Title: Missing From Me (2/2)
Rating: PG
Characters: Kurt Weller, Oscar
Summary: So this is the fiancé.

A/N: An unintended follow-up to the first chapter. Please enjoy.

There's a man standing by her grave when he drives up the next month to pay his respects. Weller sees him from afar, as he's getting out of his car, but he doesn't immediately think anything of the man. The visitor isn't standing directly in front of Jane's grave, more like off to the side, and so he tells himself the man's just a wanderer. Weller's seen men like that before, strolling through graveyards as if exploring them, stopping at tombstones that interest them. Wondering after the dead and their stories and those that they left behind.

Weller holds the bouquet of flowers—daffodils, this time—in his hand as he heads up along the path towards her row. He can see the lilies from the other month, still at the foot of the grave where he left them, but wilted now, tarnished from the punishing winds and rains they've been suffering under these past few months. He'll take them away with him when he leaves the new bouquet, just as he's done every month since she died. The spent flowers will sit in his passenger seat as he drives home, and he'll try not to imagine the woman that used to sit there instead, with her endless tattoos and bottomless mysteries and disappeared memory and those bright green eyes, so much like Taylor's…

Visiting her grave is, thankfully, something that Dr. Borden doesn't chastise him for doing. Grieving can be good, Agent Weller. Painful, yes, but necessary to move on. Weller had just nodded at that statement when Borden had said it the other week, the same way he nodded through all of his mandated weekly sessions with Borden—ones he's been made to submit to ever since he'd lost his shit over Jane's dead body and Sarah had called the trauma police on him.

Weller still can't decide if it's easier or harder having the sessions with Borden, instead of another psychiatrist. On the plus side, Borden doesn't need to have Jane explained to him, in all her unknown and yet still-classified detail. On the downside, Borden is also one of the few that knows about Taylor. And he has endless, prying questions. Even the way he says How are you today, Agent Weller? is too much sometimes.

These past few months, Weller's found himself taking to visiting Jane's grave just so he can have some peace from it all. Borden treats him like a damaged invalid; the team hardly speaks to him; Mayfair worries about his ability to do his job properly; and Sarah… God, it's like she's back to playing mom again. She makes his breakfast, keeps a sharp eye on his alcohol intake, and asks where he's going whenever he so much as glances at the front door of their apartment.

Being with Jane is nice. Relaxing, almost, now that he's passed through the numb phase, and the angry phase, and finally landed into dull, regretful acceptance. She doesn't ask any questions, doesn't place any blame, doesn't worry about his mental state and when—not if, but when—he'll relapse.

She doesn't breathe or speak or exist, either, but those little caveats he can look over. For now, at least.

When he finally makes his way over to her grave, the man is still standing there beside it, and Weller can't help himself, he glances sidelong at the visitor suspiciously, wondering why he's here. The man looks young—very early thirties, maybe—but he's made even younger by his outfit: dark jeans, black hoodie zipped the whole way up and thrown over his head, hands shoved deep in his pockets. Weller can't see his face, but he expects piercings, tattoos. In the presence of Jane's grave, Weller winces at the uncharitable thought; such alterations are not merely for aimless punk kids and delinquents. He should know better than to judge. He should be kinder, after what happened to her.

Weller busies himself with picking up the weathered lilies and depositing the fresh daffodils. He feels watched, judged, with this man standing not five feet from him, on the other side of the grave, and he doesn't know what to do. He feels like he should say something, give a tribute, as he deposits the new flowers and takes away the old. But he says nothing. He didn't say anything at her funeral, either.

For a few silent seconds, Weller stands there, lilies in hand, staring down at the daffodils, and tracing his eyes over the curves of Jane's name carved into the polished stone. He tries to ignore the man at his side, but it proves impossible: he can't stop stealing glances at this odd visitor, can't stop wondering why in the world he's here. But Weller doesn't bother asking; he knows there's no way this man knew Jane. He's probably just here on a lark, amused that he's found a gravestone with the name "Jane Doe" carved into it. How often do you come across that?

