A/N: Sorry for the long delay in updating this story. I intend to finish it and Fortuitous Consequences before I start any more multi-chapter fics, I promise! And since work is letting up for the next few months, I hope to be able to get back to posting regularly. I appreciate your patience, and as always, reviews are much appreciated!
Jane felt incredibly guilty for standing Kurt up, but she couldn't wait any longer to get answers about herself. And technically speaking, she hadn't agreed to his request to meet him later. Even if she wished more than anything that she were going to that park rather than sneaking around the city to meet Oscar.
Kurt would understand, she assured herself. He knew how much she needed answers, and she would share those answers with him, just as soon as she understood more about the person she had been. She would make things right between them.
The transmission tower appeared deserted when she arrived. "I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to show," Oscar said from behind her.
"You were wrong," Jane said as she turned to face him. "They lifted my detail."
"Oh yeah?" Oscar asked. "Then why did you take four subways and three taxis to get here?" He smiled a little at her surprised look. "They were tailing you."
"Apparently, so were you," Jane retorted, not at all pleased to learn she hadn't detected him.
"I had to be sure you weren't followed," Oscar told her. "They're scared of you. And they should be."
Jane studied him in silence for a moment before stepping closer. "Am I really Taylor Shaw?"
Oscar looked amused. "What did Weller tell you?"
"That we were friends as children, but we lost touch about nine years ago, and—What?" Jane demanded in irritation as Oscar's smile morphed into a Cheshire cat grin. He certainly had the requisite number of teeth for it.
"Weller's lying through his teeth," Oscar said, and Jane started slightly as she wondered if Oscar had somehow read her thoughts about his own. "You weren't just his friend; you were his wife for over six years. And you didn't lose touch; he divorced you."
"No," Jane disputed instantly. "You must be mistaken. I asked Kurt if he'd ever been married, and he told me he hadn't."
Oscar snorted. "Probably because he didn't want you or any of his coworkers to know that the man they hold in such esteem took advantage of a vulnerable girl on the verge of losing her mother to press his advances. He certainly took care to make sure that never came to light when you reappeared in his life. All records pertaining to your marriage disappeared the next day."
That was convenient. "So how do I know you're telling me the truth now?" Jane challenged. "If there's no proof, then you could be the one lying."
"Oh, I have proof." Oscar withdrew a copy of her marriage certificate from his coat pocket and handed it out to her. "You had the foresight to obtain this for us before we delivered you to the FBI."
Delivered, Jane thought cynically. It was a pale word for the stark terror of waking up naked and alone in a bag, with cops pointing guns at her, and realizing that her entire life was a blank, that she was a stranger even to herself. And now she was being asked to accept that the man who had helped her navigate those uncharted waters—the man who had been unfailingly kind and patient and loving to her—had been lying to her all along.
She glanced down at the paper in her hand. It was barely visible in the dim light, but Jane turned this way and that until she was able to read it, her heart sinking as it confirmed everything Oscar had just told her. "Why . . ." She hardly recognized her voice, and she took a deep breath to steady it. "Why did we get a divorce?"
Oscar shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe Weller found someone new; maybe the novelty wore off having a child bride. Or maybe he just decided that the half of your inheritance he'd receive in the divorce was more appealing than you were."
"No," Jane protested automatically. "Kurt's not . . . he's not like that. He would never—" She stopped as she realized she didn't know what he was like. She didn't know anything anymore. Everything he had led her to believe about her previous life was a lie.
Oscar placed a comforting hand on her arm. "I know this is a lot to take in, but we—you, me, the people we work with—we're the good guys. We've never lied to you. And some part of you must have always known the FBI was, or you wouldn't be here now."
"So tell me . . . where have I been since college?" Jane wanted to know. "Why can't the FBI find any trace of me all those years? What—"
"All in good time," Oscar interrupted. "We need to learn to trust each other again."
Trust. Right. After her entire world had just been upended once more. "And how do we do that?" Jane asked skeptically.
"Slowly." Oscar paused for a moment. "I have missions for you, some small, some big. Things that move us closer to our objectives. You show me you can be trusted, and I'll tell you everything you want to know."
