Jane had to get out of the house. She made no stops between Maura's bedroom and the door to the courtyard, and she didn't take a breath until the crisp night air hit her cheeks. Then, when Boston was on her body again, and not Maura, she could stand up a little straighter. She had to compose herself before she knocked on her mother's door, so she shook out her shoulders and ran her hand through her hair.
It didn't really matter. When Angela opened up, she gasped. "What happened to you? Run into a raccoon on your way here?" she was mad at Jane, too, and her hard stare matched her accusatory tone. She gestured to the entirety of Jane's person.
"What? No," Jane replied, "I waited for you in the car."
Angela detected the lie easily. "Ok," she pretended to accept it. "Then why do you look like that?"
"Like what?" Jane pressed, arms out wide so she could look down at herself. "This is what I was wearing an hour ago!"
"Yeah," Angela conceded, "but you look like you just fell out of a tree. Your shirt's untucked and your pants are wrinkled all to hell. Not to mention your jacket collar's all messed up. Here," she stepped forward to fix it, quicker than Jane who stepped back reflexively, but Angela stopped when she smelled it. Ah. Jane smelled like sweat and a particular mix of a few other things that Angela knew distinctly as sex. She put her hands up in an attempt to save both of their dignity. "Alright, suit yourself. You wanna look like a ragamuffin, go ahead."
Jane watched the minute changes on her mother's face until it settled into resignation. "Somethin' you wanna share with the class?"
Angela obfuscated. "You were mean, Janie. You were cruel," she said.
"Get ya stuff, Ma," Jane refused the conversation. "I'm tired and I need to go home."
"Ok," said Angela quietly, head full of questions, but heart knowing better than to push Jane into an argument. Given Jane's current volatility, it would erupt into ugliness quickly. So, she turned, grabbed her weekend suitcase from near her couch, and locked the door behind her.
They moved slowly from the guesthouse to the car out front on the street, Jane's hips metronoming tiredly as she walked. Others saw a cowboy march born of overconfidence, but her mother knew the truth, that Jane's legs and back had taken a beating over her years of sports and police work and that her gait hid a lot of pain. Angela put a steadying hand just above her daughter's behind just before Jane bent down to pop the trunk of her car. She grabbed the keys and opened the trunk herself, throwing her bag in. "Thanks," Jane said quietly. "I'll carry it up the stairs for ya."
Angela waved her off. "Where am I sleeping?" Jane opened the door for her and she got in.
"The couch," said Jane, shrugging and then slamming the passenger door.
When she fell into the driver's seat and put her seatbelt on, she was assaulted by Angela's umbrage. "The couch? Your couch is like a plank. I'm 56 years old, Jane."
"And?" Jane asked as she pulled away. "That's the only place there is to sleep."
"You made me leave my luxuriana mattress for a couch? Your couch? You made me pick a side between you and Maura for that?"
"Yeah yeah, I know," was all Jane said in response as they approached Jane's neighborhood.
Maura rolled her eyes at her bed, as though the notion of sleep itself were absurd. She would not sleep, at least not now, because the past twenty-four hours played on loop in her photographic memory.
At the forefront of all of it, from morning until moments before, was Jane. Infuriating and irrational Jane. Sexy, infuriating, irrational, explosive Jane. If she were honest with herself, Maura knew that kissing Jane was inevitable. Eventually. She found Jane wildly attractive, tall and lithe and so deep voiced. Jane found her wildly attractive, too, whether she'd admit it or not. Jane liked that Maura fit against her masculinity with a refined and soft femininity. Jane liked the contrast between them, Jane liked that Maura wanted to be taken care of, wanted to be held, wanted doors opened for her and someone to protect her. Jane also liked that Maura paralleled her in competence and skill. Maura wanted Jane to treat her like a genius, and she wanted to treat Jane the same.
Jane did all of those things for Maura. So of course they would kiss. Eventually. But having sex, having angry sex? That was… confusing. Maura had imagined what Jane would feel like against her, repeatedly. But, the fantasy never included clothes or cussing each other out. It never included kicking Jane out of her room in a rush, or hating Jane after she left. Most times, the fantasy didn't include Jane leaving at all.
And at that thought, the reason that Jane left was all the hurtful context of the storm around them. At the hospital, when Jane had bounded over to her out of breath and afraid, they had circled around reconciliation. So close. Maura thought that they might have kissed then, actually, the way Jane looked so hurt and Maura wanted so badly for Jane to gather her up in her arms. But then IA clapped down between them like lightning, driving them apart and on opposite sides of a particularly ugly war.
