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anthrofreshtodeath · 1 year

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If you feel like writing two separate prompts or combining them. Thanks!

15 please come home and

28 accidental touches

Let's do 15! It's kind of long. I honestly have no idea what this is - but reserve the right to flesh it out into a full, sprawling story if I want to? Agh, anyway. Here we go! Thank you all for sticking with me as I put these out at a glacial pace.

___

Jane pats her pockets a couple of times before she locks her door. Front, back, breast. Her wallet’s there, her phone’s close to her chest, and she’s got her keys in her hand. Her badge rests deep in the inside of her black leather jacket, invisible but available.

“Shit,” she curses, because her guide ID rests somewhere inside the apartment, probably on the counter. She’ll need that for work. She jiggles her key in the lock until the door opens, metal and heavy and groaning when she pushes against it. This place is old in the lead-pipes-from-the-sixties way, not the late-eighteen-hundreds way her condo in Boston had been. Sometimes, she thinks about her old place with regret, how she should have kept it instead of selling it in her hurricane hurry to get out of the city. For all the ancient shit she encounters every day on her current assignment, life feels stuck in a flip phone, video rental kind of vibe that she thought she’d left in the academy. In Boston, life had, for all its modern courtrooms and BRIC software and smartphone ubiquitousness, moved at a historical pace.

Maybe it was the family.

Jane had roots in Boston since the early twentieth century; Rizzolis hadn’t been here in Napoli since 1910. There’s nothing that the modernity here offers her in terms of mirrors - she cannot yet see herself, even though everyone around her looks like they could be a long lost cousin. And perhaps they are, but she knows no one.

Except her coworkers, perhaps, at both of her jobs. Her narc one and her cover one.

With a whoosh she’s back in, and she walks past the cluttered kitchen - no ID on the counter - to the small dining room table. Francesca Ricci, guida turistica di Pompeii, it reads. She hangs it around her neck and zips her jacket up over it. The gray sky hangs heavy over Naples’ city center, and so she’ll need to keep it dry. She also foregoes her motorcycle helmet next to her ID - she’ll ride the metro into work today because she doesn’t want to get pelted by rain on her bike if she takes the autostrada.

So, with her backpack still on her shoulder, she exits a second time, and trots down the stairs to the street. She weaves through her fellow commuters on their own way, and she thinks about popping into the bar just a few storefronts from the station to get a coffee. But then, she’ll have to sit, have to look at the paper just to feel right, and she doesn’t really have the time. Instead, she motors on her long legs to Piazza Garibaldi station and swipes her pass to get on the train.

She sees some familiar faces, a man who always puts his headphones away before getting off one stop from now, a couple of students who always talk about the same professor in a rich blend of new Neapolitan, Italian, and thirst.

The closest open seat happens to be right behind those two students, who smile cordially when Jane passes to park herself in the next row’s aisle seat. She slumps, and drops her backpack between her flat-heeled boots, stopping to stare down at them to give her mind some rest. She lets it wander: the stickysweetness of their infatuation settles in her chest, webbing between her lungs, not quite reaching her heart where it’d cause an overdose. Here, four thousand miles away from home, she remembers the fullness of love without the sting of it.

Luckily, she never has to listen for long, even though she yearns for simpler times when she does - in the best of ways. In that way that makes a heart feel light and easy, like things could go back to that simplicity. In a few minutes, the train signals its stop at Pompeii Scavi, her stop.

She picks up her bag and off she goes, past the exit and into the ticket sales area for the heritage site itself. “Ciao, Roberta,” she says when she waves to the elderly woman manning the closest ticket window. She doesn’t stop, but she smirks and scrunches two fingers in a wave when Roberta calls out a huffy greeting after her, saying something about always in a damn hurry.

Roberta reminds Jane of her grandmother because they both speak the same kind of stuck-in-time Neapolitan when Jane’s around. Even though Roberta knows Jane only as Francesca, a name chosen for her brother. Jane goes right up to Porta Marina and pulls her sign from her backpack, because her first group is in five minutes and she is, above all things, prompt.

She is also undercover, so she likes to arrive before them, watch them come in and cluster. She’s been installed because she can be inconspicuous - she ushers rich, whiny merigan’ (her grandmother’s word) through one of the richest historical sites in the world, all while keeping an eye on the Camorra men who’ve been muscled in as guards so that their bosses can keep the drug trade strong and gobble up the restoration contracts that Pompeii requires. And she looks like every other Italian doing it, except the polizia di stato like that she speaks native English and knows the grounds like the back of her hand.

