To Be Certain We Will be Tall Again

by dry-shampoo

A series of night-times in Jane and Lisbon's relationship

"Next time."

A promise she can't make but did anyway, touching her two fingers to his arm like she was checking for a pulse. Which in a way she was. She wanted to make sure he was still with her, but she knew one setback like this wouldn't end him. He was too damn determined.

It was Shakespearean really: his desire for revenge. It was red raw, burned from a blue flame; and she could feel the heat spreading sometimes, starting to lick around her edges.

It was hard not to.

There was something infectious about his intensity. Saying it was like looking at a car crash was probably unkind, but she didn't know how else to describe it.

They sat on the edge of the bed until the crime scene technicians ordered them to move. She wanted to tell them to watch their tone, but they were in their jurisdiction after all. She waited for him to stand but it took another touch of her two fingers, this time to his hand, before he returned to the world enough to move. She let him go first, so she could watch him in case he tried to go on a manhunt through the streets of Mexico.

But he didn't.

He got into the passenger seat of their borrowed car and refused to meet her eyes as she drove them back to the border.

The phone call lighting up her nightstand in the dark took her by surprise once the initial cursing and grumbling was finished.

She didn't expect to hear from him- ever, if the small part of her was being honest. It had been nearly thirty-six hours since they had driven back to the CBI in silence. Despite the late hour, no one wanted to spend a second longer in that town than they had to. Once they reached the office, he got into his own car without a word and driven off. She tried calling, of course, but he didn't answer. She told herself before she went to bed that she would put an APB out on his car if she didn't hear from him by morning. State-wide: she wouldn't be surprised if he had gone to Malibu.

A wave of anger washed over her. He left without a word, no contact, not even a text to say he was alive, and now he was calling her because he had probably done something stupid and reckless and needed her to swoop in with her badge and her authority and bail him out of trouble.

And she would tell herself she wouldn't do it, but she knew she would. It's what she had done every day since he decided to be her consultant.

"It's late," she answered.

Silence.

"Jane?" She sat herself up on her elbows, alarm bells ringing like Sunday mass in her head.

"I had a nightmare." He sounded so small, like a child. She felt a wave of guilt for her anger. "I needed to make sure you were still here."

"Uh-yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Jane, I'm still here. I'm alright."

She stopped herself from saying, "thanks to you." It felt like it would be rubbing salt in the wound somehow.

"Okay," on an exhale.

"Where are you?"

She didn't really expect him to tell her. He didn't.

"I'll be back tomorrow."

There was another pause, like he was trying to work up the courage to say something else, but he must have decided against it. Instead, there was simply, "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," she responded by rote. The line disconnected. She stared into the dark of her room for a long time before sighing and laying back down and closing her eyes.

Her own nightmare happened not too long after; Jane's voice telling her he wished she was the one who was dead.

Her apartment seemed too large and too quiet once the theatrics had come to an end, and Cho and Rigsby had taken her psychiatrist into custody. Even Minelli had stopped by but took one look at Jane, her attire, and the pills and booze on her coffee table and decided he didn't want to know anymore. She would talk to him in the morning.

"It's pretty late," she said as she placed it all into a trash bag. Ever the pragmatist. "You can stay on the couch if you want."

There was a charged silence; broken only by the sound of the glass whiskey bottle hitting the tiles of her kitchen floor. She looked up to see him staring at her with an expression that immediately served to irk her.

"Why, Lisbon. If you wanted me to sleepover, you didn't have to go to such elaborate lengths."

"Fuck's sake, Jane, that's not what-" she started but she stuttered to a stop when he held her gaze. A flush began to warm her cheeks-maroon if she had to give it a colour. A smile spread across his face. She crossed her arms. "Why do you always have to make everything so sleazy?"

