#atheist maura who was possessed in rural maine? married to catholic jane with whom she hunts ghosts?

[anthrofreshtodeath]

THE CONJURING RIZZLES AU 😧 how is every au idea outta your head a straight banger damn (esp after reading your vampire au i know you’d do it so much justice omgg)

Sigh… yes 😭. I haven’t touched it in three years and I’m sad about it because I feel like it could be really good. However, I have too many other, more fleshed out ideas to finish before I get to it. I’ll post the bit I did complete here:

Maura Isles had to use the bathroom.

She’d felt the pangs in her bladder for almost an hour now. Unfortunately, there was still at least another hour until the sun came up, and while that was the case, she found herself unable to move, unable to even open her eyes. The darkness had been oppressive these past few months, preying on her exhaustion and squashing her empirical rationality.

She whimpered into the cavernous expanse of the bedroom, besieged by fear she had started to loathe, frustrated by her inability to conquer this irrational terror. Her pulse quickened and her spine turned cold, all the while her need grew. Time slowed and her senses grew heightened, as though in collusion with whatever force sought to torture her. Stars pulsated behind her eyelids. The sheets clung to her body in swampy humidity, daring her to squirm, to move.

And she heard the tick-tock of the clock in the bathroom just a few short steps away. 3:07. It was pure cacophony when she’d gotten no sleep and something in the nighttime air had taken to terrorizing her. She tried, as she crossed her legs ever so slowly, to convince herself that it was something within: that it was her brain that waged war against her. Certainly, with all that had transpired, a certain amount of hysteria was warranted, and she even considered post traumatic stress as a cause.

But she feared what she might hear when the clock was done sounding. She feared that if she really concentrated, she would hear whispers dark enough to curdle every part of her. She knew not what the whispers would say, how they would sound.

She thought she knew who would be doing the whispering, thought, and she wasn’t ready for that yet. So, she slid her hand under the pillow on the other side of her bed, grabbed the rosary she never dared to look at in the daytime, and willed herself to get up with internal explanations of the rarity of disembodied voices, the effect of anxiety on the senses, the paranoia that would inevitably follow the agony of the invasion she had experienced only a few weeks prior.

The fall air bit at her skin as she rose, her silk, short, barely there black and white chemise more of an affront to the cold than a guard against it, but she dared not look into the corner of the room where her robe, a comfort against the chill, laid against a chair. Shadows took advantage of dark corners. And, Maura knew, though she would not have been able to explain how if asked, that the stench that had started to bubble up in the room was coming from that corner.

It smelled like death.

It smelled... offensive, and she clutched the rosary so hard it pricked her skin and spread her metacarpals. She trotted the last few steps to the bathroom and slammed the door so that she could turn the light on. She tried to grasp at an elusive and thin relief as she rested her back against the door, willing her thudding heart to calm before she walked to the toilet. She spread her fingers against her chest as if that would work, as if the beads of the necklace and the cross at its end could suck the fear out of her.

She gulped and pushed away from the door, finally deciding that her bladder could take no more abuse. She relieved herself, hyper aware of the vulnerability of her position, stuck until she finished, at the mercy of her body and its functions. The din of the overhead fan served as obscurity, but even that made her nervous - she didn’t want to be heard, she didn’t want to hear, but the sensory deprivation scared her almost as much as what she might discover in the dark.

She shrieked when a furious pounding shook the bathroom door.

The knocks were regular, but so frenzied in force and speed that they could not have been human. Maura crouched behind the half-wall next to the toilet and actually prayed.

“Maura?” rasped a voice from the other side of the door. Maura opened her eyes, relief and suspicion warring within her thundering heart. She said nothing for fear of being duped by whatever hunted her. The voice said her name again, this time a little more sure, a little more real. “Maura?”

“Jane?” Maura’s own voice was quiet, hoarse, small.

“Yeah, babe,” was the response in Jane’s unmistakable timbre. “You alright in there?” the question was hesitant and slow, as if Jane knew the answer to it and hoped that Maura wouldn’t lie.

“I’m, I’m ok,” Maura said on a shaky breath. She smoothed the silk over her thighs in a calming swipe, rising and walking toward the sink. She turned on the water more to muffle the sound of her own shame than to drown out Jane. She went through the scientist’s routine of wetting, soaping, scrubbing, and rewetting her hands for twenty uninterrupted seconds. For a moment she wondered if she hallucinated Jane calling out to her from the bedroom.

“I thought I heard you yelling,” said kind Jane in reply, infusing her response with doubt to buy Maura some dignity, some deniability. “Maybe I dreamt it.”

