A/N. Thank you for reviews, much appreciated.
Part 2 of 3

Disclaimer: I own nothing :)

Enjoyy
~WL

Talk to Him

"Talk to him,"

"I've got nothing to say to him,"

"This is killing him you know,"

"Maybe he should have thought about what he was about to do then,"

"Can you blame him for wanting to forget?"

"Can I blame him? He, of all people, knows better than that. He knew how much it would hurt me." Lisbon's tone dropped suddenly and Van Pelt came to the conclusion that maybe she had pushed Lisbon one step too far. She backed off and left the Senior Agent on her own in her office.


Lisbon didn't know what to do, heck; she didn't even know what to think. She was still unbelievably angry with Jane, but she was wondering whether it was worth all this. Was she doing more damage than good?

She knew, from Jane's attitude to her over the past week, that he realised the extent of the mistake that he had made. He had retreated to his couch, only speaking when spoken to, and he spent what seemed like all day, every day, just staring into space. Lisbon was completely torn between conflicting emotions, and although she thought deep down in her heart Van Pelt was right; her head was too stubborn to admit it.

The blunt truth was that in recent years Lisbon had not felt pain anything like this. When her mother died it ripped her apart and effectively ended her childhood, but she recovered. She had to look after her brothers and her father and she didn't have a lot of time to reflect on the meaning that her mother was gone, and she was never going to see her again. Her father being a drunkard nearly killed her, but a part of her did understand that he was in so much pain and he just didn't know what else to do.

This was different. Jane put up a front whenever he was surrounded by others. Only Lisbon knew how vulnerable he really was, and on previous occasions she had helped console him and given him a shoulder to cry on when there was nobody else. He alone knew the details of her past and her resultant despise of alcohol. That was what really got to her. He knew that she had never had more than a few glasses of wine in her life, and he knew that the cases that got to her the most were those where an individual's judgment was clouded by the effects of alcohol. He understood how much she had been hurt by intoxication, and yet he went right ahead and did what he did.

He knew.


But she missed him. As stupid as it sounded, she missed her pain in the ass consultant. She had to admit, the office was deathly quiet without his tricks, jokes and pranks. She knew that the minute she forgave him, really forgave him, he would back to his usual self. The real Jane would come back, or at least the Jane that everybody else saw. He might steer clear of her with his wildest tricks for a few weeks, but soon enough it would be back to normal. Crime scene's would no longer be places where there were no walls between them to cut the tension, car journeys would become bearable again and Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt would cease to hold silences whenever they were present in the bull-pen.

And Jane wouldn't have that vulnerably painful look in his eyes whenever they briefly held contact.


Jane lay on his couch, eyes fixed on the door of Lisbon's office. He hated himself so much for what he had done. It hadn't been a conscious decision, but he would still give anything to take it back. Of all the things he could have gone and done, getting wasted was the only one which would really affect Lisbon. She would have been angry if he had broken the law, and she would have cared if he had gone home and wallowed in his own self-pitied tears, but by drinking so much alcohol he couldn't even stand up, he had hurt her. He had really hurt her, like nobody had hurt her in a long time. When the drinking started he told himself that he wouldn't ever let her find out, because he knew what it would do to her, he knew that it was a slippery slope, but at the time it looked so attractive. It started with a few glasses of wine the night after the first W&D case, and then it just kept getting worse with each new case, right up until the night he made his way back to Harpo's in the city. He simply hadn't known where to go, or what to do, and when he came across his most frequented bar in town, he had thought that it was a good idea.

Oh what a bitch hindsight could be.

He couldn't even bring himself to try and apologize to her. It wasn't selfish, it wasn't that he didn't have the guts to, but he knew that if he even approached her office she would shoot him down or ignore him. In any other circumstance he would simply refuse to budge until she listened to him, but he couldn't even do that now. He had caused enough damage already. He lay on his couch, day in, day out, and waited for her to come to him. A part of him was confident that this would never happen, and in the bad hours his mind sometimes slipped into the depths that convinced him that Lisbon would never look at him in the same way again.
Truth be told, he was scared. He had never hurt a woman like this, whether unintentionally or not. Yes he had had fights with his wife but they were mostly about frivolous things and they had made up by the end of the day. There had been times where he had neglected ladies who had hung onto him after a few dates, he had ignored their calls and broken it off with them. His little girl sometimes used to cry if he didn't get her the toys that she wanted, but he knew that if she had grown up to be old enough she would have appreciated the fact that he hadn't spoiled her. But this was different.

Alcohol was the one thing which Lisbon couldn't deal with. It was the one thing that really got to her and made her feel emotions that she had tried so, so hard to bury. And he knew. He was, as far as he knew, the only person that Lisbon had told about her past properly. He was the one who had been there for her when she had just needed to let everything out, and he had abused this trust by going against her one single plea, that nobody else that she loved would be claimed by alcohol, whether momentarily or for an extended period of time. And all just to quell his own emotions. He had selfishly tried to forget his own problems, and in doing so had created much, much greater problems for the only person in the world that he truly trusted.

And he had no idea how to fix it.

A/N. Pretty little green button just begging to be clicked. Come onn..I do it for youu!

Cheers,
~WL