Chapter Text
IN 340 AD Archimedes said give me but one firm spot on which to stand and I will move the Earth.
Maura thought she knew what that meant, that intellectually she understood that he was referring to the lever, to the three assumptions and the law he had proven all those hundreds of years ago. Simple, precise geometry.
But now she’s beginning to think there’s a little more to it than that.
When a cop dies it’s usually the press conferences, the paperwork, the clinical treatment of a colleague that gets to everyone. Maura’s seen it before with Jane; the way she boxes in and gets testy at the slightest error or dead-end in a case. It’s a defence mechanism, and eventually it passes.
But this time, when a cop dies, what gets to them is the knowledge that it should have been someone else.
Detective Anton Bueller was a rookie looking for experience; he wasn’t much older than Frankie and he’d just made the ranks in Homicide. He was smart, eager, careful -- all the right words; all the right qualities to make it to the top. And he would have -- if he hadn’t taken Jane’s place on a stake-out and been shot three times in the chest by Boston’s latest homicidal maniac.
They all take it hard, but Maura feels the guilt settle in her like a physical weight; feels it spreading like a tumour. That doesn’t make sense, clinically, because tumours can’t be caused by a feeling -- but Maura still desperately wants to try and cut it out of her body all the same.
The clock reads just after seven when Jane wakes her for the memorial. Her husky Maura is sharp-edged with grief, and something delicate in Maura chafes to reach out and find her hand. But Jane is already up, her weight gone from the other side of the bed.
This is the third night Jane has slept over. Maura wants to put it down to Jane’s normal sense of safety being disrupted, and that she’s chosen Maura to commiserate with over her mother or Frankie because Maura won’t nag or judge.
But when Jane usually stays over it’s because she’s too tired to drive home, or because one bottle of red wine turned into two. She sleeps on the couch or in the guest room sprawled out on her back; she doesn’t crawl into the other side of Maura’s bed with a whispered go back to sleep , her fingers resting surely at the small of Maura’s back. Maura can’t help but wonder: maybe there's guilt spreading inside Jane too.
Maura rises and dresses sombrely. Her dress is dusty charcoal and she zips it to her waist, sweeping her hair around over one shoulder and following the sound of Jane’s grumbling out into the kitchen. She’s at the counter frowning at Maura’s espresso machine, poking at the buttons like they’ve wronged her personally.
“Your coffee maker is stupid,” she grouses, and readjusts the neckline of her dress. Jane always looks awkward in dresses; even though Maura picked this navy one specifically because she knew she would look good in it. It doesn’t seem matter what the dress looks like, though, Jane will still find a way to look uncomfortable in it. Maura wonders when she stopped feeling safe without a weapon at her hip.
She walks over to the offending coffee maker and presses the right button, a smile just hiding itself in the corners of her mouth. The machine hisses and gurgles, and Jane looks alarmed until a thin stream of coffee pours into the travel mug she’s placed on the grate.
“I thought you preferred instant,” Maura says, and Jane offers her a warm smile.
“Only because it’s easier to microwave.”
Maura makes a face and Jane chuckles as she fills the mug with water--boiled, not microwaved.
“I made it for you,” she says, fixing a lid to the top and sliding it across the counter. “Sorry we don’t have time for anything better.”
Unease starts to nettle at Maura -- the closer they get to leaving, the less she wants to go. For some reason, it seems wrong to her; arrogant of them to assume that Bueller would want their sympathy when it feels like it’s their fault he’s dead.
Maura’s fault.
Jane doesn’t notice her mood, but does see Maura’s forgotten dress zipper. Without hesitation she brushes the stray hair away from Maura’s spine, then her fingertips splay cool at the nape of Maura’s neck as she drags the zip up her back.
She swallows hard. “I don’t know if I should go to this, Jane.”
Fingers still pressed to Maura’s skin, Jane tenses. “Why not?”
“Because it’s a cop thing. It’s not really anything to do with me.”
“But you knew him,” Jane says, a familiar whine in her voice. “Come on Maura, I need you there with me. Anyway, you’ve come to dozens of cop things, this isn’t any different.”
But it is, Maura wants to say. It is, because I’m the reason he’s dead.
