#i'm not a particularly angry person so this was...wild to read in my drafts once i was fully awake

[nachosncheeze]

The Company You Were Keeping (Blindspot 3x11 fic/extra scene)

Also on AO3.

So on the topic of this wild exchange from 3x11:

Weller: I wanna apologize for the way I acted with Clem. He's a good guy. It's just the thought of you with someone else....

Jane: I'm sorry too. I should have told you.

Weller: We all should have done a lot of things.

The only thing I could think of that would make Weller apologizing after Jane's bombshell make any sense would be if maybe somewhere in there they'd had a fight and he said something shitty to her, sort of like early season 2, casting aspersions on her associates and by extension her as well. Well, the lovely @lurkingwhump encouraged me to try to imagine it and write it down. Apparently my 4am brain decided that Weller should take the nuclear option (conveniently, also prompting Jane to retaliate with the nuclear confession option). Anyway, I'm sorry that out of several ideas you've cheered me on to write, the first one I finished ended up being so mean! I don't think I could have planned this if I tried, but here it is anyway. 😅

Content warning for mentions of infidelity.

~~~~~

Jane and Weller rode together to the airstrip. An FBI jet waited to carry them to Berlin, where they would - they would - find Jane’s daughter and bring her home. Jane’s former associate, their transient new teammate Clem, would be joining them at the airstrip shortly for the flight over. Kurt wasn't particularly happy about using a barely-vetted stranger, but maybe he'd at least get a little more insight into Jane's life during her time on the run.

The drive was quiet, the tension palpable. It wasn’t long ago that Kurt had stood in heartbroken disbelief, watching Jane take off her wedding ring and walk out of their apartment. She had looked so angry when she said she was leaving, but the look she threw back across the threshold just before she closed the door was filled with betrayal and pain. The distance between them seemed like a million miles, but Kurt felt he needed to be with her on this mission. He was still hoping they could work it out, and this was his chance to take the first step to making it right. He wouldn’t let her do this alone, and however angry she might be, he couldn't trust an unknown element to have her or Avery’s backs. He was going to bring them both back. It was his only choice.

Jane was clearly not happy that Reade was forcing her to take him with her, though. Weller was even less happy that Reade had had to make it an order.

“So,” Weller asked mildly as they mounted the steps onto the jet, “is there anything I should know about this Clem guy?”

“Just what I said before,” Jane answered noncommittally as they stowed their go-bags and took seats on opposite sides of the table. “He’s got connections all over Europe, and he’s one of the best there is.”

“And you trust him?”

“Yes,” she answered, after a moment of hesitation so brief that he might have imagined it. They lapsed into silence as she pulled out her phone, assuming the conversation was over. Weller, it seemed, was not ready to let it rest. After a too-brief moment of quiet, he tried again.

“You say you two have worked together a lot.” She nodded without looking up from her screen. He tried to keep his tone neutral, curious. “So how do these jobs usually work? Do you notify the authorities? What kinds of weapons did you use?”

She put down her phone. “Tranqs, usually,” she replied with a half-shrug. “Live rounds when necessary. No authorities. Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing,” she finished dismissively, glancing down at the screen in her lap.

That irritated him. They were on an FBI jet, using FBI resources, and embarking under the auspices of the FBI’s investigations into Roman and Hank Crawford. This wasn’t just another mercenary job like those she'd done while she was on the run; they were the authorities, and she didn’t seem to be taking that seriously. They were responsible not just for rescuing Avery, but for anything that went wrong along the way. He was responsible.

“But leaving bodies is the last resort,” he ventured, trying not to let his frustration bleed through.

She shrugged again, turning most of her attention back to her phone instead of him. “We try to work without fatalities, but sometimes there’s no other option," she said without looking up.

His voice took on an edge as he tried to pull her focus. “And no authorities, so the first choice is to leave the kidnappers to walk off when they wake up, free to go abduct someone else?”

His challenge had the desired effect. She pocketed her phone and clenched her jaw briefly as she met his eyes. “It wasn’t like that,” she attempted to reason, but she could feel her temper rising in response to his interrogation. It almost felt like he was challenging her integrity, when he should know better than anyone where her morals stood. “The focus is getting the victim out alive. That’s the priority.”

“Sounds to me like that's where the money is."

"I don't see you complaining that we still have our apartment," she bit back irritably. Okay, maybe that was a low blow, considering it was his search for her that had nearly bankrupted them in the first place. But she'd made it right. They kept their home and most of their savings were replenished. The loneliness had been crushing, but in the end the practical outcome, at least, wasn't all that different than if they'd still had two incomes that whole time. And Kurt and Bethany had both been safe, while Avery was… she stopped there. She couldn't let herself think about it.

Weller interpreted the dig about the apartment about as well as could be expected, which was not well at all. That had been a terrible time for him; guilt about Avery's supposed death by his hand, fear for Jane, shame that if he found her safe he may have failed to provide a home for her to return to. Maybe she had brought their bills up to date, but she had recently walked out of that same apartment. Had she really been invested in calling it home, or had she just felt guilty that they’d nearly lost it? He tried another tactic. "Did you make up that playbook on your own? Or did this Clem guy train you?”

“You know what I can do; I was good at it on my own,” she answered impatiently. “But yeah, once I had an experienced partner who knew their way around the industry, I got better.” The way he kept dismissively referring to Clem as ‘some guy’ was starting to rub her the wrong way. The man had volunteered, for no other reason than loyalty, to help rescue the daughter that Kurt himself had concealed from her and left in the hands of gangsters for over half a year. She couldn’t understand why he was so hung up on the hows and whys of the job. If it offended his boy scout sensibilities, he should have stayed home. It wasn’t like she wanted him there anyway.

