A/N: Because I love when Jane is a knucklehead for Maura.
"Hey, you headed to the body on Hyde Street?" Jane's voiced boomed into the BPD lobby when she saw Maura marching from the elevator to the heavy glass of the front doors.
"Hi," Maura greeted back, still a firm believer in manners despite her friendship with the most boisterous, least-mannered detective in homicide. "No. There was a shootout at a meth lab near the bay today. Martinez has recruited me. I guess they found a body that seems unrelated to that shoot out."
"Ugh, welcome to summer in Boston, huh?" Jane grumbled. She stood close behind Maura as the Chief Medical Examiner exited the building.
Maura felt the angular push of a department-issued firearm just above her behind and nearly swooned. "I will admit that… that tension does seem to run higher when it's hot, yes," was what she managed when they stepped out onto the sidewalk. She couldn't help but settle her gaze on the offending weapon slung on Jane's left hip.
"Who's gonna meet you there? Frankie?" Jane asked, completely unaware and fumbling in her blazer pockets for her Ray-Bans.
"Yes, and Kent should be at your scene already," Maura answered, and shook her head as she watched her friend struggle, half-blinded by the oppressive sun. She braced her left hand on Jane's right side, and used her right to pluck the sunglasses from her belt, just behind that pistol. She waved them in the air and waggled her eyebrows, and Jane blushed.
"What would I do without ya?" the detective wondered aloud with a chuckle on her breath, taking the frames and placing them on her face.
"I can't answer that," Maura replied simply.
"Let's not find out, alright?" said Jane as she set out toward her car with a wave, "Be safe."
"You too, Jane," Maura called out, watching the other woman drive away before climbing into her own car.
"This ever get less disgusting?" Jane asked of her sergeant before crinkling her nose in disgust. A body, bloated with time and decay, had started to near-cook in the heat of the hoarded home. No air conditioning, no running water.
"The hoard or the gassy dead people?" Korsak chuckled, and his overall cheery step seemed to indicate that if it didn't get less disgusting with time, one at least became impervious to it. "You been in the department ten years, it ain't like you're a newbie."
"Yeah, yeah," Jane waved off his comment with her gloved hand. She looked for the Scottish assistant medical examiner, and saw him conversing with a CSRU member just out of ear shot. "What'd Drake say?"
"Looks like the guy was blown away by a .38 special. Time of death around 4 or 5 days ago; heat accelerated decomposition," he said, looking over his notes. "Pretty basic breaking and entering; there's a busted lock and signs of a struggle. My guess is whoever came here looking' to rob the place thought it was abandoned, got surprised by Mr. Robles here, and there was a tussle."
"Damn, the city goes crazy in August, huh? Blowing' people's heads off for a B and E," Jane commented with a little cynicism in her hoarse voice. She prowled the scene, taking in stacks of mildewed newspapers, broken pottery, what must have been ten years worth of the old guy's trash. That a clear path existed from the front door to the bedroom, where they found him, surprised her. Was it the worst hoard she'd seen since joining the force? By no means, but they were rare enough that the smell of it and the deco burned against her lungs. The ring of her phone was a welcome excuse to take a step outside. She held it up to her boss, he waved her on, and she stepped out the front door to answer. It was Frankie.
"Hey, little brother, what's up?" She answered, shrugging off her blazer, feeling the stick as the satin inside slithered off of her arms.
"Hey Janie," her brother began on the other line, and there was a tremor in his voice. The smile on her face slipped into something wilder, graver. "listen, I don't want you to get upset but something happened out here."
Immediately Maura's face flashed through her mind. "What?" she growled.
"Guys in the drug unit didn't clear the house, I guess, and while Maura was lookin' at the body in question, some druggie busted out of the cellar and tackled her to the ground."
"What the fuck?!" Jane shouted, grabbing her keys and sprinting toward her car. "What do you mean they didn't clear the house?! That's their fucking job! Text me your address, god dammit!" she held the phone to her ear as she gunned the engine to life.
"It's fine, Janie. She's ok. Banged up, but ok. Don't go crazy alright? We're on Sumner," Frankie attempted to reason, but still gave up their location knowing good god damn well that Jane was going to get it - either from him or someone else.
Jane hung up without a response and threw the car into drive.
"Maura?! Maura!" Jane screamed, and the jagged slam of her cruiser door shook most of the officers clumped around the dilapidated residence. She couldn't care less when she finally spotted the medical examiner seated, very conscious and alive, on the back of a medical response vehicle.
"Jane?" Maura said as her eyebrow curled at the sight of her best friend barreling toward her. She winced as the EMT finished bandaging the abrasion on her neck. "Why aren't you out in Revere?"
The detective's body coiled, and her mouth snarled. Her gaze focused squarely on the reddish-purple swelling around Maura's left eye. She stared the EMT away from them, sat next to the medical examiner, and entered her personal space. They shared a compound of breaths, Jane's livid and Maura's a combination of aroused and exhausted. "You alright?" the question came out as little more than a puff of volatile air.