That had only taken copious amounts of adderall and a few sleepless weeks to learn.

Her Italian is pretty good, too. The Neapolitan’s coming back from her childhood, and the adderall also helped the acquisition of standard Italian. She really had jumped in feet first, intent on making a life in a place her family had made life for centuries before they decided America was the best place to be. Sometimes, when she’s wandering across Pompeii’s main drag, or whispering in la Villa dei Misteri, she wonders what they’d think of her: giving it all up, running back to what they left behind so that she can nurse her ailing heart. So that she can hide.

The first of her group of ten point to her sign, however, breaking her out of her reverie, so she waves them in. “Hey hey! You guys with All Star tours?” she asks, though she knows they are. They nod, and she puts her sunglasses on. It's overcast, rainy Italy and all that, but she can’t really do a tour without them. She knows the guys she’s tailing have no idea who she is - that’s the beauty of being a foreigner - but she still refuses to show them the whites of her eyes. A habit from her DCU detective days. “Perfect. Let’s all uh, gather over here, and we’ll wait for the rest of you before going in. So - tell me: where is everyone from?”

___

Maura has paid for the private tour, because she knows the professor arranging it and, well, she has the money. It’s been literal decades since she’s been in Pompeii, the last time for her sixteenth birthday - one last hurrah before her last year of boarding school, before she headed to BCU for undergrad. She hadn’t been very sober during that visit, and of course she regrets it, not only for the lack of memories but for the shame that she’d let girls she barely knew and didn’t like pressure her into it.

She doesn’t feel much better this morning, just a couple months away from birthday thirty-six and jet-lagged into melancholy.

Well, perhaps that is a non-truth. Not a lie, per se, but the melancholy was firmly in place when she boarded an overnight flight at Logan, one that spit her out in Naples. A car service, courtesy of her mother - quite European in her no-questions-asked approach to the situation - delivered her here, to Porta Marina. To Charles, Professor Cavalieri’s French grad student, whose eyes sparkle when they see her. She looks put together, of course, as she always does, even though she feels a little underdressed. Jeans, riding boots, a light sweater and a scarf over its neckline. April south of Rome can still be a little chilly, so she’s guarded against the weather, but not against the feeling that everyone around her disparages her for not wearing head to toe designer. Charles only notices the slope of her curves in those jeans, the elegance of her features.

He stammers. “Uh, uh, D-doctor Isles, yes?” he manages when she approaches. She moves right past the rest of the tourists, in a line that will probably take an hour to get through, and smiles at him.

“Yes, and you must be Charles. The professor has told me so much about you,” she says, and they kiss twice on each cheek, clasping one another’s biceps loosely. “About your expertise regarding the ruins here.”

“He has told me about you, too,” Charles says. When he pulls away, he’s collected himself, returning some sharpness to his eyes. His French accent is actually very slight. “He was shocked that you are here. He had heard that Doctor Faulkner was in the States, with intentions of finding you.”

Cavalieri knows Maura through Ian, who knew him through his undergraduate work in Switzerland. Maura did not know, until this conversation, that they still talk. She goes pale, she can see it in her hands when she brings them up to cross her arms. Funnily enough, they haven’t spoken as of three weeks ago. Or, if they had, Ian hadn’t disclosed… well. “He was. He isn’t any longer. And neither am I,” she recovers. They both chuckle. One drop falls from the Southern Italian sky onto her nose. “Are we ready to begin?”

“Of course,” Charles says. “Let’s make our way to the forum.”

“That sounds perfect. And Charles? There may be a time or two that I wander off on my own. Don’t worry about me. I’ll find you. Or…” she pauses to pull her phone from her bag, “I will text you.”

“And if you see those indentations in the stone, that’s where the wooden planks would have gone, and this,” Jane toes the grass and weed-covered stone underneath her and her long arms reach up close to those indentations, “bottom area is where those gladiators we talked about would have… shit. Slept. Would have slept. Above is where the… uh, give me a minute, would you? Come, come here. Come inside. You all can touch.”

Maura Isles, spector behind this entire enterprise, is standing in the ancient street, heels over the rivets made by ancient carts pulled by horses, that had delivered life itself to the city. By the thunder of Jane’s heart, rattling in her chest, the carts still run. The Camorra man Jane’d been watching for the entire tour, spending more time on his phone than guarding the ruins, has slipped away, and she cannot bring herself to care.

Maura is here.

“Hey!” She shouts, in case the mirage, the ghost, shimmers away into the late-spring fog. “Maura!”

