Eureka FF: "Should something strange begin" (Jack/Nathan, PG-13)
Title: Should something strange begin
Fandom: Eureka
Pairing: Jack/Nathan
Rating: PG-13 (some sexual references, some swearing)
Length: 3,750 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to the Sci-Fi channel and people not me.
Spoilers: Through S2, set in what is probably an AU sometime afterwards
Summary: Nathan counted the doors closing: lab, corridor, elevator back up from Section Nine to Ally’s office. Jack had come a long way into Global just to ask stupid questions.
AN: For serene_quill, in the 2008 Fic Exchange at marshal_science who wanted: first time, lots of snark and banter, a happy ending, and Jack chasing Nathan and did not want: established relationship, character death, character bashing, heavy angst.
Jack was hovering by the door of his lab. Nathan waited, wondering how long it would take before he cracked. He clicked his pen, absently.
Jack coughed. “Stark.”
That was almost too easy. “Sheriff.”
“Thought I might find you here.”
“I try to hide, but somehow something like this always happens.”
“Something like…”
“People find me.” Nathan rubbed his eyes.
Jack frowned. He walked into the lab, and put his hands on the edge of Nathan’s desk. This was the way he did things - making everything that happened in the town his concern, from the top-secret Section Five projects, to Nathan’s mental health. Of course, given the way he was peering over the screen, trying to read Nathan’s upside down equations, it was possible that he thought the safe running of the projects and Nathan’s mental health might be related. If Jack wouldn’t come running every time there was any kind of minor explosion in GD, he wouldn’t have to be so concerned.
“Nathan,” Jack said.
“Yes?”
“The high school are running this field trip to Portland. Some conference on renewable energy at the Convention Centre.”
“Eureka has the lowest environmental impact per capita of any town in the United States. We’re at the forefront of renewable energy. Why are we-?”
Jack interrupted, “Some of these kids have never been outside the town.” He muttered, “I think Zoe may have been involved in some way. Anyway, I’m going with them, to supervise. A bunch of the teachers and staff at the school. And we’re looking for somebody from Global.” A long pause.
Nathan looked up at Jack, who did this sometimes - forgot who he should be talking to. Nathan tugged across another screen, and pulled the personnel files. He scrolled down the list of departments. “You know, it’s really Allison’s permission you need. Let’s see: Dr Murray’s researching ways to lower the energy drain of GD’s systems. There’s a team of grad students on secondment from Berkeley trying to work out how to make something from nothing - they’re not going to get anywhere, but it’s fun watching them try. There’s…”
“Stark!”
“Yes?”
“Really not asking you who you wanted rid of for a weekend.”
“So what were you asking, Sheriff?”
“Allison said, mentioned, really, that you hadn’t, ya know, really got out much. Since…” Since she said no, Nathan filled in, but Jack tried to save it with, “Henry left.”
Nathan stared at him. He went back to the maths.
“Stark?” Jack asked.
“Not interested, Sheriff.”
Jack sighed. “Fine,” he muttered, hurrying away from the lab. Nathan counted the doors closing: lab, corridor, elevator back up from Section Nine to Ally’s office. Jack had come a long way into Global just to ask stupid questions.
* * * *
Nathan didn’t think much about the conversation until the weekend of the trip happened, and he called the Sheriff’s office without thinking.
“I’m sorry, Dr Stark, Carter’s away with the high school, remember?”
“He’s…?”
“With Zoe? In Portland. Did you need something?”
“Actually, it’s better it’s you. Taggart’s lost something small and tooth-having in the basement.”
She growled and swore, telling him, “On it,” before throwing the phone down. Nathan would hate to be Taggart when Lupo found him.
Allison, standing at the other side of her office, looked at him oddly. He shrugged. Nathan didn’t know why she had called him up here to begin with - experimental zoology really wasn’t his field.
“Nathan,” she said.
“Jo’s on her way.”
“Yeah. Carter’s in Portland with the kids. I though he told you that.”
“He did. Not that I especially needed the information, but for some reason he thought I might be interested in playing Camp Counsellor with him.”
“He’s worried about you. So am I, for that matter.”
“You don’t need to be.”
“Nathan.” Her voice was low and soft. She came over to stand alongside him and look through the window. “He did want you to go with him,” she said.
