Author's Note: This one's for Alamo Girl. She doesn't have time to write but thanks to our weekly Blindspot recaps via Twitter, this story was born. (Really, it's half hers; I just assembled the pieces.)
Spoilers for everything up to "One Begets Technique" are fair game, but if you seek anything off-canon (e.g. Jeller babies and/or requited affection), I suggest you look elsewhere. (Alamo Girl and I like our tension juicy and unresolved!) Finally, remember that NBC and Martin Gero own these people; I borrowed them for five minutes and put them back where I found them. And if you want to share your thoughts, there's a box for that below. Cheers!
I am a stranger
I am an alien
Inside a structure
Are you really going to love me when I'm gone
With all my thoughts
And all my faults
I feel it biting
I feel it break my skin
So uninviting
Are you really going to need me when I'm gone
I fear you won't
I fear you don't
I of the Storm, Of Monsters and Men
She doesn't remember her mother. Sure there's a gold necklace with a green stone and the fleeting mental image of a cloud-faced woman from a Taylor Shaw anniversary memorial ceremony, but beyond those brief flashes, Jane doesn't remember her at all.
Despite those flimsy few recollections, however, she's fairly certain that her mother, any mother - and (honestly) any self-respecting woman – would strongly counsel her to ignore the advice of a man who willingly, consciously, and legally changed his name to Rich Dotcom.
It's simple logic.
Anyone who makes that particular life choice obviously can't be trusted. (He probably shouldn't even be given the time of day, but that's beside the point.) He lies as easily as he breathes and when he emerges from prison under the guise of helping solve not one, but two internationally-relevant cases, he takes it upon himself to offer unsolicited advice to a group of FBI agents and one U.S. Marshal, none of whom seek his counsel.
About anything.
He's pure trouble. He taunts. He teases. He mocks. He sizes up Weller and Allie and plays them off one another like ping pong balls – all while leading the entire team on a quip-filled scavenger hunt of his own devious design. Along the way, he brings in an "art restorer" (read: forger-slash-thief with repair skills) who insults Patterson and forces her to suffer the indignity of sharing her lab space, propositions Jane more than once, then taunts Weller and Allie some more for good measure.
It's his parting shot that stands out, though. It's the nearest thing to wisdom he can muster, Jane knows, but particularly in the wake of all of the insincere, insignificant, and utterly offensive statements she's endured from him, it's decidedly stark in contrast. In fact, these particular words seem heartfelt; they seem real – and therefore fly in the face of everything Rich Dotcom stands for:
"Jane, listen to me. Life is short; follow your heart. Tell Weller how you feel."
Rich speaks and is gone.
(Well, not gone gone. More like, slipped his leash and made for parts unknown gone. Had a hidden parachute inside his tuxedo jacket and jumped off the roof of a building to meet a waiting getaway car gone.)
Gone in body, but his words linger long after he sails silently into the hazy, yellow-lit night, his silhouette first stark against the buildings, then invisible within their stretched shadows. His words constantly cycle through her scattered thoughts as the team disassembles for the night and she accompanies an exhausted, defeated Weller to the hospital to visit his dying father.
This is a different Weller than the one she's come to know, the one she relies on for stability and to ground her in moments of uncertainty (or sometimes just because it's Wednesday); in the last few weeks, he's taken a lot of heavy blows – more than usual - and the accumulation of them has staggered him.
Kurt Weller is human after all.
Maybe that's why Rich's advice stays with Jane the way it does. Maybe that's why it plays on a loop in her mind even after the visit to the hospital, the visit where she watches Kurt gaze into the face of his dying father and recognize not only his own mortality, but the gaping loss of those years when Kurt was angry and his father absent. He's at once older by ten years and a lost little boy in those quiet moments and, even though the memory she manufactures of their childhood fishing trip is fake, the emotion she feels when she clasps his fingers with her own is the most genuine thing she's felt all day.
"Tell Weller how you feel."
Conflicted. So conflicted.
How desperately she wants to remember fishing with Kurt and his dad!
When she walks into the room, she even dares hope – feverishly – that she will be lucky, that maybe seeing Bill Weller in person will trigger an authentic memory of the day in the photos: the wriggle of a worm on a hook, the smell of the wet air, the tug of a fish on a line. Anything will do. Anything that can put Kurt and his dad at ease and keep her from feeling like she's betraying everyone all at once – including herself.
But she takes Bill Weller's clammy hand and feels nothing. No recognition, no familiarity, just the weakened grasp of a man losing his connection to the living world.
It's sad – all of it – so sad that she takes Kurt's hand and tries to will some strength to flow from her body into his own. It's the least she can do.
On the drive back to her safe house, they don't speak, for there's nothing more to say and anyway, they're beyond words this night – save for Rich's undying advice, which echoes inside Jane even as Weller stops the SUV and says goodnight, then heads home himself.
Alone.
Something's gone awry with Allie, Jane knows. Whether Rich managed to successfully infiltrate the tenuous dynamic of their recently reformed relationship with his antagonistic observations or whether something else – something more substantial, something that happened during or after the moment Allie saw Jane hug Kurt in the locker room – infected them eludes her. But because she knows Weller is home alone – truly alone, with no Allie, no dad, and no Sarah and Sawyer since they moved out - Jane feels a wave of solidarity befitting both her mood and the exhaustion borne of the chaos of the day overtake her. She doesn't think twice about missing what's become her regular midnight meeting with Oscar, just locks the door and goes to bed.
Do not pass go; do not collect two hundred dollars.
"Tell Weller how you feel."
