Hey party people,

I'm not 100% sure how long I want this story to be yet but I would like to challenge myself to write something completely from Maura's perspective. This chapter is mostly an introduction to let you know where I intend to go with the world.

It likely won't be nearly at long as 'How Could She Know' but I'm equally excited to write it! It's Rizzles endgame, as all my R&I fics are. Not entirely sure how slow the burn will be yet. This will mostly be light and fluffy fun with only a moment or two of angst. (Update: there are some real hard-hitting issues in this, but I have included the proper trigger warnings for each chapter and, according to readers, have dealt with the issues appropriately.)

Enjoy! -JJ

Chapter One

"You seem to rely heavily on the Homicide Department, care to elaborate on that?" Kitty Vansen, a news reporter doing a piece on Doctor Maura Isles, held the microphone out to Maura and she smiled politely as she tried to ignore the camera.

"Of course. The work of the detectives is invaluable in what we do in the lab. Their assistance is immeasurable, as they claim ours is with their work." Maura responded easily, going into detail about teamwork and professionalism. She'd fielded the question hundreds of times, though the next one she didn't expect.

"It's easy to notice that you've become particularly close with detective Rizzoli… is there perhaps a new romance budding between Boston's favorite crime-fighting duo?" Kitty smirked at the almost imperceptible surprised look that threatened to overtake Maura's face and Maura simply had no idea what to do. She opened her mouth to respond but denying it felt like a lie. She couldn't lie, lest she break out in hives and faint on national television. Confirming wasn't truthful either though, and Maura was confused by her inability to answer the question that should have been a simple 'no.' She forced the ever professional smile to return to her face before she leaned forward and spoke the last two words of her interview.

"No comment."

Maura sat at her desk with several research tabs open on both her laptop and her desktop PC. She could not get her thoughts together. It was rare for her to be unable to rationalize what she was feeling, even rarer still for her to be unable to compartmentalize. She could not for the life of her get the interview out of her head. No matter what angle she analyzed it from or how she tried to explain her reaction to the questioning, she couldn't dignify how hopeful Kitty's question had made her feel. When Maura couldn't understand something, couldn't quite quantify it, she knew she could always turn to research and science. Hence the multitude of tabs that seemed to mock her from the screens in front of her. It had been six hours since her interview had finished but Maura was still on edge. Research seemed to fail her in her quest to answer the question:

Why was she unable to form a definitive response?

She rubbed her face and stretched her hands in the way she did after completing an autopsy and huffed at her monitors before shutting them both down. She finished the last of her wine and closed her eyes as she attempted to focus on the nutty undertones but was doomed to remain distracted by her lack of hypothesis. She had received two incredibly unhelpful possibilities:

She could not respond because she simply did not know the answer, or she could not respond because she did know the answer.

Neither notion was correct and both left her more confused than she had been before she decided to attempt to explain herself. Maura scoffed at the paradoxical nonsense the internet had plagued her with. She had never before been so entirely frustrated by the ambiguity of the human mind. She rolled her eyes as she stood from her desk and angrily muttered toward Bass.

"This is why I prefer the company of the dead… and you."

Bass remained indifferent to her plight and she envied, not for the first time, the pure zen a tortoise must feel. She shook her head at her companion and made sure his latest favourite area was full of cactus pads and leaves to munch on. She made her way into her en suite to take comfort in the normalcy of her nighttime routine. By the time she tucked herself underneath the sheets of her bed she only had the energy to let one last fleeting thought drift through her brain before she started meditating herself to sleep. No doubt tomorrow, Jane was going to question her. She couldn't hope to predict how Jane would react.

As Maura walked into the precinct she noticed immediately that there was a surplus of conversations that ended as she entered the building or passed through the hallways. Even the patrons of the Division Once Café were entirely silent as she ordered her usual latte. It was a strange feeling for her; she'd worked hard over the past few years not to be the center of attention or the object of ridicule around the building and was pleased that she had been mostly successful. Beyond her colourful nicknames, she'd hoped she would continue to be successful in that, but it seemed her latest interview had added fuel to the fire. She recognized herself speaking from the television in the corner of the room and inwardly cringed as she listened to herself speak. "No comment." The words were already beginning to haunt her. Several heads snapped to look at her but she ignored them as she paid for her beverage. She refused to give in to the desire to dip her chin and cover her face with her hair. She had grown beyond such cowardice and quickly resolved to hold herself with the grace and poise she had worked so hard to exude. That didn't make her ignorant to the eyes following her as she left or of the hushed whispers that ensued a little too quickly after she passed by her colleagues. One thing she was now absolutely certain of: Jane was going to be pissed.

