A/N: Well... I'm back for a bit. This new story is the result of some soul searching away from my previous fic, Anticipation. I'm not sure if the last chapter of that fic will go up soon or not, but I know that I want to keep updating this one pretty regularly. Fair warning: while I did enjoy writing Anticipation, I wanted to explore the character of Erica D'Arcangelo in a bit of a different light, as in a more definite one, one where she was more definitely shady and less moralistic/involved with righteousness and the law. Part of this fic is my attempt at that. That means she's in here, just with a few tweaks, like her name. The other part is me hoping Jane will get her head out of her ass and go after Maura. So, without further ado, here you go: the first chapter of Odio. Let me know what you think.

Maura knew, as she strode into the olive light of the hallway she had just found, that she should not be there. The building had to be at least eighty years old – the dank smell of damp walls slithered up her nose, and the buzz buzz zap of some rogue and dying lightbulb made her feel cold. The only accompanying sound happened to be the click click click of her high heels, and she wondered at the way it perfectly signified the roulette she was playing. Any moment, the loaded click, the one with all the consequences, would call someone forth from one of the rooms she passed. She only hoped that she would have enough time to explain herself, identify herself, before they attacked. No crevices lent themselves to hiding; she surmised that it wouldn't matter if they did – the people here lived in crevices, on the fringes. They would know in an instant where she hid. The only cover for her seemed to rise from the ground up, leaving the most important parts of her raw, and exposed. Not much different than home life at the moment. Shadows lapped at her bare calves and around her heels, no doubt from the poorly designed lighting system above her head, and where shadows took on a life of their own, that was where people like her did not belong.

People like her.

People in law enforcement. No, she wasn't a cop, but she was a medical examiner, whose work kept cops in their jobs. All the people she loved were cops, or at least related to cops. The danger, the irony, was not lost on her – for the first time in her solitary life, she had a family, a group of people that she cared for so much that sometimes she felt that care scraping against her chest like sandpaper, and those people were very likely to encounter some injury, mortal or otherwise, while on duty. She'd experienced it several times – watched colleagues and friends tumble to the ground the way only lead could initiate, or cried hot, large tears to mimic the blood that oozed from wounds too big for her to stitch up. She, the Maura Isles hellbent on safety, normalcy, belonging, had unwittingly surrounded herself with chaos – letting it in, letting it settle, letting it use her kitchen and her bathrooms and even her bed, if only ever in a platonic sense. Jane.

She could not tell if the pressure against her chest came from nerves, the dissipated light at the end of the hallway she had just traversed, or the content of her pondering. Nevertheless, in her painted-on navy dress, heavy necklace like something out of an Egyptian vault, she palmed the doorknob before her. She had tried, valiantly, to dress appropriately, which included the smoky eye makeup she sported and the sliver bangles against her wrist. Her hair fell forward to frame her face, to cover it, to mask it if necessary. Everything about her moaned danger, danger.

Now or never, she mused, and pushed her way into the one room no one would expect to find her.

SCHWAK.

Jane's fist blistered through the stale air of the BPD gym, erupting against the punching bag with something a little like vengeance. The punch morphed into a barrage, one for every bead of sweat stinging her left eye. How long had she been at this? Long enough that her sports bra, the only thing on her upper body, had soaked through. She shivered as she became cognizant of the dampness against her back. She shrugged and continued, remembering her purpose, and the fact that she would be alone for the night. Maura had told her that she would be out, probably late. She assumed for a date, until the medical examiner had run a thumb over her forearm and shook her head. Jane must have made a face. She had only said, "a meeting," and left the bullpen after her goodbyes to the homicide squad.

Maura didn't dress that way for meetings; Jane felt her knuckles explode against leather before she even realized she'd released. Although, Maura had begun to dress to kill more often, seemingly right after she dumped Casey. Or it could be that Jane had only begun to notice since then - she cursed herself internally at the thought. She missed a lot of things while hung up on that man; she figured because she funneled all her energy into trying to become someone she wasn't. His betrayal, going back on his word and begging of her to follow him, in addition to the pregnancy scare, bestowed on her a sort of rebirth, a new awareness. She had scrutinized herself in the mirror after learning of the false positive – she looked thin, haggard, results of her attempt to feminize herself, to submit to a man and his body, both of which she only saw perhaps four times a year.

