This fic scares the Hell out of me. I had the idea, and I spent months writing and rewriting it. In a few ways, it goes out of my comfort zone, and in other ways, it goes against what I think or hope is actually going to happen, but hey, this fic really, really stretched me as a writer and I think that's good.
Anyway, here you go.
None of them were the same after Red John was killed. Not really.
They had done it; ended him after fifteen years of looking. After countless other murders, encounters with their pasts, deaths of other teams, deaths and resignations of bosses, and multiple close calls with the infamous serial killer himself, they'd gotten him. They'd paid their price, their horrible price, but as the four survivors said without enthusiasm afterward, in a futile attempt to feel better about their loss, "we got him. Case closed."
Case closed pizza had never tasted so bittersweet.
So perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that none of them were the same at all after that. The remaining two members of the team were distanced from Jane and Lisbon, and both of them knew why their colleagues were pushing them away. Red John was Jane's battle, Jane's ambition, and Lisbon, upon allying herself with him and proving her willingness to do anything – anything at all – to help him had made the team throw their whole beings into the cause as well, out of loyalty to Lisbon and in the name of Justice. And in doing so, one of them had paid the ultimate price.
The others didn't have to tell Jane and Lisbon that any casualty should have been one of them instead. They already knew. They were the ones invested. They were the ones that had the desire to end the monster's life coursing through their veins. Cho, Rigsby, and Van Pelt were just going along because Lisbon was their boss, they loved her, and they would always do their duty.
The week following the bloody showdown, Lisbon beat Jane to work and found her opportunity to talk to her distant colleagues.
"Guys, I'm sorry. I haven't slept since Friday, I've gone over and over in my mind what went wrong, what could have been done differently; what could have worked better. Your loss was a loss for me as well. And for Jane. We're not celebrating. We're mourning just like you are. But we're a team. We're a family. We can't be divided and distant forever."
The two remaining team members exchanged a look. Lisbon knew what they didn't have to say – they were trying. "We," one of them said after a moment. "We. You and Jane."
"Excuse me?" Lisbon asked, tilting her head.
"That's exactly why this happened. Because you and Jane consider yourselves a 'we'." The speaker motioned around the room. "The three of us. We're supposed to be your 'we'. If we were, there'd be four of us in this room right now, and we wouldn't be having this conversation."
But life went on. The four of them were never the same as a team, but they weren't divided, two against two, forever. They were professionals, and their friendship ran too deep for the foursome to be divided until the end of time.
And after months of Jane and Lisbon awkwardly tiptoeing around the others, things became better, almost as they were before.
They could never be exactly the same, even if their fallen comrade still lived. For in those months where Jane and Lisbon were literally all the other had, something had changed, something that had been there since they were hiding the Red John secret from the rest of the team, since Rigsby was preparing to be a father. Since Cho was hiding his relationship with Summer. Since Van Pelt was shaking off O'Laughlin.
"Jane," she said that first day, just hours removed from the death of the man that Jane had devoted his life to killing, "come home with me."
He cracked a halfhearted smile from the couch. "Are you this forward with every guy?"
She cocked her head ever so slightly. "Funny."
She turned to go, and she heard Jane get up and silently start to follow her. They didn't speak until they were in her car, heading off into the black night toward her home. "So," she said. "What now?"
Jane didn't answer her, and when she turned to look at him she saw he was staring out the window with a blank expression on his face. "Jane?" she asked gently. "We…we did get him."
A nod. A small one, but a response nonetheless. Then his voice. "We did. We got him."
Lisbon wanted to ask him 'what now?' again, partly out of curiosity for his plan and partly for guidance for hers. She'd been so close to the Red John case, and to Jane, for a decade, and she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do now. Sure, there were other cases that needed her attention, but she didn't have the Red John case in the background to keep her on her toes and keep her feeling like she was really working for something. And as much as she had told Jane about revenge not feeling as good as he thought it would, seeing that he wasn't happy and content now just about broke her heart.
Upon reaching Lisbon's residence, they went inside in silence. "Make yourself comfortable," she told him, gesturing toward the couch. He sank down on it and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. She came over and sat next to him. "Jane. We got him. Let that be enough for right now. There's no need to be depressed."
