a timeskip? a TIMESKIP? no thank you, i need the aftermath and the rescue and the 'jane is handled gently and compassionately by people who care about him', please. so here it is, a missing, MISSING scene from the season 2 finale, 'red sky in the morning.'
enjoy, drop me a line if you liked it!
(not written with any ship in mind, rather with a 'team as found family' angle.)
Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.
The voicemail itself isn't overly alarming, at least beyond the plain fact that Jane was told to stay put and hadn't complied, and is now out there pursuing leads by himself. This is not what could be in any way deemed unusual or out of character behavior from him, though on this particular case it's cause for far more concern than normal, for what Grace would think are fairly obvious reasons. So they're driving now, towards Salinger Mill, and what Jane says is their location.
Lisbon, driving, has a bad feeling born of some kind of second sense Grace thinks she's developed where Jane is concerned, and tells her to call Kenny's - the diner Jane said he'd be waiting in when they arrived. She does, and tells the person who picks up the phone her name, that she's with the CBI, and that they need to know if there is someone there by the name of Patrick Jane. She goes back and forth with the young hostess on the line, who doesn't believe her and thinks she's getting pranked, until Grace eventually snaps and says if she gets in trouble for any of this she will personally make a visit to flash her badge at her boss, at which point she complies. The news comes back fast. There's no Patrick Jane present.
The look on Lisbon's face tells Grace that she had expected this. She feels the moment the accelerator is pressed just that much harder, the car speeding up under them, racing towards the Hotel Del Corona. Grace makes another call, then, alerting Cho and Rigsby that it's worse than it initially appeared, and it's highly likely Jane is in trouble, considering he isn't answering the phone at all.
They arrive through some miracle of the Californian traffic gods at almost exactly the same time. The car carrying the boys screeches to the worst haphazard parking job Grace has ever seen Cho make right as Lisbon's door is slamming shut. Sirens wail in the distance, a discordant caterwaul that streaks closer and closer, promising backup in the form of local PD at any moment. Any moment is too long to wait, though, when the address from the voicemail is right in front of them and Jane very much isn't.
Grace had half expected him to be standing out front when they got there, leaning against a wall and examining his fingernails or regarding them with a quirked eyebrow and that faint, infuriating smile he turns on everyone sooner or later, "Well, took you long enough."
He isn't and Grace's heart leaps into her throat.
The building itself is musty and dark and has an air of malevolence like something truly evil is here, or was here recently. It's the kind of thought Jane would make fun of her for if she voiced out loud, and before she can get farther than that thought, they round the corner and every thought she's ever had is instantly sandblasted from her skull.
For the rest of her life, Grace is sure she's never going to be completely free from this moment, from what she sees in the corona of light in the middle of that wide, dusty room. The clear plastic wrap layered over and over on itself, mummifying the man to the chair is bad enough. The thin line of red that's streaked around the base of his throat from the back of his head, staining the blond curls at the side of his right ear, is bad enough. The frantic, restrained heave of his chest, unable to get much air in against the saran wrap binding it tight, is bad enough. But the worst is his face.
Grace doesn't know what he's seeing, but it isn't them. His eyes are wide and vacant, mouth slightly parted. Jane, bound to that ornate chair with his chin lolling down towards his sternum, doesn't acknowledge them at all. He doesn't say anything at all, seems near catatonic, and it's only because she can see his panicked breathing that Grace knows he isn't dead.
"Jane!"
The moment that Lisbon says his name, exploded from her like a bullet from a gun, is the same moment local PD arrives on the scene and swarms around them. Officers rush to the until then unnoticed, prone form of Wesley Blankfein at the same time that Jane takes a deep, whooping breath in and starts talking in a frantic rush.
"His mother," he's saying, jerking his chin towards their suspect, paying no heed to his own circumstances. "His mother, they had- Don't know how much he ever, but he didn't want to- Dylan and Ruth were making him. Someone has to find his mother. He shot Wesley, is he okay? Is Blankfein alive?"
It's so disjointed that Grace barely understands what he's saying, and it's obvious her team is in the same position. Cho grabs the nearest uniformed officer and starts speaking to him rapidly, relaying what he's deciphered out of this information. At least he's found something to do. Grace just feels lost and frozen, unable to tear her eyes off the stain of blood on gold hair.
Hands hovering over him, skimming the plastic wrap in search for any kind of tear or weakened point, Lisbon is the one who asks. "What happened? What do you mean he shot Blankfein, who is he?" She's scared. Lisbon is scared, it's obvious by the sound of her voice, and it just makes Grace that much more scared herself.
Brief flashes of loud conversation from the officers - so many of them, all of them crowding in, too many, Grace feels claustrophobic, she wants to be out of here, she wants Jane out of here, she wants them all out of here - lurch over the general chaos and din that's overtaken the room, and she hears enough to put a few things together. The bodies over by the bar, the recording equipment, all of the blood.
