaps of her own tears and then, when she was sick of hearing the words, 'it's over, it's over.' He showed no sign of hearing her but she didn't stop, wondering vaguely if the words were for herself just as much as they were for him.

She heard the barn door thrown open with a screech, and the rushing of shoes on the ground. A few urgent shouts, but it quietened to a startled silence as Bosco's men chose to believe their own eyes.

Jane cried for the end of a past and the fear of a future.

Lisbon cried for many things, but mostly for the fact that, if she were honest with herself, her lie had not been a lie at all.

Thanks for reading! And pretty please review, it makes my day and only takes a minute or so out of yours.

One more chapter to go..I'll make sure it's at least SLIGHTLY happy this time.

TAJ :)