Title: Enough
Pairing: Jane/Maura
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I claim nothing. Ownership inquiries can be directed to Gerritsen and Tamaro.
Summary: Hoyt is gone, but Jane and Maura are still trying to pick themselves back up. One-shot follow-up to episode 02.10: "Remember Me".
Notes:This idea has been nagging at me for a while, but I was long reluctant to indulge it because I've never made a real attempt at fiction writing before. Obviously, I gave in. This is imbued with first-timer jitters, but now I have a whole new respect for writers.
"Maura?"
Her voice sounded harsh against the saturated silence, but nothing in the room indicated that Jane had said anything at all. Even the medical examiner in question remained still, impervious to her own name.
"Hey, Maura?"
In fact, it was Doctor Isles' stillness that concerned Jane in the first place. The detective had loped into the morgue several moments prior, but had stopped short when she had seen Maura hunched over a cadaver. Rule number one of the morgue: never startle someone holding surgical tools. And since Maura's back was to her, it would be all too easy to unintentionally end up with a hypodermic needle to the eye. So Jane had watched and waited, leaning back against an unused countertop with her arms akimbo. She had taken a moment to note how the black scrubs that flattered no one hugged Maura's silhouette with demure charm, how the scrub cap that concealed her hair allowed a rare view of the graceful slope of her neck, how her hand expertly embraced the scalpel with experienced precision.
How that hand hadn't moved an inch since Jane walked in. And now, how even her own name wasn't waking her from her deep reverie.
Jane frowned as she called Maura's name out a third time, and then pushed herself away from the counter to walk the perimeter of the room, easing herself into Maura's peripheral vision. She stopped at the opposite side of the autopsy table, a table that held the body of a middle-aged, fit, Asian male whose abdomen was conspicuously whole and unscathed by any incision. The scalpel in Maura's fingers hovered just above the skin of the cadaver, but she made no move to marry steel and flesh.
"Doctor Maura Isles, comma, M.D., are you with us?"
Acknowledgement took form in the tremble of her hand. Jane simply watched as Maura slowly, almost painfully, extracted herself from her mind. First she lifted her head, her focus still downward upon the body. Next her eyes closed for several moments, and then Jane found herself gazing into hazel depths that lacked their usual mirth.
"Jane." The name fell from Maura's lips half in recognition, half in relief. Her hand collapsed around the scalpel, her palmar grip on the blade giving in to a mere fist.
"Maura, are you all right?" Jane's worry manifested itself in her body language, in her furrowed brow and in her neck that craned to bring her eyes level with Maura's. Especially in the way her hand snaked its way under Maura's fist, a gentle request for the blade within.
"I'm…" I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm great. I'm terrific. Maura willed her mouth to vocalize any of those adjectives, but instead her shoulders slumped and her fingers released the scalpel from its death grip. "No." She took a tentative step backward, and then a second. She peeled the gloves from her hands as she made her way to the waste basket. "No, I'm not." Without breaking her stride, she disposed of the now-shapeless latex and retreated from the room. An invitation for Jane to follow would have been redundant.
When Jane entered the medical examiner's office, she found Maura seated on the couch staring at her own interlaced hands. The blue scrub cap hung unceremoniously from a pinkie, her slightly rumpled hair the only sign that the cap had been tugged from her head only moments before. Silently, Jane perched on the corner of the desk. She knew the look on her friend's face. Maura needed no further prompting to talk, just a few moments to put her thoughts in a coherent order.
It didn't take long. Maura's words were prologued by a shake of her head. "How do you do it, Jane? How do you march through here today without a worry in the world, after what he did? After Hoyt very nearly won, how do you make everything go back to normal so quickly?"
To an outsider, Maura's words may have sounded accusatory, but the pleading in her eyes revealed a different truth. The questions weren't rhetorical; when her world was upside down, Maura wanted to know how to turn it right again.
"Too much practice." For anyone else, Jane would have left it at that, delivered with a nonchalant shrug. It was certainly true that she had dealt with her fair share of traumatic stress in the past, but Maura was no stranger to hell either. After being abducted once and held hostage at gun point thrice, she had seen more action than some of the uniformed cops. And in here, Jane could rest the tough-guy routine that made life in the testosterone-fueled bullpen survivable. Maura deserved more than that. Right now, she needed more than that. "Honestly, you think it doesn't haunt me too?"
Of course, once pointed out, the chinks in Jane's armor were all Maura could see. Dark circles under her eyes betrayed several consecutive nights of fitful sleep. Undoubtedly, she attempted to compensate for that with ungodly amounts of caffeine, which would explain why Maura had rarely seen her in the last few days without a cup of coffee at hand. And although Jane wasn't normally one to fuss at length over her unruly hair, she didn't usually resort to the loose ponytail that she now sported unless she was doing something where her hair was likely to get in the way.
But Jane's deficits weren't paralyzing her the way Maura's were. "When I hold that scalpel, all I can think of it how it felt cutting through my skin." As Maura spoke, her thumb traced the angry red line that traversed her throat. "And I think of what he did to you. Again. And what he did to all of those people throughout the years, the terror they felt and the torture they endured from his scalpel. And intellectually, I know that the man on my autopsy table is dead, that his body's nociceptors are entirely incapable of detecting the sensation of pain. But cutting into him… I can't do it without all of these other feelings getting mixed in."
