A/N: Set somewhere after the season one finale. It doesn't really matter though.
Disclaimer: Don't own. No money. ETC.
Jane convinces herself that the pain is nothing so it is nothing. That's what the pain management doctor told her to do all those years ago. Mind over matter. But some days, especially in winter in Boston, she finds herself curled into a ball on her couch on the verge of tears because it hurts so damn bad. And she's too stubborn, too proud to let the tears fall so she's always on this precipice of breaking and not breaking. She's a ball of tense muscles and fatigue and fear and anger that the pain only gets broader. It expands every time she breathes. It radiates, seeps into her veins like an infection. And it just makes the fatigue and fear and anger intensify.
It's not the physical pain that hurts the most. After days of the constant ache it just becomes white noise to her. She's seen enough of life to be able to take it. But the physical pain is the catalyst for the rest because when she doesn't hurt she doesn't feel.
It's what the physical pain does to her psyche that throws everything off kilter.
It's a barrage of thoughts. They are the kinds of thoughts that bring her to her knees. The ones that say she deserves this because she's an idiot. That she was an arrogant, young detective who thought she could save the whole world, who thought she shouldn't wait for back up because someone needed her. Only, someone always needs her. Someone is always asking for more than she can give. And she tries. She tries so hard but it's not enough. It's never enough.
It's what they don't tell you about police work. It's something you don't understand until you're there. Until you're doing it. There are real lives at stake. It's a thought that never crossed her mind until she was standing in her full uniform all doe eyes and shaky hands in the middle of a trailer staring a drunken man in the eye as he points a dirty kitchen knife at her, at the woman behind her. There are real people, crying real tears, screaming themselves hoarse because you have to help them. She can still hear that woman screaming in her ear, clawing at her back demanding that Jane not hurt him because he just gets angry when he's drunk and she loves him and please don't hurt him. That's what they didn't tell her in the academy or they did and she was too headstrong to listen because she was going to save people.
She didn't know that saving people meant throwing that pesky thought of self-preservation out of the window. Because when someone is screaming and crying, when there is a gun shaking against their temple and you're there you do what needs to be done. That was the thing about being a cop. Real lives mean you dig as deep as you have to to get the job done. There is no other option. But you do that, day in and day out and you keep digging because people need you to help them. Inevitably, you end up stuck in a hole in the ground from all of your good intentions. And you can't get out.
And every time Jane finds herself curled into a ball on her uncomfortable couch that's what she thinks. She is in a hole and she can't get out. And it is this never-ending cycle of pain and hurt and feeling too much. It's the gnawing kind of pain in the base of her ear that makes her teeth hurt. The kind that let one small thought explode into a million not-so-small thoughts.
She would take some ibuprofen but that would require her to move. She'd have to unfurl her body, unclench her hands and walk. She could barely breathe and her head was pounding. How could she walk? So she sits with her hands clenched between her knees in the fetal position on her couch while she's having this war within herself wondering if taking the edge off is really that important. Is it important enough to risk the lightheadedness? Could she even open the bottle? Would her empty stomach agree with the pills? She hadn't eaten all day and she didn't want to add stomach pain on top of hand pain on top of thought pain. She decides to stay on the couch. She clenches her thighs, her knees, harder together. She rolls her jaw, her neck, and groans into the small pillow underneath her head.
She hates this. Hates how weak she feels, how fragile and damaged and broken she is. This pain is the worst pain. She thinks that every time though. Every time she gets hurt, every first snowfall, every trip, every cut, every bruise, every graze of a weapon against her body. It's always the worst pain. It's why she hates hospitals because they don't understand pain. They don't understand her.
They ask stupid questions like what is her pain level, one being the least and ten being the worst pain she's ever felt. And when she gets kicked in the ribs by a size fourteen steel toed work boot and says her pain is a three with a question mark and they look at her like she's an idiot she feels like one and she nearly gets up from the stupid chair. Because getting kicked in the ribs a couple of times is nothing to being hit over the head with a solid two by four and waking up to scalpels being pierced straight through the palm of her hands. It's nothing to the burn of a bullet ripping through muscle and bone and somehow missing important organs and arteries and yet falling to the concrete bleeding to death anyway. She never actually gets up to leave because Maura is there with a steady hand on her shoulder and a stern word to the nurse. There's a lot of name dropping and titles being thrown around until Jane is on a table getting an x-ray and leaving the building in record time.
She doesn't know how it happens or when. One second she's thinking all of these terrible, dangerous thoughts and the next she's opening her eyes and she's on her bed. She has no recollection of getting on the bed but Maura is there, like she always is. Jane's lying diagonally across the bed and she's on Maura. She's on her hip, stomach, side, lap – everywhere. And Maura is talking. Jane's still so caught up in sleep that she can't understand the words but the soft tenor of her voice is soothing and she can feel her own heartbeat slow back down.
Maura, Jane notices, also has her left hand between hers. She doesn't know what Maura's doing to it but she's pretty sure it's magic. It still hurts, but the pain is being overshadowed by other things, good things. Like Maura's perfume and her voice and the softness of the bed and just Maura.
Maura is magic. And Jane feels herself falling and falling and falling deeper and deeper but also climbing out of that hole. It's a weird state, a strange feeling. Maybe she's soaring, not falling? Whatever it is, she never wants it to end.
She can feel Maura breathe. And the headache, the pain, the anger, the fear – it all fades into lesser versions, into tamable beasts that she can conquer on her own. But it's Maura and her magic that pushes it all back.
And she can breathe again.
"I love you." She can't help mumbling the words between slightly parted lips. She can't help herself because Maura is magic.
If Jane had opened her eyes and took her face away from Maura's abdomen she would've seen Maura's smile, the love in her eyes. But she keeps her head where it is because she can feel Maura breathe and she can feel the words Maura speaks. "I know." And the words don't just mean I know. They mean I love you too. They mean you're not broken. They mean I'll be here in the morning. It's more than Jane could ever ask for, and she settles back down, back into Maura's warm body and lets Maura continue to work her magic.
A/N: I found a draft of the beginning of this in one of my folders and I liked the idea behind it so I finished it out today.
Thanks for reading!