TITLE: Good Company
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: Through "Russet Potatoes."
FANDOM: The Mentalist
PAIRING: Patrick Jane/Teresa Lisbon
CONTAINS: Violence and language, contact me if you need or want to know more.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Written for Gardinha in gratitude for her extremely generous donation to the Help Haiti project. I hope that you like it, bb!
He drove too fast; Teresa's fingers were aching and she had left marks in the leather by the time that they reached their destination. Jane all but stood on the brakes and brought them to a halt in front of a tiny Italian restaurant so hard that Teresa slammed up against the seatbelt and smelled burning rubber. She cracked her knuckles until she had the feeling back in them and turned her head slowly to stare at Jane, who was, as always, golden and grinning.
"You--" Teresa started. She leveled her finger at him for a second and then dropped it back into her lap. If the nearly two years of admonishments that she had given him so far hadn't stuck, she couldn't see that one more was going to make the difference. "I'm driving on the way back."
"Nope," Jane answered cheerfully as he pulled the keys from the ignition and pushed them into the pocket of his jacket. "I promised Mashburn that no one else would sit behind this wheel besides me, on pain of death."
The last car of Mashburn's that Jane had had control had been exceedingly bright and exceedingly expensive, and Teresa could well imagine a threat to Jane's life being an actual item on the table. What she couldn't understand was why Jane was sitting behind the wheel of the car at all.
"You already wrecked one," she pointed out, while a very young couple walked by the vehicle and gawked. The girl had to pull on the boy's arm in order to make him leave; Jane waved through the windshield.
"The devil you know," Jane answered with much more cheer than Teresa would have thought possible for someone whose life depended on bringing an exorbitantly expensive vehicle back without a scratch. The restaurant was in a decent neighborhood. Nothing short of an electric fence and a legion of dobermans was that decent. "Teresa." While Teresa was still blinking over the fact that Jane had used her first name, he put his hand against her arm, just firmly enough so that she thought she could feel his palm through the sleeve of her jacket even though she knew that this was not possible. "Trust me."
I do, Teresa started to say, almost hurt, before she saw the curve to Jane's lower lip and pulled her arm out of his grasp so that she could swat at him instead. "I trust you to close cases, I don't trust you to choose dinner."
"Just wait, Lisbon," Jane said grandiosely as he exited the passenger door and jogged around the front of the car, waving at Teresa to stay where she was when she started to undo her seatbelt. He opened the passenger door for her with such a flourish that Teresa could not help but laugh, extended his hand down to her as he would helping a princess from a carriage.
"I'm still wearing my gun," Teresa told him dryly, meaning that she was hardly in any kind of state for elegance, but instead the corners of Jane's eyes crinkled even further, the way that they did when he was trying not to laugh at her and thinking that she did not notice.
"Oh, if you were going to shoot me you would have done it a long time ago," Jane answered easily as he escorted her from the car. His hand was in the small of her back as he walked her into the restaurant, and Teresa knew within two paces that this was going to be Jane Putting On a Show, winking at the hostess, whispering into Teresa's ear while a table was procured, pulling her chair out for her. It was all a play for the staff and guests, of course, but it was a charming play, and Teresa was in the mood to let herself be charmed. She leaned across the table as if they were going to discuss something terrible intimate and not at all the mountains of paperwork that were going to be waiting for them tomorrow in celebration of closing a case, or what Jane thought of the hikers that had gone missing in Shasta, since everyone knew that they were days away from being called in and it never hurt to be prepared beforehand. The waiter arrived at their table.
"I'll have a glass of Bardolino, please," Teresa said. Jane grinned at her across the table.
"I'll have a Corona," he told the waiter. To the gentleman's credit, a slight stiffening of the shoulders was his only reaction before he walked away.
"You hate imported beers," Teresa told him.
"Of course I do, they're pretentious. Fascinating that you noticed, though--how many times have we gone drinking together? Three?"
"Five," Teresa answered, without adding that four of them had been with the rest of the team, and all of them had been in a bar rather than an intimate restaurant. "I think you did that just to see the waiter's face."
