A/N This is it, last chapter! (well, there will be an epilogue but last true chapter) Thanks to everyone who's still reading this, hope you've enjoyed my take on one possible timeline (amongst the many multiple blindspot universes out there).
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Once again the darkness became light and she awoke in a panic. But this time there was no sense of cleansing, no feeling of rebirth; just an oppressive headache and a desperate need.
Jane pushed herself into a sitting position and looked around, feeling like someone had just pressed rewind on her life. Except this time she remembered everything up to the point where she'd passed out, including the fact that something had happened to Kurt.
No wonder her heart was pounding in her ears, her chest so tight she could only manage shallow breaths. She had done it again, made the same mistake she had sworn not to make. It didn't matter that Ivy was dead if she lost Kurt. Nothing mattered more to her than him. So why did she have such a hard time putting him first?
Just thinking about it all as her head rushed from the past to the present was making it seem like everything was closing in on her, the pressure crushing her ribcage. Jane's felt herself getting lightheaded from lack of oxygen, her mind already swaying dangerously before she'd even managed to find out if her husband was okay.
"What happened to Kurt?" she choked out, still unable to regulate her breathing.
The looks that the team passed around only made her panic heighten as she waited for the bad news. Jane steeled herself for the worst, even though no amount of emotional preparation would soften the blow of hearing that he was gone.
"Just tell me," she pleaded, the agony of not knowing digging into her.
Finally, Patterson stepped closer and put her hand on Jane's shoulder. But instead of settling her, the comforting gesture made Jane's spine crawl and pushed her blood pressure to an alarmingly high level.
"He's back in surgery," Patterson said. "But there haven't been any updates since he went in."
Somehow the already unbearable tension in her kept increasing, as if she were being internally twisted. Jane experienced a sudden onrush of hallucinations, faces from all of their previous cases, all pointing at her accusingly, telling her horrible facts she already knew far too well.
That the mortality rates of patients who require a second abdominal surgery ranged from ten to twenty-five percent. That Kurt had already been extremely weakened by his first surgery, barely able to maintain passable O2 levels. That it had been her responsibility to watch over him, make sure his condition didn't worsen. That she was about to lose her heart and it was all her own fault.
How could she have left him alone in the ICU? Jane wanted to blame it on the hallucinations but she knew it was all just her own brain, that she'd made the decision to leave her husband despite swearing to herself she wouldn't do it again.
The temptation of retribution had been too strong, especially when backed with the excuse of needing to find the bomb and save lives. But she hadn't properly considered the consequences of leaving, idiotically trusting that nothing would go wrong while he was alone.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, she cursed at herself silently, closing her eyes in an attempt to keep herself together.
"What happened?" Jane repeated, opening her eyes and scanning her teammates once again. "I remember Rich saying something about Kurt before I passed out."
Rich opened his mouth and for once, nothing came out. He gestured helplessly while Jane glared at her friends, torn apart by twin needs, driving her both physically and emotionally. She had to go, she had to get to him. But she also had to know what it was they weren't saying.
Jane swung her legs off the medical bed and looked hard at Patterson, who was futilely trying to restrain her. But when she saw the expression Patterson was wearing she froze in her attempt to flee.
"Weller called me. He said you were hallucinating and had taken off and to hack your phone to find you."
She thought he'd been asleep. But then again she had been so intensely distracted by hallucinatory Roman showing up that it wasn't surprising she hadn't noticed Kurt was awake. How he had gotten to his phone was another question though; Jane remembered it being out of reach when she'd left his room. Really, everything was out of reach for Kurt considering he had been barely out of surgery, unable to lift his own torso and still attached to numerous machines.
"What aren't you telling me?" she asked, dread sitting heavy in her stomach.
There was another long pause and Jane felt herself losing her last shreds of patience just as Patterson exhaled nervously and finally responded.
"It sounded like he was having a really hard time breathing. And after he said to find you he dropped the phone and the call ended. When I tried to call him back, I didn't get any response until Allie finally picked up and told us she found him on the floor in his room and they had to take him back into surgery."
Images of Kurt trying to get out of bed and falling cascaded through her mind, driving her guilt in so deep it becomes a physical hurt. All to save her, of course. Just to make it even worse.
He'd been barely able to breathe, sit up on his own. Kurt getting out of his hospital bed because he was worried about where she'd gone was her worst nightmare come to life.
The pain was somehow dull and sharp all at once and it overwhelmed all of her senses for an undefinable amount of time. Jane felt it in the nuclei of her cells, a black hole opening inside of her, collapsing her from within. Even her vision faded again, then became an incomprehensible blur of colour. Her head was spinning and throbbing and she shut her eyes harder in a desperate attempt to steady herself.
"Jane! Jane!"
Her teammates were yelling at her but she was unable to respond while drowning in guilt, her mind incoherent. This had happened once before, when she'd first realized what she had done, what she had caused with her little missions for Oscar. Sitting there in an empty warehouse sobbing as someone she loved bled out in her arms while blaming her for it. But even that was nothing compared to the weight of the current tidal wave dragging her under.