Weller watches the grave then, doing his best to forget the man's presence beside him as he runs through his apologies to her in his head. He repeats I'm sorrys like a devout person might recite Hail Marys. He knows they won't amount to anything, but he feels like he should try, at least, to repent a little. Borden hadn't outlawed that, either, though he did mention, again, that Jane's death wasn't his fault. As if saying that would somehow make it true.

He's halfway through yet another mea culpa when the man speaks.

"You put the wrong name on her headstone, you know."

At first, Weller's too surprised that the man is speaking to him to actually formulate a response immediately. He turns to the man, but the hooded figure is still facing forward, looking ahead. His head is bowed a bit. Kurt swallows, his heart suddenly beating a little too fast in his chest. "Well, we didn't know her name before—"

The words are hardly out of Weller's mouth before the realization jolts through him: This man knew her before—the real her.

"Doesn't matter anymore," the man whispers to himself, as if reading Weller's mind. He shifts his feet a bit, moving for the first time, Weller imagines, in hours. Then he turns towards Weller, and pulls his hands from his pockets, waving them in front of his chest in a brief mockery of excitement. "Ta-da, here I am. Somebody who actually knows who she was, before. Bet you thought you'd never live to see the day you came across one of us, huh, Agent Weller?"

"I…" Weller just stares, not knowing what to say. The man is staring at him now, a ghost of a smile on his lips even though there is nothing about this conversation, or this circumstance, that is worth smiling about. And beneath the façade of exhilaration the man offers, that Weller's quickly beating heart offers, he can sense the pain. Weller can see it, in fact: he can see it in the tautness of the tendons in the man's neck; he can see it in the surprisingly bright redness surrounding, even discoloring, his eyes. Weller looks at the man and wonders if this is what he himself looked like when Sarah found him holding Jane's dead body. Had he looked this desperate, this crazed? This… heartbroken?

"You were supposed to do your part, you know," the man says, and the sudden fury in it draws Weller right back to the present, to this unknown man standing next to him, looking, suddenly, very dangerous. "You were supposed to protect her. If it should come to it, you were supposed to give your life for hers. That was the deal." He says the words angrily, roughly, as if trying to impose these rules of his on the now-ruined present. As if saying them aloud could put Weller in that grave instead of her. "That's why it was you, you know," the man says a moment later, his voice softer, his eyes falling to the ground, then the daffodils, then her name etched in stone. "We knew you'd do whatever it took to keep her safe; that's why we picked you. You would've looked at her, seen nothing but that little girl, and you would've died rather than see her get lost again. You would've died for her, just like I would've, and goddamn it—"

Why didn't you die for her?

The empty air around them asks the question neither can quite manage to say. The man swallows the words, catches his breath, and Weller finds himself glad the man didn't manage to say it aloud, because Weller doubts he would've been able to answer it properly. The truth is, he has no excuse, no reason for why he didn't die for her. He failed Jane just like he failed Taylor, and the only thing he can say in his defense is the same answer as ever: I wasn't in the right place. I realized too late. I came running as soon as I figured it out, but—

"I've… I've been trying to do my best, with her gone, to keep going it all going. To keep everything… on the right course, like she would've wanted. But it's so hard…"

The man is shaking now, convulsing, and Weller wishes he had his gun, because he knows grieving people tend to lash out. He, himself, has done so. But he hasn't been given his gun back yet. Fucking Borden has not yet labeled him fit for field duty, the bastard.

So he is stuck here, weaponless, with the only person the team has ever come across that has knowledge of Jane's past—a man who, it seems, is just about on the cusp on a nervous breakdown.

Not for the first time, Weller wishes he were down in the ground with her.

