Fandom: The Mentalist (Chapter 72)

Summary: You guys know it by now. ;)

Author's Note: 2019 has been pretty rough for a while. This went on the back burner. Sorry for the long delay. I suppose you could argue I have been using the stress of the last year to build up a charge, like a capacitor in a computer, and maybe my writing and these final chapters will be all the better for it. This chapter is leaking out of me now, in dreams and ruminative thoughts, so it needs to get written.

Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother? . . . What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to Me from the ground" (Genesis 4:9-10).

"Holy water cannot help you now
Hours and armies couldn't keep me out
I don't want your money
I don't want your crowd
See I have come to burn
Your kingdom down" - 7 Devils by Florence + The Machines

Monday, October 27th, 2014

Jane stared at his child. His head felt strangely spongy and disconnected.

He licked his lips; placed his hands palm down on the formica surface of their table. Let his thoughts unspool like thread of his linear life coming undone.

So be it, maybe.

His little girl's voice bounced around the inside of his sensitive brain like a tennis ball. As a kid himself, when bored, when a strange grieving loneliness had come into him like a flu (after his carnival life with his father, after the disturbed twin brother who'd become a black hole in his own memory, wiped clean like an impossible thing that had never been)… when he'd been a kid, around Halloween, around what the pagans called Samhain, he'd get sick. Samhain marked the "darker half" of the year, and until that darker half was over, he was sickly.

A mental sickness masquerading as a physical one.

He'd known somewhere deep inside the sick he felt was psychological, maybe even spiritual. Was what some new-agey shrink on TV would call psychosomatic. Whatever the Hell voodoo mechanisms actually drove psychosomatic conversions anyway, but that was another complaint for another day... in his late childhood and early adolescence he'd been too exhausted just keeping up a performance of a boy to try and figure out the deeper mechanisms at work.

He'd pushed those thoughts away because they frightened him, too. Of course they did. Frightened wasn't even a strong enough word. Such thoughts, even hints of such ideas, tormented and horrified him. He was psychologically broken. He was spiritually weakened. He'd lost the person closest to him, and hadn't saved him. And the world made absolutely no sense. Sanity was an illusion. And the Devils held control and why couldn't he remember?

It had all been too much for a while and he'd tried running away. Been dragged back, of course. Gone silent for a while. A few weeks or a few months, he couldn't remember. Long enough to be significant, not long enough to get him electroshocked or something.

The dark spaces and holes in his life where he couldn't remember what had taken place (but he knew, on a very deep level, the same way some people claimed to know God was real and would go to horrific self-immolation deaths smiling in a final desire for Communion with such a God, on a level that deep he had known)... he had known. And hadn't.

Peter Jane had disappeared.

Rubbed out of existence without nary a trace.

Only, not really.

Because he had been real. Jane could remember him. But the foster parents told him, no. No, he'd never had a brother. He was mistaken.

Jane's mind began to feel like hot, loose rubber.

Peter had disappeared twice from Jane's life by the age of 11, and the second hole ripped something out of Jane's soul, something very much like trust. What had been left of Jane's trust, and his innocence. His hope in the inherent goodness of people. His hope, even, that concepts like "altruism" were more than the deluded wet dreams of naive simpletons trying to replace their mother's tit with unfounded psychobabble pseudoscientific bs.

Jane had stayed cocky and smiley, but inside he had hardened up. A boy dipped in concrete, slowly hardening all his inner goodness to the world. What he showed was the world, the bright and smiling child other people delighted and were agitated by in equal measure, was an anemic facsimile of who he'd been born to be. Indistinguishable in every way to most people. Red John would have noticed the change. Red John might have been the only person capable of noticing the change.

But little Red John had been sucked into a black pit and tortured, and whatever humanity was still left, it was gone when he finally came out of the long, dark cocoon stage of puberty. Transformation complete.

Jane grew to know humans were inherently ugly. Not just believe this, but KNOW it, know it on a level deeper than he knew he was alive, knew he was a boy, knew he had sea-blue eyes, knew which gum and soda brands he preferred. He KNEW about people... and he knew they were deep-down ugly.

Most weren't ugly enough to be anything special. Low-level urchins, despicable enough to withhold trust from, and true affection from, but not despicable enough to truly fear. The average monster's ugliness extended to low-level domestic abuse, welfare fraud, occasional animal abuse, writing children out of wills because they dared speak up about abuse, shoplifting, harassing the old war vet with the limp because there was a sick satisfaction for many in picking on the weak.

Most were not completely monstrous, not Red John's level of gravitas, but they were ugly and barbaric hominids pretending to be more than they could ever hope to be.

