Part 2: As long as you know that...
Lisbon's eyelids fluttered sporadically and her heart hammered relentlessly off-kilter. The pain surged through her head, pounding horribly down through her upper body and aching through her legs. What was broken? What wasn't? Maybe she was just broken, in body now as well as in her heart.
"Teresa!" She heard Jane's voice rip through the air as violently as that iron and steel had hit her. Teresa? God, he never called her that. She'd always loved the way he pronounced her first name, lavishly lingering over its inflections the way he made everything seem grand and luxurious somehow. Yet the last time he'd called her by it, Jane had basically been tripping. She remembered the light in his eyes when he'd smiled at her and said "Teresa, you can call me Patrick." As the physical pain lanced through her once more, she winced against the memory of how happy he'd made her by saying that. And later, by calling her "belladonna" in the hospital after awakening with her name on his lips. Right before he tricked her and ran out on her. Again. Dammit.
Jane screamed her name again. Screamed. She couldn't be imagining that, as out of it as she was. The shock and horror in his voice stretched it to its limitations, and it broke on the second syllable before finding itself again the third time he called to her. Suddenly, he was by her side, cradling her face in his warm hands. As her eyes fluttered open and were forced shut intermittently, she tried hard to maintain consciousness, to revel in this closeness to Jane.
Lisbon felt Jane's usual facade of charmed gracefulness and manipulative savvy fall away as his eyes searched hers with that same probing neediness she'd only felt flashes of before...now he was full-on looking into her soul, desperate to find it, clutching at the hope of her being alright with an intensity that shocked her. She knew he loved her, even if it was just as his best friend in the world and not in a romantic way. But the intensity of him right now was unbearable.
She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, trying to start forming words. The "J" in "Jane" couldn't quite come together. Still she kept blinking helplessly, reaching out to him with all her heart.
"Her eyes are open!" Jane shouted to someone - Cho? Probably. "She's breathing!" He added, gratitude for this discovery shining across his face. She could faintly detect the sound of Cho's clipped, worried-sounding voice calling for an ambulance.
There was little she could do but lie there and wait for medical attention, and she felt with wry self-derision the twisted contentment she felt under Jane's gaze, the comfort of knowing he was really there for her and entirely wrapped up in her alone right now. She could have lain there forever in some sense.
"Teresa," Jane murmured, his face inches from her own. He was half-lying on the ground, hovering above her, mindless as ever of how he looked to the outside world. "Breathe. Keep breathing. Help is coming. You're going to be fine." There was a strange and unexpected tremor in his voice, almost like he was going to cry. He swallowed hard. Teresa wondered distantly if he'd been like this the night he'd found her with a red smiley face of crusted blood painted onto her.
Jane swallowed again, looking as if he was swallowing past some kind of deep-seated resolve and making a decision that weighed heavy, but one he felt incapable of denying. Her heart seemed to straighten itself out a little as she stared back at him, the two of them seemingly isolated, alone together at last. She was weightless then. Free-falling.
"I love you, Teresa," Jane said clearly, distinctly, and secretly, pronouncing it in a low and intimate tone flecked with anxiety and despair. "I love you. As long as you know that..."
Cruelly, consciousness chose that moment to fade. Lisbon lost the thread of Jane's all-important sentence as her mind plunged into a black oblivion.