And he knew it. Now both of them were angry.

"Better at rescuing people?” he challenged rashly, “Or just better at ignoring the law to do it?"

“He doesn't ignore the law,” she defended. “K&R just means skirting it a little sometimes. I told you, killshots only when necessary. Anyway, how is what you and I do with the FBI any different? We take people down all the time, often fatally. You do what you have to, to achieve the objective.” 

“We’ve never just left a pile of bodies behind,” he replied scornfully. “We make arrests, there are support teams, coroners; checks and balances; investigations to make sure we don’t get out of line. Our work is about justice. There are procedures-”

She cut him off. “We followed procedures, too. Just because they’re not written down in some library doesn’t make them any less effective. If government procedures could get everyone home safely, K&R teams wouldn’t be necessary. It’s the kidnappers that are the bad guys, Kurt, not us. I don’t get why you’re so mad about this."

"K&R exists outside the law, Jane, and law enforcement exists for a reason. Hell, we are law enforcement, and that hasn't stopped us. We've saved a whole lot of lives, and we've never had to push the line to do it.” She rolled her eyes at his generous assessment of their team's positions relative to 'the line', but he wasn’t done. “There are limits. Maybe you were gone a little too long, and you've forgotten."

Her lip twisted and brow set at how patronizing his last comment was, and though she chose to try to overlook it, she was less than successful at keeping the rapidly hardening edge from her voice. "Sometimes, the law can't get the job done. We can't rescue everyone, and individual kidnappings aren't like the large organized threats or conspiracies we deal with. Whatever the Bureau may think, sometimes negotiation is the right path. And when it's not, extractions have to be fast and efficient. Investigations and warrants are a waste of time; most kidnap victims aren't lucky enough to be able to afford the delay. But we always got to them before it was too late. Sometimes, the ends justify the means."

The law is a waste of time; the ends justify the means. Where had he heard that before? It sounded an awful lot like what Shepherd and Roman adhered to, and it went against everything he stood for. Everything he had thought she stood for, too. "So what,” he grumbled carelessly, “you want to go back to being Remi? Skip due process and work outside the law, slum around with criminals and terrorists again just because they get results a little faster? Is that it?"

There it was, the t-word. The motherfucking t-word. She may have been gone from his life almost as long as she'd been present, but the time she'd spent with him hadn't been idle. She'd proven herself again and again, and he was still carrying around the name 'terrorist' somewhere in his mind? She snapped, shooting him a look of cold fury. "Clem is not a criminal; he's a good man, and he's doing this job to help fix your mistake. And... I don't even know what to say to the rest of that. After all this time, that's still what you think of me?"

He looked away, grinding his teeth behind a grimace of contrition. Good, she thought, at least he has the decency to feel bad about that. Finally he looked back at her, his jaw re-set in his anger. "You're right, that's not what I think about you," he conceded. "But what am I supposed to think, Jane? I’ve seen the kind of company you were keeping. Who the hell was Alejandro Calderon? And I met Dwire Lee. Why are you defending this guy so hard, anyway?"

"He was my friend," she said, her voice dangerously low. And then, before thinking about it, she quietly spat, "We became close. Very close."

The admission was cool, but as the implication registered, Weller's face froze as if she’d shouted it and slapped him. Every one of his emotions suddenly vanished behind a mask of stone, and her heart plummeted into her stomach. Why had she said that? It was over. Truth be told, it was over before whatever 'it' was had ever really begun. It was over because all she could see, all she could think about had been the man in front of her, the one she'd just stabbed clean through the heart of. She shouldn't have told him. And definitely not now, not like that. But Avery was god only knew where, if she was even alive - she needed a K&R specialist, not the FBI, and he wouldn't stop attacking her best hope. She couldn't afford to back down now.

"So you were in a relationship with this guy?" he asked quietly.

"You and I were apart; I didn't think we could ever see each other again," she said defensively, letting irritation be her shield.

"Were you ever gonna tell me?"

"You really wanna play that card with me? Look, it was over. I was trying not to hurt you." All the same, she could see the pain seeping through his mask, and something like panic started to rise in her gut. 

They hadn't fought like this since those first few weeks after the NSA sent him to recapture her. Clearly, neither of them knew how to cope with it any better now than they did then. Maybe they were even handling it worse. She was apparently still a terrorist with criminals for friends, and now she'd effectively revealed that she'd made him a cuck. At this point they were both just lashing out to hurt each other as much as possible.

It was hard to say who was winning that battle.

She tried to lower the temperature by finding something they could agree on. "You know, maybe we should just stop working so hard to protect each other, because it just seems to make things worse." 

Weller was deathly still. Before he could respond or she could say anything more, she heard her name behind her. Clem’s timing couldn't have been worse. She closed her eyes and sighed heavily before reluctantly looking over her shoulder in greeting.

"Hey. Clem," the newcomer introduced himself as he stepped forward and offered his hand. Weller shook it stiffly.

"Kurt," he answered tersely.

"...Ah," Clem responded as he looked between the two of them. Kurt's stony gaze never left her face as she shifted over to let Clem take the seat beside her. She answered with a warning glare. Clearly they had a lot to talk about, but now wasn't the time. "So is this gonna be…" Clem questioned awkwardly, looking between them again.

"Jane says you're good," Weller interrupted, "so what have you got?"