Lisbon lolled helplessly in his arms like a broken doll, and he supported her head and cuddled her close like she was a newborn child. The grief ripping through him was like a white hot knife and he shook against the pain it left behind. It cleared his head purified his thought down to this one moment, this one terrible moment. The smell of musty wood and dusty air mixed with the metallic tang of blood imprinted in his mind. He felt the uneven boards of the floor digging into his knees and was acutely aware the weight in his arms, how small she felt and how easily her arm flopped when he let it go.
He bowed his head and dropped it upon her head in defeat. A hand clasped upon his shoulder but he shook it away violently. He wanted neither comfort nor to be separated from her. He sobbed into her hair without restraint as the details of this; his worst nightmare assaulted him with their vividness, their reality. The brush of each strand of her hair against his, the stickiness of the blood on her cheek staining his chin, the slight puff of warmth against his neck, the –
Jane froze.
The warmth flowed over his skin again, and he pulled back to look at Lisbon's face and he focused in like a microscope on the slight parting of her lips as another breath slipped past them. Two more slow, shallow breaths, and the recognition of the warmth of her body almost convinced him. He placed a shaking hand across her chest and when he felt her beating her beating heart he choked on another sob. His hand ran away over his skin as he frantically searched her for wounds. He felt her neck for a slit throat, her wrists and arms for the cuts that had been inflicted on his precious wife, her belly, her back.
Nothing. Not a cut, not scratch. The blood wasn't hers. His eyes finally lifted from Lisbon and he finally noticed the second body in the room: Partridge, a pool of darkened blood surrounding him, the gash through his throat obvious. Jane startled and pulled Lisbon with him as he shuffled urgently away from the corpse.
The hand returned, and this time Jane looked to see one of a pair of paramedics standing over him with questioning looks in their eyes. He stared at them blankly before the only words he could fathom at that moment burst from him.
"She's alive."
He repeated himself, maybe more than once, because the words sounded truer the more he heard them. They tried to take her from him then, he clung to his lifeline until they decided to work around him with their stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs and murmured numbers. In the end they bundled them both into the ambulance as he clung to her arm. The younger medic handed him a wad of soaked gauze, and he spent the trip to the hospital gently, meticulously cleaning the blood from her face until not one speck of that face remained upon hers.