Disclaimer: I do not own Jane or Kurt or Blindspot. Writing about them is simply the outlet for my obsession.
A/N: This chapter was originally about three times as long as this, but it became so unwieldy, I've split it up into smaller ones… so the next one or two should come faster, since they're already mostly done. We're cruising toward the end of this story, but don't worry, there's plenty of heartache still to come. I hope you enjoy it!
JANE AND KURT
He held onto her until she seemed to relax yet again, which took a little longer this time than it had last time. For some reason, even though she'd said she'd started with her worst secret, spilling all of her secrets seemed to be getting harder for her, not easier… but maybe that was just because the longer this went on, the more exhausted she was. For her sake, he hoped that there wasn't too much more, mostly because he just wasn't sure how much more she could take. Besides that, the more there was to confess, the harder the legal aspects of it would be to sort out. What would become of her after all of this? He couldn't help but worry, even if the future did seem like a more distant problem just then.
She knew that she needed to stand up, walk back to the chair, sit back down across from him and get on with it. The only way to finish, to get through this nightmare that she was trapped inside, was to continue downloading all the secrets from her brain, getting them out into the open. Only when she had told him everything, absolutely everything, could she finally rest. By then, she knew, he would have heard enough that he'd understand why he was better off without her. Honestly, she couldn't understand how he hadn't realized that already. Despite the fact that she knew that rejection was coming, and that it would be easier for her in the long run if she pushed him away first, she simply couldn't bring herself to do it. Not him. Not this time. Not when he was there, holding onto her the way he was just then.
Taking a deep breath, she raised her head off of his shoulder, slowly lowering her arms from around him. She could feel him releasing her as well, though he seemed to do it reluctantly. He leaned back and looked at her, his face full of obvious concern. "Are you okay?" he asked. "We don't have to start again yet…"
I don't deserve this from him, after everything I've done, she thought for the umpteenth time. She tried to smile, but failed, and instead felt tears behind her eyes. Dammit, not yet, she thought in frustration. Knowing that she needed to provide some kind of response, she forced herself to nod slightly, only succeeding in pulling away from him by forcing herself to step back, which took all her strength. Turning away from him, she walked toward the back corner of the room, clasping her arms against her, and then unconsciously bringing one hand to her mouth as she chewed on her thumbnail. When she reached the corner she turned, then continued walking around the rest of the perimeter of the room, until she was almost back where she'd started. It was the best she could do in terms of getting distance from him – not that she wanted to get away from him… not exactly… but it was complicated – or from the chair where she'd been sitting to tell all of her secrets. She'd be perfectly happy never to see that chair, or another interrogation room, again for the rest of her life.
Finally, having completed the lap around the room, she walked back towards her chair, careful to detour around him so that she stayed out of his arms' reach. He'd been watching her, wondering what she was doing, and what was going through her head, trying to figure out what he should do. She seemed more distant, suddenly, but hadn't said anything to indicate either that she was unwilling to continue, or that she was finished.
On the contrary, there was obviously something bothering her that hadn't been there before. When she stepped around him, he tried not to take it personally, despite how obvious it was that she had done it on purpose. This isn't about you, he told himself. He'd always known her better than she knew herself, and he could see that something inside was making her withdraw. He only hoped that she wasn't shutting down completely. As long as she was still functioning, he was fairly sure that he could pull her back out of her head. Following her back to the table and sitting down once again, he leaned forward, towards her, and simply waited, leaning his forearms against his thighs.
She had turned her chair, and her body along with it, back towards the table, and was sitting with her elbows resting on the edge, her hands up in the air, the heels of which were lying flat against her forehead. It was the kind of position someone might take if they had a bad headache, and it wouldn't be surprising if she did. Her head was leaned forward against her hands, her eyes closed, and it was obvious that it was requiring effort on her part to breathe normally.
