A/N: For Ansku, with love.
Part One
Kurt couldn't wait to go to bed, could barely think of anything beyond washing this day off his body and leaving it behind. If only it was that simple.
To say it had been a big day would be a gross understatement.
'No', he thinks bitterly. 'Today has been…terrifying; nightmarish; overwhelming; exhausting; painful. Absolute Hell.'
He chances a glance at his passenger, his chest tightening with the suffocating tension that was rolling off her in waves.
He eyes the butterfly strips on Jane's eyebrow that stand out in stark comparison to the ever-darkening bruise over her eye, feeling a shiver run through him as his mind conjures horrifying memories. He watches as her head snaps backwards with the force of the blow that had been delivered; can almost feel the blunt impact of her body hitting the concrete; tastes the bile that rose in his throat as she arched against the ground, gasping for air after a kick to her stomach; smells the coppery blood that seeped from her body as he reached where she lay.
He had known what she would tell him when she caught her breath.
"I'm fine."
He had almost scoffed in her face.
Liar.
As they draw ever closer to their home, he enquires after her dinner preferences, trying to figure out how to move them both through the next few hours until they could retreat into sleep.
"Not hungry," she forces out, not bothering to even look his way.
On any other day, he may have pushed her to talk to him; tried to gently coax her into opening up to him, even if he knew what was wrong. He was tired, though; bone-numbingly tired. They both were. So, instead of asking what was wrong, he chose to sit in the deafening silence and focus instead on making it home before the pot boiled over.
Once they finally step into their apartment, she quickly toes off her boots, kicking them toward the shoe rack without care. She dumps her bag and wadded up jacket beside the door, leaving them in an unceremonious heap. Standing just inside the front door, Kurt watches as Jane storms further into the room, the muscles between her shoulder blades clenching tightly as she lets her keys clatter on the breakfast bar.
"Gonna shower," she grinds out, not bothering to look at him.
"Okay," he whispers to himself once she is out of earshot, both in acknowledgement of her words, and in acceptance of the tense evening that so clearly lay ahead. He draws in a deep breath, forcing himself to venture further into the apartment and begin preparing the meal that Jane didn't want, but which he knew she needed to eat.
Eventually she emerges from the bathroom, sees that Kurt has prepared her favourite pasta and left a small bowl on the bench for her. If she wasn't so furious, she might have smiled. Despite her resolute denial earlier, she was hungry. She was starving, actually, having skipped lunch that day. Recently she'd found herself forgetting to eat, getting so wrapped up in her thoughts that mealtimes would simply pass by without her noticing.
Kurt had noticed though, and was growing more concerned by the day. He could see her struggling, watching as she shrunk further and further into the recesses of her tortured sub-conscious. He watched her distraction level grow, and noticed as she spent more and more time in the gym, emerging with bruised knuckles and shaky limbs. He'd watched in mounting fear as she made increasingly questionable tactical decisions, putting herself in more danger with each case. It was almost as if she was trying to prove something to herself, although he doubted she was even aware of this. He knew that Reade had noticed too; had overheard him admonishing her on more than one occasion, even threatening to take her out of the field if she kept it up. That had held her at bay for a while.
Until today.
Today she had fucked up.
Today she had gone rogue, entering a building without backup, on a one-woman crusade to save the day. She had dropped two assailants before even notifying the team of her decision to move in, but was unable to fight off the next two. One grabbed a tight hold of her arm, distracting her for long enough for the other to send her to the floor. By then, the team were hot on her tail, Zapata and Reade pursuing the men while Kurt dropped to his knees beside her.
He'd seen her panic as she struggled to breathe; watched her go from frightened to annoyed when she registered Kurt's attempts to soothe her; saw her move quickly into embarrassment when she realised what had happened.
He wasn't the only one that saw things though. Jane wasn't blind. She knew Kurt was doubting her more and more each day. She saw the team eyeing her warily in the field. She heard their hesitance in mentioning her daughter, her mother, her brother.
Today, when she looked at Kurt from where she lay on the cold, concrete floor, her face throbbing, ribs protesting with each breath, she'd seen his panic, his disbelieving anger, his fear.
She knew that they all thought she was out of control, and, though she was loath to admit it, even to herself, she was finding it increasingly difficult to be okay. She was beginning to scare herself. Every molecule of her body was screaming at her to stop. Just sit still. Breathe. Calm down. But she couldn't. She was too swept up in her turmoil, almost as if she had entered a busy roundabout and couldn't find an exit.
When she finally looks up from her now empty bowl, hunger sated for the time being, she realises that he is staring openly at her, brows furrowed, lips pinched. She knows that he's still angry at her, and knows that he has good reason to be. She was reckless. She put everyone at risk. She was the one that got injured, but it could have easily been one of them.
She wants to apologise. She wants to admit her mistake. She wants to tell him that she's in pain, that her face feels like it's on fire, and that she can feel her ribs screaming at her with every movement. She wants to show him the shoe imprint on her abdomen, have him rub arnica ointment on it and fold her into his arms. She wants to fall into the safety that he offers; the love.
