45A/N: This is a sequel to my story A Game of Truth and I recommend reading that first. Thanks to North Coast, who wanted to see Jane and Lisbon working a case after becoming romantically involved - though this is probably not even a little bit what you had in mind.
The title is borrowed from the lovely Joni Mitchell song.
A Case of You
Part 1:
As Agent Lisbon knocked on the surveillance van's door, she spared a moment to pray that tonight would be the night they finally broke the case, and this stupid ordeal would be over. She was twenty minutes early for her 10 PM shift, and she clutched an oversized travel mug full of the strongest coffee she could brew.
Agent Snyder slid the door open and Lisbon climbed in, her eyes automatically scanning the bank of monitors on the opposite wall of the van, frowning when she couldn't find Jane anywhere.
"He's in the bathroom," Snyder told her, a knowing smirk in the other agent's voice.
Lisbon was well aware that the majority of the FBI's Sacramento Field Office had assumed she and Jane were sleeping together from the time their team joined up as acting agents in the aftermath of the Red John case. She'd once overheard Snyder speculating about her use of some rather intimate disciplinary measures to another agent in the lady's room. She'd just flushed her toilet and emerged from the stall with a serenely implacable smile on her face, washed her hands, met each of the other agents' eyes in turn, and left without a word. She'd learned over their years at the CBI that dignifying such remarks with even the most contemptuous replies only fed the gossip mill. And she'd long since given up being bothered by what people said about them. It was just one more brick in the wall of law-enforcement-typical misogyny.
But that had been before there was any truth to the rumors. Now, two weeks into an undefined but definitely non-platonic relationship with her wayward consultant, ten days of which he'd spent undercover in the mental institution across the street from the surveillance van, she wanted to slap that smug, insinuating look right off Snyder's face.
She didn't, of course. She just asked for an update on the developments of the day in her most flatly professional voice, flipping through the written logs as Snyder gave her the highlights. Of which there were few. She could only hope that Jane had something useful to tell her when he checked in later.
Snyder clocked out at 9:55. By 10 PM, Jane was back in his room as required by the ward schedule. The lights shut off at 10:10, and at 10:15 Jane had fished the radio disguised as an MP3 player out from his mattress and had the earphones in, ready to go. The FBI really did have cooler toys.
"Jane?" she said into her own headset.
"I hear you, Lisbon," he said, his voice a little rough.
"How are you doing?" she asked.
"Fine. But I miss sleeping in my own bed." Which was to say, he missed sleeping in their bed. This was as close to personal as he could get when every word they spoke was being recorded by the FBI as potential evidence.
"Well, I'd rather be home in my bed than spending the night in a van," she replied. "So can you tell me anything that'll get both of us out of here?"
It was an ugly case. Murders in a locked ward, suicidal patients who seemed to kill themselves - until a suspicious ME had looked a little harder at the latest victim's corpse. Even now, it was impossible to tell how many previous deaths were really murder - though there was enough evidence that a serial killer was at work to get the FBI involved. But with so much uncertainty about the scope of the crimes and so little evidence to work with, it was agreed that the best tactic was to plant a potential target inside the facility to lure the murderer into making a move. Rigsby had been placed as an orderly, Van Pelt as a physician's assistant - and Jane was the bait. He played the part of Patrick Russell, a suicidally depressed widower, with a degree of verisimilitude that Lisbon found deeply disturbing. He checked in once a day, after lights out, and every night she heard the increasing toll the charade was taking on him. It wasn't fair, she thought. The two of them should be reveling in their new closeness, stealing every moment they could together, and instead she got to watch him on video screens reliving the darkest chapter of his life.
Since he'd walked in those doors, he'd looked like a man who hadn't smiled in so long he'd forgotten how. His face was lined with despair, his demeanor listless and withdrawn, as if he'd retreated to some dark place beyond the reach of his fellow creatures. This bleak lethargy was punctuated only by moments of haunted anguish when his face twisted with unbearable pain.
It was a very convincing act. Except Lisbon was entirely aware that in another way, it wasn't an act at all, but a journey back to somewhere he'd been all too often before.
He cleared his throat. "I still think the Care Coordinator and Nurse Edward are the most likely suspects. Do you have any new background on them?"
"The Care Coordinator's father committed suicide when she was sixteen. Nurse Edward had a close friend - his college roommate - who killed himself in his early twenties."
"Do you know any more details?" he asked. "Did the suicides come after a lengthy struggle with mental illness, or were they triggered by some concrete event?"