They were so easy to fool- Jane had told himself at age 11- because they had first fooled themselves. The marks did all the psychological heavy lifting themselves and all little, smiling Jane had to do was offer them a verbal lever, a verbal pulley, an easier way to do what they were already doing: loading up their conscious minds with deliberate self-delusion. He'd make a few tweaks and benefit from their own delusions, and they thanked him for his help!

That was human reality. That was the human animal. The deluded and the aware. The weak and the willing to endure.

In a journal he'd stolen (essentially stolen, anyway, though stolen with words instead of sticky fingers) he'd written in black magic marker: "The easiest mark is the man who already believes his own lies." - PJ age 11

He'd added his age in the journal, knowing in a precocious, cocky sort of way that his adult-self would find the journal, and delight in his child-self's precocity. Also knowing that his adult self would remember his child self's motives and laugh at the circular sort of inside joke that was his life.

Even in late childhood, he'd been wise enough to know that the adult version a few decades down the line would be bitter and have a dark sense of humor. He could predict, even before his teens, what he would become, with the same ease and certainty that he could predict motives and hidden psychological mechanisms in others.

He knew he would be a dark ghost of a man with a cocky smile. He knew he would be haunted. Forever alone. He would make his living scamming people who wanted to be scammed and he would go to his eventual death with a heart full of pain he couldn't let go of.

11-year-old Patrick Jane would never be a monster, though. He would always have compassion, even when acting suave and calculated. He had to keep the balance right. Play the system, benefit, survive, but don't become corrupt, Tricky boy.

But a very basic sense of trust was gone. Not completely destroyed. Destroyed... he may have become his brother.

But that damaged trusting side of Patrick became like a vestigial organ or a shy, conjoined twin barely conscious and hidden under a tarp or a poncho in eternal gloom. His broken trust- almost physical in its strength- cried on.

It struggled along next to Jane's strong, beating heart, crying a little bit in the faintest whispers when Jane's heart beat too hard because he was enjoying a good con or when he decided to play head games with someone who reminded him- in a hazy, dreamy way- of someone he couldn't remember but knew deserved a good mental thrashing.

This non-physical-but-still-very real, wounded part of Jane cried and cried and cried and would never shut up. And Jane grew up, and with increasing ease, ignored that despair. That wounded betrayal. Scoffing and laughing and making money. Staying busy mostly, and self-medicating himself with sleeping pills for a little while when sleep refused to arrive at their agreed-upon destination.

That vestigial trust shriveled, neglected and wounded and curled in on itself. Not completely gone. But unable to grow back, watching in a strange, metaphysical way the events of Jane's life unfold. Wanting to attach and get close to people, but fearing, deeply, that something unspeakably painful would result if he dared bare his soul. He wasn't damaged enough, though, to attack or become callous, not deep inside, not where it mattered.

He told himself this over and over.

He wasn't damaged enough to become a monster.

He only ever gave to the ugly humans what he could see in their eyes they already desired more than the truth.

He only gave them the fantasies they already wanted more than reality.

That was how he kept going.

The emotions were repressed, in simple terms.

But so damned repressed it would take a team of psychoanalysts with greater IQs than Jane had and full disclosure of his past to even begin to break through, and none of that was happening anytime soon.

The wounded trust of child-Patrick became nightmares and later, obsessiveness.

Teenaged-Jane had wanted to be the best at anything he put his mind to. He wanted to dominate.

Being dominated by others was too dangerous, and you couldn't trust others to sit back and let you live your life. So... you had to control them.

It was the only logical conclusion. Dominate, control, stay hidden under the smile, and sob (occasionally, less and less) in the shower. Rocking against the pelting, too-hot water, eyes puffy from the sobbing. Towel dry off, put the smile back in place and continue on.

You had to control humans all the time, every action, just to stay safe. And actions were sequels to thoughts, so to be safe, to stay safe, Jane had logically concluded one needed to dominate another's very thoughts.

And the lack of trust and fear and grief grew, and he pushed it away, pushed it away. Ever smiling. Smiling was the easy part.

But inside he wept. Deep inside his tanned, lean body, was an organ that never stopped weeping.

Deep weeping, a weeping that was silent to the ears but made its existence known when his neck went into spasms or his lungs got a lingering cough in the fall. Hay fever, they called it, but was it really hay fever or the deepest parts of his own body and soul crying out in their grief?

It was so much easier just to call it hay fever.

And he pressed through and adapted, shifting and changing, adapting to his past and his traumas, growing into his solid surfer boy looks, almost dazed sometimes by how easily others trusted him (seriously, what was wrong with them?!), how he could charm them like an old-timey snake-charmer from Jaipur with a punji in his dusty old hands and the cobra-human weaving and waving and falling asleep and wanting to fall asleep.

That skill had grown and been pronounced by 18, but the interior sobbing had come sooner, the time right after Peter wet away for the second time. Hives and rashes, asthmatic gasping, bruxism and fingernail chewing, headbanging when he got distressed enough...

