DISCLAIMER: I do not own this show, the books, or these characters. I only borrow them.
Chapter 13
Jane was tight-lipped when Frost got back in his car, both about the caller on the phone and about taking the medication that Frost tried to hand over. But she did graciously accept the Snickers bar and the bottle of water, well, as graciously as one could who mumbled about hospital slop between bites as she nearly inhaled the sugary snack.
When they neared police headquarters, Frost decided to drive in the back way not knowing how Jane might react with passing the place where she was shot. He parked near the rear entrance to the morgue to not only bypass the front door and the bit of sidewalk where her blood was spilled, but also to bypass the majority of people who would want to say hello and give well wishes to their fellow officer. While Frost knew that most could do with the good news of Jane's slowly recovering as they had lost too many good men lately, he knew that it wouldn't be beneficial to his partner.
Jane again transferred to the borrowed wheelchair. Without even trying this time, her mind wandered away from the fact of being helped around. As much as she didn't want to think about what to her was an embarrassing situation, she would have preferred that to where her mind took her. As Frost pushed her through the wide bay doors, her thoughts weren't even on the dead bodies like her brother who would be wheeled through this path on a gurney. Instead her mind jumped to the other living people who had used this often forgotten entrance. First Maura's biological father had his men kidnap his daughter while Jane, Frost, and Korsak sat watching the front entrance and thinking for far too long that Maura was safely cocooned in her working playground. That time wasn't enough to teach her. She should have realized that SWAT would have checked all entrances to try and get the hostages out as Maura had begrudgingly told her a few days after the fact. Jane could have taken more time with Marino at the main entrance and let the hostage negotiator do his work. But no, Jane always preferred to go full tilt at anything or anyone who dared threaten her... or worse, her friends and family.
Did her quick actions make matters worse? Frankie was already getting help through the morgue entrance so she didn't need to clear the front entrance for another cavalry to run to her brother's rescue. But with her actions, the critically injured count jumped from one to three. She didn't care about what might have happened to Marino, but the doctors would just see an injured man they needed to help rather then a evil man who caused the death and injuries of too many. With the seriousness of their wounds, they probably all needed a team of surgeons so would there have been enough surgeons to go around. Would there have been enough to share? Probably not as she had always been horrible at sharing with her brother. That almost briefly brought a slight smile to Jane's face thinking of battles at the dinner table for the last cannoli, or even who would get to cuff the perp when they were at the same crime scene, but there would be no more fun-filled petty bickering for them.
Who knew how many cardio-thor-or-something surgeons were out there? Maura had already briefly stabilized her brother. What if because of her wounds they took her on back and had to call in other surgeons? She understood the basics of triage and helping those more critically injured first as long as they weren't mortally wounded. Did her brother have to wait? Was he in pain longer than necessary because of her rash actions? She could ask the doctors who went into surgery first, but they wouldn't tell her if they thought it might halt her healing. Plus not only did her quick actions add herself to the lists of patients vying for surgeons, but the shot also hit Marino. If he was treated before her brother and that was part of the reason he died, she would ask the guards for 5 minutes alone and would care less what IAB might do to her.
Her thoughts returned to the present when they reached the clear double doors to the main autopsy lab. Again Frost led her backwards through the door, and when he turned her around she was met with two of the most depressing sights of her life: a lone body covered with a white sheet who she just knew was her baby brother, and a forlorn looking Maura blankly staring at a report in front of her. For a moment Jane wondered if it was wrong of her for asking Dr. Isles to perform the autopsy as she was too close to her brother. But being a police officer wanting to become a homicide detective, Frankie had at least slightly known most of the medical examiners. One of the hazards in both jobs, being a police officer or an ME, was that one day the wall separating personal life and work would most likely crumble and they would have to work a case on a colleague and friend. Jane knew that she needed to say thanks for today, and for the life saving procedures that Maura had used to prolong Frankie's life less than a week ago, but she never did well with the heart-felt conversations. So not knowing how to start the conversation she wanted and needed to have with her friend, Jane went with the tried and true method...humor.
Frost never was good around dead bodies, and even less so around dead bodies he knew. He pushed Rizzoli closer to the Doc and then hurried back to stand by the door. If he had to run and throw up. he wanted to at least make sure he got to the bathroom. At this solemn time he didn't think it would honor either his injured partner, or the slain officer, to totally lose it in front of them. Well, he corrected that Frankie was beyond caring, but it still felt wrong. And he tried to calm his churning stomach as his gaze went back and forth between Jane and the hallway, being very caution to not look at the sheet covered body.