Maura doesn’t want to know if Jane secretly thinks that too; that she’s only asked Maura to go because she wants Maura to face what she did. But Jane is looking at her the way she always does, the way that makes Maura feel giddy and hot, her heart stranded in her chest. It’s too hard to say no when she’s standing so close.
So Maura simply nods and hopes she can put her discomfort aside. When Jane taps her hip, her hands feel like a ghost’s.
“I’ll meet you in the car,” Jane says in her ear, oblivious. “We gotta go pick up Frost.”
The memorial is in New London at the family estate, and the morning is grey as they drive out of Boston. A storm is trapped in the hills ahead of them and the sky is the colour of iron, clouds almost blue at their edges. It looks like a part of the world that is still half-asleep.
Maura herself feels half-asleep, idly regarding the increasingly rural landscape as they drive into New Hampshire, not really taking it in as her brain ticks over with less peaceful thoughts.
Jane and Frost talk about Bueller, and about all the other cops they remember who died on the job. They’re sad but they’re not -- there’s as much laughter as there is sighs, and Maura tries to smile in the right places but she can’t stop thinking about what Jane said in her kitchen.
She has been to dozens of “cop things”; Jane invites her to them without even thinking now. It’s as common as after work drinks, or dinner, or a night at either of their houses. She goes to them and she’s not Jane’s date but she’s not not Jane’s date, either, their friendship murkier and less defined by the day. The other cops treat her like Jane’s date most of the time; they stopped hitting on her months ago. Maura’s always wondered since if it’s because of something Jane has said to them, or just that she and Jane seem so much like two halves of a whole.
“You okay over there, Maura?” Jane asks.
Maura glances over at Jane, who looks concerned and amused and so achingly comforting that Maura can barely stand it. Then she looks back out her side window, back to the hills.
“It’s going to rain.”
“You a meteorologist now?” Jane asks, and then Maura feels the barely-damp spread of her hand on her thigh. It squeezes, just for a moment, then returns to the wheel.
The storm breaks as they pull off the highway, drenching the grass and the patchwork cows and the lost, echoing feeling of another world.
Maura had met Anton Bueller’s wife (widow, she corrects herself) once before at some Sergeant’s birthday party last year. Another cop thing. At that event Stacey had seemed bright and supportive and happy, and genuinely interested to know about Maura’s work.
Now, standing next to only a photo of her smiling husband at his wake, she looks small and empty.
“It’s always hardest to be the one who’s left behind,” Jane’s voice murmurs next to her. It sounds like gravel in the shell of Maura’s ear.
Unbidden, Maura sees a split second image of Jane in that photo frame instead of Bueller, and herself next to it, trying bravely to look composed as people give her hollow condolences. It turns her spine cold, and she thinks of the way his body looked lying on her table back in the morgue.
She feels Jane step forward, and for a moment Maura is incredibly proud that Jane’s always ready to provide whatever comfort she can. Maura watches her smile sadly as she takes Stacey’s hand and tells her that her husband was a great man who didn’t deserve the end he got. Maura wishes it was as easy for her to come up with something so simple but encompassing to say. Jane offers her so much clarity into the complexities of human interaction that without her as an anchor Maura is sure she’d drown.
When they go into the house proper Jane mingles with her colleagues, Maura in tow -- her ambiguous introduction all the more obvious today. She listens to speeches and rubs a hand over Jane’s arm when she hears her sniff, then tries to eat something so Jane doesn’t fret. She thinks about Jane, and Jane, and Jane. When they finally say their goodbyes, Maura searches out Stacey Bueller for one last fleeting look, and lets Jane steer her outside.
Her thoughts are like vines, like a weed, scenarios spreading out across her mind and setting her heart to hammering loudly against her ribs.
All she can think is: today could be the day that Jane dies.
She has felt blood coat her hands; held a wet rib in her palm; stitched up the skin of corpses surrounded by the smell of decay. She’s autopsied her own half-brother, but she hasn’t known any of them the way she knows Jane.
Jane, who beside her is breathing fall air into her lungs and talking quietly to Frost, solid and swaggering and completely unaware of Maura’s train of thought as they walk down the drive. Bueller’s killer is still out there, waiting to strike again. This time, the target he hits could be Jane. Thinking of her lifeless and ashen on the cold steel of an autopsy table makes Maura feel physically ill, her stomach churning. She couldn’t stand to let someone else do it, but opening Jane’s chest to find out what’s inside stirs a fear in her so wild it makes her stumble.
