a/N - something about this fandom just draws out my inner desire to write. especially while intoxicated. i'm halfway through a handle since i started posting earlier this evening, and have managed to shit out like another 3 fics. enjoys.
She compartmentalizes, she's good at it. She tucks each little part of her life away, burying anything that she doesn't want to feel. She's gotten good at burying emotions, she's gotten good at lying and pretending that everything is just fine. She's learned a long time ago, to construct a facade on a whim so that the outer her is whoever she wants it to be. She's been doing it for as long as she can remember. She's a good liar, especially to herself, and pretends that the bit she keeps hidden away do not exist, and everyone believes her.
For at least the last eighteen years when she first woke up in a sweat, having imagined what it was like to be between Jamie Coley's legs, wondering if the curtains matched the unnaturally cherry red hair, knowing that the other girl's attention to detail had been enough to have been a possibility, she's learned how to tuck certain parts of her life away. Ever since she'd been in school, and woke up dreaming about her classmates. Ever since she realized what she was, was everything that she wasn't expected to be.
She'd spent eighteen years, trying to tamp down the desire, the want that panged inside her whenever she found herself looking at an incredibly gorgeous rack, or a perfect ass highlighted by tight pants. She'd spent most of the last two decades fighting it. Pretending that these feelings didn't exist. And now, now they'd all come back to her all at once, and with eighteen years worth of repression to back them up. But now, now she'd just woken up from a dream not just about another woman, but about Maura.
This was wrong. This was everything that she wasn't. This was everything that she had hated about herself all come to light. Not just anyone. She wouldn't be freaking the fuck out right now and sitting up in bed with a jack and coke at three in the morning with the knowledge that the double whiskey is no where near enough to make her forget, and too much for her to do much than just drink it. There's something weird about it, sitting there in the middle of her bed, trying her best to pretend that what had just happened hadn't just happened. She had just woken up from the most pleasurable dream of her life, dreaming about her best friend.
If it was anyone else – if it was Walcott, the butch, yet completely feminine DA that ran the legal side of their cases with an iron fist, that would have been one thing. If it'd been someone famous, she'd have been fine with that. After all, there's something that she's always found attractive about Ellen, and she knows that the woman had become her fashion icon sometime long ago even though she tried to pretend it wasn't true. There was just something practical about pantsuits, and if she happened to DVR the show – under the entire pretense of liking the guest stars – so be it.
This is what she spent her whole life fighting. She was the tomboy. She was the one that wore wifebeaters overtop her bras, and boxers underneath her pants. She was the fearless cop who had grown up playing flag football and softball and pretending as though these feelings didn't exist, because she was not going to open herself up to be mocked. It was bad enough when her Ma's good italian cooking had turner her into Rolly Polly Rizzoli, she didn't need to add Rolly Polly Rizzoli the Lezzoli on top of that.
It wasn't that she didn't like men. She liked men just fine. She liked plenty of men just fine. Casey, Dean, multiple other interim fucks, just moderately attractive men who she ran into in bars when she had had entirely too much to drink, and when the mental filters were coming dangerously close to eroding, and there were far too many perfect skirts clinging to too many perfect asses and too many tight tee shirts and she was talking entirely to too many breasts. That was when she found herself going home with the first moderately attractive man that talked to her breasts to save her from speaking to someone elses.
It was never exactly what she wanted, but it worked. It took care of the need and the want just the same, and stopped her from making an utter fool of herself, and eroding everything that she had built up. She was not going to be a stereotype. She was going to be the strong, proud, powerful woman that she was supposed to be. She was going to be the athlete, the all star detective. She was going to prove herself. And she was not going to be a stereotype.
She was not going to fall for another woman. She was not going to fall for Maura. Stereotypes could be fucking damned. She was perfectly fine with being stereotype if it meant that she didn't fuck up the one meaningful relationship in her life. She would hula dance in the middle of a god damned pride parade if it meant not making what they had awkward. This was Maura. This was the one person who meant the world to her, she couldn't be thinking these sorts of thoughts. It'd be like falling for Frankie or Tommy. Something about it just felt wrong, and the worst thing was that the rest of it felt oh so right. This was Maura, the one person that understood her more than anyone else.