"You're not just talking to me."
It wasn't a question. That almost angered Lisbon, that he knew her well enough to know that she felt just as empty as he did. That he saw right through her. She hated it.
On one level, anyway. On another it was nice to know someone knew her well. But Lisbon, who had grown up not sharing everything about herself with anyone, wasn't entirely comfortable with that.
"Do you want to talk it out?" she asked him. "You must, or you wouldn't have come here with me."
Then he spoke. She hadn't been expecting him to, so the honesty in his voice threw her off. "I guess I just wasn't expecting this to affect me so much," he said, sighing. "I guess I thought it would feel better than this." He looked down. "You can say 'I told you so'."
"No," she said, still surprised that he'd spilled like that. "I don't really feel like it." She smiled sadly at him, and then stood up. "I'll get you a blanket."
"Thank you."
She went into her bedroom and opened the closet, reaching up and pulling down a dark blue quilt. Walking back out into the living room, she slowed her step upon seeing Jane staring off into the distance again, the same lost look on his face that he'd had in the car. "Here," she offered, holding out the blanket. She could have set it next to him, she didn't know why she didn't do that, but now that it was being offered to him she couldn't retract. Still staring off to the side, he reached up and took the quilt, setting it on his knees before bringing his hands back up to grab both of hers, still not looking at her. She closed her hands around his, staring blankly over his right shoulder for a moment while he continued to stare off to her left. Then she noticed the hint of tears in his eyes. "Nothing's changed," he said in a low voice. "They're still gone."
He spoke as if he'd never realized that before. Lisbon smiled sympathetically and squeezed his hands. "You're not alone, Jane," she said. "For what it's worth…" she trailed off, wondering if her comment was appropriate. "For what it's worth, I'm here."
"Yes," he said, finally looking at her and smiling. "You are." He let go of her hands and picked the quilt up, beginning to unfold it. "Thank you."
She nodded, wondering if he was thanking her for the blanket or for being there.
When the four of them went to visit their fallen agent's grave months after the final confrontation, they didn't say anything. They stood there and looked at the headstone, the dates that were too close together, and the inscription underneath. Eight eyes leaked tears.
After the visit, three of them returned to the CBI. It took them almost a half an hour to notice that Jane wasn't there. Within minutes of this discovery, only two of them remained in the building.
"Typical," one of them said, sitting down in their chair and flipping open a folder.
The other sat with pursed lips. "Someone has to go after him. I guess."
The first speaker looked over at the second. "Are we being too hard on them?"
There was a sigh. "I don't know. Maybe. I mean, they do feel bad. And it wasn't intentional."
"Yeah."
They looked at each other for another moment, then one shrugged. "We just have to make the best of it, I suppose."
Lisbon found him near the water, standing with his hands in his pockets, staring blankly. "I should have been the one to die," he said when she came up behind him.
Four months later, that thought wasn't any less fresh in her own mind. "We're the cops," she said. "It's our jobs to get in harm's way so other people don't have to. Strictly speaking, you're the grieving widower, and we're the officers of the law, defenders of justice, the ones who this is supposed to happen to."
"It was my cause," he said. "I was prepared to die for it. I wasn't prepared to let a friend do the dying for me." He turned his head slightly to look at her out of the corner of his eye. "But I'm glad it wasn't you. Not that I'm glad it was…I'm not glad that it was anyone. But, well, you know."
She nodded. "I know." Stepping up so she was next to him, she put a hand on his shoulder, leaning her head sideways to rest on it.
He slowly brought his arm up and around her, and they stood that way for several minutes. When he spoke again, his voice held just a slight familiarity of the old, teasing Jane. "So what does your God say about things like this?" he asked her. "About men who have everything taken from them because of their own foolishness, then when they gain back as much as they can, a piece of that is ripped away from them, and they're left without any sense of purpose when they should feel like they've finally suffered enough and can be free?"
Lisbon blinked, looking out at the water, and then looked up at him. He was looking at her like he actually needed to hear an answer. "Well," she said, "everything happens for a reason, Jane."
