My Serenity
WARNING: Rated M for some violence, language, and sexual situations. This fic contains (eventual) femmeslash and sexual situations between two female characters. Do not continue if this is not to your liking.
Trigger warnings: This chapter contains references to Charles Hoyt. While there are no graphic images or descriptions, some readers may be uncomfortable with the dark themes explored. Please be advised of trigger warnings for: kidnapping, psychological abuse, and physical violence. While these themes will not remain the focus of this story in general, it will be part of the plot for the next few chapters.
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Chapter 22 – The Hands of Blue
"What are you doing to me?" Jane muttered, completely enraptured by the smell of Maura's hair and her perfume. Her hands moved to Maura's midriff of their own accord.
Jane's heart was pounding in her chest and throbbing in her ears. Maura's warmth soaked into her like sunshine. Her body craved more, though her brain struggled desperately to hold on to reason. The cool skin of Maura's stomach twitched under Jane's touch.
The honey blond sighed, "My guess is that I am causing you to be sexually aroused."
Jane gulped, resisting the urge to turn Maura around and rip off her shirt.
Instead, she kissed at Maura's soft neck, "I thought you didn't guess." Jane laughed softly, pressing multiple kisses to Maura's neck.
She was surprised by her boldness. Every word Maura whispered turned her on even more. Her bluntness only made her harder to resist. Jane felt consumed by her desire for her.
"Well I have a lot of anecdotal evidence," Maura practically moaned, slipping her hand into Jane's hair and tugging, "I think I can draw a tentative hypothesis."
And in that moment Jane knew she wouldn't be able to resist her. She had almost forgotten why she was trying in the first place. All she knew was that she wanted to taste more, touch more of Maura.
She pulled at Maura's hips, sighing with relief as Maura turned, "I guess we'll just have to test that." Everything in the Verse became the taste of Maura's lips, the soft warmth of her tongue, the smell of her flowery perfume. Jane's arousal only increased as Maura pressed her chest against hers, burying her fingers in her hair.
Maura moaned her name as she moved kisses along her jaw, spreading her hands up Maura's back, scratching softly.
"Maura," Jane huffed, loosing herself in the moment.
"I'll take what you love the most." His voice suddenly intruded her thoughts.
Jane grimaced, stepping back.
"I'll take her." He cackled. "I'll take her from you, and I'll make you watch."
Jane shook her head, clenching her fists. She tried to drown him out, but his voice was the only thing she could hear. All the horrible things he had said. All the things he promised to do as he cut her.
"Jane?" Maura whispered, reaching for her arm.
"No!" Jane screamed, pulling away.
"It's okay," Maura said softly, calmly, though her heart was breaking, "you can tell me. What is it?"
Tears spilled from Jane's eyes. Her hands ached. She felt like a caged animal. She needed to escape. She felts as if she couldn't breathe. She struggled for something to focus on.
"Jane," Maura continued softly, "can you look me in the eyes?" She continued when Jane's darting eyes finally met her own, "Okay, now breathe. In through your nose, slowly."
Jane awoke with a start. For a moment, the picture of hazel eyes lingered in her mind's eye. The smell of gardenias. A moment later they drifted away.
Who is she? Jane thought to herself. It seemed she dreamed of her every night. But every morning she awoke, the details seemed to slip away.
Xxx
Persephone
"Are you sure you can fly this thing?" Frankie winced, his knuckles white as he held to the ship's dash.
"How hard can it be?" Giovanni chuckled, shifting the steering wheel roughly.
Frankie almost fell over. "I thought you said you could fly?!" He shouted.
"In theory, yes."
"In theory?" Frankie hollered.
"Yeah, it's a bit different from the engine room." He laughed.
"You are going to get us all killed!" Frankie said with exasperation.
"Nah…" Giovanni shrugged. "We'll be fine."
"Have we made it out of the atmosphere yet?" Maura said from behind them.
