A is for Arrogance Patrick Jane doesn't take a seat, he owns the space in the chair and around it. If you're lucky, that wasn't your chair he just took. He owns the space around him and uses that as a weapon, pushing himself into the spaces of others, dominating the room when he chooses. He holds himself straight and tall, leonid, secure in his masculinity and his sexuality and his intelligence and the truth of his perceptions. And the awareness that he is not infallible, which tempers it enough to inspire him to greater heights of perfection. It's not unwonted pride -- he really is that good. And he knows it. And if you don't acknowledge it, or raise yourself in his eyes as close to his equal, he will push that arrogance and that pride into your personal space until he smothers you with it. And you will enjoy every moment.

B is for Brilliance His smile is blinding. He's truly one of the beautiful people: blond curly locks, sky blue eyes, handsome, self-assured. A brightness that radiates from him with a glow that seems to have a self-controlled dimmer switch. When he wants to be, he can be the center of a room's adulation. A big room. When he wants to he can make the cloudiest day, rain pouring down, seem like high noon. He's so beautiful everyone wants to fall in love with him, and so terrible that they shrink from it, although they don't know why. Brilliant like the sun, and when you stare into the sun, what do you see.

C is for Charm "It's not really work, it's just the power to charm." He could have everything he ever wanted (except that which he wants most) with the power of his smile alone. With a look of soulful eyes and the way he juts out his lower lip, the lowered chin pout. He's like a child, a tall and lean-muscled child, who knows exactly how handsome and winsome he is and how little anyone is prepared to resist the charms of a child. Even one who happens to be five foot ten and favors blue shirts and suits retro to the 19th century.

D is for Destruction No one notices the way Patrick Jane merrily blazes his path to his own destruction. The sleepless nights conceal where he spends his nights; everyone is so worried about how much sleep he gets that no one thinks to ask if he's scrubbed that face off his wall yet. He dodges and squirms Lisbon' questions until, with deep reluctance and downcast eyes, he admits that he was hospitalized for a breakdown and she stops pushing. She never reaches to the suicide attempts, painting a smiling face on the wall in his own blood, attempting to finish what the killer started because he doesn't deserve to live. No one points out that he was attracted to the black widow woman. No one asks further how he extracts confessions, achieves his own sense of justice. No one worries that by the time he catches up to Red John he may have destroyed so much of his former life that once the goal that has been driving him is met he will have no life left to live.

E is for Empathy It isn't just technique and intelligence; there's a heart beneath all that teeming brain. A heart he uses as a weapon as surely as any other aspect of himself that he chooses to put into his arsenal. Empathy is his tool, is his magic power, more than the telepathy he pretended to have. That empathy with which he understands the way the world works, the way people work. Knowing the way people work, enabling him to manipulate those workings until they dance for his pleasure. Sympathy, he lacks. Sympathy, the sharing of feelings, he refuses. He wants no one's sympathy and he withholds it from those around him although he fakes it well but empathy is understanding, and that is part of what makes him so damned dangerous.

F is for Fall Patrick claims no religion, rejects faith in a higher power, but one day in conversation and a battle of wits back and forth Grace compares him to Lucifer before the fall, and Patrick shocks everyone by agreeing. He is fallen from grace, though not the grace Grace thinks of. No heaven for him but his true love's arms, in which he can never rest again. No angel but his baby girl, whose presence will never ease his heart again. He is falling, always falling, always finding a lower place while those around him remark upon how well he's doing and how he's coping and how they're sure he's coming to grips and moving on and a thousand other catchphrases. Patrick doesn't so much know better as simply accept the truth of his fall as fact. There is no coming to grips. There is no moving on. There is no getting better for him, there is only the long drop and the sudden stop at the bottom when his life ends and he pulls up short and falls, finally, into nothingness.

G is for Game It's all a game, everything's a game. He makes bets with Cho. He teases Grace in HQ. The little games are parallel to the big ones but they laugh at his antics and never see. He pushes. Always pushing, he has to be told no in a firm voice and made to believe that no, like a child. He may act like a five year old but they treat him as a responsible adult, and even Lisbon knows that's occasionally a mistake. Not how often. Never how often. Not how he can never ask for what he wants, for what he needs, how he always has to make a game of it. She doesn't see how he plays them all, how he moves them all like pieces on a chess board and him the King, most empowered and most imprisoned within his own tiny set of squares.

H is for Heartbreaker No one on the team will admit to noticing, but Jane leaves a trail of broken hearts and broken lives in his wake. One or two instances, yes, he may be called out on, but it happens more often than they want to think about. Broken families, torn apart by the revelations he pulls out of them and leaves scattered about him like wrapping paper in a Christmas aftermath. Those he touches more deeply he leaves scarred, hearts pulled out of them and given to him freely so he can examine them with a cold and clinical eye and drop them behind him, step on them as he walks past. One woman did survive the walking emotional disaster zone that is Patrick Jane, and yet she broke his heart beyond anyone's ability to repair.