Staring numbly at the wall, the signed autopsy report beside her, Maura's thoughts whirled quickly from the past, present, and the future she would now never be able to have. When she would glance toward where Frankie lay, her vision seemed to blur between time – between the pale body laying on her "dead person table" with a grimace of pain on his face as she watched his chest rise and fall, to the current sheet covered pale dead body. Maura remembered the fear and worry that coursed through her during the hostage situation, and while she was glad that was over, she would gladly live through it again if it might mean the outcome would be better. Or so she could tell him "I love you," while he was still conscious, rather than just replying to his declaration of love.
A voice tried to pierce her thoughts and grab her attention - a voice sounding like Jane, but she knew that couldn't be. However, when her eyes focused in front of her, she noticed her best friend sitting in a wheelchair in front of her and Detective Frost hovering by the door.
Jane noticed the questioning look at first herself and then the wheelchair and to fill the silence stated, "It was the only way the doctors would let me leave briefly...well, okay, there was a bit more of fight then that." Before she thought how the words might sound, she tried to lighten the mood, "Ma said not over her dead body..." She cringed at the bad word choice as she shot a glance over to the actual dead body of her brother. Even now he was getting her in trouble, and she didn't know whether to laugh or cry about that.
Jane was expecting Maura to say something, even yell at her for trying humor in her morgue as she was a stickler about that, but she said nothing. For a few moments silence hung in the air and Jane wondered where her wordy friend was hiding. It wasn't like her to be the one hogging the conversation, but the quiet was getting to her. She paused and took a deep breath before getting to the real topic at hand. "Is he ready to be released/" she asked as she glanced at the sheet-covered body. She struggled to stand up. Both Frost and Maura rushed to her and each grabbed an arm to help with the upward motion and then to support her as she took the slow and painful steps over to the metal table. She pulled back the sheet enough to see the face of her baby brother, the one who wanted to be just like her and so followed her shadow into the Boston PD. She wanted to shout at him that to follow her he would have to be alive but wondered if maybe he didn't follow her subconsciously as she felt dead inside. Maura's voice lightly punctured the numbness.
"Yes, he's ready to be released," from her morgue, from the land of the living, from her heart... Maura's words meant so much but she realized with this last glance that he would never be released from her heart. The ends of the Y-incision that were visible threw out another question, 'Why don't you tell the family?' Maura glanced at a grieving Jane, and knew that the rest of her family was also in a state of shock and grief. Thinking it would be unfair to burden them with this new information, she vowed to keep the relationship to herself. So only she and a dead man would know that she was once 'Frankie's girl.' She reminded herself that Korsak had also found out but currently she couldn't deal with thinking too long about that.
Maura turned away from the lifeless face and went to get the wheelchair and move it over to the autopsy table so Jane wouldn't have the painful trip back to it. Plus it gave her a chance to breath and close off her emotions before the tears really started falling or Jane picked up on them.
But Jane was too engrossed in her own grief to notice Maura's struggling with hers. She stared at her brother as she talked to no one in particular. "Come on Frankie, I know you hate doing anything I tell you, but you gotta open your eyes now. Ma and Pop can't take this." In a quieter voice she confided, "neither can I." She reached out a warm hand to brush an imagined stray hair off his forehead. Working in homicide, if the wounds didn't clue her in that a person was dead, their temperature would, and Frankie was too cold. Jane moved the sheet enough to get to his right hand, and without thinking about it tried to massage some heat back into his lifeless limb. She was forced to stop when she needed to grasp the table to keep from falling over as the physical pain of her wounds was starting to overwhelm the emotional ones. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before opening her tear-filled orbs and gazing up at the ceiling. "Why him? He was always the good kid...he's needed..." She left off the 'more than me' that she truly thought in her heart. She wanted to say so much more and plead with God or anyone else that she could think of to bring her brother back. Hell. she'd try to sell her soul to the Devil if she thought that might work...but she knew nothing would bring him back, and her brother wouldn't want the latter anyway.
Maura tried not to hear but the room wasn't that big, so she heard the muffled sobs. She had a white-knuckled grip on the wheelchair handles as she heard Jane first pleading with her brother to wake up, and then why God didn't pick her over her brother. She knew Jane wasn't really religious, but Maura often saw in her job that when family members died the grieving would try to find comfort in any way. She might if she thought it would help, but science was what she put her faith in. Even though there had been studies on people who have said they came back from the dead, she knew that Frankie wouldn't be the Frankie they knew at six to nine minutes without oxygen to the brain, and only a maximum of four minutes without blood flow. So after a day there was no hope in a 'miracle,' not that she believed in them anyway.
