A/N - Every time I swear I have no story ideas and no time to write, this happens. So I've given up swearing (to stuff, not swearing in general, as I do possess some extremely piratical tendencies). Related: This fic features mild cursing – govern yourselves accordingly.
MUCHAS GRACIAS to the most amazing beta reader, flail-er, brainstormer, and Blindspot aficionado on the planet, Alamo Girl, who shares my love for all things Jeller and my frustration with the current season of the show. (Jeller FTW, writers; Jeller FTW. Everything else is just stuff I fast forward through to get back to the Jeller.) 'Twas Alamo Girl who encouraged this piece to see the light of day, so if you enjoy it, thank her. (And David Gray. But mostly her.)
Finally, I write to canon. Period. Thus, if you want walks on the beach, grand sweeping admissions, and Jeller babies, this is not your fic. Everyone else, let me know what you think by clicking the little review button. Cheers!
The stolen glances, broken threads
The visions looming in our heads
The years spent running parallel
To everything that might of been
No longer possible to hide
The feeling welling up inside
Ain't never been this close before
Ain't never felt so far away
When a moment
A moment changes everything
When a moment
A moment changes everything
When a moment, it changes everything
A Moment Changes Everything, David Gray
Nas doesn't stay the night.
Theirs isn't a relationship given to soft conversation and the gently intertwined limbs of a pair dropping gently into sleep. Their relationship, like much of their work, is volatile and dangerous. It's a blasting cap, a piece of primer cord - once lit, the explosion comes on fast, burns white hot, then vanishes as though it never happened. And in the nothing that follows this night's explosion, he walks with her to the door in hazy silence, opens it, and accepts a murmured "goodnight, Kurt" and chaste peck on the cheek as she departs. It's all very businesslike - sterile almost – and in stark contrast to the moments preceding.
Resolutely, he sets the new deadbolt in place (thanks for that, Rich) and turns toward the kitchen. He neglected to close the blinds when he arrived home so the diffused edges of the city lights leak through the windows, illuminating the outlines of furniture and the recently discarded oxford shirt he'll toss in the laundry pile later. (Maybe. If-slash-when he gets to it.)
Still aimless, he pads toward the cupboard where he keeps the Scotch and reasons, It's 5:00 somewhere.
He gets as far as pulling a glass from the cupboard and twisting the cap on the bottle before he realizes he doesn't actually want a drink. He thought he did because it's become a habit of late – a reflexive response to the stresses of work and his upside down life - but the closer he comes to pouring, the less his thirst persists.
Sleep. Sleep would be good here.
That is, after all, what most people do at this hour, Kurt knows, and he really should try it. This is time set aside to erase the trials of the day (the month, the year), but he's quite honestly too tired for all that right now. He's been too tired to sleep for too many days to count and even when he manages to catch a few hours here and there, what little bit of rest he obtains is never enough to wipe out the complete and utter exhaustion that's threatened to overwhelm him since his life turned on its head last spring. It's easier therefore to keep putting one foot in front of the other and power through on empty - and so what if it makes him snappish and shortens his fuse in the process? He's not trying to be friends with people; he's trying to save the world.
Someone has to do it, right?
He's not thirsty, he refuses to sleep, and he's seen all the damn infomercials they air at this hour, which leaves him to stare blankly at the still-sealed bottle of Scotch and reach the realization that doesn't even want to be home right now. It's too quiet and his mind roars too loudly at him in the stillness - a new and seemingly perpetual state of being he's become accustomed to in the weeks (is it months now?) since Mayfair's murder. She died, he got promoted, and every single block that fell as a result of those two events bounced over him on the way down, battering and bruising as they passed.
It's in the quiet moments like this one when the echoes of those falling blocks - chunks of a story he still can't make out - resound the loudest and leave a ringing in his ears worse than any flash bang ever could:
The sound of his father's final, awful truth.
The deluge of rain and the hissing suck of the mud that surrounded Taylor's long undisturbed resting place.
The click of the handcuffs on Jane's slim wrists and her pleas for understanding - a stark contrast to their recent reunion and her enraged and pain-ladened, "Do you have any idea where I have been these past three months?!" as she held a gun to the base of his neck.
Allie's frank, "I'm pregnant, Kurt."