He didn't answer, merely shrugged, and took her exasperation as an invitation to toe off his shoes. He swung his legs up onto the couch and closed his eyes. She didn't say anything else; a few seconds later, a pillow hit him in the face and then a blanket. He smiled as he grabbed them and wished her a goodnight. She responded with a sound that was somewhere close to a scoff.

He didn't think he would sleep. Insomnia meant he slept for, at most, an hour or two at a time, and they rarely happened at night. That was on the best of nights when there was nothing acutely occupying his mind. Tonight, he found himself concerned. Concerned with what she had been put through, and what she had said. It was a performance, sure. But all the best, most convincing, performances were rooted somewhere in the truth. Especially cons. She had admitted a lot of things this evening, shown a side of herself that she never had before, at least around him, and probably never would again.

It was two in the morning when she came downstairs. She hadn't changed out of the jersey she was wearing, but she was in fluffy socks. It was all very domestic. He stayed quiet. The refrigerator opened with a soft clinking sound of bottles and shut again a few seconds later. She was back on the carpet. It took him a few seconds to realise the soft shuffles of fabric had stopped.

"I know you're awake," she whispered.

He cracked one eye open in a dramatic fraction. In her hand was a water bottle. She looked unimpressed. He tried to think what he could have done but came up short. She started to talk, but she wasn't angry. She wasn't even annoyed. She sounded nervous. It caught him off-guard.

"This job can be hard. But you know what helps? Having a good team. And that includes you."

He smiled softly but stayed quiet. He didn't know what to say. Being a part of a team was never his forte. But now he was, and she was even admitting gratefulness for it.

As if she sensed his unease, she added, "Even if you are a gigantic pain in the ass."

"Lisbon, you flatter me."

She mumbled something he knew was unkind and very un-Catholic of her as she went upstairs, but it only made him happier that she was back.

He went to the all-night grocery store near CBI headquarters and bought her an apple. He still contended that he should be exempt after being kidnapped while buying her last one, but he couldn't sleep, and she was insistent on finishing the case report today, so she could forget about the whole thing. While there, he picked up a box of tea and a punnet of strawberries for himself and made the short drive back.

When he reached the major crimes floor, all the desks in the bullpen were empty and most of the lights had been turned off. He opened the door to Lisbon's office without knocking and was confused when he didn't see her. No matter; she was probably just in the bathroom, but then movement caught his attention. He looked down: she was sitting on the ground, a bottle of whiskey on one side of her and an empty tumbler on the other.

"I got you your apple," he announced.

"Thanks," she said cheerfully. He was pretty certain it sarcastic.

He placed his purchases on the meeting table, then knelt to her level and looked into her eyes. She squirmed under the scrutiny and tried to move away from him, but she didn't make it very far.

"Oh, fucking hell."

He eased her back to the floor. "How much of that did you actually drink?"

"One glass. I guess my stomach was emptier than I thought."

He bit back a remark about how she had never once, in the time he had known her, ever eaten as much and as regularly as she should have.

"Ok, that's enough of that," he said instead, grabbing the glass and then reaching over her for the bottle. She protested at the invasion of her personal space, but he ignored her. He placed them both back in their designated drawer. Standing above her, she looked younger, more vulnerable. He was hit with images of her as a child, walking on eggshells to control the temper of a grown man.

A damaged intensity that some people might find attractive.

He gestured for her to move her legs so he could sit directly across from her. She did so with a 'humph.' A part of him thought about reaching for her hands but decided against it. Sitting this close to her was already pushing things, he could tell.

He took a moment to choose his words, but he couldn't find a way to make it more palatable. "I don't take back what I said, Lisbon. I meant it. Every word of it. I wouldn't, couldn't have, let you die that way."

"I know." It came out as a whisper. Her eyes were glistening under the harsh fluorescents of her office. She wiped at her cheeks. She tried again; her voice stronger. "I know. Thank you, for not letting me die that way."

"Any time." It sounded like a vow.

The corner of her mouth twitched. "Maybe no dead person blood next time, though, huh?"