"Mashburn recommended this place, he said that it would be amusing," Jane confessed without a trace of shame. Feeling slightly set up, and not certain what she was meant to make of the man who had given her clear signals of interest for the duration of the case advising the man who...was simultaneously clearer and more ambiguous about his thoughts and intentions than anyone else she had met in her life, Teresa leaned her elbow against the table, manners or no, so that she could rest her chin in her hand and stare at Jane hard.
"Does he take many of his conquests here?" she asked sweetly. It might improve their odds of getting his vehicle back to him unharmed, if Masburn was classy about it--or diminish it, if he and his lady friends did not part ways amicably.
"That's an unflattering way of framing them," Jane chided her, as if he and Teresa had not sat in front of Mashburn days before and watched him flirt with Teresa while his date remained engrossed in her phone, with neither Mashburn nor date seeing that there was anything odd about this situation. "And no. He's a little more discriminating in the lady friends that he brings here."
The special ones, then. Teresa took a sip of her wine and didn't color. When the waiter returned to take their orders, she hid her smile behind her hand as Jane ordered another beer with great relish.
*
Jane continued the performance of exaggerated charm with such aplomb throughout dinner that Teresa made it her personal challenge to find the moments when he was being sincere as if they were being deliberately set out bait her, a treasure hunt. There were more than a few; it was a good night. And no one stole the car.
"Mashburn thinks a lot of his luck," Teresa remarked as Jane put his hand against the small of her back again so that he could open the door for her.
"Mashburn likes to gamble," Jane replied, reaching for the handle and brushing the side of his face against hers so lightly that Teresa would have thought it an accident if anyone other than Jane had done it. Feeling a little flushed, and pleased with herself, her team, and the universe in general for a job well-done in breaking the case earlier, Teresa called him on his bluff and turned her head slightly towards his so that he would have wound up kissing her if he had not pulled away.
The corners of his lips turning up into that provocateur's smile that was going to get him either fired or shot one of these days (Teresa liked him, and promised herself that if it ever came to that she would aim for his arm), Jane said, "Why, Miss Lisbon, I think that you're trying to seduce me."
Teresa pulled the door from his grasp so that she could get in the car unaided and left it open so that she could smile at him. "I don't do seduction." The wine. She was blaming the wine. And the braciola alla napoletana, if she could get away with it.
Jane grinned more broadly and rested his chin against the top of the door for a moment, looking down at her. "Everyone can quote that movie, Lisbon, it's a part of the American experience." He waited until her arms and legs were safely inside before he closed the door for her, ever the gentleman. He had a way of doing that even when he was making Teresa mostly want to find a secluded space in which to bury him. Sometimes even because he was making Teresa want to find a secluded space in which to bury him.
They didn't talk much on the long, winding drive back through the hills of northern California; it wasn't awkward. Teresa tilted her head back against the seat and thought about the only other time that she had let Jane drive her, late at night, but on this occasion she wasn't sleepy. "Put the top down," she suggested, and wondered if she was quite relaxed enough to put her feet against the dash. In a car worth more than her life insurance policy, probably not.
Jane glanced over at her, openly surprised before he managed to hide it. Teresa liked catching him in those moments, as she didn't get them very often. "I knew that you were too little to hold two glasses of wine," he said. "You're a sweet drunk, Lisbon."
"I'm queasy because you're driving too fast," Teresa told him. "So shut up and put the top down. And you have no idea, I might have partied in college."
Jane looked at her sideways, really looked at her, for long enough that Teresa was clearing her throat, straightening in her seat, and about to tell him to put his eyes back on the road before he got them both killed. "No," he said. "You didn't." She didn't know if it was a victory or not that she had at least appeared to have made him think about it. Jane started to put the top down on the car, and even slowed to a speed that just might only leave them paralyzed rather than killing them both if they should happen to crash, but the cool night air against Teresa's face and in her hair was not what she had hoped it would be. The tension was different now than it had been seconds before, still that particular man-woman tension, but no longer as pleasant. She hadn't been kidding when she had said that she didn't do seduction; she ihad/i been kidding herself when she had allowed any kind of appreciative thoughts of Jane to enter her head at all. He was essentially her employee, and while she couldn't stop them, yet, who knew how much more efficient the team would be if Rigsby and Van Pelt didn't need to take daily breaks to sigh at each other.