He sat and watched her, thinking that she looked so tightly wound up just then, that if he made contact with her she might snap like a rubber band. Still, he moved his chair forward slightly, the movement making a loud scraping sound on the ground, in sharp contrast to the silence in the room. He still wasn't touching her, but he sat facing her, and his chair was now close enough to her that there was only just barely enough room for his knees between his chair and hers. He leaned his head on his left hand, anchoring himself against his left elbow, which rested on the table only a few inches from her left elbow. He was trying to walk the line between not crowding her, but letting her know that she wasn't in this on her own, and erring on the side of proximity rather than distance. After all, contact and proximity had always been what had worked with her before.
"I have to back up," she said without raising her head from her hands or opening her eyes, "to before Mayfair… was shot." She had trouble getting the last word out, and she took a few seconds to breathe before continuing. "Back to when she was arrested. That was when I first realized what all those little things that Oscar had had me doing actually meant, when I first realized what I had done." She was obviously stressed, and slowly let her hands slide across her temples and down the sides of her head, finally resting them against her collarbone on each side of her neck, her elbows still braced against the table and her head now held securely between her forearms. Without realizing it, she had balled both hands into fists, and she leaned forward, her head down. Though she'd now opened her eyes, she stared at the table, which was only inches below her face, refusing to lift her head.
Kurt watched her, wanting to reach out for her, but didn't. Not yet. She was talking so far, so he let her go, though he did lean in closer to her, hoping that it would help. The small distance between them felt like a gulf that stretched for miles after spending so long holding onto her hands.
"Those little things that Oscar forced me to do – sneaking a flash drive into an FBI computer, switching Mayfair's pen for an identical one, installing the GPS tracker in our car – I only realized when she was arrested that those were all to frame Mayfair. I never thought those tasks were innocent, exactly, I just didn't know what they were building up to, so it was easier to lie to myself. Tell myself that it wasn't hurting anyone. When Matthew Weitz was presenting all the evidence against her, that's when I put it together. There was more fabricated evidence, things that weren't me, too… It wasn't just me, I was only part of it. Oscar did other things that made her look guilty, and maybe others too. Like for one, Weitz said they'd found a note in Carter's pocket written with Mayfair's pen – the one Oscar made me switch. Obviously, Oscar had planted the note there."
Kurt was silent and still, waiting to see what she would do. "Then Mayfair was in jail," Jane continued after a pause. "I think Oscar thought that was all that would happen to her, that she would be put away and that would be the end of it… he told me the night he shot her that, 'This isn't how we wanted it to happen.' But of course, she couldn't just let herself be framed, because she hadn't done the things he – we – framed her for…" She stopped again, and he watched as her whole body seemed to tense, and a shaky breath escaped her, despite what was obviously her best effort to stop it. Her eyes squeezed shut again, and he watched her, motionless.
After waiting a full minute, he sat up, no longer leaning against his left arm, but instead extending it on the table so that it stretched out in front of her. It was almost like having his arm around her without touching her. His right hand undertook the more dangerous mission. He took a risk and rested it gently on the middle of her upper back, waiting to see what she would do. Instead of tensing further, she exhaled slowly, and then almost in slow motion, she dropped her head until her forehead was resting on the table, crossing her arms over the back of her head at her wrists, as if to protect herself – from what, he didn't know. Probably everything, he thought.
She hadn't moved to actively avoid or remove his hand from her back, so he began moving it slowly, gently rubbing a circle in the middle of her back, urging her to continue. She lifted her head back up to lean the heels of her hands against the forehead again, as she had when she'd first sat down. Then finally she spoke again, just above a whisper. "Mayfair was in jail, and I went to meet Oscar, in the same basement where… he ended up shooting her, a few weeks later. That time, though, I confronted him about using me to frame her. He didn't seem to care that she was being punished for crimes she didn't commit. He just said that she was responsible for some very, very bad things, and that she was getting exactly what she deserved."
Sighing heavily, she shook her head and opened her eyes, staring vacantly ahead, not even seeing his arm there in front of her. "I told him that there was nothing he could do to convince me that what he'd done was right… And then… a woman came out of the shadows. I recognized her, from before… I knew before she told me that her name was Sophia Varma."
