Over that broken road,
Out past the land mines,
I'm gonna keep your heart,
I'm gonna keep your heart,
With the world all falling apart.
TV On the Radio, 'Keep Your Heart'
XXX
"Lisbon!" His voice sounds tinny and strange through her phone, but all she can think about is how she might be dying. (Dying in a secluded cabin on the dusty floor with Jane's voice ringing in her head and sunlight falling in all around her. If she weren't dying she might appreciate the beauty of this moment.)
"Lisbon!"
But she can't die, because it will break him.
"Lisbon!"
She picks up her phone with trembling fingers and presses it to her ear, just listening to Jane breathe on the other end. She is alive. "O'Laughlin's dead. I'm wounded, but I'm okay." Her fingers are sticky with blood, and her vision's starting to go a little red around the edges, but he doesn't need to know that.
"Are you going to be all right?"
"I think I'll be all right." Her fingers grip the table in front of her, digging into the wood until it almost hurts, but she is alive, and that is all that matters.
"Listen to me, can you get O'Laughlin's phone?"
She wants to say no, wants to collapse back on the floor and sleep, but this is Jane asking, and she is Lisbon. (She gave her life up to his whims years ago, somewhere between the half-formed plans and crooked smiles.)
"I got it," she says between gritted teeth after she's dragged herself across the floor, and now she kind of wishes she had died.
"Great. Press redial and tell whoever answers...tell him O'Laughlin's dead." There's something about the way he says it that makes a shiver roll up Lisbon's spine.
Her hands leave bloody prints across the screen of O'Laughlin's phone as she picks it up and hits redial, and suddenly it's becoming much, much harder to breathe. "This is Agent Lisbon. O'Laughlin's dead," she says to the static, wincing.
The voice is quiet (and Lisbon will hear it in her nightmares for the rest of her life). "That's too bad. Never mind. You win some, you lose some I guess."
Lisbon hangs up just as a strange weight begins to settle itself in the pit of her stomach. "He says never mind," she gasps to Jane, trying to ignore the feeling clawing at the back of her throat. "Win some, lose some." She swallows, and the room around her goes black. (Tell me to hold on.)
"I'll call you back."
He never does.
XXX
She wakes up in the hospital with his name on her lips.
Everything is a blinding white, and Jane is not there, and she doesn't understand why. Lisbon runs one hand along the starched sheets, trying to swallow around the sudden lump in her throat. "Where's Jane?" she asks the ceiling.
Van Pelt's voice drifts over from a nearby chair. "He can't be here right now, Boss."
Lisbon frowns, trying desperately to move around in the bed. "What, does he have more important things to be doing right now?"
"Yes," says Van Pelt quietly, and suddenly Lisbon feels as though the room has tilted and nothing makes sense.
"Oh." Her mouth goes dry. "But he'll be here eventually, right?" She wonders if something horrible has happened, and she hates that she doesn't know.
"Right," Van Pelt answers, but her eyes are fixed on the ceiling and Lisbon really just wants to go back to sleep now, because everything is easier then, less bloodied and tangled together.
XXX
The team tells her three days later, and she hates them for it, hates him.
XXX
Her first day back at the CBI, she finds herself eating a blueberry muffin for lunch.
She chokes and spits it out, hands shaking as she brushes crumbs from her shirt. (This is not how things were supposed to go.)
XXX
There's something I've wanted to tell you for a long time.
His voice never leaves her alone, and what scares her is that she's actually begun talking back to him.
"Are you sure this is the right time?" Her voice cracks as she falls back onto her bed.
If not now, when?
She wants to know if he actually had something he wanted to tell her, if he was terrified that she might die, if he thought he might never see (touch, disobey, tease) her ever again. She tries not to think about that too much though, because then she begins to miss him, and she can't miss him because he is a murderer and a liar and he left her.
"Patrick Jane," she says, and his name feels weird on her tongue, "how are you going to get out of this one?"
Sometimes she plans escapes for him, but they are all terrible, and would almost certainly end in him being killed. (Elaborate, ridiculous plans were always his area of expertise after all.)
Lisbon closes her eyes and tries to remember other things, origami frogs and ponies and trust falls, but they all end up blood stained and twisted, so she falls asleep thinking of smiley faces and death instead.
XXX
(If I were dying I'd want to call you, but you're already here, so there's no need.
Me? What would you say?)
XXX
He looks the same, and for a second, Lisbon absolutely hates him.
Jane catches her eye as he sits down across from her and smiles wistfully as she takes a sip from the styrofoam cup that she brought with her. (It's tea. She drinks tea now, and she hates it because the smell does nothing but remind her of him.) Lisbon shifts uncomfortably in her chair. For a moment, it feels like old times, like they're sitting in her office with an absurd plan hanging between them, like he hasn't killed someone and destroyed both their lives in the process.
A nearby guard coughs, and the weight of everything returns, pressing down on Lisbon's chest and choking her.
She wants to tell Jane about revenge, and how much he's hurt her, and that she doesn't understand how everything can seem to be falling apart and coming together all at the same time.
But she thinks he might understand that already.
She spreads her hands out against the top of the table, fingers almost bumping into his. "Hello, Jane."
"Hello, Lisbon."