And then Jane's answer joins them, hitched and cracked and halfway hyperventilated.
"Red John."
Red John, he said. Red John, beats the pattern inside Grace's mind, and she sees it when she blinks, the same way she's seen it a hundred times over in her sleep. She knows they dream about it too - how could they not, she'd know even if they hadn't talked about it before, hushed snatches of conversations bailed on before anyone else could ever overhear. Walking into the station and seeing the wall above that ratty old sofa, the crude smiley face on it, corn-blond hair gone red, red, red. In Grace's recurring nightmare, they lose Jane over and over again, and this is always how.
There's no point in the Saran wrap binding that Lisbon can get enough purchase on to tear it, no edge to unravel or rip to dig her nails into. They're going to have to cut him out, she mutters it to them under her breath, and Rigsby looks around.
"Scissors?" he calls, and nobody pays attention, the local police giving them a wide berth, too smart to approach the eye of the hurricane. "Does anybody have scissors?"
Nobody has scissors but Grace has a pocket knife. She hands it to her team lead, and Lisbon flicks it open, then stops abruptly, before she can move it a fraction of an inch towards Jane. Grace can see why, in the beams of dim light swirled with motes of dust, glinting off the edge of the blade. The edge that is jittering in the air, jerking rapidly and uncontrollably.
Lisbon is shaking too hard to safely cut him loose. A hand appears over hers suddenly, copper-toned brown fingers deftly taking the tool from her, and Cho is the one who steps right up next to the chair, into the bubble of space no one has breached yet. He doesn't begin cutting right away, pausing instead to say, insistent and just barely louder than normal speaking volume, "Jane."
Wide, half-crazed blue eyes skitter over towards him. Since his agitated insistence about Blankfein and his mother, Jane hasn't said a word, gone eerily silent. Cho lifts his empty hand, slowly placing it against Jane's still heaving, constrained chest. His palm flattens out and his fingers splay wide, and he talks, steady and calm, explaining what he's doing. Grace's taciturn coworker tells their friend, half out of his mind with some deadly cocktail of terror, grief, and trauma, with a degree of composure she'd never have been able to manage, that he is going to cut Jane free, but he needs Jane to help by holding as still as possible.
"Okay?" Cho asks, moving to the side when Jane's gaze wavers, holding eye contact. "I need you to answer me, Jane. I'm not going to nick you with this, but I need you to keep still. Can you do that?"
No response.
"Patrick." Grace can't remember if she's ever heard Cho call him that before, and a tremor shivers through Jane's jaw in response to hearing it. "I need to hear your voice answer me, alright? Do you understand what I'm saying, why I need you to be still?"
Finally, faint and barely audible, his lips hardly moving around the word. "Yes."
Cho nods, but still doesn't quite start yet. He speaks again instead, something off and strange about his voice that she can't quite place, until it hits her, halfway through the short, gentle reassurance.
"Nothing is going to happen to you," Cho says, in the same voice he uses to speak to victims, to civilians so scared they can barely breathe, never mind give a useful statement. "I have a knife here, in my hand, and I'm going to use it to cut you free, but I will not hurt you. I will not hurt you."
Even fainter than the word, the slightest jerk of his chin, Jane nods.
While Cho gets to work sawing through the thick, layered plastic, Lisbon takes up the mantle and talks to him the entire time. She explains what's going on around them, tells Jane that the paramedics are working on Blankfein and the local police are going to find out what really happened here. There's already a team working elsewhere to find their maybe-former suspect's mother, and the coroner's been called for Dylan and Ruth, thankfully far enough back in the shadows behind the chair that they're out of eyesight.
As she listens to Lisbon talk, Grace finds her attention drawn to the knife, methodically removing sheet after sheet of the material used to bind Jane in place. Despite the way his voice had sounded, as strong and level as it always does, Grace doesn't miss it when it happens. Every so often, Cho pauses, grits his teeth and waits for a moment before continuing, because his hands are shaking too.
Grace, in the middle of all this noise and motion, feels useless and unmoored. She feels like she should be doing something, saying something, and she sees the same empty helplessness in Rigsby when she looks over at him. There's a powerless heartache on his face that she feels reflected in her own chest, and she flexes her fingers at her sides, aimless and numb. The paramedics are now loading Blankfein onto a stretcher, she hears Lisbon saying it looks like they've got him handled, he's coherent and talking to them. It seems like he's likely going to be okay.