It was such a strange statement that Nathan was forced to turn and face her. She looked down. A few minutes later, Jo came storming through the lobby, yelling for Taggart. Apparently she had warned him that something like this was going to happen with those ‘mutant ferrets’. Taggart, wisely, was staying hidden.
“You should go deal with that,” Nathan told Allison.
“Okay,” Allison said, walking towards the door. She opened it, and didn’t turn around. “Think about what I said?” Not waiting for an answer, she left to talk to Jo. Nathan wasn’t sure what she was supposed to have said.
* * * *
Jack looked tired, when Nathan saw him again, back where he was supposed to be. He was shepherding a crowd of teenage girls off the bus, and they were laughing at him. Or about him, given the blushing, and the way Zoe Carter was ignoring them all. Jack was doing an admirable job of ignoring them himself. Trying to, anyway, though Nathan could see the colour rise in his cheeks.
“Nathan!” Jack called, relief in his voice. He turned to the girls, who still hadn’t dispersed back to their homes. “Look, it’s Dr Stark. He has, what is it now, three doctorates and a Nobel Prize? Talk to him!”
Nathan neatly sidestepped the sudden attention. He found himself too close to Jack, pressed alongside him when the teenagers pushed past. Jack turned his head and only had to whisper to be heard. “Never doing that again. One teenage girl is quite enough.”
It felt as though they had missed a step - as if there was another conversation they should have been having, not this casual intimacy. Nathan took a breath, and between the inhale and the exhale, the press of crowd was gone. He stepped away. “Jo told me you volunteered.”
Jack looked at him curiously, and then nodded. “These kids, I think it’s better they had some non-scientist supervision. And Jo…”
“Likes to be in charge sometimes?”
Jack grinned. “Yeah.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Hey…” Jack’s expression fell, “hey, I know you’re not… but you’re pretty much doing whatever the hell you want, right? Allison still trusts you to do… whatever it is you’re doing in there.”
“Yes.”
Jack looked as though he had been waiting for a longer answer. The street had cleared, and Zoe Carter was tapping her fingers on the roof of her car. Jack said, “Stark. You want to maybe grab a coffee or something? My ride’s here anyway.”
Jack felt too close again, though there was space enough between them now that they would both need to stretch out to touch their hands together.
Nathan held up his hands, and shook his head. “I have work to do.”
“Nathan.”
“Later, Carter.”
* * * *
Nathan still wasn’t quite used to being alone for sustained periods of time. Even after Kim Anderson, and his unceremonious removal from leadership, he had never been more than yelling distance away from another person. Now Allison was busy most of the time, and Henry was still being investigated by shadowy organisations even Nathan had no sway over. It had been a conscious decision to settle his new lab in the farthest corner of Section Nine.
He wasn’t a ‘people person’, or any of the words Allison used when she really meant ‘tolerant of other people’s stupidity’. Still - he wasn’t exactly sorry when his cell phone buzzed.
“Dr Stark.”
“Fargo.”
“We have a… there’s been a bit of a…”
Nathan sighed. “What did you do?”
“Me?” Fargo squeaked. “Try asking him.”
“And ‘him’ would be?” Nathan asked, locking his screen and getting up to head for the elevator.
Fargo’s response was, as ever, full of agitated ranting and yet lacking in pertinent details. Nathan could translate from that back to real-world-speak without thinking about it. Doctor Banks was trapped in Section Seven. Computer was trying to eat them all. Not Fargo’s fault.
When he got to the atrium, Carter grinned at him. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
There was a bang. Worried looking people started pouring up the stairs. Smoke trailed after them, and alarms rang out all over the building.
“Down?” Jack asked, over his shoulder, already heading towards the epicentre of the chaos.
“Down,” Nathan agreed.
“Seriously though: I only see you when there’s a crisis. Where’s the love, Stark?”
Nathan laughed, without taking a break from solving the problem in his head. He caught up with Jack in time to see the hint of a surprised smile fading from his face.
Jack asked, “So how’ll we know when we’re inside the giant computer game?”
“It’s not-” Trust Carter to make an immensely complicated virtual interface sound like the latest ‘Halo’ upgrade. And trust Global Dynamics to somehow make what should be the least threatening project, the one that was about to knock the building down. They had, back up in Section Five, weaponry that Carter would only be slightly wrong in terming ‘sonic death rays’. But apparently it was the urban development guys they really had to watch out for. If Martin Banks wasn’t dead, he was certainly going to be up for review after this one.