"It's not as easy as it looks, babe," Giovanni winked suggestively. Frankie frowned at him with distaste. He is lucky I don't sock him one, he thought.
"You're going to have to pick up the speed if we're going to break Persephone's gravitational field." Maura stated simply.
"Don't worry," he said, looking rather worried as the ship started to shake, "we've got the gravity drive—"
"No!" Maura said, stopping his hand. "In this condition, we shouldn't risk starting up the drive until we clear the atmosphere."
Both men stared at her in shock.
"What?" Maura responded, smiling. "Jane and I had a lot of time on Regina… She's a very good teacher."
"You mean you spent all that time learning about spaceflight?" Frankie responded with a raised eyebrow.
"Not all of it." Maura smiled cheekily.
Frankie choked comically. Giovanni frowned, looking between the two of them as if they had been speaking a different language.
"I'm sorry I asked," Frankie said. He turned to Giovanni, "Let her drive."
"What?" Giovanni said, sounding almost insulted. "Her?"
"Yes, her!" He slapped his arm. When Giovanni just stared at him, Frankie shoved him off the chair. "And stop talking about Maura that way!"
"What?" Giovanni said to Frankie, giving Maura the helm. "Is she your girl? Man, I'm sorry. I had no idea, dude."
Frankie rolled his eyes. "Just get to the engine room," he hollered.
When he left, Frankie turned to Maura, who was rerouting the Serenity to make another attempt at breaking the atmosphere. He laughed, "Are you ever going to tell him?"
"Tell him what?" Maura said distractedly. Watching Jane pilot the starship was something else entirely to piloting it herself. Giovanni was right; it wasn't as easy as it looked.
"About you and Jane?" Frankie said.
"Surely, he knows." Maura responded.
"I'm not sure he does."
"I don't know why not. I told him exactly why I'm willing to risk everything to get her back."
"Everything?" Frankie questioned, studying her.
"Everything."
Xxx
Athens
Korsak and Frost reached their destination four days later—only 16 hours behind schedule. Of course, Korsak blamed Frost for their delay, despite the fact that the true reason was a random search by an Alliance vessel. Thankfully, Frost's new counterfeit I.D.s got them through the checkpoint without too much trouble. They disembarked the cargo vessel, eyes to the west, where Maura said she would meet them: a valley about 15 km from the city.
"How are we supposed to make it there with all of this?" Frost groaned, gesturing to the three heavy chests they had just lugged out of the ship.
"We got other things to worry about." Korsak grunted.
"Like what?"
"Like our contract."
"What?" Frost blinked, "I thought we were…" He lowered his voice to a whisper, "I thought we were going to skip out on that."
"Kinda hard to 'skip out' on anything with eyes on us." Korsak muttered under his breath, eyeing the tank of a man they had started referring to as "The Muscle."
"So, what do we do?" Frost asked.
"Follow my lead," Korsak said, approaching the man in question.
Xxx
Ariopolis
"I'll take her." He cackled. "I'll take her from you—I'll make you watch."
"No!" Jane cried, "Stop!"
Maura's whimpers filled her ears. Jane thrust her arms out into the dark, trying to find her. There was nothing but blackness. She could feel something close to her. A chill came over her.
"Please, don't!" Maura cried. She started to scream.
Jane frantically searched the darkness.
"It will be fun." Hoyt cackled behind her.
She spun around, but there was nothing there. "Don't you touch her!" she shouted, lunging at nothing.
"I make you watch as I cut—"
Jane awoke screaming, drenched with sweat.
This time there was no image of the woman's soft eyes. There was no lingering smell. All there was were the echoes of her screams—her screams and his cackling laughter.
Xxx
"Can you go any faster?" Frost yelled, as he looked back at the mob chased after them.
"This is as fast as she goes." Korsak shouted over the sound of the engine.
They certainly hadn't picked the best ATV to steal from the ship's cargo bay. This one was clearly dependent on a diesel engine. It was good for heavy loads, but it was loud and did not navigate the narrow trail with much accuracy. They nearly flipped over as Korsak struggled to navigate the curve of the trail.
