Author's Note: I just couldn't get this out of my head. And what if this could happen? What if there was more under the surface? Just my thoughts. I'll write the next chapters soon, and I hope to get feedback as to help me form the next bits of my story. Enjoy, and let me know if you like it or not.
"How much do you really remember?" Lisbon finally said after twenty minutes of silence, the hospital room hopefully too dark for him to notice any part of her face.
He turned over in a manner that seemed like it took twenty more minutes but instead was only thirty seconds. Patterns of past pains twist and fold into his rumpled shirt. If only she knew if they were his, or hers.
"How did you know?"
Her hands find each other to fiddle with. "When you said you just wanted to be happy,"
A man with no strains on his mind wouldn't be so desperate to make happiness stay.
Jane blinked once, twice, and then finally breathes out.
"You know, the first few hours, with you, I really had convinced myself. It was my life as a psychic, and I had no qualms. But the next day I kept on having a voice in the back of my head suggest little things to me that I knew weren't just observations, and then–" he swallows and tries to find the words "–Cho mentioned my family, and it started falling into place. I didn't realize until I conned him and got away that I actually remembered what he was talking about. It almost destroyed me. So I thought that if I could cling on to something of my past, the images wouldn't stay there so damn prominently."
His voice cracks near the end. Lisbon winces with them, his words beating against her skull to increase her guilt. She wishes she could have been with him, helped him.
Suddenly she blurts out, "So the grab at my ass was a way of distracting me from that; you thought I'd be so embarrassed that I'd leave you alone and wouldn't look to deeply at what's really happening?" Her gaze turns to her feet at the memory of the bar, of threatening him and calling him "Paddy," of his hands drifting where they didn't quite belong. A smirk betrays her thoughts. Is she blushing? She really hopes not.
A light smile crosses Jane's drawn face at her unusual facial expressions, and finally at her unique smile. He knows she has to be blushing. "Actually, I didn't really think about it that much. I was so desperate to be a normal man, if that was even possible, and you were the closest thing to offer me that chance."
He turns onto his back, hands clasped over his chest, and adds almost casually, "Maybe the next time we play a couple, I'll pull that trick again. It makes men turn their heads to really look at you. Of course, I'd give you fair warning so you wouldn't punch me in the nose or worse, not that you would because these days you're much to worried about me. Hmmm..." His eyes close as he watches whatever movie of those possible events runs behind his lids.
A scoff breaks his reverie. "Please, like I'd let you." She is most definitely blushing at this point. Sure you wouldn't, Teresa, she says to herself.
"Ah, I see what it is now!" He props himself onto his left elbow, eyes slightly aglow after so long, like lights finally on in the house across the street so you finally realize your neighbors are alive and well after all. "You're self-conscious about your... Well.." He gestures to her in a general sort of way. Her eyebrows shoot sky high. "You really shouldn't, you know. Any man, and there are quite a few, who is attracted to you would notice some of your best features, and that's one of them." For some reason, he finds himself tugging slightly on the collar of his shirt.
Lisbon shakes her head in disbelief, not sure why they're even having his conversation, or why she hasn't stopped it sooner. "What about my other charms? My personality perhaps?"
"One day, you'll see what I really mean." He looks away as he relaxes again on the bed, voice determined somehow.
"Will there be a one day, though?" Her fingers reach for the cross on her necklace. The cross Jane read was my mother's within a few minutes.
Within those seconds, he's no longer calm, no longer joking. Patrick Jane is desperate. "Please. For tomorrow, let me pretend to everyone else. Maybe to myself; I don't care. Just let them think you brought me out of it by the end of the day because they'll believe you could."
Lisbon pauss for a moment. Sitting up, he looked half-wild, hair all over the place, shirt looking even worse for wear, face too filled with feeling to allow the shadows to hide them. She should say no. She should tell him that he'd have to deal with the team sooner or later, so why not come clean?
But somehow all she can do is nod her head. Finally, when he settled again, his voice leaks out.
"This web surrounding us, it's deeper and more impenetrable than ever before. Everything seems to be closing in, and then there's another pathway of webbing I'm lead down. And I've gotten you stuck right in the middle of it. Right now, you're walking it with me, but I don't know how long we can accomplish that feat."
I don't know if I can get you out in time to save you one last time.
"Let's get through tomorrow, and then we'll go from there." Her voice seems so weary, he thinks. She doesn't need even more strain.
"Good night, Lisbon." He turns over to fall back into the mire of the web and any possibility he can ignore it one day longer, just a bit more, and then he can go back to handling it all over again.
"Good night, Jane." She stiffly tries to stretch her legs to consider every possibility she can stomach the concern over tomorrow, over what she knows she has to do but dreads to do, and then she can go back to handling everything all over again.