He'd been in foster homes, and he thought he knew enough about his own past to get by and be more or less happy (whatever that really was, who knew?), but the more he looked back, the more the events of his life seemed strangely disconnected, holes of time just gone where even adult-Jane was certain there'd be more continuity.

And he'd thought, as a boy, that that was just plain forgetfulness.

Boredom.

Nobody remembered everything, day in and day out.

Right?

On a deeper level he'd know that he was repressing shit. But after his father and the circus and the cheap psychological grifting shit which had just been starting to feel wrong in his belly about the time Peter had shown up in all his grinning, psychedelic madness for round two… after all the worst stuff of his young life, there'd been the foster homes.

And the aching, grieving mad-sadness which came on around Halloween and lasted until the first greenery of spring.

It reached a fever pitch on Halloween with shakes and cold sweats and hyperventilating episodes Jane now knew were panic attacks.

After the worst of the terror was over, it didn't go away. It changed into something like incredible laziness. Jane could dimly remember trying to pay attention in school.

Early 80s.

Home-schooled and brilliant much of his life, but regular school was torture. The desks and the bells and the hall passes and the detentions for arguing or talking back or trying to get the other kids to laugh. He struggled with attention issues, focus, all of it. Was a discipline case, smart-alecky and cocky. Not aggressive, not violent, but early puberty had brought the bullies down on his head and he'd conned them and mentally played them, and a few times come stumbling home with a split lip or black eye but most of the time come home chuckling with extra money or gum or dirty magazines.

Grinning strangely, and scared at the same time he was grinning, chuckling and spitting wads of bright red saliva sometimes- like bubbly red paint- onto the sidewalk.

He'd walk home, down-faced, an aching coldness spreading. Nothing could make him smile for real. So he smiled. But it wasn't real. He smiled when spitting blood, but not a smile of happiness. Aching insanity.

He smiled so often he forgot he was sad. Began to believe his own performance. It was what humans did, was it not? Lie to themselves, first and foremost?

One foster father had beat him with a belt for being too sullen and the next week for being too much of a jibbering chatterbox freakshow and another weak for that cocky, pesky grin meant to infuriate and yet another weak for being a probable faggot.

It had never gotten hospital-level bad, but Jane had gone to bed many times with his eyes burning, hands in fists, back turning all shades of purple and blue, wishing he could kill the fucker.

Weekends stretched on endlessly.

After chores and homework, he could barely move. It took so much energy just to stand in the shower, to brush his teeth. He hadn't wanted to be around the other kids. His foster parents thought he was a prissy snob. Probably a faggot. Faggot, faggot, faggot, the word would repeat in his head and he hated that word, he hated the judgment in it and hated the confusion it caused him because he was pretty damned sure he liked the ladies and so what if he liked to iron his clothes and be neat, so fucking what?

Jane had found an old tennis ball and started playing handball by himself after chores and homework, smashing the scuffed fuzzy ball against the stone garage over and over, like maybe he was trying to desperately punish the ball or the garage or both. Leaping and catching, throwing as hard as he could. Wanting the ball to split open down the middle like a car crash victim with their skull split and their brains coming out on the asphalt in a gooey lump of ended future possibilities, but the ball never broke just from being thrown.

He could have had friends, but they seemed like too much work.

Everything felt like too much work.

After a couple hours of smashing the ball and catching it, smashing the ball and catching it, the sun would begin to go down. He kept it up, counting the numbers in his head compulsively, engaged in his own early experiments with auto-hypnosis.

This continued. The detentions, the mockery, the withdrawal, occasional beatings, tense meals around (more often than not) evangelical tables.

His hair- which he'd always kept a bit on the longer side in the '80s California surfing style, was buzz-cut off as punishment for some crime or other Jane could no longer remember. After the buzz job, his head glimmered with a cobweb of white, raised scars and when the social worker saw them and inquired after them, Jane had no memories of receiving any head wounds and simply shrugged.

The ball and the counting and the dimming early-autumn sun. The smell of wood stoves and grass fires and childhood ending in a haze of sugar and false promises.

The weather getting cooler as if the seasons were his life and it was his childhood that was dead and starting to go cold and into rigor now, and one night he woke up choking on his own blood, a horrible nose bleed and his mouth sputtering the metallic red painty shit all over his thrift store pillow, coughing and sputtering, nose burning and throbbing.

At school the next day, or maybe a few days later, there'd been gym class. He'd tried to undress away from the other boys, hunched over, when some little shit had seen the bruises he hadn't realized he was stained with. The boys had seen Jane's confusion, and then shame, and then stolen his clothes in a sadistic game of keep-away. Jane had started yelling, voice high and cracking with panic. Too distraught and ashamed to con them, to work up the calm needed to fuck with them.