Frost looked down the sheer cliff beside them. "Careful! Remember what we have in the back there." He felt sick to his stomach, as Korsak navigated another sharp turn. "Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?"
"Shut up." He grunted.
"I'm just saying. If we don't get caught by the horde behind us, we're just as likely to go rolling down that cliff to our death." Frost gulped.
"It was your idea to steal this thing in the first place." Korsak said with annoyance.
"Well, it wasn't like Kronski was just going to let us walk off with the cargo."
"He would if you had just played along like I told you to."
"Well, I'm sorry if I'm not able to read your mind like Jane does!"
"Even as a rookie, she was a better actor than you."
"Look," Frost shouted, "I'm the tech guy. In an emergency, I'm a co-pilot. I am not an actor. I don't have …"
"You don't have a poker face." Korsak laughed.
"Yeah," Frost chuckled, "I really don't."
"And that's exactly why you still owe me 50 units."
"You just had to bring that up again, didn't you?"
Xxx
Georgia System
"So, when were you going to tell me about this elaborate rescue plan of yours?!"
"Angela!" Maura jumped as the older woman practically pounced on her as soon as she stepped out of the bridge.
"Four months!" Angela seethed. "You lied to me for four months!"
"I didn't lie…" Maura said, growing anxious. "I just … withheld the truth."
"You told me there was nothing we could do!" Angela practically growled, stalking Maura into the canteen.
"Well," Maura reasoned, starting to feel itchy. This plan isn't going to work if you break out in hives every time you have to bend the truth, Maura thought to herself frantically. "At the time … we couldn't do anything."
Angela stared her down. Maura felt completely helpless against that stare. Jane had described it before: "It's worse than when you make her mad. It's ten times worse because she's -disappointed-."
"I'm sorry," Maura pleaded. She did not have Jane's iron will. The truth was she had hated hiding the truth from the Rizzoli's. She had especially despised withholding it from Angela. The poor woman had already suffered so much. She had raised her three kids practically on her own. She had almost lost Jane in the war, and Tommy had run off not long after. After all that, Angela had managed to piece her family back together. She had even started to make Maura a part of that family. To some extent she had even adopted Korsak and Frost as honorary members of the Rizzoli clan.
But when Jane flew off four months ago, Angela's family broke apart. The crew split up and went their separate ways without telling Angela much more than that they were trying to collect enough credit for Jane's defense. So, when news came that Jane's trial had already came and went in a mere two weeks, Angela found no solace in her friends. Maura was in another star system, her boys were off trying to find work, and Barry and Vince were god-knows-where.
"I couldn't tell you anything, Angela." Maura explained, pulling her to sit down at the table with her. "It was too dangerous."
"But Frankie? Tommy?" Angela started to cry.
"I told them as little as possible." Maura apologized, "I couldn't risk it. I couldn't risk your lives as well as my own."
"Oh," Angela groaned angrily, "now you sound like Janey!"
"Angela," Maura said, her voice very serious, "do you have any idea where Jane's been since she was arrested?"
Angela grew quiet.
"The Alliance might have sentenced her to hard labor," Maura explained, "but that's not where she's ended up.
Angela looked pale but didn't respond. She waited expectantly.
"I had a feeling that something was off when you received word that she had already been sentenced," Maura explained. "The Alliance likes to make a show of their high-profile trials. A bounty like Jane? A stunt like she pulled? That would be something the Alliance would make a show of serving justice for. They would drag her all the way to Parliament itself if they could make such a charge stick.
"But they didn't do that. They arrested her, supposedly put her on trial, sentenced her, and sent her to a prison on Hera all within 10 days. That's unprecedented for the Alliance."
"W-where is she then?" Angela whimpered.
"I didn't know until about a week ago," Maura continued. "I was working at an Alliance hospital on Ariel, trying to gain access to their systems. Korsak and Frost followed some leads of their own, meanwhile working to find the supplies we would need to pull off a jailbreak.