"No," he said after a moment. "Everything happens because of a reason. We're not here now because we were destined to be. We're here because that's how things worked out."
"That's a terrible way to look at the world," Lisbon said.
"Is it? And anyway, you don't seem to be coping any better."
"Why?" she asked, stepping away from him. "Why do you do that?"
He looked at her, his expression not changing. "Why do I do what?"
"Why don't you just let me cope?" she asked. "Why, Jane?" She shook her head. "We've been through so damn much together, you, me, the team. Now one of them is gone and the other two will never completely forgive me for that. That just leaves you. You're not the only one grieving here. I'm sure you can come up with a way of doing that that doesn't belittle or interfere with me doing it my way." She shook her head. "I don't need you to get through this," she said. "But I do need you to not make it any harder."
Jane sighed, shoving his hands back in his pockets and looking out over the water. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm just looking for a sense of purpose, I guess. Something to do, something to put myself toward…"
"Oh, no," Lisbon said, holding up a hand. "You are not going to make me feel bad for standing up to you."
Jane shrugged, looking over at her. "Sorry." He offered her a smile. "I suppose I do have something I can be doing," he said. "Staying at the CBI to pay you back for picking me up off the floor way back when."
"You don't owe me anything," Lisbon said. "I could have cut ties with you at any point. I chose to stick around. This relationship is on me as much as it's on you."
He nodded slowly.
"Come home with me again tonight," she said. "I don't want you wandering around."
She half expected him to protest. He didn't. "Thank you," he said. "I've done that far too many nights."
Jane had a nightmare that night. Lisbon, unable to sleep, had gotten up to walk around, attempting to stay upstairs in order not to wake him, but upon hearing sounds coming from the living room, she tiptoed down the stairs to check it out.
Jane was on the couch, wrapped in the blanket, shaking, hands shaking seemingly independent of the rest of him, lips trembling fiercely as if he was attempting not to cry, head moving from side to side periodically as if agitated.
"Jane," she whispered. She knew it wasn't right to wake someone from a nightmare, but she wanted to pull him out of the Hell his mind had taken him too. She stood next to the couch, watched him shake for another few seconds, and then put a hand to his forehead, remembering the time he'd hypnotized her, she'd fallen into distress, and that move had calmed her down, drawn her out of it, brought her to the real world with no shock.
Her hand rested on him and he jumped, as if she'd jolted him out of the horror, but she hadn't, not really, his breathing was no less labored and his hands still shook, but at least it looked like he wasn't having convulsions anymore. She removed her hand from his forehead and rested it, along with her other hand, on her knees, watching him for a moment, unsure of what else to do. What would he want her to do?
She looked down at his hands again. The first night he'd been unstable, weary, worn out, and he'd taken her hands like he needed some reassurance, something that wasn't as shaky as he was. He'd done the same thing, reached for her hand, years ago when she'd found him lying in the dust following yet another failed attempt to snare Red John.
She didn't need him to be conscious to tell her what he needed. She already knew.
She reached out and took his hands, one in each of hers, and gave a reassuring squeeze. "I'm here, Jane," She whispered. "I'm here. For what it's worth, I'm here." Slowly, his breathing regulated, his eyes stopped rapidly racing behind their lids, and he slipped into a more peaceful sleep.
The first time they kissed, the world didn't move. Well, that wasn't exactly correct. "The world is already moving, that expression is absurd," Jane would say. So no, it didn't move any differently. It didn't cause any big change. It didn't take anyone's breath away and it didn't lead to anything more. What it did do was ensure both Jane and Lisbon that the world was turning exactly as it should. Steady. Unchanging. Ongoing. Comforting.
It happened when Jane awoke from a nightmare by hitting the floor, having rolled off of Lisbon's couch in a subconscious effort to stop Red John from reaching Angela and Charlotte. Jolted back to reality, he stood and wandered up the stairs, toward the bathroom, and on his way back down peered into Lisbon's room, afraid he'd woken her up. Instead, he found her in a delirium of her own, shaking in her sleep with a pained expression on her face. Her hands were jerking; he recognized it as her frantically attempting to get life back into the one they'd lost. Her eyes were shut but tears were leaking out of them. Still half asleep and lost in his own nightmare, he grabbed her wrists and she jolted awake with a loud gasp, bringing them both sharply into reality. They stared at each other with wide eyes before completely realizing where they both were. Then she'd sat up and he'd lowered himself into a sitting position on the bed next to her. "Hey, hey, Teresa," he said gently, trying to get her to look at him while she stared down at her knees, ashamed. "It's okay, look, it's okay."