For a moment Jane felt completely disembodied, watching herself shut down from above. But then someone was violently shaking her by the shoulder and everyone was shouting at at her and slowly she became reconnected to her physical self, remembering that she needed to leave.
"Jane, this isn't your fault," Patterson said, even though it obviously was.
She had gotten revenge for what had been done to him but at what cost? Putting Kurt through another surgery wasn't worth it, even if he survived. More and more Jane realized she'd gone after Ivy to satisfy her own need for retribution while ignoring Kurt's need to have her there, safe beside him.
She'd tried to resolve her own guilt by taking Ivy out, only to have created a massive amount of additional regret. Sometimes it felt like she would never learn to avoid the chaos that surrounded her, was drawn to it just like Carter and Roman said.
"I have to go," she said, through gritted teeth.
She could see the team exchange eye rolls, mutters of 'not again'.
"Jane, you can't go anywhere. You need more of the antidote right away. The doctor is just prepping it now," Patterson said.
"It can wait," she replied, pushing to her feet and immediately regretting moving so abruptly.
Her head hurt, a lot. But that didn't matter, she needed to be there when Kurt got out of surgery. No matter how irrational it was, Jane felt it deep in her gut. She couldn't stay another minute without losing it entirely.
"No it can't," Patterson argued. "You're dying, Jane. And if you don't get the antidote soon you could run out of time before you get back here."
Jane froze, tried to think of a way around her friends.
"We can't let you leave without the treatment," Zapata stated. "You're hallucinating and you passed out."
"Yeah, Weller would murder us all if we let you go right now," Rich added. "As soon as he's up and growling at people again, which is going to be like mega soon."
Jane managed a tiny lip twitch at Rich's comment and realized she didn't have the energy to fight through all of them. Especially when Dr. Horne came back right then with the antidote ready.
So she sat back on the table, giving her friends a slightly sheepish look.
"Okay, okay," she muttered. "I'll get the treatment first."
Everyone sighed nearly simultaneously, then gave each other rather self-satisfied grins as they left the room, once doctor started administering the antidote.
But Jane didn't feel any of their relief, still dreaded being away from the hospital for any addition al time. Even if Kurt was still in surgery, she should be there for him. No matter if he would whole-heartedly agree with all of their friends in forcing her to stay.
Regardless, she tried to settle in and get through the procedure. But as soon as Jane closed her eyes, she found that she wasn't in the medical room anymore. Instead, she was floating in space, a familiar voice talking to her.
"If you want to find that bomb, you have to stop rejecting who you are, everything in your past," Borden said, in his slightly pedantic way.
"I don't want to find the bomb. I just want to get to Kurt," Jane snapped.
Borden smiled and gave her a knowing look.
"That's not true, that's not who you are. You can't let millions of people lose their lives."
"But you're telling me to accept my past, well that's who I was. A terrorist and a time bomb. A plot in an innocent life," Jane stated.
"There was a reason for what you were doing though, a higher purpose," Borden argued. "This ZIP bomb? It's just pointless destruction."
"The purpose doesn't matter if innocent people get killed along the way," Jane argued.
Borden sighed, shook his head at her stubbornness.
"Look to your beginning, Jane. Your mind is trying to tell you something."
"What? That I was wrong? I never should have started this all?" Jane asked. "You should know, I brought chaos and death into your life, then dragged you into being a terrorist."
"My wife brought that on us the moment she took you in. I begged her not to do it. None of that was your fault. Then you gave me an outlet for my own anger and grief. I chose my own path. You didn't choose this for me. You didn't even choose it for yourself."
Jane scoffed, rolled her eyes.
"I made the choice to go back to Shepherd, even if she manipulated the circumstances around it."
"But you were trying to right a wrong, just as I was, just as Shepherd was. Your methods and Shepherd's may have diverged but she was trying to fight corruption at the highest levels."
"By killing millions of innocents. And sacrificing her own people."
"As I said, her methods aren't yours. But to get to your future you need to look to your past. As much as you want to turn away from it, that's where the key lies."
"What are you saying?" Jane asked, irritated by the vagueness of it all the hallucinatory nonsense. "I don't remember anything else about the bomb."
"I'm saying the answer is within you, Jane. You just have to listen to your instincts."
Suddenly the background behind Borden started fading away, as if getting sucked into vortex. Everything was disappearing, leaving nothing but a calm blanket of grey.
"Wait, what's going on?" Jane asked, just as Borden himself started falling into the bottomless abyss.
"The antidote is working, erasing all of this from your mind," Borden replied, as if from a great distance.
"But then I won't be able to find the bomb?" Jane asked, still unsure of what the conversation with the hallucinatory psychologist had meant.
"None of this makes any sense, I didn't hear anything else."
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Jane, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Borden said, his voice now only a faint echo.
Jane snapped back into reality and instinctively pulled the IV out of her arm. Despite her complete doubt about what Borden had said to her, she couldn't help but feel like her mind was telling her something important. After all, the hallucinations had led her to Ivy and the device once already. It wasn't impossible that there was still something lingering in her abused brain that could lead them to the exact location of the bomb.