IA thought Jane was dirty.
IA thought Jane was dirty because of Maura. IA wasn't wrong, either, because Jane was a little bit dirty for Maura - keeping tabs on Doyle for her, letting her know when he was in town without putting out a BOLO, not informing the brass about Doyle's movements when he returned to South Boston. Maura had been so wrapped up in her father and their relationship when these things happened, that she hadn't considered the ramifications for her best friend if IA were ever to sniff around, or if brass ever caught Jane in the act.
Maura still shivered with rage when she thought about how Jane had chosen her ego over Maura's comfort, when that had never happened before. She never prioritized colleagues, men, the job, anything over Maura. She never withheld what Maura needed in the exact moment that she needed it, and she had never refused to apologize so vehemently before. At least not with Maura. With Maura, Jane usually exuded kindness in addition to her strength. She usually exuded passion and a very addicting kind of unconditional love that sought to fulfill Maura's every desire as she experienced them.
Jane spoiled her, and very rarely treated her like shit.
And that was what was so infuriating to Maura when she boiled all of it down to its most essential parts - while Detective Rizzoli did what she could with the cards she was dealt, Jane made error after selfish error in how she handled Maura after the shooting. Jane and Detective Rizzoli were of course helplessly entangled, being different facets of the same person, but Jane perpetrated the worst of the damage against Maura, even if Detective Rizzoli pulled the trigger.
Maura felt truly conflicted because of this. She respected Detective Rizzoli and her ability to do the job better than any of the other cops in their orbit. But Detective Rizzoli might lose her job because Jane's love for Maura had bled through into Detective Rizzoli's actions, or lack thereof, when it came to Paddy Doyle. So, as she walked down her stairs, switching on lights as she went, she resolved to make things right. Tit for tat, she reasoned. If Detective Rizzoli was going to lose the thing that made her most happy besides Maura, her job, and if she was going to lose Maura too, Dr. Isles might as well repay the favor. She pulled out her laptop and began to draft a resignation letter.
Jane awoke gradually, grumpily, to hands in her hair. For a moment, in her sleep-soaked brain, she imagined that Maura had made it into her bed, she must have - why else would a very distinctly feminine hand be caressing her head so shortly after they angrily found their way to each other? The thought, again just for a moment, titillated her and she stretched before she turned over, ready to say all the words that Maura had made her swallow last night.
She gasped when she saw her mother's face instead. "Ma, what're you doin' in my bed?" she groaned, and turned over to stretch more fully into her pillow. Both she and Angela winced when several of her vertebrae popped in response.
"That couch feels like a sack of marbles," Angela complained, trying to snuggle closer to her daughter.
Jane stiff-armed her and then pulled away. "Get out!" she whined, still hoarse from slumber. She shut her eyes and begged sleep to return, or, at least for her mother to magically disappear.
"Again, a luxuriana mattress. I could have been in my own bed! I'm staying here with you to get this kinda treatment?!" Angela huffed as she threw back the covers and stomped toward the door.
"Ma, I'm sorry," Jane said, turning over again. She opened her eyes and saw that Angela had gotten up. "I'm sorry. Ma? Ma! C'mon."
"Too little too late, Janie," Angela shouted with her back to the bed. "I'm not talking to you until you tell me exactly what the hell is going on."
Jane froze. "Whattaya mean, 'what the hell is goin' on?'"
"Between you and Maura!" Angela threw up her hands as if it were obvious.
"I'm not sure that's any of your-"
But before Jane could finish, Angela plowed on. "I don't understand why you two just blew up at each other! When I talked to her yesterday, she wanted to put everything behind you. And now you're making me abandon her."
"I'm not making you abandon her," Jane said through a sigh of relief at the conversation she had narrowly avoided, "I'm not sayin' you can't see her or talk to her. But she's holding back from me when what she knows could mean my job, Ma. She's withholding stuff from me when she knows that whatever information she has could help me beat this 'dirty cop' ordeal. She's doin' it to be petty."
"And why is she doing that, huh?" Angela volleyed, still turned around. "What did you do to make such a timid, sweet girl so angry? Because we all know you're the queen of petty."
"If I tell you, will you stop fighting with me?" Jane asked, uncharacteristically. She sounded so exhausted and so defeated that Angela almost ceded ground and went to her.
"Yes," said Angela instead, turning around.
"She wanted me to apologize for hurting her feelings and I said no. I defended this guy I'd been seeing to her. I stuck up for him and what he did to Doyle instead of taking her side."
