"Maura, really? This is what you want?"

Maura turns to look at Jane over her shoulder. She isn't sure if it's the lights from the marquee, or the detective's actual pallor, but she looks a little green.

"This is what I want," Maura confirms. "You said if I won the bet, we could attend any event I wanted."

Jane sighs, stepping forward. "I know…I just thought you meant, like, a movie, or…the opera or something."

Maura smiles absently, reaching into her purse for the tickets. "This is almost like a movie," she reasons. "And you hate the opera."

"Would you rather go to the opera?" Jane asks hopefully.

Maura shakes her head, looking amused and resolute. Jane balls her hands into fists to keep herself from reaching for something that doesn't belong to her.

"I want to see this," Maura tells her, holding out one of the tickets. "You lost the bet, and so I get to choose."

Jane sighs more dramatically than she feels. The doctor must know by now that Jane would follow her anywhere.

"Okay," she says. "Fine, you win."

Maura smirks as the ushers hold out their programs. "Yes," she says. "That's why we're here."

They are led to their seats (first balcony, first row, dead middle. Leave it to Maura to do research on the best seat in the house), and as the lights dim, Maura takes Jane's hand in hers.

She has discovered that she can take liberties such as this as long as she does not talk about it. The casual touching, lingering hugs, the occasional spooning at night when the day has been brutal, as long as Jane is not asked to give it deep emotional thought, or worse verbalize those thoughts.She responds readily to Maura's affection.

"I'm excited," Maura whispers, as the orchestra begins to tune. She squeezes Jane's hand, and settles more comfortably in her seat.

Jane only tears her eyes away from Maura's profile when the curtain rises.

. . .

Here's the thing. Jane doesn't hate emotions. She doesn't like to talk about them, or feel them, or even pretend she has them, but it's not for the reason that anyone thinks.

Her Ma thinks she's just a tough girl. A tough, disappointingly butch girl, who never liked to conform and never will. Her favorite lines to use are Oh, no point in asking Jane! All you'll get is a grunt, and Oh, Jane doesn't care about stuff like that.

If she believes that Jane still possesses anything she would deem a feeling, she has long since given up looking for it.

Frankie and Frost, the closest things to confidantes she had before Maura arrived, they probably have the best idea, but even they don't know the full reason behind her clandestine nature. Not really.

They both think that she doesn't express herself because she thinks she has to be macho in order to be taken seriously.

And yeah, sure, that's definitely part of it. She can still remember the day Detective Marta Rojas cried in the gym. That woman was pulling tissues out of her shoes, and her holster, and who knows where else for months.

And Maura…

"You're thinking pretty hard, over there," Maura pulls her from her thoughts. They've settled into a booth at a generic burger place, and Jane knows it is Maura's compromise, choosing it over an upscale city restaurant where she could drink something besides cheap Moscato.

"Sorry," Jane mumbles. She looks down at her plate.

Maura makes a noncommittal sound. "Mmm. Well will you at least admit to me that you liked it?" she asks finally.

Jane's head snaps up. "Huh?"

Maura is looking at her with consternation that might just cover her amusement. "Just say, 'Maura, I really liked the show,'" she says plainly. "You couldn't take your eyes off the stage, and you were as impatient as a child during intermission. You don't even have to use the word musical. Just, 'I liked the show.'"

Jane snorts, the retort right there on her tongue. What she says is, "I liked the show."

Maura raises her eyebrows. Genuinely surprised. "Good," she says after a moment. "I'm glad. I thoroughly enjoyed it as well."

Jane swallows. "I – uh – didn't like the end, though."

Maura puts her fork down. "Oh?"

"Yeah. They couldn't see each other anymore? Even though the good one was in charge? That doesn't make sense."

Part of Maura's mouth quirks, like she knows that Jane remembers the character's names full well, and is just choosing not to use them. "Sometimes things can't be undone just by someone saying so," she says quietly.

Jane nods. "Yeah, I know, but-" she breaks off abruptly as the waiter comes by to check and see if they need anything, shaking her head like a mute idiot until he goes away. When Maura looks back at her, she shrugs, all her motivation gone. "Never mind."

And one of the reasons that Maura gets more of her than anyone else in her life, is that during times like this, she simply nods, and changes the subject.

