Chapter Text
6x10
It was probably the way he held the socks that finally undid what was left of her anger.
Not all of it. That had started slipping the moment she walked into the detention centre and realised, with a mixture of exasperation and reluctant admiration, exactly what he’d done.
Because the truly maddening part was that his plan had worked.
Of course it had worked.
Patrick Jane had vanished in the middle of their first case back together, manipulated and gotten arrested in the process, and still got the FBI on its knees. Which meant Teresa Lisbon had spent the last several hours cycling through a deeply unpleasant combination of fury, relief, professional admiration, and the very specific exhaustion that only Patrick Jane had ever been able to produce in her.
She’d started this day fully intending to stay angry with Patrick Jane for at least another twelve hours, preferably longer if she could sustain it.
She’d earned that anger. Carefully captivated it, in fact. Strengthened it while dealing with paperwork. Quietly rehearsed several excellent speeches about recklessness, emotional manipulation, and how many times exactly one woman could reasonably be expected to forgive the same deeply infuriating man before qualifying for psychiatric evaluation.
Then she handed him the socks.
And honestly.
It was difficult to sustain righteous indignation against a man who looked genuinely moved by footwear.
And just like that, the whole thing started dissolving beneath her feet.
Which frankly felt unfair.
Because she’d been angry. Truly angry. Angry in the way that only became possible with someone you cared for enough to keep disappointing you properly. He had vanished again. Circumvented everyone again. Turned their first case back together into a negotiation tactic with the FBI because apparently even after two years on a tropical island he still couldn’t approach life like a normal person for more than six consecutive minutes.
And the worst part was that she’d let herself hope this time might be different.
That maybe when he came back, things between them would stop feeling like trying to hold water in her hands.
But then he’d looked up at her from that prison cot, sun browned from the island, beard rough along his jaw, blue eyes too bright in the dim light, and said, "We?" with this startled little lift in his voice when she mentioned they would be working together again.
And before she could recover from that, there were the socks.
He was still holding them now, fingers curled loosely around the fabric like he was afraid somebody might take them back.
"Thank you," he said again quietly, still studying them.
Lisbon crossed her arms tighter, mostly because her emotional composure was slipping at an alarming rate.
"They're socks, Jane."
"Yes," he said softly, as if that explained everything. Which, infuriatingly, it did.
Because Patrick Jane had always been like this. Entirely unmoved by things that would devastate normal people, yet somehow capable of treating tiny gestures like sacred offerings. The man could survive murder, grief, exile, imprisonment, and psychological collapse with less visible emotion than he currently seemed to feel about wool knitwear.
"The officer said they're releasing you in fifteen minutes," she told him. "They just need to finish the paperwork."
"Okay."
The word came out easy and relaxed, as if she’d informed him a cab was running late rather than that he was currently in federal custody.
Then, apparently deciding this conversation had reached a satisfying conclusion, he leaned back against the mattress, one arm folding behind his head as his eyes drifted shut.
The socks remained resting against his chest.
Lisbon stared at him for a long moment.
Honestly, sometimes she wanted to shake him.
Not because he was careless. Careless implied a lack of understanding, and Patrick Jane understood far too much. That was the problem. Somewhere along the line, somewhere between losing everything and surviving it anyway, he had developed this strange weightlessness around suffering, as though the worst thing the world could do had already introduced itself properly and everything afterward had become background noise.
Prison didn’t frighten him. Uncertainty didn’t frighten him. Loneliness, discomfort, instability, danger, most people spent their lives arranging themselves carefully around those things, trying to avoid them, soften them, insure themselves against them. Jane simply walked through them now with that infuriating calmness, like a man who no longer entirely believed catastrophe belonged to him anymore.
Sometimes Lisbon thought grief had burned something essential out of him years ago. Not his kindness, somehow he had kept that, but his instinct for self preservation. As though after Angela and Charlotte, his own comfort had permanently stopped mattering in the same way.
Which was why he could sleep peacefully in prison cells. Why he could disappear onto islands for two years and somehow return tanned and smiling. Why he could negotiate with federal agencies like a man haggling over theatre tickets instead of his future.
But when something did reach him, when something managed to slip past all that distance he carried between himself and the world, he felt it completely.
She’d handed him a pair of socks in a detention cell and somehow his whole face had softened around them, his fingers curling into the fabric like the gesture meant everything.
And that was the thing that undid her in the end.
Because Lisbon knew, with a certainty that made her chest ache, that the fact that she’d thought about him while buying them mattered far more to him than the socks themselves ever could.
And suddenly all her anger became tangled up with something much worse.
Guilt.
Because she’d spent days furious at him for running again. Furious that on their very first case back together he’d disappeared without warning, without even giving her the chance to stand beside him properly before deciding alone what was best.
Furious because she’d uprooted her entire life in Washington for him.
Not officially for him, of course. Officially it’d been for work, for the task force, for the deal he had insisted on making with the FBI. But somewhere underneath all the practical explanations sat the humiliating truth that she had agreed because some part of her had believed his "we" meant something. That asking for her had meant something.
And then barely days later he’d run again anyway.
Left her standing there feeling foolish for ever believing this time might be different.
Worse, for a few awful hours, she’d thought he might actually be gone for good again. Another disappearing act. Another version of Patrick Jane choosing absence over staying.
That was what had hurt.
Yet here he was, staring down at a pair of stupid white socks like they were proof of something precious and nearly lost.
And God, she hated how much that hurt.
Because it made her realise, all over again, how deeply he cared when he allowed himself to care at all. How much feeling existed underneath all that ease and humour and careful deflection. How much of him was always redirected into magic tricks and jokes and observations because the full force of it was probably too much to live with continuously.
And the truly humiliating part was that despite everything, despite the anger and disappointment and exhaustion, despite all the promises she’d made herself about being smarter this time, she could already feel herself forgiving him completely.
Over socks.
Absolutely pathetic.
Next to her, Jane, still lying on his back, shifted slightly.
"Stop that," he murmured and frowned faintly. "Stop what?"
"That thing where you decide this is somehow your fault."
It shouldn’t have surprised her anymore, the way he seemed to reach conclusions she hadn’t actually spoken aloud. Still, there was something deeply irritating about it.
"I wasn't," she said automatically.
Jane made a soft sound that suggested he did not believe her for even a second.
"You had every right to be angry with me," he murmured. "Still do."
Then, after a moment, without opening his eyes, he asked quietly, "You staying here?"
"Someone has to drive you," she replied.
"Okay."
Then he shifted slightly.
At first she assumed he was simply getting comfortable, but after another second he rolled carefully onto his side, his back facing the wall, leaving a clear stretch of space on the narrow mattress.
Space for her.
Lisbon blinked at him.
He still hadn’t opened his eyes. Had not even acknowledged the invitation aloud. He had simply made room for her with the certainty of somebody who somehow believed this was a reasonable thing to do in a detention cell.
Which it absolutely was not.
But then, neither were they.
That had become increasingly difficult to ignore lately.
There should have been hesitation. Professional boundaries. Common sense. At minimum a passing internal objection from the FBI agent part of her brain.
Instead she found herself staring at the small gap he had left beside him and thinking, with growing exhaustion, well, technically it would almost be impolite not to.
Which was how Teresa Lisbon ended up lying beside Patrick Jane in a prison cell.
If anyone from the FBI could see her now, they would probably start rethinking giving in to his demands. Especially his first demand.
Week one, Teresa. This is your first week at the FBI.