Moments change everything, he knows. Split seconds convert disasters to triumphs or rock a truth to its unstable, foundation-less core. One moment life cruises along unfettered and uncluttered and smooth and the next it explodes into sharp shards of pain that render it forever altered, never to feel secure again. Smiles shatter to irreparable dust in these mere moments and relationships dissolve to mist.
One moment a naked girl crawls out of a bag in Times Square with your name tattooed across her shoulders and you think she's the answer to every question you ever asked.
Moments later – several moments, charged moments, life-or-death moments - you realize that she indeed possessed some answers but the questions you posed were all wrong and the girl isn't anyone you thought she'd be; instead she turned out to be a beautiful, deadly Trojan Horse.
One whose piercing green eyes haunt yours at every turn. Like right now, for example – close your own eyes; what do you see?
The microwave clock reads 1:17 when he retrieves jeans and a battered gray sweatshirt from his bedroom, shoves his bare feet into running shoes that he doesn't tie, and clicks the locks closed behind him, keys jingling on their way into his pants pocket.
It's 1:43 as he arrives at the park bench he's spent so much time on it's a wonder the city hasn't placed a plaque on it in his honor. "The Kurt Weller Memorial Thinking Place" has a nice (albeit morbid) ring to it. The air carries the chill of fall but he isn't cold; the hum of the city at night and the green-gray glow that bleeds into the darkness are an insulated, comfortable cocoon and he sits in sober contemplation but always at the ready out of reflex - his posture upright, feet square beneath his body even as his hands come to rest on his knees and his eyes stare into nothing.
Where did it all go wrong?
One minute, he's Kurt Weller, badass FBI Agent with most (but admittedly not all) of the answers, confident in his abilities as a team leader, a crime solver, and hell - even as a human being. He wasn't perfect, of course, and his life wasn't necessarily the example anyone would put on a poster of "How One Should Live," but he was okay. He got by. And then Jane Doe climbed out of a bag covered in tattoos (one of which happened to spell the words "Kurt Weller" in immaculate script). She had no memory and no clue as to her own identity, which meant she lacked the pretensions most people wore as masks to hide their true selves.
Therein lies the problem...
She was a blank canvas – except for all the ink, of course – and she let him begin to write a story with her.
A story only you were dumb enough to believe in the end, asshole.
Maybe that's why he's so angry all the time now. He's turning it outward and taking it out on anyone or anything in range (uncool, buddy – uncool), but if there's anyone truly deserving of his ire right this very moment, it's himself. One hundred percent himself. He didn't realize until everything surrounding the relationship he forged with Jane exploded around him that he had come to rely on her for a large part of his own identity in such a short period of time.
From the moment they met, they aligned and forged their identities together:
She was Jane, full of surprises (for everyone – especially herself) at every turn and he was Kurt, steady as a rock, and as a single unit, they tread in "us" territory where once he had tread as merely "I." And he enjoyed it, thrived within the parameters they constructed until a sudden series of ensuing moments that he still can't piece together - at least not in an order that leaves the top on the Scotch bottle and finds him getting a restful night's sleep – proved Jane's own identity to be the antithesis of anyone either expected and sent Kurt scrambling at every turn.
Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars...
The Kurt Weller of old was all about control - he had poise, he had clarity. Just getting by in life or not, he knew what he didn't know and how to protect himself from it. This new version - Kurt Weller 2.0 - can't discern down from up and the totality of what he doesn't know could fill libraries.
Is it his father's crime that plagues him most deeply? The loss of Mayfair? Does impending fatherhood have him questioning his life and his choices to this unhealthy level of introspection? Or is it something else entirely?
It's the damn green eyes, Kurt, and you know it.
Those eyes belong to someone Kurt never expected to meet - an orphaned South African whose adoptive family apparently hopes to reset the entire American nation in one violent stroke. Sandstorm is their name and anarchy and explosions are their game.
No wonder you drink too much and can't sleep.
But it isn't impending revolution that keeps him up as much as the loss of something he can't quite articulate, no matter how hard he tries. Before the rainy night on which he held a piece of Taylor Shaw's tiny skeleton in his hand while sunk waist-deep in the grave his own father left her in; before he found his way to Jane's safe house, poured a drink, and waited to wave Taylor's favorite doll in her face; and long before he pulled his service weapon and yanked her shaking hands into cuffs, he was a different person than he is right now. That version of Kurt Weller possessed something that he fears is permanently lost.
