Uh.. I am so sorry for my "couple of days" turning into "couple of months!" Thank you all again for the follows and reviews, despite my delays. Hope you enjoy! More to come soon.

Frankie's face was pale when he met Jane in lock up.

"How could anyone possibly get to him in here?" Jane asked, ripping the file from Frankie's hand more savagely than necessary.

"That's what we're trying to figure out. Nina tried to go back over the footage from tonight, and it's been wiped."

Lockup had been cleared, and the flickering florescent light buzzed constantly into the empty cell blocks. The two detectives, both wearing similar expressions of frustration and concern, stood over the body of the man Korsak had arrested just hours before. Jane squatted down. The hacker's face looked younger in death. His throat had been viciously slashed- the cut was jagged and rough, and the glass shard that Jane assumed was the murder weapon had been smashed on the ground near the victim's head.

"Why didn't Maura get this call from dispatch, too?" she finally asked, standing up.

"That was Korsak's decision. He said to run it by you first."

"Well I'd damn well rather have her here than Popov or some other idiot."

"That's kind of you, detective," Maura said, startling both of the Rizzolis.

"Jesus, Maura," Frankie said, "Don't sneak up on a group of armed cops like that."

Jane frowned at her friend, who was chuckling at Frankie's overreaction. The doctor's hair and makeup were immaculate as ever, but there was something forced about her laugh. And she was wearing flats. Jane stepped between her friend and her brother, eyes wide with sleep deprivation and concern.

"You sure you're okay to be here?" Jane asked in an undertone.

Maura smiled in what Jane could only assume was meant to be a reassuring way. It came off as more of a grimace. "This case is personal for both us, Jane. If you're here, I'm here."

Jane nodded and stepped back, unsatisfied. Her frown stayed in place.

Maura knelt by the body, examining the wound closely. "Well, this clearly wasn't made with a knife or a scalpel. The edges are too jagged for anything more sophisticated than some kind of crude tool."

The mood was heavy in the cramped space and the musty air even without the dead body, but Jane still couldn't help but be bemused by the stubbornness of the doctor's approach. "Hmm... Like a broken piece of glass, perhaps?" Jane asked, unable to stop a smirk from momentarily softening her features.

The doctor looked up with an expression Jane had seen thousands of times. "I wouldn't want to guess. But from what I'm seeing here, I certainly wouldn't rule that out."

"Well, from what I'm seeing here," Jane said, indicating to the bloody glass fragments scattered across the concrete floor, "I'm thinking we don't have anything else to rule in."

Maura sighed, straightening back to her full height. "It would be an intelligent choice as a murder weapon. You could break the glass and scatter it so finely no one would ever be able to identify it."

"Yeah, but that's not what happened here. You think the guy ran out of time?" Frankie asked.

Jane nodded. "Something interrupted him or he wouldn't have dropped the weapon here. After being so careful with everything else it doesn't make any sense."

Frankie raised his eyebrows. "So maybe we have a witness."

Jane looked at Maura. "Maybe's better than nothing."

"I'll go ask Nina about the deleted footage. She said she's trying to trace back to who did it somehow, if they accidentally left some sort of digital footprint," Frankie said.

"Yeah, keep me updated." Jane sighed, rubbing her thumb and forefinger across her eyebrows.

"Let's go, Jane," Maura said, touching the detective's arm gently. "It's the middle of the night. I'll do the autopsy in the morning."

Jane nodded, allowing Maura to lead the way out of the cell, but she glanced back at the body as they left. If she hadn't known before how far whoever was tormenting her was willing to go, she certainly knew now. And whoever it was, their resources appeared equal to the task- getting into holding, committing a murder, and wiping the footage in less than three hours seemed almost unfairly close to impossible. The detective was distracted enough by her thoughts that she let Maura drive, a decision she regretted the second they turned away from the usual route back to Beacon Hill.

"Maura? Where are we going?"

"Melanie told me that looking at the stars can be a useful tool for clearing your head. Getting everything back into perspective."

"And so we're doing that at-" Jane checked her watch, "four o'clock in the morning?"

"Yes."

Jane shook her head. "This is why I never let you drive."

But she was too awake to have fallen back asleep at that point, so she didn't keep complaining as they slowly left the lights of the city behind them. Jane watched the headlights spreading out in front of the car as they drove in silence, the houses slowly thinning as the trees thickened. Maura glanced at Jane every few minutes. The detective's eyes were trained on the pavement in front of them, her jaw set in a hard line. Even tired and sitting still, Jane was the most alive person Maura had ever known.

It's not that she hadn't seen Jane on the brink of death. She had. She had watched as a bullet tore through her abdomen, and she had felt her best friend's blood run thick and hot through her fingers. She had seen her jump off a bridge into the churning, black water too many feet below, and she had begged a God she had never believed in to give her the strength to breath the life back into sodden lungs through lips that had already turned blue. And Jane had always come back to her. Whatever twist of luck or fate that had brought the detective into her life had not yet run its warranty. But for some reason, after tonight, she couldn't shake the feeling that sometimes, maybe, even Jane Rizzoli ended up in a fight she couldn't win. And that was a feeling Maura couldn't bear. So instead, she drove until she found the stars.