"No," she said, looking up at him. "It's not. And it never will be. I can't bring back…" she trailed off-the name was too painful to say in this emotional state. There had been a conversation then, a brief one about grief and holding on and regrets, and then he'd kissed her, quickly and quietly, putting one hand on top of one of hers that was in turn resting on her knee. When he pulled back, they looked at each other for a few seconds before giving the other a small smile.
The kiss was no peck, nor was it long and passionate. It was too long to forget but not long enough to really reach into the memory for details. It was a reminder that the world was still turning, the waves were coming into the shore, and the birds were still singing.
It was a way of saying I'm here. For what it's worth, I'm here.
Lisbon thought of resigning from the CBI. She was in her forties, unmarried, childless, guilt – ridden, and without a sense of purpose. She'd been stress eating for months and had somehow lost weight. She'd let Red John define her as much as Jane had done. Even working on other cases, finding this killer was her ambition, her goal, and, she thought, her endgame. I knew this would end a disaster the day I signed on with you, she'd told Jane a dozen years ago. And it had. Not in the exact way she'd thought it would, but it had, all the same.
It was Jane and her two remaining team members that convinced her to stay. "Where would you go?" one had asked. "What else would you do?" Came from the other one. "I haven't paid my debt to you yet," was Jane's reasoning, and when she protested that he didn't owe her anything, he put a finger to her lips to shush her and began to talk about the case with the other two. Lisbon didn't protest anymore; it was good to see the three talking.
The questions her team had posed were questions that she really had no answers to. It was too late to find another career path, and she already knew that this job was her calling. It was probably too late for motherhood. It was definitely too late to go do the things she'd missed out on as a kid when she was busy raising her brothers.
She knew that her team knew all of this. And knowing Jane, he probably knew her exact thoughts. She still wasn't sure if that was terrifying or comforting.
Later on, Jane looked over at her from the couch, appearing concerned. "Lisbon, can I see you for a minute?"
She nodded quickly, and followed him into her office. He didn't look at her for several seconds, then turned. "I'm sorry."
They'd done so much apologizing since Red John that Lisbon was almost off guard that there was something else. "For?"
"If I hadn't come into your life…" Jane shrugged. "You might have a family by now. You would sure as Hell be a lot happier than you are."
"Jane, don't," she said. "You didn't force me to drink the Kool – aid, okay? I did it on my own, and while I am sorry…so sorry…for the effect it has had on other lives, I don't regret it for myself. Not one bit."
Jane closed his eyes. "Teresa," he said, "will you just let me comfort you without protest for once?"
"Telling me that my life without you would be a lot happier is probably not the best way to go about it."
He sighed. "Fine. What do you want?"
She looked at him for a long moment, holding his gaze, unblinking, before stepping toward him and putting her arms around him. He closed his around her and she closed her eyes. "I'll never stop asking myself why everyone else gets to have a normal life. What I want is for you to tell me the answer to that question."
He sighed. "I wish I could, Teresa. I wish I could."
Around six months after Red John's death, they started sharing a bed. He'd come up to her room, having woken suddenly with the thought that she was having a nightmare. She wasn't, but didn't send him away. She sensed that he had had one, a horrible one, and his subconscious was protecting him by letting the man think that he was up there to comfort Lisbon, and not in the hope that she would talk him down from whatever ledge was beckoning inside of his head. Always appearing comfortable in his situation, Jane had laid back, hands behind his head, ankles crossed, staring at the ceiling. Lisbon, sitting up, looked over at him after a few minutes and realized he was asleep. She cocked her head slightly, wondering if this should weird her out, and then shrugged, turned off the lamp by her bed, and rolled over.
