A/n This has been in the works for a while. I desperately want to write more jisbon fic but I just need some more inspo. Prompts always welcome (especially for my Pillow Talk series!).
Thank you in advance for reading :)
Warning: references to canon-compliant historic child abuse.
/
Boxes of Memories
Patrick Jane remembers the time when he felt like he couldn't go home because he had no home to go to. He owned a house of course, it was empty of physical objects but full of pain, and it was also a six-hour drive from where he worked and obsessed. Now he feels like does have a home, in fact, he has two. The one where he and Lisbon live right now and the one, he is remodelling for their future. That's where he's been today and his body aches as he calls out his nightly greeting to his wife. "In here!" She shouts in reply, the noise coming from the living room. He smiles, despite being tired, because of how much he loves her.
They got married three months ago on an absolutely crazy day that probably doesn't crack either of their top tens of crazy days, but it is a day they will forever cherish. It was a turning point. Suddenly they stopped being Patrick Jane and Teresa Lisbon, the consultant and the FBI agent, the couple of law enforcement workers, and became the married couple. Jane has only stepped into the bullpen once since that day and that was to help move his couch out of there. It replaced the uncomfortable one in the living room of her condo and will one day take centre spot in their home together. But it turns out remodelling a shack into a family home is harder than he thought… "So I think we have an answer as to why there is sewage coming out of the taps- What's with all the boxes?"
Jane's train of thought leaves him when he wanders into the living room to find his wife sitting on the floor near the coffee table surrounded by three worn-looking boxes. She's holding a dog collar in one hand and an old, history textbook in the other as she looks up at him, already in her nightwear, with fatigue written all over her face. Since being pregnant, her energy levels have been low, so usually as soon as she steps in from work, she's putting on her comfy clothes which this evening is a pair of plaid pyjama trousers and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt that is a little tight around her small bump. "Stan." She states like this is all the information he needs.
"He finally bought us a wedding gift?" This earns Patrick a playful glower. "Kidding."
"He's finally got his ass in gear and is fixing up my parents' old place. So he's couriered over some boxes of my old stuff. I'm just going through the last box now." This certainly perks her husband's interests who takes a seat on his precious couch only a few metres away from her. He watches her open the lid to the final box and how unsurety washes over her. "You know what, it's late. We should really think about dinner." She rushes and closes the lid.
"Teresa, there's no rush. I was going to suggest we ordered in." He wasn't, he actually planned to cook one of her favourite vegetable curries, but the ingredients will be okay for tomorrow. Jane knows his wife too well, and once this box gets put away then she will try to block it from her mind. It will be good for her to go through it, and he would be lying if he said he wasn't curious. "What's in the box?"
Lisbon chews on her bottom lip for a few seconds before she's taking a deep breath and lifting open the flaps to the final box. "It's been years since I've seen this." She announces as she pulls out a blue, scuffed baseball helmet. "I played softball when I was little. My parents bought me own helmet for my twelfth birthday." He smiles at this, wondering if their kid will be into sport like her or if they won't be, like him. They will be loved either way. "It was the last birthday present I ever got from my parents. My father never bothered after my mom died." She directs this statement at the blue object which she begins to polish a little with the cuff of her sleeve. It was one of her most prized possessions, in fact she has a vague recollection of kicking Tommy between the legs when he borrowed it one time. The memory both humours her and makes her miss him simultaneously.
"What's stuffed inside?" Her brow dips as the room is filled with the sound of a rustle from a translucent plastic bag containing some kind of item of clothing in an emerald green. She realises what it is as soon as she starts to unfold it. "That's a gorgeous dress." He comments as she holds it out at arm's length.
"It was my mom's…" Teresa elucidates, wondering what memories the fabric holds. "Before I started middle school, I was anxious, so she spent the day with me, and we went through her old things from my grandparent's house." She recalls, going to put it back in its plastic wrapping but being sure to fold it neatly first. Something this beautiful doesn't deserve to be screwed up. "She was quite ruthless in throwing a lot of it out or donating it, because we didn't have a lot of room to spare but my eyes apparently lit up on seeing this dress, so she kept it. Said I could wear it to prom one day." She smiles to herself, but it is so brief that if Patrick blinked, he would have missed it. "I didn't wear it to prom. It was too painful."
Jane frowns at this and leans forward so he can give her thigh a comforting squeeze when his arm is fully outstretched. It is enough of an action to make her smile and she's shaking off her emotion by putting the dress and the helmet to one side so she can resume in her task. "Clarinet." Her husband spots immediately and points at the scruffy case. "I certainly called that one."
