A/N: Ugh, I know I'm taking too long between updates, and I'm sorry! Thanks to Fenway03 and others for taking me at my word and bugging me for updates - it's so sweet to know that you are all eagerly awaiting each new installment. Hope you like this one.

There's a little pun "Easter egg" or two in this long-ish chapter for those of you who like to point out that kind of stuff. I know I do. Puns are my favorite.

That's all for now...please enjoy!

Jane made short work of changing her charcoal grey pantsuit and mint green t-shirt for a workout tank top and running shorts. The hallway from the locker rooms to the main gym floor passed a room equipped with punching bags, martial arts dummies, thickly padded floors and walls, and even a small raised sparring ring. Jane ducked inside, grateful that there were no self-defense classes at this time of night. She made a beeline for the closet at the back of the room where she knew the gym's martial arts instructors kept spare pads and gloves for practice. She selected a pair of UFC-style fingerless gloves with reinforced padding around the knuckles. She shut the closet door behind her as she exited, and approached the nearest kickboxing dummy. She got to within an arm's length of it and froze before she could deliver the first blow.

"Ugh, what!" she groaned in response to the sturdy, persistent knocking at her apartment door.

"It's us, Jane," came Frost's voice from the other side of the door.

Jane sighed and gingerly pushed herself off the couch, wincing violently as the stitches in her abdomen pulled. She shuffled slowly to the door, turned the deadbolt, slid the chain aside, and cracked it open to peer out. "What's up?" she rasped. A frown creased her forehead as it became apparent that Frost and Korsak were struggling to conceal something dark and bulky behind their backs.

"We brought you a little something," Korsak said.

Frost smiled. "A…'get well' present."

"Guys, what-?"

Korsak pulled out the bulky object from behind their backs. Frost beamed. His smile seemed to light the doorway.

"A boxing dummy?" Jane exclaimed, incredulous. She couldn't keep the amused smile from her face as she opened the door fully to accept the gift. The pain that knotted low in her side was temporarily forgotten.

"We're not trying to encourage to do anything super physical too soon," Frost noted, "But it's something to look forward to while you recover."

Korsak grinned. "After all that couch rest, you'll have tons of pent-up energy to spend."

Jane smirked. "Yeah, and lots of frustration to take out if Ma keeps on hovering like she's doing." She looked at them both affectionately. "Thank you both." She held out her arms, embracing Korsak first, then Frost. They both returned the hug far more lightly than they would have normally, but Jane didn't mind. She knew they were simply loath to do anything that might exacerbate her slowly healing wound. As she pulled away, she couldn't help but ask, "How are things at the station? How's Maura?"

Maura's name echoed in her mind as her memory-self focused her gaze on Frost, straining to maintain the clarity of the image for as long as possible before it faded. She felt as though she was zooming in on him, and her subconscious took a turn from the true memory of her partner to a vividly imagined replication of his death.

The sharp report of a nine millimeter.

Arterial spray marking the site as a place where catastrophe struck. Coloring it with the vivid hue of an abrupt and premature end.

Sirens howling, emergency lights glaring, Prada heels on tile floor, rattling gurney wheels racing.

Frost's head cradled in Maura's bloodied hands. Her eyes widening in horror as she realizes there is nothing she can do to stop it. Her face crumpling the moment his eyes fall shut. Her entire body quaking silently as he slips from her grasp.

Jane shook her head violently and struck the limbless synthetic torso in front of her as hard as she could. But her fist only made contact once. Undefined, raw emotion ripped her breath from her lungs and she sank to the padded floor, arms wrapped limply around the dummy. Tears spilled silently but profusely from her eyes as the stark reality of her partner's permanent absence collided with her heart in wave after wave. Oxygen seemed in short supply as she sat there, panting and motionless. She pulled her knees to her chest, retreating into herself.

Eventually the waves receded, and breathing became easier. I'm so sick of this shit, she lamented as a broken whimper escaped her throat. She wanted Maura.

"It's not that easy. You make it sound easy and it's not."

"I know it's not. Trust me, I know."

Maura understood. Maura didn't judge.

Jane began to worry – not for the first time – that she relied too much on Maura to help her maintain emotional stability. Typically, that role was reserved for a spouse, not a friend. Even if that friend was truly the best friend anyone could hope for. But the spouse in her life was – emotionally, at least – nowhere to be found.

Disgusted with the maudlin wreck she had become, Jane swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. She shoved to her feet and – electing to run in place rather than whaling on a glorified mannequin – marched herself to the main gym floor, scoping out available treadmills and ellipticals. She casually made note of a few vaguely familiar faces; plenty of other cops and detectives shared her idea of getting a late workout before hitting the proverbial hay. Tears pricked the back of her eyes and her throat tightened painfully as she recalled how she used to always see Frost bench-pressing or doing sit-ups in the corner. She made a concerted effort to cast aside her melancholy. This was about getting healthy again.

He would've wanted that.

She finally settled on a stationary bike that afforded her a decent view of the rest of the building, and hoped against hope that the mundane repetition of pedaling in place would combine with her fondness for people-watching to distract her from sadness. She tucked her feet securely into the stirruped pedals and set the resistance on the bike. As she pedaled, she gazed leisurely around herself, observing the workout routines of other gym-goers. As her eyes described a 180-degree arc around the room, they came to rest on the row of ellipticals to her right.

