Happy Sunday! I've got a feeling that you guys are gonna like this one, maybe. Maybe not. Probably not idk. But if you do, feel free to drop me a line or two in a review. I always appreciate it. Not long to go now, either, so don't worry; this won't trundle on forever. Some of you have questions from previous chapters; message my tumblr, it's in my bio. Thanks again!


A dusty, arid city in the heart of a country at war. This land is far from the land of hope, liberty and glory. Yet here I am.

I am awake.

I am alive.

They are wheeling soldiers past me into the emergency room. They are a khaki blur. Some of them are fitting, violent seizures tossing their bodies like electrified rag dolls on their stretchers and trolleys. We cannot cope with them all. There are too many. Most of them are wheezing.

Most of them are dying.

"Dr Isles?"

Bless pure Victoria. Poor Victoria.

A little field nurse on her first tour, standing there in her protective gear, not fully understanding the horrors that the chemical attack will bring.

"I'm right there, Vicky," I call reassuringly, rushing to follow her out from where I was yanking on my own protective suit. The gas mask is tight, and it catches on my hair. But I will be grateful when I can breathe and survive.

"What do we have, gentlemen?" I reach the first trolley, but as I look down into lifeless eyes and blue lips splattered with half coughed dark blood, I know that it is already hopeless.

I glance at my team and we skim to the next. At least this body is still jerking. Some sign of life. Nurse Amy Lancaster is spluttering out statistics. I pry the soldier's eye open and shine in my torch; his pupils are already dilating.

"What was the gas? What did this?" I ask, already cutting open the material of his camouflage uniform.

Lancaster eyes flitter around the faces of the staff who have joined our merry band around the dying soldier. This soldier is one of an endless stream that are being carted into this facility, but right now we shall concentrate only on him. I put both of my gloved and heavily restrained hands on him to hold him firm as Victoria inserts a line into his vein.

"We don't know yet...well, umm...Dr Pichonaz said-" the nurse practically chokes on her tongue.

Pichonaz, as if hearing himself called upon, skids into the room and announces the worst

"Hydrogen cyanide, everyone! Be careful," his heavily accented voice squeals, "No one makes skin contact, do I make myself clear?" The veins of his forehead are visible even through the screen of his protective headgear.

My hands are off of the body in a flash as I straighten with a whoosh of air. It is impulsive, if unnecessary. I know the protective W.H.O. issued suit that I wear protects me from the possibility of transference of hazardous toxins. Still, when an alarm went up to alert us of a surprise insurgent chemical attack, never in all of my worst terrors could I have imagined the use of hydrogen cyanide.

"That can't be right. The Chemical Weapons Convention- didn't it completely outlaw...?"

I trail off when I see the abundance of cynical faces locked behind plastic screens. I feel their disenchantment with this world and humanity bit my skin.

I don't blame them. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I hear their hollowness ringing in the air. We are medical staff in a country which rarely adheres to basic human rights, never mind global political sanctions.

This being said, I focus myself into the moment, armed with the knowledge that many of these men and women are simply going to choke and bleed on our quarantined beds. I don't say this, no matter how sourly I feel it inside. I am a team leader and I plan to do just that.

Lead.

The soldier under my hands is already struggling with extremely abnormal heartbeats, verging on dysrhythmias which will no doubt collapse into full cardiac arrest.

From the wet choking sounds his body splutters and jerks with, it is clear that there is a substantial capacity of fluid in his lungs.

"Pulmonary edema," I whisper. It is a breathy hiss inside of my protective head gear.

Despite our best efforts to hold him down, he is flopping on this bed like a fish on a line. He is drowning on dry land.

It seems, with the sudden realisation of what exactly caused this tragic predicament, that there isn't much we can do for these soldiers.

My jaw clenches. Inside of my mouth, my teeth crunch together.

I did not come to this hot, warn-torn disgraceful excuse of a country just to look upon every patient in dire, desperate need of medical aid and snort with disgust, turning away because the odds were grim.

I will not let my oath ring meaningless. I set to work.

Yet the man dies ten minutes later.

Of a group of fifteen, one survives. And even then, he is in a critical condition.

Our unit continues to be locked in quarantine when I do a melancholy inspection some time later. Every bed has a white sheet over it, a still body tented beneath. Some sheets are soaked with fluids and bloody streaks with the sodden efforts to save the life of the soldier, ultimately in vain.

