I do not own Blindspot or its characters.
Remi laughed as she ran down the dusty street, playfully kicking the worn soccer ball back and forth with the local children. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had the opportunity to take part in such a simple pleasure, and she was glad Shepherd hadn't required her presence at these negotiations. It was such a beautiful morning that she'd walked down the hill to the small village and promptly joined in the game. She didn't think she'd ever been as carefree as these kids, and it was nice to lose herself in the moment.
They'd been playing for about half an hour when Shepherd's Jeep came barreling down the hill, Oscar behind the wheel and Roman beside him. Their faces were grim. "Time to go, Remi," Roman said harshly, all but tossing her into the seat between them. They hadn't gone half the distance when she saw an RPG being launched, and she turned just in time to see the street where she had just been playing—where the children were still playing—explode behind them.
"No!" Remi fought desperately to get free, to run to help them, but Roman held her fast as Oscar gunned the vehicle.
"In all, six RPGs were fired by the time we reached the camp," Jane said dully. "Apparently, the warlord had a beef with one of the men in town, and he decided testing out the weaponry we were selling him on the village would be a good way to resolve it. None of . . ." Her voice broke, and she took a deep breath before she could go on. "None of the children survived."
Her eyes were damp as they met Kurt's stunned gaze. "That was the day I started becoming Jane," she told him. "My birth parents named me Alice, and I took the name Remi when Shepherd adopted us—my brother Ian became Roman—but I didn't feel like either of those people any more. I'd . . . I'd seen people die before because of weapons we sold, but growing up the way I did . . . I was pretty much desensitized to it. I always told myself that it was just bad guys killing bad guys. But that day, Kurt, those kids . . . they were so little and innocent and good. And I couldn't understand how their deaths didn't bother anyone else. How Oscar and Roman could just drive away knowing what was about to happen to them."
"Roman was . . . your brother," Kurt murmured, and Jane nodded even though it wasn't really a question. "Who was Oscar?"
Jane drew a deep breath. "Oscar was . . . he was a trusted member of our inner circle. Shepherd recruited him after he received a dishonorable discharge from the Marines for participating in a barroom brawl in which a man was killed. And he was also . . ." she hesitated, ". . . my fiancé."
"I see." Kurt glanced away, struggling to process all that she had just told him. It was a lot to take in. "Did you love him?" he asked when he finally met her eyes again.
Jane shook her head. "I didn't know what love was back then, Kurt. I cared about him as much as I was able, but I wasn't . . . me then. No, you're the only man I've ever truly loved." And Oscar certainly hadn't loved her. Or rather, his loyalty to Shepherd had outweighed whatever affection he felt for her.
"I love you too," Kurt reassured her, feeling the tension in her body as she awaited his response, and he ran a hand up and down her back to soothe her. "More than I've ever loved any woman. And that's never going to change." She shuddered softly as she exhaled the breath she had been holding. "You said you thought you were there to sell guns . . ." he prompted eventually when she didn't resume speaking.
"Yeah." Jane drew in a shaky breath. "That was really all Shepherd dealt in up to that point. She had been talking for months about expanding into bigger weaponry, but Roman and I were opposed to it. We were making plenty of money on the guns, and we didn't see any reason to risk the added scrutiny when we already had more than we could spend in our lifetimes." Her voice hardened. "But I guess for Shepherd, it just wasn't enough. Or maybe it was the thrill she was chasing, the prestige of selling bigger weaponry."
"That's human nature," Kurt said softly. "Unfortunately."
"Yeah." Jane smiled, but there was no humor in it. "I never cared enough to ask her why she had done it. All I could see were the faces of those twelve dead children. They haunted me, especially at night when I closed my eyes." Still did, sometimes. "It was almost as if I'd been sleepwalking through life up until that point, and suddenly I was wide awake." And for a person who had spent most of her life feeling little to nothing, it had been agony.
"So what did you do?" Kurt asked.
"At first, nothing," Jane admitted. "Loyalty had been so ingrained in me at that point that the thought of betraying my family was . . ." She shook her head. "I went back and tried to pretend that nothing had changed, to go about my business as usual, but I couldn't get the faces of those children out of my mind. Logically, I knew I hadn't been responsible for what happened to them, but it still felt as if I was, and I knew . . . I knew if I didn't act, more innocent lives would be lost.
"So . . ." Jane shifted to a sitting position and drew her knees up to her chest. "I started trying to figure out how to extricate myself and Roman from this mess—and Oscar too, since I was still convinced I loved him at this point—and leave Shepherd to hang for her crimes. I reached out to a hacker I had met online a few years back and asked him to get me the name of an FBI agent who was above reproach. He responded in under an hour with the name Cole Bryant, so I . . . on my hacker friend's advice, I sent Agent Bryant a burner phone so we could communicate."
"And you started giving him the location of these sales," Kurt guessed.
"Eventually," Jane agreed. "I started small, just the location of an arms cache here and there, in order to build trust on both sides. My goal was to take down Shepherd without the three of us winding up in prison for the rest of our lives, and I figured I would need to build up quite a bit of goodwill to get a deal like that."
"I'm guessing it didn't work out like you planned," Kurt surmised.
"No." Jane's mouth twisted in a wry smile. "The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. I was careful to have the FBI bust the buyers after the sale was complete, but Shepherd figured out the leak was coming from our end much sooner than I'd anticipated. And since Agent Bryant and his team were the common denominator in all the raids, she knew who was getting the intel."