Forty minutes outside the city, Maura pulled off the road into a clearing and tipped her seat back to look out the sun roof and into the sky. Jane, tempted as she was to make a comment about whether or not it really counted as stargazing if you did it from inside the car, stayed silent and followed Maura's lead.

"Did you know a lot of the light that we can see from the stars is already extinguished?" Maura asked, falling back on science when emotion once again failed her.

"What a cheerful perspective."

"The light from stars that collapsed centuries ago takes so long to get here that by the time it reaches the earth, nothing else is left. It's the closest thing reality has to ghosts."

"Cheerful and not at all creepy."

But Jane looked up anyway. The stars glittered across the milky blackness, hundreds of thousands of them, and she was surprised- as she always was when she left the city- at how many more there were than she ever remembered.

"How can you tell the difference between the ones that are still there and the ones that have burned out?" the detective asked.

Maura looked at her, looked at the light reflecting from her dark eyes, and then had to look away. "It's impossible to determine with the naked eye."

Jane could hear the fear in Maura's tone, and it made her mouth go dry. "Maura, this guy that's after me, or girl, whoever, they're really good."

The doctor resolutely continued staring into the sky. "So are you."

"They got to the hacker two hours after we had him in lockup, and they erased the footage. That's... They might be better than me."

Maura looked at her friend once again, this time forcing herself to keep looking, even though some small part of her couldn't help but be terrified that the light she saw there, Jane's light, could potentially be as much of a ghost as the stars. These were the thoughts she couldn't ever get into perspective. These were the fears that could not be made relative by the enormity of any universe.

"Jane." Maura's voice was a whisper.

The detective bit her bottom lip. "If something ends up happening to me... you know. If this guy gets what he wants, in the end, I just-" she ran her fingers through her hair, tangling it further. "Shit, I am bad at this. I don't even know what I'm trying to say."

Maura choked out a half laugh. But when she spoke her voice was soft and serious. "Jane," she said, and she waited until the detective's dark eyes caught her own before she continued. "You are the stars to me. You're there to help me find where I'm going, and to protect me in the dark, and... to remind me how beautiful this world can be. And I... It scared me tonight, when I woke up and you were gone, so I called Korsak."

Jane watched the doctor, adamantly fighting the heat rising in the back of her throat and prickling in her eyes. "I wondered how you got there so fast."

"He told me what happened, and he told me he could call Popov, but I wanted to go."

Jane let out a long breath, and when she spoke her voice was a rasp. "It scared me tonight, too. Seeing that they could get in to holding like that and take out a suspect... Maura, I don't know if I can stop this guy. I don't even know if I can find him."

Maura reached across the seat and took Jane's hand, squeezing it softly and then letting go. Jane held on.

"If you were one of these ghost stars and you knew that you only had a while longer before no one could see your light anymore, what would you do?" Jane knew herself well enough to know that she must be more scared than she realized if she was willing to ask that question. But she still wouldn't just say the words out loud. I think I'm going to lose, Maura. I think I'm going to die.

"Well, stars aren't cognizant of their own existence or lack thereof."

Jane chuckled, a feeling of overwhelming protectiveness toward her friend expanding in her chest almost faster than she could bear. What if I can't protect you? What if I can't even protect you from myself? What if I can't stop myself from telling you all the truth I have to tell? "At least I'm not the only one who's bad at these types of conversations."

Maura smiled, feeling the muscles around her eyes tighten in her body's natural attempt to prevent tears. A morning dove cooed softly in the distance, and a thin veil of clouds drifted across the sky. The doctor looked into Jane's eyes and saw flashes of the past. Limp hands. Cold lips. She didn't dare try and see flashes of the future. Not if it looked different than what she sometimes let herself hope for. Lips that were no longer cold. Hands that gripped back. "If I were in that position, I would try and be more like you, Jane. I would try and make everyone around me feel more safe. More loved."

Jane shifted, turning as much toward Maura as the seat of the car would allow. Her heart was beating too quickly- she was too tired. She was too afraid. "You said I was like the stars to you? Maura, you... You've been like the sky to me. You're the only place I can be," she broke off, her voice like the slow burn of a campfire. "The only place I ever want to be."

Maura looked at her, the detective hardly believing the words coming out of her own mouth as she spoke. She wondered what Maura thought she meant. She wondered what she actually meant, in that moment. But Maura's hand once again squeeze her own and she watched as the doctor's hazel eyes searched her brown ones.

Whatever this was, whatever this meant, it was different than before. She had almost lost Maura, and she was, some part of her mind reminded her, currently the target of a suspect who had outsmarted her at every turn so far.

But in that moment, as the sun began to break softly across the horizon, and the stars slowly faded into the morning sky, she was just Jane Rizzoli. And she was looking at Maura Isles, whose loosely curled hair splayed across the headrest and caught the first light of the day. And suddenly, for the first time since her apartment had burned down months ago, maybe even for the first time in years, she felt like she was home again.