DISCLAIMER: I do not own Rizzoli & Isles nor any of the characters from the show. I am writing this purely for entertainment, not profit. Rizzoli and Isles are property of Tess Gerritsen and TNT.
Please find the full disclaimers in the beginning of Chapter 1.
Chapter 3
The knocking on her door had become a pounding.
Jane had been back to DC late night on that fateful Friday.
She spent the weekend numbed by the pain of loss, sitting on her sofa, looking at thin air, in stunned silence, crying herself to oblivion.
What if Jane had not told Maura when she was landing, so Maura had not driven to the airport?
What if Jane had been there in Boston that week?
What if Jane had never left Boston behind to be in DC and was there from the moment she was called in for Hope and could have somehow protected Maura?
Jane felt guilty. And the consequence was irrevocable. Maura was dead. Any mistake Jane had made was not fixable any longer.
She decided work would be a distraction, and Monday morning she went back to work, but after less than five minutes in her very first class of the day, she simply could not concentrate, or continue a simple train of thought, or get a full sentence out without breaking down.
She excused herself hastily, dispensing the class, and immediately registered for an unpaid leave. She didn't have the stomach to check what options were available for her to be away from work for bereavement. She didn't want to have to explain to anyone, including her superior, what had happened. She didn't want to think or to talk about what happened. She was not sure how long it would take for her to recover – or if she would ever recover. She just knew that work would not be a distraction. Not now. Not yet.
She had driven back home, not before stopping by a liquor store.
And day after day since then she had drowned her sorrow. She didn't want to remember. She didn't want to think. She was trying not to feel.
She had lost track of time in her tentative of obliterating reality.
She randomly replied to texts from her family. She refused to talk to them on the phone or on video. But they knew she was alive, so she hoped none of them had flown to DC to knock on her door.
"Jane, please, open this door, or I swear I will put it down." Jane thought she recognized the voice, but could that be? Dean?
Jane tried to stand but fell back to the sofa. Yes. She was drunker than she anticipated. Although the effect on her mind was neglectful, her body was not responding. She tried again, aiming for the wall, and then her hands used the wall for support each step of the way. She opened a crack of the door.
"Jane? Please let me in." Dean took in her deranged state.
"Go away." She slurred behind the door chain, her hand trying to move to close the door but failing because she was too drunk to even do that properly.
He put a foot between the door and the jamb to keep it open, and his hand quickly reached for the chain.
She tried to struggle but he pushed her back, and in her inebriated state, she almost fell to the floor, and the only thing preventing it was that Dean caught her by the wrist.
He locked the door behind him.
"I need to talk to you." There was urgency in his voice.
"Leave me alone, Dean." Jane slurred again, her body swaying, too drunk to even stand without support.
He looked around. The living room was littered by empty bottles of cheap bourbon and cheap vodka. The alarm bells went on inside his head when he saw not a single sign of empty boxes of food. He looked at Jane again and assessed she had not seen a shower in several days as well.
And he decided he needed to switch tactics. He knew, he always knew, how close Maura and Jane were. He knew Jane would take this loss hard. But he needed her clearheaded for what he needed to tell her. And he needed that now.
Still holding Jane's wrist, he forced her to follow him, stumbling, until he found her bathroom. She tried to struggle, but was too drunk to succeed. He turned on the water in the coldest setting, and pushed her under the water jet, closing the glass door behind her.
She screamed and roared and slapped the glass door with the palms of her scarred hands, but he held the glass door closed. Finally, he heard she stopped struggling with the door, and heard she was sobbing loudly. He looked through the shade and saw she sliding to sit on the floor of the shower. So he left her under the icy cold water, and went back to the living room.
He collected the empty bottles. He counted them, and whistled to himself. Twenty one bottles. It was a lot of alcohol. Even if she had been drinking since her unpaid leave started, this was a bit more than a full bottle per day. Jane was drinking herself to death. And she probably was just not in an alcoholic coma yet simply because she was likely not drinking all at once, but dosing her drinking until she was numb, and resuming drinking when the numbness began to go away, keeping on a state of continuous drunkenness that was borderline.
One side of him was glad she seemed to have kept isolated. He flinched only imagining if she had seen all the news and media and newspapers and magazines and tv hosts talking about the Chief Medical Examiner having been murdered as the main topic for days in a row.
He put water to boil, and prepared the strongest coffee he could imagine. It looked like black sludge, but he didn't care.
He also found some painkillers – he imagined she would have a pounding headache.
Only then he walked back to the bathroom. The water was still on, but she was not sobbing any longer. He opened the glass door. Jane was sitting, hugging her folded knees against her chin, the jet of cold water hitting the back of her head and her back, and her body was shivering uncontrollably under the clinging wet clothes. Jane had not even tried to change the water to be on the hot setting instead.
"Are you half sobber at least?" he asked, sternly. As much as he knew she was suffering, he needed her in top shape for what he was about to tell her.
She didn't reply. She didn't even look up at him. He went out, picked a mug of the black coffee sludge, put it by the bathroom sink. He walked back, and picked a clean set of sweaters from a drawer on her bedroom, and put it on the hook behind the door, and left, closing the bathroom door behind him.
He stood there, and after a few moments he heard the water valve closing, and Jane groaning to stand. The next thing he heard were the sounds of Jane violently retching. He figured she would be sick. Really sick. That amount of alcohol she had been continuously consuming would not go cheap on her body and on an empty stomach.
After what seemed like a long time, he heard the toilet flush, the water from the sink running. And finally Jane came out. Her skin was grayish pale, there were black circles under her eyes, her wet dark hair tied in an improvised ponytail. She looked like a corpse. He was sure she was feeling like a corpse too.
"You made me waste my perfect state of inebriation. I will need to work on building it again. Now leave me alone." Jane growled, without looking at him, and walking past him to take her wet clothes to the laundry room.
"I told you I need to talk to you." He said, walking behind her.
She turned sharply towards him, cutting his path.
"Unless you are here to tell me you caught who did it, there is nothing for us to talk about." She hissed.
He noticed she moved her hand to her forehead. Her splitting headache must be excruciating.
He waited until she turned on the washing machine, and when she moved back to the kitchen, he pushed a bottle of painkillers and a glass of water in her direction.
She popped a handful of pills, without counting them, into her mouth, and washed them down with the full glass, water dribbling from the corner of her mouth, that she wiped dry with the back of her hand.
Seeing he was still there, she insisted.
"So… Did you catch the perp?"
"No."
"Then why are you still here?" She asked, a scowl on her face, while she opened the cabinet to find a new bottle of liquor, giving him a glimpse of the scary stash of cheap alcohol she had there.
He held her arm firmly, and closed the cabinet door.
"She would hate to see you doing this to yourself…"
"She can come back from the dead and tell me that herself if it is bothering her so much in her afterlife." Jane snapped, not making any effort to hide her tears or the tortured tone of her voice. She shoved his arm to free herself from his hold. "I already told you to leave me alone, Dean."
"Isn't there anything else I could tell you that would make me worth your while?"
Jane was not up to any games.
"The only other thing you could tell me that would interest me is an impossibility, Dean. So unless you are here to tell me Maura is alive, get the hell out of my face, I get my bottles to attend to."
"She is alive, Jane."