"The first night we danced." Lisbon reminisces, her eyes now glossed over for a completely different reason. They've not danced a lot together but they're some of her favourite memories. The best time was on his last birthday when she gifted him his repaired blue cup back from their CBI days. He played some music on his phone after that and they danced under the moon and stars, with her pressed close to his chest. "I wonder if this little one will be a good dancer like their dad." She muses with her flat hand resting on her belly.
"Or maybe musical like their mother." He suggests right back at her with a wide grin that still has the ability to dazzle her. "Either way we will be embarrassing them at their recitals."
"Oh definitely!" She chuckles under her breath as she makes a mental note to keep the instrument just in case her child does want to follow in her footsteps. Then her hands dive back into the box, much more confidently this time, and she's pulling out what looks to be a collection of thin files. "My report cards. I was always surprised my father kept them."
"Let me see!" Jane eagerly pleads and makes a grabby motion with his hands. Any kind of insight into his wife's past is always wanted, but there is something about finding out what the perfect Teresa Lisbon was like at school that really interests him perhaps because it was an experience that he himself didn't have. She rolls her eyes but does pass them over.
They're all laid out in a similar fashion with her name, date of birth and form group at the top along with a box that has an attendance percentage proudly displayed. Below that are her grades for the year and a comment box from her form teacher, all handwritten, in a varying neatness of handwriting. "I have a feeling we wouldn't have been friends at school." Patrick mumbles, flicking through the different report cards. "Based on attendance alone, I would have been a stranger. This is very impressive."
"We never got time off if we were sick." She quashes his disillusions immediately. "When I was little that was because we couldn't afford for either of our parents to take time off work to look after us. Then as we got older, we didn't want to spend any unnecessary time off school." She tries to keep things vague, but he knows exactly where she is coming from. "That's why my attendance was always 100% or very close to being 100%."
"99.72% in seventh grade… But that was the year your mother passed." He murmurs at the paper, his eyebrows so low that they're almost covering his eyes. Patrick Jane is an expert in making the inexplicable make sense, but he can't fathom what it was like for her during that time. "How is that even possible?" He asks, looking straight at her now and her initial reaction is to nervously shrug.
"She died near the end of winter break. I was desperate to get back to some kind of normality when school came back round." She tries her best to explain but nothing she could say would make it better. "I had half a day off for her funeral."
"That's…" Jane cannot put into words how sad the idea of twelve-year-old Teresa Lisbon pushing herself to go to school despite mourning is. He shakes his head, his eyes darting back down to compare her attendance for her other years. "94.44% in eleventh and 98.33% in twelfth."
"I took a few days off in my senior year to go look at colleges on the west coast."
"What about junior year?" Lisbon looks down at her hands that had begun to subconsciously wring together. "Teresa?"
She sighs, her reluctance nothing but evident, but she knows she could not tell him, and he would be okay with it because he respects her privacy. However, she wants to be open, for transparency, and perhaps to lead by example. "I had to take two weeks off because of an incident at home." If she closed her eyes, she could probably see it unfold, like it is projected on her eyelids, so she doesn't – but she will unlikely get away with it later when they head to bed.
Thankfully she has her husband to hold her when she tosses and turns, and how he looks at her now with nothing but love and supportiveness in his blue-green eyes, she believes that she can be strong. They're both pretty good at that. "My father got angry with Tommy. I can't remember if it was for truancy or breaking his curfew, but he was drunk at the time and lost it. He pushed him down the stairs, really hurting him in the process." Her voice cracks slightly as she re-tells this particular unpleasant tale, but it just gets worse. "He then hit me a few times when I tried to help him." The emotion in Jane's eyes shifts to hurt and sadly it isn't difficult to imagine his wife being the brunt of another person's evil, because he has witnessed her going through situations that aren't too dissimilar when they worked together. "Dad went AWOL after that. I had to take two weeks off to give time for the bruising to go down and to nurse my brother back to health. I told our school that we both had the flu which they bought because why would goody-two-shoes Teresa Lisbon lie to her teachers?" She questions bitterly before pushing her teeth into her bottom lip to try and regain some control.
"Mr. Jane. I'm Agent Teresa Lisbon. You wanted to talk to me?" Like when he meets everyone for the first time, he tried to get an accurate read on the detective in charge of the Red John case who is now his wife. It may be because of his six months locked away from the outside world, but he struggled, or perhaps it is because of how skilful and high she had built her walls – or it could be that he couldn't see her trauma through the red mist of his own.