When the sounds became only the occasional hiccuped sob, Maura moved the chair closer to Jane. She could see the sweat beading on Jane's forehead and wondered if the tears that she tried to hide were only for her brother's loss. She tried to help Jane slowly sit down, but odd twisting to reach around added with her slight size and Jane's weariness was not a good combination. Even with landing on the cloth seat, Maura was worried about what the pressure and movement on her wounds might have done. And with her desire as a doctor to help, and her need as a friend to make sure that nothing happened to this other Rizzoli, she quickly pushed the chair out of the autopsy suite and into the locker room for some privacy.
Frost was wondering where Maura was taking Jane until she looked over at him and said 'girl talk' as she pulled the wheelchair with Jane back into the locker room. He was glad for the privacy and that someone else was watching Jane for a moment as he bolted down the hall to the nearest restroom.
"Girl talk?" Jane asked when the door closed behind the pair.
"Well, since I'm going to make you lift up your shirt I thought it worked." Maura said as she wet a paper towel and started dabbing at Jane's forehead and neck.
Jane just glared at her like she was crazy – for both the annoyed tone she heard from her friend and also from the odd statement. She didn't ask me. Jane hated being sad and she hated being coddled. She much preferred anger and fighting if she had the choice, so she didn't think much of it when her emotions started simmering under the surface.
Seeing the glare, Maura lowered her tone to something she thought might be disarming. "I want to see if you're bleeding. If you are, I can change your bandages before you go back... Please?"
It was more the please than the calmer tones that finally had Jane nodding, and reaching up to undo a few buttons on the button up shirt.
When a few buttons were undone so Maura could pull the shirt away from Jane's left shoulder she went ahead and looked. "What was so important that you had to risk your life and leave the hospital?" Maura was also getting annoyed. Her emotions were stretched too thin from the rollercoaster in the last week. One of her best friends already died, she couldn't lose them both for one of Rizzoli's stupid stunts. She pushed a little on Jane's back to get her to lean forward.
If Jane was fully aware of all going on around her as she normally was in her job, she might have heard the tinge of fear in Maura's words. "I needed to check out who was going to take care of Frankie. Learned from one too many cases that often those who work around death do so because of their own sick perversions..." almost as an after-thought Jane added, "no offense." As she was pushed forward she had to bite her tongue to keep from yelling at Dr. Isles for her lack of bedside manner. Reminding herself that Maura always did say she didn't do well with live patients, plus most that she worked on were past caring if she pushed and prodded a bit too much...like her brother.
Maura took no offense nor pleasure in this moment as she was still too numb to be much of anything beyond just holding on. She closed off any lingering bit of anger and worry and put on her doctor's mask. So when she walked around to face Jane she seemed calm and collected and living in the land of facts and proofs rather than the emotional one that most lived in. She lifted up the edge of Jane's shirt to see the lower bandages. As they also were clean, Maura didn't ask to see the bandages on her chest. She was tired and didn't want to start a fight as she knew it would be. With all the movement and sitting, the back and abdominal wounds would have been the first ones to tear if there was a problem. She pulled down the edge of the shirt and watched as Jane buttoned her shirt back up. She really wanted to offer her friend some words of comfort, but she didn't have any. So she got another wet paper towel for Jane hoping that her look as she passed it over said enough. They shared a brief sorrow-filled smile before she pushed Jane back out to Detective Frost. Watching the pair then walk to the morgue exit, she berated herself for not saying something...anything. She already knew with Frankie that you often didn't get another chance. But for once her mind was silent.
Jane was actually glad to be readmitted to the hospital. She even told the nurse that she was in pain so she could get a dose of pain medication. Not that she needed to as the grimace on her face with every little movement told all. She didn't even mind right then that it helped send her to sleep. Sleeping, where the pain was not felt as strongly, the physical pain as well as the emotional pain that the day's events had dredged up. As her eyes started to drift shut. she hoped that the last few days were just a horrible pain-induced nightmare and that she would wake up soon.
Maura sat at her desk and wished this day was just a horrible dream. If she believed in superstition and old wives' tales she would already be sporting a nasty bruise from trying to pinch herself awake. But all the sensory input was much too real compared to the hazy, fleeting images she would dream about when on the edge of waking up and her brainwaves were in their theta state. She heard a loud knock at her door, and after saying 'enter' looked up as two well dressed men entered her safe haven. The younger man walked over and introduced himself and his partner to Maura. And the living nightmare just got more probable villians...the questioning she dreaded was now at hand.
AN: Sorry for the horrible delay. Writer's block is never fun...but less so for the readers I think :D. BTW if anyone has any idea of cases for the pair let me know...I already have 3 major ones but I need a couple small ones as filler and something when Jane is still on desk duty but bugging everyone. If I use it, or can't, I'll let you know. Thanks for those still reading :)