A/N: And we're back online! Have this Election Week present: Chapter 4 a few days early! Things start to become what I would call canon-adjacent soon. Enjoy!
"The hell's the head of IA doin' conducting interviews now?" Jane barked. She slammed the driver side door of her cruiser so hard the car rocked when she walked away.
Frost knew better than to call her out on it, especially since she was gunless and Mauraless. "I don't know, Jane, but let's get the story straight," he offered, jogging a few steps behind her in the parking garage. The garage itself, one that had originally belonged to the community college down the street, was bought and renovated by BPD a few years earlier and technically sat a block away from the station. Cops hardly ever parked there unless they had to - it was far enough away to be inconvenient when they needed to whisk away to a scene, or a court date.
Jane hated it. But as soon as Cavanaugh told her that Captain Connors wanted to interview her directly, she went into Zamboni mode, riding over all her imperfections - she became a caricature of the perfect cop: parking where she was supposed to, following her lieutenant's orders without complaint, timely arrival to appointments with superiors. All with the sourest look on her face anyone at BPD had ever seen her with. "The story's the story, Frost. What happened, happened."
"You know what I mean," he replied, getting a little annoyed. "You had my back and I'm just tryna have yours."
"You mean you're tryin' to have Maura's." Jane looked behind her before she full-stopped and turned around to face him. She halted their progress on the stairwell that was exposed to the air - the only part of the building not monitored by CCTV. Frost took a moment to still be annoyed, but then begrudgingly respect her shrewdness. Mostly despite her cantankerousness.
"Yeah, would that be so bad? You guys are so close that a lot of times it's the same damn thing," he whisper-shouted. "So, if it helps both of you to say that I didn't know Paddy was in town, or why Dean was there-"
"No no, no," Jane said in a wince as she waved him off, "we're not lyin'. We don't need to lie. We don't know why Dean was there. We could take an educated guess, but we're not gonna do that. Not with IA."
Frost nodded and shrugged. "All right. Well, what are you gonna tell them?"
"Depends on what they ask, Frost," Jane replied, turning toward the stairs and stomping down them.
"What are you gonna do about Maura?" Frost dared to ask. The question was timid, and the intent behind it was pure. He watched her shoulders cock back and her hips sway in a way that hyper-sexualized her in response. Even without her gun, she was tall and hard and all angles and lines. Most men, when Jane did this, shirked away, and he used to be most men. But as they got closer, understood each other better, he realized that this was simply Jane: it wasn't an affect, a facade to make her feel more powerful, or an act. She just inhabited her body this way. He and Maura were probably the only two people on the planet, besides maybe her brothers, that accepted this about her. Korsak barely noticed; most guys on the force berated her for it to keep their ego intact. Therefore, Jane couldn't afford to lose one of the very, very few people on the planet who knew her that way. If Frost could play a part in keeping she and Maura together, any part, he'd do it.
Jane froze for the tiniest of moments, something Frost probably only noticed because he was a detective. "I don't know yet. I'll figure it out when we get through this IA mess," she growled at him when she didn't necessarily mean to. He shook his head behind her and she felt it. "What kind of flowers say, 'sorry I shot your bio dad because he was trying to kill my partner; please don't stop loving me?" She asked in sarcasm, but it didn't lighten the mood and she didn't look at him when she swung open the door to BPD headquarters.
"The way I reacted, I just bit Jane's head off," Maura turned and said to Angela Rizzoli as she waited for the older woman to round the corner. Maura hated hospitals, hated the sickly-sanitized smell that just barely masked the stench of illness, hated how alive everyone felt to her as they struggled for their last gasps of air, or struggled to recuperate enough to cheat death and walk out. She much preferred the stillness of her morgue, the quiet that allowed her to work and to analyze. "Adrenaline impairs cognitive sequencing, but still."