The gym teacher had come in, seen what was going on, seen the young Patrick Jane howling and cursing and bruised so badly the man had winced just looking at the boy. After that, some long car ride to somewhere else which didn't matter anymore, a gray stucco building which was meant to look homey but still looked industrial. Some boys' home. Some group home for troubled kids.

Kids raped and beaten half to death and starved and kept in dog cages, but of course they were the trouble.

Another lie the ugly humans told themselves to make their days shorter and their nights less pitiful.

On whatever night of the week it came on, the staff put the TV on for Highway to Heaven. There were chores and points and a quiet room which felt like a prison cell for kids who got too worked up by their pasts and couldn't pretend to be undamaged anymore.

He'd wanted to run away so many times.

He'd wanted to run and never stop running. But he'd known with a final, deathly certainty there was nowhere to go.

But he'd wanted to run so, so badly...

Jane blinked in the present, studied Charlotte's tense, small face, and continued thinking his thoughts.

He'd survived by mastering the art of the con, figuring out what made people tick. If he could manipulate others, he could protect himself. Nobody could get him, not if he learned it better than before. Better than when he had been with his father.

The buzz cut grew out and became longish and shaggy again and the scars disappeared under the sandy blonde hair and Jane forgot about the scars on his scalp and the bruises that had been all over his body.

Bits of his past he just pushed away.

Kept bouncing the ball though. Around 15, he'd experimented with marijuana, auto-hypnosis. Read Timothy Leary and Nietzsche and Terrence McKenna. He'd stopped going to school regularly around 13 but at 15 had quit officially. Managed to get emancipated by smiling and moving his words like chess pieces and being confident and smooth. Slid into adulthood easier than he'd expected. His mind and his tongue his weapons.

Most of the time, he could fool himself and deny that inside, he was still crying.

But oh GOD, how strong the desire had been to run. He'd wanted to run and never stop.

YOU TALK FIRST. Charlotte's words.

Her haunted eyes desperate for some sort of safety.

Chronologically she was a young woman, really.

But she also wasn't.

In some ways she was very, very young and some of that young-ness (youth wasn't the right word), Jane thought, would be permanent. Certain parts of her social development, her brain, would forever be shaped by her isolation and torture. Jane knew this deeply, the same way he knew that he, also, carried emotional scars that would never go away.

Some shit never healed. Some shit was too deep and too distressing, and you adapted and you moved on and you limped your way forward, but you didn't heal from it. You didn't go back to what you were before, anymore than someone with their eyes cut out could will themselves to see again.

YOU TALK FIRST Charlotte had said. Like Chess. She wanted him to make his move first. Because she was terrified. He knew this game, he knew her moves intuitively, because he'd been the male, diet version of her once upon a time.

She was afraid she had hurt him, she was afraid of trusting him, she was afraid of putting him in danger and she was also afraid of going AWOL on her own and possibly getting murdered. Jane knew all of this instinctively. He would have known it if she hadn't been his kid and he would have guessed it if he only knew the backbone story of her life. But looking at her intensely, he knew even more completely how right he was.

She lived in perpetual terror that no longer even registered as terror, just constant hyper-vigilance. Lack of trust. Exhaustion. Just thinking about it made Jane feel exhausted, made him long for a sleep that might not ever end.

Looking at her scared the shit out of him.

"It really scared me when you took off," Jane said finally. He'd been alternating between staring at the table and staring at her blanched, pinched face and reliving his own youth, because familial trauma tended to be cyclical. Lost in memories full of missing puzzle pieces.

He wasn't sure which thoughts were spookier. That he, himself, was damaged psychologically (and possibly spiritually) with missing chunks of his life repressed and beyond hypnotic access, or that his little child had become like him, only more scared, more traumatized, more desperate. Distrusting and on edge, exhausted and tormented. He'd tried so hard to keep her safe and happy, but like a genetic curse, she'd inherited the same familial trauma.

Charlotte nodded at Jane's comment.

She was watching him carefully and what was left of her milkshake was starting to melt into pink goo.

She was watching him the way a scared animal would, unblinking, not making eye contact because on a basic, primal level eye contact was too threatening.

The sides of the frosted, fluted milkshake glass were sweating evaporation onto the table and she was doodling with the water on the table, circles and spirals.

"I am not angry, Charlotte, but what you did? It was terribly stupid. Nothing like… this… can ever happen again. Ever." He knocked his hands into fists on the tables to underscore his point and Charlotte jerked in her edgy, jerky way.

His words came out anemic and listless, no anger in them, but the anger was there. Anger borne of incredible fear.

Finally she spoke. Her move.

"Coming back into your life or taking off, or what?" The glib act, the tough kid act. Of course. It's what he would have done in her place.

