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The time without his memories does not exist in his memory.
It felt like the world had been thrown out of orbit: one moment there was coldness, clinging and dragging him down like lead, like a physical thing, curling around his shoulders and burrowing into his bones ―and the next there was a wall, and an outline in decade-old blood, and Lisbon’s soft voice in the distance like a faithless prayer, I’m sorry, Jane, I’m so sorry.
He never does blame her for it, this terrible awakening she forces on him, because ―well, he supposes there was no other way, was there? Staring at the face in his old bedroom was a shock deep in his blood, schizophrenic and horrible, but it was a determined certainty, too, his entire life unspooling before him once again.
“Lisbon,” he says, and his voice is too small, too closed up. Victim-shrill. Jane takes a deep breath. “Lisbon,” and there, it sounds even and toneless again, appropriately unfeeling, “I want to be alone, please.”
She touches his shoulder before she goes. Briefly, lightly, reassuringly. He almost thanks her for it.
He isn’t surprised when they get a call, exactly twenty-four hours later. “We’re up,” Lisbon says as she emerges from her office, phone in one hand and dress jacket in the other. She throws him a look as she walks past his couch, a heavy, oddly prolonged glance, and just like that Jane knows.
He tries to keep his mind blank as they drive up to Red John’s next crime scene, briefly rubbing at the space between his eyebrows in a half-hearted attempt to ward off a fast approaching headache. “You okay?” Lisbon asks him before they go in, and she's trying, and what is he supposed to answer? He nods, makes a passable try at a reassuring smile.
“I’m okay,” he tells her, appropriately reassuring and collected, except he probably hasn’t been okay, ever.
The display inside is like all the others. The pale body on the single bed, covered in red with an open throat and carefully arranged between twisted sheets. The face on the wall, painted at the exact spot in the bedroom to attract the most attention.
“So this is your boy Red John?” a uniformed woman asks, and she sounds cool, professional. In truth ―tired of life. Tired of corpses.
“It’s him,” Jane says, and yet―
And yet.
There’s something off about this girl, about the way her body splays across the dried pools of blood; one hip slightly canted to the side, and Jane leans close, lifts a gentle hand to push back the tarp covering her. There, on the cold skin, is a smattering of bruises in the shape of a hand, a shape Jane recognizes in troubling, light-headed detail.
“Jane?”
Lisbon, this time, all soft and hesitant, and Jane’s choking on something unnamed, something desperately acidic. It’s like drowning, his lungs filling water by the second, until he manages to push himself to his feet and straighten his spine, until he manages to shoulder his way through the swarm of police and forensics teams and their ridiculously unnecessary notepads, until, until―
He lets his body fall, heavy, on the steps of the front porch. Lets the sun wash over him, fever-hot, runs a barely trembling hand through his hair, no darkness for him to crawl away in. Only himself, and the sunlight, and the background noise of a crime scene, and the finger-patterned bruises laced across his own hip, identical to the girl’s back inside the house.
He might not remember any of it, but Jane knows he went astray during the hazy, unfocused whirlwind of his fugue state.
They never told him anything, but he could see it on their faces. Cho was, for the most part, unchanged, but still he looked at Jane with a veiled sort of cautiousness, gravitated mostly just out of Jane’s reach but always kept a dark, watchful gaze on him; Van Pelt’s cheeks colored slightly when Jane brought her coffee in the morning and gave her a warm smile, and somewhere to her side Rigsby visibly bristled; Lisbon was much more lenient with him than usual, her gaze caught somewhere between sadness and that unsure kind of annoyance.
(It was Cho who finally deigned to enlighten him, in the end.
“You were an asshole.” Matter-of-fact, arms folded across his chest. “I mean, more than usual. You brought a woman here, too.”
Jane blinked. “Well. I― well. Thank you, Cho.”)
And he saw it on himself, too. A faded, pink round mark just at the side of his throat, the shaky echo of a mouth kissing and biting. He tried to ignore the disgust that pooled inside his stomach to rot, told himself it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t count, it wasn’t me, I wasn’t myself, it doesn’t count.
He took a shower, later that same night, stood under the boiling water for as long as it took for his skin to burn, raised and red, until it hurt. There were marks elsewhere too, in places he only saw when he stripped himself of the familiar, comforting weight of his suit and dared a fleeting glance down at himself.