Hope.
That version of Kurt Weller had hope - hope for his family, hope for his career with the FBI and his ability to serve his country, and hope for something that was perhaps bigger than all of that combined.
You got greedy, didn't you, Kurt? You hoped for too much and overshot the mark.
He kissed Jane with hope in the locker room of the FBI offices before everything went to hell. He stared into her green eyes and watched a smile spread over her face and then later, in a moment that seemed to stretch blissfully before him, he left a voicemail on her phone. It was a rambling, buoyant series of sentences and statements that added up to... To what? Was it a declaration of something? An admission? A question?
It was bottled hope on the verge of being jettisoned. That's what it was in the end.
"When things happen to me in my life, you're the first person I think about and you always have been. I just... I just wanted to hear your voice telling me everything's going to be okay."
And now you're on a bench in the middle of the city in the middle of the night. Newsflash: you're not okay, man.
"It's over. Whatever this is, whatever this was about, it's over; it's finished," Kurt told Jane the night he arrested her. He remembers knowing even as he spoke the words that they were a lie - nothing was over then. Nothing could be over, something new had begun instead, and he had no idea what the outcome would be.
All he knew then (and still knows now) is that Jane's green eyes pierce his soul, his heart, his lungs and he hasn't drawn a proper breath since. Hell, maybe it goes all the way back to the very first night - the night he felt her presence before he laid eyes on her, the night he sat before her in the interrogation room, watching her tremble and quake while he attempted to maintain a professional air and treat her like any other person of interest (who showed up with his name tattooed boldly on her back).
And then she traced the contours of his face with her hand and he forgot how to breathe.
Damn her and damn her eyes! And damn his own body for betraying him at every turn since she arrived in that bag! Every move she made, every one of her own breaths he felt somewhere deep inside, no matter how close or far apart they were. On the first night, he felt her presence in the interrogation room even before his hand touched the door handle and she hasn't left him since. She moves an inch and the hairs on the back of his neck rise to follow. When she's in danger, his Big Bad Hero switch flips into overdrive. (When she shows up in a dress, other parts of him flip into overdrive.)
"You're my starting point," she told him once and he understood exactly what she meant. He felt as though he went through the motions of his life and work before her. He got by. He was okay. And then she showed up and in that moment he went from getting by to actually living. (With hope.)
Pain and dashed hopes are part of living too, Kurt - you understand that better now than you ever did before.
In the hallway of that godforsaken no-tell motel in New Jersey, Kurt knew exactly where Jane was; he didn't need the schedule he read in the laundry room, didn't need to look for the cleaning cart, and she didn't really have the drop on him when she materialized, gun in hand. She never could get the drop on him – not really. And he fought both her and himself in that narrow corridor, countering her blows for self-preservation and in an effort to contain her, all while battling a seemingly primal urge that welled up inside and demanded he pull her into a bear hug and inspect every inch of her to find out what injuries those CIA bastards had inflicted. (Every. Single. Inch.)
And when he held her against the wall in one last effort to contain her fury, he tried not to notice that their hearts beat in unison. Three months apart, oceans of lies and distrust flowing freely between them, and his damned heart still matched hers beat for adrenaline-fueled beat.
Traitorous bastard organ.
He tries very hard not to notice a lot of things like that about her these days; the green eyes and the sync of her heartbeat are just the tip of a very large and complex iceberg he'd just as soon steer clear of. He tries, for example, not to notice their shared instinct to protect everyone around them, the way she glances sidelong at him when she thinks he doesn't notice, the sadness that weights her every word and movement since she escaped the CIA black site, and the way his ears automatically pick her voice out of every conversation around him.
It's impossible not to notice, however, that she materializes beside the very bench on which he's seated sometime around 2:00 a.m.
It's a turn of events worthy of a double-take, an episode that would undoubtedly elicit a giggle from Rich Dot Com, and Kurt blinks rapidly to make sure he hasn't fallen asleep and awakened inside one of Rich's dreams - except that when she sees him, Jane speaks and then he knows he's awake. (The Jane of his dreams hasn't spoken to him since the spring; the Jane of his dreams instead stares accusingly with her green eyes and has been known to push him into a pool of water and hold him under until he struggles to breathe. That Jane - the vengeful one – ensures that he wakes from those dreams tangled in sweaty sheets. That Jane, in fact, contributes significantly to his lack of sleep these days.)
