whither thou goest
by
salvation-dear
Author's Note: This was written in October 2012, so obviously does not include any spoilers or plot developments from season 6.
The first night Lisbon doesn't sleep at all, just goes home and curls up on her couch, eyes dry as deserts. There's TV, for the sound and company, and paperwork, and there's long, overboiled cups of tea. She still smells of sweat and cordite, but she can't force herself to do anything about it until streaks of indigo and then lighter blue and then yellow make it through her half-drawn curtains. And then she showers and dresses and makes herself coffee, and irons her shirt, and cleans her boots, an after-effect from the police academy still felt all these years later. She still makes it to the office two hours before Cho.
There's paperwork to do while the morning sunlight shines twice-diffused through her office windows. She's always been a demon for paperwork; always had to make damn sure she was fast enough and good enough and reliable enough in the field that she didn't get chained to a desk.
Useful enough. She flexes the fingers of her right hand almost without thinking about it, and finally goes and makes a pot of coffee just to have something to put in her hand.
It gets better over the course of the week, or at least she gets back into some semblance of a routine. An hour's sleep the next night, in between late night Food Network and the same few pages of a mystery novel over and over (she thinks the boyfriend did it, but that could be the bias of her real-life statistics. That depressing litany, Jane had said to her once, early on, as though murderers owed it to him to be interesting).
Things get better with time, more tolerable. In quiet moments at work she notices the light coming through her window and watches it, letting her mind go blank.
"Agent Lisbon, can you walk us through what happened? In your own words."
She'd already prepared a statement, and she looks down at it anxiously before taking a breath to compose herself. How many hearings like this has she done before? It seems like thousands. This one is no different, she reminds herself.
They just want to know what happened.
Counseling is mandatory, of course. She refuses coffee and looks out of the window whenever she can and answers questions politely.
When she gets back, her team's watching her too carefully, so she's almost grateful for Jane's customary insouciance. He's spending more time in her office: sitting with ankles crossed on the couch when she comes back from meetings, or leaning his hip against her desk while she works, the light picking out gold highlights in his hair.
"Go find something to do," she tells him after a team briefing, but her eyes are too soft and her voice too gentle, and she sees Rigsby and Van Pelt glance at Cho before they cut their eyes back to her. Jane just laughs, but he wanders off as ordered. Lisbon's surprised, in fact, that these days he seems to be taking direction better. Maybe he's worried about her, like the others.
The first place she goes after she gets her weapon back is the shooting range, where she practices live and dry fire until her hand aches in a way it hasn't since she was first learning to shoot. Back then, she'd squeezed a tennis ball to build up the strength in her fingers. These days, she's strong enough, and she can handle pain.
"I was unable to gain access through the door," Lisbon said smoothly, pleased with how calm she sounded. "But I could still hear the sounds from inside."
The grayfaced lawyer ran a finger down the paper that sat in front of him, then picked up a pen and checked something off. "Raised voices," he said.
Lisbon nodded.
The lawyer looked up. "Agent Lisbon, if you could speak your responses out loud." He nodded to the stenographer in the corner, who looked up briefly and met Lisbon's eyes, then looked away.
"Yes," Lisbon said indistinctly, then cleared her throat and tried again. "Yes. Sounds of a struggle. I could hear my consultant, Patrick Jane's voice, and the voice of John Smith. So I believed I had probable cause to enter the property through the window."
It's almost a relief when they catch another case, and it makes her feel guilty to feel that way, but her office is too hot and her shoulders ache and inactivity has always made her crazy. She drives, because she likes to drive, and it's gathering dusk by the time they get to the scene, when she walks around a highway marker; feels the crick in her neck reassert itself painfully and then abate as she straightens; feels the air cooling on her skin. The sky's turning purple as a bruise. It'd be beautiful, if it wasn't for the flickering yellow crime-scene tape, the scattered somber-faced local PD officers, the rotting-leaf smell of death. Lisbon presses the heel of her hand to her forehead and allows herself a moment, then takes a deep breath and ducks underneath the tape.
"You did a good job today," Jane says to her later, in her office.
