![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Summary: Days after Neal and Sara suddenly disappear, Peter finally has a solid lead. Unfortunately, what he finds there are more questions and a witness unable to answer any of them.
Notes: Written for the awesome artwork “Jane Doe” by the equally awesome![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kanarek13. Fills the “wild card” square on my H/C Bingo Card. Set in Season 3, after “Checkmate”, but with no Kramer in the picture and no commutation hearing for Neal. Unbetaed, so if you spot any grammatical errors or/and typos, please let me know!
Also available on AO3!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 1 - Questions And Answers
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Trinity Hospital
New York City
The first thing she was aware of upon waking was the incessant hammering on the left side of her skull. She tried to come up with a reason for this pain, but was shocked when she found her brain completely empty, except for the most recent memories. What the heck was going on? Why couldn’t she remember anything?
“Oh, you’re awake.”
Though spoken in sotto voce, she startled upon hearing the words coming from the doorway. A young woman, dressed in light blue scrubs, stood there, watching her carefully before making her way over to the bed, her whole demeanor offering a sense of calmness and safety to the frightened woman lying there.
“Hi, my name is Jody,” she gestured to the nametag on her shirt, “and I’m your nurse.” She gave her latest patient a quick once-over. “Are you in any pain?”
“Yeah, my head is hurting like hell.” The two women locked gazes. “Sorry about my choice of words.”
Jody chuckled. “Don’t be. Believe me, I’ve heard much worse.” Seeing the confused look on the other woman’s face, the nurse decided to elaborate. “I’ve got three elder sisters. And all three of them are married to soldiers. So whenever I visit them and I don’t hear any of them cursing up a streak, I have to ask if anything is wrong.”
Despite having no reference to what the nurse was telling her, the redhead in the bed let out a chuckle, if only a short-lived one.
“Jody?”
“Yes, sweetie, what’s up?”
“Where am I?”
“Trinity Hospital, New York City”, Jody answered while fluffing up the spare pillow and exchanging it with the one on the bed.
“What happened to me?”
Sensing the confusion in the question, Jody changed her approach of the topic.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Nothing.” The voice of her most recent Jane Doe was empty, dejected, void of any kind of emotion. Jody gave her arm a light touch, and the woman looked up, her eyes the exact opposite to her voice. “I can’t remember anything.” She took another deep breath. “Not even my name.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FBI Building
White Collar Offices
Like on any other day of the year, the bullpen was buzzing with activity. Well, most of the teams were just doing their usual workload, ranging from copyright infringement and mortgage fraud to forged documents and art theft – except for one.
Ever since the call from the U.S. Marshals about Neal’s anklet being cut came in ten days ago, Special Agent Peter Burke and the rest of his team were only working that case. Reese Hughes transferred any upcoming “normal” case to the other teams while helping Peter’s team in any possible capacity. Kyle Bancroft came up from Washington, also intent on helping them out, but to back up Peter against the Marshals, who wanted nothing more than to put Neal back on their “Most Wanted” list, proving this way that a convicted criminal couldn’t be changed, period.
At first, Peter was more than inclined to agree with them. Ever since the whole disaster with Adler and the submarine loot, things were more than a bit rough between them. Sure, the case ended with Keller behind bars and the loot back in some museums, but the base of the friendship between Peter and Neal was in frays, too damaged by distrust, deception and betrayal. So the chance of Neal running once again was more than just a theory.
But then, only two days after the Marshals, Peter got a worried call from Sara’s boss, one Winston Bosch. According to him, Sara was working one of her most important cases to date, and it wasn’t likely for her not to show up for work, not when she was so close to finalize it. Peter changed his opinion about Neal being on the run once again. At first, it might have looked just like a coincidence, but years of experience, coupled with knowing both Neal and Sara to a degree, had taught Peter otherwise. If these two went missing in the same timeframe, it was more than likely that they were together – either forced or on their own volition.
A soft knock on his office door brought Peter back to reality, and he looked up to see Diana standing in the doorway. Sure, every single agent was working their hardest to find Neal and Sara, including colleagues from other departments like Agent Ruiz from Organized Crime or Kimberly Rice from Missing Persons, but next to himself, Diana was a second driving force in the search. She didn’t give him any reasons, but apparently Caffrey’s charming ways had finally found a way behind her walls too.