Maybe she has gone too far this time though. Maybe he wouldn't be her safe harbour this time. Maybe he wouldn't catch her as she fell.
She couldn't survive that; couldn't survive the heartbreak if he decided that he couldn't be her starting point anymore.
She hears someone speak, notices the tightly controlled tone, only realising that she had been the one to speak after the words were out.
"I was fine, Kurt."
He finds himself unable to hold back a startlingly bitter laugh. He chooses not to respond further, doesn't give that assertion the dignity of a proper reply. He can feel her blood boiling, and watches her composure slip from her face, the calm facade she'd tried to keep up slipping away entirely, finding himself feeling oddly relieved at the change.
There's the passionate woman I know.
Jane bristles at his almost startled laugh, pausing momentarily before she finally lets go. She feels the unfettered rage to overtake her body; feels it burning through her veins; her mind; her words.
Once she starts, there is no stopping her tirade. She goes for the immediate, surface-level things. How she is sick of him interfering in her battles. How she doesn't need his protection. How those actions are nothing but attempts to control her. How disgustingly misogynistic that is.
Then, before she can stop herself, she delivers a fatal blow.
"I didn't need your help to escape from the blacksite you once banished me to, so why would I need your help now? And why would I want it? Why would I want the help of the man who sent me to the CIA to be tortured, and later abandoned my child in a pool of her own blood?"
She seemed to pause then, chest heaving with the effort of her outburst. She could have stopped there, could have walked away. She was horrified at what she'd just said to him, knew that she had made a dire mistake, but she couldn't stop. She couldn't stop thinking about the times he had let her down; couldn't stop yelling about them. About how he had used her as a pawn. How this established a pattern of behaviour. How this pattern continued when they returned from Nepal. About his lies about Roman; about Berlin; about Avery.
Kurt had known this was coming. They'd been dancing around it for weeks. He had seen it build steadily, every time a case involved a child, every time Roman made contact, every time Jane was reminded of Avery. He had watched her heartache grow as more and more of her daughter's story came out, as more evidence of her absence as a mother accumulated. Her frustration at herself, at her memory loss, at the entire situation she found herself in had been steadily adding to the crescendo of emotion that had now peaked. Her hatred, her anger, her vicious words, her violent movements all suggested an animal on a rampage, fuelled by some primitive, barbaric need to destroy everything around them; to protect themself.
The icing on the very tall cake came in the form of a visit from the Devil incarnate - Jake Keaton. An overlapping case, something about national security, the mention of the CIA's personal brand of interrogation. He wasn't fooled by Jane's apparent indifference toward the man. He saw her body trembling slightly whenever he looked her way. He saw her clocking the man's movements carefully, always placing herself between Keaton and an exit. He watched her lose herself in innumerable distant stares.
And he saw how Keaton interacted with her too. He watched him sneak furtive glances toward her. He saw underneath apparently innocuous comments, to the threats that those words once held. Heard his quiet "see you later, Jane," as he made his exit.
He had watched her spiral steeply toward a complete meltdown in the hours that followed, culminating in the decision that landed her in Reade's office with a broken face and bruised pride.
So, while it would have been easy to take her words at face-value, Kurt could read between the lines; he could see beyond this mask of rage that Jane donned.
Hiding underneath her fury, shielded behind her devastating barbs, was something more insidious; more malevolent.
Trauma.
Deep, painful, unaddressed trauma, which was as much a part of her as the colour of her eyes and the curl of her hair. It's a trauma that has been written into her biology, embedded so completely in her unconscious that a tangible trigger was not needed to evoke it. That part of her was so heavy and complex. It held grief, regret, shame, yearning, despair, loneliness; a hopeless sense of failure, one that made her believe herself to be unworthy of joy or love. Her mind, he notes, constantly weaponsies this trauma, and makes her the biggest barrier against her own happiness. She may want love in her life, but she refuses to allow it. Not in the way that she wants; not in the way that he is so desperate to give.
They both know that her instinct in these situations is to fight - fight him, fight herself, fight the world. Underneath it all, however, buried in some dark, untouched recess of her mind, lives Alice Kruger. Kurt doubts Jane even knows she's there. He pictures her, huddled in a corner, wrapped around herself in a protective embrace. A little girl, an orphan, who longed for a mother she could no longer consciously remember, but which her body keenly missed.
Kurt didn't realise, however, that she was not alone. In this place, Alice sat hand-in-hand with Avery, both of them unable to face a world in which their mothers had abandoned them, however out of their control it might have been. And Jane, well, she knows how Avery must have felt; knows what it's like to both have a mother, and grieve for one that you have lost; to hold these experiences simultaneously. She knows what that does to a person, and she cannot live with herself knowing that she caused her child, her baby, this heartache.
And so, she fights. She forces him away. She protects herself. Only, she does this by hurting herself.