"I don't have that yet. We'll dig into it tomorrow. Anything else I should know?"
On the screen, she saw Jane glance up at where the camera was hidden, and then away again. "In group today, I said I'd tried to hang myself but a friend found me and saved my life. I said I wished he hadn't - that a true friend would have understood and let me end my suffering." An odd expression crossed his face. "I thought if someone tried strangulation in here, I might have a better chance of fighting them off than some other methods."
"Good choice," she said wryly, trying to keep her voice steady. She knew, now, that when he really had tried to kill himself, before they met, it had been with pain pills and alcohol. She almost wished he'd never told her that, because now she kept picturing it, his slackly unconscious face beside a pool of vomit in that beautiful mausoleum of a house. But she couldn't let him know how much the case - or rather, his role in the case - was getting to her, or he'd do something reckless and foolhardy to bring it all to a head and get himself nearly killed in the process. And she wouldn't be there to save him.
She didn't know what was wrong with her. He'd been in life-threatening situations dozens of times over the years, and it had never gotten to her like this. She'd worried over him before, lost sleep over him, imagined herself at his funeral more times than she cared to admit, but it had never made her feel this out of control. Of course, all those other times had been before he told her he was hers.
When she'd been debating whether or not to get involved with him, she'd imagined that, given his personal history, he would be the paranoid one, cooking up elaborate schemes to keep her out of the line of fire. It had never occurred to her that she might be the one losing her mind when, objectively, this situation was much safer and better controlled than most of the others he'd embroiled himself in over the years.
She was careful not to let her concerns color her voice as they went over the rest of the day's updates for each other. Their conversations were succinct and business-like, but they helped. She thought if she hadn't been able to hear his voice once a day, she'd be climbing the walls.
After they signed off, he slept or pretended to, and she watched the surveillance feeds as the staff closed up shop for the night. Once it had quieted down, she began to review videos from earlier in the day, tracking their chief suspects as well as Jane himself, looking for any salient details the rest of the surveillance team had missed. She jotted down a few moments that could be construed as suspicious, though there was nothing that narrowed down the pool of possible murderers. It could have been anyone who'd been with the facility long-term and had access to both information about the patients and their living quarters, which yielded a surprisingly long list, from nurses and doctors to janitorial staff. Jane had at one point suggested it could even be a long-term patient, though thus far no evidence had pointed in that direction.
In the morning, Cho checked in to replace Lisbon in the van, and she drove to the FBI building to review the progress their analyst had made in researching the backgrounds of their suspects and possible victims, and trying to determine whether anyone had improperly accessed electronic patient files. The case was slowly coming together, but there was nothing incriminating yet. There might not be until the murderer made another move, but she didn't want to accept that, so she spent another hour putting together her next set of instructions for the analyst they'd been assigned.
It was all so frustrating. The undercover op hinged on the fact that almost no one at the mental hospital knew the murders had been detected, which hamstrung the rest of the team. The second they tried to run a traditional investigation, bringing the suspects in for interrogations and trying to break their alibis, they ran the very real risk that their murderer would disappear, only to surface in some other facility and start killing all over again. It felt like they were getting nowhere.
Once Lisbon ran out of plausibly productive tasks, she headed home to get some rest before her night shift started. Her apartment felt empty and wrong. Jane had been staying with her for months, since shortly after McAllister's death, though they'd only recently made the arrangement official. She hadn't had any idea just how accustomed she'd grown to his presence until he was gone. Even though this was the same apartment she'd lived in alone perfectly happily for years and years, that sense of comfort and belonging had disappeared.
She took off her badge and gun and jacket, dropped her bag on the couch, toed off her shoes, and made her way back to their bedroom, thinking that maybe changing clothes would help her relax. She was foggy with exhaustion, her sleep lately fractured and plagued by nightmares, and when she swung the door open some trick of the mounded blankets on the unmade bed and an arc of shadow on the wall over the headboard suggested the ultimate horror: Jane's body lying under a bloody smile.
Her legs gave out and before she knew it she was cowering on the floor, arms over her head to block out a sight her rational mind told her was impossible. For that second it was real, though, and it felt like her ribcage had been torn open. Her throat was so tight she couldn't pull in air, but with iron will she made herself open her eyes and take in the scene. No blood, no corpse, just the same empty room she'd left the evening before.
It dawned on her, then, exactly how little she'd ever understood about Jane's grief. She had seen it in him, sympathized with him, hurt for him, but she'd lacked any frame of reference for what it actually felt like. She'd mourned her mother as a child, Bosco as a friend, her father less than she felt she should have, but she'd never lost her whole heart. She still couldn't grasp it, really, but she could come close enough now to imagine the scope of that devastation.
