A/N: Okay so first of all, I swear I actually mean it when I say this is going to be a two-shot (...at most a three-shot). Second of all, in case you couldn't tell by the description of this story, I'm hella bitter about the way this whole Jane/Casey "love story" has unfolded. I mean good heavens if this wasn't the most frustrating episode of the season, if not show. I really, really needed to write this out, and if any of it feels forced, it's because basically I just needed a way to vent my frustration with Jane in this episode while also fulfilling my most basic need in life at this point, which is Rizzles.

"Hey! What're you doing here?"

Jane's tone was surprisingly light, happy; for a moment before Maura looked up from her empty lap, she wasn't sure if the cheerfulness was genuine, or another example of Jane's typical defense mechanism: after any small display of weakness, act like everything is fine, and maybe you can fool somebody. Maura looked up and though she saw the honest-enough smile on Jane's face, she couldn't bring herself to get rid of the frown on her own. When Jane sat right next to her on the stoop, Maura couldn't bring herself to offer even a fake smile of greeting.

After a few silent moments with no response, Jane said, "What's up? You weren't there when we got back to HQ with the perp."

"Well, it wasn't so much a victory for me as for homicide, was it?" Maura asked breathlessly. "You and your athlete's eagle eye solved this one without much science."

"Yeah, but…" Jane was ready to joke around, to tease her, or even reassure Maura that her scientific opinion helped more than not—but it was obvious to the detective that that wasn't really the issue bothering her friend. As soon as she'd weakly started talking just now, Maura's eyes closed and her hand tiredly went to her forehead. Jane noticed Maura was shivering, and mistaking it for a sign that Maura was cold, she shrugged off her blazer and threw it over Maura's shoulders. Maura clutched at it with one hand, but didn't say anything. "Maura? What's …why didn't you even try calling? You're starting to freak me out a little."

Maura breathed in sharply, turning away from Jane just slightly. "Oh, am I making you uncomfortable?" she asked.

"What? No, I'm just getting worried! Are you okay—?"

"No, no, I'm not okay!" Maura cried, her words nearly slurring together as her hands thrust out in sudden emotion and she turned back to fully face Jane. Her panicked, harried, utterly un-Maura like tone only deepened Jane's concern, evident in her expression. Maura continued in a quieter but no more calm voice: "I'm not okay because you're not okay. I feel like…" She swallowed hard, blinking back tears, half-wishing she hadn't come here at all. "I feel like I don't even know you anymore."

Jane's mouth fell open. Coming from her best friend, this felt like a dagger to the heart. "Maura, what are you talking about?"

"You don't even get it," Maura whispered, averting her gaze again. "Never mind, I shouldn't have come."

She stood up, fully prepared to walk away, but Jane got to her feet as well and grabbed Maura's elbow. "No, Maura. You don't get to show up on my stoop, say something like that and then just leave!"

"Why not? Everybody else is!" Maura hissed, pulling her arm out of Jane's loose grip.

"Was that a dig at Casey?" Jane asked, features darkening.

"You're getting warm."

"A dig at me? You mad at me, Maura?"

"Brilliant deductive skills, detective."

Jane scowled at her. "I don't know what I did to you, but we're not having this conversation out in the open."

"I don't want to have it at all."

"Like hell you don't! You brought it up! So c'mon, let's get this over with!" With an air of supreme impatience, Jane walked up the remaining steps and yanked the door open. She stared fiercely down at Maura until the doctor steeled herself and stalked up the steps, throwing Jane's blazer back at her as she passed. "Thank you," Jane growled, throwing the blazer over her shoulder by its collar and following Maura up the stairs. When they reached her door, Jane thrust the key in the knob with a bit more force than was actually called for, and pushed it open hard, allowing Maura to go inside first. "Now," Jane said, walking in and kicking the door shut behind her. She tossed her blazer on a nearby chair. "What the hell's going on? Are you still pissed about the whole softball thing?"

"Well, we could easily start there if you like," Maura said, folding her arms.

