A/N - Last chapter...not completely happy with this ending, but it is what it is, as I say. Thanks in advance for reading, leaving comments, and supporting this series. If it wasn't for all of you, I would have stopped writing R&I fanfiction somewhere around Casey being magically cured and Jane's equally magical pregnancy.

- Chapter 11 -

After the case and the ridiculously long press conference – no, I don't think our suspects should be considered dangerous; yes, they surrendered peacefully; no, the suspects are not a part of a sleeper cell funded by militant fringe groups – Jane had done something she hadn't done since closing her first case in Homicide. She got in her car, put the key in the ignition, and just drove, aimlessly. Late afternoon traffic had begun to peter into the free-flowing stream of dimmed headlamps meandering down empty lanes, allowing her to just cruise around the streets she knew like the back of her own hand.

Jane reluctantly stopped at an abandoned gas station, unable to keep running. She had to call Maura, tell her where she was. But she didn't want to go home, not yet. For the last couple of days, everything had been moving in rapid speed. As shocking as it was to her own psyche, all Jane wanted was a little bit of time she could call her own, a rare moment of self-reflection.

Looking at the crumbled mess of the gas station around her, refusing to make eye-contact with the homeless man making his way over to her window to ask for change, Jane lowered her head to the steering wheel with a heavy sigh. Her long curls descended like a velvet curtain over her face, an old habit from her awkward preteen years. She had been trying to hide her face from Day back then also. Back then she had been a kid, uncomfortable with fitting in and not fitting in, all at the same time, but now she just wanted some privacy. The meeting with Day – and his subsequent reveal as a card-carrying member of the LGBT crowd – had left her more confused regarding her feelings for the captain than she had been beforehand. Maybe the crush was nothing more than – what did Maura call it? – a misfire, a simple result of circuits responding to the wrong things at the wrong time. If that was the case, what was the misfire then? Her sexual awakening after the fact or her obsessive desire to be a detective?

"Damn it," Jane said, slamming her head on the steering wheel. "Can this be any more unhelpful?"

Jane looked over at her cell, expecting it to ring. Maura was going to call, ask her where she was. It was only a matter of time, given how nosy her wife could be when it came to checking up on those she cared about. Normally, she wouldn't have cared, but the last thing she wanted to do was come home with all of this…shit on her mind. It wasn't fair to just dump all of her clusterfuck of mental angst upon her wife considering everything Maura had to deal with on a daily basis as chief medical examiner, not to mention, nothing would get resolved. As soon as her feet crossed over the threshold, Jane became Mommy Jane, all problems pushed aside in their carefully constructed work compartment until she chose to reopen it. Maura sometimes bitched her out about her compartmentalization of work versus family life when she was in a rare mood but that was the way she wanted, no needed, it to be for her own sanity. The problem with compartmentalizing was that it frequently created these grey spaces that couldn't be easily shuffled into neat rows and boxes in her mind. Spill-over, she called it.

I've gotta find an outlet, a non-judgmental outlet.

A few minutes of pitiful head-bashing against the wheel passed before Jane rose up with a start. Why didn't she think of it before? He was the only option, the only person who wouldn't think of her as a sergeant, wife, daughter, or mother. She quickly restarted the car, squealing out of the abandoned gas station like a woman possessed. Her mind raced just as fast as the car as she switched lanes, sped up, and drifted through corners to reach her destination. The few cars still out on the streets could do nothing but move out of Jane's way as the woman skillfully negotiated back roads.

In what had to be a record setting time, she skidded into a parking space across the street from his suburban house just as he was getting out of his car. The older man promptly dropped his Dairy Freeze ice-cream cone, the soft-serve immediately beginning to melt out of the waffle cone and onto his shiny, new oxfords.

"Jane?" Korsak said, mouth agape. "Dear god, was that a handbrake turn?"

"Maura let me go back to racing school for Christmas. And where the hell have you been?"

"Well, hello to you, too."

Jane frowned as she walked across the street with giraffe strides. "Korsak, you left me all alone to handle your job while you get to lividup in the rat squad. Then you go all silent. If anyone should be pissed, it's me."

"Live it up? Me? When? And more importantly what are you talking about?" Korsak exhaled calmly, shifting his weight slightly before returning back to his solid position against his former partner's intense gaze. "Slow it down for a second, Jane. I never could follow your thought process when you just threw things at me like this."

Jane released her tension in a sigh of her own, unaware she had been holding her breath. As emotionally overwhelmed as she was to see Korsak after several months of absence, she had to be clear with him. Even when they had been partners, the older man had had to ask her to rein it in, forcing her to use patience.

"Why'd you just…leave?"

Korsak shuffled awkwardly in place, sticking his hands in his suit pockets. "I didn't want to get in your way. You know you wouldn't have wanted me there anyway."

He had a point. She wouldn't have wanted him there during the investigation. Korsak watching her fumble the ball on her first case was the last thing she wanted her old partner to see. She respected him far too much for that.

"Did you hear about my case?"

Korsak smiled, proudly. "I saw you on the news at the café. Great job, by the way."

"And I had to work with the captain."

"The community crusader himself, huh?" Korsak said. "I told you that one day you'd have to deal with this, you know. You have a habit of letting things sit around and fester."

"Trust me, I know. Maura tells me the same thing."

A brief second of comfortable silence waded into the conversation. The two former partners stood before each other, equally expecting the other to fill the gap. A trail of ants began to make their way to the forgotten ice-cream cone and its melting sweetness covering the bottom of the detectives' shoes.

"Did you tell him? About meeting him back in middle-school?"

Jane nodded, her eyes lowered.

"You want to come inside for a beer?"

With a smile, Jane looked up at Korsak's mischievous face. Despite the sexual connotations, "coming inside for a beer" was an old term they made up when they had been partners. After the scary shit that went down with Hoyt, she had been sidelined until her hands and emotional wounds had healed. They had only been partners for a couple of years. There had still been a level of mystery regarding each other's background. When she had been recuperating, Korsak always invited her to come inside for a beer, an esoteric phrase that meant he wanted to have a heart-to-heart with her. After nearly losing his partner to a sociopathic serial killer, he always made sure to provide her with an emotional sounding-board, no strings attached. Sometimes they'd talk about anything and everything over a Sam Adams, other times the beer was replaced with an old recorded football game from back when the Raiders were the coolest team on the West Coast. Regardless of the noun used, the phrase was an excuse to connect with Korsak as a detective, friend, and father-figure. With his move to internal affairs, she had assumed the offer was now null-and-void.

"I don't know if I'd be good company, Sergeant," Jane said, the old words coming back to her tongue like the summery taste of her ma's homemade watermelon jam.

"Good thing I don't judge then."

-?-?-?- FIN -?-?-?-