"Well, that's stupid," Angela said quietly, surprised by her daughter's emotional perception and forthrightness. "Never pick a guy over your best friend."
"I know that now," Jane replied. "To be honest I knew it then, too. And I also know that my really, really, sweet mother left the comforts of her free Beacon Hill guesthouse to come stay with me in my crappy little apartment because she loves me."
"Yes, I do," Angela affirmed. She melted. "See what I mean? Grand, sweeping, romantic nonsense. Both you and your father. But I fall for it every time," she said as she went back to Jane and leaned in for a hug and a kiss.
"No, no hugging. No hugging," Jane swatted her away, but with a sad smile on her face. "Can you convince Maura to fall for it? It'd make my life a lot easier."
"I don't think I need to," Angela said cryptically. She had her own smile on her face, but Jane couldn't place it. "Now get ready. I'm sure you've got a lot to do at work today."
Jane assented with a shrug. Another shower and a change of clothes would at least give her more resemblance to her real self.
When she finally exited her bathroom, fully dressed, hair styled, perfume spritzed, she groaned at the sight of her little brother at the counter. "The hell are you doin' here?"
"I always have breakfast at Ma's house when I do midnights," Frankie said, his uniform unbuttoned, exposing a starched white undershirt.
Jane's first few buttons on her maroon oxford were unbuttoned, too, revealing the tanned skin of her chest. "This isn't Ma's house."
"No, thanks to you, she's crashing on that piece of plywood you call a couch," Frankie snarked. Angela flipped eggs at the small stove to the right of her children as they bickered.
"Oh thanks to me? I didn't see you step up and help her out when Dad left," Jane bit back.
"Ok can you two argue after we've had breakfast?" Tried Angela, never really able to contain her two eldest when they fought.
Jane smirked and snatched the omelette off of Frankie's plate, taking a huge bite before shoving it in a tupperware.
"Oh nice manners!" Frankie shouted with his hands outstretched, pointing to Jane in the Italianest way he could muster. "Your mother would be so proud."
"No she wouldn't!" Angela responded, waving the spatula at Jane. All three of them turned when there was a knock on the door.
Jane scrunched her face at her family and then marched over to her door, swinging it open, half-expecting to see Maura.
Instead it was Gabriel Dean. "I thought flowers would be better than a greeting card," he said in a bout of self-deprecating humor, dressed in his work suit and with his longish brown hair in his eyes.
"Bye Rizzolis," Jane gruffed, and then shoved Dean out into the hall. "Flowers are better," she said, in a soft voice for the man that had shared her bed only a few nights before, and it sounded more like sympathy than attraction.
"Yeah?" he asked, hopeful.
But Jane had somewhere to be and someone else to think about. "Yeah. But I'm not doing this right now," she said. She sounded professional and very nondistinct. American, but not regional. "I can't do this with you. I don't have the bandwidth right now. You betrayed my confidence in a moment when I needed you to be just a man."
"Jane, like I said, I-"
"And a real man doesn't sell out his potential girlfriend for professional gain. He just doesn't. A real man keeps things said to him in confidence, confidential. A real man steps up when the woman who needs him asks for his help, or asks for his time. Don't call me, alright?" she explained, and then that was it. She touched his arm gently, the way a doctor or a lawyer might deliver bad news. She left for the station hoping never to see him again.
Jane stood impatiently behind Dr. Pike as she waited for her confirmed cause of death for Wally Wisniewski. To her it was clear, with the giant holes in his front and back, but if Maura had beat one thing into her, it was that you didn't rush the science. "Pretty sure his dental work didn't kill him," she said. Pike missed the sarcasm, but Frost, who had just walked in to stand next to her, did not. "If we could just, uh, get that bullet," she finished in an exaggerated newscaster type of hum.
"You cannot rush these things," warned Pike, echoing Jane's thoughts. He turned away from Wally's teeth and moved to turn him on his side. Wally, a long time cop recently transferred to evidence management, had been shot in a liquor store not far from the Whistler Factory just the day before. And Jane needed to figure out why in order to get her mind off the shit storming raging around her.
"Thought you said the cause of death was 'quite clear,'" Frost quipped in an especially snooty mockery of Pike. His Rs and his inflection became quite defined, took on the curves of erudition.
"I guess you're used to the antiquated methods of my predecessor," Pike insulted Maura, still unaware of the teasing going on behind him.
This made Jane stiff with rage, barely subdued from the night before, this time flared by Pike and the audacity of his thought that he could be anywhere near Maura in skill or anatomical prowess. She contained it for the sake of her investigation. "Could be, yes. You know, I've never said it before," she paused, to create anticipation and to rein her emotions in, "but I'm a very big fan of your work, Dr. Pike."