This new arrangement, while still platonic, gave them a lot of knew information about each other. Sharing a bed meant that each other's sleep patterns were revealed to the other in a much more complex way. "You twitch, you know," Jane said to her about a week into the new level of cohabitation.
"What?" She asked.
"You twitch. When you're just about to fall asleep, you jerk, slightly."
"I was probably trying to get comfortable," she said. "I'm not used to sharing my sleeping space."
"No," Jane said. "That would be thrashing. This is twitching."
"Sorry," she said.
"Don't be," he said. "It lets me know that you're about to sleep. And it lets me know that your mind is at rest. You don't have nightmares on the nights that you do it. And I usually don't on the nights I notice you doing it."
"That's nice," Lisbon had responded, unable to think of any other reply.
They both were still unable to go long periods of time with peaceful sleep-they weren't every night, but the nightmares were still frequent, and Jane's were more violent than Lisbon's. Hers were actually beginning to subside, coming less frequently and less detailed. Seeing the other two recover and move forward probably helped. Jane's attachment to them was less; and his dreams were as bad as ever, always relating to Red John, but sometimes his old family, close calls in the hunt for him, or the final encounter. And just as he could tell when she'd sleep peacefully by her pre slumber twitches, she could tell by now by his involuntary spasm patterns which of those past events his brain was making him relive.
She tried calling Sophie. The number was invalid. And Jane refused to see anyone else. So they went to CBI every day like nothing was wrong, and they came home each night and didn't hide the fact that everything was.
"We still have each other," she said to him one night. "Right?"
"You're the one that's always been there," Jane said, staring at the ceiling. A book rested open on the blanket, over his stomach. "You know I know that."
"It's been almost a year," she said. "We shouldn't feel so empty. I'm a cop, I'm better than this, dammit." She got up and began to walk around the room, feeling the need to let out energy.
"Whoa, Lisbon," Jane said, sitting up. "It's okay."
"No, Jane!" she said. "It's not. What are we even doing?" She gestured around the room. "We're almost like normal at work. And then we come home and fall apart."
"We're not falling apart," he said. "We've just lost the young in us. Red John took it from us. It was his last victory."
"Okay, okay, fine," she said. "What about this? What about spending all this extra time together, and sleeping together…" Jane raised his eyebrows. "Well, you know what I mean." She sighed, blushing slightly. "Isn't this what's preventing us from being happy? Or, you know, at least as happy as we can be? 'Oh, hi, nice to meet you, does it freak you out that I share a bed with my co-worker?'" She turned to face the wall. "Jane, this is a messed up relationship." She turned her head to see him. "Can't you see that?" She shook her head. "Why doesn't it bother you? We can't move with our lives until we stop hanging onto each other." She couldn't remember if she'd asked the big question yet; if she had; he hadn't answered her. "What are we even doing?"
Jane looked at her. "We're spending time together," he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "We're healing."
"And what happens once we're done healing?" she said. "Our relationship, this…" she motioned toward him. "We'll never find someone who would be okay with this."
Jane sighed. "I don't really care to." He picked up his book and turned the page. She looked at him. After a moment, the silence made him look back up at her. "What? We've been through a lot, you and me. You said so yourself. Why would you want to be with someone who can't understand and respect that?"
"I don't think anyone who comes into our lives at this point," Lisbon said, pointing at the ground in front of her as if that made her statement stronger, "is going to understand this relationship. People who have known me longer than I've known you don't understand it."
Jane held her gaze. "What do you want?"
She realized that she didn't know. What did she want? She knew the old Lisbon had wanted to love someone, to find someone to live the rest of her life with. She'd dared to dream about children, a family that she would have separate from her work family, people she could go to when she needed to get away. She didn't know exactly when that dream had slipped out of her grasp, maybe it was when she joined the CBI, or maybe it was when she'd met Jane. Maybe it was at some undetermined time after that.
"Oh God," she said, putting her hands up to her face and crying for a reason that she wasn't fully aware of. "This is so messed up."
She heard the bedsprings creak, and then felt Jane put his arms around her. She accepted the hug.
"Everything is one day at a time, Teresa," he whispered.
"I am so sick of one day at a time."
