Author's Note: This fanfic will be a collection of one-chapter fics set in season one. None of them will be getting a second chapter, and each one stands alone from the others.

Emotional Baggage

Jeller, set around episode 1x08-ish. This is basically me taking a metaphor and running with it for a few too many paragraphs.

"Wow, I wish someone would erase my memory. There are so many embarrassing and painful things I'd love to forget, and so many regrets I wish I didn't have. Can you imagine? She must have no emotional baggage at all."

It was something Jane had overheard one of the SIOC admin pool members say, a week or so into her case. Jane had made sure she stayed well out of sight until the speaker had passed by, then retreated to the locker room to take a moment, stunned at how little thought the woman had put into her situation.

Of course, Jane had hardly any memories of her past, and when she'd woken up in Times Square, she'd had none at all. But that didn't mean she was carefree. She had emotional baggage of her own, and it had been thrown out of a white van with her unconscious body already crammed inside it. Once her body had crawled out, the confusion and the horror and the violation took its place, because her mind had only been blank until she'd woken up. Since then, it had been filled with questions, and with each new skill remembered—languages, combat moves, how to fly a damn helicopter—those questions had become darker and more ominous.

Where she had once asked who she was, she now wondered what she had done in her past life. Her initial question of 'where did I come from?'had become 'why did they send me here?' She had gone from desperately wanting to regain her memories, to being uncertain the answers would provide her with any kind of peace.

Her emotional baggage was unconventional compared to most people's, but it was heavy, and it felt as though the seams would tear at any moment, leaving her sitting on the sidewalk with the ruins of her mind spread around her.

But when she did end up that way, Kurt was always there, setting down his own baggage beside hers. Opening it up and rearranging what was inside, making room for all of her broken pieces—the questions, the bewilderment, the violent impulses—and fitting them in amongst his. And when he'd carefully packed her ugliest, least palatable shards into his own bag, he would stand up, sling it over his shoulder, and offer her his hand to pull her back to her feet. Carrying them both until she could make a stronger bag to replace the one that had broken.

He wouldn't let her take a turn at carrying his burden. Sometimes she'd try, and he'd let it slip halfway off his shoulder before shrugging it back on again. Occasionally, when the strap was fraying from the combined weight of his issues and hers, he would allow her to stop them both so she could patch it up a little, but that was as much help as he'd accept.

At least, for now.

Maybe it was easier to have baggage filled with questions and creeping, dread-filled suspicions. Maybe, compared to the bad decisions and hurtful memories the admin worker was carting around, Jane's emotional baggage weighed nothing. She guessed she'd never know. She only had her own meagre memories to draw on.