"You are?" Pike and Frost asked in unison, both flabbergasted.
"I-I am, yes. And it would help us enormously in this very important case if you could remove that bullet so that we could run it through ballistics," Jane replied. Frost raised his eyebrow at her particularly white-sounding statement. Jane winked at him before Pike turned to face them.
"Of course I can do that for you, Detective Rizzoli," he said, stupidly oblivious to her manipulation, "what a mess this place is."
Jane scoffed sarcastically and then shot Frost a please help eye roll, until she noticed Pike grabbing the forceps to remove the bullet. "Um, aren't… aren't you… aren't you gonna use your fingers?" she asked, barely containing her panic.
"Forceps can leave tool impressions," Frost explained, "kinda messes with ballistics."
"Of course I wasn't going to use the forceps," Pike flubbed. He turned Wally over and fished for the bullet with his fingers.
"Think anybody would notice if there was suddenly another corpse down here?" Frost asked Jane. She almost laughed but they were both too annoyed.
"Excellent work, if I do say so myself," Pike patted himself on the back when he handed Jane the bullet in its rightful container.
Jane smiled with her lips closed. "Thank you. Pretty big bullet. For a .38," she teased, bringing up Pike's assumption from the crime scene the day before.
"Obviously a .45," he corrected her. He rolled his eyes at her as he returned to the body.
"Obviously," Frost jabbed.
Jane went to hand him the bullet, and as she did, she saw Maura bluster into her office from the window of the autopsy suite. She looked possessed, moving about with purpose and speed. She also looked good, Jane thought, with her hair styled and her light make-up done just right, and her flawless pairing of a black sweater and white slacks. Jesus. She needed to get it together. "Would you, ah, run that to ballistics for me, please?" she said to Frost without tearing her eyes from the window. The fah instead of for just slipped out.
Frost smiled because of course he caught it. "Sure," he said, "I'll stop at Dunkie's on the way back. You take a lahge regulah?"
"Shut up," Jane replied with a smile in return, though it was a little sad. She slipped back into Detective Rizzoli speak. "Text me when you have something."
He nodded and left her. It could not have been soon enough - she rolled her shoulders back to stifle the urge to run into Maura's office. Instead, she leaned cooly against the threshold. "You're back."
"Did you ever return my book 'soothing paint choices for the home?'" Maura asked in return, her back still facing Jane.
Jane scrunched her face in confusion at the non-sequitur. "Yeah, long time ago, right after Ma tried to paint my apartment begonia," Jane said. "So… you're back."
"That's odd, because I can't seem to find it," Maura snarked.
"Did you ever return my 'guns of the world digest'?" Two could play.
"I always return the things I borrow," Maura said seriously.
"Are you sure?" Jane let her accent slip a little bit and that made Maura whip around. She felt the pull of Jane but managed to reroute herself at the last second.
"Maybe you lost it. You do lose things," she said as she turned back to her desk to look at her very regular, very non-disturbed office chair. Her last statement was too intimate and she knew it as soon as she said it. There were phantom tastes of Jane on her tongue and phantom flexes of Jane's fingers inside of her.
Jane saw. She saw and she latched onto it by entering Maura's space. "Yeah, I lost you."
Maura ignored that, but only barely. What had Angela told her about Jane once? Grand, sweeping, romantic nonsense. She had to hold onto that idea now. "We're not doing this here."
"I told him to go to hell, Maura," said Jane. "In maybe a little bit nicer terms. I told him to never call me again."
"Who?" Maura played dumb.
"Dean," Jane explained. She took the bait.
"Well, the damage has already been done. So if you want to see him, you should. What more harm could it cause?" Maura said. She poked at Jane and it worked.
"Really? After last night that's what you're gonna say to me?" Jane was shocked. Her eyes widened and her back straightened.
"I said, we're not doing this here," Maura reiterated. "And I didn't exactly initiate last night."
"Well you didn't exactly stop it, either," Jane pointed out. "What happened?"
Maura shrugged. "You and I had sex. It was a mistake; we should not have done that."
"That's bullshit and you know it, Maura," Jane said, raising her voice. "I mean, it was good. And then you bit my head off after. What the hell."
Maura marched toward Jane with an outstretched finger. "Are you serious? You insisted on doing the opposite of what I asked you to do. I didn't take you up to my room to fuck, I took you up there so we could have a private conversation."
