Disclaimer - The Mediator belongs to Meg Cabot.

Rating - K+

Summary - Jesse POV. One-shot. While picking up Suze's bedroom after Spike goes tearing around it, Jesse stumbles across something he never thought he would find hidden under Suze's pillow. His miniature portrait . . . Bringing with it new questions and new meanings.

A/N - I had this idea while I was washing my hair. So it was a quick, two-second write. I hope you like it. Please review! :)

A New Discovery

It was purely accidental that I happened to stumble across it that day.

Spike had been running around Susannah's room like the Tasmanian devil Susannah nicknamed him, running across anything and everything that got in his way. I tried stopping him but he was too fast and too wild for me. If I didn't know better, I would have said he did have devils in him. But even as I thought it I was smiling. It was a sight to behold watching him scramble across everything. In the end I gave up trying to stop him and just sat down on the window seat waiting for him to calm down. He did so eventually, curling up at my side and winding himself into a tight orange ball, abruptly falling asleep as though he hadn't just been tearing Susannah's room apart.

Aware of what her reaction would be if she came home from the last few days left of her summer vacation and saw her room in disarray, I got up from Spike's side and began straightening it up for her again. I put her CD's back on her dresser, picking up her different coloured vials of polish. Moving around her room in an arch until I got to her frilly canopy bed. The one place I know she doesn't abide Spike sleeping and straightened her comforter to remove any evidence of him running across it. Picking up the pillows that had fallen in his haste and placing them just as they were.

But that was when my eyes caught sight on something that halted me for infinite seconds.

Slowly as if in slow motion I reached forward to the palm sized portrait in a gold frame and picked it up with shaking fingers. The pillow I held in my hand dropped back to the floor as I turned and sat on her bed. Looking down at a portrait of . . . me. Frowning I turned it many different ways in my hands, fumbling with it as if looking for answers. Where did Susannah get it? How long has she had it? And why didn't she show it to me before now? I didn't understand. I couldn't comprehend what it meant finding it resting underneath her pillow, safe and until now, unfound. I knew what it could possible mean, but . . . it couldn't be.

I stopped turning it until it was facing upwards and I could see the stony, expressionless features of my face. The memory of that day rushing back to me as if it was only yesterday. I didn't want to have it done. And by the time I was allowed to move my back had gone stiff and my shoulders painful from tension. All of my family had one done. Not in the same day of course, but I know we all, my parents, sisters and I, had a small portrait version of our larger ones. Hanging in our living room hung on the walls with pride were the larger versions. I often found my Madre standing and just gazing at them.

'Eres un hombre guapo, Jesse.' She would say to me when I stepped up to her side. 'I am so proud of you.'

The praise and love was always something that filled me with warmth and contentment. And what caused my guilt to soar when I knew what I needed to do about my engagement to Maria. At the time of having my portrait done, I had no idea of her betrayal and it was sent off along with a letter to her as a gift. I in return got her handkerchief. The same one I wrapped around Susannah's wrist the first night she attempted her first mediator job in Carmel. I laid it to rest in my drawer until the day I left to go and speak with Maria and her father. Intending to give her handkerchief back with her letters. With just as much intention on asking for my own in return along with the miniature portrait held in my hand and digging into my palms.

I never expected to see it again after I sent it to Maria. I know my letters were buried in Susannah's backyard along with my body. I stood there and watched my ex-fiancée's lover bury me. Motionlessly I stood by my shallow grave, watching and waiting. Wincing when he threw the cigar box holding my letters into the whole before picking his shovel up again and throwing dirt on to it. Those, along with the portrait I believed to be lost forever to time. Did Susannah's step-father find it amongst the letters? No, I surmised, they couldn't have done. Maria held on to the portrait. If she mis-placed that too, suspicions would have been raised. As it was, I was believed to have run off to join the Gold Rush.

My family were the only ones that believed something tragic had happened. They knew I would never disgrace my family in such a way.

Whatever way Susannah got it, she has it now, I reminded myself, blinking my way out of my memories and the conspiracies surrounding my disappearance a hundred and fifty years ago. This took me back to why she has it. Having it placed under her pillow would be, in the era I was born, to mean that person was held dear to your heart. As a way to be close to them. It was a custom much more for love than any other. Like when it was in Maria's possession. I highly doubt it was placed beneath her pillow. It is, I suddenly realized, something my sisters had done. From the small gift their cariño had given them, even something as simple as a pressed flower. The portrait was something deeper than any other.

Is that how Susannah saw me? As more than a friend?