It didn't take him long though to spot the pain through the cracks, but it has taken him time to piece everything together, and he's still learning now. "Thank you for telling me." He says sincerely, attempting a thankful smile but it is strained. He hates thinking of the woman he loves being hurt, but he has grown unfortunately used of the reminders, like the scar to her shoulder from when she was shot because of his clouded judgement. "So what's left?" He asks and blinks away his tears, but she is staring back at him, her gloom evident. The last thing she wanted was to bring him sorrow.
"Patrick…"
"I'm fine. I promise." He assures with a surprising amount of confidence that has her nodding before pulling out the final item which appears to be some kind of book. "What is it?"
Teresa's eyebrows are knitted together as she opens the book, not at all recognising it. "It's a photo album." She realises as soon as she is faced with the first page that has a blown-up picture of her family from when she was a ten-year-old, with scrawl written underneath. "There's a note from Stan in it." She most definitely has not seen this before, she would remember, and there is a positive ache in her heart when she reads her brother's handwriting. "He made me this before I left for college but never gave it to me." She turns the page to find many photos, too many photos, and she's closing the album before it becomes overwhelming.
Lisbon can't bring herself to look at it properly now, tonight has been quite enough for her as it is, so she straightaway passes it over to Jane. It is the perfect move because it feeds his curiosity whilst saving herself from the potential pain. He contently takes it from her. "I always thought my brothers were resentful about me leaving… Maybe not."
Jane flicks through the album casually, taking great joy in seeing his wife so young and cheerful. He wonders if they have a daughter, will she look like this with a wide grin and mischief in her green eyes? Will their child be sporty, musical, arty, brainy, or an eclectic mix? One thing he is determined to provide though is a normal childhood, unlike what either of them had. "This is all silly." His wife mutters with a shake of her head and tears making her eyes glisten. "I have survived a quarter of a century without this stuff. I don't need it now."
"I disagree." He says seriously yet somehow softly, studying a picture of her at around eight years old with pigtails and ribbons in her dark hair. "Memories are important. Even bad ones." He directs this statement at a photograph of her and her father, not quite believing that this care-free-looking guy is the same guy who gave her so many bad memories… or maybe he should believe this. He was a victim of grief in his own self-destructive way. "I have a box of memories too." He admits and even though he isn't looking at her because he's skimming through the photo album, he senses her gaze snap to him, and he quickly grasps that he too will be bearing his soul tonight. It isn't long before he is retreating from the living room in search of the memory box he speaks of.
It's a battered shoe box that her husband returns with. He has paled in the time he has left her, showing her just how fearful he is about seeing what's inside. He knows what's inside. It is nothing bad, but the memories associated with the objects have the ability to weigh heavy on his mind. Just last year he probably wouldn't have been able to look in the box, never mind share it with someone else. Even the person he is head over heels in love with. It is vulnerably intimate and the drumming of his fingertips on top of it gives her an idea of how difficult this is going to be for him.
Lisbon slowly gets up off the floor, leaving her own memories behind, so she can sit beside him close enough that their knees bump together. Her body heat is reassuring and gives him the final boost of confidence he needs to pull off the lid – his breath hitches in his throat as soon as he does. "We don't have to do this." She tells him and rests a hand on his nearest wrist to her. She rubs the pulse point there with her thumb, feeling how his heart beats quicker than usual.
"I want to show you this stuff, but that doesn't mean it isn't going to be hard." He confesses and gulps down nothing as he looks down at the contents of the box, with her following his line of sight. "There's a lot of bureaucratic nonsense in here." He mumbles as his fingers start to almost elegantly sift through the items. "Angela and Charlotte's passports that were last used when we went to Germany a couple of years before Red John… well, you know. I was invited to speak at some convention." It puts a bad taste in his mouth when he explains this now. "There's also my previous marriage certificate, my daughter's birth certificate."
It is finding Charlotte's hospital tags that forces him to stop for a second. He wasn't intentionally rushing through the belongings, but it felt like the safe thing to do, like it would save him some of the pain. Lisbon wordlessly puts an arm around her husband's waist, to show him that she's still very much present and will wait patiently if she has to. "I was so nervous about being a dad." He admits, twirling the item between his fingertips so he can read her name, date of birth and weight. "She was so tiny. Any smaller and they would have kept her in for a few days. The moment I first held her all that nervousness slipped away."
Teresa sometimes ponders what it will feel like when she holds their baby for the first time. She knows people say it is one of the best and memorable experiences ever but currently she struggles a little to ruminate it. She silently holds out her hand now with her palm facing the ceiling, and Jane pops the small, plastic band there. She then holds it between her fingers and runs her thumb over the label, wondering what it will say for the child they share. "How did you pick her name?"
