That was it, her human interactions were now short almost clinical. There was no warm banter, no playful jokes about her vernacular, nothing except the question and answer. She was Queen of the Dead and she remained with her subjects, away from the life that used to fill the precinct, the joviality that, despite their line of work, almost all the detectives managed to share and away from the coldness that had seeped into them all. Without a Rizzoli, it felt like the building was mourning their absence, its sadness infecting each one of them.

Shaking the morbid thoughts from her mind, she returned her attention to the report before her, rereading the statements she had already made before adding a few new notes and attaching the forensics reports. She signed the bottom in her eloquent hand and reached into her desk drawer for a band aid which she carefully stuck over her blister and slipped her foot into her designer shoe.

She would deliver this to Korsak and then go and see Jane. She knew that with Frankie still in critical condition in the hospital, Angela wouldn’t have been by with food for her daughter and she knew that Jane would be living on a diet of cocoa puffs and water by now so some groceries and a good friend couldn’t hurt her recovery.

-/-

Jane stood in the bathroom, staring at her own reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were puffy and red and the tear streaks were still visible on her cheeks. She splashed cold water into her face and sighed. “C’mon Rizzoli!” she told the stranger in the mirror, “Pull it together.”

She’d awoken on the floor having, she assumed, rolled off of the sofa in her unconscious. This was getting beyond a joke now. “5 days and…” She glanced into her bedroom; a collection of small pink stickers on the mirror charted her panic attacks. “9 panic attacks.” She told herself sadly.

This is how she knew the detective in her was dead, the person she had been two weeks ago understood the concept of panicking; it just didn’t apply to her. She was action; she was about facing down the bad guys. She was Detective Jane Rizzoli!! And now she was nothing, a broken, hollow excuse for the human condition.