"I didn't... I didn't expect anyone to be here at this hour." She fumbles over the words as her eyes roll skyward in refusal to meet his and he understands she's as off-balance as he is inside this unexpected encounter. She knew about this place – "The Kurt Weller Memorial Thinking Place," now offering space for clandestine after-hours meetings for two! - because he told her about it once or twice. He even invited her to meet him there before and, even though she didn't show, it shouldn't surprise him that she remembers its location and might want to use it herself. After all, there is no plaque denoting it to be Kurt's; it truly is public property and she's more than welcome to it.
Heartbeats in sync and apparently minds as well tonight.
Jane's weight shifts from one foot to the other and he acknowledges the surprise: "Me neither."
She's in her usual uniform of combat boots, gray jeans, a pale t-shirt, and leather jacket, her recently-shorn hair flipping a bit in the light breeze that's kicked up all of a sudden and threatens to overtake the mild air and replace it with the first taste of winter.
She gives a small shiver and inquires, "Can I sit?" with a gesture toward the opposite end of the bench from where he is.
Her voice is small and her movements held close to her body as though to protect her vital organs. She speaks with the tone of someone who doesn't want to provoke a growling dog and he marvels that three and a half months ago, she would have flopped next to him companionably, their shoulders coming comfortably to rest against one another to share warmth. She might even have elbowed him teasingly and grinned, probing about what brought him to his usual spot on this particular night and she would have mercilessly cajoled until he let it all out at last.
But this moment is new and fraught with every ounce of their present tension. All he can do is nod assent and watch as she too sits at the ready, her body taut as she fumbles the fingers of her left hand over the fingers of her right, then runs them through her unruly hair in a visible effort to give them something to do.
The polite thing would be to talk right now. Kurt knows this and he knows Jane does too. (It's what people do.) But what the hell are they supposed to talk about?
Nas is out of the question on his side of the conversation - as are all things Allie-related. Too many mines in those fields. Meanwhile, her brother Roman is out for her part - as is her adoptive mother, her recovery after her time with the CIA, and that recent flirtation with the Australian water expert.
You just keep telling yourself she was only charmed by his accent, buddy.
Something's going on with Reade and Zapata and Kurt can't pinpoint what it is, but he realizes Zapata hasn't moved much beyond the mood that caused her to shoot Jane a few weeks ago and Jane isn't exactly the soul of forgiveness, so chatting about coworkers is off the table too.
Oh God - are we reduced to talking about the weather? Is that how far we've sunk?
How could two people so similar and with so much shared between them have swung so widely from "You're my starting point," "I wanted a moment that was just us," and "You're the first person I think about" that they're reduced to monosyllabic non-conversation on a park bench at an ungodly hour of the morning?
"What happened to you guys?" Rich Dot Com wanted to know.
What happened indeed?
"I thought it would be colder," she comments off-handedly and he winces.
"Jane, don't talk about the weather," he sighs and wipes an exhausted hand over his eyes.
She bristles and the expression that washes suddenly over her face slices him sharply in two. "I'm sorry. What would you like me to say?"
He opens his mouth to offer (an admittedly) paltry explanation of his present thought process but she jerks to her feet and rears back before he gets there, unleashing more venom than he's heard from her since their brawl at the motel:
"I suppose you'd like me to apologize for showing up here - or maybe for showing up in your life in the first place. Is that it? Should I go back and apologize for everything I've already apologized for three times already? Or maybe you'd like to apologize for serving me up to the CIA - no? Okay, why don't we let that go for now and so will I."
She spins on her heel and he realizes two things simultaneously: The first is that he doesn't want her to go. (Anywhere. Ever.) The second is that he's the one who has constructed the wall between them - just him without help from anyone else - so if it's ever going to come down, he'll have to put the first crack in it.
Good luck with that. Where do you plan to start?
Here and now seems as good a time as any. After all, he still doesn't want to drink or sleep or be home. And he really doesn't want her to go. (Anywhere. Ever.) Even an angry Jane is better company than the pitiful version of himself he's been communing with.
