[Fic] Seeing Red Again
Apr. 12th, 2009 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeTitle: Seeing Red Again
Fandom: The Mentalist
Character: Patrick Jane
Rating: R for potentially disturbing/triggering subject matter
Word Count: 666
Summary: How that thing got on the wall of his hospital room
A/N: Spoilers for Red Brick and Ivy
Voices roared through his head like a freight train going past the windows with his head underwater, echoing and alien and loud. Everyone's voice came to him from another world, a world where things were still all right and black was still black, white was still white, words still had meaning. His skin was not his own. Touches reached him through rubber sheeting an inch thick. He was in pain, constant, body-wracking pain. So much pain that he didn't know what to do with it.
Days and nights were separated by micro-barriers of pills and meals. Meals in pills. He didn't know what the pills were supposed to do but he didn't take them anyway, tucking them away between his fingers, in the folds of his clothes, under his tongue or between his cheek and his gums. Tucking them into the leftover food, the napkin, as they carried the tray away. If they found them they didn't try to force them down his throat, which he hadn't thought of until years after the hospital.
They didn't take him out of the room. It didn't much matter. He was in another room, another place, far away from this.
...especially by a dirty, money-grubbing fraud...
He was coming up the stairs, smiling, eager. Always anticipating, always hopeful that this time it would be different. The ending would be different. Something would be different, a smiling wife and a warm embrace to sooth the day away, a happily sleeping child. Or a picnic and crumbs in the bed, something. A different ending. But the door was still the same, the note on the door unchanged. His eyes widened, his hand reached out for empty air, for the cold metal of the doorknob.
... you wouldn't need to open the door to see what I've done to your lovely wife and child.
The face on the wall. Always the face on the wall. Dark red crust and the smell of blood everywhere, everywhere in the room. This room was white, too white. No pictures on the wall. No light, just whiteness. No color.
Jane began to paint. The walls were the wrong color. So he began to paint.
The weakness started in his hands as they trembled, the memory of what had happened. His fingers trembled. He ignored it, it was only a symptom of the greater disease, the decay of the person who had been Patrick Jane. It was irrelevant.
The walls were too white, too bare. The circle came first, one hand smearing red in a wide swath over the wall. And again, and again until it was the right color. The right depth. Until it looked right in what his mind super-imposed over the blank wall, a blank canvas on which to write the message of his crimes. The eyes next, and then the mouth. A smile that made his knees weak and brought him crashing to the ground, head bowed under the weight of that face.
It was almost done. He left drops of red in a smeared trail, liquid crushed under his bare feet as he went back to the bed, taking the mattress in one careless hand and dragging it to the wall. He wanted this face watching over him at all times. It was the last thing to be seen and the first thing to be seen and he wanted to see it to remind him of why he was here. What he deserved. They couldn't take this away from him. They couldn't take him out of this room because this was where he lived, always.
Dear mister Jane...
"Mister Jane?" Red on white. "Mister Jane!"
They put him on suicide watch within the hour. Padded cuffs and stitches holding the flesh together, the man inside long vacant. Blue eyes wide and unseeing. Nothing mattered except the face on the wall, the blood on the wall and the horror that he had perpetrated within that room.
Fandom: The Mentalist
Character: Patrick Jane
Rating: R for potentially disturbing/triggering subject matter
Word Count: 666
Summary: How that thing got on the wall of his hospital room
A/N: Spoilers for Red Brick and Ivy
Voices roared through his head like a freight train going past the windows with his head underwater, echoing and alien and loud. Everyone's voice came to him from another world, a world where things were still all right and black was still black, white was still white, words still had meaning. His skin was not his own. Touches reached him through rubber sheeting an inch thick. He was in pain, constant, body-wracking pain. So much pain that he didn't know what to do with it.
Days and nights were separated by micro-barriers of pills and meals. Meals in pills. He didn't know what the pills were supposed to do but he didn't take them anyway, tucking them away between his fingers, in the folds of his clothes, under his tongue or between his cheek and his gums. Tucking them into the leftover food, the napkin, as they carried the tray away. If they found them they didn't try to force them down his throat, which he hadn't thought of until years after the hospital.
They didn't take him out of the room. It didn't much matter. He was in another room, another place, far away from this.
...especially by a dirty, money-grubbing fraud...
He was coming up the stairs, smiling, eager. Always anticipating, always hopeful that this time it would be different. The ending would be different. Something would be different, a smiling wife and a warm embrace to sooth the day away, a happily sleeping child. Or a picnic and crumbs in the bed, something. A different ending. But the door was still the same, the note on the door unchanged. His eyes widened, his hand reached out for empty air, for the cold metal of the doorknob.
... you wouldn't need to open the door to see what I've done to your lovely wife and child.
The face on the wall. Always the face on the wall. Dark red crust and the smell of blood everywhere, everywhere in the room. This room was white, too white. No pictures on the wall. No light, just whiteness. No color.
Jane began to paint. The walls were the wrong color. So he began to paint.
The weakness started in his hands as they trembled, the memory of what had happened. His fingers trembled. He ignored it, it was only a symptom of the greater disease, the decay of the person who had been Patrick Jane. It was irrelevant.
The walls were too white, too bare. The circle came first, one hand smearing red in a wide swath over the wall. And again, and again until it was the right color. The right depth. Until it looked right in what his mind super-imposed over the blank wall, a blank canvas on which to write the message of his crimes. The eyes next, and then the mouth. A smile that made his knees weak and brought him crashing to the ground, head bowed under the weight of that face.
It was almost done. He left drops of red in a smeared trail, liquid crushed under his bare feet as he went back to the bed, taking the mattress in one careless hand and dragging it to the wall. He wanted this face watching over him at all times. It was the last thing to be seen and the first thing to be seen and he wanted to see it to remind him of why he was here. What he deserved. They couldn't take this away from him. They couldn't take him out of this room because this was where he lived, always.
Dear mister Jane...
"Mister Jane?" Red on white. "Mister Jane!"
They put him on suicide watch within the hour. Padded cuffs and stitches holding the flesh together, the man inside long vacant. Blue eyes wide and unseeing. Nothing mattered except the face on the wall, the blood on the wall and the horror that he had perpetrated within that room.