The system was meant to run simulations for city developers. It modelled the city in VR, and the user could choose the forces to act on it - flood, earthquake, alien invasion…
The walls flickered around them.
The problem, though, had only really come about when the program had started interacting with the artificial intelligence. Add some faulty (or possibly chewed-by-stray-mammal) wiring, and stand back and watch the fireworks.
Nathan said, “This should be easier for you than it is for me, but whatever you do: don’t think of anything.”
Jack looked at him in disbelief.
Nathan sighed. “The artificial intelligence, Sheriff? Which will try to recreate whichever inane thought that crosses your mind?”
“Yeah, but…” The words burst out of him. “You get that this is Ghostbusters, right? ‘Don’t cross the streams’? I mean, it’s practically…” Carter’s eyes went wide.
“Don’t you dare,” Nathan growled.
“Stark…”
“I mean it, Carter, don’t even think-”
“Trying not to!”
“Anything else but that.” Nathan grabbed Jack’s arm for emphasis, his hand settling into the bend of Jack’s elbow, onto warm skin.
The scene changed.
They were standing at the back of a ballroom, lots of little tables between them and the stage. There was a presentation running on the screen, though no one was there to operate it. Pictures and figures crossed the screen: carbon dioxide emissions and projected impact and ways science could help both of those. At some point when they weren’t about to be crushed by the AI, Nathan really was going to have to investigate Carter’s global warming fixation. Except- “Did you bring me to Portland?”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“May I ask why?”
“You told me to think of something else.”
“And your first thought was- Never mind.”
The noise in the background was the dull computer hum, and something that resembled quiet young voices. The lights were low, and Carter’s eyes very blue when Nathan looked into them.
Somewhere outside the room, someone screamed.
“Martin,” Carter said, and spun on his heel to head for the door. Nathan was forced to follow after him, still halfway holding onto his arm.
From the noises he was making, Nathan surmised that Martin’s imagination was not so happy a place as Carter’s. The floor cracked underneath them.
“Did he start an earthquake?” Carter asked.
“It is his speciality.”
“Yeah, well, my speciality’s…” Carter sputtered for a second, lost for words, and Nathan would have mocked were it not for the burst of gunfire above his head. Above his head at that point only because Jack had shoved him to the floor.
Jack turned Nathan’s head gently from side to side. “You okay?” he asked, obviously checking for concussion, or shock, or a bullet hole he hadn’t noticed.
“Do that again and I’ll make you wish earthquakes were the worst thing you’ll be locked in here with.”
Carter’s face closed off, even as he offered Nathan a hand to get back to his feet.
Three turns of the corridor later, the screen behind the unmanned security desk was flashing a message.
Dr Stark? Sheriff Carter?
The VR is spreading out into the building. You need to get to the mainframe and shut it down manually. Head right from this terminal, left at the next branch, straight ahead through the conference room, then up the stairs. Soon? I don’t want to die in Bizarro-Portland.
- D Fargo
Another yell. To the left, naturally.
Carter said, “We have to get to Dr Banks.”
“We have to get this thing turned off.”
“Stark.”
“Carter.”
“How much damage can it really be doing out there?”
“Don’t ask questions like that unless you really want to know the answer.”
“Damn it, Nathan! Can we split up?”
“Not if you want this fixed. Look… he’s probably fine. Or he will be, when we get the VR turned off.”
Carter sighed in disgust, though it was impossible to know if it was at Nathan or himself. But he followed Nathan, following Fargo’s instructions. He shoved his way through the doors which might or might not have been real, and turned switches which certainly were real, when Nathan asked him to.
And at the end, when the unreality flickered out to reveal the crumpled corpse at the other side of the room, Carter muttered, “Damn it, Nathan,” and walked away.
* * * *
There was a moment at the funeral where Nathan could have fixed things, even if he still wasn’t sure what it had been before it was broken.
Jack stood at the graveside, formal in a dark suit that screamed ‘Town Sheriff’ as much as the uniform. Zoe stood beside him, and wrapped an arm around his back. Nathan was close enough to hear Jack say, “I’ve been to more funerals the two years here than my whole life in LA.”
Zoe nodded into his shoulder. Jack looked up across the grave, and caught Nathan’s eye. Nathan dipped his head in acknowledgement of the situation, or of the sentiment. He was too far away to try a sentence like, “You know it was still the right call,” but Jack saw it in his expression, and frowned.