Jane looked up at his kid again. Not really his kid, in a lot of ways. His, but also so damaged. So feral. His child in a world of dark matter. Tragically his, but so far away.

"Taking off," Jane said as calmly as possible.

"Coming back maybe wasn't so smart, either."

Jane let the comment hang in the air, unsure if she was trying to disclose anxiety to him or bait him. Or both.

She was apparently finished.

Jane sighed.

"Why wasn't coming back, smart? What were your alternative plans? Live with Red John for the rest of your life? Live on the streets? What?"

Charlotte winced a little, even though Jane could see she'd been trying to act tough. She was strong, but she wasn't as tough as she liked to pretend to be. She felt things deeply, under the act.

When he was young, he'd confused tough and strong, too. Charlotte was very, very strong. But the toughness was 99% act.

"He would have eventually gotten tired of me," Charlotte said.

"Yeah, and that means he would have probably killed you," Jane breathed. He tented his fingers and exhaled into the tent. Counting in his head. Go easy. Go easy. But his fingers trembled.

He wasn't mad. He wasn't angry. Except… who was he really kidding? He was furious. All of this was so damned unfair. He wasn't mad at Charlotte, but the emotion of anger was there, and it was damned hard to suppress it given the morning and the sleepless nights and work and Charlotte's screaming fits when she woke up from nocturnal horror movies directed by her own memories.

Charlotte was still watching him. Spooked eyes got even brighter and rounder.

"You're angry," she told Jane in a low, awed tone of voice. Jane hated the sound of her voice. Anger in Patrick Jane had to register far too much like the slow, constant burn of Peter Jane, of Red John. Red John's anger ended in rigor mortis.

"I am scared. I am angry at the situation. I am angry that you're so tormented you wake up screaming most nights. I am angry you still don't trust me," Jane said. He was speaking faster than he meant to. But this had been bottled up a while.

Bottled up since before she was born, really.

"I'm damaged, Patrick. What else is new?" Charlotte whispered and when Jane studied her face she dropped her head, wavy bangs falling over her eyes like a veil. Exhausted or ashamed or a combination.

"You are damaged. Not all damage is permanent, though." Except, who was he kidding?

"Mine is," Charlotte said resolutely. Jane didn't have the heart to argue with her. Especially not when he secretly knew she was right. She'd hear the lack of conviction in his tone and it would be that much worse for her.

"Some damage is. We've all got damage," Jane said finally. He gestured himself, gestured the other diners with a wave of his tanned hand. "Everybody has damage. Everybody."

Charlotte didn't skip a beat. Their chess game was moving faster, now.

"Not the same thing and you know it. You were tracking me. Chipped me. Like I was a dog."

"I couldn't risk you taking off. Like, you know. You did today."

"Like a dog!" Charlotte was apparently going to fixate on this injustice if it meant not having to talk about anything scarier or heavier. "Do you think of me like a dog?"

"Charlotte," Jane breathed wearily. He was so damned tired. Even his eyelashes felt tired.

"Like a dog, an RFID tracking chip in my stuff, like a tracker in a dog's collar…"

"You have to admit there are some rather unique aspects to your life that most parents of teenagers don't really have to consider all that much," Jane finally said.

"Like a dog! And you didn't even tell me they were there!"

"That would sort have defeated the purpose. You would just have ditched the stuff."

"No, I wouldn't," Charlotte argued stubbornly. But her words were silly putty because even she knew she was stalling.

Jane counted to 10 in his head again. He was too tired for this childishness. Charlotte was stalling and deflecting because she was scared. He got it.

He would have done the same thing at her age, and with only a faint whisper of the shit she had to deal with.

So, he got it.

But he was too tired to entertain it.

He was exhausted.

He didn't have the energy to do this dance.

Not when Charlotte was smarter than this, not when he felt his insides twisting and the air seemed to be getting thinner. Anxiety attack on its way, and he rarely got those as an adult. Very rarely. The night he'd seen his wife's corpse in all its histrionic glory. The night he'd seen the child corpse that wasn't his child but he hadn't had the nerve to turn and face, to really see.

He'd been too weak to turn and look his dead child in the face, too weak and too in-shock and for that weakness, Charlotte had lost the rest of her childhood and most of her sanity.

She'd suffered for his cowardice.

He would never forgive himself for that.

"You could have gotten yourself killed." He could hear the strain in his own voice. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and texted Lisbon as Charlotte watched. WHERE R U?

"If he wanted me dead, I'd be dead," Charlotte said flippantly, playing with the straw stuck in her melted pink goo.

"He. Almost. Did. Kill. You." Jane said, enunciating every word. He needed Lisbon. Now. He felt light-headed and shaky, somewhere between puking and fainting and collapsing.

"Still here, though." Charlotte said back, but the tone wasn't so carefree anymore. She was watching the strain in his features, watching the colour of his skin start to sink into white shock.