The most prominent was a bloom of shadow-dark bruises curving along the side of his right hip, clear outlines of someone else’s hand. Jane put his own fingers on top of them, and found that his own were smaller than the imprints burned into his skin.
A man’s hand, then.
He made himself ignore that, too.
“Jane?” Lisbon says.
“Jane,” Lisbon says again, and he looks up, holds a hand as a shield against the sun and tries his damnedest to school his expression into something light and pleasant. He must fail at it, because the worried crease in her forehead only deepens. “Jane, talk to me, please.”
She’s used to seeing him in the middle of a room with blood on its walls, he knows. She’s learned how he moves and how he talks when the body on the bed is Red John’s work, left behind like a perverse gift dedicated only to him ―and this, he knows she can tell that this is wrong, even for Jane.
He considers telling her, then and there. Thinks about asking her to run tests on him, maybe even a rape kit ―is that a police or a hospital thing? after all those years, he still isn’t sure― but Red John wouldn’t have been so careless, and besides, Jane knows, he knows he hadn’t fought.
He knows it hadn’t been violent, even though he can’t, for the life of him, remember.
“Jane―”
“I’m fine, Lisbon,” he says, standing up. “I just got a little queasy back there. Didn’t eat any breakfast, today. I’m fine, I really am.”
The same uniformed woman from before calls out to her, then, sticking her head from inside the house and holding out an evidence bag with something that definitely won’t reveal any fingerprints inside. Lisbon turns to answer, and with that Jane senses his opening, walks away and all across the street to his car as fast as his legs can carry him.
He locks himself in. Rests his hands on the steering wheel, breathes in and counts to three. Breathes out. In, out. In, and out again.
He hadn’t thought more of the bruises than he had Cho’s comment about cavorting about with a woman ―it wasn’t the revelation of having had sex with a man that left him unable to sleep at night, but the knowledge that he’d had sex with anyone at all. Angela had been his first, and last, but Jane has never had any qualms about innocent flirting, and he knows himself, has no trouble admitting the people he’s occasionally, and briefly, drawn to aren’t always women.
What he should have wondered, instead of desperately trying to keep himself from thinking of how he’d betrayed his wife, was which man it had been.
His fingers close around the steering wheel, knuckles nearly turning white with Jane’s death hold on it, and he closes his eyes, starts picking out at memories as carefully, as deliberately as he can. Focus, focus, focus. His grip tightens. Focus.
A body slightly larger than his own, covering him, pushing him into a mattress: is it a memory, limned in the soft, orange lighting of a bedroom, or his own mind conjuring up an image born of hindsight knowledge?
Focus focus focus―
There’s a soft but insistent tapping against the glass, and Jane startles out of the depths of his head, loosening his hands as Lisbon, outside, gestures for him to roll down the window.
“Jane,” she bites out, and she’s angry now. Jane is almost relieved. He can deal with an angry Lisbon, but sympathy, as well as pity, always feels more like a physical blow than anything else. “Jane, what the hell is going on?”
He smiles at her. It’s less sharp now, he can feel it, almost believable. “Just wanted some privacy,” he tells her, very conversationally. “Come on, Lisbon, let’s get back to the office. There isn’t much else we can do here, you know that.”
She does. Of course she does.
That night there’s a card placed between the leather-clad pillows of Jane’s couch, only a small corner visible, as if waiting for him. Cream-colored and square, inside a plain envelope that Jane almost sends down to be swept for fingerprints, before his mind catches up with him and he realizes just how terribly useless it’d all be.
There are only six words inside, typed out in unassuming black font: thank you for the lovely evening.
Jane crumples the card in his fist until the edges cut white marks into his flesh, and tosses it in the trash. He feels bile rise up his throat, but manages to bite it back down, lies down on the couch as carefully as possible, opens a book across his lap and pretends to read as he tries to calm his heartbeat and the letters blur into each other.
Around him life goes on, the bullpen buzzing with the comfortable noises of the night shift. Jane swallows, turns the pages without looking and tries to shake the feeling of a phantom arm draped across his chest, possessively tender. It makes his insides twist and clench, now, but he must have liked it then. Jane knows he won’t remember a face, even though it’d loomed right above his own, only a few nights ago. He knows he won’t be sleeping tonight, either.
The finger-shaped bruises are still on his hip, itching, burning. The card is still in the trashcan.
Jane closes his eyes.