If you had told Maura, med school Maura, ten years ago that she'd be in this place on Christmas Eve, she probably wouldn't have done much more than laugh. She would have no doubt found this building beautiful, with its strategic darkness and lightness: reds, blues, and purples to catch the hundreds of tiny candleflames, the colors of passionate bruises. The room usually splayed forth much more light, but that was in the morning, and here at midnight, she perhaps would have admitted that there was power to be felt. At least, traces of power. The way all of the cherrywood pews, adorned with crimson cushions and plush for kneeling, looked toward an immaculate white altar thrilled her now as it would have then. Up above all of them hovered a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and she squeezed Angela Rizzoli's hand when her eyes dared to meet the stone ones of the mother ahead of them; she still found beauty in the celebration of women. She tingled from the vibrations of the towering organ behind her, letting the music thunder against her thoracic wall, zapping muscles and ringing bones, and lap like waves against her bottom teeth; song still resonated deep within her, perhaps more so at thirty-eight than twenty-eight. Oh, what humans could do. But, twenty-eight year old Maura would have never guessed that her Latin training would be used in quite this way, with so many standing, singing, sighing… live bodies around.

"Christus natus est…" she nevertheless felt terror in this moment, in the best of ways, when the voices of those around her rose up; she knew the words, what they meant, what they stood for. Never in a million years, though, would she have known that they meant so much. Not to her own spirit, no, she was far from that point. But, it meant everything to the rest of her pew.

Frankie, on the end furthest from the red-carpeted center aisle, represented the most faithful of their flock, and she looked upon him: clothed in shirt and tie, eyes fluttered shut, masculine vocals twanging the cords in his larynx as he followed the chant of the oldest Romance language there was. In his normally square shoulders she could detect the slump of deference.

A deference nowhere to be found in the man next to him, Tommy, his younger brother. No, Tommy remained seated, more a visitor than anything else. In him she saw a similar awareness as she felt within herself, but his acted more as a recent renewal than with the complete freshness of her own. He was tired, a longshoreman's job trying and taxing, so he rubbed his own forearms under his brown thermal to keep himself alert. His eyes found the things which her own did, and he relished the feeling of the soft red under his worn jeans and workboots. They sat in communion with one another, souls open to the mysteries they weren't quite sold on.

Between them was the physical divide of Angela, his mother, her mother of sorts. She sat so as to make Tommy less alone in his seatedness; Maura still had a grasp on the matriarch's right hand. She felt the warmth created by their interlaced fingers, she felt the pulsing in Angela's wrist through her palm, and she felt her engagement and wedding rings clank against the older woman's solitary girlhood ring of gold. Of course Maura sat as well, she did not know the song and she did not know the protocol. The lit candles, brought forth in a procession of a child Christ figure, stood in place of the church's normal, radiant fluorescents, and she understood the swimmings in her heart caused by the burning orange and red: it went so beyond calefaction, so beyond thermal diffusion, when she saw the colors dance on her son's face.

Her son. Filippo. Named for Brunelleschi, because he was indeed a work of art, equal parts the oil paint of Rizzoli high-Renaissance and the carved stone of an unknown Doyle crucifix. He stood, so, so earnestly he stood. And, at four years old, he sang. Sang in Latin. Bits and pieces were missing, and he had to look to his grandmother every so often to mouth unfamiliar parts, but there he sang. To him, it meant the most. Every Sunday morning, when he would enter, hand in her own, he would turn to point to the stained glass of Saint Cecilia, Roman woman buried in Sicily, and smile. She looked heavenward, and he looked heavenward with her, basking in the soft whites and blues of the glass he couldn't quite understand as false. Saint Cecilia, his saint, their saint, lived and breathed behind them each Mass they attended, and she pulled Filippo's mouth-corners just enough to give him Jane Rizzoli dimples every time that he forgot the discomfort of gelled-and-combed black hair and an itchy dress shirt over his olive-milk skin.

Jane. Her love, her life, her very own patron protector, stood closest to the center aisle. She also mouthed the words; Maura imagined that her voice would be the Saint's, if it were to be raised an octave or two. She imagined Jane as the darkened silhouette of Cecilia, the saint of music and of song. Jane's words carried the deep purple of the wine and the salty twinge of the bread. Jane's hands struck the keys of a piano in pain, as though she herself faced beheading on the citrus shores of Sicily: too much pain from too much memory, a shadowy Cecilia both young enough and old enough to have seen blood on the new Mezzogiorno.

