”They had two sets of arms, they had two sets of legs.”

Jane shook her head. She really needed to talk to Maura about her musical tastes.

”They had two faces peering out of one giant head, so they could watch all around them as they talked while they read. But they never knew nothing of love.”

Jane chewed her thumbnail as Maura sang softly. Her voice, while slightly off-key was full of sorrow. Jane ached to reach out, offer some comfort as the words fell from the doctors lips. Something stopped her, an unexplained desire to hear how this story ended.
She knew Maura listened to music that spoke to her on some level, music that touched something personal within her. Granted, it was usually in Italian, but still.

”It was before, the origins of love.”

Maura worked diligently, blissfully unaware of her audience as she removed and weighed vital organs.

”And there were three sexes then, one that looked like two men glued up back to back, called the children of the sun.”

Maura placed an intestine, Jane couldn’t tell which one, into her scale, pausing to note its weight and condition. Jane frowned. How on earth could Maura, a logical often to the point of distraction, woman of science listen to something that made so little sense?

”And similar in shape and girth were the children of the earth, they looked like two girls rolled up in one.”

Maura sighed sadly and Jane heard her sniffing as her shoulders shook. Had Jane not been so finely in tune with the doctor, she would have missed the motion.

”And the children of the moon were like a fork stuck on a spoon. They were part sun, part earth, part daughter, part son.”

Maura sniffed again, wiping her arm briskly across her eyes.

”She should know.” She spoke, her voice louder than when she had been singing. She ran her gloved hand gently over the cold forehead of the body. ”If only I knew how to tell her.”

Jane worried at the scars on her hands. The ache in Maura’s tone stirred something deep in the detective. The part of her she’d spent her entire life trying to hide, trying to run away from. Her priest had tried to ’pray the gay away’ when a twelve year old Jane had run to him in near hysterics after she had kissed a girl for the first time.
His reaction to her confession had scared her so badly that she never spoke of her feelings again, buried them in a locked box, never to see the light of day again. Until Maura. The woman had sashayed into her chaotic life, wrenched the box from its hiding place and scattered the gay all over Jane’s waking world.
Until now, Jane had assumed it was unintentional.