A/n- my new work? a collection of post-ep flash fics based on things characters (jane and Lisbon) may or not may think about happenings... with that, keep in mind: spoilers for the whole season 4.
4.3 Pretty Red Balloon
He doesn't like thinking about his time as a psych, he is… uncomfortable. He doesn't know why, but every time he thinks about it, he feels yet again like when he was just a teenager, a pawn in his father's hands, selling stories and useless stuff to dying girls - maybe it's that so-called conscience Lisbon and Van Pelt keep talking about, his "soul".
At first, as a kid, he found it funny, then, he understood what he was doing, but he still had to do it (his father's fists, his belt, were convincing enough), then, it was because he and Angie had to survive somehow, and that was the only thing he was good at. He kept saying he was doing it for a good reason, helping his family to make it, to put food in the plate. The sense of guilt kept lingering for a while. Just for a while, though.
Because, then, people started to talk, and everybody wanted to ask for his advice. First, it was just young girls, then their mothers, the maids of the rich people of California. And then, the maids told their bosses about him, and it was the rich people who asked for his advice, the wife and the husband, the lawyer and the housewife, the businessman and the mistress. Everybody wanted to talk with the wonderful psych Patrick Jane, even the press and the television and the Force. And they had money, so much money, more than they needed… more than he had ever seen.
And that's when he stopped to care, to feel guilty. Until… until that night. He lost everything, everyone he had ever cared for. And if he didn't have them at his side any longer, why the money? He didn't need it, and besides, it was all the money's fault. His, and the money's. suddenly, everything he had ever craved, turned into something he hated, couldn't stand.
(He still can't.)
He doesn't like the man he was, and he doesn't care about the one he is right now- he isn't even a man, he just exists, not alive, but not even really dead, but that man, the one he was before, he hates him for the lies and the pain he caused.
He wonders if it means he is a better man, even if it's blood his heart craves- the blood and the life belonging to Red John. Maybe he is still just the same man. Only, he has another obsession (another addiction, like he once told) , not money and fame, but revenge and blood and death.
His first addiction got his family murdered- a family by blood, a family by the means of law. He wonders what this one will do, who'll have to pay the ultimate price, in this new family Lisbon claims he created with them (and he knows she is right, he painfully knows it). He hopes he'll be the one to fall, because they don't deserve it. Like he doesn't deserve them.