A/N: How in the name of all things holy am I so late to The Mentalist party?! But anyway. I discovered it on Friday and am almost at the end of season 2. So I know I still have some catching up to do due to not fully knowing the entire story arcs, so any licence taken with backstory arcs that clash with canon, I'm really sorry in advance. Hopefully there are none, I tried to be as vague as possible. I'm just kinda running with it a bit. Thanks for reading. Really hope you enjoy it.

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, it was created by Bruno Heller and belongs to CBS. I'm just a bit of a dork who owns a gargantuan crush on Patrick Jane. The Name Game is the title of a very obscure poem/spoken word track recorded by Keith Moon and Pete Townshend.

The Name Game

He had stared into the mirror for so long that he no longer felt as though he looked real. Perhaps he wasn't real. Perhaps he had died that night too, and this is what Catholics meant by purgatory. Perhaps this was all a glitch in the Matrix, and they'd reboot the system so he would walk back through the open door from his bathroom into the bedroom, to find that his wife would still be asleep in bed.

An angry, frustrated sigh brought him to his senses. Self-loathing and self-pity were not helpful. Wishing would not bring them back. It would not change anything. He had a job to do. He squeezed toothpaste onto his toothbrush and took a deep breath, readying himself for his audience.

"Hi, my name is Patrick," he told the mirror. It hadn't landed. He tried a second and third time, with different intonations.

"Patrick Jane." This version came with a smile and an offered handshake. He didn't care for it.

"Hi, I'm Patrick." Ugh. He sounded like he was five.

He gave up after the third attempt and stuck his toothbrush in his mouth, mostly to shut himself up. Perhaps he wouldn't even meet anyone new today. The guys at the office already knew his name and he could always find a place to be busy in, or take to his trusty couch to take a convenient nap if he couldn't trust himself to be Patrick Jane for a few minutes.

Patrick was always an easy name to shorten. Pat. Patty, perhaps. Not for him, though. He had chosen Patrick. It was important to him that he was known as Patrick. It was his name, after all - and a perfectly good one at that, one which had often got him free beer every March 17th over the years. It was also the name of the man he had to be to do what he needed to do. To get his revenge. His justice. Their justice.

Patrick Jane, Phoney Psychic. Patrick Jane, CBI Consultant. What was the difference? Only the stage. The stage and the remuneration. Both much smaller now, of course. The CBI office was more intimate, more intense, he had to constantly be Patrick Jane to his colleagues. He was the goofy, affable Patrick with no discernible hand to hand combat skills, preferring to outsmart his opponents with his wit and intellect. He knew he had both in spades. Where was the sense in denying it? He had made a sizeable fortune taking money from providing people with false hope courtesy of both his wit and his intellect. Everyone knew that Patrick Jane could help grieving people reach their loved ones on the other side. Patrick Jane could contact lost fathers, lost mothers, lost wives. Lost children.

A brief, unbidden memory flooded his brain of a time his little girl, Charlotte, had run into the bathroom one morning as he was brushing his teeth, she was still only a toddler. She hugged his leg and told him she loved him. "I love you more," he had answered, barely understandable with a mouth full of foamy toothpaste. Charlotte had laughed and mimicked his reply so that they both laughed together. His smile was real. His laugh came from his belly and not his brain. His reply was truthful. He couldn't remember the last time he had told the truth so readily and completely.

He spat the toothpaste out with far more vitriol than was required, as though he was trying to spit the memory out too. He wasn't ready yet. It was too painful. He had detached enough from the loss to be able to use the briefest account of their murders. No more. Everything else hurt too much. Admittedly he had occasionally used the information to his advantage, to garner empathy, to create a stronger bond of trust with the victims. It was so important to him that he was trusted. That after publicly outing himself as a fake psychic and his somewhat controversial claims of all psychics being nothing more than super observant salespeople. They sold hope. They sold trust. Patrick Jane had publicly announced that he had built his entire career on lies, and then in the same breath demanded people's trust as he vowed to use his skills to help others, and especially to find Red John, the man who had torn Patrick's life apart, taking his wife and his child from him.

Patrick was a man who demanded trust, and went about earning that trust with meticulous precision. No detail was overlooked. He still wore his wedding ring, a silent reminder of both his pain and his purpose. He wore three piece suits which always looked comfortably worn, but never creased. As though he had been trying to care for himself and only managing to a limited degree. Always the vest. Always the dress pants. Never the tie. Shirt unbuttoned at the top three buttons. Sleeves either already rolled, or rolled for effect during interrogation. His appearance was of a man who had once looked as though he had just stepped out of a Hugo Boss advert, but was now a little ruffled around the edges. He looked more than comfortable, less than slovenly, but categorically nowhere near sleazy or titillating. Patrick Jane was not a man actively interested in women. He was still genuinely, perhaps eternally, in love with his wife. Patrick was not a man about to make a move on a colleague or a witness. Or anyone. He flirted, he was sweet, and he was always kind to the deserving. He was a harmless clown to them, with his seemingly irrelevant questions and eternal childlike curiosity in Things. Sometimes he was silly for its own sake. He liked being silly. It took less effort than being Patrick.

He was definitely Patrick. It was name and a disguise he had built well for himself.