So, though she realized she had a lot of apologizing to do to her friends and family, and a lot of lost time to make up, she decided that her body would be the first thing to change. That, as an athlete and a cop, she could control. She had a physical coming up, and it provided the perfect excuse to train. When she breathed in and took a step back from the punching bag, she took note of the heaviness, the power, in her tread. There now existed a force that hadn't been in her in a long time, and she cataloged the changes when she turned her head to the mirrored wall at her left.

Her body presented a much different story than the one it had told the few months earlier. The harshness of her angles, brought about by her thinness, had softened, and in some places all but disappeared. Her face, sweaty and dusky, remained long, sharp. Her eyes were the first and only parts of her above the neck to reflect a change: they sparkled, pooled, and ebbed in the light. Maura had called them Bay of Naples in nighttime. And Maura had traveled to that exact moment in time and space, so she believed her, even though her cheeks had flushed at the comment. Her face told her that she still was Jane Rizzoli: Sicilian, strong, young, wildfire.

However, the stasis ended there – she certainly was not the Jane Rizzoli that Casey knew. She had begun to reach inside of herself and pull out some ancienter Jane, one even Maura might have trouble recalling. Her trapezii raised against the straps of her bra like Vesuvius: inconspicuous at first and casual glance, but rippling with danger upon closer inspection. Cephalic veins ran along her biceps like twin currents, carrying fiery blood to the terrain of muscle just beneath. Maura had remarked that Jane's prominent cephalic and ulnar veins denoted a particularly splendid musculature. Jane laughed at that, Maura simply reached for her glass of wine after having run her fingers along said veins.

Looking down toward her sculpted abdominals and legs, Jane smiled at her progress. Almost there. She had thickened, and that made for a much more intimidating demeanor, if her previous one could be improved upon. She surveyed the work she and Maura had done one last time – her with her catholic devotion to exercise, and the doctor with her precise measurements of diet and distribution of supplements (all natural, of course, as she would not let the detective forget). Their pet project, she sometimes thought of it as. She wondered where exactly Maura was at the moment, when usually she was down here, offering commentary on Jane's workout and handing her whatever she needed to ingest at that moment.

In fact, the prospect of Jane's training brought them closer again after Hurricane Casey last blew through their lives. While she was grateful to have a practically free personal trainer and nutritionist, she also was grateful for the time it gave her with best friend. Time they had lost in months past. Things finally ascended toward the up and up, however. The detective mused that today had been the only hiccup in their usually cemented routine. A routine that she closed her eyes to picture, commencing with Maura stretching her and ended with the same. In fact, at the end of her workout, like now, the pathologist would run hands over the just-strained muscles, speaking breathlessly about their immaculate shape, as though she were the one who had just demolished a speedbag or blasted through a lifting session, and not Jane. When she opened her eyes again, her arms tingled with the almost-there pinpricks of Maura's alternating fingernails and palms. She filed away the sensation to ask the doctor about later.

"Staring at yourself again, Janie?" a familiar nasally Bostonian filled the once empty gym, along with the shuffle of a gymbag and some freeweights.

"Yup, just debating which arm to beat the shit out of you with, little brother," laughed Jane, her voice hoarse from lack of use and bodily exertion. She caught Frankie's eye in the mirror and flashed him a guilty grin.

Her brother took her current regimen boost as a chance to spend more time with her, and met her down here twice a week, sometimes more. His kind eyes fluttered and danced as he returned the sentiment, an agreement to spar passing between them without so much as a word. She thanked whatever deity looked over her that they had regained this silent highway of communication after Casey left, and she was thankful to him for picking up the slack enough to reaffirm their bond. Not many weighty words left her thin, Roman lips, nor his fuller, Arabic ones, but enough ran through the current between their dark, dark eyes. No Rizzolis were good with words, but this? The looking, appraising, scrutinizing, and appreciating did all the necessary talking for the family. It flickered between Jane and Frankie at all times.

Between herself and Maura, it blazed. She heard the flames roaring in her stomach, even now, as her mind wandered back to the thought of the medical examiner and her plans. Just where was she? She obviously didn't lie about it being a meeting, but hadn't said exactly what that meant. It ate at Jane's detective consciousness. However, she was not about to run around town after her friend and find out.

She'd have to take some of that frustration out on her brother, poor guy.