"And that's the closest thing to a miracle I can say I have ever experienced." He needed Lisbon.

"Isn't God amazing with those miracles? So generous," Charlotte shot back, and sucked some pink melted milkshake out of the straw. Began to blow bubbles.

A text came up on Jane's phone.

IN PARKING LOT.

Saint Teresa Lisbon.

Jane pulled out his wallet. Slapped some bills on the table to pay for the milkshakes, to pay for the tip.

"Come on. Get your stuff."

Charlotte stared at him like a feral animal.

"I'm not done," she said lamely, and blew some more bubbles into the remnants of her milkshake.

"Charlotte," Jane said. His voice was steely. It was either steel or shaky collapse, and he couldn't collapse in front of her.

Charlotte needed him to be strong. If he lost it now, whatever they had built would start to crumble.

His kid got up, backpack in front of her like a cloth shield.

Jane waited for her. Walked her out of the diner like someone doomed to face the firing squad.

Lisbon had come in her car. And Rigsby. Awkward, puppy-eyed Rigsby looking mildly guilty and mildly scared of his batshit traumatized teenage daughter.

Jane pulled his car keys out of his pocket. Tossed them to Rigsby.

"You take care of my car, Rigsby?" He said to the younger man. Rigsby nodded immediately. Jane had given him an easy escape. Rigsby's eyes screamed gratitude and Jane acknowledged his relief with the faintest nod of his head.

Charlotte was glaring daggers at Rigsby and Rigsby scuttled away. Kicked puppy dog. Kicked puppy dog who worked for the CBI and was an expert on arson, but his child still had Rigsby kowtowing it the hell out of dodge with his tail between his legs.

Lisbon looked worried and concerned, not angry. She saw Jane's face and the worry grew more pronounced.

Charlotte looked at her father, over at Lisbon, back at her father. She could feel the tension, of course. Helen fucking Keller could have felt this tension.

She stopped walking and bent down to tie her shoelace. Or tighten it. Whatever. It was a stall tactic, a fork in the road. Jane's jaw clenched and he felt daggers of pain stab him between the eyes. His breath came out like he'd been punched in the gut.

"Don't," Jane warned.

"Don't what?" Charlotte said in a low whisper.

"Charlotte, walk over to Lisbon's car. Now."

Charlotte stood back up. Walked over to Lisbon. Lisbon opened the back seat, eyes darting between Jane and his kid. Charlotte knew them both well enough to know there was a dance going on here, a non-verbal face off, but she didn't get the depth of it, didn't know who to watch or what to do...

"Jane," Lisbon said by way of recognition as Jane stood guard. As if just saying his name might enlighten her.

"Lisbon, you have your cuffs?"

"Jane?" Lisbon said a bit louder, and her voice sounded ragged. His head was pounding and his vision was pulsing, brighter and darker, blood pressure too high.

"Charlotte, put your hands out," Jane said tiredly.

"What?"

"You heard me. I can't trust you right now. You can be pissed at me later."

"Jane-" Lisbon started, but Jane held up his hand.

"You're going to cuff me?" Charlotte said. She finally met her father's eyes. Her eyes were wounded and hurt. Better that than dead.

Right?

"I don't have any way to sedate you and you can't be trusted right now. I can't hypnotize you because you've developed techniques to resist that. I am not risking your life to spare your feelings. So put out your hands. Please."

Lisbon was watching Jane warily, then Charlotte.

"Lisbon, please," Jane said wearily. He felt like he might faint. He couldn't faint without his kid secured. His vision pulsed.

Lisbon sighed. She wanted to argue but she could see how worn Jane was. She understood the gravity of the situation.

Lisbon moved back to the passenger door, reached toward the glove box. Popped it open.

Reached for the cuffs.

Charlotte bolted. Standing one second, sprinting the next.

Jane watched her sadly for a handful of seconds.

"Now she can't claim I am being unfair," Jane said tiredly, and sank into the passenger seat. "For fuck's sake, Charlotte."

Lisbon stared after the kid, looked at Jane. He pulled the belt over his chest, his lap. Slammed his door shut. Lisbon got back in the driver's side, slammed her own door.

"Jane, what the hell is going on?"

Charlotte was really sprinting. So far keeping to the road because it was easier to run on pavement, really flying. It would have been impressive if it wasn't so tragic.

"Jane?!" Lisbon demanded worriedly.

"She's exhausted. She'll either collapse or we'll just keep pace until she does. She made her move and her move is run."

"Jane," Lisbon said, urgently. Already Charlotte was nearly out of visual range.

"Okay. Start it up," Jane said tiredly. He shut his eyes and breathed deeply.

He couldn't faint right now. Later, maybe. Not now.

"Jane? You're really pale," Lisbon said. Jane felt her fingers on his face, felt her fingers travel to his neck.