"No." Jane shook her head. "I'm not blindly taking orders from people I've never met. I'm never going to hurt my team." No matter that Weller hadn't thought enough of her to show her the same respect. Did the whole team know? she wondered idly. "And I'm never going to put them in danger. If we move forward, we do this on my terms."
"You still don't get it, do you?" Oscar asked. "These are your terms. This is all your plan. And it's time to get started. Here." He withdrew another object from his pocket and held it out to her.
Jane eyed the pen as if it were a venomous snake coiled to strike. "What is that?"
"It's an exact replica of Mayfair's pen," Oscar told her.
"How do you know what Mayfair's pen looks like?" Jane asked incredulously. "Do you have cameras in there?"
"No," Oscar denied. "We have . . . another way."
Another way? Did that mean they had someone else on the inside? Jane wondered. The idea that her teammates were being spied on disturbed her more than the idea that she herself was being watched. And then she recalled that she had been lied to and wondered why she still cared so much.
Oscar held the pen out to Jane once more. "I need you to swap them. Bring me hers."
"So . . . you wipe my memory; you tattoo my entire body; and then you send me to the FBI so I can steal a pen," Jane said flippantly. Oscar huffed out a laugh, a grin splitting his face, and then he laughed again a bit louder. "What?"
"You're still . . . you're still you."
Jane refused to be diverted from the issue at hand. "What is it?" she demanded, glancing at the pen in his hand once more. "A bug? A tracker? Because I won't betray my team." No matter that they hadn't extended her the same courtesy.
"It's not a betrayal; it's a pen," Oscar assured her. "A regular pen."
Jane advanced into Oscar's space until there were only inches separating them. "How do I know that you weren't holding a gun to my head during that video?"
"I've never pointed a gun at you," Oscar grinned. "I know better. And if you really thought that, you wouldn't be here. You'd have sent your team. But you didn't. Because somehow, you know that you're not one of them, that you're just a cog in their machine, welcome while useful, disposable the second you're not. Weller's already proven that."
Jane swallowed hard, unable to speak past the lump in her throat. Unbidden, her mind flashed back to the kiss she and Kurt had shared in what already felt like a lifetime ago. She'd been certain she never could have felt more safe, loved and cherished than she did at that moment. And now . . . "What about the man at my safe house with the beard? Was he with you? With us?"
Oscar placed the pen in Jane's hand and curled her fingers around it. "Bring me that pen, and I'll give you more answers." He turned and disappeared into the blackness, leaving Jane staring down at the pen.
She tore it apart when she returned home, searching carefully for any indications it was more than it seemed, but as Oscar had said, it was just a pen. She tossed and turned all night, Oscar's words playing on a repeating loop in her head in her dreams, and she awoke in the morning no closer to a decision on what to do.
She was standing in front of her locker fingering the pen when Kurt walked in. "Morning," he greeted.
"Hi," Jane said tightly as she turned to face her ex-husband for the first time. He looked the same as ever, just as solid and reassuring, and only the fact that she couldn't explain how she had learned of their marriage kept her from demanding an explanation about it. About why it had ended. She knew instinctively that none of this would have ever happened to her if they'd stayed together. Why couldn't he have loved her the way she'd come to care for him?
Why couldn't he have been as wonderful as he seemed?
Kurt saw a myriad of emotions flicker in Jane's eyes, most of them gone too quickly for him to decipher, but he was certain that he'd seen a flash of anger—and he had no doubt of its cause. "I wanted to say sorry about last night. I should have told you that I wasn't coming." He paused for a split second, hoping she would interrupt him to explain why she hadn't showed. "The two of us . . . it's too complicated."
Complicated, Jane thought as she choked back the laugh that bubbled up in her throat. No kidding. Even for a man of few words, that had to be the biggest understatement of the century. "Right." She couldn't keep the edge of sarcasm out of her voice. "I was going to say the same thing."
"Okay," Kurt said. "I'm glad we're on the same page. I don't . . . I don't want things to be awkward."
From where she stood, they were long past that, and Jane felt anger surge within her once more. Fortunately, Reade popped his head in to announce that Patterson needed them in her lab at once before she could cast caution to the wind and demand an explanation.
