Chapter Text
It’s been a bad week. Hell, it’s been a bad month – half a year, really, if she includes his ridiculous Vegas stunt – since Jane's been back. Lisbon isn't foolish enough to think everything would go back to normal, that they would go back to normal, but she at least thought the man would at least try harder to be a team player again. Not to say he was a team player to begin with, not with all the times he set his own plans into motion or deceived them by withholding information from her all in the name of “protecting” her.
Lisbon scoffs at herself, seriously, how could he think she needed protection. She’s the one with the badge and the gun and he’s the one always antagonizing people to punch him. So, it’s in this headspace – anger, frustration, exhaustion, whatever you want to label it – that Lisbon exits her office to inform her team of their new case.
The noise of a door closing causes Cho to look up from the paperwork he’s been wrapping up from the previous case. He watches as a sour faced Lisbon exits her office and approaches the bullpen. She masks her face, replacing anger with professionalism, before anyone else on the team notices her bad mood.
Van Pelt’s periphery picks up both Lisbon’s and Cho’s movements. She turns to her right and motions for Rigsby, who no surprise, is grabbing a snack from the break room. Rigsby makes his way over towards Van Pelt’s desk for his boss’s announcement.
Lisbon stops in the middle of the bullpen facing Cho’s and Van Pelt’s desks. “We’re up. Homicide 20 miles outside of Redding. I just sent you all the address…” Lisbon trails off as her eyes notice a certain blonde lump missing from the brown leather couch behind Cho’s desk. Her frustrations interlace with her professional facade. “Has anyone seen Jane?”
Lisbon receives a chorus of no's and headshakes.
She doesn’t know why she hoped for any other answer. Jane’s been spending more and more time up in his attic. While he sees it as a place of refuge, Lisbon can’t help but view it as a prison. A prison in which he only leaves for tea and the bathroom. She’s not even sure he’s eating anymore, she certainly cannot recall the last time she saw him eat, but that would require him to actually be in her presence. Something which is far too rare these days.
“Great, that’s just perfect,” she mutters to herself unsuccessfully as Rigsby walks right by her heading back to his desk. “You guys go on ahead, it’s a couple hour drive. I’ll go get our wayward consultant and meet you all at the crime scene.” Lisbon turns on her heel to make her way out of the bullpen.
Rigsby gathers his gun and badge from the second drawer of his desk as Van Pelt stands to grab her jacket on the back of her chair. Van Pelt stalls her movement, noticing Cho hasn’t gotten up. Instead, he’s gone back to his paperwork.
“You coming Cho?” she asks casually. It’s a pointless question to ask, she knows why he’s staying behind, it’s the same reason he’s lagged behind on the past few cases, but she asks anyway.
“No,” is the only response he gives. It's not said unkindly, just matter-of-factly, as is Cho’s usual tone.
“Twenty bucks says he doesn’t come,” Rigsby baits Cho.
“No point,” Cho responds impassively.
“Come on, man. Live on the edge a little,” Rigsby teases. Like Van Pelt, he didn’t need to be told the reason behind Cho staying, but it wouldn’t hurt to try and make some money on an easy bet.
Rigsby was especially eager to win twenty bucks after losing twenty bucks to Cho the week prior as well as having to pay for Cho’s lunch the same day they made the bet. Rigsby had bet Cho five bucks originally that he could throw a paper airplane across the bullpen and have it land in one of the other detective’s trash. Cho readily accepted. The paper airplane had just missed, hitting the rim of the trash can. This spurred Rigsby on, so he bet Cho an even twenty. Cho refused, so Rigsby added more incentive, twenty bucks and the loser buys the other guy a sandwich. Cho accepted. Right as Rigsby was about to let go, Van Pelt had walked into work looking dangerously sexy for a Tuesday morning, or so Rigsby thought, and his aim detoured completely. The paper airplane didn’t even make it half way across the bullpen before it hit another agent in the face.