She made quick work of the paperwork she needed to catch up on and moved to the more entertaining parts of her job. She threw her lab coat over her charcoal pencil skirt and green blouse combo. She would never admit it, but the lab coat gave her some semblance of courage and authority. She had chosen a pair of particularly severe heels in the desire to heighten her confidence and it had worked as it always did, but the sheer power she felt when she donned her lab coat was like a kevlar vest to shield her from the bullets of people's ridicule.

"Morning, Doctor Isles," Susie Change spoke from behind one of the lab's microscopes. Maura appreciated the smile she received at the curt nod she offered her acquaintance and was glad the Susie seemed disinterested in talking about her interview. Or in talking about anything. Maura wanted to give her mind completely over to the beauty of science as she awaited the inevitable wrath of her best friend. She was mostly successful, though she did count down the minutes it took for her to hear the telltale sound of Jane stomping through the automatic glass doors of her morgue. One hour and seventeen minutes.

"No comment? Really? Maura!" Maura looked up in time to see Jane bunch her hands into fists in the air. She could sense tension coming off of Jane in waves. She looked to her left to rally support in Susie, but all that was left was a swiveling stool chair. It squeaked simply to mock her, she was sure of it. She looked back to Jane who glared at her, daring her to defend herself. "Wait, let me guess… you have no comment?"

"Jane…" Maura tried to reason but no words other than her friend's name seemed able to pass her lips.

"Do you have any idea what this has done to my mother?" Jane said as her shoulders drooped and she slumped her way over to an empty stool. "You imploded her brain, Maur. She's lost it."

"Jane, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make Angela react negatively, I simply-"

"Oh no! That I could handle!" Jane lifted a finger in a way that Maura had learned indicated that she ought to wait to speak. "If she was pissed, that'd be fine. I'm used to her disappointment in me! But she's just so goddamn happy!"

"H-happy?" Maura repeated.

"Fucking exuberant! I couldn't even get a word in to correct her! She asked me when we're adopting, Maura. Or do you think we should go through IVF? Because apparently I totally forgot about the fact that WE ARE DATING!" Jane covered her eyes with her hands and groaned up at the ceiling.

"I don't think I want kids, Jane," the words fell from Maura's mouth before she thought about them and Jane's head snapped up. Piercing brown eyes glowered at her.

"So not the point I was making…" Jane grumbled before she stood up and walked so that nothing separated the two women but a mere countertop. "Why did you say 'no comment?'"

"I… I don't know!" Maura stood too and willed Jane to understand the simple truth.

"What do you mean, you don't know? You know everything!" Jane argued.

"I don't know what happened! Honestly, Jane, I promise. Kitty was asking routine questions and then she took me off guard and it was like my mind was… buffering," Maura looked guiltily at her friend. Jane's glare lessened and her shoulders took on a less severe edge.

"You buffered?" Jane repeated.

"I just didn't know what to say and I didn't know what you would want me to say and I couldn't sit there and say nothing so I-"

"Yeah, I know the rest," Jane rolled her eyes and sighed in a defeated tone. "Somebody put a rainbow flag on my desk, Maura…" Jane grumbled.

"... at least everyone seems to be supportive..?" Maura offered guiltily and Jane huffed at her.

"Yes, thank God we have everyone's blessing for our not real relationship."

"How can I make it better?" Maura offered, moving around the counter to rub her hands comfortingly up and down Jane's arms.

"We are getting the greasiest pizza I can find for dinner and you are not allowed to complain." Jane began, and as Maura continued to look up at her expectantly, Jane continued her list of demands. "And I get to pick both movies this weekend, and I'm not sharing my chocolate ice cream with you today." Jane pouted like a toddler and Maura's nerves started to peel away from her. She could handle this list of demands. Jane still wanted to come over after work and that was all that mattered to her.

"So you don't hate me?" Maura asked and Jane's entire body softened for a moment before she sighed.

"No, I don't hate you… but I am pissed as all hell and I want you to call 'blood' at the next reddish-brown stain we find at a crime scene."

"Well, that's pushing it a little bit, Jane-"

"You convinced all of Boston that we're secret lesbian lovers, Maura, I think I deserve to see you squirm just a little bit," Jane argued and Maura sighed.

"Fine, I can hypothesize that it might be possible for an unknown reddish-brown stain to possibly be bloo-"

"Oh, for the love of- okay, you know what? Just the pizza. Just buy me a pizza and then everyone will forget about this whole thing and we can go back to normal, huh?" Jane threw her hands up in surrender and Maura nodded.