If Jane had actually lain murdered in their bed, in the place he'd held her in his arms and whispered words of love, she'd never be able to set foot in that room again. She'd burn down the whole apartment complex first.
But for Jane of course it hadn't just been grief, it had been guilt as well, and he had punished himself for years in the desecrated sanctuary of his marriage. It really wasn't surprising that he'd tried to kill himself, she reflected. The surprise was that he'd only done it once.
Her stomach gurgled, and she shook her head to clear it and changed into pajamas before microwaving some leftover pizza. Jane's absence had impacted her diet as well as her peace of mind.
She crashed out on the couch after eating, with the TV on to break up the silence, and after a few hours of sleep she got up and went through the whole routine again: the surveillance van, the check-in with Jane, a night watching video feeds, a morning at the office chasing down cold trails that never led anywhere, then back to her empty apartment with a fast food burger and fries paired with a shot of whiskey to steady her nerves.
She slept on the couch again, sliding in and out of consciousness, blind with exhaustion, her body unmoored from the cycles of the days, until she fell into a familiar nightmare. She couldn't remember the first time she'd had it, and it was never the same twice. She was always with Jane somewhere, at work, in the field - tonight they were at home together, eating dinner. Everything was normal for a while. Then Jane wiped his mouth with a napkin, but instead of smearing the sauce on his lip, it smeared his face instead. She reached out to him and his whole face fell off into her hands. Sometimes there was black emptiness inside his head, or clockwork gears, or another face, blank and reptilian. This time, it was bare muscles and blood - the inside of an actual human being.
Lisbon woke with a start, sweaty and tangled in the throw blanket. The dreams had always been painfully obvious even to her: that she feared everything she saw in Jane was just a hollow shell covering something far worse. There had been whole years when she suspected every single interaction they had was a manipulation or a series of behavioral experiments for his private amusement, that every piece of himself he showed her was a ploy at best and a lie at worst. She suspected she'd never have been able to tolerate him if she hadn't met him before he put the mask back together, and thus known that underneath the tricks he wasn't malicious: he was just lost.
Of course even when he'd been at his most calculatingly invasive, she'd never exactly wanted him to leave her alone. As much as she'd hated having her barriers breached, it had been flattering as well, the intensity of his interest. He'd played with the rest of the team, but he hadn't studied them. She'd known he was searching for something, perhaps without even being aware of it himself, and if he was trying to find it by unraveling her… well, she didn't have to make it easy for him, but she wasn't going to stop him from trying.
And the dream today? Clearly she was afraid that under the charming smiles, he was still nothing but pain. There had been times, in the past week, when she'd watched video of his vacant hopelessness and wondered if that was still the truth of him. If his claims that she made him happy, that he was finally moving on, were more wish than anything else, and he was just trying to fake his way through a relationship with her because he didn't know what else to do now that his old reason for living had died with McAllister. Or because it was what he thought she wanted, and she was the one who'd helped him execute his revenge. Or if being with her had proved an immediate let down once the thrill of the chase was gone.
It had all felt very genuine at the time. He'd seemed happier than she'd ever seen him before. When he declared his love, she'd believed him, and after a brief hesitation she'd allowed herself to be swept along by his certainty. But Jane could play any role for a week. Besotted suitor was well within his range.
And even if it had been real, it didn't mean his grief had receded so very much at all, that his affection for her wasn't a small boat floating on a deep sea of anguish. And that was all right. She hadn't taken him on because he was easy. But she hated this feeling of disorientation, not knowing which way was up.
It felt like he was disappearing right in front of her. She thought of all the times he'd left her: at a dozen crime scenes, at the beach on the way to Malibu - this wasn't even the first time a fake breakdown had been involved, though in most respects this was the opposite of his sojourn in Vegas. Then, she hadn't known where he was or how to reach him. Now, she could observe him every hour of the day, but what did that matter if she couldn't tell the act from the truth, if every night he slipped further away?
When he'd promised not to leave her again two weeks ago, they'd only been talking about his physical location. It hadn't occurred to her that he could vanish without going anywhere at all. And she couldn't even blame him - he'd done nothing but faithfully execute the plan she helped design.