I is for Intelligence Patrick is the living definition of too smart for his own good, intelligent and perceptive and quick-witted and deadly. Clever enough to know that people don't like a clever man, not when he shows it off, not when he's constantly showboating the fact that he's smarter than you, except he's also smart enough to be so damn charming you can't resist. His mind has been honed since before it knew what a mind was, worked into the finest tool it could be by his family, by himself, by the strength of his will and constant, constant practice. It is the one thing that he can always find reassurance in, that he is the most intelligent man in the room. No matter what anyone else thinks.

J is for Judgment He has it. All the time, every time. When he looks at you, you are weighed and measured in an instant and so often you will be found wanting. He judges you unfit for his full attention, unfit to receive the benefit of his wisdom. He tolerates, but it is toleration only. He judges the world around him and the people in it with a harsh set of standards that are too often too high for other to reach, and the only harsher judgment that he levels is against himself. A whole other set of standards, and if the ones he sets for others are high the ones he sets for himself are beyond the moon. He is always, always falling short of where he wants to be. But he is unable to dismiss himself from his sight so he must live with the squirming disappointment that he feels.

K is for Kiss There are many kinds of kisses. The delicate kiss of a father to a child over the top of her head that gives her that feeling of safety and peace. The brief but warm and familiar kiss of a husband to his wife as he comes home at the end of the day. There are the kisses he uses now, brush of lips across the back of a delicate hand to titillate the mind and lower the defenses. The brush of lips not over the cheek as he says but at the corner of her mouth where it's a reminder of what they once had and a message of how he thinks of her, that he wants to be so much closer than he is and will never allow himself that. Patrick Jane understands seduction, understands the power of a kiss, understands that you cannot bestow a kiss without being kissed by sensation in return and that in order to seduce someone effectively you must allow yourself to be seduced in return.

L is for Love Patrick Jane has never stopped loving his wife, his daughter, and he never will. His love for them eclipses anything he has ever done or will ever do, save one thing. And even that is for love of them, and for the hole in his heart their loss has left behind.

M is for Mercurial Jane is a creature of passions and moods that swerve so quickly it's hard even for him to keep track. The slightest thing can knock him on his ass for days, and yet he is capable of finding joy in a day in the sunshine. The ups and down leave him breathless and cost a great deal of energy, which is why the ups are so very high and the downs leave him with just enough energy to stand in the darkness and watch. He rides them like tides, using the furious energy to power himself through the cases, through the problems, to fuel the will that he imposes on the world around them so that when the energy runs out he can stand back and watch them walk through the patterns he has laid in front of them.

N is for Need Patrick's needs aren't normal. There is no escaping that and there is no point in being ashamed of it, either. He needs many of the same things he abhors or disdains. The company of others. The adulation, the attention. The idiodicy, fools and the dull-witted, for without those to lord it over he would be lord of nothing at all. He needs them as much as he needs the solitude. The quiet. The still time to be silent and take control of himself. All of these contradicting needs, striking at different times and indulged, for the most part, according to his whimsy. But whatever it is he needs, whatever it is he decides he must have, he goes after with a ferocity that would terrify any who looked at it closely and clearly enough to understand.

O is for Obfuscation Patrick Jane is odd. No one would argue that, not when he plays his tricks and games with a smile on his face and dazzles you with a show of cleverness that leaves you with not a clue as to what he's really up to. He obfuscates, deceives, inveigles. He throws up smoke and mirrors and shadows and glitter, he smiles, he rants, he rages and sighs and looks down and away and fights back tears so that you'll just stop fucking asking. He'll make you work for the littlest bit of information so that, when you think it's the world and back down, he's given you nothing. He makes you laugh so that you cannot remember you wanted to cry or scream. He hides so well that you don't even know he's hiding in plain sight, obfuscated and alone.

P is for Power It's always a power struggle with Jane, and it's never the way you think. He has it, you don't. Except when he doesn't. The last time he was truly powerless was opening that door, a feeling that is almost as terrible as the dread that makes him vomit every time he remembers it. It's that powerless feeling he hates, the feeling that Red John took away everything he ever had, everything he ever loved, and he was powerless to stop it. It's that feeling that makes him glow, makes him bold, makes him vent a little bit on every criminal they catch and put away. Venting, manipulating, showing not only the bad guys but also his supposed teammates, look. See. See me very well. I am the one with the power here, not you. And he is. Patrick Jane has, is the power in the room. Except when he isn't. Except when the power has him. And you'll never know when that is until it's too late and there's a worse monster in control.

