Fic - Seven Minutes (2/?) (Rizzoli & Isles)
Title: Seven Minutes (2/?)
Author: cj2017
Fandom: Rizzoli & Isles
Rating: PG-13
Category: Hurt/comfort. Ep cont. for When The Gun Goes… So big ol’ spoilers for anyone who’s not seen the finale.
Word Count: About 2,700.
Notes: This was supposed to be a one-shot but you know what people say about best laid plans… Huge thanks to Cat (feroxargentea ) my long-suffering beta to whom I now owe expensive chocolate. My lovely American beta (the one who takes out all my unwitting Britishisms!) isn’t in this fandom, so feel free to shout out any glaring errors and I’ll get them changed. Feedback always welcome.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Please don't sue.
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Seven Minutes (2/?)
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“Small caliber through-and-through, right upper quadrant. GCS 10, BP 76/40, tachy at around one thirty. She had reduced breath sounds on the right so we’ve used an Asherman seal. It’s not helped much. Sats are 94% on 15 liters.” The paramedic paused and pointed to the bottom corner of the plastic transfer board that he and the medics were sliding beneath Jane. “Amy, tuck the corner under a little more. That’s better.” He looked down at his patient, trying to remember what he had missed from his handover. “Uh, she’s had one liter of LRS en route and 5mg morphine. I’ve done my best with her back but it’s still bleeding through.”
The doctor heading up the trauma team nodded in acknowledgement. “Okay,” she said in a voice that effortlessly commanded attention. “On my count. One, two, three…”
“What the?! Jesus!” The sudden movement made Jane’s eyes fly open. Her hands reached out to tear the oxygen mask from her face as her first instinct to fight whatever was hurting her shouted louder than the one telling her that that would only make things worse.
“Woah, okay, so I underestimated.” The paramedic raised a wry eyebrow as he tried to hold onto a flailing hand. “Up that GCS to a 15.” He looked over his shoulder to address the woman standing by the door of the Trauma Room. “Doctor Isles?” Maura had formally introduced herself as the ambulance had careened its way through the city streets, and he emphasized her full title, attempting to ensure that her presence in the room wasn’t frowned upon. She had sensibly stayed out of the way, and so far no-one had tried to make her leave.
When there were no objections to the paramedic’s request she gave a relieved nod, hurrying over to his side and taking Jane’s hand as he stepped back.
“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay. You’re okay.” Her voice immediately cut through the adrenaline spike that had just made Jane send a tray of IV supplies clattering to the floor. It was the same tone Maura had used on countless occasions when late casework combined with alcohol or just comfortable laziness had seen her and Jane share the same bed. Jane rarely remembered her nightmares and Maura never told her how often she woke sweating and trembling with a scream she had only half-managed to suppress.
In a matter of seconds, Jane stopped struggling against the medical team and began instead to concentrate on controlling her breathing. She clung onto Maura’s hand and closed out the unfamiliar voices, the impersonal touches, and the pain that was too severe to be managed by the small amount of morphine she had been given.
“You’re in the hospital.” Maura watched as Jane slowly relaxed back into the pillow. “They had to move you off the gurney.”
“Coulda warned me.” Jane pulled a face as a nurse reattached her oxygen, but that minor irritation paled into insignificance a second later and her entire body stiffened, her free hand gripping onto the cold metal of the bed’s railing. “Oh God, what the hell?”
Maura looked across to the doctor who was peeling away the soaked dressings wrapped around Jane’s torso. The doctor’s eyes widened inadvertently before she handed a clean dressing to a nurse with orders to “press down hard” and then stepped into Jane’s line of vision.
“You’re bleeding all over my floor, Detective,” she said with a smile that immediately made Jane want to apologize and ask for a mop. She injected morphine into Jane’s IV, further endearing herself to her patient. “So we’re going to get you to the surgeons as soon as we’ve done a quick assessment in here. Is the pain any easier?”
“Mmm.” Jane nodded, her eyes closing as the drug started to take effect.
“Good. Think we can get through this without you trashing my ER?”
Another nod and Jane forced her eyes open to see the doctor already turning to fire instructions at her team. Maura pulled a blanket up beneath Jane’s chin. Jane’s shirt had been cut away and she was shivering uncontrollably, her teeth chattering.
“It’s just shock,” Maura said, as if it were nothing that couldn’t be fixed, as if it were nothing at all to worry about. Desperate circumstances seemed to be improving her ability to maintain a façade.