"Christ have mercy," they all echoed at the priest's initiation of the Penitential Act, Jane's gruff calling the loudest in their row. In fact, both she and her wife saw blood in Boston earlier that day: Jane had no time between closing the case and hurrying home to pick up her family to change clothes. Maura watched her stand there, the first in line of their Rizzoli-pew, hands behind her back, careful to conceal the piece behind her blazer. Her dark red shirt fell untucked around her hips, the buttons still in place but the black undershirt a little visible at the hem. Despite that, one couldn't read anything but a contented ache on her face, a sated sigh as it came time for the standing to sit down.

"It's a wonder he ain't bouncing of the walls," an asphalt whisper jolted Maura into the present and the rub of the fabric of her own understated black blazer against her shoulder told her that Jane was indeed touching her. The detective smirked enough to bring out her dimples, and nodded in the direction of their enamored son.

"I thought he'd either be too anxious or fast asleep, so we're doing well," the wheat-haired woman volleyed a genuine grin back to her spouse, taking her left hand out of Angela's right to clasp the fingers over her clothes.

"Yeah well, we'll see. He likes this part. I give him twenty minutes before he gets bored."

"And asks for a purse snack?" Maura whisper-giggled at the predictability of her son, who would take to fussing at Jane's hand running over the back of his head in 3, 2…

As if on cue he snapped his head forward, shaking his skull back in forth like a pint-sized Rizzoli lion, and his mother stopped. "Speaking of… I haven't eaten since two…" At that statement, his other mother had to cover her mouth to keep the chuckles from escaping. But, Jane's eyes and bottom lip persisted, so she shuffled for her purse underneath the family's pile of winter coats, and produced a granola bar, only to stop mid-grasp.

"And what about…?" she pointed a smooth, creamy finger, toward the altar, not at all surprised that, in her hunger, Jane forgot about the Eucharist.

"Crap… You're right, you're right. I'll wait-"

"Sshh!" leg-dangling Filippo turned dramatically to Maura to raise one eyebrow, and then to Jane to raise his other. He clacked his shined shoes together, Rizzoli energy still pulsating no matter how enthralled his rapidly growing, endearing, young brain seemed to be. Jane's head shot up and she raised her own eyebrows, managing only after a few shocked moments to mouth 'bossy' to the woman on the other side of him.

'From you' Maura shot back, smiling as that comment sent Jane into a mock-tizzy, and both overheard Tommy laugh before being quieted by an Angela nudge.

The ensuing (and quite rare) familial quietude sent Maura into the throes of thought. Did it matter that, when she was a mere two years from meeting Jane, that she never in a million lifetimes thought that she would be married (to a woman), with a child (not of the tortoise variety), with a family (an Italian one to boot), starting the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (quite possibly the scariest thing she's ever done)? Hell no, it did not matter, because there was Jane, with St. Michael around her neck, and there was Filippo, with St. Cecilia around his, dipped and formed in gold. She fingered Jane's original St. Michael pendant over her own chest, given to her after the detective had shot herself those years before. Only when she'd kissed Jane for the first time, a year or so later, did she find the courage to put it on.

Angela was convinced that it protected her everywhere that she went. She wasn't so sure that she disagreed with her mother-in-law. There was something entirely mystifying about the vaulted ceiling above her, fashioned in the memory of the oldest of Florentine churches, about the way the chocolate church-pew groaned and the way Filippo's body betrayed a tiredness he was not quite ready to accept by leaning into her side and taking Jane's hand into his lap. He ran tiny fingers across the prominent veins that bled out into spidery fingers, and the detective clenched the miniature, upturned palm in her own without breaking focus on the reading being presented. Maura would admit that having an archangel march over her head to promote their law-enforcement endeavors was quite comforting when she had to leave the house and her family at 3AM to examine a body, or when she had to watch Jane don Kevlar before a big bust. And she would admit that a God who brought Jane home to dinner (mostly) every night without a bullet hole in her torso was one she more and more found herself believing in.

Again, not something twenty-eight year old Maura could have conceived. But, married Maura, after managing to lock eyes with Jane, surrendered this midnight unto her family and her wife, and her parish.

"The word of the Lord," the reader proclaimed as he stepped down.

"Thanks be to God," said Italian lips and Irish lips in unison.

"Mary and all the saints it's cold out here!" Angela burst through the church doors once the congregation had been dismissed, waving wildly in the general vicinity of her hair to keep the snowflakes away. Filippo cackled at her outburst, tugging on her long, fluffy black coat from his place between her and Maura's walking legs.

"MA! Really? At midnight mass?" Frankie, arm linked with his mother's, stopped dead, falling snow and all.