Allison came up behind them, bridging the gap with one hand on each of them. “Do you guys want to get coffee and go over these reports?”
Jack said, “You have mine.”
“Jack-”
“I have work to do.”
Jack walked away, his daughter a half-step behind him, and Nathan was left to try and explain to Allison why Jack was taking this personally again all of a sudden. Like he had said, they were used to funerals here. Nathan shrugged off her questioning. Some deaths hit harder than others - that was all. The ones where you knew the victim, the ones where you should have been the victim, and the ones you should have stopped. There were the ones that were actively your fault, of course, but Eureka had surprisingly few of those by this point. Accidents, and lesser evils, and a few murders, but not much gross negligence. Their collateral damage was about as limited as it was going to get. Carter tended not to see it that way.
From the look on Allison’s face, he had said some of that last part out loud. When she left with his report, she patted his shoulder, thought about it a moment, and then kissed his cheek. “Don’t stay out too late.”
Nathan nodded, but the next time he looked up, Café Diem was considerably emptier, and the skies outside were dark. He was approximately three and a half hours away from figuring out exactly where Banks had went wrong, got himself killed, and nearly killed the rest of them with him. Vincent set a coffee down in front of him, and placed a muffin beside it.
Nathan said, “I didn’t ask for-”
“Compliments of the Sheriff.”
He couldn’t help looking up and around, to see how Jack Carter had got in here without being noticed. It took longer than it should have to ascertain that he really wasn’t there.
Vincent said, “Sorry, Dr Stark, he just left. He didn’t say much, not after this afternoon, but he did ask how long you’d been sitting there.”
“And you told him?”
“Well… yeah. Was I wrong?”
“Hmm? No, Vincent, it’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
Between Vincent’s too-nonchalant agreement, and Nathan’s own inability to think past the problem, it took him closer to four hours to finish.
* * * *
“Well,” Jack said, “you and I are just working through the classics, aren’t we?” They were the first words Carter had addressed directly to Nathan in a week. However, seeing as the pair of them were currently, presumably, the only three-inch men in the world, he didn’t really have a lot of choice.
“Which classics would those be?” Nathan asked.
“Ghostbusters,” Jack said, reminding him, “and now Alice in Wonderland. That one always freaked Zoe out for some reason. I think it was the cat. And this is a girl who’s now completely unfazed by the fact that her house sulks if she forgets to take her lunch to school.”
“Let’s hope she takes her father turning pocketsize equally in her stride.”
“It would help if her father could take that part in his stride.” Jack slumped against the wall.
Nathan sat beside him. “Carter, this isn’t even the strangest thing to happen this week.”
Jack sighed, and then laughed. “No.”
“No?”
“No, you’re right, it isn’t. The second, at best.”
“Okay then.”
“Okay what?”
“What were you doing here in the first place?” Jack had turned up without pretext, somehow tracing Nathan to the lab that wasn’t his. Nathan would have asked when Jack arrived, but there had been that moment of awkwardness before he had been able, and then the equipment’s readings had jumped. There hadn’t been much time to ask after that, what with the height loss and the “we’ll just put you in one of Taggart’s enclosures, for safekeeping.” Nathan was fairly sure Allison had been grinning when she said that, but it was hard to be sure when she towered so much above the two of them.
“I came to see what you were doing,” Jack said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Nathan asked. “You don’t understand or, for that matter, care what I’m doing.”
Jack sighed, and made a face like he wanted to yell, or bang his fist on the wall. Instead he slumped further, so that his shoulder was pressed against Nathan’s. “Are you actually this oblivious, or are you screwing with me? Because I’m starting to think the whole genius thing is just an act.”
Jack had turned to face the other wall, so he wouldn’t be able to read Nathan’s expression of confusion. He shrugged instead, and knew that Jack felt it.
“Should I have started smaller?” Jack asked. He laughed. “No pun intended.”
“Started smaller with what, Jack?”
“I mean,” Jack said, raising his arms to wave ineffectually, “A weekend away from the town - that wasn’t obvious enough? I get that you’re a guy, and maybe just coming to see you and bringing you stuff isn’t good enough, but a goddamn weekend out of town?”
“Carter, I really don’t…”
“This is the last one, okay, I swear. So if you actually are as smart as you say you are, and this has been you trying to spare my feelings or something, it’s time to speak up.”