“What’s up, Diana?”
“Trinity just called. Sara is awake.”
Diana barely had finished the sentence before Peter was out of his seat and almost out of the door. Three days ago, the hospital had called them that a woman matching Sara’s description was found in an alleyway near them, apparently beaten and drugged. Peter wasn’t so happy when the doctor told him that he had to put her in a medical induced sleep to help her body fight off the drugs in her system, while giving the physical wounds on her face time to heal as well, since Peter had trouble to recognize her beneath all the swelling when he first saw her. Now that she was awake, he hoped that with a little luck, they finally might get the answers they were so desperate to find.
“Peter…”
When Diana’s brain finally caught up with reality, her boss already was halfway through the bullpen, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he heard her voice.
“Yeah?”
“I… I come along. Maybe she will be more talkative when there’s a woman in the room too. We have no idea what she’s been through, so no offence, boss…”
“Okay,” Peter answered, holding the glass door open for her. Within the next minutes, the two agents were on their way to Trinity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Twenty minutes later, they were waiting in the hallway outside Sara’s room for Dr. Grant. Peter was eager to talk to Sara, but Head Nurse Meredith McClellan stopped them with the doctor’s order to have a talk to him first.
“Agent Burke, Agent…”
“Berrigan,” Diana said as an introduction as she and Dr. Grant shook hands.
“Dr. Grant, can we talk to her? Neal is still missing, and she might have the key to solving this case.”
The Chief of Neurology had led the two agents over to the family room in the meantime, and motioned now for them to have a seat.
“Agents, I’m afraid she might not be helpful at all.”
“How is that so, Dr. Grant?” Diana asked, a hint of worry in her voice.
“After she woke up this morning, we ran a range of tests on her. The drugs are mostly out of her system by now, but what worries me the most is the complete amnesia she has developed.”
“Meaning?” Unlike his colleague, Peter wasn’t even attempting to keep his emotions out of his voice. This time, frustration was added to the mix.
“Meaning that she doesn’t remember anything. And with “anything”, I mean anything. She doesn’t know the date, who’s currently sitting in the Oval Office, and most of all, she doesn’t even know her own name.”
Diana couldn’t help but gasp. She knew that victims of very violent crimes developed temporary amnesia to help their brain to come to terms with the crime itself, but what Dr. Grant just told them didn’t sound like that kind of amnesia at all.
“Is it temporary?” she asked.
“Honestly, I can’t tell that at the moment. She might regain her memories, or at least most of them, but that solely depends or her alone.”
“What do you know from experience?”
Peter asked the next question, and this time, all signs of frustration were gone from his voice, replaced by worry and hints of desperation.
“My experience won’t help us out here. Every amnesia case is different, and even when we have the same parameters, I can’t predict which way this case will go, not as a professional.”
“So what do you suggest? How should we approach her?”
In any other case, Dr. Grant would have chuckled upon having the two agents alternating in asking the questions. But he knew about the urgency and so kept his amusement to himself.
“First and foremost, be patient. When I talked to her this morning, she was trying desperately to answer my questions. If you put too much pressure on her, she might retreat so deep in her brain that we might not get her back anymore.”
Peter and Diana exchanged a look. Apparently, they had one hell of a rocky road ahead of them.
“Second, try to create a calm surrounding. If you go in there, demanding answers and being authoritative, you won’t get anything out of her.”
“But…”
“Agent Burke, have you ever experienced something like amnesia?” Dr. Grant could understand that they needed answers, stat, but he had to protect his patients in any way possible.
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what she’s feeling right now.” He paused, fixing Peter and Diana in their seats with his gaze. “She feels vulnerable. Not knowing who you are, the most basic things that define you, what you do for a living, if you have a bunch of friends or are a workaholic… I always compare that with walking down Fifth Avenue naked during rush hour.”
For several moments, the room was silent, as both agents tried to comprehend what the doctor told them. Then, Diana was the first to ask again.
“But we can talk to her?”