Kurt tries to remain unbothered; tries to let her words bounce off him; tries to move past them and focus on the woman behind the words. Jane, his wife, the woman he adores, who is hurting so keenly that he doubts she even knows what she's saying; knows that she'll regret her words later, if she even remembers them. He sees a woman who is desperately clinging to any modicum of self-protection that she can muster. A woman who, however incongruous her methods may be, is screaming for one thing, and one thing only: connection.
Without conscious thought, Kurt had collected the dinner dishes, carrying them to the sink. So wrapped up in his own attempt to remain calm, he'd detached himself from the moment at hand, moving away from the conflict without a word.
He realised what he had done mere moments before Jane's shrill voice pierced the air.
"Are you seriously walking away from me right now?"
Kurt swallowed thickly, her tone of incredulity grating him. Despite his best efforts, he couldn't bite back his terse retort, throwing the words over his shoulder.
"It's not like I can't hear you from over here, Jane."
"Fuck you, Kurt," she spits, venom lacing her words.
He closes his eyes, inhaling deeply in an effort to tamp down his mounting anger, his own hurt. Slowly he turns, places the dishes in the sink, and lifts his cool blue eyes to meet her heated gaze over the breakfast bar.
"Do your worst, Jane."
"What?" she asks sharply, confused (and irritated) by sudden resignation in his voice. Had she been calmer, more in tune with things happening outside of herself, she may have noticed his slumped shoulders, his exhaustion. Instead, she takes issue with his lack of fire, knowing that it will be almost impossible for her to keep up this fight if he doesn't hit back. So she steels herself for his recriminations; expects him to retaliate, wants him to tear her to shreds.
"You obviously need a punching bag, Jane, and apparently you've chosen me for that," he says slowly, exhaustedly. "So, have at it. Do your worst."
She draws in a deep breath, holds it in her chest. Her eyebrows pinch slightly, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never does, though.
"Jane," he sighs tiredly after a long moment. "You've been bottling this up. You've been punishing yourself for things you can't remember or couldn't control. So, if you need to take it out on someone else, on me, that's fine. I can handle it. Just get it out."
Several moments pass, and Jane bites her lip harshly, holding Kurt's gaze, contemplating her next move. Her face is throbbing and she's sure the cut over her eye is oozing blood after her explosion. She feels her heart thumping against her sore ribs, feels as winded as she did after taking that kick. She takes a long, deep breath and lets it out slowly, feeling the rage gradually ebbing out of her body.
Eventually, she rasps out his name, body deflating ever so slightly.
What have I done? Oh my god, what have I done?
"It's okay, Jane," he assures her. "As long as you're not destroying yourself, even if it only lasts for one night, I can handle it."
A pause.
"Just, get it out."
She casts her eyes toward the rug beneath her feet, realising that she'd moved from the table without conscious thought. Tracing the pattern with her toes, she feels the last of the fight leave her body, cast out by an exhaustion that seems to reach down deep into her soul, almost as if every single cell in her body has reached their limit all at once.
Why do I do this? Why do I insist on pushing him away?
Jane had been the one to tell him that she wanted love in her life.
Why won't I let him love me?
Of course, she knows the answer, knows that she truly believes that he will walk away one day and never come back. Hopes that, by keeping him at arm's length, she'll be able to shield herself from that abandonment.
But, she just wants to fall into his arms. Dreams of being completely surrounded by him, encased in his loving embrace. Longs for the safety he offers, for the sureness of his love. Why does she deny him this when she knows how comforting it is; how safe she feels with her head on his chest, his arms wrapped around her body? Why won't she let him do the one thing she so desperately wants him to do; the thing that she knows he wants to do equally as desperately?
She looks up again when his feet appear in front of hers, his body stopping merely a foot in front of her. She can feel the warmth radiating off him and wants nothing more than to lean forward into his arms. She sees the sadness in his eyes, the concern that he doesn't even try to mask. It calls to something inside of her, in some unreachable part of her mind. She longs to touch him, her body aching to feel him pull her toward him. She can feel herself being drawn to him, almost as if they are magnets being attracted to each other by an invisible force.
She fights it tooth and nail.
"You can't fix this, Kurt," she warns him sadly. "It's not fixable."
A beat, and then her eyes leave his once again. "I'm not fixable."
"Jane," Kurt murmurs, not sure she even realises that she had verbalised that heartbreaking admission. He takes another small step toward her, desperate to draw her into his embrace, hold her while she falls apart.
Instinctively, she balks though, taking a jerking step backwards, meeting his eyes and she shakes her in defeat. Her mouth opens as if to speak, her brain seemingly searching for a way to explain; a way to tell him that it's not him, it's her; that he is more than she could ever allow herself to hold.
No words come out. Instead, she drops her head, lets out a shaky breath and looks at her feet, before turning away, walking toward the bedroom. Her silent retreat is marked only by the soft padding of her feet on the floorboards, and the door closing gently behind her.
Kurt releases a tense sigh, feeling tears pricking at his eyes. She was right, and he knew it. He couldn't fix this, or her, but he also couldn't stand by and watch this destroy her, allow her to eviscerate herself.
He couldn't lose her.
Not again.