"You don't look like a sweet drunk any longer," Jane said to her.
"Stop with the drunk thing, it's not funny anymore," Teresa snapped, harsher than she intended, because she paid very close attention to those things and if Jane knew her at all he ought to realize that.
To his credit, a shadow moved across his face as if he did, even if it was a little too late. "I'm sorry," he said. He sounded like he meant it.
"It's--" Not okay, but she was going to say that it was, because she was not sure what was happening here, but liked it enough to try and make it last. "Don't worry about it." Jane looked at her sideways, but for once kept whatever he was thinking to himself and turned the radio up to the classic rock station that he knew she liked. At Teresa's condo, Jane opened the door for her without saying a word, walked her up the pavement to her home. Teresa nearly wished that he would say something, patter at her the way that he always did when he had invaded her office at exactly the time she was trying to concentrate on paperwork, do anything at all to define what had just happened over the past couple of hours, because if it had been a date then Teresa was probably one of the people who needed to know.
"Do you--?" Teresa started as she put her key into the lock and turned around. iWant to come in,/i she intended to finish, as she hadn't been kidding when she had told Jane that she didn't do seduction. She stopped because she realized that Jane was close enough into her personal space to ireally/i kill any idea that they had been out over the past couple of hours was a couple of friends and coworkers, and Jane's lips brushing lightly across her forehead dragged out the headstone. It had been awhile since she had wanted someone, and longer than that since she had acted.
Lower, damn it, Teresa thought and was about to say, before she noticed that Jane's right hand was curving as he pulled away, as if he wanted to reach for the ring on his left and was halting himself. He was not the only one who noticed things.
"You're good company to have around, Teresa," Jane told her softly, seriously, before he turned to leave her stoop and go back to the car.
"You, too, Patrick," Teresa answered. Jane turned back and smiled slightly at her when he heard the use of his first name, and then he was swallowed by the dark.
*
Teresa had ridden with Cho to the crime scene the day before, leaving her own vehicle at the office, and hadn't remembered until she had been closing her front door quietly behind her and wondering why in the hell all of this male-female business wasn't getting easier with age the way that she had been promised as a teenager. She arrived to work barely on time, her hair still damp from showering after her morning run and thrown up into a bun, even a minimalist attempt at makeup nothing more than a dim afterthought on the Eastern horizon. Jane was laid out on his couch with his arm thrown across his eyes; Teresa had already known that he was there based upon seeing his powder blue deathtrap in the lot. Though there was no pause in the hum of activity that made up the Bureau on any given work day, he still lifted his arm slightly and smiled at her from underneath it. Teresa honestly did not know whether waggling her fingers back at him in greeting or throwing the receipt for her cab at him was the correct response, and so decided to just go to her office instead.
Cho was at his computer, typing intently, and paused as she walked past. He said nothing, but Teresa stopped all the same.
"What?" she finally snapped when he seemed content to look at her for the next hour without saying a word.
Cho still continued his assessment for a good three seconds later before he responded, "I'm going to win the office pool."
Oh, for the love of-- "I can fire you," Teresa said.
"Hmm." The size of the pool was clearly large enough that Cho didn't care. He went back to what he was doing without another word. Teresa huffed and went into her office, where she spent the rest of the morning refusing to allow Jane to migrate from his couch onto hers, no matter how many sad eyes he made.
When the body of one of the missing hikers in Mount Shasta State Park was found and they were officially brought onto the case, no one was surprised.
*
Adrian Rodriguez, aged twenty, had been killed by a blunt force trauma to the back of the head that had broken his skull open and exposed the brain inside. It did not appear that he had struggled, and there were no clues as to what weapon had been used on the scene, no matter how many times Jane had stalked around the body and made the park rangers supervising the crime until both Teresa's team and the local police could get there think that he was mad. One ranger had pointed out that she had seen wounds like that on people who had slipped while climbing, which might have been helpful in determining Adrian's death to be an accident if not for the fact that he had not even begun his hike in earnest, it appeared, and there were no bloodied rocks around his body to even point towards the improbable outcome that a healthy young man with no history of seizures or fainting disorders had suddenly fallen so hard that he would have spent the rest of his life in a vegetative state even if there had been someone around to administer aid.