"C'mon Frankie, don't be such a bitch just 'cause it's Christmas. You say that stuff all the time the other eleven months of the year!" Tommy guffawed as he shuffled under his work jacket, workboots crunch crunching the fallen Boston snow beneath.

"Hey, ho, hey! Language in front of the kid, Tommy!" yelled Jane. Her gloved hands flew out on either side of her to shrug; her cold-pink nose stuck out like another angry finger-wag her baby brother's way.

"Alright, everyone, alright. I think we can all agree that it's cold, and we would get out of the cold sooner if we weren't all arguing," Maura, ever the voice of reason, shivered despite her resolve. She tip-toe jogged toward Jane's cruiser. Cold as hell.

"Aw, Janie, he knows better," Tommy ran to scoop up Filippo, and tossed the giggling child over his right shoulder like a prize of war. The youngest Rizzoli sibling felt a four-year old belly, bouncing with mirth, send a chuckle or two, high-pitched Bostonian, up from his grown-man chest, "cause he's smart! Right, Sir Phillip? Smartest man I know!" Tommy had mocked the baby's name mercilessly when he first heard it, saying that Jane let Maura make her drink the proverbial limoncello by going with such a ridiculous title. But, the moniker stuck.

"I'm not a man, Uncle Tommy!" Filippo corrected his uncle like it were the most natural thing in the world, and Tommy beamed.

"No? What are ya, then? I could've sworn since you been growin' so fast!"

"I'm a boy; you're a man," again, as though his words were so obvious to everyone around them. His nasally voice rang out in the dark, as he pulled with gloved hands at his uncle's jacket.

"Tommy, put that baby down before you give him a stroke," called Angela from behind. Pretty soon, the entire clan had crowded around the side-by-side police vehicles of Jane and Frankie. Cars of every conceivable size and color drove hurriedly by, their glossy paints catching and keeping the reds, greens, and blues of the surrounding homes' Christmas lights, cold engines roaring as their passengers rubbed hands for friction in front of charging heaters.

Jane smiled with a close mouth at the sight, unwilling to open any more parts of her body to the frigid cold outside, the cold that tinged her breath nice and frosty when it came out of her nose. She was more than willing to let a prancing Maura, fingers starting to tingle from lack of heat, burrow into her burgundy-covered chest as soon as she turned toward her.

"So… warm…" muttered Maura, barely audible beyond her face's place over Jane's heart. The beat pummeled her icy nose, and she wrapped her arms tightly around her wife's waist under her giant trenchoat in order to see if she could actually melt into the cologne-tinged olive under all those clothes.

"Alright, alright, we're goin'," Jane peppered the top of her wife's head with the softest ghost of a smirk and the raising of an eyebrow. Keys jingle-jangled when she went digging for them in her pocket.

"Ok, Janie, Maura, remember the bird. We'll clean and stuff the whole thing when you get to the house, 8 o'clock sharp!" shivered Angela, "matri di diu, it's cold out here. Frankie, open the door for your mother." Frankie, exchanging incredulous glances with both his siblings, who just shrugged, obeyed nevertheless.

"We got it the first hundred times, Ma, turkey at eight," said Jane, tone admonishing but brown eyes dancing and soft. She kissed her mother's cheek, her mother who'd hurried over to kiss her and Maura's own. The matriarch found Flippo's face resting on Tommy's shoulder now, sleep threatening drowsy eyes now that he had been turned right side up.

"And you, baby, I'll see you tomorrow morning. That is if I don't kill your mamma first," and like that, with a ruffle of the hair and a kiss to a ruddy cheek, she disappeared into the passenger side of Frankie's cruiser.

"You guys showing up at eight?" Jane asked the two men exhaling foggy breath into the indigo up top and gray-black down below, taking the subsequent muggy concoction around her head as her cue to begin the opening of various car doors.

"Hell no! I'm surprised you're going that early!" Tommy's youthful voice boomed through the air between the four of them, even when he bent down to strap Filippo in the back seat.

"If she had it her way, she wouldn't roll out of bed until noon," Maura said through a sweet, sweet smile, her hooded eyes looking up at Jane from her position against the whole of Saint Michael, "but she also won't admit that Christmas morning in her mother's kitchen is one of her favorite things."

"Yeah, yeah. You're telling all my secrets, Maur," Detective Rizzoli waggled her eyebrows at Frankie, "now let's get in the car! It's frickin' cold!"

"See ya tomorrow!" shouted the retreating figures of Frankie and Tommy. And with that, the Rizzoli entourage exited the Saint Cecilia Parish parking lot, caravanning to their lit-up block.