At Rigsby’s attempt to bait his colleague into winning back his money, Cho looks up from his work. To other observers, his face is as unreadable as stone, but to his close colleagues the little raise of his eyebrows gives a look that screams Really.
“I’m not funding your lunch with a pointless bet. Jane hasn’t bothered to show up to the past four cases, why would the fifth one be any different. We’ll give him the run down and he’ll read the crime scene reports and tell us how to proceed,” Cho responds dryly. He goes back to his paperwork before adding, “I’ll wait for the boss.”
“Twenty dollars for a lunch, that’s more like a snack,” Rigsby grumbles, but concedes Cho's point.
Van Pelt pipes up, “Well, bet or no bet, I hope Jane proves you both wrong and gets his head out of his ass. For the boss’s sake.”
“More like for ours,” Rigsby mumbles, which earns him a fiery glare from Van Pelt that could compete with outblazing her own hair.
Rigsby, now looking thoroughly chastened, coughs, “Sorry. Um, we should head out.”
The two agents begin to make their way out.
“You shouldn’t make comments like that about the boss. It’s wrong. She’s going through a lot right now. You know how she was when he was gone,” Van Pelt chastises Rigsby.
Cho hears her voice fade away as they get further away. The rest of their conversation cuts off from him as they reach the elevator.
The team was unsure about what to make of Jane’s return, but after seeing what his six month absence did to the boss, they were all praying his return would allow the boss some reprieve from the constant cloud of stress and depression that followed her.
They all saw how she threw herself into her work as a way to cope with his leaving and her inability to help him. She almost never ate unless reminded to, drank way too much coffee, and was starting to look more like Jane with the constant bags under her eyes.
After the first few months passed, and it seemed like he really wouldn’t be coming back, the team took it upon themselves to try to get him back. They made it a point for at least one of them to call him weekly. He never picked up, but that didn’t deter them.
Van Pelt had left heartfelt messages asking him to come back and to let the team help him with whatever he was going through. Rigsby bumbled his way through his messages trying to give pep talks to encourage Jane to get help and come back, all of which just ended up sounding like awkward phrases found on motivational children posters. Cho kept his voicemails simple with a “Stop being stupid. Call Lisbon.” or even more straight to the point “Call Lisbon.”
Van Pelt even tried tracking his credit card payments, but either he was using a card under another name or was sticking to cash only. She almost put a bolo out for the Citroen. It would have been easy to get a hit, but if Lisbon or any of the other higher ups found out. It would have merely caused more trouble than it seemed worth, especially after Lisbon ripped into her a new one when she found out Van Pelt was trying to track Jane’s phone telling her subordinate it was a complete abuse of power.
They learned very quickly to not ask Lisbon how she was holding up. The question was usually blown off with an “I’m fine”, or if she was in an even worse mood, was met with an icy, “We don’t have time to sit around discussing feelings. Get back to work.” Instead, the team kept a more watchful eye on the boss. Providing food when they noticed she hadn’t eaten all day or bringing an extra coffee on days when it was obvious she didn’t get much more than a few hours of sleep.
Upon reflection, the team realized these were all acts that Jane had taken on himself.
The team avoided talking about Jane in front of the boss as much as possible. However, every once in a while one of them would summon up enough courage to enter the lion's den to ask the boss if they could do anything to help Jane.
This was always met with an indignant response of some variation of “I can only call him so many times asking him to accept my help. If he wanted help he’d ask. He’s a grown man who apparently can handle things on his own without his friends' help. He’ll call when he gets into some kind of trouble he can’t get out of, see what I care when that happens.”
They all knew her attempt at a dismissal of the topic was just that, an attempt. They all knew she would care, does care, because she would keep calling him. She tried to keep it discreet but the team noticed anyways, they are good detectives after all. Even after Jane's leaving they still had the best closure rate of the CBI.
