A/N: Don't hate me for not posting for eons. I have no good excuse. I'm finally clawing myself out of a two-year complete depression-fueled writing hiatus and it's an incredibly raw and painful process. My sincerest apologies. I don't know yet whether I'm going to finish "Love is Like Falling". It's been a long time, so chances are, I'll scrap it and start over. Jury's still out on that though.
A/N: Also this was supposed to be a quick drabble, like sub-1000 words. Still a one-shot, but just slightly extended.
Disclaimer: R&I is property of it's owners and creators (TNT, JTam, TGerr, etc). I'm just having fun here. Don't sue me.
Brash. Confrontational. Protective. The words, scrawled in pen on the personnel file for one Boston Homicide detective, would have offended most women. But not Detective Jane Rizzoli. She relished in the rather harsh descriptions, having learned long ago that there were worse things a woman in law enforcement could be called. Her rookie years on the Force, filled with cat-calls and tampons inside her water bottles, were trying and it had taken grit and sheer determination to combat it day in and day out. Eventually, though it had taken years and more than a few fist-fights with fellow officers and aggressive perps alike, it had become known that to treat Detective Jane Rizzoli with anything less than total respect was a mistake. Sure, there was still some good natured ribbing and the occasional sexist remark around the bullpen, but for the most part, Jane Rizzoli was a respected—and feared—member of BPD.
When Doctor Maura Isles had been hired as the Chief Medical Examiner, Jane had initially seen the woman as a threat to all she'd worked so hard to change in the department. It wasn't long before comparisons between the two had begun and it had felt like her first few years all over again.
Hey Jane, why don't you and Doctor Death coordinate dresses for crime scenes?
You sure you want to go chasing after that guy, Rizzoli? Wouldn't want you to scuff a heel!
Jesus, Rizzoli. You PMSing again?
It had taken nearly a month to get things back on track, the effort of reestablishing herself among the primates in the bullpen accounting for most of her initial venom towards Doctor Isles. It wasn't until the Doctor herself had addressed the open hostility that Jane even realized she had been so harsh.
"Detective Rizzoli, do you have a moment?" Doctor Isles had asked one day, approaching Jane as she stirred copious amounts of sugar into her large coffee.
"Shoot," Jane had said, not bothering to look over.
"Shoot?" Doctor Isles had inquired, head cocked slightly to the side. "But I don't have a gun. Oh! Unless you were using the verb colloquially, in that I should proceed with conversation. I have heard the phrase before, but I'm not quite sure what would qualify as an appropriate response."
Something in the woman's monologue—possibly the first use of the word colloquially Jane had heard since a tenth grade vocabulary quiz—had caught Jane's attention and she had slowly turned to face the doctor, perching one hip against the BPD café's long counter.
At Jane's extended silence and narrowed gaze, Doctor Isles had grown uncomfortable, gesturing a bit awkwardly and speaking again.
"I realize that we have only had a handful of encounters outside of crime scenes and I'm sure you've noticed that I'm a bit lacking in social skills," she had paused for a moment to look down, taking a breath before continuing. "I would like to extend an invitation to lunch—a red flag, if you may—to perhaps encourage, if not friendship, at least a less hostile professional relationship. I understand that my presence has caused some disturbance in your department and I was hoping to make an ally of the one of the few women with whom I work on a regular basis."
"White."
"Wh—I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't…" Doctor Isles had shaken her head, tilting it even more to the side in her misunderstanding.
"Flag. White flag. The phrase is 'white flag', not 'red flag'. A red flag is a warning, a white flag is like a peace offering."
"Oh, yes. I suppose it would be," Doctor Isles had said with a slight grimace. "I'm sorry if I've bothered you at all, Detective Rizzoli. I'll just—"
Jane had stopped Doctor Isles's departure with a hand on her arm. She had sighed and dragged a hand through her unruly hair. The guilty realization that this very endearing, if slightly quirky, woman had not meant to stir up trouble, sweeping into BPD in her ever-feminine ensemble, had resounded in Jane's gut. In that moment, she'd made the decision to befriend the medical examiner, if only to offer her the amnesty she'd wished she'd been granted upon her arrival as BPD's first female homicide detective.
"I'm the sorry one," she'd said. "I've been a real ass to you, and for no good reason. I would be delighted to join you for lunch, Doctor Isles."
"Really?" The quiet gasp and hopeful way in which the doctor had said it made Jane chuckle.
"Sure, but on one condition." At this, Doctor Isles had sobered, the small smile all but dropping off of her face as she stared back intently. "You have to call me Jane."
Relieved, the doctor had released a chuckle of her own. "And you have to call me Maura."
It had been over a year since that first lunch, the hostility that inspired it long forgotten. Now, far too comfortable with each other to bother with formally extended invitations, the lunch hour would often find either Jane bursting into Maura's office laden with greasy paper bags of food for herself and a sensibly healthy salad for Maura, or Maura perched on the edge of Jane's desk while the two debated where to head out for lunch.
This particularly sunny late-spring day found them a few blocks from headquarters at a park, splitting lunch from Al's in the Financial District. They each nursed half of a large veggie sub—Jane begrudgingly so—and routinely picked from each other's side dish, though Jane would deny any insinuation that she was enjoying the majority of Maura's fruit cup and, if asked, Maura could spend a full five minutes condemning the nutritional value of Jane's rather delicious bag of cool ranch Doritos.
"Okay, next one," Jane said around a large bite of her sandwich.
Maura stole another chip and thought a moment. "Hmm, oh! Okay, well when Frost couldn't explain why he was late to work this morning and why he was wearing the same suit as yesterday, Frankie said he was doing the 'talk of shame'," Maura finally replied, confused head tilt included.
