Ronnie Masters | the MENTALIST (COMPLETE)

the paracosm

Note: thank you guys for your well wishes ❤️ still waiting to hear back about the health thing but literally all I'm letting myself care about right now is my poor lil Ronnie who's just having the worst time.
Hope you like it! Sorry it's late!

"Tell me I'm not dead."

"You are very much not dead."

"Well, in that case, it's not every day that I get significant events bookended by hospital visits."

Jane's crinkly-eyed smile rewarded her grumpy complaint like a breath of fresh air. He had her hand wrapped tightly in his own, his elbows leaned on her bed to be closer. "How are you feeling, sweetheart?"

She closed her eyes and could still see that terrible stall with her own blood all over the floor. "A little numb, honestly."

"That would be the morphine." Jane supplied cheerfully. As he said it, the rush of excitement at her long awaited awakening faded and he looked upon her with solemn sobriety. "I'm so glad you're okay. I know you're unbelievably strong for coming through what you did, but we were so worried."

When his gray eyes watered, Ronnie quirked an eyebrow at him. "I promise I'll be ok." She gripped his hand as tightly as she could and felt the sluggishness of her muscles as the morphine slogged its way through her veins. "I knew you'd find me."

His cheeks reddened ever so slightly, and his frown turned sheepish. "I couldn't, actually. My focus sort of slipped—I just kept..." he drifted off, a haunting look entering his eyes. A second passed and he shook it off. "Anyhow, it was the FBI who found you. The Behavioral Analysis Unit from Quantico. They brought you back."

She remembered the team that recovered them. She'd been told she blacked out as soon as she was loaded into the ambulance, but she remembered the team.

"And Cho? Is he good? He was hurt."

Jane straightened, happy to deliver good news. "He's better off than you are, actually. Lisbon's with him now. He should be released tomorrow."

Ronnie sank back into her pillow in relief. "Good."

The mentalist watched her carefully, moving his thumb over the back of her hand rhythmically. "You don't seem quite as shell shocked as I expected you to be."

"It will come. Don't worry." She knew it from experience. Keeping control of her psyche worked well at distracting her in the moment, but it did little to soften the blow in the years to come.

Jane glanced at her monitor as her heart rate picked up and gradually began to slow back down. He squeezed her hand comfortingly, gray eyes tracing the wearied expressions on her drawn face.

Feathering his fingertips over the veins on the back of her hand, he spent the next few minutes detailing the cases that she'd missed. He told her about the Carnelian, Inc. case where the company's VP of Human Resources fell to his death at the mercy of a sabotaged parachute, an incident claimed by Joe Q. Public. A jaded former employee seemed to be culpable but was eventually exonerated when the CEO of Carnelian rigged a bomb under his own bed and tipped his hand by defusing it himself the next day when Jane bumbled about and activated it.

"It was quite a spectacular case, all sorts of pomp and circumstance. We had to work it without Cho, of course. He never strayed from trying to track you down. But, you know, I think I finally made some headway with Lisbon. We spent hours out there on the road—made small talk, did some trust exercises...can you believe she doesn't trust me?"

Jane grinned at the little smile on her face, pressed a tender kiss to the back of her hand, and told her about a star-studded case on Hollywood Boulevard, a former state representative murdered by his daughter's boyfriend at the behest of his own wife.