Doctor Horne looked up in concern with Jane's action.
"What are you doing?" she asked. "The treatment isn't complete."
"I'm sorry," Jane said, flustered by her many questions, all mixed up in her already her messed up mind. She didn't really even know what she was doing, much less how to explain it to the doctor.
"I think the answer is still in my brain but I need the hallucinations to guide me there."
"That doesn't make any sense," Dr. Horne responded. "It's more likely your brain is malfunctioning due to the ZIP and sending you the wrong impulses."
"I know it sounds crazy but it makes sense to me," Jane maintained. "I need to go, the treatment will have to wait."
"But you'll be risking your life," Dr. Horne said, sounding extremely worried. "You need the rest of this treatment as soon as possible."
"I understand," Jane replied. "It's worth the risk."
With that, Jane took off before the doctor could call her friends to stop her and was out of the building in a flash. She didn't want to have the time to think about her decision before jumping in a cab and heading to the hospital again.
She knew she was acting irrationally, that she was taking a chance on the fruits of her diseased brain. Kurt would be losing his mind at her if he wasn't in surgery, fighting for his own life. But Jane was running on pure instinct, along with a flood of panic. She had left and something terrible had happened to Kurt. So she needed to get back even if he was still in surgery, at least be there for him. Then, once she was there, maybe she could figure out what her visions were trying to tell her.
Jane bolted into the hospital, once more running up the stairs to Kurt's room because she didn't know where else to go. When she got there, already out of breath and sweaty, her heart rate exploded at the same time her stomach dropped to the floor.
The room was a disaster zone with everything strewn about, blood and medical debris everywhere. Allie was standing in the corner staring when Jane stepped in and took in the mess, imagining what had happened.
"Aren't you supposed to be getting an antidote still?" Allie asked.
Jane barely heard the question, was definitely too stuck in the brutal projections of her imagination to formulate a response until Allie walked up to her and physically grasped her shoulder.
Looking up in surprise at how close the other woman was, Jane did her best to bring her head back into the present. But how could she possibly explain what was going on in the landscape of her poisoned mind?
"I couldn't stay there," she said, unable to explain things further. Nothing made sense, not even to her. But still Jane somehow knew what she had to do.
"Jane, they're still operating on him. It could be awhile," Allie said, sounding both weary and in shock.
"You need to be well for him once he's out of surgery and recovering."
If he makes it out of surgery.
Jane shuddered at the unbidden thought, tried to push the negativity out of her mind. But everything was so messed up in there and all slathered in overwhelming guilt.
Of course Allie wasn't wrong, just as her teammates had been doing the right thing in forcing her to stay and get the treatment. But as much as Jane wanted to take the antidote and be there entirely for her husband after his surgery, it was impossible to shake off the feeling that she was still the key to finding the bomb. She couldn't just give up on saving all those lives, not if it just meant she needed to risk her own for a little longer. That was who she was, who she had always been.
Jane exhaled, then tried to control her breathing long enough to manage an intelligible response.
"Allie, I can't explain it but the hallucinations are still trying to tell me something about the bomb. I know that sounds ridiculous but I can feel it, the answer is in my head."
Of course Allie looked very skeptical, her eyebrows reaching towards the ceiling. So before she could argue the point, Jane continued.
"And anyways, I have to be here for Kurt. Even if he's in surgery. It felt so wrong not to be here waiting. Especially after…"
Jane looked around, imagining the scene again and choking on her next words a bit before she managed to get them out.
"What happened?" she asked.
Allie also looked around the room and visibly shuddered before slowly meeting Jane's eyes again.
"He was on the ground and almost not breathing when I got here," she said. "When they tried to put a chest tube in… a lot of blood came out and they rushed him into surgery."
The last part Allie said haltingly, her eyes wide but distant. She was clearly still affected by having seen what happened. Which was distressing coming from someone as tough as Allie.
Jane was having a hard time taking it all in, knowing exactly why Kurt had, ridiculously, been out of bed in the first place. If she hadn't left he would still be just fine, resting in his room instead of undergoing emergency surgery again.
She felt one tear slip through the icy cold fear in her chest, then another. Again, she had screwed up and Kurt had paid the price. How many times could she let that happen?
"I can't believe I left him alone. This is all my fault."
Allie rubbed Jane's shoulder supportively, then gripped it tight and sighed a bit as she replied.
"It's not your fault that Kurt did something impulsive because of you. And the last thing he would want is for you to feel guilty about what happened."
It didn't matter if those things were true, nothing was going to relieve how bad Jane felt about it all. She was now fully sobbing, unable to control herself as Allie continued to look at her in concern.
"I shouldn't have let any of this happen," Jane lamented through quiet hiccupping breaths.
Allie gave her shoulder another a supportive squeeze, but this one painful enough to seize Jane's attention for a moment. Her head snapped up in surprise and met Allie's stern yet empathetic gaze.
"What happened to Kurt wasn't your fault," she repeated. "But this whole not taking the antidote thing is. And it's a really bad idea, Jane."
