Author's Note: Sorry for the delay! Health issues again, which I'm sure will surprise nobody by now... Anyway, hope this chapter is worth the wait. I wanted to build Jane and Roman's sibling relationship a little bit more here, since that will end up being fairly important to the story, by the end.
Jane woke up groggy, dizzy and nauseous, with a killer headache. Her first thought was that she'd have to find her phone, because there was no way she could go in to work feeling like this, and even though she could get Kurt to sign off on a sick day, she wanted to talk to Nas to make sure there were no misunderstandings about her dedication to the case.
She arched her back to ease discomfort, then registered that this was a firmer mattress than both Kurt's and her safehouse's beds. Her circumstances came back to her in a rush, and she forced herself to sit up, breathing deeply to try to resist the urge to vomit.
Her eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness. As far as she could make out, it was the same room she'd woken up in the last time her brother had drugged her—two beds, very few other items of furniture, virtually no decorative touches. The austere room Remi and Roman had obviously shared, before the first phase of Sandstorm's plan had begun. Shepherd's compound. Well, at least that part of the plan hasn't changed.
Fear seized her as she recalled the yearbook she'd left under Kurt's pillow, open to the picture of Shepherd watching Kurt's basketball game. What if Roman had searched the rest of the apartment while she'd been unconscious, before moving her? What if he'd found it?
What-ifs won't get you answers. Time to get moving.
Still feeling woozy, Jane got up from the bed and made for the closed door, half expecting to find it locked. It opened easily, and Jane instinctively reached for a weapon she wasn't carrying.
The upstairs hallway was well lit, though the world beyond the windows was still dark. She hadn't been unconscious all night—unless she'd slept through an entire day, which she doubted. Shepherd would want to talk to her as soon as possible.
Footsteps sounded downstairs, and Jane looked over the railing, scowling as her eyes met a familiar face. "What the hell, Roman? I thought we agreed after last time that drugging me wasn't necessary."
He shrugged. "Sorry. Shepherd's orders. She wanted there to be as much evidence as possible that you'd been abducted."
"And you couldn't have warned me in advance? You had to attack me?" She descended the stairs carefully, more of her drowsiness fading under annoyance.
"I wasn't sure you'd go along with it."
"Like I would have had a choice," Jane said bitterly, then regretted the words as soon as they'd left her lips. She needed to start convincing Shepherd and Roman that she was trustworthy enough to be read in to their future plans.
Roman cocked his head towards Shepherd's study as she reached him. "After you."
The last thing Jane wanted to do in her current state was to face Shepherd, but she began to move in the direction he'd suggested, sighing. "Do you happen to have any Tylenol? My head is killing me."
"Remi. You're awake. Come in." Shepherd appeared in the doorway to her study, smiling coolly.
"If you're gonna ask if I got away clean, I have no idea, because I was unconscious," Jane said.
"Roman got you out with no problems." Shepherd gestured for her to take a seat, which Jane gratefully did.
A bottle of water and some painkillers were a welcome peace offering, though she thought for a moment that she might throw up as she took the pills. "Could I formally request no more being knocked out and taken from place to place? I feel like hell, and I was more than capable of walking to the car on my own—if you'd just taken out the cameras, like you said you were going to."
"You were more adaptable to unexpected changes of plan before the ZIP." Shepherd's voice was mild, but Jane sensed danger beneath the words.
She sighed and slumped down a little in her chair. "I'm sorry. I just…need to get used to this. I thought I was doing good work at the FBI, and now I feel like I left things…unfinished. Add in the headache and the nausea, and…"
"I understand." Shepherd's smile was warmer now. "This will be an adjustment, but you'll make it work."
"Do we have any news on the FBI and Weller? I assume he must have gotten home to find me gone."
Shepherd nodded. "There's been a lot of FBI activity around Weller's apartment block since he got home for the night. We'll keep tabs on his investigation."
Jane wanted to ask how she'd do that, if one asset had been arrested and the other pulled out of the FBI, but she sensed now wasn't the time. Nas' advice came back to her: Tread softly until you know what ground you're on.
"So what next?" she asked, pushing thoughts of Kurt to the back of her mind. If she thought about what he must be going through now, she'd have difficulty holding it together. "What's the plan for me, now I'm back?"
"We'll get to that," Shepherd said, and indicated the stack of papers on her desk. "Right now, I want to discuss the intel you managed to lift from the FBI. I have to say, Remi, I was expecting more."
"I did what I could in the very short span of time you gave me." Jane frowned. "I didn't have time to read much of what I took—I just copied whatever I could get my hands on, whenever I had a spare second. There's not anything useful at all?"
"Bits and pieces," Shepherd said, "but not anything startling. Perhaps I should have given you a few more days."
Jane bit her tongue and said nothing, despite the overwhelming urge to point out that she'd repeatedly asked for that time, but been denied. Placate her. "I'm sorry I didn't get much we can use."
Shepherd handed the falsified reports back to her. "Read through it all, and let me know if anything stands out. You could see an application for some of this that I can't, since you were on the inside."
