Maura is furious the moment she enters the basement.
She can immediately name things that she would do differently, had she been the first one to arrive.
Most obviously, she would have covered the woman's body. She's not naked in the most technical sense of the word, but it is clear to anyone who does more than glance that she has been stripped of most articles of clothing.
At least she is unconscious.
No, wait... The doctor feels anger boil even further.
Her eyes are closed, yes, but there...there is the telltale shiver of consciousness. Just there, in her diaphragm.
She's awake.
She's awake and the scalpels are still in her hands.
Maura swears in Russian as she turns and takes the stairs to the main floor two at a time, elongating her steps enough to keep her balance. She approaches a pale EMT who goes paler at her approach.
"Give me your jacket," she hisses. "And go out to the ambulance and find a heat blanket."
The man staggers back, forgetting her first order in his haste to do her bidding.
"Y-yes, Dr. Isles. Of-of course. Right away."
Maura watches him turn and exit the house, trying to fight her rising feeling of disgust, when movement at her elbow catches her attention.
An older man, with grey-white hair is standing beside her. He holds out his own blazer.
"Will this do until that bozo gets back?"
He's wearing his Detective's badge around his neck, and Maura has to swallow to keep the questions from pouring out of her mouth.
Why did she go down there alone? Are you her partner? Does no one care for her dignity at all?
But there isn't time. She takes the blazer from him with the arch of an eyebrow, and turns back the way she came.
…
She is alone.
Maura comes to check on her four days later. She is a trauma surgeon, and this woman is no longer in the midst of medical trauma, but her feet lead her to the critical care floor without her consent, and so she gives in and asks the nurse on rotation about the detective.
"Poor kid," the nurse says in a hushed voice. "She's dealing poorly. Nightmares, flashbacks. She can't kick the fevers either. They keep running tests, pushing antibiotics. Whatever has her is nasty."
The nurse leans forward. "If you ask me-" (Maura has not, but she listens anyway), "he left something evil inside of her."
"Is anyone with her now?" Maura asks, deciding not to engage directly with this piece of superstition.
The nurse shakes her head. "No. Her mother works three shifts, still putting her youngest through school. Other brother's a cop. They get here when they can."
And that is how Maura discovers that the detective is alone.
She makes a conscious decision this time, to go to her room, though she has to redouble her determination to step over the threshold when she sees that the woman is awake.
Dark eyes watch her move to the end of the hospital bed. They watch her lift the chart.
Rizzoli, Jane
Age: 23
DOB -
"I know you."
Maura looks up at the words. Fever glass eyes look back at her, red rimmed.
"Yes," Maura says, though she doesn't elaborate. She will not be responsible for inducing a flashback. Not when the woman's vitals are so fragile.
"You call me darling."
The assertion startles Maura. She had, in the fifty seven minutes she spent in that basement, called the detective a plethora of pet names, though none of them had been in English.
"You speak Portuguese?" She asks softly, replacing the chart.
"Italian." Eyes close. Blink back open. Take a moment to find her again.
"Cara mia," she says after a moment. "Close enough."
Minha querida. Maura should not have chosen a romance language, but as she worked on the scalpels - plunged so ferociously into the wet earth of that basement - she'd chosen the soothing vowels of Portuguese, and the body under her hands had stilled.
"Are we trapped?"
The question makes Maura look at Jane sharply. "What?"
"Are we trapped? He hurt you?"
Maura comes around the corner of the bed then, and shakes her head until the other woman shakes her head too, a loyal, obedient dog.
"He's gone," Maura says slowly, careful to articulate. "And I'm not hurt."
Jane looks back at her, confusion fading into a fierce conviction made bright by fever. "I won't let him hurt you, okay?"
Maura has to swallow to answer. "He's gone, sweetheart." She leans a bit closer, and Jane's jaw tightens.
"You could take them out, I think," Jane whispers. "I think you took some out before."
Maura frowns. She looks at Jane's hands, bandaged and braced by her side.
The scalpels?
"They're out," she says gently. She puts the inside of her wrist against Jane's forehead.
She's burning.
"There aren't any more scalpels, Jane."
Jane blinks groggily at her. "When he comes back, get away from me. As far as you can. And don't look. Don't act like you care at all."
Maura cannot keep herself from answering this hallucination as though it is reality. "But I do care, Jane."
She puts her hand to the sweaty curls at Jane's temple, so, so hot. "Can you pull yourself from this?" she whispers. "We need your help. We don't know what's wrong."
"I know you," Jane says, blinking heavily. She turns her head minutely to look into Maura's eyes. "You're part of what made the pain go away."
"Jane-"
"I'm not going to let him hurt you." Such conviction from this woman. It makes Maura breathless.