Of course it was, Jane thought. But she didn't have anything else to try and it certainly wasn't the first time she'd risked herself. Her symptoms weren't even that serious yet, if passing out in the cathedral as an after effect of getting hit in the head and not because of the ZIP.
She hated having everything look at her with such concern; felt Allie's eyes boring into her as she tried to formulate a response. The problem was, none of it made any sense, not even when she explained it to herself. Yet she knew the answer was in her, that she wasn't done with the ZIP yet.
Thankfully, Jane was saved from answering when a very weary and blood-splattered doctor came to the door and every other thought was put aside as they listened to the surgeon's report.
"He made it out of surgery but his condition is still critical. It appears that a small bleed opened up in his chest after his first surgery and falling caused it to quickly expand and become a massive hemothorax. With the amount of blood he was losing, we had to do an emergency thoracotomy to open up his chest and stop the bleeding."
The doctor paused there to let Jane take in that information, her heart somehow both elated and devastated, all at once. He was alive and out of surgery. But they'd had to cut his chest open because he'd been dying, choking on his own blood.
Jane tried to push the gruesome picture out of her mind as the doctor continued on.
"I'm not going to sugar-coat this. It was touch and go for a long time while he was on the table, his body has been through an enormous amount of trauma. The recovery from this surgery is both long and extremely painful. He'll likely need to be on strong pain medication for awhile and certainly won't be getting out of bed again anytime soon. Though falling was possibly a positive in this instance because it led us to finding the hemothorax much sooner than if it had remained a small bleed. That does typically lead to a better outcome."
Allie squeezed Jane's shoulder again at the doctor's comment, obviously pleased that her point had been proven. But even with the doctor's explanation, Jane couldn't bring herself to be glad in any way to have forced her broken husband out of his hospital bed from sheer worry. Not when it had made him bleed so much that he couldn't breathe. He must have been so scared, lying there all alone.
The doctor kept talking, telling them that Weller was currently in post-op but would be back in the ICU once they were sure he was stable. But Jane was still stuck on the mental image of Kurt, on floor and gasping for air, his eyes full of fear. Thankfully the doctor didn't seem to notice through her exhaustion and left, saying she would come check on him once he was back in his room.
Allie hugged Jane hard, muttering in relief.
"See, it wasn't your fault," she said. "He's going to be okay, Jane."
Allie's arms were around her but Jane still felt cold and numb. It was little consolation that they'd found the hemothorax because he'd fallen. She'd left him alone despite promising not to and he'd ended up on the ground unable to breathe, needing emergency surgery. Nothing was going to relieve that guilt, it was just something she would have to learn to live with.
"But you need to take that antidote," Allie continued. "You know Kurt would be telling you the same thing."
Jane exhaled and stepped back, out of Allie's embrace. Shaking her head stubbornly, Jane felt a sudden throbbing behind her ears and saw explosions of light inside her skull as her vision fixated on the blood still all over the floor.
Then a series of visions flashed through her mind, familiar faces jeering at her, telling her she was making the wrong choice yet again. Roman showed up again, of course, asking her why she hadn't found the bomb, why she wasn't even out in Times Square looking. But Reade was there too, telling her she was taking unnecessary risks, that Weller needed her healthy.
Jane felt herself torn in two directions, silently screaming at the pain in her head, the ghosts that haunted her. She was sure the answer was in there but maybe that was just her neurons misfiring due to the ZIP. It was worth a shot though, even if it meant enduring the symptoms for awhile longer. Anything to save millions of others from going through what she was experiencing.
Well, anything except leaving Kurt again. No matter what the hallucinations said, she wasn't going anywhere until he had recovered. That, she was sure of.
Coming back to that reassuring thought, the vicious spinning in her vision started to settle and Jane felt herself yanked back into reality. Shaking the last of the hallucinations out of her mind, Jane was surprised to find herself on the ground on her hands and knees with Allie crouched beside her, shaking her and shouting in her ear.
"Jane, Jane!" she called frantically. "We need a doctor in here!"
"No, no, I'm okay," Jane mumbled, trying to push to her feet but finding herself restrained by Allie's arm.
"I was just lightheaded for a moment."
Allie emitted an exasperated grunt.
"Jane, you're dying," she said in her regular matter-of-fact manner. "And you look beat to shit too. You can't be like this when Kurt wakes up, he would lose it."
Jane exhaled wearily, tried to formulate thoughts through the pulsating in her skull.
Everything Allie had said was true but Kurt was in recovery, wouldn't be back in his ICU room and awake for awhile yet. There was still a chance she could locate the bomb before then, resolve everything without Kurt even knowing about it.
It was a risk though, even Dr. Horne couldn't tell her how long she had before the antidote wouldn't be effective anymore. And the thought of leaving it too late, what it would do to Kurt to wake up and find out that she was gone.
Jane shivered at the thought, then took a deep breath to try and steady herself. Maybe her friends were all right, she was taking too big a chance by pushing her luck.
"I'll take the antidote if Dr. Horne can come here to administer it," she decided. "I need to be here when Kurt gets back."
"Deal," Allie replied, pulling out her phone to set things up.
