Usually, when the freshly dead stood, they wobbled; their legs, unused to the billowy terrain of the mid-world. Jane resumed her broad footwork, missing no beat from her previous life: planted wide, hips angled, pants slung low. Her shoulders cocked back, as if to compensate for her missing weapon, and her eyes turned tempestuous. At her full height, she stood even with the Valkyrie. She expelled a burst of air through her nose, and for just a moment, Tamsin thought she might charge. "You're a what now?" Jane asked, lips pulled tight. Her tone denoted how supremely inconvenienced the whole ordeal made her.
"A Valkyrie. Think of me as your tour guide through the spirit world," Tamsin said, "I make sure that you make it to the big party waiting for you on the other side." She stepped closer to her charge; they needed to be touching in order for Jane to be transported to Valhalla.
Jane seemed to consider the words for a moment. She scrutinized Tamsin, her Norman features and foreign wings. Her gaze dragged from boots to skin tight jeans to the leather jacket on winged shoulders. When it reached blue eyes, it flitted away and looked to her body again. Ah-ha, was that fear I saw?, Tamsin blonde swooped her head to be able to catch that chestnut stare again, just to be sure.
"They must have me loaded on morphine wherever I am, because this dream is a fucking trip," Jane scoffed. She winced again, a discomfort rumbling like clouds over her irises, leaving as soon as it came.
"Come again?" Tamsin asked.
"Well, I'm dreaming, aren't I? I've never seen you a day in my life. And look at me, I don't exactly feel dead, you know?" she gestured to her body with a wide swath of her hands, and looked around as if to find some sort of exit.
"Sorry, kid. This is the real deal. You're as dead as dead gets. Now, come with me and we can get you out of this dank-ass place."
Jane sighed. Would her brain really not let up? She had an investigation to get to. And if things really did go sour back there, she needed to wake up as soon as possible to let her partners know the details so they could catch the bastard she was after. She also admitted deep within herself that she had an itch to see Maura. "Alright, alright, I'll play along, as long as I get to ask some questions."
"I can live with that. But you're not dreaming. The sooner you accept that, the better," Tamsin agreed, and then held out her hand. Jane examined it, then gave her company a playful stare – a hell no of sorts. "Oh get over yourself. We have to be touching in order for me to move you from here to where we're goin' – or would you rather ride me?" With each word spoken between them, Tamsin seemed to regain some of the bawdy talk that characterized her on Earth.
Boston's finest chuckled in good humor. "Oh what the hell," she took the outstretched fingers. They walked for a few minutes, before the sound of water became louder in the distance. "Speaking of hell... is that where I'm going?"
The valkyrie drew them to the side of a deep river, letting go of Jane long enough to gain some composure. The scar on the detective's palm pulsated all of its pain into her own, and Tamsin saw flashes of everything she had witnessed in her short life. The scalpels of Charles Hoyt, the betrayal of her fiance, the agony of her first gunshot to the belly, which ironically, she had survived. A woman in red, weeping, striving desperately and without much luck to contain the flow of black seeping from Jane to the concrete around her.
It was a black flow that much resembled the river just a few inches from their matching workboots. "You're not going to hell, far from it. Just give me a second to test the water here." The blonde dipped a solitary white feather into the water, unwaterlike as it was, and shivered at the cold. The colder the water, the deeper the heartache of the decedent's loved ones on the other side. It would make the ferry ride treacherous for the soul in her care. If Jane fell in, she could be cursed to wander forever. With her track record, however, Odin might see it fit to rebirth her as a Valkyrie. Tamsin silently vowed to keep that from happening. It was a long life no one really wanted. Just as she rose to take Jane's hand again, a canoe, large, wide, deep, rolled into view and to them.
Jane knew she had to have been tripping MAJOR fucking balls at this point. What else was there to do but try and see herself through it as smoothly as possible? Well, as smoothly as Detective Jane Rizzoli could be. "Uh huh. So then, that leaves heaven. Tell me: why we would be ascending to heaven in this piece of shit?"
"You've got quite a mouth, detective, Jesus," the valkyrie responded, annoyed. Through all the fawning over her, her sisters forgot to mention that Jane was a real ass. "Get in," nevertheless, she took extra precaution to usher her into the boat. I really should be getting a damn fare for this. "And we're not really going to heaven, either. At least not heaven as you humans imagine it," once they were both safely inside, she grabbed a gray oar and began to row.
