Chapter Text
Day 1:
As Agent Lisbon listened to Jane's first solo interrogation of Lorelei, the sick feeling in her stomach congealed into an ugly mass of outraged revulsion.
No, she decided. It wasn't an interrogation, not even by Jane's unconventional standards. It was, it occurred to her, a warped kind of seduction. On both sides. "I can make you a better offer," he promised. "Kiss me," she said.
Lisbon couldn't deny it any longer: there was something wrong with Jane. She'd tried to tell herself she just wasn't used to him anymore, that over the time they'd been apart she'd softened her recollections of him and now was tripped up by things she would have taken in stride six months ago. She'd tried to tell herself it was because this was a Red John case and those always brought out his crazy side. But she was a good enough investigator to trust her gut, and her gut was telling her that the man who'd come back from Vegas was not her Jane. Was not someone she even knew.
But she'd seen him before, she realized. In video clips. This Jane was the closest she'd ever been in real life to the TV psychic with his hard, cold eyes and his shiny suits. It stood to reason, she supposed. He'd gone back to his old cons in Vegas. And a man was, as they said, what he ate. Jane had spent half a year eating lies and hating himself and everyone around him, and if he thought he could just stroll back into the CBI and shake all that off like rain from an umbrella, the only person he was fooling was himself.
By the time he and Lorelei had set their next appointment, "We'll talk again this evening," Lisbon had had enough.
She confronted him in the hallway by the elevator. "What are you? Huh? Crazy?" Dressing him down came naturally. She could tell she wasn't even close to getting through to him, but it was a pattern so deeply ingrained that she didn't know how to break past it to something that would make him stop and take a real look at what was going on. She rolled over his attempted interruption. "I told you to be careful," she continued, "I told you not to go over the edge."
"And I told you not to listen," he retorted.
Her jaw almost dropped, and she understood that his earlier request - "I need to be able to tell her truthfully that we are alone" - had been about her all along, and not the least bit about him or Lorelei. As if he, the king of liars, needed to believe something was true to persuade someone else of it. He just didn't want her interfering in his little plans, as usual. She couldn't believe she'd actually missed him while he was gone.
"Don't be childish! I am not your girlfriend! I am an officer of the law. How could I not listen?" She'd thought he understood that. That she was just giving him the same plausible deniability he always claimed he was giving her. She'd thought that was understood. How could he have imagined she'd actually not listen? "You kissed her," she reminded him, trying to return to the point. "You offered to help her escape."
"And I would ask her to marry me if I thought she'd buy it."
This time, Lisbon's mouth did fall open as the penny finally dropped. So that was why he'd thought she'd be a good little girl and give him his privacy with his psychotic mistress. He thought he'd done that good a job of wrapping her around his finger. Incandescent fury blazed through her, and she welcomed it.
"Oh sure, I know how that one goes," she told him, voice dripping with venom. "Then tomorrow when she asks you to bring in the justice of the peace, you just act confused and say you were too hyped up to remember what you said, right?"
"What?" Jane put on a very convincing facade of shock and dismay. Or perhaps he actually couldn't believe she'd put the pieces together, even when he laid them out for her so very, very neatly. "You don't think -"
He reached a hand out toward her shoulder and she recoiled instinctively.
"No," he said, voice calm and careful and afraid, "you're wrong. That's not -"
She walked away before he could finish whatever he was trying to say. It was just going to be more lies anyway, and she had better things to do with her time than shovel his sheep dip.
She held herself together long enough to get an update on their actual case from Van Pelt, guiltily pleased there was nothing she needed to do until Rigsby and Cho got back from their interview in Bakersfield.
But her relief at escaping to the refuge of her office evaporated as soon as she got there, and the memory waiting for her hit her in the face: "Good luck, Teresa. Love you."
Bang bang.
She couldn't believe she'd spent so many hours obsessing over what had turned out to be just another lie. She'd stewed over it for the whole drive to Vegas, wondering if he'd meant it, and if so what he'd meant by it, and what she'd wanted him to mean by it, and by the time they'd gotten to that warehouse she'd had no answers at all. So she'd asked him.
She cringed now, looking back at it, at how nervous she'd been, how the words had tumbled out of her because she just couldn't keep them in even though she knew it wasn't the right time for a personal conversation. His brush-off had filled her with a slurry of relief and resentment: that nothing had to change after all, that he was so unaffected by something that transparently tied her in knots, that he'd said it at all if he wasn't going to stand by it.
That was the part she'd had the hardest time understanding: why say it to begin with? And yet, somehow, despite how long she'd known him, how closely she'd watched him operate, it had never occurred to her that it was just a lie, a con, a trick like any number of others he'd played on her and everyone else since they day they met.
She thought back to his reappearance at her church. It should have been obvious just from that, how lightly he took her and her feelings. He'd treated it all like a big joke, from his impersonation of God to his disappearance in the midst of her well-deserved tirade. Six months of nothing, when he knew full well how worried she was, how desperate she was to reach him, and he couldn't even bother to hear her out. He'd stayed just long enough to secure her assistance, and once he'd gotten what he wanted, he was done with her.