“Yes, you can. But I would like to have Nurse Jody in there with you. She was the first one to talk to Sara after she woke up, and they already have established kind of a connection.”
“I can work with that,” Peter said, the eagerness to talk to his most solid lead in the whole case back in his voice.
“Good, then I let the nurses’ station paging Jody to meet with you.”
With that, the doctor was out of the room, leaving two agents behind who didn’t really know what to think about the whole situation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Another few minutes later, Peter and Diana finally were allowed into Sara’s room. Nurse Jody already was waiting for them, talking to Sara in a quiet voice.
“Agents Burke, Berrigan, I’m Nurse Jody Hemphill.”
“Dr. Grant told us you were the first to talk to Sara when she woke up?” Diana asked.
“Yes, and even though I’m working in this department for the last ten years, my heart always goes out when I see a case like hers.” She paused, taking a breath. “You should have seen her this morning. She was absolutely desperate and dejected by the fact that she couldn’t remember anything. She senses that something very bad has happened, but she can’t access the memories linked to it.”
“Has she mentioned anything?” Again, Diana asked the nurse.
“No, nothing at all. How well do you know her?” She looked from Peter to Diana.
“We worked several cases together, since our work fields overlap on more than one point. Just recently, Diana, Neal and she solved the case of a stolen Stradivari.”
“But she’s not an FBI agent?”
Jody was curious, of that was Peter sure, but he finally got what the doctor told them. They needed to work closely with the hospital staff if they wanted to get anything out of the maze that was Sara’s brain at the moment.
“No, she works for Sterling Bosch, the insurance company. And let me tell you that Sara is excellent in what she’s doing.”
“Agent Burke, you mean she was excellent?”
“No, I meant it exactly the way I said it. I know her to a certain degree, and this woman is, if nothing else, a fierce fighter. So I’m very sure that she will make a full recovery, no matter how long the way might be.”
Sensing that the nurse and the two new arrivals were talking about her, Sara looked up to them, an uncertain smile on her lips. Maybe they could help her uncover the mysteries surrounding her.
TBC
Notes: Written for the awesome artwork “Jane Doe” by the equally awesome
kanarek13. Fills the “wild card” square on my H/C Bingo Card. Set in Season 3, after “Checkmate”, but with no Kramer in the picture and no commutation hearing for Neal. Unbetaed, so if you spot any grammatical errors or/and typos, please let me know!Also available on AO3!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 1 - Questions And Answers
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Trinity Hospital
New York City
The first thing she was aware of upon waking was the incessant hammering on the left side of her skull. She tried to come up with a reason for this pain, but was shocked when she found her brain completely empty, except for the most recent memories. What the heck was going on? Why couldn’t she remember anything?
“Oh, you’re awake.”
Though spoken in sotto voce, she startled upon hearing the words coming from the doorway. A young woman, dressed in light blue scrubs, stood there, watching her carefully before making her way over to the bed, her whole demeanor offering a sense of calmness and safety to the frightened woman lying there.
“Hi, my name is Jody,” she gestured to the nametag on her shirt, “and I’m your nurse.” She gave her latest patient a quick once-over. “Are you in any pain?”
“Yeah, my head is hurting like hell.” The two women locked gazes. “Sorry about my choice of words.”
Jody chuckled. “Don’t be. Believe me, I’ve heard much worse.” Seeing the confused look on the other woman’s face, the nurse decided to elaborate. “I’ve got three elder sisters. And all three of them are married to soldiers. So whenever I visit them and I don’t hear any of them cursing up a streak, I have to ask if anything is wrong.”
Despite having no reference to what the nurse was telling her, the redhead in the bed let out a chuckle, if only a short-lived one.
“Jody?”
“Yes, sweetie, what’s up?”
“Where am I?”
“Trinity Hospital, New York City”, Jody answered while fluffing up the spare pillow and exchanging it with the one on the bed.
“What happened to me?”
Sensing the confusion in the question, Jody changed her approach of the topic.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Nothing.” The voice of her most recent Jane Doe was empty, dejected, void of any kind of emotion. Jody gave her arm a light touch, and the woman looked up, her eyes the exact opposite to her voice. “I can’t remember anything.” She took another deep breath. “Not even my name.”