Q is for Questions How did you do that? What are you doing? What do you want? Where are you going? Why are you smiling? What are you talking about? What do you mean? Why did you do that? What's going on? Questions float thick in the air around Patrick Jane, but when he smiles like that you can't help the fleeting sense that even if he deigns to respond you wouldn't understand the answers.

R is for Redemption which he can never, ever have.

S is for Synchronicity It wasn't any one thing that made Patrick the way he was. Looking back on it even he couldn't trace the web to a single point of origin. It was a confluence of events; many opportunities died and many lessons were learned just slanted enough to make him the damaged, warped man he is today. But for a casual, cocky choice of words his family would be alive. But for a pair of tickets won in a raffle to a taping of a show he wouldn't have a family at all, only a collection of conquests. But for an unflinching gaze and a few parlor tricks when the head of the studio happened to be watching there wouldn't have been a show at all. Beyond that he cannot see, behind all the deceptions and all the dire consequences of his actiosn somewhere in his childhood there is a horseshoe nail, but damned if Patrick can find it. All he knows of the present is that he's riding the synchronicity highway.

T is for Touch Sophie Miller learned the hard way that Patrick Jane does not suffer touch casually. She reached into the abyss and tried to grab ahold and ended up nearly being pulled in after him. Since his wife's death Patrick so rarely touches anyone, and never without purpose. He uses touch the way he uses his words or glances or gestures, without compunction or mercy. Withholding it, hands clasped behind his back. Granting it, curling one hand over the other over the woman's. One hand on Lisbon's back, pressing her forward as he gives her the illusion of guiding him. The only ones he touches unhesitatingly are children, who are too young to know better and too innocent to be hurt by withholding that touch.

U is for Un U is for unconventional, his methods are off the wall and off the reservation but they get results and that's why they keep him around. U is for unbelieving, because no matter how many times he shows them, tells them, does everything but tattoo it on his skin his teammates cannot and will not see or understand. U is for understanding, and the lack of it that surrounds him, they cannot see how he is drowning and so they cannot throw him the line. U is for unwanted, because if anyone truly saw him they would run to the ends of the earth to escape him. U is for untouchable, for the way he holds himself apart and refuses any touch that is not in his control. U is for unkind, because while he has been generous up until now he can be very, very cruel. U is for unflinching, look into that abyss that is Patrick Jane and do not flinch, because if you flinch and give him that advantage he will take you and break you and shake you inside to out. U is for uncontrollable, because he is.

V is for Vengeance Bloody, slow vengeance. It burns in his mind when he lets himself think on it, and when he lets himself show it even just a little it makes those who touch it recoil. So he doesn't. He hides the need to have satisfaction in the blood and viscera of Red John behind a wide smile and a tearful gaze towards the floor, a trembling and watery frown, a fist through a wall. All the outward signs of what everyone expects, but when he finally has his revenge on the man who he believes destroyed him it will be what no one expects; it will be a thousand times worse. And what Patrick won't let himself think about, what he knows but won't admit, is that in the end vengeance is all he has anymore.

W is for Will There are as many aphorisms and sayings about the power of will as there are mouths to say them, and Patrick Jane knows so many. He doesn't need one of his own; the way he moves about his co-workers, so-called friends, the way he lives his life is living proof of the strength of his will. Given a hand reached out to him in compassion he reaches up and by the strength of his spirit pulls her under so he can climb out over her. Given a crowd of people in a room he becomes the center of gravity as easily as breathing. He imposes his will on you with a hand on your wrist and a look of deep gray-blue into your eyes and the words on his lips become your world, you would do it, whatever he said. Effortless. Your will is subsumed as easy as breathing to him, and with a little more effort he could break it. A good thing, then, that it is not his will to do so.

X marks the spot His attacks are precise. His strikes are surgical and to the purpose, his twin weapons of wit and perception cutting away what he needs to be cut away and leaving the victim, so often, with no idea of what has been lost. An opportunity, a moment of truth, a piece of emotion valuable and unknown to them. The perfect marksman; he shoots with his mind. Even when his target is himself.

Y is for You You don't understand him. You can't know him. You can't control or contain him. You can never, ever have him. You are in his power, at his mercy, and may whatever powers you believe in have mercy on you if you manage to hold his full attention. And yet there are times, there are always times few and far between, when he needs you. When he will cling to you harder than anyone ever has in ways you would never suspect. And if you fail him, if you leave, if you step away in that moment you may damn well never be able to return again. Really, you are doomed to fail him at one point or another, always. But that's okay. He'll let you fall, too.

Z is for Zero Patrick Jane is ground zero for his own personal walking disaster area.

Go to the top! For you have reached the bottom.