WARNING: It gets real soon, so know that before you read ahead, please. This story does deal with abuse, but there will be nothing unnecessarily done for shock value. There will be many rewards at the end of these tunnels. I believe Rizzles is at its best when Jane and Maura work together as partners in crime law enforcement. I have a lot of fun in mind as well.
Jane's phone rang loudly from her coat pocket. She woke up to the familiar shrill scream of the ringer, put her hand down to get it, and found her badge instead. She took it out, and looked at it for the millionth time since the day she had earned it. Even after thousands of tussles and scrapes, running away from murderers and mobsters, Jane had held on to the same badge. It was the only thing that felt immovable and solid about her life still.
Which is why it had surprised everyone when she walked in and told them all she couldn't sign the document that would have helped them find Maura's father, Patty Doyle after his sudden and unexpected flee from the hospital.
Jane wanted to believe she hadn't done it out of guilt, but she really couldn't explain it any other way. No one had really seemed surprised, actually, except a few folks. Jane bit the inside of her lip a little, squinted at the gleaming badge, and found a smudge. She rubbed it off until it shimmered again, and put it back in it's rightful place in her pocket.
'What was I doing?', Jane thought. 'Ah', she found her phone and looked at the missed call. It was her mom. 'Of course', Jane said to herself, sighing. She thought about texting Angela, but decided against it when she remembered Angela's previous attempts at text lingo. Anything that increased the chances of a sentence containing her mother and the word "boner" didn't need to ever happen, ever again. Jane opted to call instead.
"HELLO!" Angela yelled into the phone when she answered, right into Jane's overworked ear canal. "Shhh…yeah, MA! It's me!", Jane tried to get her voice loud enough to be heard over her mother's shrill continuous "HELLO?"s.
"Oh,HI,Jane", Angela said in a tone Jane didn't particularly care for.
"Yeah, what do you want?" asked Jane impatiently. "To see my daughter", Angela snapped back in her usual tone.
Really she was biting her tongue after each word in an attempt to hide the lilt caused by the gladness she felt in her heart at that moment. Angela had been so worried for Jane until now, but she could relax at last.
"You want to see her do what?" Jane asked, assuming her mother had some sort of job for her to do or task for her to tackle, as usual.
"I just want to see you! Can't I want to see my only daughter once in a while?" Angela began to say the usual things she said when she was upset with Jane, but this time it seemed to give her a little glee, and Jane began to pick up on it, which left Jane pretty confused.
"So come home if you want to see me, you know where I live. I thought you lived here, too, as of three weeks ago, but you must have forgotten," Jane moved to hang up the phone, but stopped as she heard Angela's voice, loud again this time.
"Well, I wouldn't want to just ASSUME that-", Angela started to say.
"-You're up to something, aren't you?" asked Jane.
An unexpected giggle rose from Angela's throat when she remembered a certain look Maura had during their lunch, as she described something that happened to her and Jane during a case once-upon-a-time. Stifling her happiness for Jane's sake once again, Angela regained her self-control.
"No, no, of course I'm not up to something. I'll be home soon, I'm making lasagna with those egg noodles you like, but I need to drive now honey, so I gottagetoffthephone, OKAY? JANE? GOODBYE!", Angela juggled the groceries as her phone slid down her shoulder, managing to hang up with her shoulder and chin and just barely not drop the mozzarella.
Jane didn't know how to take her mother's strange behavior. Angela was always up to something, and she was…unique, as suspects went, but Jane had known the woman a long time and had never seen her this, well, giddy.
Jane put herself to work tidying up the papers and the general mess she and her mother had created in what seemed like no time at all. She put everything except the information about Ruth Anne's murder away somewhere, tucking the mess of papers back into the bins she hid in her anonymous storage unit. She'd take them all back where they belonged soon enough; all except one.
By the time Angela got home, Jane had put on an old DVR'd Celtic's game to sit back and watch. Jane had finally started to feel the beginning sensations of relaxation flow through her toes and shoulders.
So the loud, shrill tone of her mother's relentless stories and the endless banging cupboards were not exactly a welcome distraction to the tired detective-on-leave-of-absence. Jane wondered what she should call herself, now that everything was upside down and she didn't even get to use her worry-worn badge the way she had for so long.