She couldn't believe what a naive fool she'd been. Well, it had taken her an embarrassingly long time, but she finally understood his game, and she was done playing it. It would be a blessed relief, she told herself as tears burned her eyes, to wash her hands of Patrick Jane.
Sure, they still needed each other to catch Red John. She wasn't going to let her wounded feelings impact her ability to do her job. But beyond that they were done.
Of course, because his sense of timing was never less than impeccable, that was when Jane barged into her office, a ball of indignant energy.
Lisbon schooled her face into cold neutrality. If he thought he was going to get her back on his hook with a little overwrought acting, he was sorely mistaken.
"How could you say that?" he demanded, pacing around the office. "How could you even think it?"
She leaned back in her chair. "Oh gosh, how could I think you'd ever lie to me or manipulate me to get what you want? It's not like you've ever done that before."
"Fine, sure, I've lied, but not about something like that!"
"Like what?"
"Like what I said last time we were in this office," he hissed at her.
"What did you say?" she asked, deadpan. "I thought it was all just a blur to you."
"Don't play games with me," he snarled.
"I'm not the one playing games," she retorted, "but fine, sure, let's just lay it all on the table. You lied about loving me, pretended not to remember doing so, and now you're pissed off that I caught on and called you out."
"Why would I have lied about that?" he asked, dropping into the chair in front of her desk. "What did I have to gain from it? You were already going along with my plan."
"Maybe you just wanted me too distracted to have second thoughts when I figured out someone was calling my brothers to inform them of my untimely death," she mused, "but probably that was just a side benefit. My guess is that it was all about Red John, like it always is with you. You wanted me to give you a shot at killing him yourself, and maybe you were hoping I'd let you get away with it if you did. You had to figure a jury wasn't too likely to give you two passes for murdering a single serial killer. But with a convincing enough police report backing up your self-defense story, the DA wouldn't even press charges."
Jane stared at her for a moment, no doubt trying and failing to find the flaw in her logic. Then he seemed to deflate. "Lisbon," he said, "you know me. I wouldn't do that to you. I'm your partner."
She couldn't stop herself from laughing out loud at that. "Right. My 'partner' who ditches me for six months for an undercover op he can't be bothered to tell me about. My 'partner' who hangs me out to dry in an interview with our lead suspect. My 'partner' who constantly tries to keep me in the dark. I'm not your partner. I'm a stepping stone to Red John. Just like Lorelei. Except you've had to stand on me for a lot longer."
"That's you how you see it?" He looked genuinely stricken. She had to give him points for that. But then if there was one thing you could rely on Patrick Jane for, it was not knowing when to quit.
"That's how it is," she said. "But there's no need to get dramatic about it. This doesn't really change anything."
"You think you not trusting me, you thinking I'm using you, doesn't change anything?"
She shrugged. "Not anything that matters to you. You don't need my trust or my friendship to catch Red John. You just need to stay on my team and have my cooperation. And that part hasn't changed. We can just stop dressing it up as more than it is. It'll save both of us some time and energy. You can stop pretending to give a damn about any of us, and I can stop pretending I can save your soul."
He stuck his chin out. "You think you've solved some great mystery here, huh? Well, you've got everything mixed up and backwards - as usual - and once the dust clears you'll regret jumping to these ridiculous conclusions."
She rolled her eyes. What had she really expected, that he would just roll over and admit he'd been found out? Not him. He never could back down. "Fine," she said. "Whatever. But for now, I have an actual case to solve, and shouldn't you be planning your next date with Lorelei? Maybe bake a lock pick into a cake or something? Personally I think she's a girl who'd prefer a shiv, but then you're the one who knows her best."
"This is not over," he told her, and stalked out of her office.
She let out a long breath and sagged down in her chair. Telling him off had felt good while it lasted, but now that he was gone again, her fury ebbed away, leaving a bleak sort of desolation in its place.
She closed her eyes and looked within herself. She gathered together every tender feeling and secret yearning she'd ever harbored for him and rolled them up into a ball. Then she lit a match in her heart and set them on fire.
Then she felt nothing at all.
It wouldn't last, she knew. But for the time being, she could look her team in the eye and do her job, and she'd take that over the alternative.
It was past four in the morning when the banging on her apartment door started. Lisbon should have been asleep, but predictably she was lying awake in bed cataloging every remotely personal interaction she'd ever had with Jane and trying to puzzle out if he'd ever cared about her at all, if any of those moments of connection had been even slightly genuine, or if it had been a nonstop con from the beginning.
She conceded to herself that she hadn't needed much from him, over the years, to keep her hooked. She'd been an easy mark, and he'd had her measured from the start: a care-taker with an instinctive need to fix broken men and difficulty getting close to anyone. It must have been like Christmas for him, the day they met. As if she'd been tailor made to smooth his way into law enforcement. All he had to do was throw her the odd soulful look or sweet gesture and she came through for him every time, no matter how much damage he did to her or her career in between.