"She was better at this than me," the man whispers, no longer looking at Weller, no longer looking at anything. He's lost somewhere with that grave, with the woman who later became Jane. "She was always better, that's why she got the job. Because she—she always knew what to do, knew how to keep going, despite all odds." When he laughs quietly, a half-sob, half-gasp, Weller tries not to jump in place at the sharp, ugly sound. "Even when everything went wrong, she'd figure it out. We'd be fucked, we'd be about to be get made, and she'd sit down with me for a second and she'd go, 'Okay, Oscar. This is what we're going to do.' And then we'd come up with a contingency plan, just like that. Just out of her sheer force of will to survive, to see the mission completed." He smiles a little to himself, and then suddenly glances over to Weller. Despite their redness, his eyes are sharp, piercing almost, and Weller finds he can't look away. He clutches the lilies tighter in his hand, wishing he had a gun instead. "She was still like that with you, wasn't she? She still thought of everything. Still always got the job done, no matter the odds. No matter the blank slate in her head."

Weller doesn't bother answering. He's realizing now that this man—Oscar—probably knows all the answers to the questions he's asking. Weller wonders how long Oscar's been looking after Jane, keeping an eye on them all from afar.

Weller knows he should feel violated. For his own sake, if not for Jane's. But he feels oddly… vindicated. Here, finally, is living, breathing proof of this whole insane conspiracy that sent Jane to him. Here, finally, is someone with answers.

Weller's just about to start asking his questions when he sees something bright flash in Oscar's hands. He frowns, staring, wondering what he has between his fists, before Oscar's fingers part for a second and Weller can see clearly.

He's holding a ring. A diamond ring.

So this is the fiancé.

Weller remembers, vaguely, reading about this man in one of the files he'd filched from Borden's office. He'd been searching for his own file, desperate to know how Borden was reading him, and when he'd be let back on active duty, but his eye had first been caught by a file labeled Doe, Jane, before he'd gotten anywhere close to Weller, Kurt, and he hadn't been able to resist. She's dead, he told himself as he grabbed the file, and smuggled it home along with his own, as if such a fact permitted him to invade the privacy of her shattered, washed-out mind. She's dead, he reminded himself as he got drunk and read over her private confessions to Borden, read over her thoughts, her fears, her hopes, her dreams. Read over her admission of a sex dream, in which she could remember little more than the fact that she was wearing an engagement ring and that the man she was with had a tree tattooed on his inner right forearm.

Weller would bet his life—regardless of how little it might be worth these days—that if he reached over and lifted the right sleeve of Oscar's hoodie, there'd be a tall tree with deep roots waiting for him there.

The thought turns his stomach at the tortured reality of it—at the fact that she actually did have people looking out for her, counting on her, caring for her—and Weller suddenly feels intrusive, standing here. He feels ugly and dirty and too close to this man and his dead fiancée. He feels like a stranger forcing his way into an exceedingly intimate moment, and he wants to run, wants to remove himself from it.

He starts to back away, clutching the lilies tight as if they were some kind of shield, thinking he should grab the daffodils before he goes, too, so there's nothing of him left here with them.

"It's fine," Oscar whispers, somehow sensing his retreat even though the man's got his back to Weller. "You don't have to leave."

"It's just… Privacy," Weller says stupidly. Surely this man has a greater claim to be alone with her grave than he does. It wasn't like his connection with Jane was borne out of anything more than his name tattooed between her shoulderblades. They hadn't been in love; they hadn't planned to spend their lives together; they hadn't made promises over a ring…

But Oscar just shrugs at the excuse Weller offers. "She never cared much for privacy. I mean, you saw the tattoos, right?" Weller waits, but there is no bite, no anger, in the other man's voice. He just sounds tired. "Does a woman that cares about her privacy decide to tattoo her entire body and then place herself, naked, in one of the most crowded spots in the entire world?" He shakes his head, answering his own question. "No. She does not."

Weller doesn't bother pointing out that the privacy mention had been more for Oscar's sake than Jane's. The man looks too far gone already as it is.

"I just…"

Oscar starts to speak, only to stop.

Weller watches him out of the corner of his eye, wondering if it's worse that he's loitering here, or if it'll be worse if he leaves. In the end, he just ends up standing there, waiting for the moment the other man orders him away. He will gladly head back to his car the second he's given an out.

