A/N: Thank you for the reviews. Delay caused by bizarre computer issues and my resuming college.
This chapter is a bit different in terms of length/structure. Standard disclaimer applies.
She falls into a routine of getting to work too early and staying too late over the next week, since the two cases they get are close by. The dream about D.C. doesn't come back again, but in its place are disjointed nightmares about her childhood in Chicago—she wakes up swearing she can smell whiskey, looking for bruises on her skin. She calls Tommy once to make sure he and Annie are doing alright, but doesn't give any details about her own life.
She responds to a three-week-old email from Van Pelt asking how D.C. is in two sentences—There was a change of plans and I'm staying in Austin. But thanks for asking. When she gets an email back and a few days later a message from Rigsby too, she doesn't open either of them. When they call her she lets the phone ring and doesn't check her voicemail.
In the mornings Jane finds her at her desk and brings her coffee. She always says thank you and he always tells her in a half-distant voice that she shouldn't drink so much caffeine. She tries laughing at that once, but can't make it very convincing.
In the evenings she writes reports and fills out paperwork until there's really nothing left to possibly do. Jane sits on the couch nearby and reads paperbacks while she's working, staying so quiet that she can almost forget he's there at all. He always says goodnight to her when she leaves, but stays sitting on the couch. (Unlocking her car in the parking lot one night she glances back at the front of the building to see him leaving, and decides he only stays to make sure she goes home at a reasonable time.)
Other than the pleasantries and to exchange information on cases, they don't speak to each other. She realizes halfway through the week that she never did answer his question—do you think you can be happy here? She called him selfish, she told him not to run away, she said she couldn't talk to him anymore that night. But she never answered.
It's past nine one evening when he sets a menu for a nearby Chinese restaurant down on her desk, covering up the paper she's writing on.
"I'm fine, Jane," she tells him. "I'll go home soon."
"And eat cereal again, I imagine." He's missing the grin she expects to see on that line.
"I'm just finishing this. You don't have to—"
He pulls the form she's been working on out from under the menu. "You can finish this once you pick something to eat, Lisbon."
She narrows her eyes. "You're not just going to order for me?"
"No," he says. "And if you don't want Chinese, there are other places that deliver. But you do need to eat something."
"Fine."
She stands near the counter in the break room with the carton of lo mein while Jane makes tea. When he sets a mug in front of her she takes it, realizing how cold her fingers are.
"You're not eating," he says.
"I'm not that hungry," she lies. "You didn't have to do this."
"No." His voice hasn't lost its edge. "I did."
She could walk away right now, leave the tea and Chinese food on the counter and collect her things, take the stairs down to the lobby so she won't have to wait for the elevator.
She's so sick of running.
"We need to talk, Jane."
"I know," he says. "About what I said in Miami."
She thinks she should find it liberating that he can't read her mind anymore, but she doesn't.
"No," she tells him. "About what happened with the human trafficking case."
He's silent for half a minute, but she decides he's thinking and not trying to avoid the subject. She twirls the fork in the lo mein absently and doesn't eat any of it.
"That case was why you decided to leave," he finally says.
She nods. "Because—"
"You already didn't trust me," he finishes. "And I made it so that you couldn't trust yourself, either."
"You didn't force me to do anything." She swallows. "You never do. But I've been in so many of your cons that I can't tell what the right thing to do is anymore. We saved those girls, but what if we could've done it by-the-book, and we didn't realize it?"
"Do you—?"
"I used uphold the law, Jane. That was what I swore to do, and I caught criminals doing that. Now you decide someone's guilty, and I go along with it and don't even think if there's a way to catch them without breaking any laws." She takes a breath. "I helped you murder someone. I helped you kill McAllister, and just by moving here I helped you stay out of jail. I—"
"You think that I should be in prison?" he interrupts. "You wanted me to be?"
"I wanted you to find a way to kill him in self-defense," she snaps. "All those years I kept telling you that when we found Red John, we were going to bring him in and give him a trial—and by the time we found him, you'd twisted everything up so much that I wanted you to kill him, and to not have to be on the run afterwards."
"You always knew I was going to kill him, Lisbon. I always made that clear."
"But I was supposed to stop you. I was supposed to convince you not to kill him, not let you make me think it was okay." She has to keep her voice from shaking. "What you did in Miami was nothing. The worst con you ever ran on me happened years ago."
His eyes narrow. "Then why did you agree to work with me again?"
She's finally going to say it.
"Because I don't know who the hell I am anymore," she chokes. "I used to be someone, I used to make decisions and know what I thought about things, and then somewhere along the line I wasn't someone anymore. Somewhere along the line I stopped existing without you."