She wasn't going to risk that.
Which is why when she wakes up some five hours later, the faint taste of Jack Daniels still on her tongue, but none of its comfortable numbness, she groans, heading to work feeling like she was on eggshels. She can't help it. She sees Maura down in the morgue, dress wrapped tightly around an ass, bent over a dead body. She can't help but stare, watching and nimble fingers stitch up a corpse, and the only thing she can think of is what she had imagined those nimble fingers doing her her.
The talk. They bullshit about the case. They bullshit about her mother, and she's doing everything she can to not talk to the two most perfect breasts she's ever seen in her life. She'd seen them before, talked to them before, but before she'd always had the excuse of a few beers too many, and had always gone home with someone else. They do everything they're supposed to do, everything that has always been so routine. Maura asks if she wants to grab takeout, watch a movie. She agrees, knowing that she could never say no. She retreats back to her case, tempted to go out and kill someone her self just to give her and excuse to not go over, not spend the night on the couch, not spend all night replaying everything she'd imagined.
Maura, at her door. Maura, in her arms. Maura, in her bed. Maura on Maura's couch. Maura, in Maura's bed. Maura in the car. On one of the autopsy tables. On a desk, on a kitchen counter, on the fucking bar of the Robber for all to see. Her head buried in tan curls, ankles locked around her shoulder blades. She finds Frankie, asks him if he wants to go to the bar later .Texts Maura change of plans. Robber? And gets an assent in response. She couldn't do this. She'd spent eighteen years fighting this, and she wasn't about to let all eighteen years go to waste.
The rest of the day passes slowly, as she spends her time very carefully recompartmentalizing her life, packing away the feelings that she keeps carefully hidden behind her facade. She spends the next five hours staring at cold case files, pretending as though everything is just fine, and convincing herself that it is so. That she's not going to go home and get drunk and watch episodes of The Real L Word and tell herself it's just because she likes trash TV. Ethnographic research, as Maura had called reality TV once. She's not going to pretend that she's jealous, or that she can imagine herself fitting in.
Instead, she finds Frankie standing at her desk, nodding towards the door as they go to the Robber, and she orders a double jack and coke, and another, and she looks at Maura, talks to Maura's chest, pretending that she doesn't. She pointedly ignores Maura's questioning looks. She knows better. She knows that this is just a path to ruin, and she'd rather go without than to have and lose. Tennyson could go fuck himself, there was no way that twas better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all could possibly right. Somewhere, she's pretty sure that if she somehow fucks things up with Maura, she'd break.
So she talks to Maura's breasts and and avoids Maura's glances, and finds some moderately attractive man after the fifth Jack and Coke. She pretends not to acknowledge the disappointed look in Maura's eyes as she lets herself get tugged out of the Robber, pretends not to notice the questioning, hopeful look that was there when she made her goodbyes to a rack that had to be sculpted by God himself, followed by a whisper of something to the most perfect mouth ever, that she could imagine latching onto and never letting go from.
She compartmentalizes, and rationalizes that if this has worked for her for the last eighteen years, it can keep working. The sex isn't what she wants, it isn't good, but it's something. She doesn't get off, but it alleviates the need that she feels whenever she looks at Maura. It's not what she wants, but it's enough, and she wakes up well before him and slips away before she can even get his name. She's used to this routine, and she goes to bed, and finds that she sleeps a dreamless sleep for the next few weeks.
She knows that it's just waiting to restart. That a few weeks from now, this whole cycle is going to start over again, and she braces herself for it. But she's not going to be a fucking stereotype. She's not going to fuck up the one good thing she has. She knows that she can't run forever, but she can lie to herself and pretend that she can. So she compartmentalizes, and pretends as though everything is all right. She's always been a good liar, now is no different. Maybe, just maybe, she'll even believe herself.