Jane nodded. "Do I have permission to sleep off this headache first? I didn't get much rest last night, between bad dreams and—"goodbye sex with Kurt—"trying to figure out if I'd missed anything."
Shepherd stood up. "Absolutely. Roman will show you where to find everything you'll need to settle back in. I'll get some sleep myself, and we'll discuss your new position in the group tomorrow. There's still a lot to put in place before phase two." She stepped in close to Jane, putting her hands on her adopted daughter's shoulders. "It's such a relief to have you back in the fold, Remi. Welcome home."
Jane forced herself to relax and return Shepherd's embrace. "Thanks, Shepherd."
I'd say it's good to be home, but that's a lie.
It was strange to be lying in the darkness, a few feet away from a man she counted equally as ally and enemy. There was an undeniable sibling bond between them, even though the ZIP had taken away most of Jane's memories of being Roman's sister, and he'd saved her ass from Shepherd's wrath on more than one occasion.
Even so, if he caught on to her true allegiance, he would turn on her—of that, she was sure. Maybe he wouldn't be able to bring himself to kill her, but he didn't have the experiences she did with the FBI—working for good; bringing corrupt people to justice; seeing how dedicated the agents who worked in SIOC were. All Roman knew was Shepherd's way.
"Can't sleep?" Roman's voice startled her a little.
"I guess I slept enough earlier." She couldn't help the pointed comment.
He sighed. "Are you gonna keep holding that over my head? It wasn't my call, Remi. I argued against it, but you've seen how Shepherd is. If I hadn't done what she said, she'd have come up with some way to make me pay for the disobedience."
Jane felt a pang of sympathy for her brother, despite her irritation. "Fine. I'll quit giving you a hard time."
"First time for everything." He sounded amused now.
Jane turned on her side, shifting her pillow in an attempt to get comfortable. "Isn't it a little weird for siblings as old as we are to still be sharing a room?"
"Yeah. But there are reasons." Roman's voice was slightly guarded, as though she was criticising him.
"Reasons like…?" she prompted.
He paused for a second, then said, "We used to share a room, back at our parents' place. Our birth parents', I mean. Then they were murdered, and we were sent to the orphanage—and obviously, we shared a room there, with a ton of other kids. There weren't enough beds to go around. We even ended up sharing a bed sometimes, when I didn't fight hard enough to get my own."
"God… We were just little kids." A flash of memory came back—she was drawing a thin, threadbare blanket protectively over them both, so that the other kids wouldn't see Roman was crying silently. The anger and helplessness Remi had felt returned to Jane in the present moment, and she swallowed hard. "It should never have happened. We didn't deserve that."
"Yeah, well, we just had to cope. However we could. We got faster, more vicious, cared less about the other kids. It was just us against them, and against the adults. I guess it made us a little codependent on each other for a while—at least, that was what Thornton said."
"We did what we had to do." She couldn't help but bristle at Nigel Thornton's assessment. In their situation, he probably would have curled up into a ball and waited to die.
Roman let out a shaky breath in the dark, and she wondered if she should sit up, switch on the light and try to talk about it some more. But the darkness was also a refuge, one she sensed he needed, so she waited for him to continue.
"When Shepherd adopted us, she gave us separate rooms. But I had night terrors, so you started refusing to sleep in your room, so you could wake me up when I started dreaming."
"Your PTSD," Jane murmured, her heart breaking for the little boy whose life had been so traumatic, from such a young age.
"Yeah. Don't get me wrong, you didn't come out of the orphanage unscathed. You had your own demons to fight, but you once told me that getting me through my issues made you repress yours, so you could be there for me. Course, that came back to bite you in the ass later in life, but it seemed like a good thing at the time."
Jane smiled into the darkness. "Seems like I was a pretty awesome sister." Shame about the terrorism.
"Yeah, back in those days, we were glued together most of the time. Shepherd said we needed to learn how to survive on our own, and tried to drive us apart, but nothing she did put a serious wedge between us. But then we got to be teenagers, and we did have separate rooms for a few years."
He paused, but whatever opinion he'd had about those years, he kept to himself. "And then you got out of Shepherd's house as soon as you could, joined the Navy as a 'fuck you'—because Shepherd had always told us the armed forces had gone to shit, were full of corruption and self-interested commanders. And you were gone for two tours in Afghanistan—you gave the Navy close to a decade of your life."
"Did we stay in touch? Was I happy with Orion?" She genuinely had no idea what Remi had thought of the military life, besides her devastation when they'd betrayed her.
"Yeah. We wrote to each other a lot, and you visited when you were home on leave. I guess I resented you a little for leaving me behind, but I understood you wanting to get out. You and Shepherd really hadn't gotten along, and after your boyfriend died, you were convinced Shepherd had something to do with it, even though he was in a motorcycle accident."
"I was sure that Shepherd killed Luis?" It didn't surprise Jane. Shepherd seemed like the type who needed to be the most important thing in her children's lives. Anyone who might have more influence than she did would have to go.