She hadn't made much progress in untangling her feelings for him yet - hadn't even tried hard, if she was being honest, but she'd become very clear on two points: she wanted him to be happy, and she wanted him to be with her. Right now he was neither of those things, and she had the sinking feeling it was all her fault. She was the one who was supposed to take care of him, to steer him away from the edge. But she'd failed him this time. She hadn't understood what going undercover would mean for him. She'd thought it would be just another mask he could put on and take off without changing what was underneath.
She knew now that she'd been wrong. She'd merrily sent him off to tear himself into pieces for this stupid, awful case. She just hoped that when it was over, he'd let her help him put himself back together again.
Lisbon decided she was irrevocably awake and shuffled to the kitchen to eat a granola bar and brew a pot of coffee. Maybe a shower would restore her to some semblance of humanity.
Despite feeling like she was moving at half speed, she arrived at the surveillance van ahead of her shift.
When Snyder opened the door, she was holding a bag of potato chips in her other hand. "Want any?" she asked, jiggling the packet in Lisbon's direction.
Lisbon glanced at it briefly before her gaze flicked to the monitors and she forgot all about snack foods. "What's wrong with Jane?" she demanded. The man was sprawled out on his bed, fully dressed but apparently unconscious, his disguised radio dangling from one hand. With a feeling of abject relief, she saw his chest rise and fall.
Snyder shrugged, unconcerned. "He seemed really tired. He went to bed early."
She bit back a retort. "Show me what happened before this."
Snyder fiddled with the controls for a moment, then queued up the scene on another display. Jane was in the patients' common area, making desultory conversation with the woman from room 19, when he began to sway slightly in his seat. He shook his head as if to clear it, then stood up and headed for the exit, looking increasingly unsteady as he went. By the time he got to the hall, he had a hand against the wall for balance.
"He's obviously been drugged," she said.
Snyder made some sort of pitiful excuse for her gross incompetence, but that wasn't important. Lisbon had already dialed Van Pelt, who would be nearest to hand, and explained the situation.
Then she called Rigsby, telling him to get into position across the hall from Jane's room, and Cho, telling him to quietly bring in some backup in case the murderer made a break for it and an ambulance in case Jane turned out to be less sedated and more poisoned.
The surveillance feeds showed no one out of place, and Lisbon watched in an agony of impatience as Grace got off the elevator, chatted briefly with the woman on night-duty at the nurse's station, and made her way back to Jane's room.
Finally she was there, bending over him to check his heartbeat and breathing. "His pulse and respiration are elevated but not distressed," she reported over her headset. She continued her exam. "He's unresponsive. Body a bit rigid. No obvious signs of overdose or poisoning. I'm going to see if I can rouse him."
On the screen, Lisbon watched Grace shake and then slap Jane, who flinched and groaned but did not regain consciousness. "He's really out," she reported redundantly. "What do you want me to do?"
A brief but vicious war raged within Lisbon. "Stay in the room, out of sight. We wait for the killer to make a move. Unless Jane gets worse. If he needs medical help, we get it for him."
"Got it, boss." Van Pelt moved the easy chair into the least visible corner of the room and crouched behind it as the lights switched off for the night.
"I'm in position," Rigsby reported.
"Snyder," Lisbon snapped, "look back over the evening's feeds and see if you can tell who drugged Jane. It was probably within half an hour of when he went back to his room."
She didn't really trust Snyder to do the job right, but there was no way she was taking her eyes away from the live feed to do it herself.
And then they waited. The murderer would want to strike once the ward was as quiet as possible, but before Jane regained consciousness.
After fifteen minutes, she had Van Pelt check Jane's vitals again. If he died while they were all sitting there watching, she'd end up in a padded room herself.
She demanded an update from Snyder. "I'm not sure," was all she got. "I don't see anything off about his evening meds, but someone could have switched his placebos out earlier. And then he's in the rec room drinking tea, but the angle's bad and a lot of people are nearby - plenty of opportunity for someone to drug the cup but I can't see it happen."
"Go frame by frame," Lisbon told her shortly. "Make a list of everyone who gets close enough to do it."
Finally, after the better part of an hour, there was motion in the stairwell. "Heads up, team," she said into her headset. "Nurse Edward's moving towards Jane's room."
She heard Van Pelt cock her weapon. The nurse walked briskly down the hall, glanced around for observers, unlocked Jane's door, and slipped inside. This was the trickiest part. They needed to wait long enough to have the suspect dead to rights for attempted murder, but not long enough to run too much risk of it turning into actual murder.
As Edward stripped the top sheet off of Jane's bed and fashioned it into a noose, Lisbon spared a moment to appreciate Jane's foresight. The timing would be even harder if he'd threatened to slit his wrists. If he'd said he'd OD, he might have already been dead by the time she got to the van and realized something was wrong.
