Author's Note: Part 2 of 3. Again, be advised ***Warning*** for Rape triggers.
CH 2: The Boogeyman has Blue Eyes
If only everything could be reduced to weights and measures. Quantifiable calculations that could be infinitely replicated without error, there was beauty in that; beauty in the simplicity of the predictable no matter how cognitively complex the formula or proof might be.
The body could not be forced into such standardization. In the organic variableness of human existence two plus two equaled four only when it didn't equal something else. Jane shot herself, and she should have died, but she didn't. Hold everything constant, the same shot, the same trajectory on ten different people and there were only odds as to who would live and who would die. No certainty. Sometimes the will is stronger than the body.
Maura fought the urge to sleep. She scooted down lower on Jane's body to place her ear where her palm rested over a steadily beating heart. The cadence reverberated through her body; the only rhythm she heard, the only pulse she felt was Jane's. Jane was strong, in body and will.
And he knew today, Maura, he knew that you were my weakness…But, he didn't know that you're also my strength. Maura turned her head, pressing her lips to Jane's skin, tasting the meter of her life. I don't feel like your strength.
She could rattle off innumerable ways in which the body was a marvel of fortitude. It could be punished, taken to the brink of torture the mind could conjure and still not break. It could be beaten, crushed, torn, sliced, pierced and yet it could live. Parts could be lost, parts rendered nonfunctional and yet it could live. But, there was no certainty. The organic vessel with its delicate tissue, its finite supply of necessary fluids, its seemingly fragile frame of bone and cartilage could defy all boundaries of reasonable expectation of survival…it could also just as easily succumb to the microscopic or the mundane. For everything science and medicine had evolved to be the very machine that gave human agency substance to perform those cerebral explorations was still very much a mystery.
And if the body, when it came down to it remained ultimately unquantifiable, the inner recesses of the mind were another impossible calculation altogether. The challenges of solving the body's riddles were what propelled her into medicine. There are ranges of expectations one can hold fast to in her line of work. But, the realm of the mind and emotion had always presented a more daunting enigma. If there could be relatively little certainty in the body's reaction to trauma, the unknown of the mind's reaction was truly terrifying.
So, Maura fought biology, tried to stave off sleep to spare herself from the unknown of dreams. The mind like the body needs time to heal, but the psyche isn't tissue and there are no stitches to knit back together a fractured spirit.
But, Edward at school says the boogeyman is real…he has no face and hollow sockets where his eyes should be. He kills children in their sleep. Maura's eyes fluttered, body once again giving in to exhaustion as the long ago memory in her childhood bedroom flashed in her mind. There is no such thing as the boogeyman; her mother pushed her gently back down to the pillow. There is no such thing as a monster man with no eyes.
"No…" Maura muttered softly as her eyes fluttered shut and didn't reopen, "…sleep." A soft moan slipped past her lips as slumber took over. His eyes are blue.
He was enjoying this. Truly enjoying it. Hoyt could mimic any emotion and the average person that hadn't dedicated time to decoding the outward expression of feeling would be fooled. His emotional charade was as obvious on their previous meeting as his sick and genuinely honest reveling in the circumstances of their current meeting was now. Maura wanted to believe that monsters like Hoyt had no feeling; that was how they perpetrated their acts of vile indecency on other human beings, by feeling nothing. It wasn't like that. He could feel, could take pleasure, could enjoy…and he was, enjoying every moment of her breaking.
Lips, pale, drained, pencil-thin lips inched closer and closer to her own until they pressed against her, consuming her mouth, his tongue flicking out in serpentine fashion to tease her as he tasted. Bite him. Move. She couldn't, she was paralyzed. He took, and she had to let him.
I wonder…if you've imagined what kissing her would be like? Because I know she's imagined what it would taste like to kiss you. His voice rasped in her ear as he moved again to her mouth, sucking on her lower lip before his tongue forced entrance. Mmm, like vanilla and defeat.
She wants to touch you, slip her fingers inside your hot, tight little body.
Please. Maura thought she said it, though she'd regained just enough control of her faculties to utter the words. Please, stop. If the plea was audible, it had no effect. He was unfazed, his mission unchanged. Charles Hoyt was a destroyer and in that act he asserted ownership. Shatter the self and break the body and in the aftermath own the fruit of that destruction – misery.
The rough, cracked skin of his hand scratched up the inside of her thigh as he kneaded at her soft flesh. Higher his malevolent caress trailed, sliding easily under the hem of her skirt. Higher still as he traced the pronounced ridge of her pelvis before fingering the waistband of her underwear.
Maura closed her eyes. Jane. Please, Jane. And still she couldn't move. Open your eyes, an amorphous voice instructed…and she did to the sight of Charles Hoyt still pressed down on top of her. The boogeyman has blue eyes.
Calloused fingers scraped across her underwear, pushing down between her legs and cupping her through fear-stained satin. The only movement she could respond with…full body trembles as his fingers pushed the flimsy fabric aside. Skin on skin, as his gnarled digits roamed through her.
A surgeon's hands are quite deft, wouldn't you say? Aww, now Dr. Isles, you're not wet for me? I should be offended. I bet if these were Jane's fingers…he chuckled aloud to himself
The rate of her heartbeat accelerated with each stroke. Faster and faster until the muscle's frenetic pounding had her entire body poised to burst. Cardiac arythmia. Maybe I'll just die.
His fingers teased for a moment longer before thrusting with all his force inside. Lips curling upward in devilish grin of sadistic pleasure as he thrust inside her again…and again…and again.
Maura. Maura. Maura!
"Maura! Wake up!"
Every ounce of strength she had tried to muster in the infirmary, laid out on the gurney, locked in her own body propelled her forward. Every once muted and paralyzed muscle firing simultaneously launching her into Jane's body. She crashed with a bone-jarring thud into open arms.
"You were dreaming. Maur, you were dreaming," Jane's hands brushed the sweat-plastered hair back from her face as she tilted her chin up.
Everything burned, as if her heart pumped acid and not blood through her veins. Her hands shook as she dug them into the bare skin of Jane's back. Her lip quivered as her mouth recalled the acrid taste of Hoyt on her and in her. Faint breaths became more noticeable until soft lips pressed against her own. The trembles stopped.
"It was just a dream," Jane whispered into the kiss.
"It felt…I feel…" Maura stammered.
"I know," Jane eased her back down to the bed and propped herself up so she could look down at Maura as her hand caressed lightly from forehead through damp hair, down her cheek and back again. "Open your eyes." Reluctantly, Maura complied.
"Tell me what you see."
"You, Jane. I see you."
Jane held up her palm, looked at the scar and then turned it for Maura to see, "I know. Believe me, I know."
"I feel so weak," Maura's voice was barely an anguished whisper.
"You're not weak. Look at me." Jane cupped her face, thumbs wiping back the tears, "We won. We're strong…together. I'm not invincible, Maura, and if I act like it it's all a show. I know about the dreams and the nagging fear and the self-loathing and the what ifs and the if I had onlys. It doesn't matter. It took me a long time to realize that, to realize that he couldn't take away what I wouldn't let him. You're the first person that really made me feel worthwhile after him and you gave me back everything I thought he had stolen. And when the doubt crept in, you pushed it back. A weak person can't do that, can't be that for someone else."
Maura pulled Jane down half on top of her, one arm looping around her waist, the other around her back. "It won't feel like this forever?"
Jane kissed her neck, "It won't, I promise."