"If that's what you'd like..." Maura acquiesced and Jane turned to leave. There was a certain timidity to Jane's usually confident strides and Maura felt her friend hesitate in the doorway. It seemed Jane had something to add, but Maura watched as her best friend simply shook her mass of curls as if clearing her head and walked determinedly toward the elevator.

It was that hesitancy that Maura saw that spurred her to wonder if Jane was just as confounded by their relationship as she was.

It was several hours later when Maura had the results for a case and, in an effort to maintain an air of normalcy, she elected to deliver them herself. Susie had watched her pick up the folder of results and then pace around the room for several minutes, muttering quietly under her breath. The last words Susie heard were 'be a tortoise,' before Maura took a deep breath and strutted purposefully out of the room.

As Maura stepped off of the elevator and made her way through the halls surrounding the bullpen, she couldn't help but overhear a conversation happening loudly in the lounge. She stopped a few feet from the door when she heard detective Crowe say 'Queenie.'

"I've been telling you guys for years! I knew Rizzoli was a dyke but I didn't think Doctor Death was so adventurous… it's pretty hot."

"Ew, what the hell, Crowe, those are my sisters!" Maura heard Frankie complain and several other people laughed.

"C'mon, Frankie, you must have known they were together, why don't you give us the details?"

"They aren't together, Mason, and it's none of our business alright?" Frankie argued with someone else and Maura's heart melted slightly at his protectiveness of her and at him referring to her so openly as his family.

"I think it became everyone's business when she said that in an interview…" Crowe spoke up again, "I mean, the way they walk around here always touching each other and sharing longing glances over dead bodies…"

"Yeah," someone else chimed in, "and Rizzoli's always defending her if we call her anything but Doctor Isles."

"Yeah, because my sister is a good person! Why don't you try to be?" Frankie argued.

"Nah, it's cause Queenie's got her whipped," Crowe remarked and laughter bubbled up out of the room.

"You're all hopeless," Maura heard Frankie mutter and he suddenly walked out of the room and collided with her. "Oh! Uh, Hey Maura! Nice day, huh? Those the results for the possible murder-suicide?" Frankie made sure Maura was steady and then stood awkwardly, glancing into the lounge to make sure the conversation had ended.

"Yes, but it seems there's nothing to investigate as the autopsies concluded that both individuals killed themselves. Evidence is consistent with a suicide pact," Maura corrected him and Frankie coughed quite loudly to cover the sound of a joke someone had just cracked in the lounge. Maura glanced at the door and back into Frankie's nervous face.

"You heard, didn't you?" He asked.

"It's fine, Frankie, I'm sure they'll forget about it soon," Maura spoke as they began to walk away from the door towards Jane's work area.

"Yeah, well that doesn't give them the right to talk about you or Janie that way."

"I appreciate you sticking up for us… and for me. Jane would be proud that you stood up to your superior male colleagues," Maura complimented Frankie and he humbly waved off her comment, though Maura knew how much it meant to him to have Jane's approval.

"You think those numbskulls are the superior males?" Frankie joked to cover his embarrassment at the compliment and Maura laughed.

"Not it that sense, I simply meant seniority."

"I know, I'm just jokin' with you," Frankie nudged her with his elbow and she smiled at him. "You want me to give that to Jane? I think she's interrogating a suspect for another case right now anyway. You can get back down to the morgue and hide from all the idiots up here."

"That's very kind, thank you, Frankie," Maura handed the file over to him and he patted her on the shoulder in the same way he often did to Jane before he turned and walked away from her.

Maura headed back down to the lab with two new thoughts occupying her mind. The first was that even though multiple people in the building seemed to be focused on gossiping about her, the people who mattered to her the most didn't care at all about the rumors. It made her incredibly happy to know that for the first time in her life, though she may still be an outcast, she finally had a group of people she was close to that would support her through it all. Susie had behaved normally in the lab, which was likely her way of quiet support, and Frankie had openly defended her against his peers. No longer was she the lonely Ice Queen, not with all the warmth she'd found.

The second thought was about the comments she'd overheard from the lounge. It seemed that multiple people had noticed that Jane acted differently towards Maura than Jane did with anyone else. This caused Maura to assess Jane's behaviour as well as she could from an unbiased perspective. She hoped that if other people could infer that Jane's behaviour toward Maura was beyond the norm of friendship, then perhaps that was the reason she couldn't deny Kitty's question. Thus, Maura developed a theory and decided to use the scientific method to try to explain her relationship with Jane so that she could clear up the mess she'd gotten them into. With an invigorated sense of purpose as she walked back into the lab, Maura was able to compartmentalize her anxiety and focus on her work, electing to conduct new research when she got home for the day.

