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It hits her at the most inappropriate of moments.
He (very deliberately) stumbles into her in the middle of the bullpen and she wonders where he even came from, because he was asleep on his couch just three minutes ago; she feels her shoulder crash into his arm as she moves towards her office door, and lets out an exasperated exhale by default.
He grins down at her and beams with innocence, with those little crinkles appearing just at the corner of his eyes. As everything about him screams playful and she's trying to muster up enough authority for a lecture, or maybe just enough to shove him away, she thinks something like —oh.
And then she thinks it's all very inconvenient. Which is the stupidest, most unprofessional thought in the entire world and could someone just please erase the last few seconds from the whirlwind that he’s made of her life?
She blames the new mailroom girl, whos' made a point of staring at Jane as intently as humanly possible every time she comes in. She blames every single female agent in the building, and a few men as well, that seem unable to stop fidgeting every time he walks by.
(She even blames Van Pelt, who, in a rare moment of female bonding, confessed to Lisbon how ridiculously pretty she thinks he is.)
But she mostly blames the ridiculous romance novels she used to read as a child curled up in her favorite blanket, with their intolerable, dashing, anti-hero of a protagonist who's changed by the perseverance and all-consuming love of the damsel in distress.
She was never that girl, Teresa Lisbon, and she didn't grow up to be that woman. Thankfully. And Jane, he's not the wonder child of someone else's imagination, a fickle fictional hero she can accept or discard and change at will, and nothing in her life has ever been like that.
Besides, he's far from protagonist material, of that she's certain. He is arrogant, frustrating, conniving and annoyingly extravagant, and she couldn't stand him for it.
Can't stand him for it. Can't. As in present tense.
She feels like she has to keep reminding herself of the present tense.
Lisbon knows that she loves her job. She truly, genuinely does. And she believes in the law, and she believes in justice, in proper police work and ethics. Lisbon believes in morals; she can accept that the world isn't painted in black and white, but what she has trouble stomaching is that the world is seen entirely through shades of gray.
She cannot understand how vengeance can mean justice, or how it can be possible for someone to not only ignore very specific sets of rules, but deny their existence altogether.
But these days... these days, she maybe thinks about Jane more.
She thinks about the way he's been reconstructing that almost-impeccable mask, day by day, week by week, since the day she first met him. And she still remembers that like it was yesterday, not because she thinks it was the beginning of something big, but because it was something decidedly different. The Patrick Jane of that first day when they shook hands was just as broken as the Patrick Jane of today, but it was open, hung on his face and the air around him for all the world to see.
She thinks about those things, and sometimes lets herself entertain the thought that maybe, just maybe, he isn't wrong, maybe he does have the right to —no.
She’s no stranger to grief and pain, but she is determined to remain a stranger to revenge and ruins.
Lisbon knows that feelings of anything other than friendship and collegial trust are reserved entirely for outside the job. She really does. And she believes in romance, no matter what some may say, and she believes in sentiment and affection. But she also believes in drawing a line; she can accept that her team is much more to her than mere co-workers, but what she can't allow herself to think of is that one day she might not be able to see the line clearly.
She cannot understand how anyone can ever let themselves fall in love while knowing the sentiment is doomed from the start.
But these days, she thinks about Jane more.
He just slips into her thoughts when she's not paying enough attention, filters through the cracks when she's not fully guarding them. And, mostly, it's about how he's a completely annoying son of a bitch and how much better her life would be if he wasn't in it.
But sometimes she thinks about him after he's said something to her with that smile that isn't bright and entirely false and altogether frightening, with that smile that might be genuine, might be half-affectionate, and she thinks something like perhaps.
Except that is, perhaps he's just the physical manifestation of the universe playing a cruel prank on her, or perhaps he should have a leash. And no one can say a word against that, because, really, Lisbon can't understand people who allow sentiment to bloom when there is no hope.
She can't.
She notices him staring at her, sometimes.
Like he just happened to glance her way and forgot to look away, and it's only for the space of a single breath, but it's there.
But, the thing is, she also knows he notices her staring at him sometimes. Like she just happened to glance his way and forgot to look away. She turns her gaze when he notices, of course, because it's stupid, and embarrassing, and most of all, it doesn't make any sense. Because she has no reason to be staring, at all.
She hasn't.
And, in the moments when he truly thinks she is not looking —or, the moments when he knows she's looking but doesn't know she's also seeing, because Patrick Jane is nothing if not utterly convinced of the infallibility of his presented self— he's only the man lost.
Lisbon can see it, the grief that eclipses all his arrogant airs, tucked carefully under layers and layers of sun-bright smiles and flippant behavior. And it hurts her, but—
(—but there's also something else, something she will not admit, can not admit, not even to herself, not even when she's in the privacy of her own house, surrounded by late night and silence.
She will not admit this.
That she sometimes thinks that there's no one to be left in the state he's in, were she to die.
That she sometimes wonders what it'd be like, to be loved like that, with that half-wild desperation that he loves a ghost, with that self-destructive need to avenge her, with that way he will never forget her.
She will not admit this.)