I stop at each bed, pulling back the sheet to peer at the faces. They deserve my respect, every last one. All individually. They came here to serve their country, and ended up dying in a toxic cloud of poisonous gas. No one should die like that.

Victoria comes into the room. We trade sad smiles. She looks exhausted. I know I look the same.

In the morning a commander will be here from some regiment or other, and when the bodies have been adequately decontaminated, then the process of flying them home to their grieving families for their funerals can begin.

I reach the last body. Another female. Of the fifteen patients, four were women. This person used to be one of them. I lift the sheet.

I take one look at the lifeless face-

The colours of my world run into one another. Like a painter who throws a bucket of water over his art in a moment of self-destructive rage.

I shriek and wheel backwards. The sheet drops back from where I snatch back my hand but it is too late. I have already seen the lifeless eyes. The alabaster skin marked with trails of crusty, bloody vomit. Its grey colour a far cry from the tan it should hold. The dusty, matted black hair.

"Dr Isles?" Victoria calls to me from somewhere in the blurring, swirling painting.

Dilated, unseeing black eyes are staring at me in my mind. The sheet has fallen back but those eyes don't go away, like a Polaroid flashed and printed and brought into existence where it shall remain.

"Dr Isles? Are you alright?"

I feel the world reduced to the obnoxiously loud wheezes of my own breathing inside of this mask. The sheet does nothing to dull the stark, blank face in my mind. The face of a soldier I used to know.

"Maura...?"

Jane...

"Maura!"

Sucking air into her lungs as if she had been suffocated, Maura bolts upright in bed and pants for air. When the gulps of oxygen stop her head spinning and her heart rate stops thumping quick so loudly in her ears, she comes back down to earth, realising that she is in her bedroom. Safe in the mighty neighbours of Beacon Hill.

Safe.

Frankie Rizzoli is standing in her bedroom, arms swinging limply by his sides. His eyes are big and frightened in a way that triggers a great sympathy in Maura. It takes him a while to pull his collar away from his neck and find his voice.

"You were ah...screaming for Jane. I thought you might be umm, y'know, hurt," he supplies. "I was looking for Ma in the guesthouse and heard so I came and..."

He trails off, becoming suddenly self-aware. Here he stands in Maura Isles' bedroom, somewhere intimate and private. Maura can almost hear the way his mind is churning;

The only guests that get entertained here are...

His mind drifts back to the woman on the bed, waiting patiently for him to speak again. He swallows audibly.

It appears that both his mind and stomach cramp.

Maura is inwardly smirking at his sheepish expression. He looks like a little boy who has lost his mother in a crowded grocery store. She decides to be gracious.

"Have you had breakfast yet, Frankie?" Maura asks politely.

"Uh, no," Frankie answers, shrugging his jacket and fixing his tie.

Maura waves at the open doorway. "Please, go ahead and help yourself. Jane does. I'll be down in just a moment."

He flashes a grateful smile her way and then he's gone.

Alone now, Maura's smile falls away and she gingerly lowers herself back against her pillow. She flinches when she feels the damp patch left from where her sweat soaked into the cotton during her nightmare. Truth be told, the room starts to twist and bend every time she envisions that face...

Cold and dead and bloody...

"Maura? You got Lucky Charms?" Frankie shouts.

"The cupboard to the immediate left of the fridge!" she calls back.

Maura used to fear the chemical weapons. It was always a possibility when she worked in the dangerous, insurgent run areas of northern Africa, just before her relief work with Ian in Uganda. She almost threw up every time the siren for the drill wailed.

But in the dream she was calm, cool, level headed. It was who died due to the attack which scars her very soul.

She shudders. Turns over to curl up on her side. But she doesn't close her eyes. For every time she does, she sees the dilated, unseeing brown eyes which she hopes she never has to see again.

Fear in the mind is a terrible thing.


The dough sticking in between her fingers as she kneaded it wasn't the most pleasant thing in the world.

But the smell of it baking in the oven just might be.

Jane's barefeet pads around in the kitchen, where she is refilling their glasses. With carbonated, sugar fuelled drinks that Maura professes to loathe, no less. Jane doesn't have any wine, and refused to let her friend drink water, so the compromise was entirely Maura's.

Maura currently sits hidden from Jane's view. Cross-legged on the rug of Jane's living room area. The coffee table has been pushed away to make space for the fort the two of them have made. After an hour of fixing and constructing their perfect pillow-floored fort, finally they were able to start baking cookies.