"Well we ended up fucking anyway!" Jane whispered with enough decorum to keep it at least a little quiet. "And when I tried having a conversation with you, you shut me down. Kicked me out!"
"I asked you to tell me about what factors made the shooting of Doyle, his near death, necessary," Maura returned, "and you wanted to talk about how shitty you were to me at the hospital."
"Yeah, to apologize," Jane shouted. "I wanted to apologize for being an asshole to you."
At this, Pike began to move toward the office, interest piqued and phone out.
"And I don't care! That's not what I wanted to know! I wanted to know how you justified shooting my father!" Maura matched Jane's energy and they were both gesticulating freely now.
"I just find it rich that he's your fucking father now," Jane mused sarcastically, "but he wasn't when he was just the guy who was wanted for 15 murders. You know, just fuckin' 48 hours ago."
"I'm glad you think you're so witty," Maura said as she spotted Pike entering the threshold.
"Well I'd rather be witty than fuckin' poindexter the know-it-all," Jane spat back.
Maura glared severely to keep from crying. "Well, I'd rather be poindexter the know-it-all than the hoi polloi," she said. She knew Jane wouldn't know what that meant, and therefore she knew how to hit Jane where it hurt the most: bringing up all the education she didn't have.
"Good one, Maura," Jane replied lamely.
"You don't even know what it means," Maura said, walking past Jane for a file, saying the quiet part out loud to be extra mean.
"It means common," Pike offered. He stood out awkwardly amongst all the passion between them flooding the room. "The literal translation is 'the great unwashed.'"
"Classy," Jane growled, feeling doubly insulted, "hide ya insults in Latin."
"It's Greek."
"Oh yeah, the geek that knows Greek," Jane said, hunting for revenge, "Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? You know, people laugh at you behind your back." Pike walked behind her, making a call on his phone to the brass upstairs and then turning it sideways to get a better video of the two of them.
Maura gasped before she recovered. "Oh yeah? Well people call you a bitch behind yours."
Jane raised an eyebrow. She was impressed that Maura could go toe to toe with her for this long. "Well damn. At least when my father gets pissed off he doesn't stab people with an ice pick!"
"Well at least my father didn't move to Florida to sleep with some floozy he met at a pizza parlor!"
"Maura," warned Jane, her family a boundary that should not be crossed.
"Or was it a massage parlor?" but Maura was far beyond the point of reason or of no return. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled at Jane as if to say oh well.
"Oh fuck you!" Jane shouted, reduced only to cursing, when Lieutenant Cavanaugh barged into the office straight off the elevator. Captain Connors tailed right behind him.
"Break it up, ladies!" Cavanaugh yelled, "What's goin' on here?"
"What the hell's goin' on in your house, Lieutenant?" Connors shouted from behind him, pointing right at Jane.
"I've got it under control," Cavanaugh responded with an unusual amount of calm.
"I can see that - a homicide detective and a medical examiner having a cat fight that needs police intervention!" Connors exclaimed.
Maura opened her mouth to apologize for the unprofessionalism when that strong shoulder showed up in front of her again, the same way it did the first time she encountered Connors.
"A cat fight?" Jane roared as she half-shielded Maura from the men in the room, "did you really just call a disagreement between female colleagues a cat fight?!"
Maura put a hand on Jane's shoulder in an old artefact of calming affection. "Actually, aggression between two females is-"
"God dammit - stop!" Jane turned her head and whispered harshly to Maura.
"I want Detective Rizzoli placed on leave," said Connors.
"I'll go one step better. Rizzoli, I'm transferring you out of homicide," Cavanaugh ordered.
"What?!" both Jane and Maura gasped, and when she flushed with shame for being the reason why Jane had just lost her spot in homicide, instantly Maura remembered why she had come into the office. She reached into her bag for the envelope she had placed in it that morning.
"You got thirty seconds to get your ass over to evidence management," said Cavanaugh.
"Place me on leave, don't send me there!" Jane pleaded, and Maura's knees weakened at the sound.
"Go now!" Cavanaugh screamed.
Jane snarled at all of them and made to leave.
"What about Dr. Isles? She was part of the cat fight too," Pike added unhelpfully, and for that statement Jane shoved him out of the way on her path out of the office.
When Jane had left, Maura walked up to Pike and pressed the envelope into his chest. "You're in charge now," she told him. Her tone was a mix of acrid and despondent.
"I am?" he gulped weakly.
"What's in that envelope?" Cavanaugh demanded of her, afraid of what he already knew.
"My resignation," Maura gave him the answer he asked for, the one he didn't want, and then she too left the building.