Maura placed scratched hands on Jane's shoulders. "I'm fine. He caught me off guard, is all. I was on the ground before I even realized what was happening," she explained. She felt the energy building under her fingertips, rippling under Jane's skin. "Hey. Jane? Jane, I'm ok. I am ok." she repeated, eyes latching onto her friend's in one last desperate attempt to calm her.
No such luck could be had.
"He here?" Jane asked, standing.
"I'm sorry?" the brusqueness, the abruptness of the motion, caught Maura off guard.
"He here? Or they take him to the station?"
"He's here, Jane. They got him cuffed at detained in one of the bedrooms until Maura's done in the ambulance. He's pretty messed up. They're gonna take him to the hospital, I guess," Frankie's voice cut in from behind them. Jane spun on her heels and bored into him with a glare.
"Where were you?" She asked, eerily quiet. "Huh? Where was your ass when she was gettin' pummeled by a drug addict?"
Frankie gulped. "I was across the property, Janie, c'mon. Doing my job." he reasoned.
She heard none of it. "Wrong answer. Make yourself scarce for a while, do yourself a favor." She marched past him and jogged up onto the porch steps when she felt him grab for her.
"Jane, don't! Don't do it!"
Detective Jane Rizzoli ignored her brother's calls and shoved through the open front door, where Martinez and some others conversed in a huddle. She stomped past them, down a hall, and stopped when she saw a uniformed officer standing watch over a closed bedroom door.
"Detective," he greeted, tipping his hat to her.
She cocked her shoulders back, adjusted the holster on her belt. "Reynolds. This the one? He in there?" She asked, calmly enough, despite her bared teeth and curled upper lip.
"Yeah. Real knucklehead. EMT's in there lookin' him over now," Reynolds answered. He was no fool - he knew exactly what Jane sought. He stepped further away from the door.
"Good," she said. She hiked her leg up and back, and kicked a heeled boot straight through the frail wood.
With a cacophonous schwack!, the door flew into the wall and hummed with energy. The EMT bandaging the meth addict nearly shit his pants when Jane appeared on the other side of the obliterated door. The meth addict's eyes exploded at the sight of the destroyer of the door coming straight for him. He attempted to crawl behind an old bookshelf.
Jane's foot caught his face instead. "You in a good enough frame of mind to run now, motherfucker?" She asked in a grunt. The emergency med tech rose to try and come between them, but she shot him a feral look. "Get the fuck out of this room. I'm interrogating this suspect."
Needless to say, he ran out. The suspect attempted to follow, but Jane grabbed his collar and used his momentum to thrust him into the wall.
"Jane! Jane what the hell are you doin'?" Frankie had apparently run into the house when he heard the commotion, but couldn't wrap his arms around his sister until she had pulled the man up and head butted him. He fell to the floor, seemingly unconscious.
"You try and touch her again, and I promise this motherfucker won't be here to stop me from beating the shit out of you," she spit at the limp body on the floor, and she struggled as her brother dragged her out of the room. Frankie rolled his eyes, and shook his head severely as Martinez attempted an approach.
"Listen to me," said Maura. She had been speaking for the last two minutes as she assembled sutures and antiseptic, but Jane had looked everywhere but her face. Jane sat on a stool near Maura's work desk in the autopsy suite, and Dr. Isles pulled up next to her with a look of admonishment.
"I know what you're gonna say," Jane mumbled, trying to visualize the gash on her forehead.
"Oh? And what am I going to say, Detective?" Maura smirked. She pulled an alcohol wipe from its package and dabbed at her friend's heinous amalgam of clotted blood and ruptured skin.
Jane fought a wince. "You're gonna say that I shouldn't have done what I did. That I should have taken the help from the EMT and gotten stitched at the scene and blah, blah, blah I don't need to be headbutting suspects."
"See, what they say about assumptions is true," Maura commented, blowing on the area. It wasn't necessarily sanitary thing to do, but she knew it comforted Jane. God knew she had plenty of stitch-ups to learn how her friend did and did not like to be nurtured. "It's selfish, but I'm glad you did it. You know how I feel about you going rogue for me," she winked. Jane turned pink. "What I was going to say was that I wish you would be more careful with yourself. Just because you're protecting me by busting people's heads in doesn't mean you need to bust your own."
"Yeah, you're right," Jane grumbled.
"I'm sorry, say that again?" Maura said cheekily, and her friend growled. "Just kidding. Hold still."
"You want to go get a drink after this?" detective Rizzoli asked. She would have hung her head if she needn't hold it up for Maura to stitch.
"Like at The Robber?"
"Nah. Like somewhere quiet where we don't know people who will point and laugh at my forehead all night."
"That sounds… great, actually. And then we can go home, where I can… repay you for your chivalry," Maura teased.
"Very funny, Maura. Very funny." Jane shot back as she rolled her eyes, but there was nowhere to hide her dilated pupils and quickened breath.