"D'you mind living in my neighborhood?" Jane, still in rolled-up burgundy sleeves, watched a swaying, hovering Maura tuck in their son.

"What? Why would you even ask that?" Maura instantly looked back to her wife. Her bare toes wiggled on the thick cream carpet below as she walked over to the threshold and the arm-crossed figure facing her, lips pursed.

"I know you're used to, I don't know, fancy pants stuff," Jane asked these type of things when she was tired. Or when she investigated a murder involving the elite. In this case, Maura knew it was both. So, with the soft light glowing out from the hall and in from Filippo's ceiling fan, she closed the door and the distance between them.

"This is a question more suited for dating," doing her best Jane impression, she attempted to spin her lilting, warm voice into a husk. It instead only melted the chocolate of her vocal cords into a smooth, breathy whisper. "And we're married…" She used her hips, after pressing them to the pair covered by a gun and badge across the way, to push Jane down the hall into their own dimly lit bedroom. "aren't we? I love your neighborhood. It's my neighborhood."

"I, I guess you're right. I just know I'm probably not exactly what you expected when you envisioned your lavish future," Jane did as she always did when being self-deprecating: she gestured down the length of her body, a hint of teasing in her almost-whisper.

Maura had to stop herself after that; she surveyed their connected bodies. Was that link the reason behind Jane's uncanny perception? Of course that was irrational, but it was also irrational to simply believe that her wife could do that. Five years of marriage left her just as off-kilter as before, and it titillated her to no end. "And what do you think that I imagined, hmm?"

"I dunno… Not a working-class, Italian, Catholic, that's for sure," said Jane in a sing-song. Her twitching nose and knowing smirk betrayed her inner doubt. When the going gets tough, the tough get to faking. "And… and I can't tell you how much it means to me that you're going through with this," her breath hitched twice as still-warming fingers undid the buckle of her belt. Maura found the button and zipper easily, undoing them with a swish and then a tiny pop-pop-pop. The weight of the beretta and shield caused the now open pants to droop, until the doctor could put each in the lockable nightstand drawer just a few feet behind them. The Sicilian closed her eyes, ready for the coming avalanche of affection.

"The RCIA? There's nothing I want more…" there was a gulp from Maura when she leaned in to feel hot peppermint breath on her face: Jane had a penchant for sucking on candy canes this time of year. "There's nothing I want more than to be a part of every part of you, Jane. I want my child, our child, to grow up knowing that…" a pause for the unbuttoning of a wrinkled shirt, "that my life is a ballad, a love song, an epic; its verses dedicated entirely to the tale of your heroism. You. Are. My. Hero."

A kiss. Jane in only a black wifebeater was a confident Jane: the kiss started slow, with Rizzoli lips pressing out and then meshing upwards, and then down again. Seconds tick, tocked, tick, tocked; each woman heard the clock near the bathroom door say so. The kiss turned wetter when the Detective decided that her wife should no longer be in her red dress, but rather only in the black lace underneath it. Small sounds of appreciation, of the melting of two gene pools into one, both stringing, settling, and trickling into the opposite mouths, of teeth nipping and catching small drops of it all, of bottom lips being tugged away from tongues by those same teeth punctuated stillness around them.

Maura willingly separated her mouth from her spouse's to scrutinize. There they stood, in their room, swaying inches away from their bed. She felt the languid buzzes and soft zaps of electricity pass from Jane's forehead to hers, meaning that the other woman had her eyes closed to bridle the power. She dragged her own open eyes up from Jane's practical white socks to her ever-so-slightly bent knees, all the way to her undone pants and now exposed abdomen. She ran hands over scars and bruises and… oh. Divine, subtle, taut muscle. Muscle that felt so good against her own flat stomach when her detective pulled them flush against one another, not content to forever remain.

Jane's right fingers played against the hem of black panties like they were keys, her left splaying on Maura's back just under the clasp of a matching bra, long, honey hair tickling her knuckles. "I know what you're doing…" shuddered the doctor, tip-toeing so that she could dip and lock her hands across the back of the neck above her. She gave a light, comforting scratch under wild, dark hair, and Jane buckled into the crook of her neck.

Peppered kisses left minute pucker marks of fire water along an Irish jaw and collarbone, the mint sparking against her skin. "What am I doing?" Maura tried to determine whether the question was a rough gruff or a result of pinching teeth, but she was on her back and on an exposed bedsheet too quickly for her brain to catch up. Ever the opportunist, she took the new time and position to cradle the writhing Rizzoli between her legs.