"Susie showed up wearing socks and flip-flops!"

"So?"

"So?! You don't wear flip-flops to a softball practice! You wear sports shoes!"

"You know what else you wear? A sports bra, which unless I'm mistaken, is not what you were wearing! That's right, I noticed!" Maura said, looking stern when Jane's eyebrows rose in surprise. "You were wearing one of the pairs I made you buy the last time we went shopping together! I told you they would make a difference!"

Jane groaned in frustration. "Did you really come over here to yell at me about my undergarment choices today?!"

Maura's hands balled into fists, and she stood as tall as possible. She took a deep breath to try and stead herself a little before saying, "I came here to tell you to stop …to stop…"

"Stop what?" Jane pressed her, totally lost.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop acting like Casey Jones is the end-all, be-all for you."

It had been a while since Maura had seen Jane look so shocked and so hurt. "I… I think I need to sit down," she muttered, sinking onto her couch. Maura remained standing next to it as Jane ran a hand through her hair. "You think—with Casey wounded like this, you think I feel sorry for myself?"

"I don't know what to think anymore," Maura said with a weak shrug. "This isn't you, Jane."

"What isn't me?" Jane asked, her voice harsh and defensive. "Feeling sad that my—my—"

As she struggled for the right word, Maura lifted her hand in exasperation. "See? You don't even know what to call him! I used to think you were in love with him—"

"And now you think I'm not?!" Jane half-shouted, vaulting back to her feet.

Maura gulped again, determined. "No. I don't think you are."

Jane gaped wordlessly at her for a moment, then veered away. "Piss off, Maura."

"You're the one who insisted I come up here and insisted I talk, so I'm going to be a real friend for once and make you listen! Or are you the type who can only dish it out and never take it when it comes to massive relationship wake-up calls?"

"This is different, Maura!" Jane insisted. "Casey went through hell in Afghanistan—"

"And you don't go through hell every day?" Maura shot back.

"It's different! He's in a war zone!"

"You're in a war zone! Or have you gotten so accustomed to throwing yourself in front of civilians and all but killing yourself in the line of duty that you let your lack of camouflage attire keep you from believing that you are as much a hero as any soldier? You all wake up every day knowing you could be killed on the job!"

"Don't compare me to him, don't compare me to any of them," Jane said uneasily. She wasn't entirely sure why, but the thought of somebody likening her to a soldier made her feel so unworthy.

Maura sighed, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose as she thought of another tack to take. She couldn't blame this line of Jane's reasoning on Casey; she'd clearly felt it before they'd become involved, manifested by her embarrassed attitude at the gala where she and that young female soldier had both been honored. That was the night Casey had come back into her life…

"Think about when you two were first reunited," Maura said softly. "You were still recovering from that self-inflicted bullet wound which could have ended your life. You hadn't been cleared for active duty because your strength was far from ideal. You limped. Your breath was short. Your nerves were shot. And…" Her voice caught as some tears escaped her eyes; she blinked hard to focus her gaze, not bothering to wipe the tears away. "And I know you were scared. You told me so. You were afraid you would never be yourself again, that you'd never be allowed to work again.

"But you still let him in. You still let Casey in. He spent the night with you, but you didn't sleep with him, presumably because your body had not recovered sufficiently enough to perform as well as you'd like. Is that a fair assessment of that night?"

Jane shifted her weight to one foot. "Yeah, I guess," she mumbled.

Maura's tone became softer, though it was still urgent. "Jane, don't you see? You've always had your guard up, especially around men, because you feel like if they notice even the most minutely feminine thing about you, they'll pounce and say you're not fit for your occupation. You used to only let those walls down around me, but you let them down for Casey, too. He got to see you when you were weak, when you weren't running at full capacity. And I have no doubt that he admired that about you, as he admires many of your qualities."

Wearily, Jane sat back down on the couch again. This time Maura joined her, a safe distance away. Jane took a deep breath, slowly raising her gaze from the floor back up to Maura's eyes. She shook her head.

