Jane eventually retreated from the strange, reverse, perverse pietà of Maura Isles over Paddy Doyle. She couldn't help but feel that as Maura hovered near him, her tears sought to absolve him of all of his sins and make him into something good. Something he was not.

Jane knew that she was being irrational. She knew that the relationship between a child and a parent transcended good and evil, because be they good or evil, a parent never stopped being the person who begot you. Of course Maura wanted Paddy to be everything he was never going to be. Of course she wanted him to love her not just in the way that he already did, but in the way that she wished he would. Of course she panicked when he fell, and of course she trembled in fear and agony when her second parent in as many days hovered between life and death. But when Maura spurned Jane for Paddy, screamed at her for Paddy, Jane felt her heart break.

And when Jane's heart broke, she got angry.

She stomped outside the factory and into the alley where their unmarkeds were parked, with Frost trotting quickly behind her. "I'm calling it in," he said, not giving her the chance to debate him when he pulled out his phone. "Three GSWs at the corner of Kneeland and Utica - officer involved shooting with one agent down, one suspect dead, and one civilian seriously injured," he told dispatch. His voice drifted further and further away as she marched unsteadily toward the trunk of her car. She put her hand on the lid to steady herself and fought the urge to throw up.

"What the hell happened in there?" It was Korsak that she heard next. She wasn't expecting him and she jumped. "Jesus, kid."

"Paddy was there," Jane said, with her wrist to her nose, "Paddy was there and because Paddy was there, Dean was there," she shrugged as though this explained everything. "Paddy shot Flynn, Dean shot Paddy. Then Paddy shot Dean and when he took aim at Frost I… I took him out."

"Paddy Doyle was in the factory? Why?" Korsak questioned, as though he was interrogating her. He had his brown suit jacket on, his gray hair clipped close and styled tight - all that was missing was his notebook and pen with the way he stood to keep her from running.

"I'm assuming because someone tried to kill Maura," Jane growled. How it made sense, she wasn't quite sure, but it did. The only person in the city who loved Maura half as hard as she did was laying, dying, on the floor of the building behind them. Of course he knew Flynn was a threat to Maura, and of course he would try to take Flynn out because of it. "He wanted the guy dead himself."

"And Agent Dean?" Korsak asked. Jane tried to tell herself that she was imagining his accusatory tone.

"He's FBI and they've wanted Paddy for decades. He probably saw it as the best chance to get him," she replied in a defensive tone of her own.

"Look kid, no judgment, but how the hell would Dean know Paddy was here? And why the hell would he shoot him? He's wanted for 15 murders and countless racketeering charges. How is Paddy useful to any of us dead?" Korsak stepped forward and put a meaty hand on Jane's shoulder to calm her.

She worked herself into hysteria anyway. "I told him, a'right? I told him last night that we had eyes on Paddy and he told me that he wasn't going to do anything with that information. He told me that he was just gonna listen. Clearly he fucking didn't," she spat out, the climbing walls of the alley around them her confessional. "Maura hates me, Vince," she said in a much quieter, much more helpless voice, "she fucking hates me."

Korsak's blue eyes ballooned for just a few tell-tale milliseconds. He hadn't even considered Maura in all of this, let alone her reaction. He felt stupid when he pulled Jane in for a hug. "Her dad's laying in there with a couple of bullets in his body. That'd make anybody crazy. Give her time, Jane."

Jane wanted so badly to hold onto his words, but she couldn't, so she just settled for the comfort of the spice in his cologne and his strong arms at her back. They clapped hard to signal the end of their embrace when Frost walked up to them.

"Units are on their way, Jane," he said, and she nodded. "You did what you could. You did what you were supposed to do. He was gonna take me out."

"Yeah," was all she said, hoarse like she had lost her voice.

"I mean it," he said, his eyes all kind and soft. Jane loved him but his stare made her feel weak. She turned away from him. "You couldn't just let me die."

"Tell that to Maura," Jane whispered harshly when she heard the whine of sirens and the screech of tires pull in around them.

Boston Police cruisers, including one with her brother in it, and FBI vans peeled onto the asphalt, and suddenly there was a flurry of yellow caution tape and crime scene cameras. The relative quiet of the time with her partners was invaded by barely controlled chaos, and Jane stood there, feeling helpless.

The blare of the ambulance jolted her as it pulled up right next to her car, and two paramedics burst out from behind its doors. They wheeled the gurney and grabbed their equipment with brutal, surgical precision, and a coroner's van just like it parked at the opposite end did the same, outfits a little different, but everybody preparing to bring out a body. Both teams swarmed into the factory and Jane knew everything was about to change. She just hoped one of those bodies was still alive.

Almost as soon as they went in, the coroner's team marched out with Kevin Flynn on their stretcher in a black bag. She could tell it was him, because the body was long and broad in a way that Paddy Doyle wasn't. She fidgeted, danced from one heel to the next, anxiety forcing her into motion, in dread of what she would see next.