"You didn't have any proof. So you left as soon as the Navy would take you. I thought about leaving Shepherd and Aurora after high school, but I guess with you gone, I felt like Shepherd was all I had. I wasn't great at making connections elsewhere, so I stuck around. Helped her train the recruits."
Poor Roman. Maybe if you'd gotten out, you'd be living a normal life now. But then again, Remi sure didn't end up that way. All roads led back to Shepherd in the end.
"And then Orion went to hell?" Jane guessed, using her own patchy memory and the things she'd been told.
"Yeah. They betrayed you, and you came back home. And then it was the same situation from our childhood, but in reverse—you were the one with the nightmares, and I was the one waking you up. It was worse than it should have been, because all the stuff from when we were kids came back, on top of the war-zone PTSD. You were a mess. But you'd brought a trained psychiatrist back from Afghanistan with you, so you started to get help dealing with it."
Despite Remi's twisted actions, Jane couldn't help but feel terrible for her past self. "But Shepherd didn't approve of treatment for PTSD, right?"
"Nope. She thought you were weak, and she was a hell of a lot less gentle about it than when we were kids. You were a disappointment to her, and you hated that, because you'd finally seen that Shepherd was right all along, and you wanted to prove yourself to her. So when Shepherd started talking about replacing Mayfair with Weller, you pitched your Trojan horse plan."
"The tattoos and the memory loss." For the first time, Jane could imagine why Remi had gone ahead with taking the ZIP. "Was I still having nightmares and flashbacks by the time I was tattooed?"
"Yeah. Not anywhere near as badly, but bad enough that you just wanted it out of your brain. Since ZIP was experimentally being used for PTSD anyway…"
"But you…and Oscar… Didn't I want to hang on to my memories of you? And Nigel, Cade, Markos…even Shepherd?"
In Roman's silence, Jane read the answer. Remi had considered losing her memories worth it, her dedication to the mission and desire to forget her trauma overwhelming everything else.
"I was wrong, Roman." She could see his outline in the other bed, but no details of his face. "What we went through together might have been hell, but it made us so much closer, right? How could I have thought forgetting you would be worth it?"
He laughed bitterly. "I guess you'd have to remember what it was like back then to know the answer to that. Plus, we…weren't on great terms when you made the decision."
"Why not?"
He turned over, sighing. "I'm going to sleep, Remi. Enough reminiscing for tonight, okay?"
Must have touched a nerve. Jane stored away the knowledge that Roman and Remi had been arguing, for later use.
"Okay. Goodnight."
It seemed to take a while for him to fall asleep—not as sleepy as he'd wanted her to think, obviously—but eventually his breathing deepened and slowed. Jane considered getting out of bed to sneak around, to try to find something that would help the team, but it would raise suspicions if she were caught. It would be safer to play a longer game, though she chafed at the idea of drawing this mission out for any longer than necessary.
As soon as she made the decision to try to sleep, Kurt's face appeared in her mind's eye. It had only been a few hours since she'd last seen him, but already, she missed his steady, grounding presence. She couldn't remember the last time she'd attempted to fall asleep without him close by, his arms around her or their bodies in some kind of contact.
How did he feel about her unexpected abduction? He wouldn't know her cover hadn't been compromised, and he'd fear for her safety now even more than he already had been. She just hoped the picture of Shepherd she'd found led to some kind of new lead, something that would help the team figure out why Shepherd knew everything she knew. Maybe they would even track down the compound.
Then again, maybe it would be a bad idea to arrest Shepherd now, before they had any details about the 'complete reset' she was planning. There could be other people in play, people who would carry out phase two in Shepherd's absence. Jane still couldn't get much of a sense of how many members Sandstorm had, or in how many places around the country. Shepherd might be the leader, but leaders always had subordinates ready to step up and take their place, if necessary.
Would Kurt stay safe? Or would he throw himself at every lead, no matter how risky, in the hopes that it would lead him to break the case faster, so she could come home?
He's a trained agent, and he has Nas and the team to keep him from going off the rails, she reassured herself. He'll manage. Worry about your own safety; that's what he'd tell you to do.
Anxious thoughts of Kurt, and of the case, ran through her mind until she fell into a troubled sleep. It felt like only five minutes had passed before a nightmare took hold—Kurt being tortured by Shepherd, while she could only look on in powerless horror.
As he had back at her safehouse, Roman lobbed a cold, wet washcloth at her chest to wake her up. Her mind scrambling to contextualise her surroundings, Jane picked it up and stared at it, then groaned and threw it back at him. She curled up into a ball and fought the urge to burst into tears, shaking her head when her brother asked her if she wanted to talk about the nightmare.
Roman returned to bed after a few moments of hesitation, and Jane fought to stabilise her breathing, trying to forget the images of Kurt being beaten and waterboarded. It wasn't real. It will never be real. You need to sleep.
She imagined Kurt was sitting by her bedside, stroking her hair, the way he had so many times. She visualised it until she could almost feel his calming, repetitive touch. Only then was she able to slide back into sleep, and this time, exhaustion kept her from dreaming.