"I—"
"And I thought I could remember who I was in Washington, thought if I was away from everywhere you'd been then I'd be a person again. But I didn't remember." She's crying again. Crying again, dammit. "You erased everything about me so you could invent someone who could help you get your revenge, and then you erased all that trying to invent someone who could make you happy, who could make you feel like all of this wasn't just pointless, and—"
Something hits the ground and shatters. Ceramic. She thinks Jane's dropped a teacup onto the floor. She thinks she's gone too far.
"Do you really think that I could have done that?" he asks, voice cracking. "Do you really think I set out to do something like that to you?"
"I don't know," she whispers. "I never know what you're doing. I never know what the hell you're doing."
"But you remember…" He pauses and she can see him trying to calm down and she really did go too far. "You remember what I was like at the beginning, Lisbon. When you met me. You remember that, right?"
She nods, fingers gripping the counter in front of her.
"I was a shell—almost everything about me was gone, and you…" He takes a breath. "Right from the start, you were trying to make me into a person again. I always thought that he…that Red John determined who I became after I lost them, but it was you. It was always you."
"I didn't—"
"You said that you stopped existing without me, but I…the me that you know, that you've always known…can't exist without you. I wasn't writing you those letters so that I could keep using you. I was writing them to keep existing."
"But you remember who you were before. You remember, and I don't." She's sobbing so hard she thinks he won't understand, but she has to keep going, she has to. "You could go back to who you were before, and—"
"No, I can't," he says. "I can't, not with all of my memories still intact. And I wouldn't want to, even if I could. I wouldn't want to, Lisbon. I love you, and—"
"Stop. You can't…please stop, Jane." She's going to say too much. "You know how I feel about you, and you think that if you keep saying what you're saying then eventually I'm going to—"
"That isn't what I'm doing. This isn't a scheme because I don't know how you feel about me—not now, at least—and I still…don't understand why you didn't leave. If either of us can start over, it's you." His voice turns to a whisper. "I want you to be happy, I want that more than anything, and all I've done the past few months is make you cry every time we have a conversation. You aren't happy here at all, and I think that maybe…I should have let you leave. I should never have tried to stop you."
She's not going to tell him how she feels. She's not going to move from the spot where she's standing, even though he looks so lost it's unbearable.
"You didn't stop me from leaving, Jane. It was something I chose, it was the first thing I really chose in forever, because—" She has to be strong, she has to be strong about this. "I was trying to con him. I was just using Marcus to try to get away from you, to try to get away from who I am around you, who I…"
And she can't finish and—
"Lisbon?"
His voice is panicked, she thinks, and he's moving around the counter toward her. She's sitting on the floor and isn't sure how it happened.
"Drink this." He's handing her the mug of tea. "I think it might be cold now, but you should still…and you need to eat something, you really do."
She chokes a little on the tea but drinks a few sips—it isn't cold yet, but it isn't warm either. Jane sits across from her on the floor and hands her the lo mein and a fork once she puts down the mug. She eats half of the carton in silence. It doesn't taste like anything.
She looks up again to see that he's crying and giving her a broken smile at the same time, and she wishes he were closer to her and holding her hand. She wishes she could forget this conversation, forget everything that's happened since she moved to Austin, forget that she's forgotten who she is.
"How are we supposed to fix this?" Her voice sounds like she's swallowed ash. "How the hell do we fix this, Jane?"
"I wish I knew the answer to that." His eyes close for a few seconds and then open again. "I kept thinking that I could show you how much I care about you, that I could do something to make you forgive me. But I—"
"I know you're trying," she interrupts. "But it's not just about me forgiving you. Even if you quit treating me like your sidekick, I have to…quit acting like your sidekick. I can't keep doing things like what we did in the trafficking case. And I can't keep doing things like what I did to Marcus."
"Okay. I understand that, Lisbon," he says. "But right now you're…torturing yourself. You're barely eating and you're working almost nonstop and I can tell that you haven't been sleeping at all."
"I'm—"
"And I can tell you that it isn't going to help. Torturing yourself isn't going to change anything about the past or make up for anything you think you've done—and you have to trust me on that, because I spent years…" he doesn't finish. "I still haven't forgiven myself for what happened to my family, and I don't think that I ever will. I've…tortured myself about it. I still do. But it doesn't help them, not at all."
She stares at him. "You're giving me advice?"
"I am giving you advice, and I know that you won't take it, but I'm giving you advice anyway," he tells her. "I told you before that I want you to be safe and I want you to be happy, and right now you're not either of those. You're putting yourself in danger, and I need to convince you not to."
"I'm not—"
"I need to tell you that if you think that you've become a bad person, you're wrong," he interrupts. "You've helped hundreds—probably thousands—of people over the years. And you've saved my life more times than I can count, even if you don't think that that's worth anything."
"Jane…" She really wishes he were closer.
"I've seen you hide yourself in work before, I've seen you angry with yourself before—but never this much," he continues. "And it makes me think that you're feeling guilty about something else, too—beyond our recent cases and beyond you deciding not to leave."