As Allie talked to Patterson, staff came in to clean the room in anticipation of Kurt's return. So Jane stepped into the hall and did her best to pull herself back together, even as more hallucinations tried to push her towards Times Square.
This time though, she knew nothing would get her to leave the hospital. No matter the consequences, Kurt was her priority, even if she was just there to watch over him. However, she did still hold onto a dim hope that she could figure out what her brain was trying to tell her before she got rid of the ZIP for good.
Allie finished her call and came over to tell her that Dr. Horne would be coming with the antidote as soon as she had prepped another round of the treatment. It should have been reassuring news but it only pushed the urgency in Jane's mind. She didn't have much more time to reflect on her past, or whatever it was Borden had said. And the clamour of thoughts and weird visions, along with the blur of being concussed, was making it hard to sort everything out.
She must have been standing in a daze in the hallway because the next thing Jane knew, Allie was guiding her into a seat and talking to her in a worried tone.
"You look like you're about to pass out again," she said, helping Jane settle into the chair. "What the hell happened out there?"
Honestly, she couldn't really remember much except launching Ivy out the window at the end of the fight. But it was a toss up on whether that was due to being hit in the head or the ZIP poisoning or just the blur of the moment when engaged in battle. Either way, what had happened to her didn't matter now that it was over. The plethora of sore body parts was just a minor annoyance compared to her mental distress. A few broken ribs and a concussion was par for the course after a fight like that, certainly nothing she hadn't been through before, many times.
"I'm fine," Jane grumbled. "It's just a headache."
Allie looked skeptical but didn't push any further on the issue, just sat down next to Jane and grasped her hand reassuringly.
"Kurt's going to be okay," she said, sounding much more confident than Jane felt.
"He is way to stubborn to let this take him down."
Jane gulped, praying that Allie was right. But she suddenly couldn't get words out past the worry in her throat and hot tears started streaming down her cheek until she was sobbing into her own arms, all her guilt and anxiety pouring out at once.
Allie tried talking her down and patting her back but the combination of her rampant emotions and her malfunctioning brain made it impossible to get herself under control. So Jane did her best to hug herself and manage her breathing even as tears kept pouring out of her, while Allie continued to repeat that they would get through this, that Kurt would be okay.
They sat like that for an unknowable amount of time, right up until their attention was diverted by a team of staff bringing Kurt back to the ICU.
Jane stood and stared from outside the room as the nurses resettled Weller in his bed and attached him to the machines that surrounded him. Her chest loosened a tiny bit as she realized that Kurt hadn't been put back on the ventilator, despite the additional trauma to his lungs. But other than that one piece of positivity, he was covered in even more tubes and new bandages, looked devastatingly frail.
Still, he was alive. But the warm glow of that knowledge pushed against the ice in her gut at seeing him so broken.
Once Kurt was finally reattached to everything keeping him alive, Jane was allowed to enter the room. For a moment, she stood just inside the doorway staring at her husband, feeling an intense feeling of déjà vu. And the sensation only got stronger as she sat down beside him and slipped her hand into his.
She'd been pretending the last time this happened, something Jane hated remembering. The memory thrust itself through her mind, painfully jarring everything around once more and throwing it together with the present. It was like a rising wave of ZIP symptoms, the headache, the memory lapses, the voices from her past, all surging in her head before it crushed her with its strength, once more spinning her mind into a hallucinatory space.
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Weller's first coherent thought was that he was on fire, his entire torso irradiating white hot streaks of pain. It was a struggle just to be awake and lying still, unable to even contemplate opening his eyelids yet, existing in a silent scream.
Being sentient was so excruciating that he nearly dropped back into the nothingness. But there was a line tying him to the world above and Kurt mentally held onto it with everything he had.
At first his neurons weren't firing fast enough to identify what he was grasping onto, he was just operating on pure animal instinct, holding onto the feeling of warmth and safety, seeking anything but the agony of his body. But after floating in semi-consciousness for what seemed like ages, his brain cells finally came to the obvious answer and Kurt's heart immediately settled.
Jane.
Now that he was becoming more awake, he could hear more voices, but muted as if from afar.
He knew the one speaking, the voice in his ear, always saving them.
Patterson. Talking about a cylinder, garbage cans, a bomb, a payout.
Kurt's heart quickened again as the warm sensation in his hand tightened for a moment.
"So he only gets paid if the bomb goes off. Of course Ivy had a backup plan."
Jane, in a quiet voice. She sounded worried, and more.
"Jane, you shouldn't be worrying about this. We've got the search underway in Times Square, there's nothing more you can do. Doctor Horne almost has the antidote prepped again, she'll be on her way to the hospital soon."
Jane. Antidote.
He suddenly remembered why he was so scared, it had nothing to do with the hellfire in his own body. She was sick again, hallucinating.
Kurt reached for the surface, but couldn't find the top. Tried to open his eyes but his eyelids were like weighted blankets.
Then suddenly it was quiet, no more extra voices. Just Jane.
"I'm so sorry Kurt. Please be okay."