He held his hands up in defence. "I make no promises."

They fell back into a silence. She looked down at her hands.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get some ice cream."

She looked up from under her lashes. "Is ice cream your answer to everything?"

"Has it ever been the wrong answer," he challenged.

She rolled her eyes but there was fondness in the action. A smile was brightening her face and his mood. Somewhere, her happiness or lack thereof had started to impact on his. The thought should scare him, he felt, but right now he didn't care.

He stood, and then held out his hand to help her up. Then, because he couldn't stop himself, he reached out and caught one of her tears in the crook of his finger and wiped it on his jacket.

A look passed over her face and he knew he had ruined it-she would mumble an excuse and go back to her desk-but before either of them could say anything, her door opened. The janitor standing with his mop and sheepish expression would have earned a laugh from the audience if they were in a TV show. He started to apologise but Lisbon assured him that they were leaving.

The look was gone.

Jane grabbed her jacket from the stand and helped her into it as they walked to the elevator.

"Can we get fries as well," she asked.

"You, my dear, can have whatever you want."

It occurred to her in the driveway that she didn't think this through properly. For one, she would have to drive them back to Sacramento when this was all done. Or, more likely, pay for the last-minute motel that she couldn't even expense back. More immediately and more importantly, of course, was the issue of Jane. She didn't know how we would react. She was about to rip open the deepest of wounds all in the hopes that feel of the blood on his skin would rebirth him into the person he was. Into the person he was supposed to be. She knew he had the capacity for violence, the very reason for his existence at the CBI was born from it, and, while he had never shown violence towards her, she didn't rule it out. This job had taught her that most of, if not all, of us were one bad day way from doing unspeakable things.

And remembering that your family had been brutally murdered by a serial killer certainly qualified as a bad fucking day.

But Angela and Charlotte deserved to be remembered. He deserved to remember them. The warm memories that cauterised as they cut deeply. Her own selfish interests in the matter meant nothing. Or, at least, that's what she told herself to try assuage the guilt see was feeling.

So, she held her resolve, using his key in the front door like it was her own and led them upstairs. She felt a shiver as they reached the landing, ghosts dancing in the shadows. She stood back and let him close the last few meters himself. He opened the door and then nothing. No sound, no movement. Strangely underwhelming.

Her shoulders wanted to slump, but she remained optimistic which sounded awful to admit. If he had no idea what was happening, he would be vocal about it.

"Jane," she said cautiously.

"I need to be alone," he told her. He sounded like he was in physical pain.

"I don't think-"

"Please, Lisbon. You brought me here; this is the least you could do for me."

She expected the anger. She hadn't expected it to hurt as much as it did. She nodded. "Ok. I'll wait here."

"Outside."

"I can't-"

He finally moved, turning his upper body to her. The look she saw felt like a sucker punch. She had been company to his grief and trauma for a long time, but it wasn't the same thing as witnessing it from beginning. The look on his face was a reminder she had joined in the second act. Images of a locked room and padded walls sprung to mind like a leak in a rowboat.

Her fight left her. "I'll be in the car."

He didn't acknowledge her, stepping through the threshold and closing the door. She waited a few seconds then realised if he was crying, she wouldn't hear it.

She went outside.

She wanted to leave Cho a voicemail telling him what was happening but her phone was dead. She turned the radio on for a few seconds, but it quickly annoyed her. Plus, she wanted to be able to hear everything happening. Who knew if Red John liked to come back and relieve his sick murders? That thought woke her for a bit, but without streetlights and Jane annoying her, there was only so long she could keep her eyes open.

She woke to a bang. She cursed loudly and scrambled for the door handle. Jane didn't like guns; she didn't think to check that there wasn't any in the house. She got the door open but, before she could step out, a hand grabbed her wrist. He had seen better days, but he was alive, and he was her Jane again: she could tell by the broken look in his eyes. She felt shame at feeling relieved.