Her hand shoots out to grab Jane’s wrist, steadying herself, and she can feel Jane’s heartbeat under her thumb.
“You okay?” Jane asks, chuckling.
“I—I shouldn’t have worn these heels,” Maura says, and it’s not a lie, not wholly -- she just really wants her head to stop swimming.
“I told you they were ridiculous,” Jane replies, brassy and teasing. She tucks Maura’s arm through hers as they head for the car. Maura feels for Jane’s bicep under her coat, the muscle and skin warm and yielding under the thick fabric. Alive. The wild feeling in her heart is steadied, if only for a moment.
When Jane parks up outside her house, Maura feels uneasy. It’s irrational, worrying that Jane will get into a car accident or a random shooting on a Wednesday afternoon, but her fingers twist around her middle finger all the same.
“Jane, will you come in for a bit?” she asks. “I have a bottle of red wine that needs finishing, and I’d rather not do it by myself.”
“Feeling lonely?” Jane asks, and maybe she’s a little more understanding of Maura’s mood than she had thought.
Maura gives her a wan smile, and Jane returns it with a warmer one, nodding. “We can do whatever you want.”
Maura sits close on the couch while Jane talks about nothing, and every time she moves it makes Maura want to reach over and put her hands somewhere, anywhere -– feel the beat of Jane’s heart under her skin, or the rough jut of bone in her hip. She stops herself only by virtue of having to explain herself; having to explain that suddenly she is consumed by the need to know Jane is still alive. Living, breathing.
It’s completely absurd, the idea that without some kind of physicality between them Jane will suddenly drop dead or vanish before her eyes. It defies any kind of logic Maura has ever been governed by.
And yet, her brain signals the muscles in her arm to move, and she feels safer when Jane’s fingers are finally laced through hers; when she can feel the small knot of a scar against her palm.
Jane stops mid-sentence and looks down, not making an effort to do anything but tighten her grip around Maura’s hand. Maura is grateful once again that Jane can parse unspoken gestures so much better than herself -- Maura always has to ask a question, confirm a hypothesis; Jane simply seems to know.
“Today was hard, huh?” Jane says.
Maura nods, and Jane either doesn’t want to know more or she thinks Maura isn’t up for discussing more, because she directs them right back to the previous topic of conversation.
“Anyway, Ma says that the stove in the guest house is too fussy and the one in here is obviously superior--”
“That’s a state-of-the-art induction cooking range,” Maura says incredulously, trying to stop focusing on how the graze of Jane’s thumbnail is sending tiny jolts along her skin.
“You know Ma,” Jane shrugs, “Nothing gets in the way of the perfect gnocchi, ‘specially if Frankie requests it -- so he’ll be here too, by the way. As usual you’re gonna be stuck with half my family for dinner… I swear, we should just put a ban on any more Rizzolis being allowed in here.”
She doesn’t know why Jane makes it sound like a bad thing. Why wouldn’t she want a loud family dinner to fill the corners of her large house with warmth and a tender, familial hum? All of it is still so unknown to her that Maura just thinks it sounds nice. Like maybe this is how she could see the rest of her life.
Jane suddenly stands, abrupt as ever, and Maura unconsciously clenches her hand when she feels the loss of Jane’s around it.
“So I’ll see you later, okay?” Jane asks, and Maura realises she’s completely missed the rest of the conversation.
“Right, dinner,” she says vaguely, still not entirely comprehending.
“Yes...” Jane says, tilting her head. “After I go back to the station. We have to interview the security guard from the impound lot where… where the shooting happened.”
She gives Maura a searching look, then leans down and presses a kiss to her temple. It’s a confused gesture, but there is comfort in it and it serves to break Maura out of her haze.
All her anxiety from before comes rushing back tenfold, and she can almost hear a gunshot going off in her head. “The case?!”
Jane, a little taken aback at her tone, nods. “It’s kind of an ongoing thing, Maura.”