"We're still not certain that this is a homicide," Teresa insisted, because someone had to stand on the opposite side of the teeter-totter when Jane was already questioning the park rangers as to their eating habits and shoe sizes. Two hours and three dogs later, they found Risa Rodriguez, aged seventeen. She had not been left in the open as her brother had been; her body had been pulled beneath a cedar tree, and she had been strangled. There was not, at this point in time, any sign of a sexual assault. When Teresa was sitting in front of Adrian's and Risa's weeping mother four hours after that, she broken that detail in the most gentle way that she possibly could and knew that it was still not nearly enough. It was well past ten by the time that they had done everything that they could do for the day and were driving back in order to start again in the morning. Jane had ridden with her to the crime scene; he was quieter than normal in the passenger seat during the return. Teresa studied the ache in her knuckles on the steering wheel and the ache behind her eyes, and hit the brakes hard enough to throw them both against their seat belts when she saw red paint and lights standing up on poles around an informal dirt lot. Roadside food stand.
"Come on," Teresa said as she parked her vehicle and released her seat belt. "I'll buy you dinner."
Jane studied the moths dancing around the hanging lights and started to shake his head. "I'm not hungry."
"Unless you're a chipmunk, you haven't eaten all day, either. Come on, I don't want to turn you loose back at the office only so you can pass out behind the wheel." When Jane still looked dubious, Teresa added, "Look, you bought me dinner last night, it's only fair."
"Ah." A very ominous syllable when he said it like that. "All right."
The young woman taking their orders looked sleepy, as if they were the first customers that she had had in awhile. She didn't look much older than Risa; Teresa thought of the back of Adrian's skull and avoided fish.
"Let's break this down," Teresa said as she and Jane sat down with their food at one of the provided picnic tables. Something tickled at her hairline, and she swatted at it impatiently without bothering to investigate further.
Jane reached out and very delicately removed one of the moths that had been flying above them from her bangs, holding his hand open and waiting for the insect to fly away before he answered. "We need to look at the tutor," he said.
"Who--right." Teresa barely remembered the man, save to wonder vaguely why he was in the house at all when the youngest Rodriguez had been missing for three days by then and her mother had been treating him as an employee, not as a family friend. He had been wearing a sweater vest; he had not, to Teresa's once-over, looked like the kind of man who would have gone on an hours-long hike in order to catch his prey while he had access to their home. "I'm not even going to ask how you've come to that conclusion."
"He creeped me out," Jane admitted.
"That's not a valid reason," Teresa said. Jane looked unrepentant, and she sighed. He had a point that they were probably looking for someone who had known Risa rather than Adrian, given that the oldest victim had been treated as such an afterthought. "Van Pelt's working on the cars--" The Rodriguez family was wealthy, and each child had driven a shining BMW to the hike's start point that were now missing. "And Cho and Rigsby will interview Risa's boyfriend in the morning. You and I can take Adrian's girlfriend, she was probably the last person to see him alive except for his sister and our killer."
"We're not going to find anything with her," Jane insisted. "Adrian was an afterthought, Risa was the prize."
"Alicia is from a lower income bracket, she's spent a large amount of time in the home, and Mrs. Rodriguez doesn't like her," Teresa said. She received the rare and treasured prize of watching Patrick Jane look completely blank before she clarified, "Adrian's girlfriend works as a housekeeper. The help pays attention to the help, their employers' don't. If your tutor theory is right, she's the one most likely to have noticed something that will get us probable cause." Pleased that they might actually be getting somewhere, Teresa actually took a bite of her burrito because she wanted it rather than because her body demanded it.
"That's very astute, Lisbon."
"Believe it or not, I was a cop even before I met you." Patrick was looking at her, so Teresa's hand drifted up to her hair again. "Another one...?"
