A/N: Yet another 6x01 tag, because Bruno Heller is an evil, evil, brilliant man, and this is my only catharsis until next Sunday. fk.

"I'm sorry, Patrick. Teresa can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?"

That familiar, deceptively placid voice shot through Jane's heart. It took him a second to understand that this voice wasn't coming from inside his head; it was not the familiar whisper of a guilty conscience or one of the many nightmarish flickers of his vivid imagination or memory. One second before a wave of nausea so strong it rocked him back on his feet came rolling through and the colours of the world around him started fading to an all-encompassing grey.

Before he could even fully grasp the horror he was feeling, the voice spoke again. Red John's voice. Jane's mind conjured up the image of a half congealed droplet of blood slowly tracking down a white wall.

"No?" the killer spoke again from Lisbon's phone, "I'll let her know you called."

Her. Lisbon. He had her. Finally Jane regained enough function to gasp a word.

"Wait –"

The harsh tone blaring in his ear that he was too late felt like a solid blow to the face. That blow knocked the air from his lungs and the warmth from his body. It was happening again – his life was crashing down around his ears with nothing that mattered left to support it. He was suddenly hit by the agonising realisation of exactly how much this mattered. How much she mattered.

For a moment in time he was frozen in place, so many different emotions pulling at him that he couldn't feel a single one. And then they galvanised into a single feeling – fear. Fear of losing her. It swelled up into his chest until he felt like he would explode if he didn't move, and then it propelled him to the team, to Grace. Words fell from his mouth sounding incongruently calm to his ears, and he watched the panic in their eyes from a distance.

He clung desperately to the hope that he hadn't yet killed her, that he wasn't going to find her bloody and cold on the floor beneath the same cruel smile that had mocked his grief a decade before. A bitter chill took over his heart and a dreadful stillness filled his mind as he took a seat in a black SUV that took him speeding towards an answer. They shadowed over that small, foolish hope, suffocating it.

All he could hear were Red John's word's echoing in his ears. He gripped the door as his mind conjured up nightmarish visions and silently urged the vehicle to go even faster. Even if it took him to her body; to the destruction of the last thread holding him together in some semblance of humanity, he needed to find her.