And there it was. Maura's weaknesses, her irrational fears, all laid out at Jane's feet. Had she expected to feel relief simply from exposing her turmoil? She didn't know. But she surely hadn't expected this sudden feeling of complete vulnerability.
If Jane was surprised at her admission, she didn't show it. "It's okay," Jane started, sliding off the desk to pace the floor. "It's all okay, Maur. It's only been five days, and since Pike covered for the case that Detective Moore picked up on Friday, this is your first autopsy since everything went down." Until that moment, Maura hadn't noticed that Jane still held the scalpel that she herself had relinquished in the other room. The instrument rolled between nimble fingers as casually as a pen, albeit with a healthy respect for the blade at the end. "After what Hoyt did to my hands, do you know how long it took me to watch another autopsy? A month. Even after I got cleared for duty, it was a full month before I came back down here. And I wasn't even the one who had to do the cutting."
This was news to Maura. After all, this all happened just before she secured her position with the City of Boston. "But… How? Even then, you were in homicide. The autopsy is essential to the investigation."
"I just always made sure I had somewhere else to be." This was obviously not a proud moment for Jane. She couldn't even meet Maura's eyes, instead focusing entirely on the steel that she worried at with her fingers. "Witnesses to interview. Physical therapy for my hands. Whatever. Almost screwed up a case too, when the M.E. left a page out of the autopsy report, and since I wasn't there, I didn't know any better."
"Is that what it took to get you back to an autopsy?" Maura knew that Jane would have berated herself endlessly for such a blunder, regardless of the fact that the medical examiner on the case had made the real error.
"Actually, no." A hint of a smirk pulled at the corner of Jane's mouth. "No, what happened is that my request for a new partner finally came through, so I couldn't push Korsak to go to the autopsies for me anymore. And if you think Frost has a weak stomach now, you should have seen him during his first few homicide cases. He wouldn't go near the morgue. So I had no choice."
"And was it as bad as you thought it would be?" Maura asked.
"Well, it wasn't a walk in the park. I jumped six feet in the air when Doctor Tierney made the first cut. Of course, Defective Crowe was down there and saw the whole thing." Jane's revision to Crowe's title was entirely juvenile, but Maura couldn't hide her amusement. He was a difficult man to like. Jane considered that smile, however slight, to be a small victory. "He didn't let me live it down for ages."
Finally, Jane's pacing ceased. "I guess my point is this: those feelings that you're feeling? They're normal. Overwhelming, perhaps, but that fades in time. What Hoyt does—did—is sick. I mean, look at what he did to all those couples, and to Frankie. That bastard managed to turn love itself into a weapon." She stood in the middle of the room for a moment, contemplative, and then joined Maura on the couch. She held up the scalpel between them. "This scalpel, by itself, means nothing. In my hand, it's an expensive letter opener. In Hoyt's hand, it's an instrument of torture. But give it to a real surgeon, and it can save a life." She then reached for Maura's hand, extending it palm-side up before setting the blade in it gingerly. "And in your hand, it can reveal the truth."
Maura's fingers closed around the metal warmed by Jane's fiddling. A smile graced Maura's lips as she met Jane's eyes. "Jane, I never knew that you could be so… poetic."
Jane laughed at that. Maura's delivery of sarcasm was never subtle. "Hey, I was having a moment there."
"Yes, I know, and I appreciate it." That, at least, was sincere.
Jane could tell she was about to lose Maura to her thoughts again by the gaze she held on the scalpel. One she wouldn't be able to use tonight, anyway, since they had both just contaminated it. Jane stood up, offering her hand. "Listen, it's late. The only ones left in the building are the poor souls that are just starting their graveyard shifts. Mister Lind over there will still be here in the morning, ready for his autopsy. Call it a night and join me at the Robber?"
Maura was silent for a few moments as she weighed her options, probably factoring in the rate of bacterial decay and her schedule five weeks out, before she nodded her head and took Jane's outstretched hand as she stood. "I just need a few minutes to put everything away and get cleaned up."
"All right, I need to go get my keys from my desk. I'll be back down in a few." Jane shoved her hands in her pockets as she moseyed toward the door.
"Jane?"
Jane stopped her trek, pivoting on the ball of her foot to face Maura again. "Hm?"
"You're right. Hoyt did awful things with a scalpel, but that doesn't mean I should be afraid to use one." Maura paused, closing the yards between them to just mere inches. "Jane, don't be afraid to love." She leaned in, hesitated for a moment, and then kissed Jane on the cheek.
And there it was. Jane's weaknesses, her irrational fears, all laid out at Maura's feet. Maura knew. For years, Jane tried to hide it, tried not to think about it. Loving someone meant new vulnerabilities. It meant watching her heart run around outside her body. And Maura knew that this was Jane's fear.
But as Jane studied those hazel eyes, with mirth subdued, she realized that it was too late anyway. Her heart was already exposed, standing right in front of her, hand on Jane's cheek. And Maura knew that too.
Metal clattered as Maura tidied up in the next room, drawing Jane out of her reverie. The elevator dinged, her desk drawer squeaked open, keys jangled in her fingers, footsteps echoed in the stairwell. The trip upstairs was mostly a blur, but time itself stalled for the smile that greeted her in the morgue. As they left the building, nothing was spoken, and at the moment, nothing needed to be said. There would be time for that, sleepless nights for brooding, and a full evening ahead for talk. But for now, the smooth skin of Maura's hand interlaced with her own, a thumb absently stroking the scalpel-induced scar, was enough.