Becoming Maura
AN: the characters do not belong to me but to Tess Gerritsen and TNT.
She doesn't know how long she's been in the basement with the newest apprentice but it is leeching the last bits of her identity from the marrow of her persona. Maura wakes, blinks and cries because another day has begun in a world devoid of light and being. He has come back and she barely feel his kicks or tastes the blood in her mouth as he goes about his daily routine of humiliating her. She is spared the most in humane act only due to a gunshot wound courtesy of one Jane Rizzoli took his function away. Otherwise she'd be his victim in every way possible. He settles instead for the bearings and rubbing his disgusting hands down her face like a farce of a lover caressing his paramour. Other times he makes tiny nicks in the skin of her neck to remind her that he could end it any time. Today he has pulled her joints slightly out of socket at the shoulder and hip, causing red hot pain to overtake her body.
Why hasn't Jane found her? Tears slide down Maura's cheeks, rewetting the dried blood there as she wonders if there is a future for her or if this dark prison will be her last home. She stares at the ceiling and wonders why her hair, normally silky and soft, clings to the floor until she remembers the blood there too. She opens her mouth, dry as her throat is and whispers into the darkness. "God," she pleads for the first time in her life, "please let Jane find me..."
And she does. Jane dispatches the captor and is cradling Maura in her arms as they wait for the ambulance to arrive. But now Maura is crying again and it gives voice to a dolorous wound far beneath the body, the fear that she may never remember how to be who she was again. Maura didn't lie in pools of iron red blood and beg for her life. She was strong, in control. Not broken. Nothing like this. Nothing.
In Jane's arms she whimpers and sobs. "I'm not Maura anymore. I can't be. Just look at all of this." Jane holds her tighter and kisses her tenderly on the forehead.
"Then I will guide you back," Jane promises. She wraps Maura tighter into her calming embrace.
Maura flinches when the paramedics look over her wounds and treat her but she cannot stand anyone touching her face except Jane. So it is Jane's hand that slides the mask over her face and Jane's hand that squeezes the bag delivering oxygen to her rib punctured lungs long past the end of her consciousness, despite the hurt in the scarred hands at performing such an action over the time it takes to bring the broken woman to the hospital.
It is Jane who sits by her bedside and steps safe from the awareness of Maura, given the coma that claims her from the waking world. Remembering Maura's few words in the moments before her eyes closed, Jane promises herself and her friend to teach her how to become Maura again. With tears in her eyes Jane vows to present her with tortoises and cobalt blue slingbacks and wash her hair for her until her ripped joints are healed enough to do it on her own. Nothing can steal her away forever, nothing.