"Anyway, while working at the hospital, I made some connections with some high-profile patients. I learned about a medical research facility on Ariopolis that many of them had received treatments from. It seems that only select members of Parliament and other government officials had access to these treatments. I later discovered that this same facility was also transporting patients from Alliance prisons."
"Why?" Angela frowned.
"I'm still not sure," she shook her head, "but I have my suspicions."
Angela put her hand to her chest. Her mind started to race as she imagined the worst. She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the troublesome thoughts.
Maura continued. "Have you ever heard of 'The Hands of Blue'?"
Angela shook her head, "That's just some conspiracy theory, isn't it?"
"It may have some basis in fact," Maura explained. "There seems to be certain factions of the Alliance that fly under the radar, so-to-speak. From what I can tell, they work outside the rules of Parliament. So far Korsak, Frost, and I have found links of these men in suits wearing blue gloves with dozens of disappearances, mostly of Brown Coats and prisoners on boarder planets."
"What would these people want with former Independents?"
"It's not clear. The only commonality we could figure out is that these people would likely not be missed when they vanished."
"But Janey?" Angela frowned.
"I was confused too," Maura nodded. "Her case is rather high profile for a covert operation like what The Hands of Blue seem to be working. After some digging, however, Korsak and Frost were able to posit a plausible theory."
"Yes?"
"They believe Charles Hoyt is involved somehow."
"No!" Angela shrieked. "He can't be. He's a criminal. It just can't be, Maura."
Maura shook her head somberly, "I didn't believe it either at first. But then I received this." She pulled out Jane's falsified I.D. and placed it on the table. "Most of the files are corrupted, but I was able to recover some of the data."
"How did you get this?" Angela asked, looking the card over. It had a small hole about 1 cm wide on one side, exposing what looked like a computer chip. "Is this a bullet hole?!"
"It's what Jane risked her life to rescue from the shuttle she went chasing after. She used it to hack into the Ministry of Intelligence's security files eight years ago. Korsak said she barely made it out alive. She was shot fleeing Alliance security guards."
Angela looked impossibly pale but didn't say a word. Maura worried about whether or not she should continue with how upset the older woman was getting, but Angela deserved to know the truth. Maura only wished she had known about it sooner. Maybe then she could have helped Jane before all this mess happened.
"Korsak managed to get her to a medic friend of theirs, Susie Chang. Jane took a long time to recover, but she went after Hoyt as soon as she was capable. She was lucky that the Alliance didn't go after her. As it turns out, they didn't want word to spread that sensitive information had been leaked. It's still not clear why The Hands of Blue didn't pursue her.
"What is clear, however, is that Jane stumbled onto an unprecedented conspiracy. I'm still not sure how far it reaches. If all of the files could be recovered, perhaps we would know, but it seems doing so is impossible. Frost tried, but there's just too much physical damage."
"Wait," Angela interrupted, "how did you get Janey's card in the first place?"
"My suspicion is that Paddy Doyle arranged that it be sent to me with her affects. It seems he wanted me to see why I was in so much danger. He couldn't risk telling me himself, but he arranged for me to figure it out myself."
"You mean to say that Paddy Doyle has those kinds of connections in Alliance affairs?"
"Yes," Maura confirmed, "he is also part of the reason Jane was transferred to Ariopolis."
"Wait, I thought you said that was Hoyt?"
"Not originally. Doyle made sure she was transferred because I asked him to do so."
"What?!" Angela said, looking horrified.
"She was supposed to be transferred there for specialized medical care," Maura swallowed, trying to hold back guilty tears. "I wasn't aware of it at the time, but the reason was because she had suffered multiple concussions."
Tears started to pour down Maura's cheeks, she reached out for Angela's hands pleadingly. Racked with guilt, Maura struggled to hold back sobs, "But Hoyt ordered her to be transferred to his special psych ward before Doyle could reach his contact.