Van Pelt made her move the second Edward slipped the knotted sheet over Jane's head. "Federal Agent! Put your hands up or I will shoot!"
"Rigsby, get in there!" Lisbon shouted. "Cho, get a medic up to Jane!"
Nurse Edward was babbling about how he was saving Patrick really, but Lisbon couldn't bring herself to pay attention. The only thing that mattered was that he'd surrendered without a fight, and Rigsby was bursting into the room and getting the noose off Jane while Van Pelt slapped on the handcuffs. "Get him to tell you what he dosed Jane with the second he's Mirandized," she instructed, before telling Snyder to keep an eye on the monitors on the off chance that Edward had an accomplice who might try sneaking away. Then she abandoned the van to run across the street and into the building, needing to be there already, to touch Jane and assure herself that he'd be all right.
The trip was a blur of staircases and fluorescent lighting. By the time she got there, Jane's room was full to bursting. Nurse Edward had confessed to drugging his tea, and Lisbon told Van Pelt to get Edward out of there and take lead on the interrogation once he was booked. She sent Cho along to back her up and start putting together statements, while Rigsby stayed onsite to liaise with the facility's management and collect physical evidence.
And then finally, finally she turned her attention to Jane, and the EMT who was wrapping up her assessment. "His condition is consistent with a high oral dose of ketamine, as the suspect indicated," she told Lisbon. "He should wake up in another hour or so, but he'll be groggy and tired for the next day. The only real danger now is nausea - if he aspirates vomit he could asphyxiate without waking up. So don't leave him unsupervised or let him lie on his back. We can bring him to the hospital for observation, but off the record there's nothing we can do to ease his recovery besides keeping an eye on him. He may be having hallucinations, or even a death-like experience. If he knew he was drugged by a murderer, my guess is he's not having a very nice trip. He may be upset and disoriented when he wakes up."
Lisbon nodded. She could all too easily imagine the nightmares he might be conjuring up for himself. But it could have been so much worse. "Any damage from the attempted strangulation?"
"He may have some soreness and bruising, but nothing worse than that."
She let out a breath. "All right. I don't think he'd want to go to the hospital. If it's safe, I'll take him home and keep an eye on him."
After that, everything happened quickly. They took a blood sample from Jane for evidence, after which she commandeered a couple of spare LEOs to help her get him back to her - their - apartment.
And then, finally, there was nothing to do but wait for him to wake up.
Well, technically there was lots to do - she should be writing up her formal statement, checking in with the rest of the team for updates, helping to sort through any new evidence that was being brought in, putting together notes for the federal prosecutors, and planning their strategy for the next day's work.
But she couldn't do any of those things without getting up from where she was ensconced with Jane wedged on his side between her body and the back of the couch, her arm around him, his head on her chest, so in practical terms she had no choice but to let it all be.
The murderer was in custody. They could manage the rest without her for one night. And she hoped that even in his comatose state, her proximity might bring Jane some comfort, that he would breathe her in and feel her touch and hear her heartbeat and know he was safe.
Besides which, now that she had him back, she wasn't about to let go. The pleasure of his body against hers was one she'd become frighteningly attached to in the scant days they'd spent as a couple. And bad things happened when she wasn't there to watch over him.
Eventually, he grew restless, jerking against her every few minutes, making wordless noises of distress until she soothed him back into quietude.
Then his whole body tensed and he looked up at her, face full of panic.
"You're safe," she told him. "We arrested the murderer. You've been drugged but you're all right. You just need to sleep it off."
He murmured an incomprehensible question, which she inferred was about her from the way he was looking frantically up and down her body. "I'm fine," she said. "I was never in any danger. We're home again now. Just relax and rest. I'm right here, I won't go anywhere." She continued murmuring reassurances until he slipped back under.
They went through variations of the same scene twice more before he woke more gradually and looked at her with real awareness.
"Welcome back," she said, reaching up with the hand not already holding him to stroke his cheek. "How are you feeling?"
"Not so good," he admitted. "What happened?"
"Nurse Edward put ketamine in your tea. You went back to your room to try to tell us what happened, but you passed out before you could. We saw something was wrong from the video, though, so Van Pelt was waiting in your room when he broke in and tried to hang you. He's in custody. I figured you'd be more comfortable at home than at a hospital while you slept it off, so that's where we are."
A look of relief and confusion passed over his face. "That's all?" he asked.
She thought she understood. "Ketamine can cause hallucinations. Whatever you thought you saw… it wasn't real."
