Author's Note: This chapter feels a little bit forced, but I'm hoping that's temporary. Hope it's not too painful to read! :)
Weller stared down at the last box of his father's possessions for the hundredth time. He'd thrown most of it out without trouble. The medical equipment from the guest bedroom had gone to a new home. Boxes of clothing, books, the completed crossword puzzle anthologies Bill had gone through before he'd gotten too sick to think properly… All gone. Now there were just a couple of shirts, a pair of shoes, a framed picture of the three of them—Sarah, Bill and Kurt—that had sat by his father's bedside. Just one small box containing the remainder of his father's last few months of life.
He wanted to throw it out with everything in his soul, but he couldn't make himself touch it. It had sat there on the floor for three months, from back when there'd been a bigger pile of stuff to donate or throw away. The rest of it had gone. This had stayed.
He turned his back on it, a frustrated growl in the back of his throat. It wasn't like he didn't already have a million other things to worry about. Jane's connection to Sandstorm went deeper than he could ever have imagined. She was suffering both mentally and physically, and he had no idea where he stood when it came to helping her; or if she even wanted his help. If he should even want to help her as much as he did.
His team were still grieving for Mayfair, and so was he. Nas was an unknown commodity, so invested in bringing Sandstorm down that everything else was secondary. And the CIA were on the warpath again because Jane had thrown Keaton's identity to terrorists.
And though he wanted to hate her, he was in love with her. Despite it all.
Bill Weller's possessions should have been the most trivial of matters, and yet he couldn't let go of them. It was just one more thing to loathe about the man who'd raised him and lied to him for so many years.
Work was something he could focus on. It was the only thing keeping him sane at this point. They were taking a day off to catch up on sleep, and to allow Jane to recuperate a little from her gunshot wound, but tomorrow they'd be getting back to work on the tattoos, to make things look as normal as possible from Sandstorm's perspective.
He'd asked Jane if she needed him to drive her home early that morning, as the sun rose over the city. She'd declined, saying the agents from her protective detail were waiting for her. Weller wondered if she'd slept any better than he had. It didn't seem likely.
Remi. My name was Remi.
She'd once heard Oscar whisper it during sex, but she'd been on the brink of climax and hadn't had any idea it was a name, let alone her name. It had been a mystery swiftly forgotten amidst physical sensation, and she'd had no reason to remember it until now.
She'd learned so much last night. Her adopted mother and birth brother were both terrorists. She'd been born Alice Kruger in Pretoria, South Africa, and her murdered parents had been anti-apartheid activists. When Shepherd had rescued her and Roman from the orphanage that had tried to turn them into child soldiers, they'd picked new names to distance themselves from their troubled pasts. Hers had been Remi, but Remi what? Remi Kruger? Remi Shepherd?
And she couldn't tell Borden, who she'd just seen for her first session of PTSD therapy, any of this. She'd asked Nas to consider giving him clearance, but Nas had said something about doctor/patient confidentiality not meaning anything if someone from Sandstorm hacked into Borden's notes, which was a very real possibility if they were keeping tabs on her mental state.
Jane knew she should be focusing on the advice Borden had just given her—she needed to write down her dreams and recurring memories, start to figure out what her specific triggers were so she could avoid them in general life, and face them with his guidance during her therapy sessions. It was a strangely familiar process, though she knew she hadn't gone through it in the past year. Maybe she'd had PTSD before she'd had her memory wiped. From what Shepherd had told her, it was a distinct possibility.
Instead of zeroing in on her recent trauma, however, Jane's mind was drawn further back, to a time she couldn't remember.
Remi was the one she should be blaming for Mayfair's downfall, not Alice. Alice had been a defenceless child, seized by state thugs and traumatised into becoming a killing machine against her will. Somehow, Jane felt connected to her identity as Remi the way she hadn't when she'd begun referring to herself as Alice.
Or when she'd thought she was Taylor.
It's funny that we still call you Jane, isn't it?
Jane gritted her teeth, trying to stop the memory from continuing.
I get it. You don't really feel connected to Taylor. Such a long time ago, wasn't it?
She clutched her head in her hands as if it would make any difference. "Stop it. Just stop it."
"Stop what?"
Patterson stood in the doorway to Zero Division, looking uneasy.
"Sorry," Jane murmured. "Just…talking to myself."
"Zapata told me she shot you yesterday. How are you holding up?"
Jane appreciated the attempt at conversation. It was more than she'd had from of all three of them yesterday. "Hey, what's one gunshot wound on top of three months' worth of CIA-inflicted injuries, right?"
"We never wanted that. You know that, right?" Patterson stopped awkwardly in front of her. "The second I got the alert that the CIA had checked you out of holding, I tried to stop them. And we searched for you the whole time you were gone."
"I appreciate that," Jane said, just as awkwardly.
They stared at each other in silence for a second.
"Ugh, I'm just gonna say it." Patterson threw up her hands. "What you did wasn't cool, Jane. I thought we were friends, but I don't know how much I can trust you now. I need some distance. But I'm sorry you've been through so much hell. I don't think you deserved that."
Jane nodded slowly. "Thank you. For your honesty." Though I would have appreciated it back when you knew about my tooth isotope result. "Did they tell you what I found out last night?"
"About your family? Yeah." She sat down opposite Jane. "Did you have any idea?"
"That my mother and my brother are terrorists, and so was I? That Shepherd rescued me and Roman from a South African orphanage meant to transform kids into killing machines and brought me to America? No. I'm…kind of still in shock." The hugs that she'd received from both Shepherd and Roman had put her completely off-kilter, though. They seemed to really love her. Or love Remi, at least.
