"Tell me I'm not dead."

"You are very much not dead."

"Well, in that case, it's not every day that I get significant events bookended by hospital visits."

Jane's crinkly-eyed smile rewarded her grumpy complaint like a breath of fresh air. He had her hand wrapped tightly in his own, his elbows leaned on her bed to be closer. "How are you feeling, sweetheart?"

She closed her eyes and could still see that terrible stall with her own blood all over the floor. "A little numb, honestly."

"That would be the morphine." Jane supplied cheerfully. As he said it, the rush of excitement at her long awaited awakening faded and he looked upon her with solemn sobriety. "I'm so glad you're okay. I know you're unbelievably strong for coming through what you did, but we were so worried."

When his gray eyes watered, Ronnie quirked an eyebrow at him. "I promise I'll be ok." She gripped his hand as tightly as she could and felt the sluggishness of her muscles as the morphine slogged its way through her veins. "I knew you'd find me."

His cheeks reddened ever so slightly, and his frown turned sheepish. "I couldn't, actually. My focus sort of slipped—I just kept..." he drifted off, a haunting look entering his eyes. A second passed and he shook it off. "Anyhow, it was the FBI who found you. The Behavioral Analysis Unit from Quantico. They brought you back."

She remembered the team that recovered them. She'd been told she blacked out as soon as she was loaded into the ambulance, but she remembered the team.

"And Cho? Is he good? He was hurt."

Jane straightened, happy to deliver good news. "He's better off than you are, actually. Lisbon's with him now. He should be released tomorrow."

Ronnie sank back into her pillow in relief. "Good."

The mentalist watched her carefully, moving his thumb over the back of her hand rhythmically. "You don't seem quite as shell shocked as I expected you to be."

"It will come. Don't worry." She knew it from experience. Keeping control of her psyche worked well at distracting her in the moment, but it did little to soften the blow in the years to come.

Jane glanced at her monitor as her heart rate picked up and gradually began to slow back down. He squeezed her hand comfortingly, gray eyes tracing the wearied expressions on her drawn face.

Feathering his fingertips over the veins on the back of her hand, he spent the next few minutes detailing the cases that she'd missed. He told her about the Carnelian, Inc. case where the company's VP of Human Resources fell to his death at the mercy of a sabotaged parachute, an incident claimed by Joe Q. Public. A jaded former employee seemed to be culpable but was eventually exonerated when the CEO of Carnelian rigged a bomb under his own bed and tipped his hand by defusing it himself the next day when Jane bumbled about and activated it.

"It was quite a spectacular case, all sorts of pomp and circumstance. We had to work it without Cho, of course. He never strayed from trying to track you down. But, you know, I think I finally made some headway with Lisbon. We spent hours out there on the road—made small talk, did some trust exercises...can you believe she doesn't trust me?"

Jane grinned at the little smile on her face, pressed a tender kiss to the back of her hand, and told her about a star-studded case on Hollywood Boulevard, a former state representative murdered by his daughter's boyfriend at the behest of his own wife.

He explained that during that case, Cho had gone missing, right out of his car. When the team was about to pass on the case to another unit so they could focus on Cho and Ronnie's abduction, the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit had arrived and swiftly took up the task of tracking down the missing agents, allowing Lisbon and Jane to finish their assignment.

"You made it out, Veronica. We got you back." Jane's gentle gray eyes gleamed at her adoringly.

Blinking tears away, overcome with the relief of being back in the kind grasp of her team, Ronnie smiled shakily at the mentalist. "Thank you." The words nearly didn't reach them with her choked whisper. "You don't know how much."

Patrick Jane leaned over almost automatically to kiss her forehead and brush her tears away with warm hands. The gentle touches on her skin only made her want to cry harder. "Ronnie," as he settled back in his chair, Jane took up her hand again. "The doctors said they had to use a rape kit. I'm...I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I would—" Jane's voice broke and his own tears started, spilling onto his cheeks before he could stop them. "I would end his life with my own hands to make this right for you."

Ronnie's heartbeat calmed ever so slightly, but her face flamed with vulnerability. "I know."

Her reaction confused him.

She seemed reflexively subdued, and almost sedated at the mention of her own assault. Rather than becoming overwrought with emotion when recalling her trauma, she physically relaxed. The heart rate monitor on the screen only proved it.

Baffled, Jane's brow lowered questioningly. "He did..." the implication hung in his hesitation. "...didn't he?"

Ronnie nodded minutely, appearing almost mechanical with the blankness in her eyes. "Yes."

Understanding slowly lifted the confusion from the mentalist's features. "You disassociated." It wasn't a question. He had no doubt, given her physiological response, that she hadn't mentally been present during the attack.