There's no way in hell she's telling him about the dreams. "Don't. Just…leave it, okay?"
"I won't ask you to talk about it, Lisbon," he says. "But I will say that…I know you blame yourself for things that happened when you were younger, things that were never your fault. I hope that someday you can realize that you're not to blame."
"You don't know…" She rubs at her eyes. "You can't say—"
"And I take responsibility for what happened on the human trafficking case," he tells her. "I don't think I should promise never to ask you to do anything illegal again, because I'm not sure I can keep that promise, but I will try. I am trying."
She swallows the memory of her dreams and she won't think of them again. "I know. I noticed that. I noticed you're trying."
"And I know…" He pauses. "I know you won't appreciate me saying this, but I think that Marcus Pike made an unreasonable request of you. I don't think he should have expected anything to go differently than it did, and if he said anything to you—"
"He didn't," she interrupts. "So don't try anything, okay?"
"I won't, I won't," Jane assures her. "But I won't wish anything pleasant upon him either. Or anyone else who asks you to move halfway across the country with them."
"You made me move from Washington to Texas," she says. "That's halfway across the country."
The trace of a grin. "Yes, but I saved you from the boredom of a small town."
She can't remember the last time he's teased her like this—months, maybe.
"We were friends, right?" It's a silly question, but she can't keep herself from asking anyway. "Me and you were friends?"
"We were," he tells her. "Very good friends, I would say."
"I miss…how it was sometimes." She looks away. "You remember when you made Van Pelt and Rigsby go on that radio show?"
"Mm, I remember you trying to stop us from listening to the broadcast, even though it was definitely case-related."
"It was not."
He half-smiles. "But it turned out well for the two of them, in the end."
"Yeah, it did. I didn't think it would, but it did," she says. "And I really like Fischer and Wiley, and I like how the FBI has name recognition and isn't always running out of money, but I…"
"But you miss the CBI," he finishes.
"Even though I always had to deal with all your paperwork. And apologize to a lot of important people for all the stunts you pulled."
"You miss the familiarity," he says. "I do too. And there were good things that happened there. I remember you smiling, on occasion."
She swallows. "But even if we were friends, Jane, we were still…using each other. You were using me to catch Red John and I was using you as…" She can't think of the word. "If I had to deal with all the messes you were making all the time, I didn't have to think about a relationship or friends or figure out what I wanted for my life."
"I—"
"And you have to let me figure that out," she says. "You have to let me figure out how to be who I want to be, and not just your sidekick."
"You were never—"
"And you have to be someone too," she interrupts. "You have to still exist without me. We can't be using each other anymore, Jane. If we keep doing things like what you did in Miami or what I did when you lost your memory, just to stop each other from leaving, then we'll both end up…"
'Dead' is the first word she thinks of. She's sure from the look on his face that he does too.
"I understand that," he says after a moment. "But I have to tell you that I'm not going to be able to change how I feel about you. And it seems like you deciding not to leave…really had nothing to do with what I said—"
"Stop." She needs him closer now. "This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have to quit saying things like that. We have to be able to talk to each other without crying. We have to figure out how to work with each other without using each other."
He's silent a few seconds. "You want to…start over."
"No," she snaps. "No because I can't and you can't and—"
"You want us to go back to how we used to be," he starts. "But without me hurting you, and without you needing to use me as a distraction."
She nods.
"And you're afraid that I'm trying to protect you because I'm desperate and not because I care about you," he continues. "And you're wrong about that. But if you think we need to repair this, if you think we need to be friends again but not while using each other, then you're right. You're right and I will do anything to make that work."
"Okay." Her hands are in fists so she won't reach for him.
He gives her a strained smile. "But you look like you haven't gotten any sleep in days, and I think you should go home now."
He stands again and she follows suit quickly, picking up the mug and the carton of lo mein and setting them back on the counter. He's a few feet away from her but still too close, and she knows he won't try to hug her (she's scared him away from that), but she's still wishing he would.
She remembers. "The broken—"
"I'll get it," he interrupts.
"I made you break it."
"No, you didn't," he tells her. "I'm glad…you said what you did. And you really should go home now, just…"
"Just what?" she asks when he doesn't finish.
"I hope you realize that you're not just important to me—you're important period," he starts. "And I hope you realize that you don't need to suffer this much, that you don't need to suffer at all."
"Jane—"
"And I hope that…that you want to be happy. That you realize you deserve that."
She loves him too much and it's difficult to breathe. "I should go—"
"Right. Right, you should," he says. "Goodnight, Lisbon. Drive safely."
"See you tomorrow." It's a half-whisper and she's floating toward the doorway.
"See you."
She can hear the sound of ceramic shards being swept up as she gets her things from her desk. In the elevator she shuts her eyes, but it's too quiet and too steady to pretend she's still at the CBI.