"I'm not going to kill myself," he told her, (thankfully) misreading the cause of her facial expressions.

"Good."

They sat in silence for a few seconds. She thought the conversation was over, but as she started getting ready to drive them, at least part of the way back, he spoke again.

"I understand why you did it this way, Lisbon."

She braced for impact.

He continued, "But you have to understand it's like I have lost them all over again."

She filled in the blank: that it was because of her. One could argue whether that was fair, but fair had never much mattered to grief.

Grief shot to kill, it always had.

But she realised before she fell asleep that didn't regret doing it. She regretted that someone had to do it in the first place; which meant there was nothing left to do but take it on the chin.

"Yeah. Yeah, I understand."

He nodded and put on his seatbelt. Conversation over. She started the car. He was only across the centre console, but he may as well have been on the moon.

She wouldn't call it her 'Spidey senses' (or rather 'Jane senses') because it sounded juvenile. But she knew him better than anyone else and, as he liked to tell her, the subconscious mind was constantly taking in information, most of it discarded until sometimes, even hours later, a bubble popped into the conscious mind. That bubble was telling her that Jane had done, or was about to do, something incredibly stupid. With a muttered curse and a bemused look from lobby security, she said goodbye to her plans of ice-cream and a rewatch of It Happened One Night.

As she pressed the button in the elevator harder than it deserved, she realised that it was his disappearance from the Major Crimes floor that was triggering the alarm bells. He claimed he was tired, and she was too busy trying to draft a case report that would excuse their scheming to notice the tone in his voice. But now it was coming through clear as if a radio was playing her favourite song. She pounded on the door to his attic room and waited. There was nothing. She called his name when she tried again. Nothing. He wasn't that deep a sleeper that he could sleep through her shouting. So, either he had decided to go to his motel, he was ignoring her, or- she pounded again with a newfound sense of urgency.

Nothing.

She cursed under her breath and fished her phone from her blazer pocket, but before she could dial the door rattled open. She whipped around, an expression of relief on her tongue but it died when she saw him. Because speaking of dying, he looked one misstep away from the grave. She closed the gap between them, eyes scanning looking for obvious signs of injury or trauma but there was nothing.

He looked like he had seen a ghost.

Or an hallucination.

Her eyes widened. "Please, tell me you didn't."

But he had, his pupils made it obvious.

"I needed to see her again," he said but it his voice was a half-formed thing. "I had so much left to say but-"

He started crying. She tried to keep the shock and awkwardness from her face. She had seen him teary before in these moments they kept finding themselves in, but he wasn't just crying this time, he was sobbing. And it was panicking her more than finding him unresponsive. He tipped forward towards her and she had to step back with one leg to catch him without them both toppling over. He clung to her back and her initial stillness gave way to wrapping her arms around him and trying to rub soothing circles.

The last grown man she had seen cry this way had gone on to make her life a misery. And in some ways, you could argue Jane had too, but it was hard to be angry when his tears were beginning to soak her shirt.

She tried to hush gently but this really wasn't her forte and she was getting tired bearing his weight. She started to move them backwards and then angled them towards the bed. As she moved, she noticed the cup and the brown bag on his desk. She would kill whoever supplied him, and then she would probably kill him to, but he had to stop crying long enough to make it a fair fight.

She hooked her foot around his ankle used it to get him off-balance. He landed gently on the edge of the bed, the new position putting his head firmly against her chest. For a few seconds he didn't notice but when he felt more than heard her say his name, he released her and immediately avoided her gaze.

"No, you don't have to be embarrassed for crying. It's just...we're close but we're not that close."

He huffed a laugh and she felt some of the tension easing from her shoulders. He moved over to make room for her to sit. She did so and found herself shifting closer so that their thighs were a hair's breadth away from touching. For a long time, they just sat there but the silence soon became too much for her.

"What happened?"