Still shuddering but much less violently, Jane mouthed “thank you” beneath the mask. She could hear the doctors discussing an urgent chest tube, then someone stuck a needle in her arm with only the most perfunctory of warnings, and an alarmed voice loudly registered a drop in her blood pressure. She let it all fade into the background and focused her energy on staying awake. The drugs were making that almost impossible, and she was drifting, pleasantly anesthetized, when her eyes suddenly shot open. She pulled her oxygen mask down around her chin again and ignored the disapproving scowl that a young nurse shot in her direction.
“Will you feed Jo?” she whispered urgently and then bit down hard on her lip as all of Maura’s hard-won composure seemed to vanish in an instant. “Oh hey, just while I’m in here.” She reached out a clumsy hand that came nowhere near the tears spilling down Maura’s cheeks. “Oh God, I’m sorry.” She vaguely remembered making an earlier apology, but suspected that there wasn’t a big enough forfeit in the world for what she had put her friend through in the last few hours.
Maura wiped her eyes dry with the back of her hand. “Done nothing but cry on you,” she said with a self-conscious smile. As she considered Jane’s request her brow slowly wrinkled with puzzlement. “Would Jo eat fresh chicken?” Having tried and failed to think of a recognizable dog food, she was now genuinely baffled. The only pet she had ever had was Bass and she was pretty sure that dogs didn’t eat strawberries.
“Maura, she’s a dog.” Jane tried not to laugh; it hurt too much. “She likes eating my sofa cushions. I think she’ll be fine with kibble…”
~ ~ ~
“Take as long as you want, honey. These should fit and I’ll try to find you a pair of shoes.”
With a murmur of thanks, Maura took the set of scrubs the nurse was holding out. The nurse had waited at the elevator until the doors had closed to block Jane from sight, and had then firmly ushered Maura towards the staff locker room. Maura had gone without a protest, relieved to find someone who would tell her what to do and temporarily absolve her from the burden of having to think for herself.
She didn’t want to think. As she stepped out of her dress, she didn’t want to think that it was Jane’s blood that made the fabric so brittle. She didn’t want to think as she scrubbed her hands clean and watched the water swirl red against the porcelain. Before taking Jane to the OR, the doctor had told Maura that the bullet had torn a hole in Jane’s liver, and she really didn’t want to think about that.
Stepping beneath the lukewarm spray, Maura closed her eyes, lifted her face to the water and let it pound over her. It was so tempting to stay hidden in there with the door locked and the water running. Outside there would be statements and interviews, the untamed grief of Angela Rizzoli and platitudes from concerned colleagues. But there would also be updates from the surgeons who were currently attempting to save the two youngest Rizzoli siblings.
Maura twisted the dial and the water sputtered to a stop. She ran the scratchy, institutional towel hard across her skin and combed her hair with her fingers. It fell loosely around her face, damp and unstyled. Her face was pale, her eyes bruised from the tears and the stress. On any other day she would have been horrified. Today, she barely afforded herself a second glance. She unlocked the door and walked out into the locker room.
“Oh, you look better.” The nurse was waiting with coffee and a pair of the plastic OR shoes so beloved of surgeons. “These were all I could find.”
“They’re fine, thank you.” Maura slipped the shoes on, cradled the cup of coffee in both hands, and followed the nurse into the corridor.
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Frost and Korsak were taking it in turns to pace across the small room that had been specially designed to offer privacy to the relatives of the critically ill. It wasn’t as if they were intentionally coordinating their movements, but neither seemed able to sit and wait at the side of the other. For the last ten minutes, Korsak had had the floor. The tread of his boots was heavy on the tiles - eight steps to the door, a quick pause to peer through the blinds covering the window, and then eight steps back again. Sitting in the corner with a blanket draped around her shoulders, Maura drew comfort from the predictable routine.
“What is that now?” Korsak stopped suddenly, his rough voice fracturing the silence. “What? Three hours? What the hell they doin’ in there?”
The last update on Jane’s condition had been over an hour ago - she was still hemorrhaging but the surgeon was making steady progress. Already out of the OR, Frankie had been moved to the High Dependency Unit. His ruptured spleen had been removed and a new drain sited to allow his lung to heal. Angela and Frank Rizzoli had left to sit by his bedside.
“Three hours, forty-five minutes,” Frost said, without needing to look at his watch. “Feels like longer.”
“Yeah,” Korsak slumped into his chair, all of his nervous energy abruptly deserting him. He sounded old and very weary. “Yeah, it does.”
They fell back into silence. For another seemingly endless hour, the only sounds came from beyond the door - PA calls for staff members, the squeak of a trolley’s unoiled wheels and the chatter of passing visitors. When it finally came, the quiet knock on the door was so unexpected that the surgeon had stepped into the room before anyone inside had reacted.