Patrick knew that for a lot of people, the shortening of one's first name was intended as a sign of friendship, of warmth. His insistence on using both syllables of his name often jarred with his gregarious persona. If persona was the right word - something about the word indicated a falseness. His warmth was not false, that was all truly him. He didn't have to work at being a friendly, congenial person. He was a warm man. Physically and emotionally. The warmth seemed to radiate from him, as though being wrapped in one of his seldom-given hugs would warm a person to their core in the harshest of winters. He had warm eyes, despite their hue. A warm, friendly blue, like a calm sea in summer. Calm. Warm. The calm warmth spread to his tone of voice too, he rarely shouted, rarely lost his cool. He would throw out an offhand, flippant quip to stop a line of conversation he didn't want to pursue, or to end a conversation with a person he had no interest or desire to speak to. It still frequently astounded him at what a person could get away with saying, if only they smiled as they said it.

He had a ready smile. Hyper-ready. Always there, waiting to jump out and disarm people with one of a hundred different smiles he used for a hundred different reasons. People like smiley people, it's a simple fact. Smiles are the most contagious of all the gestures. People trust a smile. A smiley person is too caring to be untrustworthy, simply because they smiled. Perhaps Patrick's armament of smiles were the greatest weapons in his arsenal of self-preservation. Not every smile reached his eyes. Occasionally, his smile barely reached his lips. A vague indentation of a laugh line next to his left dimpled cheek. That was his angry smile, his 'I wont give the bastard the satisfaction' smile. Because Patrick Jane didn't lose his temper with those who didn't deserve his energy. He just smiled vaguely, sometimes also raising his left eyebrow the smallest of fractions, wordlessly letting them know that he was very much laughing at them.

Another random memory came to him. One of the carny women, a woman he hadn't thought of in years. When his father was out celebrating Patrick's success as a psychic, he would often wander around the carny, people watching. Observing people was, of course, great for the act - but it was also an activity he genuinely enjoyed. Seeing a boy and girl out on their first date. A father taking his child to the carny for the first time and trying in vain to win a giant panda at the rigged hoopla stall. Their world brought so much happiness to people. He didn't understand why, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that he saw everything. Observed everything. The girl on the date whose face lit up as the boy tentatively curled his fingers around hers for the first time. The way he adopted a proud stride, swinging their arms so everyone could see that she was his. The pain in the father's eyes as he saw his child's lip wobble as they realised they hadn't won the panda. His haste to hand over another dollar to try again, knowing deep down he had no chance of winning.

Invariably, Patrick would find himself at the hot dog stand so he could speak to Gloria - a round, motherly woman who was probably in her early forties but somehow seemed much older. Gloria was always kind to him. Always made sure he got extra onions on his hot dog. One time, he told Gloria that he wanted to get away from the carny, that he didn't want to be like his father. He didn't think it was right to take people's money over lies. It was wrong. Gloria didn't reply at first, she turned the frankfurters over as she considered his plight. Eventually she shook her head and sighed.

"Ricky, honey. I've known you almost all your life. I know you won't be like him. You got a kind heart, son. You gotta learn to protect it better," she said at last. "Whether you stay or whether you go - somewhere in this world you're gonna meet people who lie and cheat. It's a cruel world, son. But you're a good boy, Ricky. That's one thing your dad can't take away from you."

"You always call me Ricky," he said, with a frown. "You know my name's Patrick."

Gloria smiled, turned her attention away from the hot dogs for a moment and cupped Patrick's face in her hands. "Sweetie, to the dumbass marks around here, maybe you're Patrick. To me, you're Ricky. You know and I know, they aren't the same boy," she said. wrapping him into a tight hug. Tears stung the back of his eyes as the truth of her words hit home to him. Patrick was an act, a disguise. One he naturally inhabited, one whose personality eventually would develop so many layers that he could show any aspect of his true psyche while still hiding behind Patrick Jane. Patrick. Two syllables. Everything had to be precise. The devil is in the detail, wasn't that the way of every successful trick?

He shook his head and breathed in sharply, bringing himself back to the present moment. Gloria's words lingered. "They aren't the same boy."

Perhaps he was still Ricky, deep down. Perhaps he had been Ricky with Angela. Perhaps he would be Ricky again. Or Pat. Or Patty. Or just plain Jane. Lisbon seemed to have an infinite number of intonations of the name 'Jane' - mostly used to denote exasperation - and each one made him smile. A smile that always reached his eyes. A smile that she often wouldn't see, or he wouldn't let her see. He swallowed hard and reached for his shirt, which he carefully fastened from the fourth button down. He briefly thought of Lisbon. Maybe she hid behind being Lisbon, too. At least a little. Maybe she'd understand. Maybe.

Hope was a luxury he had sold for years to gullible fools with more money than sense. It was not a luxury he could afford for himself. Maybe things would change. Maybe he could stop pretending one day. Maybe he would die trying to get Red John. Maybe he never would, and maybe his desire for vengeance would end up eating him alive. He didn't know. For now, Patrick had a job to do. Someone was hiding behind the name of Red John - and until the man masquerading as Red John was good and dead, Patrick Jane would hide himself in plain sight too.

He ran his hands through his hair and took one last look in the mirror. In the mirror's reflection he saw the giant red smiley face on the bedroom wall, Red John's calling card, staring back at him. His eyes hardened and he set his jaw squarely as he fought to quash the anger bubbling inside of him. Maybe today would be the day they'd catch him. Or at least get a good lead.

Patrick straightened his vest and nodded at his reflection, satisfied that his costume was arranged just right. He gave himself a reassuring grin and lifted his chin slightly, straightening his shoulders, his poise perfect once more.

"Showtime."

THE END