"It didn't work like the last time," he told her. "She wasn't a teenager I could talk with. She was a little girl, covered in blood."

He swallowed hard, like the words were shards of glass. "She blamed me. For everything."

"Oh, Jane," she whispered. "It wasn't real."

"It felt so real."

"I know. But it's not. Do you know what is though? Us, all of us. The team. Me, ok?" Ignoring her words from earlier, reached over and took his face between her hands. "I'm here, and I'm real."

"This conversation seems familiar," he said. She didn't say anything. He phrased it like he was questioning her, but she knew he remembered. Like she knew he remembered what he told her before his crazy plan to catch Red John. Somethings should stay quiet.

His left hand came to hold her wrist and she would choose to forget it later, but his eyes momentarily flicked down to her lips. She didn't blame him, they were in a darkened room, more intimate than they had perhaps ever been, and he was vulnerable. And vulnerability could lead to some very stupid decisions. But he would never do it, even if he truly wanted to, and wasn't just desperate for human contact and comfort. He dropped his hand from her wrist, and she dropped hers from his face and they both turned to stare, again, into the darkness of the room.

She cleared her throat once she felt enough time had passed that she wouldn't be misconstrued. "Why don't you sleep on my couch tonight, hm? I don't like the idea of you being alone up here. Not while you're not fully sober."

"I'll be fine, Lisbon," he said.

She hopped down from the bed, heels making a definitive bang as they hit the wooden floor. "Let me rephrase: either come willingly or I will taser you."

"You're not wearing a taser. I would have felt it while I was hugging you."

She raised an eyebrow. "Wanna bet?"

He didn't: not because he was wrong but because he liked the idea of being near her. He had come to rely on her presence to keep him anchored to the world outside of his revenge and grief.

He still made a point of rolling his eyes, before he stood and gestured for her to go first so he could lock up after her.

They were in her car by the time he spoke again. "I'm glad you're real."

"I'm glad I'm real too."

She glanced over to him and caught his smile in the glow of the streetlights.

Major Crimes didn't happen in Canon River which made her uneasy. She had spent so much of her adult life surrounded by assaults, and murders, and kidnappings that their absence made her unsettled. Sometimes it made her roll her eyes: clocking out for the night (yes, she even got to have nights) and feeling like she hadn't done anything to earn her title or her wage because no one had died.

It was an odd change of pace: the absence of fluorescent saturation and light pollution, and the constant buzz of city life. Cars didn't pass at all hours of the night, no sirens or loud voices to soundtrack her midnights. Nothing but the odd rustle of an animal in the woods at the back of her house. She found no distraction from her thoughts in Canon River, and she hadn't had that in a while. Jane had been correct when he concluded she used to work herself to the point of an ulcer in high school, but it wasn't from academic desire. It was a form of escape. The long nights and overtime of her working life had just been another means of achieving the same thing.

She was sat on her back porch this evening, glass of wine in one hand, blanket draped over her lap. It wasn't even that chilly this evening, which was a first for the summer so far, though granted it had only been summer for a month and a half and she hadn't been in Washington much longer. But she liked the feel of it. Plus, it could be very cold sometimes without the heat from her life going down in flames. She knocked back the rest of the glass and grimaced slightly at the bitterness. It truly was the cheapest wine there was.

She poured herself another glass. She wondered if it was night-time where he was. But then she realised that she was making a big assumption that he was even still alive. He could have died crossing the border. Been shot and killed on the side of the road somewhere or drowned trying to cross by ocean. She didn't believe that was true, however. He was cunning, a trickster, sly as a fox if anyone was going to make it out of this alive, it was him.

But what did it matter really: the cynical part of her asked. If she never saw or heard from him again, then he was good as dead, and she would have to mourn him just the same. She was good at that. Well, perhaps, good wasn't the correct word, but she had a lot of experience with it.

Being interrogated by the FBI had made for one hell of a wake.