As if her emotions weren't raw enough, the case took them on a roller coaster ride of its own. A supposedly dead Army vet shot up a military base, and it turned out that he'd been the victim of a medical experiment to create a super-soldier, his memory wiped just like her own. She looked into Charlie's eyes and saw all the loneliness and fear and anger she had felt when she first emerged from her bag. The same emotions she was feeling today. She was just as surrounded by strangers now as she had been then.
"Her son killed three people, and all she wants to do is hug him," Jane commented as she and Kurt observed Charlie's reunion with his mother.
"She got him back," Kurt said with a meaningful glance at Jane. "That's all she cares about."
What the hell did that mean? Jane wondered. He'd made it clear only a few short hours ago that he had no interest in having her back, and she was growing weary of the mixed signals he was sending her. She was tired of all the secrets and lies. "Why did you stop talking to your dad?" she asked abruptly.
Kurt was startled by the question. "It's . . . complicated, Jane."
His relationship with his father was complicated. They were too complicated. Everything was complicated, and she was sick of it. "So explain it to me. What could he have done that was so bad you haven't talked to him in over a decade?"
He tried to molest you. Kurt's jaw clenched at the memory, but he could hardly say that. "He was a terrible father," he told Jane hoarsely. "He was distant. He was drunk. He was abusive to Sarah, and . . . and he tried to hurt someone I cared—care—very much about."
Her? Jane wondered, but she was suddenly much less eager to press the issue. She certainly couldn't take anything Kurt told her at face value any longer anyway.
The rest of the day passed in a daze. They weren't able to save the other four soldiers who were being experimented on with Charlie, but fortunately they did arrive in time to save him. Unfortunately, he'd had his memory wiped again, and Kurt was forced to shoot him in the shoulder when he levelled Jane's own gun at her after a brief fight.
Jane kept pressure on Charlie's wound until the paramedics arrived, and she stepped aside to give them room to work, standing well apart from the team. She was still standing alone when they loaded him into the ambulance and drove away.
"The, uh . . . the paramedics think Charlie is going to be fine," Kurt said as he walked over to Jane.
"I'm glad." Jane was silent for a moment. "You didn't have to shoot him—"
"Yeah," Kurt snapped. "I did. Or instead of Charlie leaving in an ambulance, you might have left in a body bag." His hand clenched into a fist at the thought of how close he had come to losing her again. "If someone puts my team at risk—or you at risk—I don't second-guess."
Too bad he hadn't second-guessed himself when he'd left her without hesitation. Or maybe when he'd married her in the first place. Jane nodded and started to turn away, but his voice stopped her.
"You took some hits yourself," Kurt said in a softer tone. "Get checked out. We'll regroup later."
Jane nodded again silently. It hadn't escaped her attention that he'd excluded her from the team when he made his point about their safety, and Mayfair's dressing down upon her return to the NYO only made her feel more isolated. She glanced through the glass as Mayfair left the room, checking to make sure that no one was watching, and swapped Mayfair's pen out for the one Oscar had given her.
Mayfair still hadn't made it upstairs when she emerged from the office. She was standing in the bullpen with Kurt and a man Jane didn't recognize, engaged in an apparently heated conversation, and they all turned to look at her as she started past.
"Jane Doe," the unfamiliar man greeted, holding out his hand to her. "It's nice to see you again." He pulled his hand back when she stared at him in confusion, making no move to shake it.
"You . . . know me?" Jane asked hesitantly.
"We met a few times," the man told her. "I'm Assistant US Attorney Matthew Weitz—and I have some questions for you."
Jane's breath caught in her throat. "About . . .?"
"About . . ." Weitz drew out the word. "About the man you call Oscar, and his role in the disappearance of Tom Carter."
Jane felt like sinking through the floor as two sets of very confused eyes turned to her.
xxx
"Jane?" Kurt frowned as she took on a deer-in-the-headlights expression. "What is Weitz talking about? Who is Oscar?"
"Before you attempt to deny that, how about we take this somewhere more private?" Weitz suggested, mindful of the curious stares being levelled their way. "I have something you should see before you answer."
"Let's go into my office," Mayfair suggested, leading the way in there.