"No. Thank you for dinner, Lisbon, but really, if I was out of line last night, you can just say so." Patrick put his elbows on the table and leaned over the aged wood at her. Teresa could not help but think of how she had leaned over at him in nearly the same way the night before. She stopped herself before she leaned back.
"What?" Something in her brain clearly wasn't working right, because if there was a thread between their conversation and Jane's statement, then she wasn't finding it.
"You've been tense around me all day. You're tense around me a lot--" He was going to get a jalapeno thrown at him if he didn't watch it. "But not like this."
"We are working a double homicide. I spent most of the day around two murdered bodies and their grieving family." Teresa pushed the remainder of her food away from herself, no longer interested. "God. You--you seriously have no idea how arrogant you are sometimes, do you?"
"Oh, I'm aware." Jane picked up his taco and grimaced only slightly at the fact that he had allowed it go cold before he took a bite. But he still looked pleased. "My apologies, Lisbon. I'll make it up to you by buying you a beer when the case is closed."
"And a round of darts." Even after they found the murderer, Teresa thought that she might still need it.
Jane smiled at her.
*
Bryant Stevens was urbane, educated, and a child of privilege. A bad gamble with the remainder of his trust fund five years previously and parents who believed in bootstraps had landed him in his current diminished economic circumstances, and Teresa could tell that he had been pissed right the hell off about it ever since. Alan Patterson had dropped out of high school in his sophomore year and had spent the next fifteen years of his life flirting with meth recreationally and breaking the law professionally. If Teresa was going to hazard a guess, she was willing to bet that Alan's involvement solved the question of where the Rodriguez children's vehicles had gone, and also why the method of murder with Adrian was so very different from that of his sister.
In the meantime, though, she didn't have the luxury of all of the questions that she would be asking if she were in an interrogation room and the suspects were in handcuffs and, most, importantly of all, unarmed. They were both currently holding guns and wearing the looks of people who knew that they were done, and between Bryant being desperate and Alan being crazy Teresa did not see any way that this was going to end well. She refused to holster her gun, even though she had Jane beside her and Mrs. Rodriguez behind her and was still the only one among them who was armed. Alicia had called her frantic, saying that Mrs. Rodriguez had stumbled across her daughter's diary and discovered that Bryant's interest in Risa had not been academic and gone to his house, and Teresa was still not certain how Mrs. Rodriguez had intended to kill him. With her bare hands, maybe.
Alan's eyes were the wilder of the pair, but Teresa still had a feeling that Bryant was the one that she needed to address if this was going to end in any way other than bodies strewn out across the driveway. "Bryant, you need to think very hard about what you're doing," she said. A few curious heads of the neighbors began to peek out of doors, eager to see what was going on in the teacher's driveway. "Get back inside!" Teresa barked at them, and returned to the task at hand with the sound of sirens echoing from only a few blocks away. "Do you hear that? There is no way that you two are going to walk away from this free and clear, but I'm telling you now: it will be a lot better if you get into a squad car and not a body bag."
"I can't go to prison!" Bryant cried, panicky and shrill, and jerked the gun that he had probably learned to use a few weeks before to and fro in a way that made Teresa's throat tighten and her finger tug back on the trigger of her weapon. "Do you have any idea what my parents--"
"You are going to prison," Teresa interrupted him firmly. "Right now the only thing left for you to decide is if it's going to be for a life sentence or if you're going to get the death penalty. You kill me, the prosecutor is going to make absolutely certain that you meet a lethal injection."
"Alan," Jane said softly, drawing the other man's attention onto him. He had his hands where they were clearly visible, his face was pale, and if it were under any other circumstances Teresa thought that she could have kicked him right in the shins.
"Jane," Teresa said, her voice low and warning. She had one hand braced out behind her to keep Mrs. Rodriguez in a point of relative safety.
"I have it, Lisbon," Jane answered in a similar tone. They both sounded as if they were trying to talk down biting dogs. Teresa grit her teeth against one another very hard and swore to herself that she would not do anything to make the situation worse, but it was entirely possible that she was going to kill Jane as soon as he was safe. He handled the trapeze-like leaps of logic and defiance of professional protocol, she handled the guns and actual police work. They both knew this.