"I've said this already, but I'll say it again. He doesn't deserve you." She waited for Jane to deny this, to stand up immediately for Casey and all of his baggage, but she remained silent. Perhaps now she'd heard enough to hear out the rest of what Maura had to say. Still, no harm in cinching it a little further: "Angela told me what you said about her and …what did you call him, Lightning McQueen?"

"Yeah," Jane snorted, allowing herself a brief, tiny smile.

"You told her that flirting with him was beneath her," Maura said. "And Jane …I don't understand how a woman like you could tell something like to her own mother, and not see that—not see that groveling to Casey is beneath you." She faltered slightly when Jane took a deep breath, now looking a little on edge, her hand curling into a fist at her knee. Maura kept going: "From my observations of your behavior and my knowledge of your interactions and lack of interactions with him, I have deduced that the butterflies you felt in your stomach for him all those months ago were the result of an old crush. Skyping with him stirred up long-dormant feelings of attraction which were never consummated and that, despite your profession that you wish they could be, still have not been."

"You remember he has a debilitating injury that's kind of keeping him from being able to do stuff like that, right?" Jane asked.

Maura's brow furrowed. "Does this debilitating injury also keep him from being able to act like a decent human being?"

"Maura!"

"This is all beneath you, Jane. He's been hurt. Badly, I admit. You were hurt, too, when you first broached the notion of rekindling that old flame—but you didn't shy away from him. You didn't ignore him, you didn't try to hide. Meanwhile, he'd been home for weeks without telling you? And given his reaction to you, probably with no intent of ever telling you, if he could have avoided it? And then when you happened to run into him through work, he couldn't even honor your relationship by being honest with you? Of course not, says male pride! Why be honest when you can just act like a selfish, pompous ass and make the woman feel like it's her fault? You know why? Because I told you long ago, Jane, the most powerful force on earth is a thought. By leaving you in the dark, he let you imagine the worst, which turned out to mean imagining the worst about yourself."

"H-he was worried… he was self-conscious about it. Wouldn't you be?"

"Having never gone through a similar experience, I can't say that I would," Maura said. "All I know is that when I talked to him, I could ascertain the severity of his injuries, and asked him to talk to you. I hoped that by doing that, he might have seen your willingness to be supportive—but instead, he remains wallowing in his self-pity, giving me no hope that he intends on ever pulling himself back out because he cannot bring himself to let you try helping him. Every time you've seen him, or every time you tell me you've seen him, you say that it's only been for him to say good-bye! Can't you see what he's doing? He's stringing you along!"

That intimation got Jane on the defensive again. "What kind of idiot do you take me for?!"

"A masochistic one at this rate! How can you not see how terribly you're being treated, and how much you've been taking it out on me?"

"On you?"

"Yes, on me! I'm not just talking about the fact that I had to listen you rant about him for thirty-one minutes earlier today, I mean all the time. It hurts, Jane. You used to tease me, but now I feel as if you really have no patience for me and no understanding of me anymore. It's like we're drifting apart, and it gets worse every time Casey drops in and does nothing but tell you to leave him alone."

"Maura, don't say that," Jane whispered, her voice suddenly thick with emotion. She reached out and took Maura's hand between both of her own. "You mean more to me than—I mean, you're my best friend. I'm sorry if you feel like you got caught up in all this. I don't ever want you to feel hurt."

"I know you don't," Maura said softly. "So think about this, Jane. Pretend that Casey—or, if you'd rather, just another man in Casey's exact circumstance—was treating me the way Casey's treating you. Imagine I offered him all of my vulnerabilities, and did my best to love and support him, and he pushed me away. Imagine he pushed me away after I'd been informed by a third party about his condition, and before that point, imagine he'd pushed me away by telling me a cruel lie, making me doubt myself. What would you do?

"I'll tell you what you'd do, because you've threatened men who've done much less. You would hunt this man down. You would, as the expression goes, take the tar out of him for treating me that way. You'd tell him to either man up or get the hell out of town and stop teasing me. Yes?"

