Author's Note: Remi meets her daughter in this chapter. It makes sense that she'd meet her fairly soon after waking up, since she, y'know, lives with her...but I don't know if Remi is supposed to have met Avery in canon yet. They don't seem to have given that information, which doesn't make much sense, since it's been three months and surely Avery would have been home for some of that time, and it would be important to show Remi's reaction to actually meeting her grown-up daughter. Hmmm...
Oh, and I lifted the details about Avery's father from my other fic, Torture Without You. Since we don't actually know anything except for that he was Remi's high school sweetheart, this is my headcanon for him.
After sitting at Weller's bedside for an hour, holding his hand, pretending to care if he ever woke up, Remi went back to the apartment she and her husband now shared. Luckily, it was the same one Weller had had when she'd been surveilling him before the operation commenced, so when Reade had dropped her off outside the building after her discharge from the hospital the night before, she'd been reasonably sure where she was going.
Last night, she'd done a quick search of the place before exhaustion had forced her to give up and go to bed. Weller's sister and nephew had moved out, thank god, so at least she hadn't had to put on her Jane face for them. The apartment had a few new touches, but was mostly the same as it had been back when she'd broken in.
Her heart had seized for a moment when she'd opened the door to the spare bedroom and seen the child's décor and toys. Did she and Weller have a kid? Kids, plural? Oh, god… She'd pulled up her shirt to check for stretch-marks, felt her breasts to see whether they'd changed because of breastfeeding, but nothing seemed different except for the tattoos. She hadn't given birth. She was pretty sure she'd know if she had. Weller must have knocked someone else up before he and Jane had gotten together. Thank fuck for that.
Then she'd noticed the teenage magazines lying on the desk, and had gone through the closet and found clothing a young adult would wear. Weller definitely hadn't had a teenage daughter. So who was this? She'd found no identification or anything with a name written on it. Did Jane and Weller foster kids now? What the hell was going on?
She found out when she returned that night, after visiting the site of Oscar's death and then Weller's bedside. When she let herself into the apartment, it was a struggle not to grab the nearest object she could use as a weapon—a young woman jumped up off the couch, already talking fast. "Jane! You're back! I was calling your cell phone, didn't you hear it? Oh, god, I've been so worried. Wait… Are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Sorry," Remi managed. "You just startled me, is all."
The girl came over and wrapped her in a hug. "How's Kurt? I got back earlier and there was a message from Patterson on the machine saying you must be at the hospital with him. What happened to him?"
Remi eased back from her embrace, scrambling for context of this situation. "He had complications from the gunshot wound. The one he got in South Africa?" She knew that much, at least. "He's in a coma."
The girl gasped, her eyes filling with horror. "Why didn't you call and tell me?"
"My phone's been dead. I forgot to charge it after I was discharged and came home last night. I'm sorry." That was true. Jane's phone had been dead since Remi had first woken up in the hospital.
The girl looked even more horrified. "You were in the hospital too? What happened to you? Are you okay now?"
"I collapsed while everyone was here the other night. They're saying it's something to do with the ZIP I was injected with to wipe my memory." Wait, did this kid even know about that? Had she just made things ten times more complicated?
But the girl nodded, as though she knew all about the ZIP. "I'm sorry. But they let you come home, right? That's something."
"Yeah." There was something really bugging her about this girl, but Remi needed breathing room to think about what it was. Hoping for a respite, she said, "I'm gonna make some coffee. You want some?"
"Eww. You know I don't drink coffee. Hot chocolate would be nice, though."
"Sure." The feeling that she should know who this girl was got stronger. "Are you going out tonight?"
A short pause, then the girl laughed. "Wow, you really must be stressed. Usually it's, 'Avery, where are you going?' 'Avery, that's not safe!' 'Avery, are you sure you should be living your life?'"
Avery. It can't be. Remi's hands shook as she added instant hot chocolate powder to a mug.
"Hey," her daughter said, coming to stand beside her. "You look like you should sit down. Let me make you the coffee, okay?"
"No, it's okay. I'm—"
"Jane. Kurt would kill me if anything happened to you while he was in a coma. Please, sit down. I'm worried about you." Avery took over Remi's task, leaving her no choice but to go and sit on the couch.
She sat quietly, staring at her daughter's back, doing the mental math and realising that yes, Avery would be eighteen now. Why wasn't she still living with Drabkin? Why had she sought out her birth mother after all these years? Why did Remi's first contact with her daughter have to have been while she'd been Jane?
She couldn't even ask her most of the questions whirling through her mind, or Avery would know something was wrong, that Remi wasn't the person she used to be. Questions like, 'how did you find me?' and 'how come you're living with us now?' and 'what's your life been like?'
"So, how was your trip?" she asked, making a reasonable deduction that since Avery hadn't been around when she and Weller had been admitted to the hospital, she must have been away from the city.
"Good. It feels great not to have a protective detail anymore. My father already had a gravestone even though we didn't find the body until recently, so I scattered his ashes over that. It's next to mom's, so…"
"I'm sorry." And she really was. God, both of the Drabkins were dead now? That must have really hurt. Not that she gave a fuck about the Drabkins, but she did care about Avery.
"It's okay. It's thanks to you and Kurt that I have closure for his death in the first place. Here you go." Her daughter handed her a mug of black coffee—at least she and Jane had the same taste there—then curled up on the other side of the couch with her hot chocolate.
"Thanks." Remi sat back, cradling her mug, and just looked at her daughter. There were traces of her own DNA there, but she had more of Luis' features, now she was searching for them.
