It was a typical Friday night at the Robber. The homicide team had successfully closed out another murder, the paperwork was finished and everyone had the weekend free. Naturally the group had decided to go out and celebrate, including the crime lab crew in the invitation as well.
Maura sat alone in the booth, watching the group interact. She had always found people-watching fascinating, even before she had learned to analyse the behaviour she was seeing and interpret motives behind particular activities.
She was presently observing several groups of her colleagues interact. Near the dart board Detective Korsak and Jane had encouraged her lab team out of a corner and were trying to teach them darts. The previous three hours of drinking was inhibiting everyone's ability to successfully finish a game, so they had been stuck trying for the same double three for the last twenty minutes. Nobody seemed to mind, with Korsak supressing laughter and giving throwing tips, Susie giggling so contagiously that Jane was also having trouble keeping a straight face.
Over by the bar Frankie was in deep conversation with one of her new lab techs, Denise. She was enthusiastic but innocent, her wide eyes indicating that Frankie was telling some sort of dangerous story. Maura estimated her age to be close to Frankie and had originally thought to ask Jane about setting them up, but it seemed her assistance had not been required. Maura smiled a little as Frankie finished the story with a large hand gesture, apparently describing some sort of explosion, causing Denise to grab onto his forearm and shuffle closer.
Further around the bar Lieutenant Cavanaugh and Nina seemed to be having an entertaining good-tempered argument with the balance of her crime lab staff. There were a lot of hand gestures coming from both sides, but no outward signs of hostility or impending violence. Angela stood to one side with a wry grin on her face, the occasional roll of the eyes cluing Maura to the silliness of the argument.
As usual Maura felt no real desire to move from the booth and try to engage with any of the groups. She was always more inclined to find a quiet place and observe large gatherings of people rather than trying to interject into a conversation. Too many times that approach had led to awkward silences and shuffling feet, before someone would bravely restart the conversation and direct it away from anything she could blurt something embarrassingly factual into.
Finishing her wine Maura reflected on the many different people she was watching interact seamlessly. Although all were American and on the surface had different jobs, the building blocks that made up the individuals were fundamentally very different. It had always amazed her that people with potentially opposite personality traits, stemming from different backgrounds and experiences, could somehow find common ground, or where none could be found built it from scratch. She had always had difficulty doing so; she supposed she was just too different from most other people to be able to blend with others.
As she felt her mood turn maudlin the exception to the rule her thoughts had conjured sat down in the seat next to her and jostled her shoulder. Loud and brash, especially after several beers, Jane was not one to let her best friend sit in a corner and mope during a celebration.
"What's going on in that big brain Maura? Come join the fun, we've almost got Susie throwing straight!" Maura glanced over to the dart board with a frown, observing Korsak attempting to remove an errant dart from the wall about a foot away from the side of the board where Susie had thrown it with rather more force than necessarily required. For such a small woman she was somehow able to throw projectiles at very dangerous velocities.
Jane followed Maura's line of vision and snorted loudly, watching as Korsak finally worked the dart free and gingerly returned it to Susie, obviously coaching her to be a bit more gentle.
"Come on Maur, join us! Or not, just talk to me, what are you turning over in there?"
Maura didn't want to admit that she had been slipping towards self-pity over her lacking social skills, so she skipped into a somewhat related topic to avoid lying.
"I was just considering the unlikelihood of all these people ending up in similar enough fields to result in the camaraderie displayed tonight. Statistically speaking the chances of any one individual being born at all is astronomical, requiring millennia of correct pairs of mates meeting and having children that survive to bear children of their own. The chances of those people also finding enough in common to be able to work together is infinitesimally small, much less those same people being able to then enjoy social conversation."
Jane had seemed to follow most of the doctor's diatribe, although she had zoned out a little at 'astronomical', but she seemed to have gleaned the gist of what had been said. "So you're saying we're all one of a kind and it's astonishing that we all ended up here having fun?"
Maura frowned at the idiom. "I've never understood that phrase; if something is one of a kind it implies there are many of that kind, and yet it means that the object is unique."