Jane laughed. "Nice. Okay, so it's 'walk of shame'," she explained. "It's what happens the night after you hook up with someone but you don't have a change of clothes for the next morning, so you have to very shamefully wear the same thing until you get home. Walk. Of. Shame." Jane punctuated the last word by popping the last grape from Maura's fruit cup into her mouth.
"Remind me what 'hook up' means again," Maura asked, taking a dainty bite of her own half of the sandwich.
Jane shrugged. "Hook up, you know." She waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
Maura still looked confused.
"Come on! Okay, so you know… you meet someone and you like them and maybe there's some flirting, so you head back to their place and…" she nodded meaningfully, making a vaguely lewd gesture with the few bites she had left of her sandwich.
The corner of Maura's lip quirked up, but the doctor pretended to dab at her mouth and hoped Jane didn't catch it. "I'm not sure I follow," she said. It wasn't exactly a lie, but it certainly wasn't the truth either. Plus, she secretly enjoyed the exaggerated show Jane put on when she had to explain anything remotely sexual.
"Really? Mau-ra!" Jane whined, stretching her friend's name into two syllables. Her face looked pained as she thought for a moment. Finally she put down her sandwich. "Ugh. Okay, so it's when you have a one night stand with someone," Jane said exasperatedly. At even the slightest beginnings of a head tilt from Maura, Jane threw her head back and put one hand over her eyes. "Sex, Maura. It means wearing yesterday's clothes after you have sex with someone."
Satisfied at having made her stoic friend squirm, Maura smiled. "Oh!" she said, as if the meaning had just then become clear to her. "Right, I remember now." She laughed outright when Jane's head shot up and the detective stared at her, mouth gaping open in disbelief.
Jane recovered and joined in with a snicker of her own. "Okay, what else?"
"Oh gosh, what was it Crowe said yesterday?" Maura said to herself, twisting the ring on her right hand idly.
Jane's gaze zeroed in on the action. Maura only twisted her ring when she was agitated about something. Jane made a show of offering the last piece of pineapple from the fruit cup to Maura before upending the leftover juice into her own mouth and dropping the empty cup into the open paper bag between them.
Maura chewed for a second, accepted the napkin Jane passed her, and swallowed before speaking. "Right. Well, I was visiting Angela and getting a cup of coffee when I saw they have those cinnamon rolls you like, so I got you one."
"Which was, for the record, absolutely delicious," Jane complimented, earning her a quick grin from Maura.
"So I'm waiting for the pastry, and Detective Crowe is behind me standing with Detective Moore, and I overhear him say, 'and here I thought she was only good for one thing'." Maura recited the sentence slowly and without inflection, before looking up at Jane. Her eyes betrayed not only her confusion, but also a bit of hurt. She may not have fully understood the comment, but it didn't take a genius—though she was one—to understand that it was an insult, nonetheless.
Jane's jaw clenched and she took a breath. "Ah, don't let that ass get to you. He was making a nasty comment about women only being good for sex." This time, Jane's thinly veiled frustration overrode her squeamishness about sexual topics.
Maura still looked a little off, so Jane grabbed both of her hands, rubbing her thumbs over the delicate knuckles. "Seriously, Maur. Don't listen to anything that idiot says. You're brilliant, and twice the person he could ever hope to be."
Maura's smile was shaky, but there was a faint blush across her cheeks, which Jane took as a good sign to let her next comment fly.
"Plus, he was probably just jealous that I'm the only one getting your goods," she said, folding her hands behind her head and kicking her legs out in front over her, the posture of complete confidence. She winked at her flustered friend for good measure.
"Jane!" Maura laughed, slapping the lanky detective's arm with the back of her hand. The comment, so very closely toeing the line between friendship and the something-more they'd been dancing around for ages now, surprised Maura enough to distract her from Crowe's crass remark.
Jane snorted and playfully shoved Maura back, turning to face her more fully on the bench, now that their lunch was mostly picked over. "Okay, okay, next one."
Maura, still laughing, recounted a few other idioms and slang phrases she'd heard throughout the day, and Jane dutifully explained each one. They continued on in this way for the better part of an hour before Maura's phone rang, summoning the doctor back to the lab to discuss some tox-screen results.
They packed up and headed back to headquarters, making plans for dinner and a movie night later that week before parting at the elevator bank.
The next day as she was stirring some sugar into Jane's coffee morning coffee while the detective was chatting with her mother behind the counter, Maura spotted Crowe heading into the café. She raised a hand to greet him, but as soon as he saw her and Jane's approaching form, he spun on his heel and walked briskly in the opposite direction.
Noticing Jane's chest puff up just the slightest bit, Maura looked over, suspicion clear on her face.
"Jane," she asked slowly, "did you notice that Detective Crowe had a rather painful looking black eye this morning?"
Jane frowned, stirred a bit more sugar into her own coffee—Maura never added enough—and shrugged. "Nope. I didn't see anything."
Maura stared down her friend, carefully dissecting her demeanor. Jane's left hand was carefully tucked into her pocket and Maura had little doubt that she was hiding some sort of bruising—not that she would be guessing, of course. Maura Isles did not guess.
Jane looked over, gave Maura a little half-smile, and then pushed the M.E.'s decaf green tea a little bit closer on the counter. "Come on, Poindexter. We've got cases to solve." With a wink and a smirk, she disappeared around the corner.
Maura didn't bother fighting the blush creeping up her neck, and strode into the bullpen after Jane with a radiant smile on her face.