Her legs and feet faltered in their rotations as she focused in on the last person she'd anticipated seeing there, but also the one who had been foremost on her mind only moments ago.

Maura made purposeful strides on the elliptical. She wore headphones in her ears – fancy, expensive ones that wrapped around the outside cartilage and didn't reach too far into the ear so as to be less damaging to the eardrum. Or so she'd explained once. She appeared to be very engaged in whatever she was listening to. Her eyes were closed, her expression relaxed. There was an absence of tension in her body as she moved with steady strides. Probably listening to some Rachmaninoff-Stradivarius van Something Concerto in F sharp major, Opus 28 thingy, Jane thought with a smirk, though she wouldn't have put it past Maura to have found some literary magazine or even medical journal on a podcast, as absurd as it seemed.

But then Maura started bobbing her head rhythmically and even mouthing the occasional word. And she looked happy. Like she was enjoying this time by herself. Time where she didn't have to think or worry or be sad.

Jane envied her resilience. Here she was, struggling to shake this opaque shroud of despondency, and there Maura was, taking it all in stride, as it were.

But she also admired Maura. She was beautiful, her warm gold hair swept into a relaxed ponytail, her body trim and defined, but still soft and slightly curvy. Observing her recalled to mind her unique scent that Jane had come to easily recognize and appreciate – it was warm and clean and faintly sweet, like fresh laundry and…honey? Vanilla? Jasmine? Jane could never pinpoint that extra essence of something that made it so easy for her to pick out Maura's scent.

Jane realized she had stopped pedaling right around the time that Maura slowed to a stop on her own machine and took a glance around the room. Lifting a water bottle to her lips, the medical examiner perused her surroundings in much the same way as Jane had earlier. Catching herself staring, Jane wasn't sure how she should react once Maura saw her.

But when her best friend caught her eye and smiled, when her lips formed Jane's name, Jane marveled at the swiftness with which she felt herself responding. That unmistakable warmth flushing through the capillaries nearest the surface of her skin; the swooping sensation in her stomach like she had just leapt off a rooftop; the erratic, racing flutter in her heart that she felt all the way up into her throat.

She glanced stupidly at the wedding band on her left hand and thought, The hell am I doing?

"You're here!" Maura said as she stepped up to Jane's bike.

"What, you weren't expecting me?" Jane jibed, slouching back away from the handle bars and looking down at her friend.

A rare expression crossed her features and Jane couldn't quite read it. "Well, no, to be honest – I wasn't. But I'm glad to see you…here. It's an improvement."

"Yeah, I've been sorely lacking in the progress department lately," Jane groused as she dismounted from the bike and wiped the seat down. Seeing Maura look a little crestfallen at the possibility her words had been misinterpreted, Jane changed the subject. "How long have you been here? More importantly, how did you get here? I didn't see your car in the lot."

Maura shook her head. "You wouldn't have. I ran here." She grinned triumphantly.

Jane reeled for a moment as the woman beamed up at her. "Okay…seriously? You ran? How – how do you even…do that?"

Here came the endearing head tilt. "Do what?"

"That, that 'bounce-back' thing you do! I mean, I feel like I barely made it through today and I almost went straight to bed from the station – but here you are, running from there to here and then running some more once you've arrived – I guess I just don't understand." Her shoulders bunched with rising tension even as she slouched, and she could feel her stomach clenching. All these conflicting emotions – frustration, exasperation, depression, and not to mention her growing attraction to her best friend – were making her so uncomfortable in her own skin. And she didn't know what to do about it. So she wrapped it all up in anger out of pure force of habit.

"Jane, what are you trying to say?" Maura's forehead furrowed with deep misgivings and concern for her best friend. She seemed to lean back almost imperceptibly as she observed Jane's body language and interpreted the signs of rising anger.

Jane loathed herself for making Maura cringe like that. It broke her heart that Maura still instinctively shied from Jane's anger; to Jane, it meant that Maura still didn't feel one-hundred percent secure in her friendship status with Jane to where anger was no longer something to fear. Jane's goal had always been to quash that insecurity and replace it with the kind of love and affection that Jane had taken for granted growing up. She huffed out a sigh, her voice coming out low and strained. "I'm trying to say that I feel like I don't know how to handle anything anymore. I don't know how to react – normal, day-to-day routine stuff is so hard now…and then I get moments like this where," she gestured to Maura with an open palm, "I don't feel like we're even remotely on the same page emotionally and that…I don't know what to do with that. It's like…it's almost like you've forgotten already – or you've moved on – and I'm here wanting nothing more than to do the same," she dropped her voice further, "and not having a goddamn clue how to do that."

"Jane, I'm sorry you're frustrated…but I don't want you to mistake my pursuit of physical activity for…forgetting." Though her expression grew cold as a means of defense, there was the faintest quaver in Maura's voice now, betraying the effect Jane's words had on her composure. That Jane would even allude to the possibility of Maura forgetting their friend and colleague clearly struck the medical examiner to her core. "I do miss him still. If that's what you're getting at. I miss Frost terribly. It'll be a long time before I don't. And while you and I, we are…quite close…as friends, we are still individuals, Jane. You and I will always process certain emotions very differently from one another. If you want to sit and talk about it…"

"No, Maura, I just…don't…dammit." She swiped her wrist beneath her nose again as she felt tears threaten for the umpteenth time. "I don't want to feel anymore," she whispered in a harsh, broken accent, fleeing abruptly from a very exasperated, very worried Maura.