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 17

Maura sighed, and said nothing at first, but Jane observed how she brought her hands together wringing her fingers. Jane knew Maura for ten years and Maura didn't normally fidget. Only when she didn't know where to begin.

So Jane kept her silence, and waited. She knew Maura needed time to put her ideas in some semblance of order before she would begin to talk.

"I… I know it is odd… But I do miss them…"

"Why would it be odd?"

"Because… we were never close… close like you are with your mother. God… even your mother is closer to me than they were…" Maura shook her head. "But I always knew they were there, somewhere around the globe. And more recently, since you interfered, we were speaking more often than before…"

Jane felt the pinprick of tears in the back of her eyes. It was sad that only recently Maura's parents had begun to get closer to this wonderful person that was their daughter…

"And although we were never close… Now, that I know they are gone, forever… It feels like a hole was opened inside of me, as if a space was left empty, and… and I really don't know how to patch it…" Maura sighed. "I am not making sense…" she shook her head, frustrated.

"You don't need to make sense, Maura… It is how you feel… But, for what it is worth, you are making sense. I can understand perfectly how you are feeling based on what you are telling me…" Jane squeezed Maura's hand lightly, to reinforce her point.

"Although I have been independent from them since I went to boarding school, I still feel adrift now that I know they are not there any longer… It is as if… a link to my past was forever lost. As if a ton of things I didn't even yet realized I wanted to ask or to say to them and never brought myself to do so now will remain forever silenced…" Maura's lips were set on a thin line, as she shook her head lightly as if to dispel the thought.

"And then I keep thinking about the senseless way they died… I mean… they were getting older, in their early eighties, and I knew this is the natural order of things, that they would likely die before I do…" Maura swallowed hard. "But hearing that man describe how they just begged for him to take whatever he wanted and leave… And still, he just made them kneel and shot them point blank… I try to put myself on their shoes, on how they felt, what they thought in those last moments…" Maura sobbed, and inhaled deeply trying to recover some control.

"I… I wonder if I had decided to go there as soon as I heard the news of the war… if I could have saved them… If I had gone directly there instead of trying to get help from the useless politicians in DC…" Maura spoke in a very small voice.

Jane had tried to interfere the least possible, because she knew Maura typically solved her own problems by the simple fact of putting them into words and giving them shape and form. But this would require an intervention.

"Maura… When do you think they were killed?"

"I don't like to guess, and without tests it is a very imprecise estimate… But I would say within a couple of days from when the war started."

"You learned about the war on the news, right?"

"Yes."

"From the moment you heard of the war… Let's say you immediately found a flight and went there… It would still have taken you what? Two or three days to get there?"

"Sounds fair."

Jane kept looking at Maura, waiting for her to pick up on the line of thought.

"Oh…" Jane watched as Maura figured it out.

"Yeah… oh… you likely would have been there to be killed with them. Or arrived there to find them gone and then be in the middle of it when the troops were still around."

Maura swallowed hard. One deserter had been more than enough, she didn't want to even imagine meeting a group of them, in the frenzy of battle.

"Gosh. One was more than I could handle…" Maura visibly shuddered.

"Correction… He was almost more than what we both could handle together…" Jane agreed, shivering herself at the memory of how close they had been to being raped and killed. "There was nothing you could have done differently that would change the outcome, Maura, as sad as it is to admit it."

Maura nodded, a sad expression on her face.

Jane immediately noticed when Maura's demeanor changed and she tensed up, as a caged animal.

"What is it, Maura?" Jane asked gently.

Maura shook her head, trying to dispel her thoughts.

"Maura?"

She sighed. "Even if they had not been killed, Jane… My plan was a complete flunk. It would have killed them. We barely made out of there alive. We would have found them, just to then get them killed trying to get them out of there…" Maura's voice was strangled by the guilt.

"You don't know that, Maura…"

"No? I only survived because you starved yourself, Jane. Because even starved you carried unconscious me in your arms for fifteen hours, for Pete's sake…" Maura's voice exploded in a heartfelt sob.

"Maura…" Jane tried, realizing for the first time what Maura had been carrying inside her for all these weeks. "You have no way to know that. If we found them alive, it might have been because their house had not been ransacked. We could have had more provisions. We could have procured them bikes and have them biking part of the way. We could have had different stops or tried our luck in some of the villages. We would have tried other things…"

"Or die trying. Like we almost did…" Maura exhaled, frustrated.

"The wisest person I know hates what-ifs… All your scenarios are biased by what happened to us. Things could have been completely different. If that man had not shown up…"

Maura swallowed hard, nodding, but not looking very convinced.

"You… you never told me what happened when he entered the house…" Jane tried to change the subject.

"It was a fraction of a second before you came downstairs. I was hearing your noise on the upper floor, I saw the door open, this tall man entered, and when I opened my mouth to scream his dirty hand was already gagging me. And then you were coming downstairs…" Maura swallowed hard.

"I am glad you killed him." Jane stated flatly.

Maura sighed. "How bad it is that I don't feel guilty at all for having killed him?" She asked, in a barely audible voice.

"I will tell you what you told me many times when I killed a suspect or a perp: you didn't have a choice."

"But you were in the line of duty. I…"

"You were saving my life." Jane stated flatly. "He was about to kill me, and you know that. He almost did."

"But the fact I knew he had killed my parents, and that he had been about to rape me…" Maura shook her head and exhaled loudly.

Jane paused for a moment.

"Do you think I felt guilty for having killed Hoyt? Or Alice Sands?"

"I hope you don't."

"You are right. I don't. I feel guilty, sometimes, for not having killed them before I did. I could have saved some lives…"

"But again, you were in the line of duty… I… I might have been driven by revenge…"

"Maura… I didn't see it because I was focused on fighting him... When did you pick up the blade from the floor?"

"When I saw you had stopped struggling and I realized he was killing you."

"So there you have your answer. The blade was there before. You already knew he had killed your parents. He had just tried to rape you. But you didn't act on revenge. You only acted when you saw my life in real danger…"