Lying wide awake, she decides that Rich's advice isn't fundamentally bad. It doesn't even appear self-serving in the vein of the other ninety-nine point nine percent of statements that pass his lips (though who's to say there isn't an ulterior motive in play, some part of an even longer con?)
Don't put it past him.
But Rich's twisted, selfish motivations aside, the problem with Jane telling Weller how she feels is that she simply can't do it – not right now. It isn't even a matter of won't tell Weller (though admittedly there's self-preservation in play, for her feelings about – and for – Weller are tangled so tightly in the mess she's in with Oscar that she can't touch on one topic without insinuating the other). No. It's truly a case of:
She. Can't. Tell. Him.
Besides, how can she possibly explain feelings there aren't even words for? Seriously, what's she supposed to say, Rich?
Is she supposed to tell Weller that she can feel him walk into a room even when she can't see him? That she's been able to do that since the night she woke up in a bag and they dragged Weller in to question her because his name was indelibly etched across her shoulder blades?
It's true. She felt him on the other side of the interrogation room door, felt his fingers twist the handle as sure as if she could see through metal and watch the process unfold before her eyes.
Is she supposed to say that she wants nothing more in the world than to see him kept safe and it scares her to death that he'll be killed and it will be her fault? That one day their luck will run out?
Kurt Weller just took shrapnel to his jugular for her and Jane still feels a twinge of pain whenever she sees the surgical scars on his neck. A part of her soul drained from her body that day and when she fought to staunch the stream of blood, it wasn't just his life force she wanted to hold in, it was her own.
Then there's the guilt.
Rich doesn't understand the concept of guilt (he lacks personal experience with it), but Jane knows its weight intimately. Should she tell Weller that ever since the night of their kiss – the night she nearly died, the night Oscar showed up and told her of her mission – the fact that she can't share it all with Kurt gnaws at her? The threat to him is far too great - one wrong whispered word secures his demise, a thought that haunts her every waking hour and invades her dreams as well.
Should she admit that in those dreams, she sees only Kurt's stricken blue eyes staring back at her, horrified at what she's kept from him, at her betrayal of his trust? That when they get really bad she sees the eyes close forever and wakes up in a cold sweat?
A lie of protection is no less a lie than one intended to harm; they're two sides of the same coin.
Jane's guilt is all jagged edges that cut her to the quick – guilt for the lies she tells Kurt, guilt for the trench of betrayal she digs deeper with each nighttime visit to Oscar, and shame for the things she does with Oscar. She sleeps with him because her body remembers his and because it fills a space not currently occupied by anyone else.
She sleeps with Oscar but it's Kurt Weller's eyes she sees when she closes her own. Should she tell Weller about that, Rich? Was that what you meant?
"Tell Weller how you feel."
How do you feel, Jane?
She feels everything all at once and it's so overwhelming she can't find words. The only thing she's certain of – the one true feeling that always vibrates within her - is that when she looks at Kurt Weller and their eyes lock, she can read his thoughts as sure as if they were printed in the air before her. When they touch – no matter how briefly - she feels first a spark of electricity, then the skipped beat of her heart as it jolts itself into perfect sync with the one that beats inside his chest.
She needs Kurt Weller. Maybe she always needed him and never knew it before her memory was wiped. Maybe she's only able to feel this way now because of her amnesia. Or maybe this is just the sort of thing that happens when a woman named Taylor Shaw hatches a meticulous, dangerous plan and it goes irreparably awry the moment she wakes up as tattooed amnesiac Jane Doe. Perhaps an over-confident Taylor underestimated the power of her own heart and didn't foresee the moment it might supersede her blank mind, relying not on the clues she left for herself to find and follow, but instead feeling its way into alignment with the heart of a man who's searched for her his entire life.
And there's no turning back now.
But no matter what Rich Dotcom thinks or says, she can't tell Weller any of this. Not now. Not yet. There's too much she still doesn't know, too many things she still isn't sure of.
It's just over a week after Rich's high-flying escape when the report arrives – the report that reveals two suspects matching the description of both Rich and his (apparently not ex) boyfriend Boston recently crossed the border into Mexico. Undoubtedly bound for some part of South America where the extradition agreements are suggestions rather than enforceable law, a grainy photo attachment shows that the pair drove across the border holding hands.
The image gives Jane pause.
Rich Dotcom is a villain of the highest magnitude. He's self-centered, self-important, a liar, a thief, drug addict, and murderer. He's frivolous and vapid and doesn't care whose life is ruined or lost as long as he comes out ahead. He takes what he wants and leaves those stuck in his wake to pick up the pieces. He's despicable; he nearly got Jane and Weller, Allie, Reade, and Zapata killed – and now he's traveling through Mexico with a dozen stolen, priceless paintings.
He's also traveling hand in hand with the person he loves.
Perhaps he plans to betray Boston again soon. Perhaps he only feigns love to serve his own ends. Or perhaps Rich Dotcom spoke true words one time in his wasted life and for some inexplicable reason bestowed them on Jane:
"Life is short; follow your heart."
Rich Dotcom leaped from the roof of a building for love. (And fortune. And to say he beat the FBI. But ostensibly for love.) He followed his heart (at the expense of others) and won his freedom. Sure the FBI and U.S. Marshals are on his trail and – because cockiness is one of Rich's most prominent traits – they'll eventually catch him, Jane knows.
But for four seconds on that rooftop, Rich Dotcom was actually sincere. Rich was sincere and he's free (for now). Meanwhile, Jane's so tangled up in her own feelings it's a wonder she doesn't trip.
"Tell Weller how you feel."
I feel everything.
"Life is short."
I want his to be long.
"Follow your heart."
My heart beats inside his chest. I can't lose him.
"Tell Weller how you feel."
One day I hope I can.
FIN