He let go of her, not knowing anything to say, and got back under the covers, setting the book on the nightstand.
She looked at the empty half. She didn't want to go there tonight; all of a sudden she was realizing just how weird this was. She and her consultant were essentially living together, sharing a bed…it didn't matter that their relationship wasn't physical. In a way, that almost made this weirder. More wrong. More confusing.
But she was tired, both of body and of mind, and so she crawled in next to him, turned on her side to face the wall, and covered her eyes with her hand. She felt the mattress shift and wondered if Jane was looking over at her. But she didn't look and he didn't say anything. After a minute or two, it shifted again, and there was silence.
"So what?" Lisbon asked, on another day soon after their late night discussion. After one of the team members made a side comment while out in the field about Lisbon having a lot in common with the victim's brother - a comment she was sure wasn't hinting at anything, but a mere observation - she began to run her relationship with Jane through her mind again. What is this? What are we? Where is this headed? "Huh, Jane? So what? We settle?"
Jane's eyes changed at her comment, as if that word had never entered into his mind. "You know," he said, "most people who have someone in their lives who knows them at their worst but are still there…they don't call that settling."
She looked down and gave a shake of the head. "Jane," she said, turning her head to look at him. "What are you saying?" She looked at him for a moment. "I mean, you don't love me."
"I trust you," Jane responded almost immediately, too soon for Lisbon to wonder if she had been making a statement or asking a question. "Completely."
She stared, not understanding. "And that's enough?"
He shrugged. "It depends on what you value, doesn't it? When you love someone, you love something about them. And there is nothing on this Earth that I value more than what good your presence has had on my life." He leaned back and closed his eyes. "I'm too old for grand passion. That's kid stuff." He made a meh motion with his hand. "But…"
She wondered if he'd intended to cut off his sentence there or if he'd decided not to say his original thought. Knowing him, it was probably the former; Jane usually thought before he spoke when it came to matters like this.
Now that he was silent, she wondered if it was her turn. Was there an unspoken question hovering between them? Was she supposed to say what he meant to her?
His eyes were open now; he was looking at her and seemed to be waiting for her to speak. "I…" she said, her voice sounding strange, "I need to know you're okay." Her eyebrows shifted downward slightly, her first clue, just behind the catch in her throat that she was near tears. "All the time. And when you're not, I hate it, I hate whatever's making you that way, and I hate myself if I can't help you."
She blinked, desperate to not let the tears exit her eyes. One disobeyed her wishes, and her hand flew up to brush it away.
Jane sat up straight again and then leaned over toward her. "If it helps any," he said, "you can always help me."
She gave him a sad smile. "I just wish I could do more."
Jane put a hand on top of one of hers. "For someone like me," he told her, "knowing that someone cares as much as you do does more than you could ever know."
She looked down at their hands and then back at him and offered him a small smile. And then he kissed her, putting his other hand flat on her back, between her shoulders, and doing most of the leaning that required their lips to meet so she didn't have to. This kiss was different, not releasing an explosion of feelings and desires but still, longer and deeper than the previous one. She shifted her weight slightly and kissed him back.
"It's okay," Jane told her gently when they broke apart. "No more tears, okay?" He smiled. "You don't have to worry about me. I'm right here."
She swallowed and nodded. "That's good."
He grinned. "Yeah."
The first time they slept together, it was a surprise. It wasn't anything that Lisbon had ever thought they would do, her and Jane, and it certainly wasn't how she would have expected that particular night to go if she had thought they'd ever reach that point.
She'd woken up that morning, on one of their unit's weekends off, to find him gone. When he wasn't back by lunch time, she got in her car and drove to his old home. He wasn't there. She drove to the CBI, kicking herself for not thinking of that first, and found only co-workers confused as to why she showed up at work on a day off in casual clothes.
It started raining on her drive home. Of course, she thought. Jane left with no explanation, and the weather was being dramatic about it. "Stop it," she mumbled under her breath, chiding the clouds for letting the rain escape. "It's not like he hasn't left before."
He'd never left so shortly after promising her he wasn't going anywhere, though. He must have said that just to shut her up.
