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Jay remembers thinking this was it, he would die without telling Lily how much he loved her. Then everything is consumed by darkness and pain. When he does wake up again, the pain is dulled under the haze of medication and when he opens his eyes it’s unbearably bright. He blinks away until his eyes focus. He’s woken up like this plenty of times before and he doesn’t need to listen to the monitor beeping or look around the room to know he’s in a hospital. He feels a hand squeezing his and he knows it’s Lily’s before he even turns to look at it. She’s sitting in a chair drawn next to his bed. She looks tired, with red rimmed eyes and a bandage on her temple. Jay feels a pang of worry at seeing her like that. But it all fades to the background when a blinding smile splits her face.
“You’re gonna be fine”, she informs him and her voice is flooded with relief, “Dr. Rhodes said the surgery went well.”
“That’s right. You were lucky that your organs weren’t hit”, Connor adds as he enters the room, Will and April following behind him. While April assists Connor in examining Jay, Will sits down on a chair next to Lily. He’s out of his scrubs now, which means his shift is over, but he’s still in the hospital waiting for Jay.
“Everything looks good”, Connor announces when he’s done with the examination, “but we’ll need to keep you here for monitoring for a couple days to be safe.”
Once it’s just Lily and Will with him, Jay turns to them. There’s concern in Will’s eyes and Jay knows it deep in his bones that he may be fine but something is wrong.
“What happened to your head?” he asks protectively and Lily’s posture stiffens momentarily.
“Just a bump. Will already checked it out”, she replies and Jay feels like there’s something she’s hiding. He turns to Will for confirmation.
“She’s fine, Jay. She only bumped her head on a corner of the bed. It’s only two stitches and we’ll be taking them off in a couple days”, Will tries to explain without alarming his brother. They’ve both been through a lot today. Jay doesn’t like Will’s answer. He isn’t telling him everything. Jay’s a detective, he interrogates people for a living, and even pumped full of painkillers he can pick on that. It’s nothing but second nature to him at this point. Lily stands up and places a kiss on his forehead.
“I’ll go tell Voight and the others that you woke up”, she smiles at him and turns to leave. Jay takes a hold of her hand and tugs at it. She stops and turns back to look at him. There’s a kind of panic hiding behind her unshed tears in her eyes and Jay can’t ignore that.
“Will can tell them. Please, stay”, he asks.
“I have to talk to Doctor Charles anyway”, she shrugs.
“What? Why?” Jay demands and there’s no mistaking the protectiveness in his voice.
“I almost lost you, Jay”, she tells him gently and squeezes his hand as if to remind herself he’s still alive, “And Will made a deal with me, I talk with Doctor Charles and they let me stay with you outside of visitor hours.”
Jay nods and smiles at her reassuringly. There will be plenty of time for him to ask questions later, when his brain doesn’t feel hazy at the edges and she’s had time to rest. That doesn’t mean he won’t ask Will about it.
“How did she really hit her head?” he demands from his brother once they’re alone.
“I told you already”, Will insists gently and it just reinforces for Jay the idea that they’re hiding something from him. He wants to press Will more about it, but that moment the team trickles in and he’s forced to drop the conversation.
Jay wakes up early in the morning. He has to go to Med to get the stitches out before finally going back to the precinct. He’s not allowed back in the field yet, but at least he can get to work a case. Yet he can’t be excited, because when he wakes up at the crack of dawn, Lily is already awake and looking at him. Again.
“You’re staring”, he murmurs, unsure of what to do or say. Ever since he woke up in the hospital she spends the nights watching him sleep. He suspects it’s because she’s afraid if she closes her eyes he will die. He had similar issues after she was abducted, but he doesn’t know how to help her. And it hurts seeing her like that. He doesn’t want to go to Doctor Charles behind her back, but if this keeps going on he might have to.
“Yeah, well my fiance is very nice to look at”, she deflects and places a kiss on his lips.
