A/N so the happy ending I promised is almost done and will be posted shortly. But I've been a little ADD with fic, and have like 15 other things I've been working on and taking up precious time.
She paces in front of the motel room door, smoking a calming cigarette as she walks, trying to steel herself enough to not just shoot the bastard. It was one thing to take her best friend away from her. It was another to then leave said BFF, and not even give a reason why. She'd tracked the rat bastard down across four states, six hours of driving, and was thisclose to just kicking the door in and beating him to death with her bare hands.
She'd never seen Maura look so broken before until that day about a week prior when she'd walked into the morgue and saw Maura looking – well, there was no other word to describe it but deflated. Like someone had completely let all of everything out, and all that was left was a sagging shell of nothing. And she'd listened to what happened with a rising anger inside of her. No one had any right to do that to Maura. No one.
And she smokes. She smokes to calm herself down enough to not do something that she'll regret – although she's not sure if she'd regret doing anything to the little shit. As the cigarette burned down to the filter, she straightened herself, knocking twice on the door, yelling out "Front Desk!" knowing that there was no way he'd open the door if she had said who she was.
"Jane?" He questions as she sticks a foot in the door to prevent him from slamming it in her face, forcing her way in.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" She questions, immediately in his face. "You marry her and then you run off after you knock her up? What the hell do you think you're doing?" She's surprised at how passive he's being, not even attempting to do anything more than turn around and sit down on the edge of his bed. She knows he's got a bad track record with marriage. The second it had become serious between him and Maura she had done a background check that the military would have been jealous of, but she'd never thought he'd just up and run off.
"I know, I'm sorry." She blinked, not believing the words coming out of his mouth.
"You're sorry? You just wake up one morning, pack your bags and leave without even so much as a 'this isn't working out' and you just say sorry! You load up all your stuff, and leave in the middle of the day so that Maura came home to an empty fucking house, and all you can say about that is that you're sorry? Sorry – sorry doesn't even begin to cover what you should be feeling." She was angry, furious, a hell on wheels, and he was doing nothing to defend himself. He just sat there, taking her ranting at him, without saying anything. "Dammit, do something, don't just sit there."
"What am I supposed to do?" She blinked, wondering why he was the one that was sounding defeated. That was definitely something that was all Maura, she was the one that was supposed to be sad about a husband leaving her the day after telling him something that was supposed to be happy news for a married couple. "She doesn't love me." The confusion was multiplied.
"She's crazy about you, what the hell are you going on about?"
"She loves the idea of me. She doesn't love me." If she hadn't been confused already, she definitely was now. "You weren't there when she told me. Maura – she – you could tell it was something that she wanted, but that at the same time, it wasn't. The right thing, but for the wrong reasons. She doesn't love me, and I knew it. I knew it when I married her – thought that it could be all right, that we could pretend about it. But when she told me she was-" The sentence trailed off, and she nodded. "It's not fair to do that to a kid."
"What?" She questioned, pushing him, wanting to hear his damned side of the story.
"Have them grow up in a house where their parents feel obligated to love each other. And it's not that I don't – I do. I do love her. But she and I – we're just – we settled for each other." Her left temple was starting to ache, and she hated the feeling working it's way through her chest. Like she was getting something, but not getting it, and she wondered if it was a doctor thing, being able to describe things so as to make no sense at all.
"The fuck you going on about?"
"Maura is -" There was a beat, and Jane shifted uncomfortably, "She's in love with the idea of love, she wants the house, the kids, the family, the happy doting spouse, the white picket fence – the whole nine yards. So do I. I want to be able to come home and feel like I'm home and not just at the house, feel like everything is complete."
"So why are you here and not in Boston?"
"Because Boston wasn't home."
"She would have followed you here." The words are quiet, and somewhere, she can feel her heart breaking at the very thought.
"No she wouldn't. In person maybe, but she wouldn't ever feel at home here, the same way I would never feel at home in Boston. We settled for each other, because we thought it would work. We thought that we both wanted the same thing, that we could make it work, and that if we pretended hard enough it would work." A large hand ran through sandy hair, pausing on the back of a neck. "We were fools. Pretending that we could ignore what was right in front of us." The dull ache was threatening to become a full on migraine, and she wonders if Maura married him if only because everything he said sounded like a puzzle to be solved.
"What?"
"My home, it's a place that smells like whiskey and stale smoke, and aftershave, and there's beer cans on the table, and terrible movies on the television, and too much takeout, and it's an absolute wreck that I'm forever trying to set right, and we're hardly ever there, and rarer still there together with work and everything, but it's home. What I had with Maura, I thought that maybe it would get there, but it won't. My home is here, in a run down little apartment, and Maura's is – well, to be honest, I don't think I've seen your place." She blinks, all the pieces of the puzzle fitting together, before she turns, and runs – not walks – back to the car.
She chain smokes her way through the rest of the pack on the six hour drive back to Boston, wondering how she could have been so blind. Her phone rings while she's somewhere in Connecticut, and she frowns when she hears the funeral march begin. "Hey." She says, trying to pretend that she's not feeling six hundred thousand different things right now.
"Where did you go?" She hates herself for rushing off and not telling Maura because right now, more than anything, Maura needed her. Maura needed someone that she could lean on, someone to protect her, someone to be with her, and even a day apart was too long.
"I-uh-found James."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"How is he?" The words are perfunctory, polite, without a single emotion in them.
"He – went home."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"Back to Princeton." It's a statement, not a question.
"Yeah. Listen, I'll be home soon, we can talk about it then, okay?"
"Oh. Yeah." She sat back in the seat, thinking that 95 should not be this crowded at six on a Sunday, and when she crosses the bridge that takes her into Massachusetts she's suddenly got a heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach. What if James was wrong? What if this would all come crashing down around them? Would Maura settle for her as well, just to have a sort of happy ending? She knew that she would settle for anything so long as Maura was there. Whether it was standing up in a pretty blue dress and playing maid of honor, whether it was coming in to be a good babysitter for her best friend, or whether it involved them together, in a forever sort of way. She would happily take whatever part of Maura she could get.
But it didn't stop her from staring at the cigarette burning between her fingers, watching it slowly burn down to the filter, parked outside of her own apartment, wondering what she could say. Wondering how to broach the unbroachable topic. But when she finally stubs it out and opens the door, she doesn't even need to look to know Maura's already there, she can feel it when she steps through the threshold and finds herself feeling at home.