"I don't know what you expected, Lisbon," she could see him shrugging. "I told you from the beginning what I was going to do."

And he had. She had stupidly, naively, believed that somehow, somewhere along the way, he would choose a different path. That he would choose her. That he wouldn't be someone else she had to lose. Though he wasn't ever really hers to lose, was he? They had been two people with same goal, nothing more than strangers who formed an alliance. Everything else: all the lunches, and the ice cream breaks, and the nights they spent together trying to mend what other people had broken had been nothing more than what it was: two perfect pretenders stuck in the middle of something that wasn't real.

"I hate you, Jane," she whispered to the sky, as the wine kicked in enough to numb her brain. Later, as she closed her eyes for a fruitless night's sleep, she hoped her words had carried on the wind or imprinted on the moon.

The words, of course, don't do this, but that doesn't stop him from imagining her voice coming to him on the ocean breeze. Sometimes, gentle and calming like she had been all those nights by his side. Other times angry and reactive, begging for him to stop being so fucking stubborn and arrogant. He would give anything to hear her voice again, even if she was shouting at him. He missed the way her California softened vowels would return to their roots when she was passionate about something. He missed how it lilted when she was teasing him. The power and respect and sometimes the fear it commanded from her team and suspects. He missed the cinnamon of her hair and the coffee he was sometimes able to smell on her breath. And the way she sometimes hummed in the car on long drives when she was too bored to maintain a pretence.

He almost tried Belladonna tea again, but he didn't want her hallucination to remind him that she hated him. And he wouldn't blame her if she did. He never wanted to lead her on, and he tried to keep the distance from her that he knew he needed to but he had failed.

And he was about to fail again.

He vowed to never contact her again for her own safety, but he had always been selfish. That was one of her favourite accusations to level at him, and he could never be angry about it because it was less an insult than it was an astute observation.

His selfishness was the reason for all of the stupid prizes he had won in his life and all the real treasure he had lost.

But as he started writing that fateful first letter to her, he felt the selfishness turn to a warmth. And he would take comfort in any flame that kept him alive.

It takes hours for her to finally be allowed home.

First, there was the medical evaluation at the scene, even though she insisted the worst that was wrong with her was dehydration and malnutrition from the prison food. But no one was being too careful with her, least of all Jane who hovered like a fly. He seemed to buzz like one too; he wouldn't calm down until he could feel her solid and real under his arms and probably his mouth too. After that was the policework. Once she was cleared by the paramedics, Cho drove her and Jane back to HQ. She had never thought herself as one for public displays of affection (even if that meant just one other person) but exhaustion was creeping in as the adrenaline drained away and she found she wanted nothing more than to lay her head on Jane's shoulder. But they had their rules. Instead, she laid it against the window, still sipping the chemically coloured sports drink. Trees and highway blurred into grey urban sprawl.

She didn't look to Jane at all, but she catches Cho's eyes in the rear-view mirror a couple of times. Maybe it was delusion, but he seemed to be telling her to slide over in the back and do what she wanted, but his face was the same as it always was, and he could have been saying anything or nothing at all. Probably the latter. He had been dragged kicking and screaming into Rigsby and Van Pelt; she doubted he would voluntarily offer an opinion.

Did he even know?

He was the one to take her statement which she appreciated. He didn't ask any questions that weren't important, keeping it short, simple, and straight to the point. Most importantly he didn't ask her how she was. She gave her answers in as few words as possible, partly because she wanted to crawl under her duvet, partly because things were starting to get hazy. When he saw her start to struggle, he ended the session and told her they could follow-up later.

"Go home," he said. "I'm sure Jane will drive you."

She saw the corner of his mouth twitch: imperceptible to someone who didn't know him.

If anyone deserved to be the first to know, it was him.

She rolled her eyes. "Funny."

"I'm happy for you. For you both."