"Your heart is racing."

"Panic attack coming on maybe," Jane said in a tight voice.

Lisbon stared at him, haunted.

Jane fumbled through one pocket, pulled out an orange plastic medication vial. Ativan. For his kid. He popped off the top and took 2 sublinguals. Put the top back on.

Lisbon was still watching him. Eyes even rounder and bigger than usual. She was scared for him. She didn't think this was panic.

Of course not, because for most of the time she had known him, the idea that he was capable of panicking was unthinkable to her.

Jane opened his eyes and looked at her. Nodded. Tried to smile. His mouth felt bone dry and his hands were cold and sweating. His heart felt strange and was going so, so fast. Panic. Had to be.

He knew this was likely panic. He'd gotten this shit as a kid.

The thing about panic was, during the worst of it, it didn't feel like panic. It felt like insanity coming on. It felt like imminent death. A heart attack. Organ failure.

Panic was a consummate liar.

"Should take effect in 20 minutes or so. Just stay calm Lisbon. Let's get my kid before she collapses or gets hit by a semi or something."

Lisbon nodded. Swore under her breath and pulled the car out of the parking lot.

"Trail her," Jane ordered.

Lisbon nodded, Jane knew. He opened his eyes. Their car came down the road and Charlotte cast a glance over her shoulder. Fear spiked into her and she fell, righted herself (Jane inwardly winced) and sprinted off the shoulder of the highway, into the sandy terrain and dusty shrubs and dried grass.

"Stay on her," Jane said tightly, more to test his voice than because Lisbon didn't know what to do. Lisbon swore again and drove over the shoulder of the highway, out onto the shrubby land.

She kept the car speed just below Charlotte's running speed, at enough distance that she could stop when she needed to, or if the kid toppled.

"She won't stop until she collapses. Not now," Jane said bleakly and licked his lips.

"It doesn't appear that way," Lisbon agreed.

It took four more minutes of sprinting. Several times his kid hit a bush, should have crumbled but sheer adrenaline had her back on her feet and going.

"She is going to break something, Jane, or-"

"Lisbon, we're out of choices" Jane said softly.

They kept on her for what felt like five minutes. Maybe was longer. Maybe shorter. Time was hard to perceive through the veil of panic and fear and disorientation.

And then his kid collapsed.

Her legs gave way and she fell down in stages, legs weakening and trying to right themselves, staggering, and then down. Lisbon slowed the car and then stopped it.

She tried to get back up on her feet, fingers and knees raw and bloody, scratches from some bush on her cheek. Face scarlet and body trembling. Jane got out of the driver's side of Lisbon's car. Saw his kid. Saw the terror in her eyes. Felt Lisbon shadow his movements.

He'd failed his child when he hadn't had the strength to confirm the small body next to his wife was really her. And he was failing her now.

He had no idea what else to do, but the way she was shaking on the ground like a hunted animal about to be put out of its misery was definitely a sort of betrayal.

Better to get this over with. Don't drag it out.

Jane continued on to her.

His kid was still trying to get up and escape, fighting to the bitter end. Was still trying to get up. Panic spiking in her eyes, hands scrabbling at the dust and rocks. Scrapes and tears and blood coming from a few fingernails, now.

"Lisbon? I look too much like Red John. Can you…?" He trailed. He couldn't do this. Not with his kid panicking and still trying to force her body to escape his approach. He couldn't.

He wouldn't. Maybe he was being weak again, putting this on Lisbon. But. God damnit.

Lisbon nodded tightly. Looked over at Jane and nodded and her eyes were shining. She tried to smile at him. An it'll-be-okay sort of a smile. But she was too haunted for the smile to have any charge.

Lisbon continued on to the kid, the last few feet.

Charlotte began to scramble away from Lisbon. Her skinny legs and arms were shaking so hard and fast. Sheer exhaustion battling terror.

"Charlotte, stop," Lisbon said softly as she approached. Lisbon held her hands out and palms out to show she had no weapons. An instinctive move, Jane knew. She was walking slowly, as calmly and gently as she could. Trying to decrease his child's terror.

Charlotte couldn't stop, though. Whatever terror had sent her running had her terrified of them both. The handcuff thing and the car thing had made it worse. The obvious sleep deprivation. Whatever horror Halloween represented. She couldn't deal, and she couldn't stop.

"Shhh," Lisbon said as gently as she could. Charlotte tried to lift herself off the sandy earth like she was doing a push up and collapsed on her belly. She was crying softly, little mewling, moaning noises.

The kid didn't need handcuffs now. She could barely move.

Lisbon crouched next to her. Charlotte moaned in fear, but was too exhausted to scream. The circles under her eyes were so pronounced, so dark, almost black-eye shiners. Jane looked at the dark sleep deprivation bruising and felt his self-loathing ratchet up another few notches.