Jane's eyes appeared to be starting to focus again, and she looked down at his arm in front of her. For a second he thought he saw her smile slightly, but it was gone as soon as it came. Closing her eyes and wincing slightly for a second, she opened them again and looked down at the table sadly. "Sophia said that she and Mayfair had fallen in love.And I remembered… talking to Sophia, before… at some point when we were making the plan. And it was strange, because what she started telling me was the same thing I remembered telling her... before. It was… like she was reciting my own words back to me. I could hear them – the words – in both my ears and in my memories."
She stopped for a second, letting it sink in. "She told me, just as I had told her, before, that she knew I felt lost." He watched as she tried to continue, but for a few seconds she couldn't breathe, much less talk.
Oh course she feels lost, he thought. How could she not?
She seemed to recover admirably, however, and she continued. "I remembered telling her that they – she and Mayfair – had fallen prey to temptation. Sophia told me that they had 'used illegal intel and fake informants to force convictions that should never have stood.' I don't know why I remembered that wording so clearly. It just… materialized in my head out of nowhere."
"Daylight," Kurt whispered, just as Jane had when Sophia had described it to her. Jane looked up at him over her shoulder for the first time since she'd sat back down at the table, her surprise obvious. He knew about Daylight? But… how? What else did he know that she didn't know about?
"You knew about Daylight?" she asked, both shocked and confused.
Kurt nodded, keeping his eyes on her. He hadn't had a choice but to keep it from everyone else, but in hindsight he still felt badly about having secrets from his team. Look what secrets had done to them, after all – and he didn't even know all of them yet. "I confronted her about the Guerrero interrogation. She was supposedly his case officer, but he obviously didn't know her. I called her on it, and she finally told me about Daylight. Guerrero was just the cover for the illegal information she used. He was never an informant."
Jane lifted her head off of her hands and looked over at him, taking it all in. After a minute, she simply nodded and looked away again, her hands clenching together, then falling back against her right cheek. She took a deep breath and continued. "I remembered telling Sophia that we they had worked outside the law, and only way she could set things right was by working outside the law again. That was the only way she could buy back her soul. Sophia said that she'd tried to get Mayfair to walk away from it all, twice, but that Mayfair had refused."
"She didn't want it all to be for nothing," Kurt said softly. It was almost like this time, they each had pieces of the puzzle, pieces that made more sense when seen together. Jane closed her eyes and shook her head, listening, then opened them again and simply stared at the wall once again. Kurt continued talking. "If she'd walked away, all the criminals she'd put away would've gone free, and she couldn't stand the idea that it had all been for nothing." He thought that she'd heard him, but he couldn't be sure.
"I asked Oscar why I should trust him." Jane was almost whispering now, still staring at the wall. "He told me I shouldn't. That's the only thing he ever said that I should have actually listened to…" Her voice cracked, and she looked back down again. "I remembered telling Sophia that she should trust herself," she said sadly. "I only wish I'd been smart enough to do that myself." Kurt watched her from the side, and the look on her face was heartbreaking, even just in profile. She finally folded her arms loosely in front of her on the table, which was all the invitation he needed. Within a few seconds, his left arm moved slowly until it was touching both of hers, his left hand curled around on her right elbow.
"Jane, you can't do this to yourself," he told her quietly.
"No, I did do this to myself, remember?" she replied sharply, swinging around to look at him with a surprising amount of anger in her face. It wasn't directed at him, but at herself. "This was my plan. I was the one who insisted that it had to happen. That you had to be the one at the center of it. Oscar may be the one who told me everything, and the only one who knew the bigger picture, but it was me, all of it."
"No," he replied suddenly, just as forcefully. She could insist as many times as she wanted to that it was all her fault, and he was going to fight her every time. "We've been over this. It was her, whoever she was… and you are not her." He pulled his left arm more tightly around her folded arms, once again leaning closer to her little by little.
She ignored him, turning back toward the wall ahead of her, no longer facing him. "Over the next few weeks, I saw Oscar every few days. I kept trying to convince him that the ends didn't justify the means. That there had to be another way." She shook her head, staring hard at the far wall as if it had angered her. "There was nothing I could do or say. He just kept reminding me that I had no choice but to cooperate, and what the stakes were," she said bitterly. Her anger was obvious. "He didn't care that I hated every second of it, that I hated him. He didn't care about anything except his damn mission."