It was worse than she had expected. Maura, her rage making her beautiful and terrifying to Jane all the same, kept pace with the EMTs that wheeled a stabilized Doyle toward the ambulance. She glared at Jane pointedly as they walked past, eyes that had loved her just an hour before now hated her in the way that they glistened and narrowed, communicating nothing but severance.

Jane could think of nothing worse. Anger was there, yes, and so was hurt. But the distance, the way Maura's gaze cut her off like a gangrenous limb? Her chest burned and the pain radiated out until she could hardly speak. "I just shot my best friend's father," she whispered, the taste of it acidic, when Korsak walked back up next to her.

"You had no choice," he said, half to be comforting and half to state the obvious.

"How's that supposed to help me when I go home tonight, huh? When I gotta go home to that?" she gestured widely to the ambulance just as Maura climbed in, still with ice in her irises.

"Jane, you shot a man who's the head of the Irish mob," Korsak replied, "20 years on the run. Again, suspected of 15 murders."

She shrugged. "Yeah well he was nice to her though," she joked bitterly. She knocked desperately on humor's door, hoping for it to come out and save her, but there was no answer as her statement fell flatly against the fall air.

"Well that doesn't make him her father or mean you stop doing your job," said Korsak, shaking his head with all the adrenaline finally settling low in his stomach after spending the last half hour or so holding tight to his chest. "My God, I didn't think this was the way we'd take down Paddy Doyle."

Jane didn't even try to listen to him because she was too busy watching Maura dismount the ambulance and slap its closed doors as it drove away.

She turned toward the two detectives when Doyle was en route to the hospital, focused only on Jane again.

"See? She hates me," Jane said under her breath.

Vince shook his head, taking his exit, knowing this was something he shouldn't be in the middle of. "She's just in shock, Jane," he offered as his last condolence, and then he was gone, meeting back up with Frost.

Maura thrust Jane's blazer right at Jane's belly, and even though Jane caught it with ease, she could still feel the malicious force behind the gesture. "Here, take your jacket," Maura fulminated - a quiet utterance but a very loud sentiment.

"Maura, c'mon," Jane replied tiredly, but still Maura started to walk away. She needed to say something, anything, to keep her here, in front of her. If she turned away again, she might never come back. "I had to - Paddy showed up and he shot our suspect."

That did it. Maura turned on her heels instantly. "He shot the guy who tried to run me over with his fucking car yesterday, put my mother in the hospital," she spat, the rare curse filling Jane's blood with a fire she didn't have time to investigate.

"Look," Jane said as she stepped forward, "we had a handle on it until Paddy crashed our operation," she replied with impetus, giving into the desire to be drawn in.

"Oh! You mean your boyfriend had a handle on it? Thanks for letting me know that Agent Dean was planning to join us," Maura shot back, for reasons more than just that she felt out of the loop. Her hate for him grew under the excuse that he had wounded her father, but it was born out of entirely different reasons. This gave her space to air out the grievance that had bubbled between them when Jane last had her hands on her.

"I told you he's not - I didn't know he was gonna follow us in there, but what'd you expect him to do?" Jane bristled at this new development, half in fury and half in curiosity. She teased it out, wanted more of it, whatever Maura was giving her. "He's a federal agent! Paddy shot him!"

"In the leg!" countered Maura, "if Paddy wanted Dean dead, he'd be dead."

This was too far, however. Maura sounded to Jane like so many of the suspects and witnesses she'd brought in over years in homicide. Excuses for murder, excuses for strongmen, excuses for the actions of dangerous people. She hated it, especially on Maura. "What're you saying - you don't think your father was gonna take us all out?" she balked at the audacity of Maura's naivete. "Shoot me too? Because he would have, Maura. He doesn't give a fuck about me. He woulda shot me too."

"He was only there to protect me," Maura replied, "the way you should have been. It should have been your bullet in Flynn, for me. If it were, we wouldn't be in this fucking mess! Instead all your attention was on Dean!"

Jane was aghast. Her skin was flushed with shame at the insinuation that she had failed to protect Maura and instead had broken her heart. She was angry at Maura's complete misunderstanding of how her training prepared her, how these high intensity situations worked. She turned her ire at all of it on the person in front of her. "If that's what you think… you are naive, or ignorant, or I don't know what."

Maura had plenty of her own rage to battle it. "Well, at least I don't play judge and jury and kill people," she said calmly before walking away, taking from Jane the one thing she knew that Jane needed most - her time and her presence.

Jane saw the naked power play and contemplated storming after her when she looked down at the high slit in Maura's skirt, contemplated chasing the skin there, contemplated screaming at the owner of those legs to listen to reason.

Korsak found her before she gave into those baser impulses. "You guys'll make up," he said, hand at her back as soon as he saw that it was over.

Jane could only swallow her own shock. "Y-yeah," she stuttered, "that's what they said about the Beatles. We shoulda never let her do this. Nah." Korsak considered staying with her, driving her back to the station himself, distracting her from the detonation of the thing she cared the most about, but decided on none of it and walked away when she continued to mutter to herself.


A/N: this is the second to the last of the short and sweet chapters. The rest of them are easily double or triple this length. LOL