ease your feet in the sea
by
salvation-dear
Spoilers for 4x24, "The Crimson Hat".
Lorelei takes him to the ocean in Las Vegas. He hadn't known there was one, but everything's making more sense now. He stands in front of the water, feeling the sand dissolve between his toes, and stares out at the sea, the sea, the endless sea.
Grief makes you light; it cuts you from your moorings. He's feeling lighter already. On a day like today, he'd found his family. (He focused on Charlotte's hair. There was a knot on one side, low down, streaked with blood, like someone had wrapped a big fist around it, maybe turning her head to the front, maybe. This becomes the detail he pinpoints in on. He can ignore the blood and filthy smell of death, the flaps of flesh, and just look
at
that
one
piece
of
hair.)
Lorelei had excused herself to the bathroom, and Jane waited. He sat on the motel bed (it smelled like foam rubber and those pine-scented fresheners), legs apart, hands folded between his knees.
He hears her cellphone ring while she's in there, electronic beeps that make up "Sheep May Safely Graze" over running water. It would be funny, in different circumstances. Lisbon might laugh. It could be hard to predict Lisbon's sense of humor: sometimes she laughed and sometimes she called him an inconsiderate asshole. Sometimes she did both.
He'd found Lisbon, or Lisbon had found him, and she'd moored him. Towed him, maybe was a better metaphor. His engine had never really started right again after that day.
(He'd never thought there could be so much blood.)
Jane feels heavy and sick long before Lorelei comes back, and he keeps his back to her and just listens to her footsteps, closer closer. He'll stay in character, do whatever it takes. He centers himself, and looks over his shoulder at her, and the first thing he sees is the syringe, the instant before she drives it into the base of his neck.
"That was unexpected," he says to himself when he wakes up. He's tied to the bed in the middle of the desert, and he has to talk to himself because there's no-one else here. Just sand and tumbleweed and a motel bed. His wrists are tied with blaze orange nylon rope, and he stares at it for a while, for something to do. The bed creaks when he moves, and later he notices black birds in the sky above him.
He stays there for a long, long time. He hears the birds calling.
When he wakes, Lorelei's untying him. She has trouble with the knots and he hears her curse. Her mouth is so delicate. He watches it form words and waits. She has to support him to stand up and that's when she takes him to the beach.
There are birds here too, wheeling at the edges of the sky, echoes crying. The sound blurs, and it sounds like children sobbing.
He digs his feet hard into the sand. The waves wash in, across his feet, and he can feel the water washing each particle out from under his feet. The birds sound like birds again. Lorelei, with her back to him at the edge of the water, her shoulders slumped, looks a little bit like Lisbon.
He's in a warehouse, or maybe it's a hospital. It's all light gray and it smells like alcohol and that pink soap. He hates that smell and he hates hospitals. He wonders when the doctor's getting here.
The birds don't seem to know.
Lorelei brings him water, holding a straw between his lips. He's tempted to refuse, but he is thirsty. He's in chains, now, metal links held around his wrists with small goldtone padlocks. On each lock is a stylized picture of a bird.
He keeps half-waking up, realizing that all he needs to do to get free is pick the locks, and then remembering that he's chained up and can't reach one with the other hand, can't fold his hand back on itself. Even if he'd had anything metal to use. If Lisbon were here she'd have a hairpin, or a pocketknife, or a key. Of course, if Lisbon were here, she would have shot someone by now and he wouldn't be in this mess.
Jane has always loved the forest. He wishes he could go to the forest, cool green trees and shade and space to think. He goes back to the desert when Lorelei sticks another load of crystalline liquid in his still-aching neck. This time it's cold, it's so cold he shivers through the night. He can't think.
When Lorelei comes back to inject him again, he holds his hand close by his side at first, sitting quietly as though dazed. She reaches across him and he grabs a fistful of her hair, and even without much leverage he yanks her down to his level. There's a spark of fear in her eyes before she pulls back (strands of dark hair left behind, between his fingers) and he can't help himself, he starts to laugh. He's still laughing after she leaves, long afterward.
He doesn't realize she's come back until he hears "Sheep May Safely Graze" again, played by robots on a metal keyboard. When he focuses his eyes on her, he can see her in the corner, her dark hair falling down into her eyes. She hisses into the phone, snake-sibilant. The wall behind her falls away, and behind her the desert stretches to the horizon.
He circles, anchorless.
When the doctor arrives, he's wearing a rubber mask and Jane panics. He pulls at his fetters, which are no longer chains but plastic tubing. He pulls, stares for a second, pulls again. They tighten around his wrists as the doctor (red doctor) leans over him. Jane can see his eyes beneath the mask, moving, moving.
"Patrick Jane," he says, voice whispered, distorted. "I've been waiting for you."
The thing about pain is that even when you think you can completely control it, it leaks in. That's something you don't find out until you're in the kind of pain that will change your life. Supposing you get to continue it.
The first slice of the knife across his belly feels like nothing, just a flap of nerveless skin. Jane slows his breathing, centers himself, goes to a quiet, tranquil forest in his mind. He can smell the fir trees, hear the wind in the branches. He feels the second cut, the third, the fourth, the PAIN. Warm wetness at his sides almost as an afterthought. The edges of his forest bleed red and ragged. Pain and lightness, and every time he thinks he's got a handle on the pain it comes back and
he
would
do
anything
to
stop
the
PAIN.
The ragged edges start turning black, but it still doesn't stop. In the distance, he hears Lorelei laughing, high-pitched, girlish. It goes on and on, an endless sea, and suddenly it's screaming and it's all he can hear, on and on and after a while, it doesn't sound like a woman's voice any more.
His engine-heart coughs and races, a stuttering thing. Blood swirls around him. He'd never dreamed there could be
so
much
blood.
Jane has always loved the ocean. The one in Las Vegas looks strangely familiar. Beyond the sand is green and eucalyptus-scented, and sunlight reflects off windows from a house at the top of the hill. The sand crunches beneath his feet, sunbaked hot, and the shush of the waves is like a heartbeat. It's peaceful here, and Jane gazes out at the sea, fingering the ropy scars on his belly under his shirt, the bird-tracks of stitched flesh. He has such clarity of mind, like nothing he's ever felt before.
"What kind of gift?" he hears himself saying, but the echo echo echo makes him seem far away, far away from himself.
"Teresa Lisbon's dead body would be the perfect thing," the reply comes from over the sea.
Jane looks up at the sky. "Yes," he says with a smile, and he is light enough to float away.
End.