For a moment, the warm, safe feeling in his hand extended to his forehead, pushed back on the screams coming from his chest. But then her touch stiffened and Weller tensed too.
"No, I am exactly where I need to be. I'm not going to make the same mistake this time."
Jane again. But now angry, defensive.
"They have enough people out looking in Times Square, I have to be here with Kurt."
Another pulse of warmth pumped into his hand, then through his body.
"Of course I don't want millions of people to die but that isn't my priority right now."
"Shut up, Roman. I haven't taken the antidote because I still might know something useful, not because I'm going to go out there and try to find it myself."
The FBI agent in him told her to go, save the world, be the hero you've always been to me.
The selfish husband in him begged her to save herself, stay with him.
She would be out there if not for him. That he knew, even drifting beneath the world.
Weller had never wanted to hold her back. But he sometimes worried he did.
He needed to talk to her, the urge pushing him towards the surface, despite the growing awareness of pain. His eyelids were still heavy, required many failed attempts to make any progress in lifting them. Even then, he'd get a glimpse of light before the dark took over once more and the effort would leave him too spent to try again for a long while.
"Stop it, Roman," she snapped. "I told you, I'm not leaving Kurt this time, not for anything."
How could something make him feel so safe and so worried at the same time? It was an impossibility. One that was his wife.
He was just about ready to try and open his eyes again when the warm weight in his hand tightened and he felt her breath on his cheek.
"Kurt, can you hear me?"
Of course, he thought. I'll always hear you.
He doubled down on his battle with his eyelids, put everything he had into his next effort and managed half the distance. It was enough to see the troubled green flecks in her irises, right there searching for him. But his strength didn't last as an inferno erupted in his core and pushed his eyes shut once more.
"Hey, hey, it's okay" Jane soothed, as he surfed on waves of agony. "It's okay, Kurt. You don't have to wake up if it hurts. You rest and I'll see if the nurse can give you some more pain meds."
He didn't want more drugs though, not even to dull the flames. He wanted to see his wife. There was something wrong. She needed him.
There was no point in trying for words, not with how his lungs felt and an oxygen mask sitting heavy on his face. He had to win the fight with his eyelids.
Her fingers were drifting through his short hair, a feeling so familiar and comforting that it helped him gain equilibrium. He sunk into the sensation to let his strength build, make another attempt at opening his eyes.
She was in distress, even as she soothed him. Talking to ghosts, pushing them back.
"No, I can't follow you," she muttered, off to the side. "I have to stay here."
He had to see her, was full of desperation to get there before more medication arrived. The gravitational pull of unconsciousness was strong enough without the drugs and Weller had to hold onto Jane's voice and touch to keep himself in place while he built the energy to push for the top.
"Stop it," Jane seethed at the creations of her poisoned mind.
She needed him and he reached for her, disregarding the screaming in his chest even as it became overwhelming and the dark rose around him. He fought with everything he had to hold onto her, fuelled himself with her unwavering support.
This time Weller's eyes flew fully open for a second before he blinked hard at the reality of consciousness. It was long enough to see that Jane was still focused on him even as she snapped at her ghosts. Long enough to see her frown turn to a radiant smile as she saw his eyelids raise.
"Hi. Hey," she said, her voice full of worried affection. "You're awake."
Her teary eyes searched his cloudy ones, her smile full of love. But she was tense too, unsettled. Which quickened his heart, made breathing even more difficult.
"Don't try to talk. You've been through a lot. But everything's going to be okay," Jane soothed, leaning over him, her hand still running along his hairline.
Her gaze snapped away for moment and hardened but then returned immediately, just as gentle as before. Kurt frowned at the action, knowing what she battling and unable to do anything about it.
Jane smoothed her thumb over the furrow in his brow, then leaned over to kiss him in the same spot.
"I'm sorry, my head's still a bit of a mess," she admitted softly. "But Patterson is sending over the cure."
Don't be sorry, he told her silently. I want to know how you are.
Maybe she read it in his expression, correctly interpreted the crinkle in his forehead. Or maybe she just knew him that well, understood him without the need for words.
"I'm alright, Kurt. The hallucinations are telling me to go to Times Square but I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying right here with you and the doctor is coming with the antidote. So don't worry."
It helped calm him but then she groaned, held her head and his heart rate spiked again.
Kurt watched in a growing panic as Jane struggled to get out her phone and make it work. He couldn't say anything though with his lungs seemingly made of fire and lead. Could only watch as she bit back another moan and closed her eyes to gain strength before finally managing to operate her phone.
"Jane, what's going on? Doctor Horne should be there any minute now."
Patterson's voice came through on speakerphone, sounding worried but, as usual, fully in control of the situation.
He could see her holding back another grunt of pain, gritting her teeth and exhaling slowly through her nostrils. But then Jane opened her eyes and she was both there beside him and somewhere else completely, looking around the hospital room with rapt focus.
Weller reached up to remove the oxygen mask from his face, determined to talk to his wife. But when he tried to push words out, he choked on the agony of his damaged lungs. His sputtering was enough to momentarily snap Jane out of her trance for just long enough to replace the mask and run a comforting touch over his cheekbone before being pulled away by her visions again.