FBI Building
White Collar Offices
Like on any other day of the year, the bullpen was buzzing with activity. Well, most of the teams were just doing their usual workload, ranging from copyright infringement and mortgage fraud to forged documents and art theft – except for one.
Ever since the call from the U.S. Marshals about Neal’s anklet being cut came in ten days ago, Special Agent Peter Burke and the rest of his team were only working that case. Reese Hughes transferred any upcoming “normal” case to the other teams while helping Peter’s team in any possible capacity. Kyle Bancroft came up from Washington, also intent on helping them out, but to back up Peter against the Marshals, who wanted nothing more than to put Neal back on their “Most Wanted” list, proving this way that a convicted criminal couldn’t be changed, period.
At first, Peter was more than inclined to agree with them. Ever since the whole disaster with Adler and the submarine loot, things were more than a bit rough between them. Sure, the case ended with Keller behind bars and the loot back in some museums, but the base of the friendship between Peter and Neal was in frays, too damaged by distrust, deception and betrayal. So the chance of Neal running once again was more than just a theory.
But then, only two days after the Marshals, Peter got a worried call from Sara’s boss, one Winston Bosch. According to him, Sara was working one of her most important cases to date, and it wasn’t likely for her not to show up for work, not when she was so close to finalize it. Peter changed his opinion about Neal being on the run once again. At first, it might have looked just like a coincidence, but years of experience, coupled with knowing both Neal and Sara to a degree, had taught Peter otherwise. If these two went missing in the same timeframe, it was more than likely that they were together – either forced or on their own volition.
A soft knock on his office door brought Peter back to reality, and he looked up to see Diana standing in the doorway. Sure, every single agent was working their hardest to find Neal and Sara, including colleagues from other departments like Agent Ruiz from Organized Crime or Kimberly Rice from Missing Persons, but next to himself, Diana was a second driving force in the search. She didn’t give him any reasons, but apparently Caffrey’s charming ways had finally found a way behind her walls too.
“What’s up, Diana?”
“Trinity just called. Sara is awake.”
Diana barely had finished the sentence before Peter was out of his seat and almost out of the door. Three days ago, the hospital had called them that a woman matching Sara’s description was found in an alleyway near them, apparently beaten and drugged. Peter wasn’t so happy when the doctor told him that he had to put her in a medical induced sleep to help her body fight off the drugs in her system, while giving the physical wounds on her face time to heal as well, since Peter had trouble to recognize her beneath all the swelling when he first saw her. Now that she was awake, he hoped that with a little luck, they finally might get the answers they were so desperate to find.
“Peter…”
When Diana’s brain finally caught up with reality, her boss already was halfway through the bullpen, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he heard her voice.
“Yeah?”
“I… I come along. Maybe she will be more talkative when there’s a woman in the room too. We have no idea what she’s been through, so no offence, boss…”
“Okay,” Peter answered, holding the glass door open for her. Within the next minutes, the two agents were on their way to Trinity.
Twenty minutes later, they were waiting in the hallway outside Sara’s room for Dr. Grant. Peter was eager to talk to Sara, but Head Nurse Meredith McClellan stopped them with the doctor’s order to have a talk to him first.
“Agent Burke, Agent…”
“Berrigan,” Diana said as an introduction as she and Dr. Grant shook hands.
“Dr. Grant, can we talk to her? Neal is still missing, and she might have the key to solving this case.”
The Chief of Neurology had led the two agents over to the family room in the meantime, and motioned now for them to have a seat.
“Agents, I’m afraid she might not be helpful at all.”
“How is that so, Dr. Grant?” Diana asked, a hint of worry in her voice.
“After she woke up this morning, we ran a range of tests on her. The drugs are mostly out of her system by now, but what worries me the most is the complete amnesia she has developed.”
“Meaning?” Unlike his colleague, Peter wasn’t even attempting to keep his emotions out of his voice. This time, frustration was added to the mix.
“Meaning that she doesn’t remember anything. And with “anything”, I mean anything. She doesn’t know the date, who’s currently sitting in the Oval Office, and most of all, she doesn’t even know her own name.”