"You… are… ohhh… teasing," it was unclear which woman had shoved away the heavier bedclothes, or even the offending black slacks, for that didn't matter. Along with those slunking to the floor went a very Isles-esque bra, and Jane kneaded pert breasts sending Maura's head upwards and into an oversized pillow. Quickly stiffening nipples licked fading scars, a sensation she'd known a million times yet always made her stop to take a breath. "You are… asserting yourself… to quell your doubts…" as two hooked fingers shimmied underwear completely off, Maura found trouble finding words. The sound of herself, her wet, slip-sliding against Jane's abs, the feel of those muscles, rock hard under the smoothest of Mediterranean skin, spreading her and forcing her, was simply intoxicating. Too much of a heroin to get things out right. But damned if she wouldn't try.

"Hmm." The detective snarled, not in malice, but with impatience. She tore off the rest of her own clothing, and attacked Maura's mouth with her own. She felt the fine hair on her back stand from exposure to the cool air, but as soon as she registered smooth, creamy legs slide down the expanse of her toned ones, she felt open hands run across her blades and down to her hips, slow and sure, and bring up the comforter around them.

Jane collapsed. The care, the exhaustion, the affection, the late hour, all became almost too much for her; she wanted no more foreplay. She didn't want to dive into Maura's body and surface hours later, sweaty and triumphant. She didn't want to hear Maura cry or scream or yelp, she didn't want to test her endurance, or wake the neighbors, or end up on the floor. What she did want was to continue feeling the way she felt now. With Maura wrapped around her, holding her, touching her, warming her. She wanted to find her wife's heat with her own, press into it until a sweet, semi-silent orgasm of relief and sleep crept from her pelvis and leaked all the way down to the bottoms of her feet.

And so Maura let her. She heard, and wanted to hear, the slickness between them, the sound like the kisses they shared in the shower. Kisses that Jane would initiate when she would interrupt Maura's bathing, kisses that smacked and lathered and consisted of no teeth and no tongue whatsoever. Kisses that would tease because of the low hum of two pairs of the softest lips waxing and waning inside and around each other, rowing into each other like river boats on the Styx, because the detective swore that the Medical Examiner was the death of her. There would be gulps of water mingled with air, sucking, breathing, slippery melting, as there was now, only now they swam-kissed in white linen instead of steamy tap.

Each of these thoughts rose from Jane's pounding heart, thudding into her wife's own, and finally travelled to the lips of the woman below. She reveled in the half-stare afforded her way before Maura initiated the kiss they both wanted so badly, the kiss that had started in one chest and trickled into another. Her wife's tongue painted her gums with strokes to match the rhythm she established between them, still steady, still slow. They were close enough for her to feel the lungs below her expand and quicken, the toned belly tucked and rubbing so closely against her own run like a kind hand over her scars. Legs crossed loosely against the backs of her thighs like the comfort of a cloak under the shifting of the bedding around them, she knew what was close; it was close in her too.

"Christ have… mmm. Jane…" moaned out Dr. Rizzoli, Mrs. Rizzoli, as soon as she detected just the holiest little hint of lingering church wine across the inner wetness of her detective's bottom lip. It sent her crashing, hard, soon, rugged, dropping her legs on either side of the detective on top of her.

Detective Rizzoli reached clumsily for the lamp switch on her nightstand. Nothing more said, nothing more done, no more movements. She felt Maura's breathing even under her and grunted before settling on a suitable place for her head on the pillow between the smaller woman's neck and hair-stroking fingers. She felt a sleepy voice hum in approval, before stopping for an interrogative pause.

"… Are you still wearing your socks?" a little brush from a bare foot against her socked one sent a shiver up to her shoulders. "You are! Jane Rizzoli!"

"Mmmph…" Maura giggled at the nonresponse from the detective still buried under her earlobe, "what, Maura Rizzoli?"

Said woman felt something akin to a sob rattle her larynx, but it never came out; rather, a sigh and then a whisper. "I was going to say that you are terrible at romance, but that's false statement. You excel at it."

"Well… thanks."

"No problem. I love you."

"Love you too. And Maura?"

"Yes?"

"Merry Christmas."

A/N: In this universe, I had Filippo come from Jane's ovum and a donor from the Doyle family, and Maura gave birth to him. I may or may not explore that a little more. As for chapter 16 of Anticipation, it's coming, I promise! I just got consumed by this little thing first, so I decided to get it out of my system. Thank you so much for your reading and reviewing! It really means a lot.