Cath Trilogy: Hey Jane

Almost the entire drive to Berkeley was done with an amount of peace. Jane sat in the passenger seat reviewing the case file moving her hair back into a ponytail then taking it out again. It was a habit that she had used to concentrate since she was ten. Her stomach felt queasy from reading in a moving vehicle, but she was intent on studying, so she just took two more Effexors.

"Ease up there," Rhys had a concerned look on his face when he saw her put the pills in her mouth. "Tell me what's going on."

"Nothing," Jane shook her head to clear away the fuzz that clouded her mind.

Rhys rolled his eyes, "I'm not going to let you get into trouble just because you having something you want to get off your chest. You can't take so many of those pills."

"You're not my doctor," Jane scoffed and looked out the window to avoid eye contact.

"No, I more pride myself with being your friend," Rhys was stoic and never once turned his eyes away from the road. "If it's this case then..."

"It's not the case," Jane flared. It was almost as if she were a teenager arguing with a stubborn parent. She took a breath, "I just have stuff, okay? That's all it is, stuff."

"Are Mike and Gabe okay?" Rhys referred to her adopted parents.

"They're fine," Jane felt the darkness in her mind seep through, and she wanted to make it go away. It was worse than any other pain she could imagine or had been through. The darkness seeped over her mind when she let it and for two years when she had been younger, it was all that she knew.

The pills helped her not shut down again, because as much as it hurt her to think about what would happen if she reverted back to old ways, she worried more for Rhys' sake. He cared about her, and she wouldn't want him to see her the way that she would become. Cut off from the world, oblivious to anyone around her. That was just where it started, and Rhys would want to be there for her. It would break his heart.

"Just... if you ever want to talk about it, I'm here," Rhys rubbed his cleanly shaved chin and returned to focusing on driving.

"Father I have sinned," Jane muttered, and Rhys smiled and gave a little laugh.

"Atheists telling Jews that they have sinned," Rhys smirked. "It sounds like the set up to a bad joke."

Jane smiled and looked at the road ahead of them. in the distance, she could see a small amount of San Francisco. She could see the unsettling cleanliness of it. She preferred dirty, crime-filled Los Angeles to a city that lied to itself by believing that these things weren't at all a part of its history.

"An atheist woman and a Jewish man go to a crime scene," Jane leaned back in her seat and didn't pay much attention to the words that slipped out of her mouth.

Rhys hit the side of her head, and Jane slapped it away.

"No sleep, there are murders to be investigated.