He noticed that she'd said his mission, at least subconsciously separating herself from it for once. It's a start, he thought, but he knew there was a long, long way to go in convincing her that all this wasn't her fault.
"So I just kept lying to you," she said, slowly becoming more and more frantic. After all, it was the truth, wasn't it? She had been lying to him. Not because she wanted to, but what did that matter? The more she thought about it all, the more she hated herself. It didn't really matter how she thought about it, because there were now so many reasons why she hated herself. She simply couldn't escape them, so she'd given up trying.
Jane's tone was acidic as she continued. "And then, two weeks later, Mayfair got out of jail on house arrest. Considering that she was framed, I guess it was only a matter of time before she went after the truth, tried to clear herself." Kurt knew from experience to be that it was exhausting to be that angry, and he wondered how long she could keep it up.
Trying to diffuse Jane's anger, he told her, "I tried to get Mayfair to come clean… about Daylight. I went to see her after she got out of jail. Confessing about Daylight was the only way I could see to help her fight what had been done to her. She flat out refused, said she didn't want to jeopardize all those convictions just to vindicate herself. Said she knew that what she'd done was wrong, but… she accepted that she'd cheated the system and lost, and just told me to find another way. But I couldn't…" He sighed. How did it all get so fucked up? How had they all ended up lying to each other? This team that had once been such a family… They'd all trusted each other once upon a time…
Jane had turned to look at him over her shoulder, and she just nodded and took over, slowly turning towards him. "When she broke her house arrest… well, none of us knew where she was, of course. Obviously, I had no reason to think she'd end up in the basement where I met Oscar… if I'd just kept my mouth shut… I mean, I shouldn't have assumed that no one could find that meeting place. It was stupid of me. And if she hadn't heard me thinking I was talking to Oscar, then I could've just… I don't know. Maybe somehow I could've explained why I was there… maybe she wouldn't have pulled her gun on me, and Oscar wouldn't have shot her. Maybe somehow, she wouldn't have had to die… If I hadn't—"
"Jane, stop," he ordered her. "Look at me." But of course, being Jane and stubborn as hell, she did the opposite. Instead, she turned away again, pulled her arms in tightly against her and squeezed her eyes shut, attempting to force herself to breathe normally.
I am not here, she told herself. I am not here. I am not here. Once again, she willed herself to simply disappear. It would make life so much simpler for everyone else, especially for Kurt, if she just ceased to exist. What was he even still doing here, talking to her so patiently, as if she hadn't ruined so many lives – mostly his? She did her best to tune him out, but it was hard. Anyone else would have simply faded into the background, but she was so finely tuned to Kurt, she simply couldn't ignore him.
Sighing in exasperation, and swearing to himself that she was absolutely the most stubborn person he had ever met (with the possible exception of himself), he scooted his chair back just enough to make space between them, then he pulled her chair out from the table and turned it to face his.
She ignored him, or tried, but she was conscious of the fact that he was moving her chair, and her breathing was beginning to come faster as she felt panic taking over. She couldn't do this anymore. She just couldn't. Why couldn't they just throw her in jail and get it over with? Why did they have to keep doing this?
Because you owe them the truth, a calm voice in her head reminded her. You owe him the truth. Don't pretend that you're not the one who wanted to chance to tell him the truth in the first place. You wanted it more than anything. And now you have it, so you don't get to stop. Not until you're done.
He leaned forward in his chair, not sure what to do to get through to her. She seemed to have locked herself up tight and simply shut down. It was just a matter of finding the right way in, he knew, but he wasn't quite sure what the right way was. Currently her hands were unavailable to him, so he put his hands on her knees, squeezing slightly. "I'm not going away, Jane," he said more gently, keeping his hands still except him thumbs, which moved gently back and forth on the insides of her knees. "No matter how hard you try to make that happen. I know that's what you're doing."
As usual, it didn't take long for her to give in and listen to him – just long enough for his words to work their way inside her head. As much as she might think she wanted to fight against him, deep down, she really didn't. Even when she didn't want to admit it, she knew that she needed him. Leaning forward with her shoulders hunched, her arms stayed momentarily clamped to her chest. It didn't last, however. Gritting her teeth together as if in pain, she forced herself to release her arms from each other, pressing her palms momentarily into her thighs, in her last ditch effort to not give in to the pull he had on her, before finally surrendering to her need to let him help her. She'd never been good at fighting it, after all.