"I wanted to… to leave it with her," Oscar whispers, and Weller watches as the man holds the ring tight between thumb and index finger. It shakes visibly as he holds it out towards the grave, like some sort of horrible offering. Weller thinks, again, that he really should not be here to witness this. "I feel like…" Oscar's voice is hoarse and he takes a second to catch his breath, to marshal his emotions. Weller watches him close his eyes, breathe long and slow, and then open them again. "I feel like… Like maybe she should have it back. It was mine, at the beginning, but it was… It was always hers, you know? I feel like she should have it. Should keep it."

Weller has to bite his tongue so he won't say aloud that Oscar should've just put it in her coffin when they buried her. It wasn't like this man, her fiancé, was invited to her funeral to pay his respects.

"I don't want it to get stolen, though," Oscar continues softly, thinking aloud. "I want to leave it with her, for her, but not just… Not just out on the slab like it's…"

A bouquet of flowers? Weller thinks, but doesn't say. Neither does Oscar.

There's silence for a long moment, while they each try and figure out something else to say, to move past the awkwardness.

"You could bury it," Weller suggests finally, not even know why he's saying this, or where it's coming from.

But Oscar smiles a little at the suggestion. He looks even younger when he smiles, if that's possible. "Bury it, yeah," he murmurs, nodding along. "That might… I could do that. Maybe tonight, I could come back and…" He trails off, thinking.

Weller lets him go, not having anything else to say, or anything else to do. He has his old flowers in his hands, and the new ones have been deposited at the foot of her grave, and it is far past time for him to leave. But there is still this man waiting here, this man with his lost fiancée and his disappeared future and his red eyes…

Weller can't just leave him with nothing like this. Not after how she died.

"Look, I want you to know that I—I tried to protect her. I tried to do my job, tried to—to die for her." Weller's throat is growing tight already, but he forces the rest out anyway. "I tried, okay, that day, and—and later, I tried—"

"I know, Agent Weller."

Oscar's voice is quiet, soothing, and Weller wonders if he's been keeping track of them all still these past few months even despite Jane's death. Was he alerted when Sarah had to call 911 and rush him to the emergency room? Had Oscar kept an eye on his hospital room, kept a clock of the hours until he was let off suicide watch? Has he been perusing Borden's files on his mental state too?

Weller shuts his eyes, avoiding the questions. He doesn't need the answers to them, not now, and probably not ever. He takes a breath, pushes his shoulders back, and finally opens his eyes to take his leave. He's walked only ten steps away from Jane's grave when Oscar calls out to him.

"Do you still want to know her real name?" There is a beat of silence and then Oscar adds, "I know how important that… mystery was to you, is all. If you want to know..." Weller closes his eyes, and pictures the man shrugging his slim shoulders as he pauses. "It doesn't matter much anymore, with her gone," he says finally. "I can tell you, if you want to know."

Oscar trails off then, waiting, and Weller thinks on it for a while. A positive answer about her identity would bring him closure, he thinks, the voice in his head sounding much like Borden's. It might bring him some sort of peace. Maybe.

Or it might just torture him with all the missed opportunities, the squandered time.

Finally, Weller glances over his shoulder. He finds Oscar is already staring after him, and he shakes his head, a quiet "No, I don't want to know" leaving his lips.

Oscar nods calmly, somehow not surprised, not even by this decision. "Yeah, I get it," he murmurs. He still has the ring in his hand, and Weller watches him rub it between two fingers, like a talisman. "Let her be, right?" He sighs, his shoulders sinking slowly, his thin body already getting smaller as he turns back to the grave. "Let her rest, for once."

Weller doesn't argue, and instead lets his silence be his agreement. Jane—or whoever she is, was—certainly deserves the rest. He leaves the grave, and the man standing beside it, without another word.

Author's Note: Thank you for reading! Would love to hear your thoughts. :)