There was so much fighting going on in hospitals, and fighting was more Jane's business. She had fought and scrapped when she shot herself to save Frankie and Maura from Marino a year and a half ago, hooked up to ventilators and heart monitors and IVs full of deliriously strong antibiotics. Maura had decided then that she never wanted to be so close to the front line of the war between life and death again, and yet, here she was, in the trenches with both her mother and her biological father when fighting came so much easier to the Rizzolis.
"You were afraid for your life," Angela reasoned, trying to bring Maura comfort. She was out of her depth, too, so used to Italian kids who needed Italian love and Mediterranean bluster to feel better, and not Irish kids who needed clinical precision and impenetrable logic.
"Oh no, Paddy wouldn't have shot me," said Maura. She turned to Angela and they spread out a little bit into the linoleum covered hallway of the orthopedic wing of the hospital.
"We can't help who we love," Angela replied, in her usual cryptic way. Her eyes bounced around the room and ended pointedly on Maura.
"I don't love Paddy Doyle," Maura said, "He's done terrible things. It's just when Jane pulled that trigger… you know, I never really see how they end up on my autopsy table. And he kept trying to tell me something. 'Hope,' he kept saying 'hope.' I wonder if that was her name."
It was all a lie, all of it. Angela meant something different; Maura knew that Angela meant something different; Angela knew also that even in her deflection, Maura was lying because she did love Paddy Doyle. Maura also often saw how people ended up on her autopsy table. Lie upon lie upon lie to obfuscate something she didn't want Angela to see.
"You mean your biological mother's name?" Angela responded. She wanted to chase Maura's cover-up, but again, those were her Italian instincts. She had no Irish instincts, so she let the Irishwoman before her lead the conversation.
Before Maura could answer, the attending surgeon burst through the double doors of the suite with a clipboard in her hands. "Dr. Isles, I'm sorry to have to ask you this, but you didn't fill out the DNR."
"I have no idea what he would have wanted… I don't…" Maura began, and then the tears began in earnest. She dropped her head and gulped down a sob.
"Well," said the doctor kindly, "just think about it for a minute." She touched Maura's arm and then walked away.
"Oh Maura, Maura," Angela cried, her inhibitions melted away. She reached for Maura as much as a balm for her own distress as for Maura's.
Maura pulled away as if she were scalded. "Please don't," she said, "my mother's very reserved. I'm not very good at it, either."
Another lie. Angela had seen Maura wrapped up in so many of Jane's hugs, so many of Frankie's hugs, so many of her own hugs, countless times. She'd seen her hold onto her adult children tight enough to hurt and she'd seen them hug her just as tight. However, her executive functioning had kicked in again, and she respected Maura's arbitrary boundary. Who was she to call out the grieving? "Jane always used to squirm off of my lap. You two have that in common." she offered.
Maura sighed, put her defensive hand down. "You should go home. I'll be fine."
"No, no," Angela said, "I-I'm gonna stay here." She stepped forward again but didn't try the hug.
Maura didn't move away, but her body became rigid. "No," she commanded, firm, with her chin high in the air. "I'm used to being alone. Please, I'll be ok."
Angela couldn't help but feel like she'd somehow made Maura take care of her instead of the other way around.
Jane threw her unmarked into park right up on the hospital's front curb. Korsak was right - to outsiders, they looked dirty for keeping Paddy's movements to themselves. She looked dirty for what she asked the team to do for Maura. And that meant, to IA, there was plenty of evidence to take her gun away. That was why she had to get to Maura, and quickly - even though Maura had ignored her last five calls, even though Maura had thrown her jacket in Jane's face and taken her heart out of Jane's hands. She needed Maura to hold it down. She needed Maura to be a ride-or-die, just for the day, to make sure that IA didn't ruin Jane's career, all for the moment of a colossal sexual error. She needed Maura to save her from the mistake of Agent Dean and the dirty things she had done to protect Maura's biological father.