…

Jane sees the musical Wicked four more times in the next six months, slipping away to the city twice with relative ease, thinking that only Maura notices a rise in the number of convention speakers that Jane is interested in.

The music is like a drug that she was addicted to before she heard it, and the two main characters captivate her. She downloads the soundtrack to her ipod to listen to when she runs.

She plays it on the nights she is alone in her apartment.

She falls asleep and dreams that flying monkeys descend on the city, Cavanaugh, in an odd pinstripe suit, is useless and unhelpful.

Going to see the touring company when it passes through Boston is a little trickier, and she ends up going twice, once with Maura and Angela, and then another time by herself.

"Thank you for getting her to go, Maura," Angela says as they exit the theatre after the performance. I asked and asked, but it was like talking to a brick wall."

Maura is looking curiously, and a bit amusedly, at Jane. "Did you enjoy it?" she asks lightly, not mentioning that it is ostensibly her second viewing.

"It was okay," Jane says.

Angela rolls her eyes. "High praise from my daughter. She dragged me out of Aladdin during "A Whole New World." Called it 'goopy!' Can you imagine?"

Maura doesn't take her eyes off Jane. "Dinner's on me," she says brightly.

At the restaurant, Maura and Angela have a spirited conversation about Wicked that makes Jane sweat the effort of staying out of it.

"I just don't see why she couldn't give in," her mother says, for the 40th time. "If she'd given in, and worked with her friend, maybe they could have solved a lot of problems much sooner."

"She had her own moral code, Angela," Maura says mildly. "She couldn't just throw that away."

"Pfft," Angela says. "Sometimes you have to just go along to get along," Angela says.

Jane hears herself make a very disgruntled sound. "She couldn't Ma," she says. "Don't you think she wanted to? She'd tried so hard to fit in and be like everyone else, and not care when things happened, and she'd give anything – even stupid Fiyero to be with Maura at the end of it all. But she can't."

As soon as the words are out (and out loudly. Has she always been so fucking loud about things?) she wants to shove them all back into her mouth.

Maura and her mother are staring at her.

"Glinda," Angela says into the tense silence. "You mean the good witch, Glinda."

Maura continues to look at Jane with an expression that seems close to…what? Jane can't make it out in her panic, which is quickly turning to anger.

"Yeah," she mutters. "Glinda."

"That actress did kind of look like you though, Maura," Angela continues. "And Elphaba could be Jane in a heartbeat. So impulsive, so intense all the time!"

This is a full-fledged kick to the stomach.

Jane is nauseated for the rest of the night.

…

…

The next time she goes to New York to see her play (she's started to think of it that way, despite attempts to distance herself), she hands her card through the window at the ticket counter, and the man hands it back without swiping.

"Rizzoli, Jane," he says in a gravelly voice, and for an awful second, she thinks he's about to say he knows her.

But he spins in his seat to a little drawer in the side of his desk and pulls out an envelope. "I'm not to sell you a ticket," he says, sliding the envelope through the hole. "Just give you this."

"What is it?" she can't help herself.

He looks at her incredulously through the plastic pane of the window. "If I could see through things, I'd be in Vegas, babe," he says. "Raking in the dough."

Jane takes the envelope and steps out of the way of the next customer, slitting it open with her fingernail.

It's a ticket, with an amazing seat, a key card to a hotel Jane has never heard of…

And a note, in familiar cursive.

"This ticket is for tomorrow night's show. I've let Cavanaugh know you won't be back until Sunday. Come join me at the address below. Suite 608."

Jane should be sweating bullets.

She finds herself grinning.

…

"How'd you figure me out?"

Maura is working on her laptop when Jane pushes into the room. She's dressed for a normal day at work, but her heels are off, and her stockinged feet against the plush hotel carpet make Jane feel a little woozy.

"You're not very subtle, detective. I saw you going for a second time in Boston, and I put the pieces together."

Jane slips off her boots, and moves to sit on the bed. It is king size, and there is only one. As she eases backwards, Maura stands. She shuts her laptop and comes over to Jane, bending slightly to put her hands on either side of Jane's face.

"I love you," Maura says softly.