So he had to settle for clinging to her fingers as Jane started gasping out words, her confusion about what she was seeing coming through as she scrunched her forehead and muttered to Patterson.
"I can see Times Square," she said. "It's blurry but I'm there. I'm following all these signs, people from my past."
"Where are you, Jane?" Patterson asked. "Where are they pointing you towards?"
Jane became shaky, he could feel it in her hand. Kurt did his best to use his to guide her into the chair beside his bed, despite barely being able to move at all. She got the message though and stumbled into the chair, her breathing frantic.
"It feels like I'm there, with the search party. But it's all messed up, like everyone I've ever met is here in my head, like I'm seeing my entire story."
Jane gasped and tensed, frozen in the seat.
"I don't know my location though, I think it's not clear enough because I'm not actually there."
She sounded frustrated, desperate. Weller gripped her hand with all his meagre strength.
"Jane, it's okay," Patterson said. "Just tell me everything you're getting from the hallucinations and I'll see if gives us a direction to look in."
"Um… I feel like they're taking me back to the start, like time is going in a loop," Jane said, her eyes shut tight and her hand clenching his.
"Anything more specific? Can you see any landmarks?"
"No, it's all so fuzzy, I can't see where I am. I'm sorry. I'm really trying. All the signs just keep going in a circle, right back to where I began. Nothing makes any sense and everything is spinning. A lot."
Jane! Kurt mentally shouted, as he watched his wife teeter in her seat. She reached out and steadied herself with her free hand. But when she tried to force her eyes open, Jane moaned and slumped back against the chair.
"Jane?" Patterson called. "Jane, are you okay? I have an idea about where the hallucinations are trying to take you. I think we should look in Duffy Square, it's where everything started for you."
He wanted to yell at Patterson to get Dr. Horne there faster, to call the hospital and alert them to the situation in his room. This time, Weller even managed to pull the oxygen mask off his face easily, fuelled by adrenaline past all the stiffness of his body. But his attempts at getting words out were entirely unsuccessful, barely managing an inaudible rasp while exerting enough effort to make his own head swim.
Kurt refused to give up though, looked around for an emergency button, only to realize it was uselessly hanging just out of his reach. He was starting to panic, could hear the beep of the machine attached to him begin to increase.
Patterson was still talking through the phone, sounding concerned but also trying to run the search in Times Square at the same time. It was up to him to get help for Jane, which was nearly impossible when he couldn't move or speak.
The noise of his heart monitor was making him lose it, and Kurt began to feel the dark closing in when he was struck by a last ditch idea. With his oxygen mask off, he managed to use his mouth to remove the pulse ox from his finger, then used his free hand to slip the device onto Jane's finger.
Instantly the machine began screeching, her O2 and respiration levels dangerously low already. Kurt silently screamed along with the monitor, wondering what the hell was taking the medical staff so long to respond even as nurses and doctors ran into the room and stopped in surprise at what they saw.
Obviously they'd been expecting to deal with Kurt internally bleeding again but they quickly adjusted to the situation and got Jane lying down on the ground to start working on her.
Even though he knew it was necessary, Weller hated having to let go of Jane's hand. Her skin was already so cold and he wanted nothing more than the ability to warm her up, pump life back into her.
But instead he had to watch in absolute terror as Jane began to experience respiratory arrest and they had to bag her to force enough air through her lungs to keep her heart pumping. Weller could tell that the doctors had no idea what to do other than keep manually pushing oxygen into her and he was desperate to explain the situation, tell them that the antidote was on the way so they couldn't give up.
The panic in his body was overwhelming. Kurt eventually noticed that one of the nurses had replaced his own oxygen mask and was eyeing him in concern as he leaned as far as he could in his bed, trying to see what was happening. Still, it felt like his entire body was burning red hot.
He could tell his heart rate was dangerously high when the staff started turning towards him, their expressions dire. Weller wanted to shout that he was fine, that they needed to focus on Jane. But he had the damn mask on and they wouldn't let him move his arms as the doctor checked his wounds, even the gentle prodding touch making shooting stars of pain appear.
Weller could hear the staff debating his condition, questioning if he was experiencing another post-surgical bleed. But then he heard Patterson shouting through the speakerphone, trying to explain the situation to the doctors.
"Just keep getting air into her! The antidote will be there in less than a minute, Dr. Horne is inside the hospital with it now. And Weller's going to be fine once he sees Jane getting the treatment, so just keep him breathing until then too."
The room must have been quite the sight to Dr. Horne as she rushed in with the antidote. Both Kurt and Jane surrounded by medical staff and getting air pumped into them, everyone in the room running in crisis mode.
Quickly she hooked Jane up to the cure, then all they could do was wait and see if she responded. The nurses continued breathing for her, giving her pumps of air at steady intervals as everyone stared at the screen she was now attached to.
Jane's heart rate had been dangerously low, along with all her other vitals. But almost as soon as the antidote was administered, the monitor showed her heartbeat getting stronger. Then, a few minutes after that, the nurse called out that she was breathing on her own again, her O2 levels increasing quickly as well.