"Angie just liked the name Charlotte. She was reading a book one day and suggested it, I think it was the name of one of the characters." He regrets never finding out. Patrick was so swept up in the life they were living that he was never truly really living it. "Anne was the name of our first ever landlady when we left the carny life. She was really good to us."
"I sometimes wonder what the hell we are going to name our kid. So many names are tainted by murderers and corrupt agents."
"We'd better hope it's a girl then." This comment has Lisbon's brow dipping and she looks to her husband with a questioning expression etched into her features. "Statistically we've put away more men than women."
"This is a great thing we have to consider when picking our baby's name." She dryly mutters. Her sarcasm always has the ability to humour him, but his amusement doesn't last when he catches what will be the next thing to come out of the shoebox.
It is a small, soft toy bunny, pale pink in colour. It is about eight inches tall, with one ear completely pristine whilst the other is rough as if it has been sucked. He knows it has; it was one of his daughter's coping mechanisms when they told her she couldn't have a pacifier anymore. It barely weighs of anything, yet it feels heavy in his hands. "I couldn't find this before I buried her. I wanted it to go in her coffin but… I didn't find it until a week later. Too late at that point." He broke down when he did find it, wept for hours whilst clutching it to his chest. "She loved this bunny. She wouldn't sleep without it."
You are safe, you are loved, and you are wise. Words that he said to her every night when he put her to bed. She didn't hear those words the night her life was so cruelly ended. "Patrick… it's okay…" He hadn't realised a tear had escaped him until hearing his wife's concerned yet comforting drawl.
Teresa hooks her arm around his and holds him comfortingly tight. Her thumb draws circles in the fabric of his blue shirt, and he feels himself lean towards her. Once upon a time he would try to hide his tears from everyone including her, now he lets them fall freely, not even attempting to conceal them with his hand. "She would have been a great big sister." He snivels. "We wanted her to be, but it just wasn't happening for us."
This is new information that also makes her emotional and she's ignoring the unshed tears making her own eyes sparkle as she presses a delicate kiss to his cheek. She can taste the saltiness on his skin. "Charlotte is going to be a big sister. Just not in the way you hoped." She says gently, continuing her affectionate ministrations on his arm.
"I know, I know." He replies and then he sucks in a breath. "God, this is a lot."
"Do you want to stop?"
"No… We are almost done anyway. Although just a side note I will be ordering two mains when we get Chinese food after this."
"Who said we are having Chinese food?"
"Your cravings." He points out cheekily with a glint in his blue eyes that manages to shine through the tears, it makes her smile. He's right of course.
The next item Patrick is pulling from the box is actually two, wrapped in newspaper. He unwraps knowing exactly what they are and how they fit together, whereas she gasps when he sits the cup on the saucer. "That's your cup." But it isn't. This cup although crafted the exact same way as his famous cup from the CBI, is unblemished and unfaded, with not a single mark or crack.
"It's my late wife's." He clarifies whilst holding it up, so it catches the dim light of the room. "It was a two-set. She bought them when we got our first place." He remembers fondly but then he's grimacing as something hits him. "Should I have told you that before? Like does it now feel weird that one of the best gifts you've ever given me is a mended cup that my previous wife had got me before?" He fleetingly panics but she's already shaking her head before he even stops speaking.
"Not at all." She reassures. "Patrick, Angela is a big part of our relationship. Initially for upsetting reasons but… you need to know that she will always be with us, same as Charlotte, even with us now married and with a baby on the way." It isn't the first time that she's said something to him along these lines and it most likely won't be the last, but her keenness for him to believe her won't ever relinquish. "Promise me that you won't ever feel the need to suppress your memories of them because of us."
"I promise." He states with ease, flashing her a handsome smile as he does. Then his attention returns to the battered shoe box, his eyes falling on the final item. He moves his free hand to pick it up, but his fingertips dance over the surface instead as he thinks hard about what he wants to do. "It's an envelope of photos." He explains, some of the included pictures already popping up in his mind. "I do want to go through them but maybe we could do that at the weekend? We can also look through Stan's photo album, maybe find some pictures from both that we can have up at our new place?" He momentarily considers that this suggestion may be seen as a cop out, which he doesn't intend it to be, but thankfully she reacts in a nothing but positive manner.
"I love that idea." She smiles but then her expression shifts, as if she has just remembered something. "I'm sorry did you say something about sewage coming out of the taps at said new place when you came in?"
Jane laughs to himself and pulls his arm free from her grasp just so he can wrap it around her snuggly with a light kiss to her temple. "Maybe."