“What a coincidence, mine too”, he smiles at her and swipes a lock of hair behind her ear. She leans down and carefully cuddles to his side, ever watchful of not aggravating his still healing injuries.
“I love you Jay, more than anything”, she murmurs into his chest, but he still hears the melancholy tone underlying her voice. He wants to call it out, but he’d tried it the first few times she used that tone and she just shut down and deflected. He doesn’t want to argue the first time he’s going back to work. He knows it must be stressful for her.
“I love you too, Lils”, he replies instead, hoping his love and support are enough to haul her out of that hole she’s stuck in.
It’s peaceful, cuddling with her in their bed, but it can’t last for long. Soon he has to leave. He makes sure to kiss her and tease her and talk the worry away from her before he leaves, even though he knows it will probably come back the moment he closes the door. But he can’t just ignore the signs he sees and do nothing. He cares about her too much to do that. They’ll just have to figure it out eventually.
Jay’s visit to Med was quick, Connor getting the stitches out in mere minutes and telling Jay that his injuries are healing well. And before he knows it, Jay is walking up the stairs to the intelligence unit’s offices. Everyone welcomes him back with pats on the back and smiles, but there’s a thin layer of frost in their actions that Jay can’t understand the cause of. He didn’t do anything wrong during his last mission and he definitely not while he was at home recovering. Even Voight looks at him weird, as if there’s an inkling of disappointment in the depths of his eyes. And that’s ridiculous. Jay was undercover when he got shot, it’s not like he could have worn a vest to avoid that. He ignores that and sits at his desk to familiarize himself with the case.
He keeps getting iced out for the whole day, but just bites it and says nothing. He goes home that night and focuses on his lovely fiance, forgetting all about the team’s issues with him. They’ll tell him what their problem is eventually. Lily is more important to him and he has to make sure she’ll sleep that night. She doesn’t, but at least she finally admits she hasn’t been sleeping and agrees that she can’t keep doing that. That’s a step at least. In the morning, Jay hugs her as tight as his injuries allow and kisses her before he leaves. Back at the precinct things are the same. It all comes to a head when he goes to give some papers to Platt. Sergeant Platt has never been a very warm or polite person. But she never treated Jay so coldly.
“Hey sarge, Voight said you needed these?” he greets and places the papers on her desk.
“Just leave it there, Halstead”, she tells him, indifferently. Usually she’s snarky, calling him chuckles or detective pretty or some other nickname she’s in the mood for. If the situation doesn’t call for a nickname, she calls him Jay. Platt hasn’t called him Halstead in years. The thing is, she’s not needling him or busting his balls or anything. She’s being perfectly civil, and that makes it worse.
“Why’s everyone acting like I’m the devil all of a sudden?” he bursts, because damn it he did nothing wrong. He only did his job and almost died for it!
“Ask Voight what happened when he went to get Lily. And I would better watch my tone when asking him if I were you”, is all Platt says and turns back to her files, effectively dismissing the baffled detective.
Jay doesn’t need to be a police detective to figure out what everyone’s issue with him is, not after Platt’s answer. Still he goes and talks with Voight when the case is closed. He understands why they’re protective of Lily, he is protective of Lily. He loves her more than anything, and hearing Voight’s version of the events feels like he’s being stabbed through the heart. He never meant to hurt her so deeply, he just wanted to tell her goodbye. But he messed up and he doesn’t know how he can fix it. He only hopes he can.
When he goes home that evening he talks with Lily. It breaks his heart all over when she admits how badly his voicemail had affected her. And Jay really wants to fix this, no matter what he has to do, because he loves Lily more than life and he can’t keep ignoring seeing how hurt she is. That’s why he suggests something no-one who knows him would ever believe he would. He suggests that along her individual therapy sessions, they go to couple therapy so that he can help her get through this together. Jay hates therapy, absolutely loathes people trying to get into his head, but if that’s what Lily needs to heal, he’s willing to go through that. Because Lily is his life and he’ll be damned if he keeps on letting her hide and suffer alone.