Although her reasons for coming to get me in the shadowland, according to her were strictly platonic. She had not come up there to get me because she was in-love with me as she so finely put it. Her reasons, she argued were because of Spike. Because he apparently missed me. Even as she said it I knew it wasn't the complete truth. And it was slightly disheartening to think she still couldn't accept our friendship enough for her to say that was why she came to retrieve me. Even while I fought off the hope that it might have been more. That I may have meant more to her, like she does to me.

Finding my miniature portrait beneath her pillow would certainly suggest that she does. And when I foolishly kissed her . . . that certainly wasn't one-sided.

Sighing and tugging myself firmly away from that memory, I placed the portrait where I found it and replaced her pillows. Placing them all so it looked as if they hadn't been moved. Getting up from her bed I walked back to the bay window seat, staring out the window at the last hour of sunshine. The sky ablaze with pinks, oranges and reds. It was peaceful, a contradiction to how I was feeling after finding my picture hidden by Susannah.

I never should have kissed her. I knew that even while I felt her return the embrace. And I knew it even more when I pulled away, fumbling a startled apology and left. It took me three days to return to her room after that. On the hopes she would have forgotten about it. She never mentioned it and neither did I. I took the cowards way out and pretended I didn't have a lapse in judgment and prolonged my own torturous feelings for Susannah. When silences became too long and too awkward, I muttered a quick apology for being the one to place the cloud of grey around us and left. And it's still not completely normal between us.

I've missed that feeling of comfort and friendship with Susannah. Of being able to sit in her company, talking or not. And I berate myself again and again for letting my feelings grow to a point where I cannot turn back from them. That I let them rule me for a while and swept common sense out of the window. But most of all, I feel the guilt for not being able to bring forth the shame with myself for enjoying the kiss. And wishing, seconds after leaving her abruptly, to do it again.

I turned away from the waning day and sat back down beside Spike. Petting him when he yawned and stretched a paw out towards me.

I had come to a point between finally plucking up the nerve to see Susannah again after our kiss and finding my portrait; that I wouldn't dwell on Susannah's feelings for me. Her actions and her words contradicting and crossing each other out were leaving me confused and lost. This new discovery adding even more weight to the indecision I held. If she doesn't see me as more than a friend now, will she come to? Does my portrait under her pillow mean she already does and it's a way for her to be close to me, because she never can be? If that is the case, I could more than understand. It's the reason I spend time in her bedroom so much. I could leave it if I wanted to. But using the excuse of being connected here gives me a reason to come back again and again. As a way for me to be close to Susannah in a way I can never be.

The sound of a car-door slamming from the front of her house had me turning to look out her window. I saw Susannah walking up her gravel drive-way, glancing up to her bedroom window and seeing me. She smiles seamlessly, raising a hand to wave before climbing the porch steps. She didn't have to wave to me, considering she would be up here with me, I thought. Does that mean something too? But before I could let my mind pick and look into everything more than I already have, I pushed it all aside.

All in favour of being able to have the one thing I know I can have with Susannah. Her friendship.

She came through her bedroom door not two seconds later, giving me another smile. I smiled back instinctively, watching her throw her bag on to the bed and climb up on it. Words weren't passed between us. It was just like it used to be. As though Susannah had never been gone and we were picking up from where we last left off. She dug around under her bed for a magazine before she stretched out across her comforter on her front, flicking through it carelessly. When she still felt my eyes still firmly trained on her, she raised her head, arching her slim eyebrows enquiringly, looking a little uncomfortable.

"What? Do I have something in my teeth?" She asked patiently.

"No. You look fine, Susannah," I truthfully answered, turning my eyes away from hers to look down at Spike.

She didn't say anything in return. Choosing to go back to reading her magazine. But when I looked up again, it wasn't to Susannah. It was to the pillow sitting on her bed, not seeming out of place or out of the ordinary. But I knew better. And I wrapped myself in that knowledge of what was hidden beneath it. Allowing my mind, for just a few hours more, to believe she kept it there for another reason. To hope for a little while, that it meant she cares for me, just as much as I care for her. All because of one gesture that may seem innocent to her, but meant anything but to me.

"Jesse what are you smiling at?" She challenged, smiling slightly herself from seeing mine. I had the feeling she didn't even realize she was reflecting it.

I widened it just a fraction and shrugged. "Nothing, querida. I just am." I acknowledged, allowing myself to say the sentiment I reserve just for her, for the first time since I kissed her. That seemed as good enough a reason as I any, I thought to myself, turning to look out to the setting horizon and enjoying the comfortable company. And the light secret of Susannah's she didn't and would never know I have.

And I planned on keeping it that way.