Jane stared at her a long while, trying to go along with it, trying to picture a man treating Maura this way. "Yes," she finally whispered.

"And maybe you would feel particularly inclined to do that because a man in that situation is doing nothing more than tear down the esteem of the woman he's treating so awfully," Maura continued, now putting her other hand on top of Jane's and gripping tightly. "And you know I've always struggled to—I mean, I have always had trouble finding my place outside of a laboratory. Do you know what I admired most about you when we first met, Jane?"

She felt oddly breathless in anticipation. "What?"

"It seemed to me that you knew exactly who you were, and you did not apologize for it. You had enough self-confidence that you didn't need to. I found that really very inspiring. It made it so easy to become your friend. It's why I was so proud and so eager to show you off to my young half-sister, who's at such an impressionable age. I thought maybe if I reminded her too much of her mother, if I was too strange or too into science and inaccessible, maybe she would find someone like Jane Rizzoli as fascinating as I did. Maybe she'd love her, like I do. Maybe she'd see the independent, self-assured, but caring person I know you are, and want to emulate that behavior. And I know we haven't really resolved much or been on great terms lately, Cailin and I, but…" She inhaled deeply again, knowing what she was about to say would probably offend Jane quite a bit. "I'm thankful she's not being introduced to you as you are now."

Jane's voice sounded as hurt and confused as Maura thought it might. "Maur…"

"You have saved dozens of lives," Maura said, tears leaking out again. "You've brought closure to countless others. You know more about people than anyone else I know, and generally you're braver and you're stronger than anyone I know. Now suddenly you've invested all of your self-worth in what someone else thinks of you? And not just someone else, but a man who has treated you with zero respect, all while playing the part of the noble, wounded hero? Who throws you under the bus under the guise of throwing himself on the sword?" Shaking her head in confusion, Maura lowered her voice to a whisper again. "I want to understand what happened to you, Jane. You're not the woman you used to be."

You're not the woman I need you to be. For both our sakes.

A few moments passed, then Jane shuddered and fell forward into Maura's arms. She wasn't crying, but her breathing was shallow as she allowed Maura's hand to gently rub her back, both of them just trying to understand. They stayed like that for a minute or so, exchanging no words as Jane tried to get to a point where she thought she could speak without fear of bursting into tears.

"I hate who I am around him," she finally admitted quietly, in a shaky voice. "I didn't used to. I used to feel like it was all cool, y'know? And then this happened, and it's like …he's not who he was."

"Well, it's exactly like he's not who he was," Maura pointed out, "because he isn't."

"But Maura, I want him to have somebody. Even if he doesn't think he needs it now, he should have someone."

"Doesn't he have an ex-wife?"

"Well…yeah…"

"What kind of terms are they on?"

"Um…I dunno…" Jane pulled herself out of Maura's grip.

"Does he have family?"

"Yeah…"

"Has he given you any reason to believe he's honestly interested in pursuing a relationship with you? Be honest, Jane. Be brutally honest with yourself."

Jane bit her lip, searching Maura's eyes. Brutal honesty would call for more than just a thorough examination of Casey's feelings for her: it would also call for an evaluation of her true feelings for him, and possibly, for someone else. Maybe she'd been lashing out at Maura for a different reason. Maybe she'd have been quick to jump in for Maura's defense if she'd been the one treated so badly because Jane knew exactly how that woman deserved to be treated—like royalty.

What was keeping her tied to Casey? True attraction, or guilt? She had been the one romantically attached to him—however distanced—the most recently, so was it mostly obligation that made her keep trying to help him, and keep feeling like crap every time he turned her down? Why the desperation for him to stay when it was clearly doing neither of them any good? Why that desperation when she felt more emotion surging through her by Maura's hand on her own than when Casey had let her kiss him?

Had let her. Like he was deigning to give her some great honor by allowing her the chance.

Maura had come here hoping to shed a little light on Jane's current situation. What she wound up shedding was a lightning bolt.