A/N: So I basically just wrote this up as sort of a character exercise (Maura's head always baffles me :P) but then I decided to actually take it somewhere. I haven't decided how many parts it will be yet, but probably less than 3. Also, for the sake of the story let's pretend that Jane and Maura didn't go to Paris together before Jane's move (even though, squee! That was absolutely adorable…) But yeah. In this story, it didn't happen.

Also, I don't know what my obsession is with the idea of Maura and Jane being each other's "home" but whatever, I'm just rolling with it. The next part should be up in the next few days.

Enjoy!

"Guide You Home"

If there was one thing that had truly always fascinated Dr. Maura Isles, it was science. From a young age, her parents had indulged her interest in science and the passion for knowledge. By age 6, Maura knew, of course, her alphabet and how to read, but she could also recite the periodic table by atomic number. She got her first telescope at age 7, and she would spend hours upon hours gazing at the stars and the moon in the sky outside her bedroom – a bedroom that was pristine and gave no indication that a small child dwelled within it. The moon and the stars were her first friends. She'd babble on and on about whatever came into her mind, thinking back to the silly rhyme one of her nannies had told her about there being a man in the moon and often times reciting it as she stared up in awe at the large expanse of dark sky, "the man in the moon/ looked out of the moon/ looked out of the moon and said: it's time for all children on the Earth/ to think about getting to bed!

She also recalled sneaking into her father's office and climbing on a chair, reaching up, up, to one of many leather bound books on the large mahogany shelves lining the walls. She always did this when her father was away, but that simply added to the thrill of it (she always did what she was told; sometimes it was fun to have a thrill). Her favorite book on the entire shelf was a worn copy of Gray's Anatomy. The book took up her entire lap and then some, as she would sit on the floor of the study, legs criss-cross applesauce, reading by the dim light of the moon.

Science and knowledge were Maura's refuge. They were safe in a world that often was not. Of course, how could a world be safe when people were so unpredictable? It was always the people that Maura could never understand. Her parents hardly counted; she couldn't remember more than a handful of times when they had tried to relate to her during her childhood. They always saw her as self-sufficient, which she was, and when she outgrew the need for a nanny to look after her, she spent most of her time alone. She wouldn't have recognized it at the time, but despite throwing herself into her schoolwork and her insatiable need for learning, she was lonely.

But it had always been that way, so Maura had nothing to compare it to. Sure, she'd tried to befriend the children at school early on, but quickly learned that they were not interested in hearing what she had to say – especially if it was anything remotely academic or of a culture that those kids knew nothing about. Maura knew from a young age that it was easier to keep to herself, after all, she knew of one thing that had never betrayed her – science.

Science was easy. It was predictable and there were patterns. She liked patterns. She often recalled as a small child, exploring the world around her, and looking for patterns in the seemingly randomness of life. Her eye would catch the clock, and mentally she would add the numbers together, subtract, multiply, divide; whatever she could do to manipulate them. After all, numbers were constant and their values always stayed the same.

When she went to boarding school, she truly thought it would be different from the school she had come from where the kids were only there because they had to be, and not because they actually valued learning. But she quickly discovered that her boarding school was no different from any encounter she had previously. If anything, it was worse because it was an all-girls school and it was a battle of cliques and whose parents had more money, who could brag about the more extravagant gifts or vacation. Maura had no interest in competing in these fields. Her confidence came academically, but she soon found that did not make her popular either.

If anything, outshining her classmates in school only made things worse for her. They called her names ("Maura the Bora"), teased her and found great pleasure in humiliating her any chance they could. It was a select few girls that did this often, but none of her other classmates really did anything to stop it. For years, she went to sleep hearing their jovial laughter and she felt the hurt from being used for knowledge, to help them cheat on some test. She had actually believed that they liked her, that they wanted to be her friend. She'd never had a real friend before, not if she didn't count a couple of nannies that had formed a personal connection with her.

Growing up, all she had wanted was a friendship like she saw in movies. One of her guilty pleasures was watching cheesy comedies that centered on romance, and often friendship. She longed for a relationship of any sort, but she had learned firsthand just how cruel humans could be, so the yearning remained just that.

College had been fun for Maura. One day, she presumed it was somewhere midway through her sophomore year, she'd woken up and decided that she didn't want to be the person she'd always been. So she changed. She went to parties, she joined a sorority. She was the life of the party, all while maintaining her straight A marks. Despite finally, finally feeling like something other than a misfit, she knew that she was never really meant to fit in among the masses.

It wasn't until after college and medical school that Maura truly began to accept who she was, and that she may never have what other people seemed to strive for in life – unconditional love, the comfort of another. Sure, she'd maintained a few serious relationships, hell, she'd even been engaged to Garrett Fairfield and she had a marriage that lasted all of a day, but still, looking back she couldn't say that she'd ever truly connected to another soul. What she thought had been true love, more than once, always turned out wrongly for her. Most that she dated and hung around, ditched her long before even really getting to know her. They said she was boring, that she was robotic and less than human – not warm, cold, distant. Even when she had accepted the position of Chief Medical Examiner, the cops had begun calling her The Queen of the Dead. Though, she thought with a smile, she didn't mind that one so much – she liked that she could speak for the dead and to her, they were the safest kind of people. They couldn't mock her or hurt her. There was only one living person who had ever truly made her feel the same…

She could credit her development in confidence to one person – Jane Rizzoli. She'd entered her life like a whirlwind and she had never left. Jane was the one true friend that Maura ever had and she was still, after all these years, trying to wrap her mind around why?

She'd considered asking Jane why, what she saw in her that made her stick around. She wanted, desperately, to know why Jane, and by extension her family and friends, stuck around past the long spiels about ancient history, and scientific processes' and tidbits that no normal person really cared about. But she was scared of that question too.

Maura knew she would never find another friend like Jane Rizzoli, so the day she began to realize that her feelings for the brunette went deeper than friendship, she almost shut down completely, reverting to a version of herself that had long since passed. She knew that was the only way to protect herself and keep Jane around.

She never imagined that it could do the opposite, but, Maura sat alone in her Beacon Hill home, hands wrapped around a cup of warm tea, as she realized that she had facilitated the outcome of the situation. She'd pushed Jane away and put her at arm's length. She'd helped Jane make the decision to move to Washington D.C. and she'd never gotten her chance to tell her how she felt.

Maura sighed and hung her head, softly beginning to sob and yearning for nothing but Jane. Maura had always relied on science to guide her, to find the answers she sought, but now... Loving Jane had taught her that sometimes the answers weren't in a pattern or a formula. Sometimes, she had to rely on her heart to give her the answers she needed. But it was too late. She was never any good at relying on herself for answers and this, the time it mattered most of all, she'd still failed herself. Stars don't align for two people to be together and fate is a myth. After all, if they were real, wouldn't she have Jane?