Jane rolled her eyes. "Since when have any idioms made sense to you, just go with it! Stop analysing and come have fun"
Maura tilted her head as she looked at Jane. "I don't think it's possible to stop my brain analysing things, it's just how I make sense of the world. For example, I have been trying to quantify just how unique everyone here actually is."
Jane opened her mouth to interrupt somewhere in the middle of the first sentence, but closed her mouth with a huff and an eye roll, resigning herself to another google mouth lecture which she usually ended up begrudgingly enjoying anyway.
Maura had barrelled on, oblivious to Jane's expression. "For example, let's examine your demographic breakdown. You are an American of Italian heritage. The population of the U.S. is around 316 million and Italian Americans make up 5.37% of that population, which makes you one of 17 million. There are around 780,000 police in the U.S. Assuming that Italian Americans make up a representative sample of the police, which for the sake of this representative exercise is mathematically acceptable, that makes you one of 42,000. Next, you have never been married, which is true of 24% of Americans. This makes you one of 10,000."
Jane had listened in fascination as Maura dissected her life, distilling it down to its most basic elements as seen by the rest of the world. These were all very broad categories, and yet they had narrowed her existence to one shared by only 10,000 people out of the 7 billion on the planet.
"Wow, that's kind of lonely when you look at it that way. How do you stack up, similarly I would think since we both live and work in the same place?" Jane's tone was hopeful, wanting to be reassured of her connection to her best friend through the science that Maura clung to so fiercely.
"In fact we have vastly different categories that make our subsets differ significantly. If we take Paddy as my ancestry, Irish Americans make up around 11.45% of the population, which makes the group equal 36.2 million. There are around 8,000 medical examiners in the U.S, which takes the set down to only 916 people." Jane jerked up at the small number; there were already less people in Maura's group than hers.
Maura continued relentlessly. "Taking the same statistics we chose for your case, I have also never been married, so the same 24% applies, taking my group to 220 people."
Jane blinked, trying to absorb the fact that Maura could be seen as that unique by only examining her country of residence, her job and her marital status. She reached over and grabbed her hand comfortingly, recognising that Maura's big brain had constructed this elaborate statistical model to explain her inability to blend with the group. She had been friends with the genius doctor for long enough to know when she was avoiding answering a question with a deflecting fact, but this particular one was especially lonely.
"Well we all know you are unique Maur, no calculations required. And whether you belong to a big group statistically or not, you definitely belong to this group, as diverse as we may be." With that Jane drained the last of her beer and tugged Maura out of the seat behind her.
Throwing a hand around the shorter woman's shoulders in a warm hug, she headed to the bar. Angela bustled over to the pair, having given up on watching the continuing debate between the homicide team and the lab techs. With a smirk at Jane, Angela threw her arms around the pair, squashing them together and gripping tight against Jane's wriggling. Maura allowed herself a moment to appreciate how welcome and loved she felt with this special family she had somehow stumbled into and become a part of. Statistics were, after all, only predictive tools, not a true representation of how the world truly was on a human level. She decided to leave the numbers behind and stop trying to quantify her life, at least for tonight, and just enjoy being with the people she loved. As Maura looked around the bar, her best friend on her arm and her work colleagues smiling at her in appreciation and warmth, she appreciated how these were the only numbers that mattered.
As Angela released them, Jane and Maura happily headed over to the bar to get the next round.
A/N Hi all, hope you enjoyed this quick little tale. I did the best I could with the numbers for the statistics, they are mostly out of date though so they may be slightly wrong, but they will be in the ballpark at least. As stated the assumption that all groups are equally represented is ok for this exercise but in reality is wrong, for example if we took gender into account within the occupation statistic there are, for example, less female cops than the 50% that would be true if female representation within the force was the same as the representation within the general population. It was just too hard to get hold of the correct statistics for those interactions though, so I just went with it. It's a fun exercise to do for yourself though, my number for the same dissection is only 5 people.