"Have a seat," Weitz said to Jane, and she reluctantly did so as he pulled a laptop out of his briefcase and set it on the table in front of her. Mayfair and Kurt crowded in close as he took the seat next to her and pulled up a video.
Jane swallowed hard as her image appeared on the screen. "If you're watching this, then Oscar has made contact," past her addressed them. "No doubt he's showed you the video where you said you could trust him, but you can't. The people he's working with are plotting the overthrow of the US government, and they manipulated you into joining them under . . . false pretenses. When you learned the truth, you enlisted Weitz to help you stop them. You can trust him . . . and Kurt Weller."
The video came to an end, but Jane continued to stare at her frozen image on the screen, feeling as if she'd had the wind knocked out of her as her world was upended for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.
"Who is Oscar?" Kurt asked once more.
Jane stared down at her hands as snippets of her recent conversations played through her mind. Weller's lying through his teeth . . . You weren't just his friend; you were his wife . . . You're just a cog in their machine, welcome while useful, disposable the second you're not . . . She got him back. That's all she cares about . . . You can't trust Oscar . . . you can trust Weller . . . Weller . . . Weller . . ."
She sucked in a breath and took a leap of faith. "Oscar is—was—my . . . fiancé." She chanced a glance over her shoulder at Kurt, only to find him staring at her with a thunderous expression. "I did tell you I thought I'd been engaged once before."
Yes, but he'd assumed he had been the fiancé she was referring to. "When did you meet this Oscar?" Kurt demanded.
Jane swallowed hard. "The night you and I . . . the night before our mission in the Black Sea." She kept her gaze on the table in front of her as she came clean about the rest of it, Carter's men abducting her off the street, being taken to the abandoned warehouse and tortured, Oscar's timely rescue of her.
"You should have told us this at once," Mayfair snapped. She placed a hand on Jane's shoulder as she stiffened. "We would have taken you straight to the hospital to get checked out. I never should have agreed to drop your detail."
"No, it's my fault," Kurt said grimly. "Jane slipped her detail to come . . . talk to me that night. I should have walked her home." He was silent for a moment. "But I don't understand why you haven't told me any of this before now. You had no business keeping a secret like this from me—us."
"Really?" Jane's eyes blazed with cold fury as she deliberately rose and turned to face Kurt. "I had no business keeping a secret like this?" She withdrew their marriage license from her pocket and slapped it against his chest. "What about the secret you've been keeping?"
Kurt's heart sank as he unfolded the paper. "Jane. I can explain—"
"I ordered Kurt to keep your marriage a secret," Mayfair intervened. "And that was as much out of consideration for you as him. I didn't see any benefit in airing your past dirty laundry for the whole of the FBI to gossip over."
"I'm sorry you didn't hear the news from me, instead of . . . someone you don't really remember," Kurt apologized. "Borden and I did suggest that we tell you the truth after you'd been here a while, but Mayfair didn't think the time was right yet."
"Borden knew too?" Jane was incensed at the realization that the man to whom she had confided her most intimate thoughts and feelings about Kurt had been aware the entire time that she had been literally intimate with him.
"He's the only other person who knows besides the three—four—of us," Kurt corrected with a glance at Weitz.
Jane's brow furrowed as she recalled Mayfair's words. "What did you mean, 'air our dirty laundry?' What . . . what happened between us?"
"What did this Oscar tell you?" Kurt asked gently.
"He . . . he said that you took advantage of my mother dying to marry me when I was still a child, and divorced me six years later. He suggested that it was because you were tired of me, or found someone else, or wanted your half of my inheritance." She faltered her way through her final words as Kurt's expression became thunderous. "It didn't happen that way, did it?"
Kurt took a deep breath to restrain his temper. And then another and another. "It's true that I married you when you were only just sixteen, but that was with your mother's blessing, in order to keep you out of foster care. I've never touched a dime of your inheritance, although I certainly could have since it's still in a joint account, and I never so much as looked at another woman while we were married. And most importantly, nothing happened between us until well after you'd come of age. If you believe nothing else I've told you, please believe that."
"I do," Jane said softly. "I believe you, Kurt. Everything Oscar told me seemed so out of character for you, but he had proof you had lied to me, so I . . ."