She nodded again, and the invented memory of Cho's body wrapped around her as her body fought to process that terrible feeling struck her heavily with guilt. She was desperate for reassurance.

Casting her thousand yard stare onto the man who had inadvertently become a sort of father figure, Ronnie took a moment to squeeze his hand back. "Do you remember that day a few years ago when we got ice cream at that cart? And you told me about your mind castle to help me study for my detective's exam?"

A proud little smirk lifted the corners of his lips as he straightened. He bobbed a quick nod. "Of course."

Ronnie cleared her throat and folded creases into her blanket with her free hand. "When things...happen to me...I hide inside my head. It helps me endure the incident and it altars my memories so that it's not so hard to survive when it's over."

Jane nodded. He understood. She'd developed a psychological coping mechanism to endure significant trauma. It was the only reason she was as functional as she was after everything she'd been through. "You went into a memory."

She paused, flashes of details from her story rushing to mind—the man with the potatoes, the man from her past, the kiss from Cho.

And what the hell was that, by the way?

"Not exactly."

Jane leaned forward, eyebrows raised. "Some people see a significant loved one. Or your mother, perhaps? Is that what's bothering you?"

"I created a case, in my head. While he tortured me, I told myself a story." She found herself laughing awkwardly, embarrassed. "I don't remember most of what he actually did to me." Ronnie could feel it though, all the marks on her skin and the cuts in her flesh.

Jane gave an illuminated smile. "You created a paracosm. A fictional world inside your head. I have to say, that's quite a lot of talent. Given what happened to you, it probably saved your psyche."

She explained the story. The hypnotized man with the body, the sister of the victim who hypnotized Rigsby, the man who hypnotized the potato man—all of the details drew Jane deeper into the story.

"That's genius," he'd say. Or— "how intriguing."

Opening herself up a little more, like cracking open her ribcage, she revealed all of the little moments where her storyline with Cho had become more flirtatious than she'd expected, and how she still didn't know how to rationalize it.

"Well, sweetheart, I think it's perfectly likely that, as you yourself suspected, when reality started to pull you out of your narrative, you spiced up the plot to keep yourself hooked. It's classic storytelling, Ronnie."

She wasn't satisfied. "Or?"

Jane hesitated with a suave little smirk. "Or you were simply daydreaming about our Kimball Cho. Either way, it served its purpose, did it not?"

Her cheeks burned under his smile. She didn't buy it. The comments and touches in her story had taken her so much by surprise as they popped up that they had almost distracted her completely. She couldn't have been dreaming about him. Then again— "In my story, he kissed me."

Jane gave a little "Ah," of surprised pleasure.

She didn't let him make presumptions. "But when I felt the assault happening, I imagined him hugging me." Her eyes turned to his and he saw tears swimming there. "Every time I think about it, I remember hugging Cho. How could I do that? To me? To him? I remember feeling Arlov and it's Cho that I think of. How could I do that?"

She was spiraling.

Jane's hand clutched hers before she could dissolve into sobs and he leaned over her battered form with such intensity in his eyes. "You protected yourself."

Ronnie had to calm her racing breaths to hear him, and it worked to slowly soothe her.

"You protected yourself with the person who would have protected you if he could have. There's nothing wrong with that." Jane's hands cupped her face. "Very little of your mental faculty was left at that point to invent a story. Your subconscious picked Cho, because it was always going to be Cho. Right, Ronnie?"

He searched her face for clarity and watched her slowly come back to herself.

"He's your best friend. He's your partner. You have more history with him than with the rest of us, and he's the one who saved you from your mother. He plays the role of hero and savior in your subconscious and it's perfectly natural for him to fill in the blanks when you need to be rescued, even inside your own head."

Ronnie timed her anxious breaths until her chin stopped quivering. "My brain filled in the blanks."

"You built a story to be with your best friend instead of your greatest enemy. It saved you, Ronnie." He lifted her face to meet his eyes. "You didn't do anything wrong."

"If he knew that my memory of that was superimposed by a memory of him—"

Jane smiled sadly at the pain in her broken voice. "Why don't you ask him?"

The pulse on the monitor started beeping faster again. "I can't. Absolutely not. I can never tell him."

Silence ticked between them slowly. He caught each of her tears with the pad of his thumb and pressed a loving kiss to her pale cheek.

"It's going to be okay, Ronnie."

Heaving sobs broke past her lips, then, strong enough to shake the hospital bed.

Jane leaned closer, pulling her face to his shoulder. Her breath heated his neck as she cried into his rumpled suit, gripping the panels of his vest with jagged fingernails. "You're gonna be okay."

He kissed her temple and squeezed his eyes shut, heart aching for the little girl in his arms.