"Really, Alan, come on," Jane kept going in a smooth voice, his hands spread out to either side of his body to show that he was clearly no threat, his Adam's apple working up and down. "We both know that you're not a real killer, you just did this for a paycheck. I can tell just by looking at the way that you're standing that you hate this guy." Alan jerked, and if anything inclined his body even further away from Bryant than he had before. Teresa held her breath, kept her gun steady, and wondered if the trope about seeing the whites of a horse's eyes meant the same thing when applied towards humans. "The things that he was thinking of doing--that he wanted to do--to a child?" A rasp entered Jane's voice that was not entirely feigned.
"What are you trying to do?" Bryant said, sounding panicky. His jerked again. You're looking at the wrong person, Jane, come on, Teresa thought. The sirens were down the street, the loudest sound in the whole world, but still too far away when everything had slowed down.
"Stay where you are," Teresa growled, and called louder, "Jane, what are you doing?"
"So now you're thinking, hell, you got paid for a job, right?" Jane continued, not acknowledging that Lisbon had spoken. "Except that you're caught, it's over, you won't even be able to use that money to hire a better attorney because Lisbon here is going to seize it as evidence just as soon as she tracks it down, and she'll freeze every dime that you have in the meanwhile. You cannot be associated with a child killer. That's the only chance you have."
Alan swallowed; Teresa saw the choice being made. "Nope," he said evenly, and raised his gun.
Teresa heard two shots ringing out and jerked back hard on her trigger in answer to each even as something that felt like being hit with a board was slamming into her bicep and jerking her entire body around sideways, and her head was hitting metal, and then it was going dark.
*
The most humiliating part was the head injury. The bullet wound she could handle--she even pulled the dressing back on her bicep so that Cho could see the stitches where the lead had been pulled out of her and intone in an appropriately solemn voice, "Bitchin',"--but there wasn't any particular way to dress up the fact that she had rung her own head like a gong by hitting it against the car as she had fallen.
"On the other hand, two guns against one, and you got them both," Rigsby offered, clearly trying to make her feel better and hide the fact that he was worried. That they were all worried. The nurses had already threatened to tether Teresa to her bed three times, and together they were all a lot bigger than she was. The fact Teresa was strongly considering taking on that fight probably did nothing to assure anyone that her concussion was not nearly as bad as it was being painted, no, really. "That's pretty cool, when you think about it, except for..." Rigsby trailed off when he saw how Teresa was looking at him. "Well, the newspapers think that you're pretty cool, anyway."
"Who saw Jane last?" Teresa demanded rather than answer. She peeked at the door to her room, but the latest in her series of Nurse Ratcheds was lingering outside and looking over a chart that could probably have been examined just as easily elsewhere. Van Pelt raised her hand. Teresa waited for an answer.
"Still sleeping," Van Pelt admitted. "But I talked to his doctor, and he said that everything had gone very well, the bullet missed his artery by..." She faltered and fell silent. Only Van Pelt could make the fact that someone had been shot at all sound like something that needed to be printed on a motivational calendar. "So...you both got incredibly lucky." To her credit, she winced a little even as she said it.
Rigsby read Teresa's face and stood. "Get some sleep, boss," he said. "If anything changes, you'll be the first to know." Teresa decided not to correct him.
*
Hospitals never really turned off, but they still had hours that were quieter than others. Teresa crept down a hallway at just past the time when witches went to sleep, taking her IV stand along with her and wearing a tee shirt and pair of sweats that Van Pelt had brought from her condo. There had been a changing of the guard; the new nurse hadn't been warned. She found Jane's room based upon the information that Cho had given her earlier based upon a mutual understanding that he would not be responsible if she passed out on the tile halfway there and slipped inside. Jane was wide awake and looking at her.
"Good God!" It was ill-advised to startle when one had an IV needle in one's hand, not to mention a head that still ached as if she had pissed off that same deity. Teresa put her hand over her heart. "They told me you were asleep!" she hissed, never mind that that had been some hours before. It still counted that she could trust Jane not to sleep like a normal person even when he was on morphine.