"You couldn't help wondering what else I had been less than honest about," Kurt finished for Jane. "It's perfectly understandable. I shouldn't have lied to you, but I felt like I was caught between a rock and a hard place when you put me on the spot like that."
Jane nodded. "I get it." She was silent for a moment. "Our breakup . . . it was my fault, wasn't it? That's why you were so angry at me when I first arrived."
"No!" Kurt said adamantly. "I mean, I thought it was your fault, but . . ." He took a deep breath. "You sent me a letter after I left for Quantico claiming to have met someone else and wanting a divorce, but I believe that you were trying to protect me or were forced to write it. I've talked to your roommate from back then, and she's adamant that you weren't interested in anyone else."
"I'd have had to been crazy to look twice at anyone else, much less left you for them," Jane commented, and blushed as she realized the implication of her words.
Kurt swallowed hard as her words reignited the hope that they could have a future together that had been all but extinguished when she hadn't shown up last night. "Yes, well . . . I think Carter was involved somehow. I got the sense he recognized you when he first saw you, and your roommate showed me a picture of him arguing with you that she took shortly before you left Stanford. He also fits the description of a man my father spoke to around that time in Clearfield. But I'm afraid the truth about his interest in you died with him."
"No," Mayfair said quietly. "It didn't." She took a deep breath as their eyes snapped to hers, and she held up a hand as Kurt opened his mouth to demand an explanation. "Just . . . let me get this out, okay? Carter . . . Carter approached Taylor to recruit her for a joint FBI/CIA mission to take down an international arms dealer. The operation was codenamed Orion."
"You're telling me that the head of one of the most sophisticated spy organizations in the world decided to recruit a college girl with no experience in that world, rather than one of the legions of trained agents at his disposal?" Kurt asked in disbelief. "Even if that were true, why would Taylor go along with it?"
"Because that arms dealer, Andrew Hunter, was her biological father," Mayfair informed Kurt quietly. "Your father, Jane. And you weren't an only child; you were a twin. I don't really know the particulars of how or why your mother escaped with only you and not your sister Brianne as well, but based on the intel the CIA shared with us, your father was narcissistic and controlling, and your mother was in fear for her life, so I imagine she had no other choice."
"We were identical twins, weren't we?" Jane asked Mayfair. "I remembered her," she continued when the woman nodded. "I remembered Brianne." She looked at Kurt. "That was why I rushed out of your place the night you invited me over for dinner. When Sawyer asked me where I went after we lost touch, I had this flashback of kneeling beside myself as I was pinned in a burning building, dying. I've been struggling to make sense of it ever since."
"That must have been when Carter called in the drone strike on your father's compound," Mayfair said grimly. "The CIA's initial plan was to have you find leverage on him that would enable them to use him as an asset, but Carter got intel that your father had acquired a nuclear weapon, and he . . . he jumped the gun. The intel was later proven to be faulty, but by then . . ." She shook her head. "I am so sorry, Jane."
"So you knew who I was before we even met," Kurt said harshly. "Why my wife left me. Or was that why you took such an interest in me? Because—"
"No!" Mayfair interrupted desperately. "It wasn't like that, Weller, I swear. I took an interest in you because I saw what incredible potential you had as an agent, not because of your connection to Orion. I didn't even know you were connected to it. It's the truth," she protested at his disbelieving look. "You'd been divorced for years before we met, and I never knew your ex-wife's name until Jane showed up. Not that it would have made any difference. Carter always referred to Taylor by her birth name, Marissa."
"And if you had known," Kurt demanded, "would you have told me?"
"Probably not." Mayfair shrugged helplessly. "What good would it have done, Kurt? Marissa—Taylor—had been dead for years by then, and her and Brianne's deaths haunted me every day. All telling you would have accomplished was for you to carry that same weight. You would have blamed yourself for Taylor's death, no matter that she lied to you and left you. As your boss . . . as your friend . . . I wouldn't have wanted that for you. But I'm very thankful that you got her back."
"Actually . . ." Weitz had been silent throughout the conversation, allowing them to get up to speed and taking the opportunity to get caught up on details he'd been in the dark about, but he couldn't keep silent any longer. "I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but Jane isn't Marissa. She's Brianne."