But, Maura doesn’t move. Maura stays put, and Maura smiles. “Hi,” she says softly, an awful lot like a real person. A real, American, Bostonian, medical examiner person. Jane shakes her head. “My god, you look…”

Jane narrows her very sleep-deprived eyes. She runs a hand through barely brushed black hair. “Like shit?” she snarks.

“I was going to say tired,” Maura replies quietly. Her hands clasp in front of her hips, and she laces her fingers together to give them something to do. “You look so tired. And like you’re not eating. Are you eating?”

Jane scoffs. “That isn’t any of your business. I’m working. You know what? I’m working. Which, by the way… how did you find me? How on Earth did you know I was here?”

“I… he’s gone,” Maura says. Jane leans against one of the old stone walls around them and crosses her arms in defense. She is long and she is gaunt. She is haggard and very angry. “He left almost a month ago. I’ve been trying to find you since then.”

“That’s…” Jane summons all the venom, all the ire she can. She grits her teeth for the effect. “None of that is my business. You made that abundantly clear.”

“I never said that,” Maura counters. The way Jane wafts toward her, the scent of despair and righteousness, Maura might topple. So her hand goes to that same wall near Jane’s shoulder. “I said I needed time. And you gave it to me in spades. Hell, you gave me time and an entire continent. I am lucky that my mother has contacts.”

“You sicced your mom on me?” Jane, incredulous, drops her hands so that they ball into fists at her sides.

“I was willing to do anything to find you. You’ve been gone for six months. I’ve spent almost all of those figuring out where you went.”

“Allora, già sai,” Jane shouts, loud enough for several tourists to turn their way. She yanks her tone down to a poisonous whisper. “Now what do you want.”

She doesn’t ask, she demands. And it pains her because Maura is on the verge of tears, Maura is telling her that Ian is gone, and Maura has come all this way to see her, but a heart broken is a heart reluctant to open.

“I want you to come home. Please, come home,” pleads Maura. The watery begging pulls Jane forward, but so do Maura’s hands on the lapels of her jacket. Surprisingly strong, and intoxicatingly warm. “I… I need you. I thought I needed him and the whole time he was there, I… was so empty for you,” Maura confesses. “I needed filling up and you were nowhere to be found.”

“Well you found me,” Jane is deflated. Jane closes her eyes as her last defense against the onslaught.

“So, will you come with me? Come back home? My mother would even lend us her plane,” Maura senses an in, a lowering of the defenses, so she takes it.

“No,” Jane says. When she opens her eyes again, they are resolute. But then, there is a smile. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. And, if you really want me to come around? For there to even be a chance of moving forward? You’re not goin’ anywhere, either. For a while.”

Maura cocks her head, confused, but oh is she smart. “Europe?” she asks. Jane frowns. “Italy.”

“Napoli,” Jane corrects.

“For how long?” Maura asks, and she hasn’t said no.

“For however long it takes,” Jane says. “And you learn to work with me again before you, before we…”

“Love again,” Maura supplies, giddy off of chance.

“Ah! Ah,” Jane holds a finger up in the air. “That’s a forbidden word,” she nods in the direction of Charles, who has stayed respectfully close, but also respectfully behind. “He with you?”

“My tour guide, yes,” Maura tells her.

“Ok then. You know what’s not a forbidden word? Surveillance. Which is what I’m doin’ here. So, tell him to fuck off, join my group, and I’ll fill you in on the train.”

“The train? Like… the metro…?” Maura scrunches her nose.

“The train. You’re doin’ Napoli. With me, remember? That means public transit,” Jane says. She waits for about a dozen more people to pass, hand on Maura’s back, and then guides them over together. “Don’t worry, I’m sure your mother can get you a car once you settle in.”

Maura laughs. “Yes, Detective,” she responds.

“We’re gonna have to work on that accent,” Jane jokes. “But somethin’ tells me you’ll be a quick study. OK, Americani! Let’s keep it moving! Let me show all where the gladiators duked it out, left everything on the field, so to speak. And boy, do I mean everything.”

Something told the both of them, when they returned to Jane’s group, that they would find themselves on such a field not very long from now. Whether opposite each other or with each other, only time would tell.

#otp prompts april/may 2023 #lauren writes rizzoli and isles fanfiction #this is unhinged but hopefully it resonates with some of you LOL #also napolitana jane wtf #rizzoli and isles #it’s a rough and rushed sketch but you know #that’s how things are going for me these days

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