After getting home, Maura poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open in front of her. The first step in the scientific method is to find a purpose or to ask a question. Maura reasoned that her inability to answer Kitty's question stemmed from the fact that she did not completely understand her relationship with Jane, thus she found the purpose of the research. Step two is to conduct research that will help acquire the knowledge to answer the question. With this in mind, Maura began to pull up as many peer-reviewed articles as she could find about the complex relationships between female friends and where the line was drawn between friendship and intimacy.

The third step in the scientific method is to form a hypothesis based on the information attained. As Maura read through article after article, there was only one hypothesis that she could reasonably form: her and Jane's relationship went beyond that of the average friendship. As Maura decided on her hypothesis she noted a flutter in her stomach and felt her cheeks flush. As she reached for her wine glass she realized that her palms had become clammy.

"Dopamine, oxytocin…" Maura started to list the chemicals rushing through her body at the thought of her best friend and gasped when she realized that the concoction flowing within her indicated both emotional and physical attraction. Maura laughed at herself for being so blind to her feelings. I took overhearing Crowe and his band of neanderthals pointing out the obvious for Maura to realize that she was attracted to her best friend.

"At least now I know why I couldn't answer Kitty's question…" Maura muttered before she took a sip of wine to try to steady her nerves. Of course, Maura had always thought Jane was gorgeous and was never shy in telling her so, but it hadn't occurred to her to think beyond a mere appreciation of the physical form because she thought Jane was straight. Now though, as she analyzed Jane's behavior over the years and compared it to what her research taught her, she was comfortable entertaining the notion that Jane might be attracted to her too.

Maura closed the windows of her research and walked to her office to find an unused journal so that she could write down all the information she learned that evening. She wrote about Kitty's question and her inability to respond. She wrote about how she learned why she couldn't respond and she listed several sources of research that she had referenced that evening. She wrote her new hypothesis at the top of the front page and simply titled the cover 'Jane.' She flipped back through some of the pages that she wrote and decided to start a new section in the journal where she could dictate step four of the scientific method: Experiments.

Maura knew that if she were to outright ask Jane if she was interested in a relationship it was likely Jane would make a joke about it or simply run away. Maura knew that she didn't have the heart to handle either of those scenarios, so she began to think of things that Jane did that went beyond the realm of friendship so that she could experiment with the actions. She decided to start with something small. If she was too obvious in her experiments, she was sure to scare Jane off. Before she could decide on something her phone chimed.

Done work. If you want to order the pizza now, I'll probably get there right when it does. -Jane

Deal… Movie? -Maura

How about we watch Jeopardy? -Jane

You complete me. -Maura

Maura smiled down at her phone and put her new research journal in the top drawer of her desk. She called Jane's favourite pizza place and made sure that no evidence of her new hypothesis was left anywhere Jane could find it. Just after she topped off her glass of wine and filled a second glass for Jane, she heard her front door unlock.

"Ugh, I'm starving," Jane exaggerated, crossing her eyes as she drawled out the last word. Maura smiled at her and handed her a glass of wine.

"Pizza should be here any minute," Maura offered as they moved into the living room. Maura smiled as Jane kicked off her boots and sink into the cushions on the couch. Jane tossed her feet up onto the coffee table and grabbed the remote to flick to the show they wanted to watch while she took a sip of wine. The familiar casualness made Maura smile. Jane caught her staring, and Maura was sure the look on her own face could only be described as goofy.

"What?" Jane demanded with a pout, despite Maura's grin.

"Nothing, I'm just… I'm happy you're here," Maura admitted and Jane raised an eyebrow at her.

"I'm here all the time, Maur, how much wine have you had?" Jane joked, "you're not going soft on me, are you?" Maura laughed at the gentle teasing and was grateful for the knock at the door. She'd take any excuse not to answer that particular line of questioning. She moved to pay the delivery boy, tipped him generously, and brought the food to Jane, who was immediately too distracted by the pizza to continue her earlier questions and Maura was glad that they could just sit together as they always did, pretending to argue about who was better at the game show. Maura knew most history, word origins, and science questions but Jane could keep up with the sporting, movies, and actors categories. They had fun surprising each other when they knew something from an unexpected category.

Maura was content to allot half of her attention to the show but she frequently stole glances of Jane's profile. She smiled as Jane's eyes lit up at a question and chuckled when Jane pulled the pizza from her mouth and dropped cheese onto her shirt to yell at the television with her usual fierce passion.

"You staring at me for any particular reason, Maur?" Jane asked.

"You have cheese on your shirt, Jane," Maura deflected and Jane looked down and picked the cheese up off of her shirt, shrugged, and ate it anyway. Maura had never been so utterly enchanted in her life.