Chapter Text
Jess still has mud from Ordos between her toes the day she lands at JFK. The photograph on her fake passport is of a businesswoman, and reassembling that persona takes forever in the tiny plane bathroom. It's the first time she's styled her hair in a month, the first time she's worn perfume in three.
The bullet hole in her belly aches constantly, but she downs a couple of oxycontin for the pain along with a snoot of cocaine to counter the sedation, and she's ready to go. She assumes a lofty demeanour, with her stolen rollaway luggage and her glass jewellery, and breezes towards the queue for entry into the USA.
The passport holds. She makes it all the way to the line of cabs without starting to fade. She falls asleep on the way to New Rochelle.
The motel is ugly, sparse and cold, but the sleep she gets there is the best she's had in weeks. She tells herself that this feeling of security is thanks to her good work, her own care and planning for this eventual departure from the agency. If she hadn't organised those papers in Turkey, if she hadn't made sure to always keep an exit strategy in play, she'd be dead in the mud in China.
In the middle of the night, lit by reflected neon creeping in through the worn curtains, Jess admits to herself that it just feels better to be closer to John.
John is on a night shift rotation at the moment, so he arrives at Montefiore-New Rochelle hospital at around 9:30 at night. He's still driving the same black truck Jess saw the last time she checked in on him. It's in good shape, despite the years, but then, John takes care of his things.
From between two SUVs, Jess watches John park, grab a backpack from the passenger's seat, click the remote to lock the truck. He has good awareness of his surroundings, chooses the best-lit end of the parking structure, walks quickly and easily towards the elevator. That's good. He's not a soldier anymore, but he hasn't let those habits lapse.
"Hey, John!"
Jess jumps and then for a few seconds she's doubled over, seeing stars. She hears footsteps over the concrete, and for a confused moment she thinks that John has seen her, is coming to talk to her.
"You had that head trauma kid yesterday, didn't you?" The voice came from a tall slender black woman. She's in scrubs, with the same lanyard round her neck as John's, and obviously on her way home. "She came through the surgery okay, they're transferring her to Pediatric now – I thought I'd tell you before you walk in and see her gone."
Leaning against the muddy tire, Jess brings her knees to her chest, presses her mouth into the cloth of her pants to stop herself from crying out.
"Thanks." John's voice is the same – easy, gruff, with a recognisable kindness to it that used to make Jess glow. "Little fighter, that one."
"Yeah," says the female nurse. "She's still got a long road ahead of her."
"Better than no road," John says.
The really scary thing for Jess is that in the moment when she thought he was coming over, she felt relief. At least it would be over. She would finally have to tell John everything. She digs nails into her hand, bites the side of her cheek, tries to get a bit of adrenaline going so that she can extract herself from the situation before she gets everyone killed.
By the time she claws her way back to her feet, John has gone on into the hospital. There's nothing else to do but go back to her cheap motel.
It's still dark when Jess wakes up with her hair plastered to her face and her head floating somewhere up around the popcorn ceiling. The fever is back. She's going to need to track down another round of antibiotics. Another break and enter at a veterinary surgery.
"Fuck you, Kara," she says, and laughs. "Of all the times not to take a headshot."
It's really hard to stop laughing. Jess forces herself to take a cold shower, throws down aspirin and a sachet of motel instant coffee made with cold water. By the time the sun comes up, she's had an amazing, hilarious idea. She's going to the ER. For real, this time, as a patient.
When she gets there, it's the middle of the day. John will be home and sleeping. She'll get some antibiotics, properly targeted IV meds, not random vials stolen from veterinary surgeries in Beijing. Maybe she'll even get an x-ray, and finally see if there are fragments of Kara's hollow point floating inside her.
It's weird to walk in through those sliding doors like a regular person. Jess has come to New Rochelle now and then since John moved to the East Coast, but always surreptitiously, always hiding from both John and the agency. Kara knows, but they'd worked out their issues on this matter early on in their working relationship. Jess is pretty sure that Kara haunted her own family from time to time. As long as neither of them crossed that line, as long as it was just to watch, it was acceptable.
This is so wrong, Jess thinks, settling into the plastic bucket seat in the waiting area. This is more than fevered thinking. This is suicide. It's so liberating.
There's a TV hanging above the admissions desk, and in the middle of the day, it's blaring some made-for-TV disaster movie. Jess keeps her head turned in that direction, but even with a fever, she's still alert for danger.
The triage nurse knows exactly what the wound in her belly means. Sitting on the exam bed, Jess sees his expression change as soon as she lifts the hem of her sweater. He glances up at her face, back at the weeks-old perforation that has scabbed over and opened up multiple times. He's clearly organising words, gauging the best way to broach the subject.
The aim of the game in getting people to do what you want, Kara would have said, is to convince them that what you want is the right thing to do.
"Please," Jess says, her voice high-pitched. "You can't report this. I didn't want to come in at all, but it just… It hurts so much." It's easy to let emotion thicken her words, to let loose the tremor she's been feeling on and off since Ordos. Her hands tremble on the hem of her sweater where she's holding it up. "It was an accident," she says. "He… he wasn't serious about it."
"Cady." Cady is the name she's using. The triage nurse's badge says Raoul, and he has a tiny scar in the shape of a Y distorting his left eyebrow. A knife, thinks Jess. Or maybe a piece of glass. She needs to stop burning through her fake IDs. She's running out of aliases, and now that she's on the run from the agency, it's going to be tricky to make more.
"The mandatory reporting is there for a reason," Raoul says. "You have a right to safety. And so do we." He presses gently on the edge of the wound and Jess lets herself flinch. He sighs, and touches her shoulder. "Let's work on getting you feeling better, and we can talk about it later today."