Jack tilted his head to look at Nathan, face very close all of a sudden, and expression so serious. Nathan knew now, or thought that he did; it made sense now. The thing was, he had been puzzling away without an inkling of a working hypothesis, which was the sort of thing no scientist ever really did. Even if you were just going to be proved hopelessly wrong, everyone needed an idea to start with. What they also needed, naturally, was that one piece of conclusive evidence that proved beyond a shadow of doubt. The piece that turned conjecture into truth, shining and clear. Nathan waited. He closed his eyes, the hint of invitation if Jack needed one.
Nathan could feel the warmth - breath and closer body heat - before Jack’s lips touched his, soft and careful. Testing. Nathan leant back, enough to whisper, “Go ahead.”
Jack stopped. Nathan opened his eyes to see Jack’s hint of a smile. “You really didn’t know?” Jack asked.
“It wouldn’t have been my first guess, no.”
“And now?”
Nathan shifted, probably a tiny fraction of an inch, but at this size it was plenty. Jack gasped, and twisted to match his movement. Nathan said, “Enough invitation for you Sheriff?”
“Won’t they…?” Jack asked, looking up at their currently opaque ceiling.
“Even if they do look,” Nathan said, “what are they possibly going to see at this scale?”
“Now there,” Jack muttered, already leaning in again, “is that Stark intellect that was MIA before.”
He should have taken offence, and might have, any other day. But Jack moved fluidly from angle to angle as if he had been planning this out in his head long before today. And Nathan counted coffees, and inexplicable visits that suddenly made sense, and knew they had another hour or so before anyone would be able to fix their height problem. Sure Allison could decide to look in (and would probably perceive more than he’d implied to Jack), and certainly this was a spectacularly bad idea on both their parts. It was still only the second dumbest he’d been this week, and that was weirdly comforting.
“You know this is a one-time thing?” Nathan asked.
Jack stopped.
“You getting one over on me,” Nathan went on. “It won’t happen again.”
Jack grinned, reaching his hand into Nathan’s shirt and pulling them closer together. “Have to say, I never really pictured you as the ditz in this relationship. It was more you with the science, quantum entanglement, ‘let me show you my grav convertor’…” His other hand slid down, and Nathan’s inarticulacy probably didn’t help his case much. Jack’s smirk was wicked.
Nathan managed, “And what are you doing during all this?”
“Oh, you know,” Jack said, and leant in for another kiss. “keeping you on your toes. Or off them, whichever works for you.”
Off, as it happened, worked just fine for Nathan.
FIN. Title ref is, in fact, 'Alice in Wonderland': "Be patient, is very good advice/ But the waiting makes me curious/ And I'd love the change/ Should something strange begin". And feedback is always appreciated :)
Fandom: Eureka
Pairing: Jack/Nathan
Rating: PG-13 (some sexual references, some swearing)
Length: 3,750 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to the Sci-Fi channel and people not me.
Spoilers: Through S2, set in what is probably an AU sometime afterwards
Summary: Nathan counted the doors closing: lab, corridor, elevator back up from Section Nine to Ally’s office. Jack had come a long way into Global just to ask stupid questions.
AN: For serene_quill, in the 2008 Fic Exchange at marshal_science who wanted: first time, lots of snark and banter, a happy ending, and Jack chasing Nathan and did not want: established relationship, character death, character bashing, heavy angst.
Jack was hovering by the door of his lab. Nathan waited, wondering how long it would take before he cracked. He clicked his pen, absently.
Jack coughed. “Stark.”
That was almost too easy. “Sheriff.”
“Thought I might find you here.”
“I try to hide, but somehow something like this always happens.”
“Something like…”
“People find me.” Nathan rubbed his eyes.
Jack frowned. He walked into the lab, and put his hands on the edge of Nathan’s desk. This was the way he did things - making everything that happened in the town his concern, from the top-secret Section Five projects, to Nathan’s mental health. Of course, given the way he was peering over the screen, trying to read Nathan’s upside down equations, it was possible that he thought the safe running of the projects and Nathan’s mental health might be related. If Jack wouldn’t come running every time there was any kind of minor explosion in GD, he wouldn’t have to be so concerned.
“Nathan,” Jack said.
“Yes?”
“The high school are running this field trip to Portland. Some conference on renewable energy at the Convention Centre.”
“Eureka has the lowest environmental impact per capita of any town in the United States. We’re at the forefront of renewable energy. Why are we-?”