"Well, it's early days yet," she told him. Because it was. But also, because she didn't quite believe it yet, even if she did break up with Pike and spend every day for almost two weeks with Jane in her house.

She still wasn't convinced every scrap of him wouldn't be taken from her again.

Jane, of course, told her he was driving, even if she reminded him that he was also almost killed but that didn't seem to faze him. He barely waited until the elevator doors closed before he pulled her to him by her waist. He kissed her until the bell dinged on the ground floor. She was too tired to care about their rules, but she did dip her head on the way out so the desk agent wouldn't see the flush on her cheeks. The sun was starting to set when he pulled into the parking lot of their favourite Vietnamese restaurant.

"It's not quite salad," he said when he returned to the car with their order.

She smiled softly at him. "I dunno how much I'll be able to eat anyway."

Adrenaline crashes always caused her nausea, but this one was being made worse by the fact that every time she blinked, she saw the store clerk's chest being busted open bullets.

Pressure started forming in her own chest and found its release in the form of tears. He noticed her shaking form as he checked the mirrors to make a right turn.

"Hey, hey" he reached out his hand to her, and found her thigh.

She squeezed it, hoping to ground herself. She tried to take a deep breath but it all it did was make the nausea worse. "Find somewhere to pull over."

The streetlights had turned on: her skin looking marble in their glow. He pulled into the parking lot of a closed coffee shop. Its sign promised that you could always have another cup coffee and try again. She dashed for the shrubs. What emerged was a pathetic excuse for stomach contents. Jane gathered her hair and rubbed soothing circles on her back as she dry heaved. When she was done, she turned to him. He held out a bottle of water he must have gotten with the food, but she ignored it, and wrapped her arms around his waist so her head was against his chest. She closed her eyes to his heartbeat. It sounded corny and, short of torture, she would probably never admit it, but it had become one of her favourite sounds.

She felt a fresh prick of tears, but they were ones of anger this time. She raised her head so she could look at him. "What you did: coming in after me like that, was incredibly stupid."

He released her with a sigh, holding her at arm's length. She hadn't intended a fight, but she supposed what other outcome was there? She was left to feel like some kind of confused pigeon when all he did was uncap the water and tell her to drink and then rinse out her mouth. She looked between the bottle and him. He held it to her mouth and started to tip it: she could either drink it or wear it. She chose the former.

When she did what he asked, he kissed her like he did in the elevator, hand tracing up her arm until it reached her face.

Forehead against hers. "I told you I would always save you, Teresa. I didn't intend to take that lightly."

"But I don't need you to die for me, Jane. In fact, I don't want you to. No more death wishes. If you're serious about this-"

"I am."

-then you need to have a life wish. No unnecessary danger."

"You're not unnecessary."

"Please?"

He nodded.

She wasn't convinced, but it was good enough for now.

She found him reading by the amber glow of the side-table lamp when she grew frustrated with staring at the ceiling. She got out of bed with a well-used to resignation and moved barefoot down her hallway. Their hallway now, she supposed. Temporarily at least. They had taken the airstream on a week-long trip after their wedding, but it soon became clear it wasn't going to work as a long-term living arrangement. She was too sensitive to smell to be in a confined space. Which was fine when the weather was good and she could sit outside while he cooked, but when it rained it was torture for them both. They were back in her rented bungalow until the remodel was finished.

It doesn't surprise her that he was still awake, or that he decided to stay in the sitting room. Sometimes he knew before he even needed to try that he wasn't going to be able to sleep. If he did manage it, he had spent so many years sleeping on couches that continuing to sleep on them wasn't going to kill him. Thankfully his insomnia wasn't as frequent or severe as it had been in the CBI days, and it no longer required medication, but she knew how hard it could be to break yourself out of the pattern of sleepless nights, and hers had never been as frequent or consecutive as his were. She did joke once, during a particular bad stretch when not even concealer could hide it, that one actually needed an opportunity for sleep to be able to have a sleepless night.

