4Jane loved her job, she really did.
Ironically, once she'd had enough time to really think about it, she knew it was actually because of that whole childhood hated Roly-Poly Rizzoli thing that she even had it.
Kids could be just as every bit cruel as adults.
Maybe even more perhaps, at least verbally, because even in their brutality they tended to absolute unfiltered intense honesty in everything they felt or thought and their victims felt it. They meant what they said. It just added to the hurt when you knew that what they said was also true beneath all the cruelty.
She had always wondered why they were this way. The best she could come up with was that kids just hadn't lived long enough to stop putting in one hundred and ten percent in everything. They hadn't learned yet to tame their passion for living with reason, so even when it was something they knew they shouldn't do, they still usually went all in anyway. They just didn't know anyway else to live. Their world experience simply wasn't long enough yet to have taught them any different.
Jane didn't know if this was actually true or not, but it seemed to make the most sense to her. Though she did make a mental note to sometime remember to ask Maura what the child psychological studies said about the whole thing.
It was handy having your own personal Search Engine.
And Maura knew a lot about the cruelty of children. She had, after all, been different from the others, too.
Jane's hand automatically tightened into a fist and she forced herself to relax it.
She couldn't change the past for either of them.
But whatever it ultimately was, kids definitely weren't all cute puppy dog tails and sugar and spice niceness. She remembered way too many school playground recesses ending in fights, followed by way too many detentions and trips to the principal's office after the school nurse got done patching everybody up to believe that Pollyanna idea.
She'd grown out of the baby fat eventually and the awful hated nickname had faded away once she had. But by the time it did, Jane knew it had thoroughly changed her somehow. She'd gotten so used to protecting herself from being taunted and bullied that it had only seemed natural to extend that fierceness to the protection of her brothers when they needed it. And later, to expand out beyond her family to anyone else who found themselves needing some of it, too.
It was like some internal switch had been flipped in her pudgy kid psyche that first cold Boston morning when she had suddenly stopped crying helplessly at the tormenting hurt and thrown that first angry justice seeking punch back.
The moment when she had first realized that she didn't have to just take it anymore. That she could do something to try and make the pain stop.
Apparently, unlike Batman, not all children needed to see abject horror to get their superhero origin story going. Sometimes all they needed was just enough personal suffering to motivate them to decide to finally dare to change their world themselves.
Jane blushed a bit.
Not that she thought herself a superhero, of course.
Her long fingers found themselves ever so gently tracing over the thin fabric of her shirt, feeling the scar of the bullet wound in her side.
And not that she would ever admit to anyone, even Maura, that her origin story started with being called Roly-Poly Rizzoli because that was, well, just too plain embarrassing with the silly indignity of it.
Jane smiled ruefully.
But nonetheless, it didn't change the fact that it was true.
Her gaze shifted to the stack of closed cases on her desk that she'd just finished doing all the signing off on. And to the last one on top in particular.
She had figured it out fast enough to save the little boy.
His sobbing mother and father had hugged her so hard that she swore she could actually hear her ribs creak. She had put up the crayon drawn picture he'd made for 'his detective' on her battered refrigerator door last night. It was of a happy family holding hands again. And though she knew she didn't rate superhero, with that whole lack of cool powers or sweet gadgets and mad kung fu skills, maybe Maura had been right that she could still manage to be something else just as desperately needed.
It was why Jane worked here, in spite of all the headaches and the nightmares and the near death moments and the endless idiot paperwork she had to put up with on a regular basis.
Because here she got the chance to do something to try and make the pain stop every day.
For everyone in Boston.
And she loved it.
It was just still weirdly funny to her is all.
Who would have ever thought it would begin all those years ago with some stupid bullying kids having fun torturing the chubby girl every recess on the playground?
That Roly-Poly Rizzoli would one day eventually create Detective Jane Clementine Rizzoli 'city hailed hero'?
Jane grinned mischievously to herself, shaking her wild black curls at the amusing irony of it all. She shifted forward in her creaking desk chair and picked up a well chewed pen to get back to work.
And to tell the truth, it was just as utterly satisfying as bloodying that first nose had been.
But then, maybe there could have been just a touch of righteous vengeance mixed in with the justice of that first punch.
She was, after all, Italian.