Jack interrupted, “Some of these kids have never been outside the town.” He muttered, “I think Zoe may have been involved in some way. Anyway, I’m going with them, to supervise. A bunch of the teachers and staff at the school. And we’re looking for somebody from Global.” A long pause.
Nathan looked up at Jack, who did this sometimes - forgot who he should be talking to. Nathan tugged across another screen, and pulled the personnel files. He scrolled down the list of departments. “You know, it’s really Allison’s permission you need. Let’s see: Dr Murray’s researching ways to lower the energy drain of GD’s systems. There’s a team of grad students on secondment from Berkeley trying to work out how to make something from nothing - they’re not going to get anywhere, but it’s fun watching them try. There’s…”
“Stark!”
“Yes?”
“Really not asking you who you wanted rid of for a weekend.”
“So what were you asking, Sheriff?”
“Allison said, mentioned, really, that you hadn’t, ya know, really got out much. Since…” Since she said no, Nathan filled in, but Jack tried to save it with, “Henry left.”
Nathan stared at him. He went back to the maths.
“Stark?” Jack asked.
“Not interested, Sheriff.”
Jack sighed. “Fine,” he muttered, hurrying away from the lab. Nathan counted the doors closing: lab, corridor, elevator back up from Section Nine to Ally’s office. Jack had come a long way into Global just to ask stupid questions.
* * * *
Nathan didn’t think much about the conversation until the weekend of the trip happened, and he called the Sheriff’s office without thinking.
“I’m sorry, Dr Stark, Carter’s away with the high school, remember?”
“He’s…?”
“With Zoe? In Portland. Did you need something?”
“Actually, it’s better it’s you. Taggart’s lost something small and tooth-having in the basement.”
She growled and swore, telling him, “On it,” before throwing the phone down. Nathan would hate to be Taggart when Lupo found him.
Allison, standing at the other side of her office, looked at him oddly. He shrugged. Nathan didn’t know why she had called him up here to begin with - experimental zoology really wasn’t his field.
“Nathan,” she said.
“Jo’s on her way.”
“Yeah. Carter’s in Portland with the kids. I though he told you that.”
“He did. Not that I especially needed the information, but for some reason he thought I might be interested in playing Camp Counsellor with him.”
“He’s worried about you. So am I, for that matter.”
“You don’t need to be.”
“Nathan.” Her voice was low and soft. She came over to stand alongside him and look through the window. “He did want you to go with him,” she said.
It was such a strange statement that Nathan was forced to turn and face her. She looked down. A few minutes later, Jo came storming through the lobby, yelling for Taggart. Apparently she had warned him that something like this was going to happen with those ‘mutant ferrets’. Taggart, wisely, was staying hidden.
“You should go deal with that,” Nathan told Allison.
“Okay,” Allison said, walking towards the door. She opened it, and didn’t turn around. “Think about what I said?” Not waiting for an answer, she left to talk to Jo. Nathan wasn’t sure what she was supposed to have said.
* * * *
Jack looked tired, when Nathan saw him again, back where he was supposed to be. He was shepherding a crowd of teenage girls off the bus, and they were laughing at him. Or about him, given the blushing, and the way Zoe Carter was ignoring them all. Jack was doing an admirable job of ignoring them himself. Trying to, anyway, though Nathan could see the colour rise in his cheeks.
“Nathan!” Jack called, relief in his voice. He turned to the girls, who still hadn’t dispersed back to their homes. “Look, it’s Dr Stark. He has, what is it now, three doctorates and a Nobel Prize? Talk to him!”
Nathan neatly sidestepped the sudden attention. He found himself too close to Jack, pressed alongside him when the teenagers pushed past. Jack turned his head and only had to whisper to be heard. “Never doing that again. One teenage girl is quite enough.”
It felt as though they had missed a step - as if there was another conversation they should have been having, not this casual intimacy. Nathan took a breath, and between the inhale and the exhale, the press of crowd was gone. He stepped away. “Jo told me you volunteered.”
Jack looked at him curiously, and then nodded. “These kids, I think it’s better they had some non-scientist supervision. And Jo…”
“Likes to be in charge sometimes?”
Jack grinned. “Yeah.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Hey…” Jack’s expression fell, “hey, I know you’re not… but you’re pretty much doing whatever the hell you want, right? Allison still trusts you to do… whatever it is you’re doing in there.”
