Holiday Fic, Day 17: Brothers in Arms for Red
Title: Brothers in Arms
Author: miss_peg
Rating: R
Summary: Rigsby and Van Pelt get stuck in a lift together.
Notes: Another holiday fic! A reminder that whilst many people did them in December I had lots going on (and quite frankly it was a good idea not to do it then as I was highly unmotivated) so I'm doing it in January along with tromana.
Today's story is for reddawg82's prompt Brothers in Arms about Red John from The Mentalist and John Foster from Skins. Potentially the weirdest fic I have ever written.
A long time ago in a village in Sussex, England, he lived a different life. He grew up one of two boys, twins. A family blessed with love and hope and desire to live the good life. Every Christmas, he’d run down the stairs with his brother, John; fighting to be the first one at the door to the lounge to see if Father Christmas had visited. Every year, he beat him to prime position, but it no longer mattered because they were inside the room, tearing open their gifts, in no time at all. On their birthdays, their mother would make them breakfast in bed and sit on a wooden chair in the centre of the room, watching them explore their birthday presents. At the weekends, she and their father would take them to the park where they would have a picnic, or play football, or visit a castle or museum. In the summer they took the ferry across the English Channel to France; they’d spend two weeks building sandcastles, eating croissants and crepes and walking through historic villages.
Until their twelfth birthday, when they woke up to no breakfast, or presents, just their parents, slaughtered in their bed.
In the years that followed, he lived a solitary life. Despite having John by his side in the foster home, he couldn’t stop thinking about the blood or the way their parent’s bodies had been carved up like pieces of meat. He knew that John had adjusted to their new life and the social worker assigned to them constantly compared them like they were two peas in a pod. But they weren’t. They were twins, biologically, yet emotionally they were strangers. Where John had grown up with the desire to understand the world around him, to understand what kind of person mutilated someone else, he merely fixated his attention on death.
It wasn’t until he turned eighteen and could escape the clutches of his foster family that he changed his life completely. He took the money his parents had left him and fled across the Atlantic Ocean to America, the land of opportunity.
Somewhere along the way his fixation of death became a desire to murder.
He didn’t think about John again until the day his new name landed in the newspapers; “Red John”. He didn’t choose the name, nor did he really care for it. If anything, it made him feel miserable and lonely for the first time since crossing the Atlantic. He’d never missed his brother before and now, everyone knew him by a name which wasn’t even his. He’d become infamous, a cut above the rest, the greatest serial killer that ever lived and that was an achievement he wasn’t willing to lay to rest.
The only time he went back to England after that was after a brief phone call with his foster mother. She could barely get out the words in order to explain that his brother had been killed, beaten to death with his own bat after he’d apparently killed a young boy. For the first time since their parent’s death, he found himself relating to his twin, a strange sense of relief that it wasn’t just him that had lost their sense of light.
So he travelled to England for the funeral and to slaughter the man that killed his brother.