Maura sighed. She wiped her hands dry and then ran one through her sleep-mussed hair. Objectively, she looked beautiful, skin rosy with rest and nightwear salaciously short, a gold pendant the perfect accent to the smattering of freckles across her chest like a constellation. In actuality, she was a mess. Nerves were shot, eyes were bleary - but the perfect antidote for her woes, at least in this moment, was waiting just a room away.

All she had to do was open the door, so she did. “No, you heard correctly.” she said, her hazel eyes bashful, downcast.

At least it allowed her to survey Jane from the toes up. Jane Rizzoli was planted firmly on the floor, and Maura adored the way the skin over her long feet, runner’s feet, provided dark contrast to the bathroom carpet’s light. Maura adored Jane’s slim ankles, her open stance, her defined quadriceps poking out through a pair of short basketball shorts she wore to bed. She adored Jane’s cocked hips, as though ready to fire, she adored the torso that went on forever and the arms open for her already.

More than any of those things, however, she adored Jane’s handsome features knotted up in sleep and concern. Dark and wild eyes glossed over with worry and the harsh lines of her cheeks bunched forward in a sympathetic grimace. Her mouth was a hard, closed line. “C’mere,” it finally said, and Maura collapsed into the hug waiting for her. She wanted to cry, and figured that if Jane’s face was buried in her hair, maybe she could without being seen.

Jane was warm, she was soft, and her unruly black hair provided the perfect shield to the outside world. Perception was failing Maura and up until very recently, Maura relied completely on perception to process her surroundings. The only truths were the ones she could see, hear, smell, taste, touch. The only things that existed were the provable ones, and what other way to prove them but by sensing them?

Now there were very clearly things that existed which could not be explained by natural processes. There were things that assaulted her senses, manipulated them, but operated completely outside the realm of them. And, just thinking about all of it ratcheted up her anxiety again - she clawed at the back of Jane’s t-shirt and inhaled as much of her as possible. “I’m sorry I woke you,” she said against Jane’s sternum.

“It’s ok. You grabbed my rosary and I think I started waking up then. You know, eventually you’re gonna have to tell me what happened at the Theriault house,” Jane whispered against Maura’s temple.

For fifteen days she had actively avoided speaking about the Theriault house in rural Maine. She actively avoided even thinking about it. Days one through four were spent in a self-imposed isolation in this very bedroom, and when she broke it to find Jane in the kitchen one morning, making coffee, she had said nothing, only wrapped her arms around Jane from behind and sobbed into the t-shirt stretched across a broad Italian back. “I… I know,” she said, a monumental acquiescence, “but for now, I want to go back to sleep.”

Jane sighed. “Then let’s do that,” she said. They labored through the cold back under the covers, and when Maura burrowed against Jane’s front, her face at the conjunction of Jane’s chest and throat, she finally felt herself fall back into a fitful sleep.

___

Maura, in a high-waisted plum skirt, a multi-colored, purple-tinged sleeveless blouse, looked nothing like the scared woman hiding in the bathroom only a few hours before. Her heels made her nearly as tall as a barefoot Jane when she stepped into the kitchen. Sun poured in through the expanse of windows on either side of the fireplace, and the light accentuated all of the wisps of light brown around the crown of Jane’s black hair. Jane was all brightness in light gray suit pants and a pastel yellow t-shirt, and together they looked immaculate.

“You hate the espresso machine,” Maura teased, her eyebrows knitted tight with her smirking mouth. She spread her fingers over Jane’s outspread ones when the portafilter clattered to the counter and grounds splattered across the granite.

“Shit,” Jane popped her pointer finger in her mouth; it smarted with the pressure of the uncooperative portafilter. “Well, I thought I’d surprise your mother.”

Maura laughed and her cheeks tinged red with pleasure. “You refuse to learn for me for years - my mother stays for one night and suddenly you’re interested?”

“I feel like I need to get on her good side,” Jane shrugged, “we didn’t start off so smooth.”

“You were defending me when she had neglected to put me on the list of an event that she invited me to,” Maura reasoned, “she respects you for that.”

#ask anthrofreshtodeath #rizzoli and isles #lauren writes rizzoli and isles fanfiction #there have been a lot of things I’ve almost written and now regret not going back to #perhaps this will get written someday #atheist maura who was possessed in rural maine? married to catholic jane with whom she hunts ghosts? #idk if I know how to write that much trauma #but of course Jane would love the shit out of her #as it should be in any universe