It seemed to Jane, when she looked at all of them now, that everyone was acting strangely these days. The only thing that made sense to her detective mind is that people were hiding things, and now that she was beginning to be more honest with herself, maybe she was seeing things a little, tiny bit more clearly.
Except Jane didn't know what she was seeing, everything was still blurry. Her mother was hiding multiple things or something complicated, because she was crying one minute and happy as a clam the next. Maura was hiding physically, obviously, but she was also hiding things, Jane was sure of it.
Except, really, Jane had to be honest now with herself, she was the one who had been hiding things from Maura. There were so many things she had hidden from Maura. Instead of telling her or showing her any of those many things Jane could readily imagine now, Jane had trusted someone other than Maura.
Jane had trusted Dean instead, and now everything was ruined. 'Stupid, stupid Dean, stupid, STUPID me!' she thought, as Jane forcibly heaved herself up from the couch she had just started to sink perfectly into.
Her sweatpants dragging a little on the ground, tanned arms showing themselves off against the white undershirt she wore so well, Jane went to help her mother with the groceries.
"So, what's so funny?" Jane shot over her shoulder as she put away the buttermilk.
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Did you see where I put the chicken?" Angela answered quickly in an attempt to steer the conversation someplace else. Angela may have spent much of her life raising two cops, but she was still horrible at pretending not to have a secret, and they both knew it. Jane leaned in and fixed her wide, doe eyes on her mother intently.
"Mom, please, tell me the truth?" Jane managed to say in the most adorable, pitiful voice she could muster. She had been just a bit curious at first, just wanted to see how true her suspicions were about how odd everyone had been acting lately.
Now, Jane saw Angela's face change shape, twist into something a bit stranger than usual. It was raw pain, but just a quick flash of it, and then nothing else, except that Angela's eyes almost seemed to water at the edges, just not quite spilling over to her cheeks.
Angela looked up, into Jane's eyes directly at last. "Jane! I would never lie to you, how can you even ask me that?" Angela was genuinely hurt, her eyes crinkled a little at the edges, her eyebrows crinkled much the way Jane's did, in an expression of hurt wonder.
It was too late, however. Jane couldn't stop herself, somehow, "really?" she asked. Jane was not intending to push it as far as she had, but she realized that her voice was starting to come out of her throat by itself.
It had pushed its way from that spot between her eyebrows, down to her jaw, to the parts of her that were clamped down the tightest in her mouth, and then out to the air, where she could no longer contain the word she hadn't know she needed to ask Angela. Still, Jane really couldn't explain to herself why.
Except now it seemed horrifically plausible that something she was asking might be touching a truth too close to Angela for comfort. Jane noticed the tell-tale giveaways of a lie; the twitchy nose, the jaw clenches, the flared nostrils, the eyes moving faster. Jane had spent her entire life studying her mother, and had never seen her so intimately before.
Suddenly Angela was grotesque. She was crying, and Jane was frozen, trying to figure out what to do. Except she was smaller; Jane was small, and there had been a man, and he was gone now, and Angela was very big and very hurt…and Jane couldn't do anything. Jane screamed, "MOM!" and before she could reply, suddenly Angela's face changed, became older. Jane noticed that everything had been black and white, and was suddenly zooming back out into color, into perspective.
Angela was waiting for Jane to say something else. She had never seen Jane freeze that way before, just stop everything like that. Angela wanted to reach out and do something to comfort her, because she could tell that Jane was in what seemed to almost be a physical pain, but something about her daughter's face warned her away.
Jane lifted her ribcage consciously, breathed in deeply a few times, and settled herself as best she could. "Are you okay?" Angela finally asked, tentatively. Jane felt sick when she heard the more tender, quieter tone of voice that Angela was using. It was such a nice change from the shrill urgent guilt trips, but it was too late, and it made Jane feel disgusted with herself for having ever wanted it in the first place.
Angela was truly confused, she started to reach out to Jane to comfort her in some way, only to find Jane's hand draw back quickly in response.
"I need to be alone", Jane managed to get out between her clenched teeth. Her body had completely frozen up now, and she clenched herself tightly together, feeling all at once like she may never move again, and like she would crumble into a cliché amount of tiny pieces.