"Of course, I didn't know any of this until I was already on my way to Persephone. Doyle sent me an encoded video message directly to my shuttle. He said he risked exposure, but he needed me to know that breaking Jane out would be more dangerous than ever. He begged me not to do it."
"But why?" Angela questioned. "Why does Paddy Doyle care so much about what you do?"
"Because …" Maura faltered. She was still reluctant to accept the truth herself, "… he's my biological father."
Angela was silent for a long time. She looked over the mess that was one Doctor Maura Isles. She noticed for the first time that the honey-blonde wasn't the usual cool and collected professional. There were dark circles under her eyes. Her skin was pale, and her hair was in a loose ponytail. She wore drab clothes in pale hues. Maura's hands shook as she reached out to her desperately.
Mrs. Rizzoli's motherly nature won over her fearful, angry thoughts. She moved to sit in the chair next to Maura, pulling her into a tight hug. Maura wept on her shoulder, wetting her blouse, but Angela paid no mind. She just patted Maura's hair and whispered a soft "Shh" until she finally took a deep inhale and sat back.
"I'm so sorry Angela." Maura said, fighting back new sobs. "I didn't know. I didn't know Hoyt was involved. I thought I could trust Doyle. I thought he was trying to help me."
"It's okay." Angela said, pulling her into a hug again. "I know. We'll figure it out, Maura. We'll get her back."
Maura laughed softly, "I'm not sure how you can be so certain."
"We're Rizzoli's, Maura. We survive. It's just what we do."
"We?"
"Yes," she nodded, "you're just as much a Rizzoli as anyone else. More so, even. I can see why Jane loves you so much."
Maura blushed a little. She wasn't sure why. Everyone seemed to realize that Jane was in love but Jane herself. Sometimes it seemed Jane was willfully ignorant of her attachment to Maura, similar to how she seemed to pretend that she didn't like her mother being on the Serenity, or her brothers following in her footsteps becoming bounty hunters. She kept her distance from people, especially the ones closest to her. As if she could prevent heartbreak by denying she cared at all. But Jane did care. She cared deeply. She cared so much that she had sacrificed her freedom, perhaps her life, to protect Maura. To protect what was on that I.D. card about Constance Isles, Paddy Doyle, and Maura's true identity.
Xxx
Athens
"Do you think we lost them?" Frost said, checking the hills anxiously. This is a horrible position, they could take us out from pretty much any angle, Frost thought.
Korsak ignored him, "They should already be here by now." He looked at his watch and then up at the double suns. This time of the year the protostar Murphy swung closely around Athens, causing the days to be almost twice as long, with both sides of the planet covered in sunlight.
"I'm not sure your watch is any use here." Frost grumbled. He felt cornered, vulnerable.
"Shh!" Korsak whispered rather loudly.
"What is it?" Frost said, reaching for his pistol.
"Cool it!" Korsak snapped, grabbing his arm. "I mean that sound."
Frost's eyes widened as he realized Korsak was pointing to the sky. A smile spread across his face. "Serenity!" he shouted.
They peered up into the bright sky, but it was almost impossible to see anything with twice the sunlight. Still, the sound was unmistakable: Serenity's archaic gravity drive powering down as the thrusters kicked in. The sound grew louder. Much louder.
"Shit!" Frost said, spotting the ship coming in hot from the east. "They're coming in fast."
"Too fast!" Korsak shouted, pulling Frost as he bolted off. "And low!"
The pair only just barely made it the 100 meters across the valley to high ground as the firefly class starship swooped down and finally landed about ½ a kilometer off target.
At least they landed, Korsak sighed internally. I could have sworn they were going to crash.
"Who the hell is piloting that thing?" Frost shouted, dashing off towards the ship at full speed.
"If I didn't know any better, I'd say Jane was piloting that thing." Korsak grumbled, starting the ATV and driving off towards the Serenity.
[To be continued]