He closed his eyes and put an arm around her. "I was paralyzed," he said, voice rough. "I couldn't move or say anything. The murderer used me to set a trap, and when you came to save me…"
He didn't finish, but she understood. "I wasn't even in the room until he was already in handcuffs," she said. "We were the ones who trapped him."
"I thought it was Edward," he murmured. "He was too…" His voice trailed off, another shadow falling across his face.
"You saw something else too," she guessed. "What was it?"
He shook his head a little, a tear spilling down his cheek.
"Tell me," she insisted, stroking his hair, guilt at exploiting his weakened state more than outbalanced by her need to understand what was hurting him.
He took a shaking breath. "Angela came to me," he confessed, voice thin and brittle. "She said… she said if I'd really loved her I wouldn't have been able to live without her. She said if I'd meant my vows I shouldn't have let death separate us. I should have gone with her and Charlotte."
She didn't let her caresses falter. "You know that wasn't really her," she said gently. "You were hallucinating."
"Yeah," he agreed, voice scratchy.
She bit her lip, unsure how to find out what she needed to without causing him unnecessary pain. "When was the last time you thought seriously about killing yourself?"
"The day we killed Red John," he said without hesitation. She couldn't help drawing in a shocked breath. That was less than six months ago. But she kept stroking his head, waiting for him to go on.
"For a long time, I didn't plan to outlive him," Jane admitted. "I didn't want to. Then it stopped being just about revenge. I wanted Red John dead so I - so we could be free of him as well. I started to imagine an after. So suicide - assuming I lived that long - became less of a plan than a… possibility. But I knew it would hurt you, and I didn't want that. So I made plans to flee the country instead. Then when the day actually came, I knew I couldn't die or run away because I still had work to do, bringing down the rest of McAllister's network. But I still thought about it, before we went in to face him. Out of habit as much as anything."
"And since then?" she prompted.
"Meh," he said. "It crossed my mind, I suppose, when I was sorting through everything, after it was all really over. But not with any intention behind it. Just… laying to rest a path not taken."
"What about while you were undercover?"
He pushed himself up enough to look at her properly. "That wasn't real," he said.
She just met his gaze, telling him without words that she knew how to read pain in him.
"I did that by pretending I'd lost you," he said. "I'm not in that place anymore. I would never, never choose death if I had the option of spending my days with you instead. I promise you that you'll never have to survive my suicide."
She nodded her acceptance. She saw the loophole he'd left for himself, but she wasn't going to press him for more. Instead, she cradled his cheek in her hand and leaned up toward him, keeping her eyes open to watch his face for any sign that her kiss would be unwelcome. But he met her halfway, his mouth soft but desperate, and she pulled him with her as she sank back into the couch.
He smelled of sour sweat and the wrong shampoo, but his weight was familiar and perfect, and he kissed her like she was spring water in the desert - like he hadn't quite believed she was real until he could taste her, like a sip of her might save his life.
She melted into the couch and let him mold himself against her, the iron bands around her heart beginning to loosen. He was still here. He was still hers. They weren't over before they'd more than begun.
After a while, he slid down to nuzzle her neck. His kisses grew slower, and after a few minutes she realized he'd fallen asleep again. She petted his back, and her eyes drifted shut too.
When she woke, it was still dark, and she was covered with a throw blanket instead of with Jane. Apparently even prescription sedatives weren't a match for his insomnia. Worried, she groped to turn on the lamp on the end table. The sudden illumination elicited a hiss of objection from Jane, who turned out to be sitting in the chair beside the couch.
"What're you doing?" she mumbled, trying to blink through her grogginess. He had clearly been awake for a while. His face was drawn with weariness and there was a glint in his eyes that suggested fear or even desperation. She pushed herself into a sitting position. "What's wrong?"
"I want to take it off," he said, gaze darting as if looking for a way out. "But I can't."
She wondered for a moment if he was hallucinating again, before seeing how he was fidgeting. "Are you talking about your ring?"
His head dipped in assent.
"Can you tell me why it's bothering you all of a sudden?" she asked, trying to make her voice warm and soothing.