Diana couldn’t help but gasp. She knew that victims of very violent crimes developed temporary amnesia to help their brain to come to terms with the crime itself, but what Dr. Grant just told them didn’t sound like that kind of amnesia at all.
“Is it temporary?” she asked.
“Honestly, I can’t tell that at the moment. She might regain her memories, or at least most of them, but that solely depends or her alone.”
“What do you know from experience?”
Peter asked the next question, and this time, all signs of frustration were gone from his voice, replaced by worry and hints of desperation.
“My experience won’t help us out here. Every amnesia case is different, and even when we have the same parameters, I can’t predict which way this case will go, not as a professional.”
“So what do you suggest? How should we approach her?”
In any other case, Dr. Grant would have chuckled upon having the two agents alternating in asking the questions. But he knew about the urgency and so kept his amusement to himself.
“First and foremost, be patient. When I talked to her this morning, she was trying desperately to answer my questions. If you put too much pressure on her, she might retreat so deep in her brain that we might not get her back anymore.”
Peter and Diana exchanged a look. Apparently, they had one hell of a rocky road ahead of them.
“Second, try to create a calm surrounding. If you go in there, demanding answers and being authoritative, you won’t get anything out of her.”
“But…”
“Agent Burke, have you ever experienced something like amnesia?” Dr. Grant could understand that they needed answers, stat, but he had to protect his patients in any way possible.
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what she’s feeling right now.” He paused, fixing Peter and Diana in their seats with his gaze. “She feels vulnerable. Not knowing who you are, the most basic things that define you, what you do for a living, if you have a bunch of friends or are a workaholic… I always compare that with walking down Fifth Avenue naked during rush hour.”
For several moments, the room was silent, as both agents tried to comprehend what the doctor told them. Then, Diana was the first to ask again.
“But we can talk to her?”
“Yes, you can. But I would like to have Nurse Jody in there with you. She was the first one to talk to Sara after she woke up, and they already have established kind of a connection.”
“I can work with that,” Peter said, the eagerness to talk to his most solid lead in the whole case back in his voice.
“Good, then I let the nurses’ station paging Jody to meet with you.”
With that, the doctor was out of the room, leaving two agents behind who didn’t really know what to think about the whole situation.
Another few minutes later, Peter and Diana finally were allowed into Sara’s room. Nurse Jody already was waiting for them, talking to Sara in a quiet voice.
“Agents Burke, Berrigan, I’m Nurse Jody Hemphill.”
“Dr. Grant told us you were the first to talk to Sara when she woke up?” Diana asked.
“Yes, and even though I’m working in this department for the last ten years, my heart always goes out when I see a case like hers.” She paused, taking a breath. “You should have seen her this morning. She was absolutely desperate and dejected by the fact that she couldn’t remember anything. She senses that something very bad has happened, but she can’t access the memories linked to it.”
“Has she mentioned anything?” Again, Diana asked the nurse.
“No, nothing at all. How well do you know her?” She looked from Peter to Diana.
“We worked several cases together, since our work fields overlap on more than one point. Just recently, Diana, Neal and she solved the case of a stolen Stradivari.”
“But she’s not an FBI agent?”
Jody was curious, of that was Peter sure, but he finally got what the doctor told them. They needed to work closely with the hospital staff if they wanted to get anything out of the maze that was Sara’s brain at the moment.
“No, she works for Sterling Bosch, the insurance company. And let me tell you that Sara is excellent in what she’s doing.”
“Agent Burke, you mean she was excellent?”
“No, I meant it exactly the way I said it. I know her to a certain degree, and this woman is, if nothing else, a fierce fighter. So I’m very sure that she will make a full recovery, no matter how long the way might be.”
Sensing that the nurse and the two new arrivals were talking about her, Sara looked up to them, an uncertain smile on her lips. Maybe they could help her uncover the mysteries surrounding her.
TBC
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2015-08-14 06:55 pm (UTC)As for the next chapter: Sara will make some progress, some possible suspects will show up - and we will see how Neal's holding up
(no subject)
Date: 2015-08-14 07:00 pm (UTC)As for the pic, of course I don't mind *hugs*