Kurt watched as colour returned to Jane's face, blood pumping through her again, along with the cure. His own chest didn't seem to burn so badly anymore either as he watched Jane start to recover and his blood pressure started coming down as soon as she started breathing for herself.
Weller sagged into his bed and did his best to maintain even breathing as his head spun from the residual effects of stress and poor oxygen saturation. One of the nurses replaced the breathing mask and he didn't bother to resist, knew he needed the help. Then, as his system began returning to normal, Kurt finally stopped just seeing a red panic in his mind and things other than Jane came back into his field of view.
Eventually he realized that Patterson was still on the line and he could hear her directing the search in Times Square. From what he could make out, Tasha had just found the bomb in the garbage can closest to where Jane had originally been found in a bag; covered in tattoos and without a single memory.
He could hear Patterson and Rich discussing the setup of the explosive, how they were going to dismantle it. Weller hated being stuck in a hospital bed, unable to be there with his team, in the middle of the action. Even though it sounded like they had things under control for the moment, he still thought it should be him and Jane out there, cutting the wires on the bomb together, one last time.
But then Kurt turned to look at Jane again and her eyelids flickered. Instantly, he forgot about the deadly device about to go off in front of Tasha, all the millions of people that could lose their lives. Pulling his oxygen mask off again, this time he managed to croak out one syllable.
"Jane."
Jane's eyes fluttered open for a moment and she looked around in confusion at all the faces above her. She was still lying on the ground with medical personnel surrounding her but immediately she tried to push to a sitting position, only to be restrained by many sets of hands.
"Jane, you should stay lying down for now," Dr. Horne said. "We're only halfway through the treatment and your system is just starting to recover."
"Did they find it?"
Of course that was her first concern, even after nearly dying in front of him.
No one needed to reply though because suddenly the voices coming through the speakerphone were frantic. Tasha was yelling that she needed an answer on which wires to cut, then Patterson and Rich shouted back at the same time, but with different answers.
Kurt tried to swallow his nervousness, upset that Tasha was out there, not only putting her own life on the line but risking her unborn child too. Looking down into Jane's now wide-open eyes, he could see that she was thinking the same thing.
He wanted to tell her that they found the bomb because of her clues, because she had held on, nearly pushed her body too far. But then Patterson was yelling to cut the green wires simultaneously and he could see the scene in his head, like he was right there standing next to the bomb in an empty Times Square.
Of course, Jane was beside him, both in his mind and in reality. The timer was counting down and he reached over, pulled her into an epic, intense kiss. One to end on, if things went badly.
Then, in his head, they cut the wires, both clenching their eyes shut for just long enough to realize that they weren't dead.
In reality, they stared into each other as Tasha cut the wires, everyone in the room flinching together as they waited to hear what happened.
Zapata was the first to speak, hollering that it worked, that the timer had stopped. A second later, Patterson and Rich were yelling mutual congratulations with glee and relief all poured into one. Then all the doctors and nurses in the hospital room joined in, shouting and hugging even though they didn't even know the whole story of what was going on.
Through it all, Kurt held onto Jane's eyes, pulling off his oxygen mask once more just to grin at her. The smile she returned was full of relief and love, her irises sparkling green as she recovered enough to push her way up into a sitting position on the floor, before standing up on wobbly legs.
Dr. Horne was saying how she shouldn't stand up before the treatment was finished but Jane, of course, wasn't being compliant. Knowing better than to fight it, Weller reached his hand out to her and Jane grabbed on to steady herself, before stepping close to him and leaning against his bed.
"You okay?" he mouthed, his heart still pounding too hard.
Jane nodded.
"I am now," she said softly, even as the tremble in her hand told him differently.
"I'm sorry I scared you."
Scared didn't begin to describe what it felt like to watch her dying and being unable to do anything about it. He'd barely recovered from it the first time, when he hadn't been helpless in a hospital bed.
But she'd been right. Somehow she'd known that the hallucinations would show her where the bomb was and had risked everything to save the city from a devastating terrorist attack. And even though it was terrifying each time, watching her go to the brink, it was also who she was, a significant part of why he loved her so much.
"It's okay," he breathed, the words a bare rasp. "You're okay."
Selfishly, that was all that mattered to him at the moment. Their mission was done, all of that was over. Weller didn't need a doctor to tell him that his recovery would be long and arduous, but now he had all the time in the world and the woman he was desperate to spend some quiet, non life-threatening days with. And, from the look of her, Jane needed that recovery time as much as he did, both physically and mentally.
He knew she still carried far too much guilt over everything they'd ben through, particularly about his current medical situation. He only hoped she would let him help her resolve those feelings, come to terms with what happened.
But, for the moment, he could put that all aside, even ignore the agony of his body. Kurt replayed that image in his mind, standing over the bomb with Jane, about to cut the wires.
He reached up, and she gave him a perfect relaxed smile before letting him guide her lips to his. It wasn't as spectacular as the mental scene he'd created. Yet the kiss was perfect anyways, full of their past and their future, all in one.