Of course, Maura had taken Jane out to dinner first. She forced her to eat something healthy just to balance out the cookies and the snacks they were likely to munch their way through in the evening.

Much to Jane's chagrin.

Jane's head ducks beneath the entrance to the fort. Their only light is the setting sun and a lamp Maura insisted upon using. She said she didn't trust the faulty Christmas lights which would no doubt send them up in flames.

Jane eyes Maura, who is beaming up at her with childlike glee. It isn't long until her own face is splitting into a wide grin. She inches her way inside, crossing her long legs as she settles herself down beside Maura.

"So, Doctor Isles, what's your hypothesis on the fort and the cookies so far?" Jane asks, pushing some hair behind her ears.

Maura's brow creases. "I don't believe hypothesis is the correct word, Jane."

Jane shrugs, wiggling her toes. She shifts to get more comfortable. "So cookies, check. Fort, check. Deep dark secret, no."

Maura also shuffles. "Dark secret...hmmm. Yes, I've been considering what this could be since we drew up our lists."

"Bucketlists are fun. Yay," Jane breathes sarcastically, but then softens. She puts a hand on Maura's knee. "No, seriously. I don't mind. But if you wanna tell me something deep, know that I'm not gonna judge you."

Maura dips her head in appreciation.

Jane pretends that she's not melting at the warmth of Maura's knee under her palm.

It seems Maura does have something revolving at the back of her mind. Jane can see it in the apprehension.

Maura takes a deep breath. "After you shot yourself-" They both wince. "-Well, when you were unconscious in the hospital I became obsessed with poetry about...death."

Jane tries not to let the shock register on her face. She doesn't want to spook Maura at such a vulnerable moment.

"Okay," she breathes, eyes skirting maura's face. "Any particular reason or was it because...?"

You were afraid you were gonna lose me.

Both of them acknowledge the unspoken words. Maura answers as if Jane had said them aloud anyway.

"Yes. Yes it was because I feared I had lost you. I had spates of atrocious nightmares, so real and..." Maura shakes her head. "Ambulances by Philip Larkin was the worst. I couldn't get through it without convulsing and bursting into tears at the very thought of..."

Maura's jaw clenches. Jane cautiously reaches for her hand. She then sits back and absorbs the information, letting it steep in her blood like a toxin. She thinks she makes a throaty noise, but with her whole world currently revolving around the hazel eyes which drown her in feeling, she isn't entirely sure.

"Can you quote it?" She doesn't know where the question came from. While it doesn't really seem like the right thing to say, it isn't wrong thing either.

"I can recite it, if you wish?"

Losing her ability to speak, Jane nods solemnly as a means of encouragement.

Maura takes a shuddering breath, tracing her eyes upwards. "Closed like confessionals, they thread - Loud noons of cities giving back none of the glances they absorb..."

Jane listens to the cadences in Maura's voice. She is enthralled. The way emotion trembles just under the surface of each word, strong enough to threaten a crack or break but not quite making it happen.

At some point, Maura's eyes flutter closed. Jane takes this as the freedom to openly admire her beauty without fear that Maura would pick up on her dilating pupils or the blush rising up her chest and cheeks.

The rhythmic voice comes to a soft end. "And dulls to distance all we are…"

"That's incredible," Jane whispers. Her voice is as rough as sandpaper. She blinks and tries to reign in the need to lower Maura back onto the pillows. To kiss her until delicate, unblemished hands are buried deeply into brunette tresses. To rest her own hips between Maura's legs. To test their fit in the cradle of her thighs.

Maura looks shy, a lock of hair falling down over her face. "It's just a poem, Jane."

Yeah, and I'm just a fool for love.

Jane clears her voice. Snap out of it, Rizzoli. "You wanna check on those cookies?"

"They haven't been in the oven nearly long enough," Maura berates, but she dampens it with a smile.

Jane scowls. Maura smiles wider. "Such impatience."

"I like cookies. I hate waiting. Can you see the problem?"

Maura lies back on the pillows, staring up at the sheets strewn above them. It is usually a plain white sheet, but right now it's a patchwork of mandarin oranges and hazy yellows from the lamp light and the sunset.

Jane shuffles up to lie down beside her, just about avoiding the desire to crawl on top of her. She sighs, wiggling a little so her feet aren't sticking out the entrance. She forgets how tall she is, sometimes. Maura notices, and covers her mouth as she tries not to giggle.