"You're not human, then? What are you? An angel, I'm guessing, by the wings on you. Quite a pair, I must say," the Italian wiggled her eyebrows suggestively, though the woman that they were attached to missed the tone entirely.
She only laughed bitterly. An angel. Oh Jane, if only. "Look, I'm not an angel, ok? We're going to Valhalla, because that is where I was told to take you. Despite your assholery, I'm told you very much belong there."
"What the hell is Valhalla?" Jane asked. She turned serious for a moment. "What is Valhalla and why am I going to it? Assuming I'm really dead, of course."
"You ARE really dead. Valhalla is a great hall, a celebration place for great warriors. Only the bravest of the brave, who've lost their lives on the battlefield, get to go there. Valkyries like me scoop warriors like you away once your soul has passed to this place," Tamsin explained as they eased along the river, "and then we take you there. And you valor is lauded from end to end."
At the explanation, Jane's body sunk. Her eyes unfocused, and her shoulders, rigid, powerful until now, went slack. That, for some reason, made a lot of sense to her. It resonated. Though her last moments were nothing more than a flurry of sweat, dread, and pain to her, she seemed to know exactly what the valkyrie was saying. They were words specifically designed for her, words that she did not yet have the courage to face. Am I really... no longer alive? There's no way. And this is where I'm going, how I'm ending up? Man, did catholics ever get it wrong. Perhaps, she mused, if she focused on the mechanics of how it all worked, she could distance herself from her own reality. It was what made her the prodigy of a detective she was in life – her dogged pursuit of the inner workings of things. Her relentless need for the truth of others' lives so that she needn't examine her own.
"Then what are you? You're not angel, and you're not human. And don't say you're a valkyrie; that means shit to me. Tell me in a way I can understand."
When she finally could talk, Jane's words carried bite. Tamsin, however, took it as an encouraging sign, let it roll off of her back and into the river below. "Ok, Hot Shot, I can try and do that. I'm a valkyrie, yeah. What that means is that when people like you die, brave, fierce people, when they die in a war, or a battle, metophorical or otherwise, their soul comes here. It's kind of like..." she stopped to row, to grit out some exertion as the waters began to speed up. Jane moved to help her, but she waved her off, "it's kind of like purgatory. Your soul ends up here, and then I come to whisk you away to where you belong. Where you'll spend the rest of eternity. But when I'm not doing the whole valkyrie thing? I'm a detective, just like you. Homicide. Toronto."
This stunned Jane. Discomfiture lurched about her in tandem with their boat. "So... you are human, then?"
"No," Tamsin winced, cursing herself for letting that part slip. She felt like she was on the wrong end of an interrogation.
"Then, what are you? Jesus Christ, what does it take to get some real answers, huh?!" the Bostonian slammed a fist against the side of the canoe closest to her, rocking them further. Tamsin grabbed her wrist in fear, anxious to keep her from going over the side.
"Ok, just don't do that shit! I'm responsible for your ass!" she yelled back. This could get very dangerous; their personalities were much too similar, and her charge was having an outburst completely unrelated to the woman across from her. Jane took a labored breath because, Tamsin thought, of what seemed to be a few icy droplets on her bare arm. She closed her eyes, as if to ward off pain, and then awaited further response. "Look, I'm fae. We're a... we're like a race of people that are a little older than humans. We have special abilities, most of the time. Mine happen to be what I'm doing now." Hopefully, if she spoke calmly, Jane would ease into acceptance of her situation. Hurricane seemed a more accurate description by the minute.
"F... fae? Are you bullshitting me? Where are you from?"
"Yeah, fae. And no I'm not bullshitting you. I happen to be from what is now Norway, but I live in Toronto. Like I said, I'm a cop, too. We're given regular human jobs to help us blend in."
"I'm sorry, I really am. But an ancient race of people that have special powers? Are you trying to tell me you're the X-Men or something?"
"More like your childhood bedtime stories. Usually the scary ones. People come in contact with us all the time, and always have. They just don't always have the words to describe us properly sometimes. But you don't need to worry about that now," the blonder offered, her voice softening, her hand reaching to cover Jane's, this time in comfort.
Neither spoke for a long while, and it was the deceased who finally broke the silence. "Tamsin?"
"Yeah, kid?"
"How did I die?"
"A hero."
They reached an embankment, their destination.