“But you can’t go,” she says, alarmed to find her voice pitching much higher than she intended. She stands, trying to get some height, and wills herself to not physically sit Jane back down on the couch again.
“Maura, what’s going on? You’ve been super weird ever since we got home.”
Blood rushes loud in her ears as she swallows, skin hot with apprehension. Home, as though it’s theirs, together.
She tries to calculate if there’s a way out of this conversation.
Home, like they’re a family.
“You could die,” she says, the words coming out of her mouth before she can stop them.
Jane looks bewildered. Maura’s heartbeat is feral in her chest, beating like a desperate animal.
“You could die investigating this case. Any case, but especially this case, Jane. Someone has already died.”
For a transient moment, she thinks: can Jane hear her heartbeat too?
“I’ve almost died a lotta times, Maura,” she says. The tender, knowing rasp in her voice makes Maura blink back a sudden sting in the corners of her eyes.
“I know that. I know that,” she attempts. Being a homicide detective is not exactly a low-risk career. There’s danger, there’s always danger -- that is a fact she can put into words. What she can’t articulate is how today of all days she has seen that danger so vividly.
She knows Jane won’t get it, and her expression says as much, but her brow is creased in concern as she takes Maura’s hand again.
“At the memorial,” Maura says, irritated that her voice won’t keep steady, “It just hit me that that could be—that I could be going to one for you.”
Anxious and uncomfortable, Jane’s body language shifts. Maura can feel her grip changing where their hands are clasped together and she knows Jane’s going on the defensive.
“So, what do you want me to do, Maura?” she asks, “Quit my job and lock myself in a padded room? You know I can’t do that.”
“I would never ask you to,” Maura says in a small voice.
“So why are you standing here sounding like every guy I’ve never wanted to date?”
Maura can feel her bottom lip tremble and wishes she could make her hands stop shaking, because she knows Jane can feel it.
“Because it’s my fault.”
Maura’s tired. The kind of tired that fatigues more than muscles and neurons; it sinks into her bones and the recesses of her mind and she can’t summon up enough energy to fight her guilt-ridden feelings anymore.
“It’s not your fault, Maura,” Jane says, her voice sharp.
Maura lets go of Jane’s hands.
“See, but you didn’t even need to ask what I was talking about,” she says, barely holding back a sob, “You knew I was talking about Bueller, which means you’ve been thinking about how it was only my phone call that put him in that car. That it’s my fault he’s dead.”
Jane shakes her head, “You didn’t know, Maura. None of us could have known.”
Maura doesn't know how to explain -- her body on the morgue table instead of Bueller's; Jane's face staring out from a photograph.
“Would you have asked for Bueller to switch with you if it had been someone else who called?” she asks suddenly.
“Probably not? But you’re my best friend, Maura, and you asked for my help. I couldn’t not come.”
“Frost is your partner, would you have left for him?” Maura asks, accusatory. She has a bone, now, and doesn’t know how to let go of it. “Korsak is your Sergeant, what about him?”
“Maura I don’t... know what you want from me, here,” Jane says, and she sounds almost scared.
Angry that Jane’s deciding she’s the one who can’t handle it, Maura blinks back the blurriness that keeps surfacing in front of her eyes and clenches her fists. “You don’t get it. You don’t get it.”
She knows she’s repeating herself uselessly, but she doesn’t understand how Jane isn’t connecting the dots the way Maura has.
“No, I don’t get it, Maura, you’re not making a whole lotta sense.”
Maura takes a deep breath; lets the air fill her chest and brace itself against her lung walls, stretching them tight. Then she lets it out.
“If you die, Jane, I’m going to be the wife that’s left behind.”
Something finally clicks, and Jane seems to close in on herself for a moment.
Maura knows well Jane’s instinct to protect; she’s been a witness to the way she’ll round on anyone who thinks they stand a chance getting past her to Maura more than once. She’s attack-dog predatory, and on some deep, carnal level it’s always sent a little thrill down Maura’s spine.
Right now, though, she knows that Jane is stepping in to protect herself.
“I think I need to go.”
It’s not like Maura couldn’t have anticipated this reaction, but like with a lot of things today, her usual logic is proving oddly ineffective.
She just nods, and hopes that she can stave off the sob welling in her throat until Jane shuts the door behind her.