Lisbon looks up from reading interdepartmental emails in surprise. It's unusual for him to compliment her directly. He usually buries what he means in curlicues and layers that she only figures out much later, usually after she's left for the day and is sitting on her couch or jogging down her street to the running track at the park and thinks: Oh.
"You disappeared today," she says reprovingly. "So how would you know?"
She was familiar enough with his nature not to have worried, of course, or not to have allowed herself to worry. It just got disconcerting when she drove him somewhere, caught his eye in the rearview mirror in the back of the van, and then later when she looked around for him he was as gone as smoke.
Now he crosses the room to sit on her couch; she catches his scent, tea and dust, as he passes. He arranges himself carefully as he sits. Lisbon's reminded of a cat. When he looks up at her again, the lines around his eyes are pronounced.
"Lisbon," he says reprovingly. "One of these days you're going to have to get used to doing things without me."
She thinks of several responses, but satisfies herself with scoffing an annoyed breath. He knows what she's going to say anyway. They've had conversations like this so often, he can fill in the blanks himself.
Cho, surprisingly, is the one on the team who is most careful with her. Or perhaps it's not surprising. They've known each other a long time, after all. Refills of coffee turn up silently on her desk; once he catches her elbow as she stumbles slightly through the doorway and gives her a look she can't quite puzzle out.
Jane has always been the one with the talent for puzzles.
"I'm fine, thanks," she'd said politely, but Cho had kept standing there, kept looking at her. "Really," she'd added after a long pause, and finally, he'd stepped away.
"It was a good shoot, boss," he says, so quietly she almost doesn't catch it. She keeps her eyes on him, and he's the first to look away. "You know what I mean," he says, taking another step back. She doesn't usually see him so visibly uncomfortable.
"I know," she says finally, but she can't bring herself to add anything else, and after a moment when all she could hear was the rush of the airconditioning, he nods and goes back to his desk.
"They're worried about you," Jane says, reclining on her couch. He stares at her ceiling as though there are answers printed there.
There aren't. She would have noticed.
"They're treating me like I'm going to break or something. It's not appropriate. I'm-"
"Say 'fine' again, Lisbon, I'm hoping for a record."
"Oh-"
"Now say, 'Shut up, Jane, that's not what I was going to say'."
She screws up the paper closest to hand and flings it at him, but it bounces off the back of the couch and skitters to the floor.
Things do get better with time. After a few weeks, she starts sleeping almost full nights, although the days retain their thick, underwater feeling. It's spring and the days are longer, the sunlight too bright. Jane stands on the edge of crime scenes with arms outstretched, orange light glowing at his back. Lisbon, as always, keeps one eye on him while she works, and is, as always, the tiniest bit envious. He's so comfortable doing exactly what he wants.
Rigsby comes by her office on a Tuesday afternoon to talk about a transfer. He has other avenues he wants to explore, he tells her sadly, while his eyes keep drifting away from hers, over his shoulder to the bullpen. She wonders where he stole that phrase from: a build-your-resume guide, a TV show maybe, or Van Pelt.
"Boss, with everything that's gone on..." his voice drops on the last word and he can't finish the sentence. She's reminded suddenly of her brothers ribbing Tommy when his voice broke, laughing at him every time he dared speak a word. She'd shut them down whenever she was around to protect him, but she couldn't be with him all the time.
Rigsby's looking at her expectantly, shadows from her office blinds striping his face; light, dark.
"Of course," she says quietly. "I understand."
Rigsby's face brightens like the sun breaking over the horizon, and Lisbon feels an ache settle into the center of her chest. Wayne has a gentle heart, he doesn't want to hurt her. He needs to leave, but he also needs to be forgiven.
She can hardly blame him for that. It's a job, she reminds herself fiercely before she lets herself get sentimental. She clears her throat with a sharp cough, hiding her face behind her hand for a moment, grimacing and waving him down when Rigsby half-rises.
"John Smith."
"Yes."
"The suspect you had been investigating in the Red John murders."
"Yes," Lisbon said. "We had enough physical evidence to request a warrant on his home and the storage unit he kept downtown. One of my team, Agent Rigsby, was trying to contact a judge. It was late, though. The rest of the team and I were running surveillance, maintaining a line of eyesight on the suspect at all times. We-the suspect was out of our sight for a minute, tops, and he disappeared. Agents Cho and Van Pelt headed west along the waterfront, and I-I-" Lisbon broke off, and reached for the glass of water in front of her. Her hand slipped on the glass, and she had to reach with the other hand to steady it. The water was cold and metallic in her throat. She swallowed hard.