Jane can't help the way her eyes close. Every time Maura says that to her, it feels like her muscles all relax at once.

Maura leans in, kissing the side of her mouth. "Oh, sweetheart," she murmurs. "It's okay."

Jane tilts her head just the slightest bit to kiss her. It is more wonderful and more terrifying than she has been imagining for the last three years. She only recognizes that Maura has moved to straddle her when her hands come in contact with the bare skin of the doctor's upper thighs. Her skirt has ridden up.

"Maura," she says, but when the other woman tries to pull back, she keeps her close, arms locking around her waist.

"My first movie was The Fox and the Hound," she says into Maura's neck, and she feels her relax, waiting. "My Ma and Pop took me to it. Ma was like, just pregnant with Frankie, and they were trying to make me feel like I was still important, you know?"

Maura nods. One of her hands slips into Jane's hair.

"So. We go, and…I don't know if you've ever seen it. But it's about these two animals who form a friendship when they're small, even though the hound is going to grow up to hunt the fox."

"Hmm," is all Maura says, though Jane can practically feel her brain whirring.

"Yeah. So, there's this really sad part, at the end…I won't spoil it, and I just start balling. Like crying my eyes out in the middle of the theatre. Pop had to carry me out. I was so distressed." Jane takes a breath, willing herself to stay calm. "No. I mean, I was sad, you know? But I was other things too. Happy, and angry, and like…confused. And I can remember sitting in the back of our wagon on the way home, talking at my parents about all of the ways the movie made me feel. And I'm going and going, and then all of a sudden, my Pop, from outta nowhere, he goes, 'Christ, Janie! Hush about the damn feeling stuff, will ya?"

Jane has loosened her grip, and so when Maura pulls away to look at her this time, she is able. Jane looks to her left, at the TV, and the armchairs in the corner of the suite, so she doesn't have to see the doctor's expression.

"And he looks at my Ma and goes, 'See, Ange? Boys don't talk like this. This boy will be a chip off the old block."

It was over two decades ago, but Jane can feel tears prick her eyes.

"It's like…the first time I remember thinking…that I remember feeling like, okay, Jane, what you just did back there wasn't normal. And I wanted to be normal more than...anything."

Lips press against the corner of her eye. "Oh, Jane," Maura breathes.

"It's not that I don't have feelings, Maura," Jane says thickly. "I…don't want you to think I-"

But Maura puts her hand on Jane's cheek and turns her face so that they are looking each other in the eye.

"You can't have too many feelings with me, Jane," Maura says. Her eyes are shiny with tears as well. "And I know that it must have been one big, positive feedback loop, reinforcing your belief that you're not normal, but I don't want you because you're normal."

"You want me?" Jane can barely make herself ask the question.

"So much so that when I thought you were leaving the city to visit a secret lover, I almost lost my mind."

Jane puffs out a laugh. "Gross, Maura. A secret lover? Really?"

Maura doesn't want to be diverted. "I'm glad this musical made you feel things, honey, but it's not about us."

"But what if it is?" Jane bursts out. It feels so good to finally say it. "What if I'm too…intense, and unwilling to compromise, and…what if, what if it's good, and we work, and grow and everything, and then we get separated, and can't see each other ever, ever again?"

She means death. They both know it.

"What if…the ways you changed me, the ways I want to keep being changed…what if they don't matter at the end."

A tear slides down Maura's cheek, even though she is smiling harder than Jane has ever seen. She pushes Jane backwards by the shoulders, pitching them both backwards onto the giant bed.

Maura Isles, against her. The most normal, natural thing in the world.

"You are not wicked, my love," Maura murmurs, shifting to the side so she can start on the buttons of Jane's top.

"And everything we are, for as long as we are, matters."

…

…

Jane still cries the next night, when it's time for her favorite song "For Good." She still gets a painful lump in her throat, and the wings of frightened 'what ifs' flutter in her chest.

But Maura leans across the armrest and kisses her ear. "So much of me," she sings along softly. "Is made of what I learned from you. You'll be with me…like a handprint on my heart."

Jane turns to kiss her for real. In public.

Who cares.

Because I knew you.

Because I knew you.

I have been changed…

Jane mouths the last words back, just before the applause and the triumphant finale.

"For Good."