"What?" Avery asked, looking a little unnerved.
"Sorry." She forced what she hoped was a Jane-like smile onto her face. She'd seen photographs of Kurt and Jane around the apartment, so she was reasonably sure she was pulling it off. "You just remind me so much of your father right now. Your biological dad, I mean."
Avery's eyes widened. "You remembered him?"
Shit. She really needed to work on getting all the information Jane had, and to be clearer on what Jane hadn't known. "Uh, yeah. A little bit. Just the other day."
"Tell me about him!"
She cast her mind back to her childhood sweetheart. "His name was Luis. We dated in high school. He was a year older than me and he rode a motorcycle, which I thought was amazing. His family hated me. My family hated him. That just made us more determined to be together. We used to sneak out to see each other a lot."
"How romantic," Avery breathed.
Remi snorted. "No. We were just stupid kids. And then he came off his bike and died on his way to see me, late one night. That was that."
"Oh," Avery said softly, her eyes downcast. "Wow, that's sad."
Remembering who she was talking to, Remi floundered for a moment. What would Jane do? Patterson and Reade had been so touchy-feely with her at the hospital that it stood to reason that Jane was the same kind of person. She reached out and put a hand on Avery's shoulder.
"I'm sorry. I should have made that a little easier to hear, I guess. I'm just tired, is all."
Avery gave her a sympathetic look. "It's okay. It's not like I ever knew him anyway." She hesitated. "Could…could you draw him for me? When you feel better; when you have time?"
She could remember Luis' face as clearly now as she had on the last day she'd seen him. "Sure. I will."
"Thanks."
They sat quietly for a few moments, Remi's mind racing for something to say that would give her information. "I'm glad we met, Avery."
Avery's face softened. "I'm glad we did, too. I mean, I know I've been a bit of a handful. I was a bitch to you when we first met and then the protective detail really got too much, you know? But I'm really glad at least one of my family members is still alive. And totally kicks ass."
Remi didn't know what to do with the outpouring of affection, so she changed the subject to something she did know a little about: Kurt's condition. After she'd finished telling Avery about it, her daughter looked worried as hell, and Remi tried to calm her. "I know he'll get through this. He's Kurt, right? He's good at surviving." Hopefully not too good. If he never wakes up, that makes my job so much easier.
"I really hope you're right, Jane." Avery smothered a yawn. "I'm still a little tired from my flight. Do you need anything before I turn in early?"
"No. I'm good, thanks."
"Goodnight."
Avery dropped a quick kiss on the top of her head on her way past, and Remi's eyes filled with tears for the third time that day. "Goodnight," she said quietly, hoping her voice didn't shake.
After Avery's bedroom door shut, Remi fought the urge to break down again. You're pathetic. Shepherd's voice in her mind helped her regain composure. She straightened her spine, took a deep breath and took stock of the situation.
She should eat something— it was mid-evening, and she hadn't bothered to eat since breakfast—but she wasn't hungry. What she really needed was more information on Jane. On how to be her, how to fool everyone she interacted with into believing that she was Jane Doe. Right now, she had the good fortune to have a comatose husband, and she could blame all her behavioural changes on being worried about him. But sooner or later, he would probably wake up, and when he did, he would see right through her.
Where could she find video footage of Jane? Her mannerisms, her inflections, the expressions on her face—those would all be invaluable to Remi's act.
There'd probably be interrogation videos in the digital Sandstorm file, from when she was initially brought in, and from when she'd been interrogated by Nas Kamal of the NSA. She should be able to access those tomorrow from the office. They'd tell her how Jane suffered, at least. Maybe she'd even been on the other side of the interrogation table while she'd been working the tattoo cases with Weller. That could prove useful for her general manner at work.
But what about footage of her being happy? Maybe Jane had filmed herself on her phone, happy moments with Weller or something? She found the dead phone in her bag and hunted around the living room until she found a cord plugged into the wall that seemed to fit. As the phone began to charge, Remi straightened, her eyes falling on the small collection of DVDs in the bookcase.
Wait. Is that…?
"Oh, my god," she muttered scornfully, picking up a DVD from the shelf. "They actually hired a wedding videographer?"
Remi was pretty sure Jane Doe had never pulled a face like the one she was making right then. This wedding DVD was the epitome of tacky trash. The cover showed Jane and Weller kissing. A title in swirly pink font proclaimed that this was the Doe-Weller Wedding Memories DVD, and gave the date of the wedding—they'd been married for nearly three years.
"Jesus, fuck," she mumbled, beginning to put the DVD back—but then she hesitated. This was sure to be full of saccharine moments of Jane and Weller gazing adoringly at each other, and if she was going to convince Weller that she loved him, she had to put herself through the torture of watching it.
But not today. She couldn't watch herself get married to another man on the same day she'd learned about Oscar's death. She just couldn't.
She'd call Patterson back, find out what she'd wanted when she'd left the message that had freaked Avery out. Then she'd search the rest of the apartment more thoroughly, to piece together details from Jane's life. And she should go find the nearest payphone, too, and try to contact Hobbes again. It would be hard for anyone receiving her messages to get someone out to see her—she'd have to be the one rendezvousing with them, not the other way around. Roman and Shepherd would be keeping their distance, even now they knew she was back to being herself.
It was imperative that her cover wasn't blown. She'd just have to keep trying to call until someone picked up, and make coded posts on the message boards they used on the Internet. Surely someone would reply there, even if Hobbes had been compromised.