"And Patrick Jane?"
Lisbon dropped the glass back on the desk a little too abruptly. "Jane," she said, carefully.
"And then there were three," she mutters to herself, hand across her eyes. It's dark in the office, although the lights glare, twist and sparkle into her eyes. She feels a headache coming on.
"Four," says Jane, his tone offended.
When she moves her fingers enough to see, he's standing in her doorway. She sighs. The aircon starts up again, the familiar old-building startup groan she almost doesn't notice any more. "Jane, seriously, don't you have anywhere else to be?"
Jane frowns at her. "You don't really want me to leave," he says, a melodramatic hint of hurt in his voice.
Lisbon sighs again. "No," she says. "Of course not." She waves him over to the couch, and picks up her pen and starts drafting another statement.
Something flutters in the moving air. When she looks up at him, a piece of fabric on his vest flaps back against his chest. He looks at her and smiles.
"When's our new guy coming in?" Cho asks, leaning back in his chair, uncharacteristically informal for him. Lisbon didn't know what that meant, but she thought there was probably a reason for it.
She'd learned a lot from Jane, and before him, from her father, although at the gates of hell she wouldn't admit it to either one of them. Jane, because he'd just smile smugly. Her father, because everything she'd learned about body language and mood from him she learned the hard way.
Lisbon recaps her pen and dropped it on the desk in front of her. It rolls for a moment, and she stops it with two fingers. "Thursday. It's Winslow from Cyber."
Cho nods. "I know him. Solid candidate."
Van Pelt leans forward. "Cyber's kind of conservative, isn't it? How do you think he'll get along with-"
It's Lisbon's sharp intake of breath that interrupts her, although Lisbon herself doesn't even realize she's doing it right away.
Van Pelt blushes; looked down at her hands, folded into her lap. "Us," she says quietly. "How do you think he'll get along with us?"
There's a short pause, and Lisbon becomes aware of the sounds of agents in the offices surrounding them; on the phone, in meetings, the scratch of pens on paper, the click of keyboards, the rumble of airconditioning.
"Boss," Cho says, but very quietly.
"Fine," Lisbon says quickly, picking up her pen again. "He'll be fine."
"Are you feeling better, Agent Lisbon?"
"Yes. Yes, I'm fine. We can go on."
"So. You drew your firearm-"
"Yes," she said again. "The suspect, John Smith, was carrying a knife. In the struggle with Jane, he'd-Smith had cut him, there was blood-" Lisbon heard her own voice, as though it was coming from far away, from through a tunnel or down a well. Her breath rattled in her throat. "I called to Smith to drop the knife, and he moved the knife up to Jane's throat. And I fired."
Grayface pushed a box of Kleenex across the desk with one finger, stopping it when it hit Lisbon's glass of water. She ignored it, steepled her fingers, and pressed hard on a point on her forehead between her eyes.
"Awk-ward," Jane says from the couch when she returns to her office. He's lying flat on his back, hand held up to the light in a way that paints a shadow-hand on his face. Lisbon watches him for a second, trying to figure out what he's doing, and then stops trying. Like she could ever understand what Jane's doing.
"You could come to the meetings instead of just eavesdropping on them," she says instead.
"Ah," he says. "But then, you and I wouldn't have an excuse to talk."
"Mr Jane was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital."
"Yes," Lisbon said. "Yes."
"Boss, we caught another one," Cho says. His face and Van Pelt's shine in the office light, smooth and beatific. They're gathering what they need for a crime scene, but every so often they look up at her, checking in. Her team.
When she goes outside, the late-afternoon is still hot, and she feels the heat of the ground through the soles of her boots. Jane is waiting beside the car. He looks up at her and smiles, the light behind his head like a halo.
The breeze picks up, and the hole in his vest flutters. Through it, she can see glimpses of the windowglass behind him, and when he shifts his feet, she can see the street, and a glimpse of the sky turning purple.
She raises her hand, and smiles back.
End