She got back to her house and sank down on the couch, staring up at the ceiling and not noticing when the rain stopped or when night fell. She jumped when there was a knock at the door and looked at the clock. It was after midnight.
Before she could get up to answer the door, it opened. Relief flooded through her – she hadn't even realized she was that worried; she'd thought she was just frustrated that he'd vanished yet again – as Jane walked through the door, a lock pick in his hand. "You're still up."
The relief was still there, but it easily backed down and let anger take center stage. "Of course I'm still up, Jane," she said, getting up and marching toward him. "Of course I am. You vanish, you-you leave with no explanation, and you expect me to just go about my day and…and then just go to bed and have a pleasant night's sleep while not even thinking about you out there on your own and God knows what's running through your mind and God knows how many of…of Red John's friends might want you dead, and if I don't know where you're going then I can't get there to save you and…" she trailed off, swallowed, and then continued. "And you just promised me you weren't going to leave." She shook her head. "Jane, whether you like it or not, we're a part of each other now. We have roots, we can't just leave and expect the other one to be okay with that." She blinked. "Or maybe you wouldn't care if I left. But I'd sure as Hell care if you did."
Jane looked hurt and confused. "I didn't leave," he said. "I mean, I mean, I left, but I didn't run off. I went for a walk. I went to the graveyard. I had to think about some things." He looked at her. "I would only leave if there wasn't someone strong enough to hold me." He looked away briefly before returning his gaze. "With all that's happened, my own strength has been sapped. I have nowhere else to go, and no one else to go to. Teresa," he said, raising his eyebrows slightly and tipping his head to see her better, attempting to catch her eyes as she diverted them. "I owe you so much. I owe you more than I could ever pay back."
"You don't owe me anything," she said angrily. "You don't have to pay me back. Half of what I did for you, I did because my job asked it of me." She put a hand on his arm. "All I ask is you tell me where you're going. Just a note. Or wait until I'm awake. You've vanished too many times, Jane. I get scared for you. You told me once that you might not always be here…" she swallowed. "I can't take that. Not again."
He put his left hand over hers where it rested on his right arm. "I'm sorry," he said. Lisbon silently thanked him for not pointing out that he was a grown man who had been gone less than a day. He met her gaze, searching her eyes for some sort of sign that they were okay, that he hadn't inadvertently broken her.
She wasn't totally surprised by realizing she wanted to kiss him, but she was shocked when she did, taking the step that separated them, putting her hands on his neck, and pressing her mouth to his. He kissed her back instantly; she knew he would, his hands went to her sides and his mouth asked her to deepen the kiss. She agreed, allowing him access, moving closer.
When they pulled back for a breath, Lisbon knew that Jane instantly recognized the horror on her face. "What?" he asked.
This was just so simple to him, wasn't it? Lisbon didn't understand how he just seemed to think that this…this is what they were supposed to be. She knew he had moved on from his wife as much as he could, but…but that wasn't the only thing standing in their way. He was Jane. He was the stray she had taken in. He was the damaged soul she had to nurture. He was the sometimes boyish man she had to mother.
And then she realized that as odd as it sounded, that was exactly why this wasn't wrong.
He was whatever she needed him to be. And she'd known for a long time that she was whatever he needed her to be, too. They were so in tune, so much the same person with different backgrounds that came together so far back they almost didn't matter anymore that they'd once been different, that their relationship evolved when they did. It changed when they needed it to change.
The problem was when they resisted the change, tried to stay where they were because it was familiar or because they never thought they'd reach the place they were at right now.
But here they were. Lisbon stared at Jane, her terror still evident on her face, as it finally, completely hit her. Jane was right. They were never going to find someone that understood them more than the other. They were never going to create as much history with anyone else as they had together. They'd risked their lives to not let the other down and she was as sure that Jane would do it all over again in an instant as she was sure that she would.
They didn't have to have a burning desire for the other. They didn't have to be destined for each other from the start. Maybe Jane was right. Maybe everything happened because of a reason. Maybe they were where they were now because of a million reasons, a good number of them tragic, that had come into existence since they met. Maybe, not only was this the best option for them, considering where they were and what they had both been through, but it was also the right option. After all, didn't everything that ever happened to everyone happen "considering" something?