"Stop, Maura," Jane whines.

Maura folds a hand underneath her head. "You must have been such a handful for your poor mother."

Jane's head snaps towards her. She gapes. "Poor mother? Poor mother?! You've met Angela Rizzoli, right? Are we talking about the same woman?"

Maura grins. The type of unadulterated grin that Jane knows is only for her. Green eyes glisten with humour as they turn towards her.

Jane feels like when she was 16 and waiting for her boyfriend to kiss her for the first time. It wasn't her first kiss, but it would be the first one she actually yearned for.

"Besides," Jane drawls, rolling her eyes. "Ma exaggerates a lot. I was a pretty good kid. Got a lot of cuts and bruises cause I wanted to be as tough as the boys but…" She shrugs, wiggling her bare toes.

Maura turns on her side, eyes still sparkling with humour as she watches Jane's profiles twitching due to fighting off a smile. "And now? Would you still like to be as tough as the other boys?"

Jane looks offended. "What do you mean want to be? I am as tough!"

There is a moment of charged silence.

And then their fort is filled with laughter.


Jane sips on the coffee, ignoring the constant aching of her eyes. She is thankful that they are both off tomorrow. Once she crashes from this caffeine high she isn't sure she is going to wake up again.

She glances behind her, seeing the outline of Maura through the entrance of the tent. Even in the gloomy hour before the sun rises, Jane can see the rising and falling of the doctor's chest as she sleeps.

Maura had complained about how terrible it was that they would have to sleep without proper spinal support on the blankets and pillows on Jane's living room floor instead of a bed, but Jane just tuned her out after a while.

Eventually Maura gave up her lament on injuries to cervical, thoracic, lumbar and sacrum vertebrae.

Jane looks around the rest of the dark living room. There are the two plates of cookie crumbs just outside the fort. Jo Friday is curled up in her basket. When Jane had got up to make her third cup of coffee, the little dog had been jerking and growling in her sleep.

The detective heaves out a breath and rolls her shoulders. She is waiting for the sun to rise. Just to prove she had stayed awake the whole night. It surprised Maura, and when she realised it as truth is surprised herself, that despite working graveyard shifts covering cases in both Vice and Homicide, Jane had never actually witnessed a Boston sunrise.

She shifts, sighing again. Exhaustion claws at her muscles. The caffeine pumping in her blood is keeping her awake but at such a cost to her well being. She aches. Everywhere.

A soft murmur comes from inside the tent. She turns. Maura is leaning up a little, fisting her eyes and yawning. Jane grins. Chief Medical Examiner. Philanthropist. Perfectionist. And now she looks like a sleepy child.

"Jane?" Maura whispers groggily.

"Yeah?" Jane utters back, crawling back into the fort and settling herself on her stomach beside her friend.

"What time is it?"

"Uh…" Jane blindly pats an open palm out around her, eventually finding her phone in the darkness. She click on the screen, squinting and groaning at the harsh light. "5:34. Go back to sleep, Maura."

"What are you doing?"

The unusual husk of Maura's voice makes the hair on the back of Jane's neck stand on end. "What do you think I'm doing? Waiting for the sunrise, dummy."

"The sunrise?" Maura repeats dumbly, yawning and resting her head back on her pillow. "Why?"

Jane thumps her pillow into a better shape, and then turns onto her back. She doesn't get too comfortable; she doesn't want to fall asleep. "It's on my bucketlist. Sunset and sunrise."

"Oh," Maura murmurs, already drifting back to sleep. Then she cocks her head and opens an eye. "Speak to me." She closes it again.

Jane cocks her head. "Uh, Maura?"

Maura smiles but doesn't open her eyes. "Your voice holds calming properties for me."

"Calming properties?" Jane parrots.

Maura sighs, stretching her neck back and resettling on her pillow. "Yes."

Jane laces her hands on her stomach. "Is that really a thing, or did you make that up? Cause sometimes I think you make things up because you know I won't know the difference."

Maura chuckles, her sleep laden voice rich and deep. Jane's stomach quivers.

"Yes, Jane. Perhaps you are more familiar with music therapy. It is an alternative avenue of neuroscience in which the patient is treated through techniques related to the listening to or creation of music. There are different models which practise this theory, of course. The Nordoff-Robbins techniques, for example."

Jane squints up at the sheets above them. She is impressed that they haven't caved in around the pair.