"I just woke up," Jane said. He proved it by looking about his room as if he had only the vaguest idea of what he was doing there, and there was already a line drawing itself down between his eyes. He started fiddling with the IV line in his own hand.
"Oh, no." Teresa crossed the room and put her hand over his. "I don't care how much you hate doctors, you have stitches, you're staying put." In between getting clothes for Teresa and being the only person in the unit who was even pretending to work, Van Pelt had also found time to preemptively pick up a cane for Jane. It rested against the guest chair, gleaming, and Teresa had no doubt that he would use it to great effect once he was up and around.
Jane looked pointedly at Teresa's arm, where the white edge of her dressing was peeking out beneath her sleeve, and said, "No one likes a hypocrite, Lisbon."
"My stitches aren't in anything important." Van Pelt had skipped around mentioning as much of the gory details as Teresa would possibly allow, but it still came down to Jane being shot in the thigh and the bullet not coming out again of its own accord, and Teresa had been around more than enough bullet wounds in her life to know how lucky Jane had gotten that it hadn't turned out much more serious. There were holy men who couldn't have counted on being looked after that much. Still, when Jane continued to look at her, Teresa sighed and acquiesced by taking one of the seats beside the hospital bed rather than continuing to stand. She had been getting a bit dizzy, too, even though pain of death would not make her admit it.
Jane looked down at his leg as if he were just now noticing it. Oh, they had to have him on the good medications, then. Teresa privately hoped that the same nurses who had been giving her such hell that afternoon got to experience what a truly hideous patient he actually was as soon as he was alert enough to realize that he was in a hospital and not going anywhere for a bit.
"I guess that is," Jane conceded. He settled back against his pillows. "What were you going to do, Lisbon, watch me sleep?"
"No," Teresa snapped back automatically, and then shrugged when Jane grinned at her. That was also a mistake when she had been shot in the arm earlier that day; she made a note. "This is the first chance that I had to sneak away and make sure you're okay."
"That's very sweet of you." When Jane was really smiling, he could make even the sallow hospital lighting become flattering. "You got shot, too, you know."
"Not on quite the same level," Teresa answered dryly. "Haven't you learned by now to let me handle the violence?"
"I was hoping to stop it before it became violence." Jane shifted a little and winced. "In the future, trust me, I'll let you handle it. One need not always branch out into new territory." He studied his IV line with a dedication that it did not deserve until Teresa could not escape the feeling that she was intruding upon something that he would have far rather kept private, and would have succeeded if he weren't so addled.
She stood, saying, "I'll let you get some sleep, all right?"
Jane's hand shot out faster than Teresa would have thought possible, snagging her by the hand. "Um. Ow," Jane said very seriously, putting his hand against his thigh and wincing.
"Did you pull stitches?" Teresa leaned over his bed and was debating whether or not she ought to call a nurse before she realized that Jane was still holding her hand.
"Stay," Jane told her solemnly. "I like having you around, Teresa."
"Such a flatterer," Teresa answered. Since Jane's leg did not appear to be falling off, she could not stop her eyebrow from crawling up.
"You don't like it when I flatter you," Jane said, and didn't release her hand until he had deposited a light kiss onto the knuckles. He pointed towards a dinner tray that some careless orderly had wheeled in and then not taken away again. "Look, I'll even give you a present if you stay. Jello. I think it's strawberry."
"I'm all right here," Teresa said as she settled herself down into the chair again while Jane drifted off to sleep again. By the time that a nurse discovered them, Jane was awake enough to make Teresa look nearly tractable by comparison, and the two of them united were enough to make even Ratched pass them off to the first person that she outranked.
*
Three weeks after he was released from the hospital and one after he stopped wearing his wedding band, Jane came to Teresa's condo and cooked. An hour and a half after that, he said, "You weren't kidding about the seduction," while Teresa answered fondly, "Shut up, Jane," and was gentle with the new scar, but only just. They mutually agreed that only lasting through one date this time around did not make them cheap, and Teresa didn't even try to hide her laugh when Cho lost the poll.
End