It was, of course, the secret to every great con: get the sucker so turned around she'll beg you to take her for everything she has. Make her think it's all her idea to hand you her life on a silver platter, and she'll wave you off with a smile as you leave her with nothing.
Lisbon had to face the truth: he'd seen right through her, and he'd used what he'd seen, and she had no one to blame but herself for how happily she'd lapped it all up, time after time.
It hurt, of course, but she'd found that the truth usually did.
The banging got louder, and she realized she'd have to get up and deal with it if she didn't want the neighbors involved.
She hauled herself out of bed, shrugged on a robe, and stumbled to the door in the dark. "Go away," she said.
"Let me in," he replied. "You know I can just pick the lock."
She gritted her teeth. "If you set one foot inside this apartment I'm arresting you for trespassing and you'll be spending the rest of the night in jail," she promised.
"Please?" he tried. "We need to talk."
There was no way she was letting him through that door. She was tired and frayed thin, and whatever he was trying to convince her of, she'd rather eat dirt than give him the advantage of being able to watch her face while he did it.
"You can talk from out there," she said.
"Fine," he said, and there was a faint sound of cloth sliding against door, but no further communication.
She put a hand to her forehead. "If you don't have anything to say, I'm going back to bed."
"I want to tell you that I'm sorry." This time his voice came from lower down, as if he was sitting on the ground, and as it hit her that he was actually owning up to what he'd done to her, a wave of weariness passed over her and she found herself mirroring him, sliding down to the floor and leaning back against the door.
Then she remembered that he was Jane and nothing he said was ever straightforward. "What are you sorry for?" she asked.
"For - for treating you so badly for so long that it became easier for you to believe that I'm such a cold bastard that I'd toy with your heart for my personal gain than that I love you but I'm too conflicted and cowardly to admit it when I'm not in fear for your life."
She closed her eyes. She wished he wasn't such a good actor. "Why are you here, Jane? Why are you at my apartment in the middle of the night trying to mess with my head? Why is it so important to you that I believe this particular pack of lies? Shouldn't you be busy plotting how to crack Lorelei once we get her back from the Feds?"
She heard him laugh. "I should be, shouldn't I?" he said. "I tried to. But I couldn't. I couldn't think about anything but you. And that made me so angry. That you should be distracting me when I was closer than ever to catching him. And then I realized that I wasn't really angry with you at all. I was angry with myself. When I left six months ago, I thought the damage I was doing to you and to our - our relationship would be fixable. Or even if it wasn't, that it would be worth it if I got him without anyone else having to die. But it turns out I was wrong. About all of it. And I don't know what to do anymore. So I came here. Because you're where I go when I'm lost."
Lisbon didn't think she would have bought that even before he'd burned the remnants of her faith in him to the ground. But she knew by now that coming at him head-on was almost always a mistake. And the retort that sprang to her lips - that she'd thought all the direction he needed was painted in blood on his bedroom wall in Malibu - seemed too cruel for that hour of the night. So she just said, "What do you want from me, Jane?"
"Tell me how I can earn back your trust. Just - tell me what to do."
She laughed. He had some nerve. "It doesn't work that way."
"I want to prove to you that I'm not just using you. What if - what if you take me off the Red John case? You deal with Lorelei, you deal with everything, you don't have to even tell me what you find out."
"Oh come on. You'd just break into my office every night and read the files for yourself."
"Kick me off the whole team, then. Kick me out of the CBI."
She wondered for half a second if he was actually serious before she remembered what world they were living in. "Nice try," she said. "You know full well I can never call that bluff if I don't want to end up like Bosco. We all know how Red John reacts when you're taken off his case."
"Let the FBI take the case," he suggested. "It won't be your fault, then."
"Yeah, that creepy video we got starring Agent Darcy proves just how well he'd respond to that. No thanks, I don't want any dead Feds on my conscience."
A pause. "I don't know what to do, then. I don't know how to untangle you and me and him enough to show you what I really care about. What can I do?"
A coldness settled over her. She might be a mark to him, but she wasn't going to be such a pathetically easy one that she gave him step by step instructions on how to hoodwink her. "You don't do anything, Jane. I'm perfectly clear on what matters to you already. I'm done here, I'm going back to bed."
She stood up, then paused for a moment to see if he was going to start shouting or pick her locks, but there was no sound at all from the other side of the door. She shook her head and made her way back to her cold bed.
Sleep didn't come any easier than it had earlier, though. She found herself thinking about what she'd effectively confessed to both Jane and herself that day. What had he said about conning Red John? I'm giving him his heart's desire. He will see what he wants to see.
And what had Jane given her as rope to hang herself with? Good luck, Teresa. Love you. Her heart's desire. Goddamn it.
But she wasn't going to fall for it. Because there was, she reminded herself, one thing she wanted more than him, more than anything else. The truth. Without the truth, you were nowhere. You had nothing to hold onto. Her childhood had taught her that lesson better than any other, and she wasn't going to forget it for anyone. Not even him.
Because when she looked back at their time together, not at what he'd said but what he'd done, she knew the truth. Patrick Jane didn't love her at all.