Title: Reliance

Author: Miss Peg

Rating: T

Summary: Patrick Jane had wanted vengeance for his family's murders for years, only now, there was more to the story.

Note: Written for the Paint It Red August Monthly challenge to fit the prompt sine qua non: "an indispensable thing". Before she went out, tromana set me a challenge of nominating 5 stories in the Jello Forever awards, as well as writing 500 words. She told me to be creative, I'm not sure if this is what either of us had in mind.

Reliance

The gun shot rattled his ears. He hated guns. Always had and probably always would. Lisbon and the team assumed he'd grown more accustomed to them; after all, he had shot a man. They didn't understand the pain that burst through his body every time he heard a pistol go off. The sudden, unexpected reminder of the crime that he'd committed.

They'd never understand what it meant to Patrick Jane. Nobody realised that the day he shot Timothy Carter was the day he knew he'd lost the plot entirely. Not that he'd ever let anyone else know that. Everything he did was because of Red John, for Red John, in order to catch Red John. It was a mantra he'd learned many years before.

In the early days, it meant something more than it did now. He wanted vengeance for his family's deaths. Who wouldn't? In reality, that hadn't changed. There was merely more to the story than there once was.

Everything he did now was in order to keep the man, who killed them, close by.

He realised how twisted it sounded. Which was why it stayed locked up in his mind, the one place no one, not even Red John, could break into. Didn't they all realise what had become of his life now? The reality was that Red John was as much a part of his past, present and future as the memory of his wife and child. He'd suffered a breakdown all because he'd let his guard down and allowed his grief to consume him. Not anymore. If he didn't fight every single day, fight for the vengeance of his family, then he'd have to face up to the truth. They were never coming back.

For a while he'd been deluded, he thought that killing Red John would somehow make things easier. Then he'd stood in that shopping mall, the gun in his hand with Timothy Carter telling him all about the shampoo he used to wash his daughter's hair. Very few people would know that fact; it clouded his judgement for a mere second before he snapped out of it. This man was not the man he'd been looking for, why would he risk his own death like that? Red John was clever; he had to give him that. Cleverer than he'd ever anticipated because it was that moment, that realisation that Timothy Carter wasn't Red John, which led Jane to realise how much he relied upon the serial killer in order to stay sane.

And Red John knew that.

If he didn't, then why was he constantly one step ahead? Why was he always there on the edge of his life, waiting for the right moment to strike, to remind him that he was still there? It had become an obsession, not least for Jane, but also for the man he sought on a daily basis.

Without that fixation, that hope that he could avenge the worst tragedy of his life, Jane would be left with the hopelessness that he'd seen people live with time and time again. Death cut a hole into a person's heart, one that was so hard to repair that he'd given up on trying a long time ago. He would never be okay. He would never recover from the pain of losing Angela and especially losing Charlotte.

That was why he needed to hold on to the dream that was his vengeance. If he didn't, then he would have to see the size of the gap in the centre of his heart, instead of looking for ways to fix it. That was why he would never track down Red John and he would never kill him, because doing so would only make things ten times worse.