"Okay. Maybe I should go for that the next time the department issues me with mandatory shrink-seeing duties. Could spend an hour a week doing some sick shredding on a Gibson. That would totally make me feel better."

Maura clucks her tongue on the roof of her mouth. Forever disappointed with Jane's inability to take anything seriously. She is quiet for a moment, and then repeats, "Speak to me."

"About?"

"Whatever you want to."

"Okay..." Jane laughs breathily. "Alpha beta, uno dos tres, one two skip a few ninety nine one hundred!"

Beside her, Maura trembles with hoarse laughter. The fort is too dark for Jane to really see but she feels it.

Jane clears her throat, grinning wildly at the frivolity. "Holy smokes, Batman! The Medical Examiner was a cyborg all along!"

Maura shakes harder. Jane laughs along with her, throwing up her hands. "I don't know what it is you want me to say. Biblical stories? Embarrassing tales from when I was in Vice? State capitols?"

Maura shifts onto her back, intertwining her hands onto her stomach just like Jane. She sighs again. "If you want," she croaks.

"Umm...okay..." Jane worries her bottom lip. "Well, there's grand old Boston, Massachusetts. No, wait I should have done them like the song...screw it. There's uh, Austin, Texas. And Tallahassee in Florida. Honolulu, Hawaii..."

"You're doing this in the strangest order, Jane." The amused voice from beside her made her scowl.

"Shhhh. Where was I?"

"You could be anywhere. You've just chosen four states with no geographical relevance to each other. It truly is anyone's guess as to how the next forty six states will come."

"Yeah but..." Jane stresses, holding up a finger. "You don't guess. So shh."

Another exasperated sigh signals for her to continue. "Lansing, Michigan. Oh, fun fact from the Rizzoli family files," Jane lilts, her voice sarcasm-heavy. "We took a road trip there once in my summer before high school. Spoiler alert: it sucked."

"How so?" Maura manages in between a yawn.

Jane bats a hand in the air. "Uh, the usual. Ma and Pop fighting most of the time, Tommy and Frankie being brats..."

Jane can feel the dull thumps of the caffeine in the back of her eyes. "But..." Hesitation. "But we went during a week or two of nice weather. So it meant the skies were really clear."

She notices that the sheets of the fort are starting to turn a misty blue colour. She smiles. Not too long now.

"I've never seen skies so clear. Or stars so bright. There's too much light pollution in the city, y'know?" Jane pauses. "Bet you have some fancy word for that, huh?"

No answer

Jane turns her head. "Maura...?"

The medical examiner is fast asleep. Jane watches her for a moment. The caffeine thrums in her veins. Or maybe it's the surge of affection she experiences every time she travels her eyes across the soft skin of Maura's unguarded face. Innocence. And purity. And little freckles which are set aflame by the first rays of sun.

"I wish I..." Jane blinks in surprise, not realising she was about to say what she wanted out loud, but since Maura doesn't answer, she continues. "I wish I could tell you in real life what I'm feeling, but I can't. Cause I'm a coward and..."

She swallows, leaning over to gingerly brush some of the hair away from Maura's brow. The doctor twitches, and Jane freezes. When Maura doesn't stir, Jane exhales shakily in relief. She feels like her lungs are being barred in. Like her ribs are shrinking to half their size.

"But as well as that..." Jane breathes, shifting on her side. "I have no idea what it is I'm actually feeling. It's...confusing. Is this love? Or lust? Is it just some weird funk that will pass or has it always been here inside my messed up brain?"

Maura doesn't answer. Jane shifts onto her side, laying her head down on her pillow and unabashedly staring at how the orange and red lights start to colour Maura's face.

"And I wish I could speak to you about it. Cause you'd know exactly what to say. What I should do. How to make me feel better. But I can't tell you anything, can I?" Jane mutters defeatedly.

Jane thinks about the art gallery. She knows that if she had enough talent, she would paint this very image and put it on display for everyone to see.

Beside her head, Maura's hand lies open. Fingers outstretched and palm facing upwards, almost in invitation. Jane wants to fit her fingers through that hand. But she doesn't.

She heaves herself up and crawls out of the tent. Stretching and cracking her joints, she stands and shuffles to the window. The sun stains the horizon and bloody red. It chases away the night. Below her, Boston is still. Boston is waking.

Boston is beautiful.

But even so, she thinks, clutching the window sill and feeling her blood thudding in her wrists and head.

Not as gorgeous as Maura.