He drew in a sharp breath. "For so long it was a symbol of my failures as a husband, of my commitment to avenging them, of everything else I had to sacrifice to do that. It became a talisman of pain instead of one of love. And then at some point after we got McAllister, I realized I wasn't bound by any of those vows anymore. But I thought that taking it off would leave me… untethered. After I realized how I felt about you, keeping it on seemed like it might be wrong, but I didn't want to do anything that would make you ask questions before I was ready. And then this case happened and I needed it again to play my part. It helped me feel what I had to in there. But that's done now and I don't want to feel that way anymore. I don't want to be tied physically to the worst parts of my life. But my hand feels so wrong when I try to take it off, I can't stand it. I've had it on for so long - my body feels like it needs it. I should be able to put it down but I can't - I can't."
He looked at her with pleading eyes, and she understood that he needed her help. She considered telling him that the drugs in his system were wrecking his emotional state and he'd probably feel much better after a few more hours of rest, but he looked far too distressed to sleep. And his feelings were, of course, perfectly valid. But what could she do? She couldn't hypnotize him into not minding an empty finger, and she felt ill-equipped to talk him through these murky waters. Then her eyes dropped from his face to his hands, and it occurred to her that this was a tangible problem, and perhaps she could offer him a tangible solution.
"Okay, I'm going to try something to help you," she said, feeling too unsure to put her idea into words. "Wait here."
She got up and went to the kitchen for supplies, then hesitated in the doorway to the living room. "Close your eyes and hold out your hands," she instructed with confidence she did not feel. She didn't think she could do it with him watching her.
When he'd complied, she came and knelt before him. She carefully slid his ring off and pressed it into the palm of his right hand, folding his fingers over so he wouldn't drop it. Then she picked up the strand of cooking twine she'd gotten from the kitchen (he'd bought it a month ago for one of his more gourmet dinners - a crown of lamb, she thought). She looped it several times around his finger, in the indentation left by the ring, the skin there pale and especially naked, concentrating on not making it too loose or too tight. She tied it off with a good knot and trimmed the trailing ends with a pair of scissors.
Then she looked up at him, still holding his hand in hers. "Okay, that's it," she said. "How does that feel?"
He looked at her with an expression she couldn't interpret, then down at his hand. He opened and closed his fist, testing the feel of it, then rubbed the twine with his thumb. He met her eyes again. "It's -" he broke off and cleared his throat. "That helps, thank you. I think - that should work." He flashed a brilliant smile that she didn't believe. "You're a genius."
She shook her head fondly. "I'm just more practical than you."
"That too." His face sobered, and he held out his wedding ring to her. "Would you put this somewhere safe for me? I think it'll be easier to get used to the change if it's somewhere I can't see it."
She accepted it, uneasily aware she was still kneeling before him. She fiercely refused to contemplate any potential connotations or parallels to other exchanges between couples. She was just helping him through a rough night. That was all.
She turned away and left him sitting behind her as she sought a sufficiently secure storage location. Putting it on the chain with her cross wouldn't keep it out of sight. Her jewelry box seemed too obvious, too much a part of daily life. Instead her feet carried her to the guest bedroom. She pulled the storage tub with things from her childhood out of the closet and found the cigar box in which she kept mementos of her mother. She put Jane's ring carefully inside it and put everything back where it was.
When she got back to the living room, he looked calmer, and though he was still playing with the string on his finger, he didn't seem disturbed by it. "Do you think you could sleep more now?" she asked.
He shrugged. "May as well try."
"Let's go to bed."
He rubbed his face. "I'll clean up a little first."
They changed into pajamas and brushed their teeth together quietly. Jane cast a longing glance at the shower, but settled for washing up at the sink. He still didn't look quite steady on his feet.
In bed, he wrapped himself around her tightly, burying his face in her hair. "I love you so much," he told her softly. "Let's never do that again."
She gave a little choke of laughter. "Next time I'll go undercover with you," she said. "I can be the crazy lady down the hall in the asylum." She screwed her eyes shut. "I missed you," she said, and wondered if it would ever get easier to say such things to him. Surely practice would help.
He pulled her impossibly closer to him. "I was a little afraid you would have come to your senses and decided you liked having your apartment to yourself again."
Her heart constricted in her chest. She could tell from his tone that what he'd said was an understatement. "I hated it," she admitted. "Everything felt wrong."
"For me too," he said, his voice gravelly.
She swallowed. "You said… you pretended you'd lost me." She didn't know quite what she wanted to ask.
She felt him shrug against her back. "I was so happy with you. And I had to make that go away to do the job. I couldn't see any other way to fake it well enough."
Her eyes burned as she thought of what he'd put himself through. It wasn't right. Their job was important, but Patrick Jane had already spent far too much time in a hell of his own design. She never wanted to send him back there again. She wondered if he viewed further punishment as his rightful penance. She had no idea how to talk to him about any of that, so she tried to concentrate on her relief that he was with her again instead.