"You're dying." Maura chokes it out, the Arabic rolling off of her tongue easily. She knows that Jane will not understand her. "You have to help us. Please. You don't deserve this."
Jane pats her hand gently. "Just close your eyes, beautiful," she murmurs. "I won't let him anywhere near you."
…
…
Maura is engulfed. Drowned.
Lost.
Detective Jane Rizzoli takes up every waking hour as well as many of her unconscious ones as well.
She finds herself speaking another language to people when she shouldn't. A confused barista asks his manager if they have a translator before Maura realizes she has been repeating her order in Spanish over and over.
Open your eyes. Look at me. Come up, sweetheart. Come up, love. Open your eyes.
They fight the fever, they are getting somewhere, and then
they almost lose her. Maura does not want to give credence to the nurse's words, but it is as though something evil has ahold of Jane, as though it drags her back down into oblivion after they'd had so much hope of recovery.
Jane begins to fight hands that aren't Maura Isles'. She turns unseeing, glassy eyes to the doctor and tells her that the dark is always moving, always in different parts of the room.
Is it enough? Sometimes, at the height of her fever and her pain, she will beg Maura to tell her she has had a life worthy of reward.
Do you believe in Heaven? Will I go there? Tell Frankie that he was the only person I could depend on when we were kids. Tell Frost he's just as good as blood.
Hours of memories. Hours and hours of memories and fears and hopes and truncates dreams.
I wanted to marry a woman. I wanted to get married. I wanted her to wear white, and I wanted her to look at me like I hung the moon. I wanted to fall in love.
"Me too," Maura says into the fiery nape of Jane's neck. Her Italian is broken, halting, but not unsure. "I love you. I love you, Jane."
In a fit of her own manic madness, Maura writes to Hoyt in prison.
Let her go. Just let her go, I love her.
Six days later, Jane disappears.
….
For two months, Maura drowns. It is a slow, agonizing compression of her torso, and the edges of her vision burn with a fever of its own.
Don't leave, Jane would beg her. The orderlies lowering her into the ice bath, her long fingers reaching blindly for the last place Maura's hands were. Don't leave, don't leave. Hoyt. Don't touch her!
And Maura promised never. She promised never in all the languages she knew.
And then, when she's kicking back towards the surface of a life without Jane Rizzoli, there she is. She steps out of the shadows in front of Maura's condo, her tall body still too thin, the circles under her eyes pronounced and haunting.
Maura makes an ungainly noise in the back of her throat. She opens her mouth, and what comes out is Spanish. It fades into Italian half way through.
"You were just gone and I couldn't find you. They said you hadn't….They said they didn't know where you'd gone."
How furious she ought to be.
How furious she planned to be.
There is no emotion inside of her but gut wrenching, all encompassing relief.
Jane flexes hands that seem too fragile and too strong. "Yeah," she says. "I...Yeah."
How incoherent she is, now that she is coherent. Maura bites her lip.
"You saved my life," Jane says hoarsely. She looks down at the pavement, skimming a toe along a line drawn by shadow and streetlight. "You...were my life."
Maura knows what this means, although it isn't how she might have described it. Those last two days - before they found the miniscule scalpel piece that was flooding Jane's body with infection - those last two days, Maura had not left Jane's bed.
She could feel the life going, could see it going, and she had tried to bind it against Jane's skin with her own.
"My Ma says that God is merciful. She says he is a g-good...powerful…"
Minha querida, cara mia, my love, hold on.
Jane rolled into her.
On fire.
"I won't go through the gates," she'd murmured. "I'll never let him touch you."
Now, Jane looks at her with clear eyes above dark circles. A body that has refused God's mercy. A frame still wrapped in something dark.
"I thought, if half of the things I remembered were true...then I could never find the strength to face you. That the feelings from those LSD dreams would go away."
Dark eyes finally meet hers.
"But...I…" shoulders shrug. "Jesus, Maura," a thin hand through hair. "I love you so much."
Maura shakes her head, more to clear her eyes of tears than anything else. "I love you, too," she says.
English, because there is no need to call her home anymore.
Maura steps forward into Jane's arms, and very suddenly they are in her bedroom, under the sheets, and Jane's warm, half clothed body is pressed snugly into hers.
"The portuguese," Jane requests, stretching her length against the coolness of the sheets, surrendering herself to home. "It was my favorite."
Maura kisses the nape of Jane's neck, kisses her shoulder, kisses her ear.
She begins to speak.
…
…
It's six days later that she receives the letter in the mail. The postage stamp says it is from just outside Boston, and when she comes up with the name for its theoretical sender, everything around her seems to blur away like a watercolor.
See you soon, Dr. Isles