It was all a bunch of maybes. What she knew for sure was their relationship was changing again, and she was finally ready to accept it. She wasn't sure if Jane was, but when she kissed him again, and he welcomed her, curling his arms around her and drawing her small body close, she got her answer.
Jane had always kept her at arm's length – Red John had made any long term movement closer much too dangerous, and as foolish as Jane could act sometimes, a complete fool he was not. But Lisbon had never thought what if because she never expected he would move this close after that danger had passed. But as they parted again, looking at each other, both asking the question are you sure and both answering with an affirmation, as made their way up to her bedroom, stood just inside the door and kissed again, just baby steps, just to see if anything was different, and as they crossed what she would have considered the most unreachable, unthinkable line just a year ago, she found she had no more doubts. They both needed someone to be around as they grew older, a companion, and who better than the one person who knew them almost better than they knew themselves? Someone who they could trust? Someone who knew the worst side of the other, but still loved them?
The first time they slept together, it wasn't about grand passion. That wasn't what they needed.
What they needed was mutual-ism.
What they needed was for the other to simply assure them that, I'm here.
He still had nightmares, sometimes.
Twenty years since Red John had finally been made past tense, and he still had nightmares. Nightmares about coming home just a little bit earlier that night over three decades ago, witnessing the killings and being unable to stop them, nightmares about finding them still alive and losing them before the paramedics could arrive, and nightmares that he never could quite remember when he woke up in a cold sweat.
Or maybe nightmares that he just refused to share with her. For whatever reason.
He'd kept his promise. He'd never left. And, bringing proof to the thought that Lisbon had become his reason to stay at the CBI, he quit the day she retired.
Lots of things were different. Lots of things had changed. Her hair was going gray. She'd picked out the lighter hairs for a long time, but now, at sixty two, she had accepted it. She was getting old. It was a miracle her dark hairs were still there at all.
Of the two surviving team members, the more senior one had been made senior agent when Lisbon retired fifteen years prior. Both of them had since retired, damaged, broken, and bitter in a lot of ways, but alive. Lisbon was grateful for that. They'd overcome the devastation of losing their friend and had repaired their relationship with Jane and Lisbon as much as could be expected. They all still saw each other on a semi regular basis, which was much more than Lisbon had dared to hope for back when they'd accused her of being a part of the wrong 'we'. They were still a family, a family that had been somewhat estranged, but a family that could not only tolerate, but cherish the time they did get to spend together. Because like Lisbon and Jane, the team as a whole had too much history to ever let go, to ever not be enough to hold each other.
Of all the things that hadn't worked out, somehow this one had ended up okay.
Her 'we' was still only her and Jane. They'd never been careful about protection; at least in the first few years most of their sexual encounters happened after some sort of emotional event had occurred and there was no time to think about that, but there were never any children. They were both too old, or maybe the timing of their intimacy had been off, or maybe it was something else. It was better that way, Lisbon had reasoned, they were too messed up to have to take responsibility for someone new.
But despite everything that had changed, Jane's nightmares had never gone away. They weren't frequent, but on occasion, they happened. She'd wake up to find him making a whimpering sound in his sleep, or he'd be making agonized sounds that scared her at first but she'd come to understand that his subconscious was making him relive the night the lights went out in Georgia. Or he'd be shaking, twitching, not in the way that she did when she was about to fall asleep, but in the way that was anything but restful.
Jane was still somewhat haunted by Red John, the same as he had been for the past thirty odd years. Lisbon had accepted that that would never change.
But there was one more thing would never change – every time she woke up to him having a nightmare, she would slid her hand under the covers between them, find where his hand was moving frantically around on the mattress, subconsciously searching, and curl her fingers around his. His grip would tighten on her, and she'd squeeze his hand back. And then Jane would go still, fall silent, and drift into a more pleasant sleep. Her touch, her reassurance, was all he needed, just as it had been enough on that hot, dusty day outside of Las Vegas when she'd first sensed that their relationship was beginning to change.
It was what it always had been.
It was a way of saying, I'm here.