A/N: I thought that last chapter was it, but then I found I wanted to see what happened next.

I like to think that when Audrey Pauley says to Doggett, 'You love her, though', she's pulling focus on something he's been trying to keep blurred for a while.

John Doggett wakes to the pale gleam of a new day's light. It has found its way in around the edges of the faded curtains of his motel room. He lies with his head on an unfamiliar pillow, eyes closed, keeping still as he waits for and then registers the arrival of a sensation that he has come to expect every morning for the past nine years. A sharp pulse of pain awakens itself in his heart, stabbing as it does with fresh energy every time he wakes into the memory of what his life has lacked for those long nine years. This pain, he knows, will accompany him through the rest of the day. It will not always be as acute as it is now, but it will always be present. Occasionally it will steal up on him unawares, lunging out of the background of his day to fill his mind like an off-key note jangling at an unbearable volume, loud enough to rupture every capillary beneath his skin.

It is an irony not lost on him that on this particular morning, this memory is a sign of healing. The last time he woke up, he woke not to this quantifiable agony, but to a nothingness so absolute it didn't even have a name. Agony this may be, but at least it is his. At least it is him, returned to himself. Most importantly it means that Luke is not lost to him, or at least not entirely.

It isn't until he opens his eyes and sees her that Doggett remembers he is not alone. Monica Reyes is lying beside him, curled on her side, still asleep.

He doesn't remember waking in the night, and for her sake he hopes that he didn't. In fact, he feels as if he slept well, although that could simply be because he has slept. Since this whole thing started he can't have had more than a night's worth of rest in the two weeks put together. His disappearing sense of self, drowning beneath that heavy tide of forgetting, was receding too quickly to let him lose yet more to sleep.

Doggett has the vague feeling that he should get up, shower and dress. That would surely give Reyes time to awake herself, negating any awkwardness that might be associated with them finding themselves in the same bed. But the knowledge fails to promote an action. Instead he stays still, for some reason keen not to wake her, not yet. Her dark hair has drifted over her face, but he can still make out the slight line between her eyes, the one he has come to associate with the sight of her frowning as she concentrates on something. He wonders when he first started to notice that about her and cannot come up with a definitive answer. It is a knowledge that has come upon him gradually, one of a growing catalogue of facts about Monica Reyes that he has collected and filed away without consciously making an effort to do so.

She'll want coffee when she wakes up. She drinks it black and far too sweet. She'll want a cigarette, too, but she won't have one. She won't eat breakfast unless he physically picks something up for her, not because of some absurd diet plan but simply because she always forgets to get something for herself. On a normal day, back in Washington, she'd go to the gym before coming into their little basement office, so perhaps this morning she'll want to go for a run before they set off for the last fifteen hours of the solid driving that will get them back to D.C. She drove fast and straight yesterday and he never once offered to take over until they'd already stopped. Her legs are probably stiff as all hell. She didn't even take time for a shower before she got into bed last night. She didn't take time for herself at all.

He watches her steady breathing stir the strands of hair that lie across her face and something unplanned for constricts his chest. He worries about it, but then it's probably just because it's been a long time since he woke up to a woman in his bed. She must know that. He's been more alone in the past two weeks than he has been for the nine lonely years that preceded them, and she knows that, too. It's why she's here, isn't it, instead of on the other side of the flimsy wall behind this bed? He remembers falling asleep to the warm weight of her hand on his. Monica Reyes can be perplexing, frustrating and at times downright infuriating, but so far she has proven to be the most selfless partner he's ever worked with. He knows from Skinner that she wasn't supposed to come to Mexico – it's why she was sent back north so swiftly. There'll be hell to pay from Kersh for disobeying orders no matter the successful outcome, and she must have known that would be the case. But she came anyway.

She mutters something and turns on her back, her hair still over her face. At first he thinks she's waking up and his heart does a strange double beat in his chest as if his body is preparing for flight. But Monica is still asleep, muttering something, frowning to herself, apparently agitated by whatever dream is flitting through her frontal cortex. Before he realises what he's doing he's leaning over her, reaching out to smooth that hair away from her face. The action shocks him mid-movement and he freezes, his fingers on her cheek as her eyes open. She stares up at him and lifts her hand to cover his where they rest on her face.

"John?"

She says it sleepily and with slight confusion, and the sound of his name in that voice is suddenly so intimate that something he doesn't want to believe is even there turns over in the pit of his belly.

"Hey," he whispers, in a voice far lower and rougher than he intended. He clears his throat and removes his hand. "You were dreaming."

She blinks, dispelling the last vestiges of sleep from her eyes. "Sorry."

"No, I-" he's not at all sure where he was going with that sentence, so he lets it hang.

"How are you feeling?" Her dark eyes search his, that little line between her eyes furrowing deeper.

"I'm OK. Little sore, but – I'll be OK."

She smiles. "I was half afraid you'd wake up and have forgotten everything again."

He shakes his head. "No. No, I… remember."

Something flinches in her eyes. "Sorry."

"Not your fault." He keeps looking down at her, thinking, I should really move now. But something he is not willing to define is keeping him there, watching her as she watches him. Her gaze drifts down to his lips and in the split-second that it takes him to register the movement she's flicked it hurriedly back up to his again. Then she's moving and he's sitting back, wondering what just happened and at the same time, with another sparking, spinning pulse in the pit of his stomach, he is completely and utterly certain that he knows.

"What time is it?" she asks, pushing herself up, glancing past him to the motel clock, which reads 8.23am. "We should probably get going."

She's wearing a black T and simple black cotton panties that are so lacking in provocation that they wouldn't have broken military regs. Yet when she gets out of bed he suddenly finds he wants to look at her legs so badly that he has to turn away.

He can hear rustling as she pulls on her slacks. "I'll head next door and have a shower," she says. "See you at the car in 20?"

"Sure," he manages, but by that time she's already at the door and in the next moment she's through it and gone. A few seconds later he hears the door to the room next door open and close, followed by her faint footsteps crossing the room.

Doggett shuts his eyes and leans back against the faintly peeling paint of the wall behind his head. He takes a breath and lets it go, feeling the myriad tiny aches from the bruises on his torso. Swapping one pain for another often works, he's found.

He gets up and heads for the shower. He strips off the clothes she bought him and stands under the warm jets of water, trying not to imagine her doing the same.

[END]