And she's prettier.
"Jane wait!" he calls out as all of those thoughts simultaneously collide in his mind.
"What?" she demands, turning back and holding out her hands defiantly. Her tone turns pleading: "What do you want from me, Kurt?"
Everything and nothing.
"Just sit down," he gestures weakly at the opposite end of the bench and tries not to make his own words sound like a plea. (He fails at this.)
Still visibly irritated, she perches on the bench once more, feet poised to carry her away at the drop of a hat and face taut as she burns his face with glaring green eyes that demand explanation.
"I don't know what to say here and I don't know what to do," he tells her honestly. "Up is down and down is up and I'm in no control of anything in my life..."
"Really? You want to tell me how that feels, Weller?" she cuts him off and the eyes cut him to the bone again. "You want to explain to me what that's like, because..."
He puts up a hand of surrender to stop the flow of her words while ignoring the pain her expression injects directly into his veins and says, "What I do know is that something has to change. Right here. Right now. Because nothing is working, Jane."
"You can say that again," she snorts and looks down at her feet.
"So what I want to know," he ignores her derision and continues thinking aloud before the words dry up, "is if maybe - maybe - you and I can just sit here together quietly. Because if we can manage that, maybe that tiny change can set off a bigger one. And if that's possible, maybe other things are possible too. Maybe we can strike some sort of balance and move forward out of wherever the hell we are right now."
"We're going to sit here in silence?" she repeats in disbelief, eyes still flashing. "And that's going to fix everything? We sit here and it's like the CIA never tortured me and we suddenly trust each other again?"
When you put it that way, it's the dumbest idea on the face of the planet.
"I didn't say that," he shakes his head, defeated. "But I can't change what's happened and I don't know what else to do. I'm willing to try anything at this point - and it certainly can't make things worse."
"You're setting the bar extremely low," she says sarcastically.
"I am," he agrees, his voice wan. For the first time, he hears exactly how exhausted he sounds.
"I mean, there's the floor, the sub-floor, the foundation, twelve feet of dirt, and then this bar," her tone remains flat.
"It might be lower than that," he concedes equally gravely.
"And what comes after?" Her voice rises again. "If we can sit here quietly, we… what? We progress to saying good morning in the office without it being awkward? And if that works maybe by Christmas we finally work up to talking about the weather?"
A humorous edge has crept into her voice and Kurt finds he can't help it - he laughs. It's short and shallow and unfamiliar to his own ears, but it's a laugh nonetheless and when it erupts from his chest, he sees Jane smile. Like his laugh, the smile is small and it reveals absolutely none of her thoughts to him, but it's unmistakably there and unmistakably real, even as it vanishes as quickly as it appeared.
"Something like that," he shrugs. It's a stupid idea – and acknowledging that is the first step toward recovery, he assumes.
Also, you have nothing better to offer. If you did, you would've led with it. You know this and so does she.
Jane shakes her head in exasperation and disbelief and he catches a glimpse of another half-smile that he knows is both agreement on the utter ridiculousness of his half-assed plan, as well as assent that she's willing to try.
The exchange occurs within the briefest of moments, but it's there and real and doesn't evaporate like so many other moments between them have, so maybe the idea isn't one hundred percent bad. Maybe it's just fifty percent convoluted, twenty-five percent bad, and twenty-five percent "aw hell let's just see what happens," therefore rendering it not the worst idea he's ever come up with. Maybe this is one of those moments that creates change if it just has time and the space to breathe.
Kurt feels a tiny twinge of renewed hope at the thought and realizes just how much he's missed that feeling.
Almost as much as you've missed the girl with the green eyes?
The girl with the green eyes is here. With him. Now. She's here in the quiet that suddenly doesn't seem to roar so loudly and Kurt Weller sits and waits and hopes for the moment to breathe and thrive. And beside him, Jane looks out into the night and he swears she's thinking the same thing.
So far, so good...
At 2:12 a.m., he feels the wind shift back around and realizes it's turned mild again, a gentle caress rather than a quick nip. Jane apparently feels it too, for she glances over at him and they lock eyes for the first time since she arrived.
Green meets blue and a spark warms the moment as it stretches its arms to envelop them.
They smile.
FIN