Hi all! Here's the first chapter of something that's still coming. It's not really au (yet) or rizzles (yet to be determined), but it was time to get back to writing. Hope you all enjoy! Comments of all shapes and sizes are always appreciated :)

The musty smell of the boxing gym permeated the air to the point that Jane's eyes watered slightly as she landed another solid blow to the old heavy bag swaying lazily in front of her.

She was glad her eyes were watering. It made it easier for her to deny that tears had mingled in and were now streaming down her cheeks along with the sweat that already glistened across her face and chest. She jabbed at the bag and followed with a powerful left uppercut. Her dark eyes were trained straight ahead, her jaw set in grim determination. No one else came to the basement BPD gym at 4:30 in the morning. Even if they had tried, Jane locked the door as soon as she got there. She didn't come often in the night. But when she did, she always came to the heavy bag. And she always came alone.

The last time she had showed up, her hands already wrapped and the door locked behind her, she had just left an accident scene on a warm night on a busy highway. The lights had flashed behind her eyes then, leaving shadows of reds and blues hovering in her vision every time she blinked. Even hours later, she still heard the ghost of sirens in the silence. She had not cried, in the hours still too early to really be called morning. She had not cried, but she had punched the bag until her wrists ached and her fingers were swollen and bruised. She had not begged or bargained or even prayed. But she had kept punching until her knuckles bled.

Because she had seen death before. She had seen it intimately, up close, in all its stages of decay. She had smelled it and investigated it and even, at times, wrestled with it herself.

"It's what we've been trained to do," she breathed, her voice a low rasp against the steady hum of the one old florescent light, flickering half-heartedly above the boxing ring in the middle of the room.

The detective's shoulders ached, and she shrugged a few times, trying to loosen her already knotted muscles. It didn't work. She punched the bag again, this time hitting it so hard she saw the dust particles explode around her hand as it made contact with the old material.

Maura is dead.

That's the what she had been thinking as she sat her desk more than a full 24 hours earlier, staring at an action figure. Her mother had brought her a sandwich, and Jane had looked up and thought it again- Maura is dead. But she didn't say that out loud. She said thank you for the food. She said they would find Maura. But she didn't say she was already dead. That was a truth that was going to have to haunt her alone until they found the body, found the proof that matched all of the medical examiner's peer reviewed statistics. 75% of victims who are abducted are murdered within 3 hours.

A small voice in the back of Jane's head reminded her that Maura had not been in the majority 75% of anything in her life. First in her class in medical school. First woman promoted to chief medical examiner before she was 35.

Jane forced her eyes away from the action figure and picked up a stack of case files. She couldn't keep sitting there, staring at the chair that didn't used to be empty. So she allowed her feet to carry her automatically to Maura's office. She almost let her guard down as she walked in, almost let herself give in to the panic and fear that thrashed against the dam constructed in her chest. The doctor's desk was immaculate, as usual. Everything looked as if she had just stepped out. As if she would be right back. Jane sunk down onto the couch and closed her eyes, just for a moment, letting the scent of Maura's perfume and the familiar comfort of the warm office wash over her.

After 24 hours, 91% of kidnap victims had been murdered.

But still, still Maura had beaten odds steeper than that before. She was the child of a mobster, and she was an M.D. She was a genius, literally, who even after years of friendship with the Rizzolis had a hard time picking up on sarcasm. And, the voice insisted, maybe most unlikely of all, Dr. Maura Isles had walked into Jane's life, wearing her too-high heels and her too-expensive dresses, without any resistance. It wasn't that Jane took her walls down for Maura- it was that, for some inexplicable reason, they had never been there for her at all. They had barely even been friends when Jane showed up at the doctor's house in the middle of the night and admitted she was as afraid as she had ever been in her life. She thought it was afraid as she ever could be.

But, as Jane opened the first file in the stack and settled in to read it, she realized she had been wrong. There were a million words to describe her fear now, but there was only one that mattered. More. She was more afraid now. She was more afraid than she knew she was capable of. She was more afraid than she was alive.

The words blurred slightly on the page, and she shook her head to clear the drowsiness from her mind.

Jane landed another solid punch, and the jolt shook her from the memory.

She hadn't cried the last time she had been there, and she hadn't prayed. She blinked the sweat out of her eyes, and when she opened them again the room swayed before it steadied. She had gone too long without sleeping. Her legs shook as she bent down to pick her towel, and she knew that no matter what nightmares were waiting for her in the dark, the time was coming when she was going to have to face them.

"Jane, go home."

She looked at the older detective. His tie was loosened, the top button of his shirt undone. She knew he was almost as tired as she was, but she would make him fight this one out because she could not go home. Not yet.

"I'm just going to stay here until they release her. The doctor said it would only be overnight, and then I can drive her home."

Korsak sighed. "You look awful."

"Gee, thanks."

"You need to sleep, Jane. It's been almost 48 hours."

The two detectives were standing in the hallway of the hospital, their usual good humor strained with exhaustion and fear. But it was the relief that kept them standing. That kept them arguing without even a trace of malice.

Jane looked through the window into the hospital room.

Not dead, she repeated to herself for what felt like the ten thousandth time since they had found Maura. She is not dead.

Jane nodded wearily. "I know. And I will. But I can't- I can't leave her, Korsak. Not yet."

If it hadn't been for her ma and Frankie choosing that moment to barge into the hallway, he probably would have let her stay. But with the three of them working together, Korsak's request had turned into an order. She had been told to leave for two hours, minimum. Maura would be sleeping the whole time anyway, they insisted.

And so she found herself in the basement of BPD, once again facing the heavy bag. The station was closer to the hospital than Frankie's, and she had intended to take a quick nap on Maura's office couch before heading back, but she had felt the pull of the empty gym, and she had followed it.

Jane stood next to the swaying bag, towel draped across her shoulders. Her mind was too tired to focus, too tired to process more than the feel of sweat sliding down her back and the burn of acid in her muscles.

"Frost," she whispered, and it surprised her the name had been spoken out loud.

"I asked you once to find me," she continued, her voice low and rough with exhaustion. "That crazy baker guy kidnapped me and decided I was his wife, remember? And I knew you could find me. I knew you could see me and that you would be listening."

Jane sat down on the edge of the boxing ring, kneading her fingers back and forth across the scars on her hands. She looked up, blinking against more tears, her voice dropping impossibly lower, like sandpaper and velvet. "I don't know if you can see me now, or if you can see Mau-" her voice broke, and she swallowed against the heat rising in the back of her throat. "If you can see Maura. I don't know if you can hear me, Frost. But I know you always had my back. And if you had anything to do with today... with us finding her alive..." She paused again, shaking her head. "I think I'm just trying to say thank you. And you better be saving me a spot up there, alright? Let's just try and make sure you're the only one keeping watch... just for a while longer."

The detective looked back down at her scarred hands. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. "I miss you."

The quiet after Jane fell silent seemed louder than before. She sat there on the side of the ring for a moment more and then, slowly, gathered her towel and bag and walked stiffly to the door. It was 5:30. She had been away from the hospital for sixty minutes and she had felt each of them, like a physical reminder of what she had almost lost that day. Korsak had said two hours, but one was enough. One was enough when at some point one more hour will be the last hour.

She turned back and looked at the empty gym, the heavy bag once again unmoving on its chains. And then she walked out the door and into the dawn.