He hadn't found it funny then, and he definitely wasn't finding her insomnia funny now, but there was very little they could do. She couldn't take sleeping pills, and even forgoing the small amount of caffeine she was allowed hadn't helped either. She spent every day struggling to keep her eyes open and her brain working long enough to get through the day's workload of reports and telephone follow-ups, and every night wide awake as her alarm clock mocked her. He didn't notice her approach, and he startled slightly when she lightly scratched her nails at the nape of his neck and then kissed his cheek. His brow furrowed with concern, but he said nothing, just marked his page in his book and patted the couch beside him.

It made her smile. He was still making an effort to invite her to sit beside him even though she felt they had long moved past that, but she knew it was his way of telling her he chooses her, and he would choose over and over again.

She laid her head on his lap. One of his hands came to wrap around her stomach, the other stroked her hair.

"I knew being your child, he would cause me trouble," she said. "But I thought he would at least have the decency to wait until he was born. Was Angela this bad with Charlotte?"

She still wore his wedding ring on her necklace. She touched it briefly. His fingers stilled for a beat in her hair. He wasn't averse to talking about them, but it still caught him off guard that she asked about them and talked about them like it was no big deal. Not that she didn't take them seriously, but that she wasn't awkward about it.

His fingers started to move again. "No. No, she had the opposite problem. I'd come home from my meetings and find she had been asleep the whole time."

"That sounds nice."

"She hated it."

"Oh," she said, then shrugged. "Grass is greener, I guess."

"Hm," he agreed softly. There was beat of silence. When he spoke again, his voice was back to its usual mischievous tone. "Also, It's she, Teresa. Our child is a she. She is causing you trouble."

She rolled her eyes. They had been having this argument pretty much every day since she told him she was pregnant. Which felt like a lifetime ago, now. A different world where he had left her after Vega's death and she had found out she was pregnant, alone, on the floor of the bathroom he now spent hours sitting on holding her hair.

They both had a lot of regrets about that. She tried not to dwell on them much, but she knew he found it harder to move on from the fact he hadn't been there with her, holding her hand, as they waited for the results to show.

"You're never going to sleep with your thoughts being that loud," he teased softly. "What is it?"

She snuggled into him, felt the hand around her burgeoning bump tighten softly. "That I love you. And I love this little one. But also, that I would sacrifice you to whatever God I needed to in order to sleep for even twenty minutes."

He chuckled at that, and she turned her head so she could look at him.

"Read to me," she asked.

He removed his hand from her hair and picked up his novel. Sometimes she hummed softly at a striking piece of imagery or satisfying string of prose, but she didn't comment or ask questions. One of her fingers slowly traced a pattern on his thigh.

After a while he noticed the drawing had stopped, and there was evenness to her breathing he hadn't heard in quite some time.

When she woke, dawn was starting to break. She blinked against her grogginess as she sat up. Her throw blanket fell from her lap to the ground with a soft thud. She was confused for a few seconds until she remembered last night, and how Jane's book mixed with the warmth of his lap had put her to sleep. She picked it up from the coffee table. She had never heard of it before, but it was old.

"Don't ever say the classics aren't useful for something," she muttered to herself.

She heard quiet movement in the kitchen, and then Jane came through the connecting archway with a cup of tea. "Good morning. I hope I didn't wake you."

She shook her head and softly and then reached out for him. She only intended to hug him and then let him go about his morning, but her eyes looked to the book. Before she needed to say anything, he smiled knowingly. It was one of pure warmth. He sat down in the same place where he had been last night and flicked back to where he remembered being when he noticed her asleep. His cup of tea ended up abandoned on the coffee table. But he didn't mind all that much.

She kissed him softly, morning breath be damned, before laying her head back on his lap. His hand once again wrapped around her stomach. Sun streamed through the curtains, his voice was soothing and warm. She closed her eyes and sunk into him.

It was shaping up to be a beautiful day.