She hugged the arms he'd wrapped around her. "There were - a lot of times during the Red John case when I wished we could have this," she said. She didn't even mean the romantic aspect - just the comfort of his body beside hers. A hug. A single touch. It had all seemed so impossible for so long. The blurrier their emotional boundaries had gotten, the more imperative it had seemed to maintain their physical ones, until just holding his hand for a few minutes in the aftermath of catastrophe had felt like a daring liberty.
"Me too," he agreed.
This night felt a lot like those old bad ones had, and it occurred to her that this was a chance to redeem them, to give each other now what they hadn't been able to then. "Tell me you won't leave me again," she said, voice almost a whisper.
"Never," he said immediately, "not for a minute longer than I have to."
She wanted to offer him something in exchange, but she didn't know what would help. "What do you need me to tell you?" she asked. There were so many things she hadn't said yet, that she didn't know how to say, but she felt that in that instant she could give him anything.
She could practically hear him thinking as he hesitated before answering. "Tell me I can stay."
It almost hurt, how little he felt he could ask of her. But she hadn't yet shown him otherwise. "This is your home," she said, trying to put into her voice everything she meant by that. "You belong here."
He took a shuddering breath. "You're my home," he said. "Where thou lodgest, I will lodge."
She found, despite all her fears, that she believed him. It struck her that this felt more real, more meaningful, than all the romantic promises he'd made about their future when he declared his love. She didn't trust hopes or dreams or happiness, but she trusted this raw, wounded need. She understood that this was a symptom of her own damage, that she felt more comfortable in crisis and extremity than in pleasant leisure. She knew who to be, and how to be with him, at times like this in a way she didn't on a date or a vacation.
She would have to change, she realized. If not for her own sake, then for his. She didn't want this life for him anymore. She didn't want him to have to suffer so she could give him comfort. He shouldn't have to cling to her in desperation for her to have faith in his devotion.
When she agreed to get involved with him, she'd been more than half convinced that sooner or later, it would all go up in smoke. And the more she'd enjoyed being with him, those few days they had together, the more it had terrified her. Then he'd been undercover, and her terror had shifted form. So where did that leave her next week when - hopefully - life was back to normal and they were working a case that didn't swallow them whole? She knew that fear could not be the foundation of a lasting relationship. But she had been afraid for him - even, she could grudgingly admit to herself, of him, or at least the power he had over her - forever. She had no idea how to let it go.
It was somewhat comforting to see that he was afraid too. She understood now that she'd misread his pain during his assignment. It was just that she'd thought the only thing that could hurt him that much was the loss of his family.
Her breath caught in her throat as the implication of that hit home. Maybe he thought of her as his family now, not just in a loose metaphoric sense but for real and true. She knew that was what the Bible verse he'd just quoted meant. But she'd taken it as one of those silly hyperbolic things Jane liked to tell her these days, like he wanted to spend the rest of his life making her happy, or she gave his life meaning, or…
Oh Hell. Maybe all of those things he'd said to her hadn't just been charming nonsense intended to win her over in that characteristically over the top way of his. It had just been so overwhelming and improbable that she'd focused on the most central and salient points, namely that he believed he was in love with her and wanted to act on it, and not paid much attention to the rest.
But it was true that on matters of real importance to their lives, he seldom exaggerated. She was just used to that focused intensity applying only to terrible things. The better his mood was, the less she took him seriously. But she could see now that she might need to recalibrate that assumption. His emotional landscape had clearly changed significantly in the past few months, while she… well, it was normal for him to be three steps ahead of her, waiting for her to catch up.
Maybe they had more to build on than just fear after all.
She realized she'd been lost in her thoughts for too long and glanced over her shoulder, only to find that Jane had drifted off to sleep, though his grip on her had barely slackened. She sighed and closed her own eyes, wriggling into the mattress to get more comfortable.
They were together again. That was enough for tonight. She could worry about the rest of it tomorrow. She could make sure he got a good breakfast and then type up her statement while he napped on the couch, and then maybe in the afternoon if he was up to it she'd take him out to feed the ducks in the park. It would be good for him to get outside, after all that time locked up indoors. She'd make him wear a scarf if it was cold. She'd…
But the rest of her thought went nowhere, for Teresa Lisbon had fallen asleep.
A/N 2: This is still a work in progress, and I'm hoping to have Part 2 up in a week or two. But I figure we can all use some distraction in our time of social distancing. Hope you and yours are staying healthy and getting by.