Kurt's brow furrowed. "But she couldn't have known which member of the team the mole was passing information to," he theorized. "And I'm guessing Bryant didn't know who you were anyway. So trying to get information out of them would have been useless." Not to mention foolhardy. Grabbing and torturing an FBI agent would have meant a death sentence.
"Yeah . . ." Jane drew out the word. "Which is why she decided to send me to them instead." She couldn't restrain her laugh at the shocked expression on Kurt's face. "That was pretty much my reaction as well. But from her view, it made perfect sense. Roman and I were the only two people in the world she trusted completely, and I was more . . . adept at persuasion. And she thought a female would be more sympathetic as a victim."
Kurt frowned. "A victim?" That was the last thing he could ever picture Jane being.
Jane nodded. "That's how I got amnesia. Shepherd, umm . . . she decided that the best way to proceed was to give me an experimental drug that erased memory and send me to the FBI . . . to Agent Bryant. That way, they'd have a mole on the inside who could get that information, and she could simultaneously use the FBI to take out several competitors. It was a win-win from her point of view."
"She wanted you to erase your entire life?" Kurt asked in disbelief. "To forget her? Your brother? Everyone and everything you've ever known? How could she do that? How could you?"
"I didn't really have much of a choice," Jane said with a wry laugh. "Nobody really said no to Shepherd. And as it turned out, she did me a favor." She sobered at his questioning look. "Just because I was ready to turn my back on arms dealing didn't mean I automatically morphed into a good person, Kurt. In all likelihood, if the memory wipe hadn't happened, once I took down Shepherd, I probably would have turned to some other form of crime. It was all I knew. But getting that clean slate, working with Agent Bryant and his team and learning from their example . . . it completed the transformation that those children's deaths began. It made me into who I am today."
Kurt pulled her back into his arms. "In that case, I'm grateful as well. But I still don't see how Shepherd thought her plan was going to work if you couldn't remember who you were, much less what your mission was. Even if you were able to find out who the mole was, she had to know you probably wouldn't trust them enough to pass it on. What did they plan to do, threaten you?" He paused. "And how did she plan to get the FBI to take out her competitors for her?"
"They tattooed me," Jane told him, and he glanced at her in confusion. "I had them removed when I was put in witness protection," she explained. "They were . . . too distinctive to keep." Not that she had wanted to anyway. "The tattoos were cryptic clues that when deciphered led to these other arms dealers. I didn't object to that part of the plan. From my perspective, it would just save more innocent victims. And yes, they did use threats to try to get me to cooperate with them. Not against me, but Agent Bryant and his team, once we had become friends."
Kurt swore under his breath. He had never hated anyone more, not even his father. Shepherd made Bill Weller look like a choirboy. "Except you were the mole," he pointed out. "The flow of information would stop when you went undercover." Making it obvious who the leak was. "What did you do about that?"
"I told Roman the truth," Jane admitted. "He was so angry at first I thought he was going to kill me, but that was mostly just due to fear of what Shepherd would do to me if—when—she found out. Once he calmed down, I was able to convince him to help me in order to divert suspicion for a while, but he made it clear that it was going to stop. But he agreed to continue making the dead drops for a while and to pass along a letter that I had written myself explaining what was going on."
Kurt sucked in a breath as everything suddenly came into sharp focus. "You said Roman died saving your life. That you had gotten him killed. That's how, isn't it?" he asked, tenderly cupping her jaw as tears flooded her eyes. "Shepherd discovered Roman was the mole, and instead of outing you, he took the blame for it and she killed him.
"Pretty much," Jane told him. "Except that it was Oscar who figured it out, not Shepherd. He publicly sided with Roman and me when we urged Shepherd not to expand the business, but privately . . . privately he was playing both ends against the middle. We were the only two who had been against the expansion, and the leak started shortly after, so he figured it had to be one of us. And since the leak continued after I was sent undercover, he felt certain it was Roman."
She smiled humorlessly. "Apparently, I was a better actor than I thought. We both were, I guess. We were sharing a bed, planning a life together, and neither of us had a clue what the other was up to. I was so . . . so distraught at first after those children died and so busy pretending not to be affected, and then later so busy making plans of my own to take down Shepherd and make sure her scheme didn't succeed before I infiltrated the FBI, that I missed all the warning signs about what he really was. Maybe if I hadn't . . ."
"You can't think like that, Jane," Kurt said gently. "I'm sure Roman wouldn't want you to blame yourself."
"No, I know," Jane agreed. He had told her so at the end, urged her to find happiness. He would be thrilled to know that she had finally done so. "He'd have liked you."
"I wish I could have met him," Kurt returned. "Maybe we could visit his grave together sometime? I'd like to thank him for keeping you safe for me."
The smile that lit Jane's face this time was genuine, albeit brief. "I'd like that." She took a deep breath, knowing there were still a few loose ends to her story she needed to tie up when a knock sounded on the cabin door. She glanced at the clock and then at Kurt, but his face told her he was just as puzzled as she was. They'd been talking for quite some time; it was now well after eleven. Much later than was the norm for someone to drop by.
She got to her feet as Kurt started toward the door, pasting an appropriately hostile look on her face in case it was Rich Dotcom on the other side of it.
An ashen-faced crewmember was waiting on the other side. "Captain Weller, sir. Ma'am. Mr. Dotcom sent me to get the two of you. There's been an accident . . ."