In the meantime, one of the uniforms has located a pair of scissors, bringing them over to Cho, who accepts them and passes Grace's knife back to her. She folds it up and slips it back into her pocket, wondering if she's ever going to be able to stomach carrying that particular tool again. Things move faster now that the scissors are in use, and soon enough, Jane is freed completely, curling over on himself in the shadow cast through the light filtering in from the ceiling by Lisbon, standing at his shoulder. He's breathing in deep gasps now, audible from where Grace is standing, lungs able to fully expand now that the restrictive plastic is gone from around his chest.
That's when the second team of paramedics arrives on-scene, and everything slips sideways. In a startling turn of events, when one of them, a man with sandy brown hair and glasses, reaches for Jane, the immediate problem that results is not caused by Jane himself.
The moment the paramedic starts towards Jane, already reaching, is the moment that Rigsby steps between them, six-foot-four and broad shouldered to match, and actually looking like it for once in his life. It's startling to see him like that, deliberately making himself bigger, more imposing, looming deliberately towards the two smaller newcomers. Usually he carries himself in such a way as to be as small as possible, reminding Grace of the kind of dog that knows how big he is and disagrees, like he's embarrassed by the amount of space he takes up. Rigsby's posture, at a given moment in time, is an apology, an excuse me, sorry, I know, I don't want me to be this way either. Right now, it's not that at all. Right now, it's a threat.
"Don't touch him."
His voice is hard and harsh in a way it never goes, and she sees Jane's hand twitch. Not away from the loud, intense order for the approaching pair to back off, like she'd have expected if asked to predict how that would have gone, but towards Rigsby, whose back is to him. Lisbon edges fractionally closer to him, Cho closing in on the other side. They can't quite see what's going on in the low lighting, but if Rigsby has identified a threat, it's clear they're not going to let it get near Jane.
The semi-standoff lasts for a few more moments before Grace finds it in herself to move. She steps forward and reaches out, laying a hand on Rigsby's arm. She can feel the tension in him, muscles tightly corded steel under his shirt, his entire body rigid, and tells him to stand down.
"They're paramedics, Wayne," she says quietly, the use of his first name causing the side of his mouth to twitch. He still doesn't move, stare boring into the two strangers who look a patient, practiced sort of uncomfortable. "Stand down. They're not going to hurt him."
If they try, they'll take a bullet with Grace's name on it before they can damage so much as a curl on Jane's head, and that's a promise.
Even when he manages to grasp that these people are here to help, that they're not going to harm Jane, Rigsby doesn't shy away from his reaction or become ashamed. He holds his chin up, daring anyone to call him on it, though he does allow them to pass.
The paramedics conduct a preliminary exam, tilting his head forward with blue gloved hands, throwing the blood-soaked hair into motion, glittering and wet. It looks almost like a garish mockery of a crown, ruby set into gold.
Whatever they find must not be too bad, because Jane is quickly deemed safe to transport without much intervention on the scene. Trouble comes again when they try to load him onto a gurney to take him out to the waiting ambulance, and this time, it is from the patient himself. They try and move Jane towards the stretcher, with its black velcro straps hanging down innocently by the sides, and he balks, jerking back and away so hard he'd likely have fallen were it not for Rigsby reaching out lightning quick to catch him.
He flinches hard when the hands touch his back and says, to the paramedics, to Rigsby, to the world wholesale, "Don't."
No. 'Says' isn't right. Begs. Thinking that word and applying it to Jane makes Grace's throat close, her lungs feel like they're full of couch stuffing that's been lit on fire. Reluctantly removing his hold, Rigsby lets him stand of his own accord though his hands remain out, hovering, waiting to be needed again. Lisbon steps around them, crowding the paramedics back, and there's a fire in her face and in her voice that Grace wouldn't dare cross.
"This man," Lisbon hisses, "has been a victim and a witness to a violent crime committed by the most wanted killer in the state of California. He is also one of the best investigators the CBI has, and he already has post-traumatic stress disorder. He's going to be accompanied by one of my team at all times and you are to, under no circumstances, restrain him. Do you understand?"
Either they're on board with the plan or, like Grace, value their lives too much to argue with Lisbon when she sounds and looks like that, and they both back off.
Turning back around, Lisbon gives Rigsby a meaningful look over Jane's shoulder, and then reaches out to him. She doesn't touch him, though, and as Rigsby steps to the side, over towards her, he does the same. The meaning is clear. They're giving Jane back any piece of control that they can, waiting with outstretched hands and open, empty palms, hovering in the air, a message to him. No one touches you without your permission.
If it weren't for giving him the option to reject it, Grace doesn't know that he would ever have accepted the help.
Jane walks out to the ambulance mostly of his own power. Lisbon and Rigsby support him on either side, hands protective and guarding at his back and his waist, and the paramedics lead the way. The day is too sunny and too happy looking outside, for the horror that they've just come upon, and Grace squints in the sudden brightness. She feels lightheaded and distant, static buzzing in her fingertips and on her tongue. None of this feels real. Every time she blinks, she still sees Jane's face when they first saw him, empty and destroyed.