Leaning forward, she slid her hands down her legs until they got halfway to her knees, then she clasped them together tightly, resting her forearms against her legs just above where Kurt had his hands on her knees.
He watched the transition, simply holding his hands still on her knees and watching her until she stopped moving again. In the past twenty-four hours, how many times had he seen her ride to the top of the emotional roller coaster and then crash back down? It was exhausting even just watching, and he couldn't imagine how it felt to be in her head. Every time, it seemed harder for her to recover, and understandably so.
She was afraid to look at him. He'd sounded so angry a moment ago, and she couldn't stand the thought of seeing his anger directed at her. You were just as angry with him, she reminded herself. HHHHiH
He was only trying to get your attention… you were kind of freaking out for a minute.
Finally, her eyes blinked open and she looked slowly back up at him. As the voice in her head had suggested, there was no anger in his eyes, just that same compassion that she was so certain that she didn't deserve.
She shook her head sadly. "I guess we were never meant to go out for a drink," she said miserably, looking into his eyes. The pain he saw there was crushing. There's far more than a drink that was never meant to be between us, it seemed to be saying. She looked completely defeated.
He shook his head, letting go of her knees and once again disentangling her hands from each other so that he could hold onto them, and insisted, "You're wrong about that, Jane." His voice grew softer as he talked, and she could see that like her own words, there was a deeper meaning to what he was saying. "I still owe you more than one drink, and I'm not going to forget about that." He stared at her, trying to will her to understand. "Besides, you're not getting rid of me that easily. So stop trying."
Looking up at him surprise, she almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. "This was easily, huh?" she asked, feeling her stomach drop a little, despite the fact that she knew that was not what he was saying, that it was only an attempt at levity.
Shaking his head slowly, he replied, "I don't think anything has ever come easily to either of us." After a pause, his smile turned mischievous, and he added, "So you admit to trying to get rid of me then?"
She knew that he was kidding, that again, he was trying to lighten the incredibly intense mood in the room, and yet… in a way she was guilty of doing just that. How many times since she'd been arrested – or even before, for that matter – had she pushed everyone away, Kurt included, and tried simply to tell herself that there was no point because she'd end up in a cell anyway? How many times had she decided that he was better off without her, and then tried to shut him out? No, she had actually tried to get rid of him – but only for his own good. After all, as far as she knew, none of the people around her had deserved to be caught up in the complete mess left in the aftermath of this plan of hers, a plan so secret that she had even kept it a secret from herself… no matter what Oscar seemed to think.
He'd been kidding, of course, but now he saw that he should have thought more carefully about his words. Of course she'd been pushing him away, not in a malicious way, but because she was so overtaken by guilt, and she wanted to spare others the burden of her presence. That was so very much like Jane – to sacrifice herself completely for the good of others. She'd tried to distance herself from the team to protect them in the past, after all, so it shouldn't have surprised him. Sighing, he realized that his attempt at levity had sent her back into her own head.
"Jane," he said, trying to re-establish eye contact, "I'm sorry, I didn't think that one through."
Looking back up at him, she simply nodded. She wasn't angry. After all, the things that she'd done weren't his fault. If anything, she should be insisting that he not apologize for things that he had no control over. She wanted to tell him exactly that, but he couldn't bring herself to string together the words to say it.
It wasn't even mid-morning, and she was exhausted. And yet, she wanted this over and done with. Finished. What she was doing now was simply dragging it out. She needed to get herself together, finish telling him everything and then she could go back to her cell and wait for whatever punishment – whatever sentence, whatever deep, dark hole, they decided she deserved. The rest of it didn't matter, after all, because that was exactly what she deserved. Knowing this, she almost felt a calm descend over her. She wasn't getting out of this, but at least she could do the right thing. She'd done enough damage, it was time to try to make it right.
Taking a deep breath and feeling a renewed sense of determination, she suddenly started talking again, determined not to stop until she was finished.