Patterson squirmed at the mention of South Africa. "About your tooth isotope test…"
Surprised she'd actually brought it up, Jane tensed. Was she about to get excuses or an apology? Either way, she couldn't afford to reject Patterson now. They all needed to work together to bring down Sandstorm.
"I should have told you. Weller told me not to, but I didn't feel right about keeping it from you. But then David died and I just got so caught up in myself and the tattoos that I forgot. I'm sorry. Weller said you'd remembered your birth name right after he told you, and I know that could have made a real difference to…a few things."
"It could have, yeah." She didn't want to let Patterson off the hook, but she didn't have the energy to get angry, either. "But I guess we'll never know now. How much would have changed, I mean." Whether Mayfair would still be alive. Whether I would have been tortured. "People screw up sometimes."
"Yeah. They do."
Something relaxed in the atmosphere between them—small, but significant.
"I'd better get back to work."
"And I should get back to my safehouse. I'll see you later."
Jane watched her go, wondering if things would ever be the same between them. Patterson had been the first member of the team she'd met, and apart from Weller—who'd thought she was Taylor—she'd been the first to reassure Jane that she just needed to find her place in the team, and things would get easier. They'd gotten drunk together. Trained in the gym together. She'd held Patterson while she'd grieved over David's death. They really had been friends.
More than anything, she wished she could go back to that time with the knowledge she had now.
She pulled out her phone to send a text to her protective detail, but just as she was about to hit send, a pager beep from her pocket startled her.
Roman had given her the pager the night before, telling her to get in touch using a payphone or a burner phone the FBI didn't know about. She stood up, hissing softly at the pain in her side, and went in search of Nas.
"I think Roman wants to meet."
When Weller reached Zero Division the next morning, Jane was putting the finishing touches to a facial sketch of a woman. Beside it was a completed drawing of a man with a scarred face. They were both crude compared to the sketches he'd found in her notebook; one look at the pained grimace on her face clued him in as to why.
"Should you be using that arm yet?"
"Probably not, but Nas needed descriptions and I was bored, so…"
Weller took the drawings from her and studied them. Neither was familiar, though that was no surprise to him. "Good enough."
"But I—"
"Did you miss out any identifying features, or did you just want to shade them some more?" Weller had dated an artist during his time at Quantico. Her drive towards perfectionism had eventually driven him crazy.
Jane sighed and put down her pencil in reply.
"Rest your arm. You might need to fire a weapon soon."
She immediately straightened her back, her expression gaining a new focus. "Are we going out in the field?"
"As soon as Patterson has a tattoo lead for us. You up for that?" He already knew what her answer would be. She handled time on the bench about as well as he did.
"Sure. Just don't count on me to make the kind of shot I did at the Statue of Liberty." She stood up just as he turned away, commanding his attention again. "Nas said Keaton's headed out of the country for a while. She didn't tell me where, obviously."
"Would you tell Sandstorm where he is if you knew?" He didn't think so, but he'd promised himself that he'd second-guess everything he thought he'd known about her.
Jane gave him a wounded look. "Of course not. I wouldn't cry if I found out he was dead, but sending someone to kill him is a totally different matter." After a moment, she sat back down, looking defeated. "Remi, though… Remi probably would."
"You're not her, Jane. You made mistakes trying to do what you thought was best. Remi orchestrated this whole thing."
"Can I really put myself into one tidy box and Remi into another one? Is it that easy? It feels like a cop-out. This morning, I…"
Before she could continue, Nas appeared in the doorway.
"Weller, good morning. Let's talk about Jane's meeting with Roman earlier."
She could feel Weller bristling beside her; that she'd gone to Nas about it rather than him was obviously pissing him off. Never mind that Nas had been in the building yesterday and Weller hadn't, or that the team had been officially taking a day off.
"Is there a reason I was kept out of the loop on this?"
"The message to meet him came when I was in the building after my session with Borden," Jane explained, already knowing nothing she said would appease him. "I went to Nas because she was like two rooms away. Then when I called Roman, he said he'd pick me up at dawn. There didn't seem like any need to contact you since I'd be coming to work right after I saw him, and you'd be here."
"In the future, you tell me before you go out there," Weller said abruptly, training a hard gaze on Jane. "Whether you think it makes sense to give me a heads-up or not. That clear?"
She nodded, truly meaning it. Anything so trivial that made Weller this pissed wasn't worth fighting over. "Crystal."
"Nas?" Weller prompted.
Nas looked as though she was suppressing a sigh. "Understood. Look, what happened out there, Jane?"
This is what your country thought you were worth.
Jane explained about the memory she'd recovered of a military operation gone wrong, and the memorial Roman had driven her to, where Shepherd had explained what had happened to Orion. As she spoke, the tiny plaque in an out of the way location haunted her. "The CIA thought I was dead. That everyone from Orion was dead. And that tiny memorial was all they thought we were worth."
"That sounds like Shepherd's words, not yours." Nas looked uneasy. Was she worried Sandstorm would turn her with this information?
"Roman was the one who said it, but yeah. I'm guessing the sentiment originally came from Shepherd."
"You must be angry." Nas' words were mild, but the implication was plain.
"Not angry enough to rejoin their cause, if that's what you're worried about." Frowning, Jane resumed her story. "Shepherd said America needs to be saved from itself. I asked how, and Roman was going to tell me, but Shepherd stopped him."
"Sounds like Roman is the weak link," Weller said.
"He said it was a complete reset, but since Shepherd warned him to keep quiet, I don't think he'll let anything else slip. I'll work on him, though. Oh, and Shepherd gave me a tattoo clue. Said it needs to be solved today."