Credit for the thoughts in this chapter goes to people who submitted on Rizzoli & Isles head canon.
The literature referenced is J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan. I own nothing except fluffy socks, a mad dog, insane cats and M&Ms, so there’s no point in suing me. I am playing with the characters for my own enjoyment.

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When Maura finally awoke it was to the sound of rain hammering on her window. Stretching and yawning loudly, she snuggled in closer to the pillow and sighed. This was the worst part about her current situation, Jane would so often spend the night and she always awoke surrounded by the smell of her shampoo, her perfume, her Jane. To have her so close and not be able to touch her, to hold her in her arms as she slept, it was a mixed blessing. She knew that to have Jane in her life at all was a true blessing. Growing up as the socially awkward child she had been, she hadn’t had any friends, not real ones. The people that she found around her were always after something, a copy of her notes, a slice of her inheritance, or something more physical. None of them had ever wanted her for who she was. Stripped of intelligence, money, stature or her other fine attributes, Maura knew they wouldn’t have looked at her twice.
Jane asked her for nothing and in return, Maura had found herself giving the detective everything. But to have her so close and not be able to tell her of the thoughts and feelings she had, was almost too painful to handle.

As a child she had been lonely, locking herself away in the huge library at boarding school for hours on end, reading the classics by Austen and Shakespeare and, when she felt particularly lonely, more childish pleasures like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’or her personal favourite, ‘Peter Pan’.
She sat up in bed and reached for her nightstand without looking. Taped to the top of the drawer’s compartment, she pulled the worn and well-read copy and fingered the pages with love before settling it in her lap and wiping her eyes.

“All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother.” She spoke softly, her voice shaking with the unshed tears of a childhood devoid of love and friendship. She didn’t need to open the binding; she knew this story as well as she knew herself. “I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’” Tears fell unashamedly down her cheeks, marking her otherwise pristine dress.