To say the team was disappointed to see that things would not return to normal anytime soon with Jane’s return would be the biggest understatement of the year. This was made abundantly clear after Lorelei’s bombshell confession. Even Cho couldn’t hide the slight signs of disbelief on his face when he first heard about it.
Jane never made a point of bringing up his self-imposed celibacy, but the guys always noticed how he gently turned down the women who would not so subtly flirt with him on cases.
Rigsby even retold a tale once to Cho and Van Pelt of Jane turning down a threesome. It was right after they wrapped up that case with that womanizer Paul Fricke. Rigsby had told them about how a very attractive lady approached Jane at the bar and pointed to her also very hot friend.
Rigsby was too far away to hear what they were saying, but he saw Jane point to his ring. The woman then shrugged her shoulders as if to say, oh well, and walked away. Jane went back to his drink, and Rigsby approached him a few minutes later offering a ride back to the station to which Jane graciously accepted.
Rigsby was baffled at the time that Jane would turn down what would have been a pretty good time with two sexy ladies, but after Van Pelt broke things off with him because of the rules, he was starting to appreciate Jane’s situation a bit more. He may not have lost Van Pelt to a horrible tragedy, but his heart still felt broken and it took him much longer than he expected to get back into the dating scene. He honestly had no desire to until O’Laughlin entered the picture. He would have kept pining after Grace, but when she started dating again, he told himself it was time for him too, which then led to the online dating fiasco.
So, when word got out to the team that Jane ended what they suspected to be nearing a decade long celibacy, they were all shocked. They knew right then and there that Jane was nearing the end of his rope. He wanted the game over, and was willing to make bigger sacrifices.
Ever since that part of Jane’s Vegas stint was revealed, there’s been a never ending tension between Jane and Lisbon, and thus between the team itself.
Jane tried to be an active member of the team, at least for the first couple cases. That was until the FBI blind sided Bertram and stole custody of Lorelei Martins. After that, Jane became less focused on their cases and more focused on how to get Lorelei back into CBI custody. Things went from bad to worse after Jane and Lisbon’s visit to the prison where Lorelei was supposedly being held.
It didn’t help that the case immediately after, Jane had to get his stomach pumped for belladonna poisoning.
There was a nice break in the tension between the boss and Jane during the case, though. Things almost seemed to go back to normal. If Lisbon was too busy worrying about Jane then she’d be too distracted to be angry at him.
Unfortunately, that break did not last long.
Incidentally, that was the last case Jane fully participated in. He hasn’t been back to a case scene since. As soon as that case wrapped up, Jane made permanent residence in the attic.
The guys spent the whole next case theorizing why Jane wasn’t getting involved, well, it was more Rigsby throwing out asinine theories while Cho mocked him for being stupid.
At the end of the case Van Pelt put her two cents in. She told the guys how she overheard Jane casually drop in conversation that he was hallucinating his daughter. She figured that in some absurd Jane logic, seeing his daughter just reminded him that he hasn’t avenged her yet. Or it reminded him of a future he would never have with her.
In any scenario, it just made him feel more guilty, so now he wouldn't let himself be distracted by anything.
The guys came over to her side of reasoning pretty quickly.
So, now Jane spends ninety percent of his time in the attic scheming. The problem he’s running into right now, though, is that the FBI won’t confirm or deny if Lorelei missing is their doing or Red John’s.
If it’s the FBI hiding Lorelei in a different facility, well then he’ll just figure out which one, and break her out somehow.
But, if Red John took his girl back, she could be anywhere.
So, upstairs Jane remains, and the team’s prayers that the boss’s cloud would finally be able to fade away remain unanswered. In fact, his return seems to only worsen the cloud. It has added a third friend, unrelenting anger. It’s become dark and heavy like it was verging on a storm the size of a natural disaster.
While Lisbon did get angry during the six months Jane was gone, that anger usually centered around extreme hunger levels or after nights when she couldn’t even get an hour of sleep. This anger is different, it’s constant. It’s always there simmering, ready to boil over at any moment.