Jane stomped through the walkway, flashed her badge to the front desk with only a grunt, and punished the Up button on the elevator with her finger. 5th floor. Five floors between her and Maura, five floors until she put eyes on Maura again, until she could convince Maura to set this thing right. Jane told herself that she could live with Maura hating her for the foreseeable future as long as she could protect her from afar with all the weight that the badge afforded her. She stepped into the car when it opened to receive her, dragging a heavy aura in with her, slamming the door-close button as soon as she could.
"Maura!" she half yelled, half groaned when she saw Maura sitting there in the hallway. She gulped in air from her sprint toward the waiting area, all hunched shoulders and dark eyes and determination. As soon as Maura saw her, she got up from her seat and put her hands out to touch. Jane couldn't resist doing the same. "Don't say anything, just listen," Jane ordered kindly, heaving breath into Maura's space and Maura sucking it up.
"Jane, I'm sorry too," Maura immediately said, wanting everything to be over. When she saw Jane scramble into the hallway, she thought she saw a contrite version of her protector. She thought she saw Jane frantic with want, the same way she was after hours of fracture between them.
"No, we don't have much time, the head of internal affairs is on his way up here to get a statement from you about the shootings," Jane barreled through, waving off Maura's plea for intimacy. How could she give Maura intimacy if she couldn't give her safety? She needed this first.
"That's it - That's it? That's all you have to say? No 'I'm sorry your father is dying?'" Maura turned hard again. Cold.
Jane simmered in response. If Maura spurned her for Paddy one more time… "Oh so he's your father now?" When Maura didn't answer, she continued. "What, am I sorry that a man that's wanted for 15 murders didn't shoot me or Fr- no! I'm not!" The simmer raged into a full-blown boil.
"I'm not asking you to be sorry for what you did to him, I'm asking you to be sorry for how it's making me feel. Something you did hurt me. Acknowledge that! You're always so willing to make it up to me when you do it - what's so different about now?" Maura said, but Jane was too pissed to hear it.
"I did what I had to do to protect myself and my partner. He would have killed me. I can't make anything up to you ever again if Paddy Doyle puts me in the goddamn ground, Maura," Jane spat. Maura had stepped away and Jane stepped boldly forward, followed, chased. "I'm not apologizing for shooting first."
Maura's gut clenched at the thought of Jane in the grave. Jane in the grave because of her father. She almost held onto that, almost let that be enough to absolve Jane of the petty knife she had just planted into Maura's heart - but more than an uneasy gut, Maura felt primal anger at being left to stand alone with all of the uncertain agony of a brutalized mother and a dying father. "You're not supposed to pick Dean over me. You're not supposed to pick a man over me!"
Again, there was the insinuation that she had failed to keep Maura out of danger, and it curdled Jane's blood. "I-"
"Why are you even here?" Maura cut her off, now uninterested in anything she had to say.
"To warn you. Maura, if our friendship ever meant anything to you, will you please think before you answer the questions you're about to be asked. Protect me-"
"Detective Rizzoli!" Connors and Cummings called her by her title in unison as they stalked toward her back.
"So I can keep protecting you. They're doing an investigation, they're building a case, they think I'm dirty," Jane finished her demand of Maura before putting her hands on her belt and waiting for the coming IA storm.
"Your contempt for the rules borders on criminal, Detective! You're talking to a witness!" Connors shouted when Jane turned to him, now at Maura's side, her shoulder placed conspicuously between Maura and Captain Connors.
Maura looked down at that shoulder, level with the slender column of her own throat, and she surprised herself with the sudden burn of passion and possession inside of her, flowering all through her thorax and speeding below. It mixed itself with anger and she had a brief, engrossing desire to leash the war dog in front of her, the one always ready to tussle with the devil on her behalf. She thought of what it would feel like to control all that instinctual violence, to tug at Detective Rizzoli's neck and bring her to submission, Detective Rizzoli who always stood between Chief Medical Examiner Isles and peril. "She was just asking about my father," Maura lied again. Lying for Detective Rizzoli was easy, even when Jane refused to be good to Maura.
In fact, Dr. Isles could think of a thousand lies to tell if it kept Detective Rizzoli potent in the way that she needed her to be.