“Mr and Mrs Rizzoli?” He only looked up from the piece of paper in his hand when Maura answered him.
“They’re with Jane’s brother in the HDU.”
“Oh.” For a moment he hesitated, his exhaustion hindering his ability to make sense of Maura’s information. “Oh, of course.” He checked the paper again. “Are you Doctor Isles?”
“Yes.” Shrugging off the blanket, she crossed the space between them and offered her hand. “How is she?”
Frost and Korsak were also standing, one on either side of her, so close she could feel Korsak holding his breath.
The surgeon’s face softened into a smile. “She’s doing okay. Better than we expected, really.”
Korsak’s breath whooshed out of him and he sat down onto the nearest chair. Her hand gripping his shoulder, Maura just about managed to stay on her feet, and she welcomed the arm that Frost surreptitiously wrapped around her waist.
“She’s okay?” Maura’s throat closed on the question.
The surgeon gestured to the chairs and waited until they were seated before he sat down himself. “She’s critical but stable. We performed a hepatorrhaphy - that’s a suture to repair a tear in her liver,” he translated for the benefit of the two detectives who both nodded gratefully. “She has a chest tube to correct a right-sided hemopneumothorax and her right kidney is badly contused. Given the extent of the initial hemorrhage, I expected worse. She’s not out of the woods - there’s always the possibility of infection or a rebleed - but she’s stable at the moment.”
“Can we see her?”
“Is she awake?”
The questions came in almost simultaneously from Frost and Korsak, both already poised to stand.
The surgeon shook his head, raising his hands to keep the two men seated. “Detective Rizzoli is in the ICU. I’m afraid it’s family members only. Doctor Isles?” He looked over to where Maura was sitting with a stunned expression on her face as she processed the ramifications of everything he had told them.
“Maura,” she corrected automatically.
“Maura.” He paused until she nodded at him, and then passed her the sheet of paper he was holding. “You’re listed as Detective Rizzoli’s next of kin.”
“I am?” Maura studied the pro forma, skimming through the preliminary details on Jane’s admission document until she found the relevant section. Angela and Frank Rizzoli occupied the first box reserved for next of kin. The second contained her own name and contact details. “I wasn’t aware of that,” she said quietly. Jane had been her own next of kin for a couple of years now, absent parents and no siblings making the decision an easy one. She had had no idea that Jane had afforded her the same status.
“You can sit with her if you’d like.” At some point unnoticed by Maura, the surgeon had walked to the door.
Maura nodded quickly. “Yes, of course.” She stood to follow him out but then turned back to the two detectives she was leaving behind. “I’ll tell her you’re here. She’ll know that already but I’ll tell her.” Barely able to get the words out, she left the room without waiting for them to reply.
~ ~ ~
The elevator climbed steadily, the lights on its display illuminating intermittently as it passed the lower floors. It stopped once for a man and a woman who entered bearing pink gift-wrapped presents and a balloon announcing It’s a Girl in lurid fluorescence. They beamed proudly at Maura, who smiled politely at them and then tried not to show her frustration when they stepped off a floor later.
The surgeon shook his head in despair. “And we wonder why there’s an obesity crisis.”
He and Maura were the only ones to exit on the floor for the ICU. Walking beside him, tracking the signs highlighting the different departments, she felt a flutter of nerves beginning to make her palms sweat and her stomach churn. As if picking up on her train of thought, he slowed his pace.
“We’re keeping her on the ventilator for at least another twelve hours,” he said.
“She’s still unconscious then.” It was nothing that Maura hadn’t expected, but confirmation of the fact still felt like someone had punched her in the guts.
“Yes, she is. Her lung took a bad hit. The vent allows us to control how far it expands, which is giving it a chance to heal.”
Maura looked up at him, a smile unexpectedly touching the edge of her lips. “You want her to stay in bed for a while?”
He nodded, his expression slightly confused.
“Then you might want to keep her unconscious for longer.”
His eyes widened. “That bad, huh?”
“Oh God, worse.” She laughed quietly, only half-joking.
Four days after Hoyt’s first assault, Jane had been back at work, her hands so swathed in bandages that she couldn’t actually hold a gun, or a pen, or type out a report. In the end she had spent hours in the autopsy bay with Maura, who hadn’t told her to go home and rest up or nagged her to discuss her deepest, darkest fears with the shrink. They had swapped stories while Maura worked, eaten Chinese with spoons when everyone else had gone home, and ended up as best friends.
The surgeon swiped his security pass and then paused with his hand on the door of the ICU.
“You okay?”
Maura nodded without hesitation. “I’m fine.”
He held the door open and she walked through.
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End part two.
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