How could he have been so blind?

Except... he hadn't been blind. He'd been exhausted, too.

Still.

Still.

Lisbon heard the car door close. Looked up to see Jane approach. He'd gone back to the car as Lisbon crept nearer his kid, trying to calm her, and he'd returned.

Charlotte lay on the ground. Moaning. Defeated.

"Jane?" Lisbon asked, unsure of how to proceed.

Jane crouched by his kid in the dusty dirt. Pulled a small baggy from his suit vest pocket. A hypodermic needle and a vial of clear fluid.

He gave Lisbon an exhausted look.

Lisbon tried to rub Charlotte's back but that move sent a shriek of terror out of her and Lisbon pulled back her hand like she'd been burned. Jane looked at Lisbon, spoke no words, shook his head bleakly.

He pulled the cap off the needle end and spit it on the ground. Plunged the needle into the vial, breaking the seal. Carefully drew up the drug. Whatever this current state of affairs was, Jane had been expecting something like this.

He hadn't wanted to expect this, but he'd planned for it as a worst case scenario.

He tapped the side of the needle, carefully ejected enough sedative to get rid of any air bubbles.

He nodded at his kid.

"Lisbon, pull her shirt up a bit. And her jeans…" He nodded with his head. Lisbon winced. Did what was asked.

Charlotte tried to move again, but was beyond words and beyond anything resembling physical strength. She had no fight left in her.

There was no need to restrain her.

She'd exhausted herself running.

Lisbon could see now that Jane had been right in letting her run.

Having to hold her down for this would have been so much worse.

"Don't… don't… please…" Charlotte begged as she felt air on her skin. She was still trying to get away. Found a spurt of adrenaline and staggered up. Lisbon pulled her back down, as gently as possible. Jane tore the edge off an alcohol wipe, wiped down a spot on her hip, let the wipe fall to the ground. Pulled the syringe out from between his teeth.

"Don't…"

He slid the needle into the muscle of her hip. Charlotte jerked and moaned a little, but was too tired for any more. Tried to crawl some more, but it was sheer will power driving her now.

"Lisbon," Jane said. "Hold her."

Lisbon did. She pulled the kid over onto her lap. It didn't take much physical effort to keep her from moving. The drug was quickly taking hold. To Lisbon, she felt like she was holding an exhausted rabbit. No real effort was required to keep the teen from moving. She'd exhausted herself. Holding her was just to keep her from getting even more banged up.

His kid stared up at him, confused and fading, hair dark with sweat. Her legs and arms were jerking, still trying to gather strength that was long since depleted. She looked like an animal that was facing death in the face and knew it was pointless to keep fighting, but couldn't stop.

Her eyelids began to close.

"Jesus," Lisbon breathed, deeply troubled by what she was witnessing. Finally Charlotte lay still in her arms. No movement.

"What… what is going on, here?" Lisbon said to Jane as Jane reached down and pulled his kid into his arms. He stood up with her. Even unconscious and leaden she was terribly light for her age.

He carried her back to the car. The back seat was open and he put her down in the back as gently as he could.

"Lisbon? Cuffs?" He said in a whisper. She handed them to Jane. He pulled Charlotte's wrists in front of her as gently as possible. Cuffed her wrists. Felt for the pulse in her neck like Lisbon had done with him not half an hour earlier.

"Rigsby give you an address?"

Lisbon nodded.

"You can drive?" Jane said. Lisbon nodded. Jane got back in the passenger seat and buckled himself in.

Lisbon started the car back up.

Jane had asked for the location for an off-grid safe house. Had to be out of the city. Had to be somewhere they could keep a deeply traumatized kid doped up until Halloween was over and Jane had a chance to reassess the situation.

Red John was dead of course.

Of course he was.

But just in case... just in case...

Rigsby or Cho would bring them supplies. Until then it was lay low and rest and let Jane think.

Lisbon looked over at Jane as he pulled the passenger side seat down a bit to rest. He was exhausted, pale, drugged himself. Lisbon shot a glance into the rearview mirror. Whatever Jane had dosed his kid with, she was out cold.

Lisbon turned her attention back to the road. Tried to unclench her jaw, which felt like it had been wired shut with steel cables. Her head was pounding and she felt shaky and sick, trembly and shock-shaky herself. But Jane needed her. Charlotte needed her.

She was a part of this, whether she wanted to be or not.

But oh Gawd, the next few days were going to suck.

"Maybe... maybe just rest for a few minutes Lisbon. You're shaking. Just rest a few," Jane said, and shut his eyes.

"Yeah," Lisbon said. "Okay."

Lisbon pulled the car onto the shoulder of the highway. Turned the engine off. Let her heart rate come back to something approaching a normal beat.