Lisbon helps Jane up into the back of the ambulance itself, while Rigsby plants himself by the open doors, blocking the view of the gathering crowd as much as he can. His face is thunder and he's still drawn up to his full height, shoulders squared. He doesn't move until the ambulance doors close and the vehicle begins to pull out onto the street.
Grace looks away before she can see him deflate.
By the time they reach the hospital, Lisbon seems to have already given the staff the same ultimatums she'd laid on the paramedics back in the theater. As they put Jane through a battery of exams and tests, up to and including a CT scan of his head, not for a moment is he left without one of them standing guard and watching over everything that happens. The hospital will only compromise so far, only one of them allowed to accompany him at a time, and so they form a rotating sentry, spelling each other out to take their turn staying with him and napping in the waiting farthest Jane is from any of them at any point during his short lived stint at Salinger Mill General Hospital is when they take him in for the CT, which Cho tells Grace, when he and Rigsby have changed places, had required him to leave the room.
"They let me talk to him through the speaker, though, and I watched the whole time," he says. He looks as tired and strung out as Grace feels, short thumbnail picking at the rolled paper lip of his coffee cup. "Seemed like it helped. It was hard to tell."
Grace can imagine it, the sound of Cho's deep, steady voice over the speaker, though she hasn't the faintest idea what he'd said. She doesn't have the faintest idea what she would have said, if it had been her there, forced to let a wall and a pane of glass separate her from their charge, left with only a mic to try and hold him here. The thought sends her hand out on an odd impulse, fingers snagging and gripping onto the sleeve of Cho's jacket. He doesn't say anything or shake her off, and after a beat, his hand twists around to grasp her elbow, squeezing back. After not much longer than a second or two, they both let go. They don't talk about it, just settle into chairs to wait.
The more acutely horrible the situation, the more grateful you are for the smallest of mercies. All of those tests, a comprehensive physical, a dozen different pairs of eyes from all levels of the Salinger Mill emergency department, and Jane is ruled to be almost completely physically unharmed, and allowed to be discharged. By some miracle, he's walked away from the whole situation with only a mild concussion, the cut on the back of his head that had stained his hair in such mesmerizingly jewel toned streaks not even severe enough to warrant stitches.
So here they are now, on the first stretch of the long drive back to Sacramento. It's night time by now, and there was the option of bunking down in a hotel for the night in nearby, much bigger San Bernardino, but by unanimous agreement, they'd voted against that. Instead, all having gone longer on less sleep than this, and ready to swap out drivers as necessary, the team opted to head for home.
Loaded into the same van, Grace is glad that they've managed to take just one vehicle home. Not only does it mean shorter shifts behind the wheel for herself and each of her three colleagues fit for driving, it also means none of them have to draw the short straw of having to let Jane out of their sight for the duration of the six and a half hour trip.
Rolling her head to the side, sitting just behind the passenger's seat, Grace peers through the dark of the interior of the car, lit only by the distant, widely spaced lamps illuminating the almost deserted corridor of the Five. Jane isn't asleep. He's not talking, hasn't said much of anything at all since they'd rescued him, just enough to convince the doctors he wasn't actually experiencing some kind of major psychological break, and his eyes stare vacantly out the window, fixed on nothing in particular. Any other day he would likely glance over his shoulder, quirk an eyebrow, and start pontificating on why Grace is staring at him, but he doesn't tonight.
Tonight, he sits silent and still as a ghost, and looks out into the featureless black of the freeway on the long stretch between any kind of semi-major cities. The headlights of a rare car, passing them headed in the opposite direction, cast a sickly glow over his face and Jane squints against the sudden brightness of it. In that same flash of clarity, Grace can see that he's shaking. Barely, impossible to see without the extra help, but there.
Slowly, tentatively, unsure if she'll be welcome, Grace reaches out her hand. The van is silent and still around her, Cho asleep in the passenger's seat, Rigsby stretched against traffic law across the seats behind her, Lisbon driving with the radio off. She leaves her hand laying on the seat between her and Jane, palm up and fingers slightly curled. It's an offer with no pressure attached, a pinky swear in a treehouse, a note passed between elementary school children, morse code on the wall between bedrooms. Grace doesn't say anything, or clear her throat, or touch Jane first. She just sits there, and offers.
It's been several minutes, her arm beginning to go numb from the slightly awkward position, when Grace feels it. A feather-light pressure, a cold, unsteady hand laid over hers. She doesn't dare look over, but makes a moment's eye contact with Lisbon in the rearview mirror, knows the other woman sees what's happened.
Until it's her turn to swap out and drive, Grace stays there, stubbornly letting her arm fall asleep, fingers closed over her palm just far enough that they brush the back of Jane's hand in hers, and hopes.