“Yes.”
Jack looked as though he had been waiting for a longer answer. The street had cleared, and Zoe Carter was tapping her fingers on the roof of her car. Jack said, “Stark. You want to maybe grab a coffee or something? My ride’s here anyway.”
Jack felt too close again, though there was space enough between them now that they would both need to stretch out to touch their hands together.
Nathan held up his hands, and shook his head. “I have work to do.”
“Nathan.”
“Later, Carter.”
* * * *
Nathan still wasn’t quite used to being alone for sustained periods of time. Even after Kim Anderson, and his unceremonious removal from leadership, he had never been more than yelling distance away from another person. Now Allison was busy most of the time, and Henry was still being investigated by shadowy organisations even Nathan had no sway over. It had been a conscious decision to settle his new lab in the farthest corner of Section Nine.
He wasn’t a ‘people person’, or any of the words Allison used when she really meant ‘tolerant of other people’s stupidity’. Still - he wasn’t exactly sorry when his cell phone buzzed.
“Dr Stark.”
“Fargo.”
“We have a… there’s been a bit of a…”
Nathan sighed. “What did you do?”
“Me?” Fargo squeaked. “Try asking him.”
“And ‘him’ would be?” Nathan asked, locking his screen and getting up to head for the elevator.
Fargo’s response was, as ever, full of agitated ranting and yet lacking in pertinent details. Nathan could translate from that back to real-world-speak without thinking about it. Doctor Banks was trapped in Section Seven. Computer was trying to eat them all. Not Fargo’s fault.
When he got to the atrium, Carter grinned at him. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
There was a bang. Worried looking people started pouring up the stairs. Smoke trailed after them, and alarms rang out all over the building.
“Down?” Jack asked, over his shoulder, already heading towards the epicentre of the chaos.
“Down,” Nathan agreed.
“Seriously though: I only see you when there’s a crisis. Where’s the love, Stark?”
Nathan laughed, without taking a break from solving the problem in his head. He caught up with Jack in time to see the hint of a surprised smile fading from his face.
Jack asked, “So how’ll we know when we’re inside the giant computer game?”
“It’s not-” Trust Carter to make an immensely complicated virtual interface sound like the latest ‘Halo’ upgrade. And trust Global Dynamics to somehow make what should be the least threatening project, the one that was about to knock the building down. They had, back up in Section Five, weaponry that Carter would only be slightly wrong in terming ‘sonic death rays’. But apparently it was the urban development guys they really had to watch out for. If Martin Banks wasn’t dead, he was certainly going to be up for review after this one.
The system was meant to run simulations for city developers. It modelled the city in VR, and the user could choose the forces to act on it - flood, earthquake, alien invasion…
The walls flickered around them.
The problem, though, had only really come about when the program had started interacting with the artificial intelligence. Add some faulty (or possibly chewed-by-stray-mammal) wiring, and stand back and watch the fireworks.
Nathan said, “This should be easier for you than it is for me, but whatever you do: don’t think of anything.”
Jack looked at him in disbelief.
Nathan sighed. “The artificial intelligence, Sheriff? Which will try to recreate whichever inane thought that crosses your mind?”
“Yeah, but…” The words burst out of him. “You get that this is Ghostbusters, right? ‘Don’t cross the streams’? I mean, it’s practically…” Carter’s eyes went wide.
“Don’t you dare,” Nathan growled.
“Stark…”
“I mean it, Carter, don’t even think-”
“Trying not to!”
“Anything else but that.” Nathan grabbed Jack’s arm for emphasis, his hand settling into the bend of Jack’s elbow, onto warm skin.
The scene changed.
They were standing at the back of a ballroom, lots of little tables between them and the stage. There was a presentation running on the screen, though no one was there to operate it. Pictures and figures crossed the screen: carbon dioxide emissions and projected impact and ways science could help both of those. At some point when they weren’t about to be crushed by the AI, Nathan really was going to have to investigate Carter’s global warming fixation. Except- “Did you bring me to Portland?”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“May I ask why?”
“You told me to think of something else.”
“And your first thought was- Never mind.”
The noise in the background was the dull computer hum, and something that resembled quiet young voices. The lights were low, and Carter’s eyes very blue when Nathan looked into them.
Somewhere outside the room, someone screamed.
“Martin,” Carter said, and spun on his heel to head for the door. Nathan was forced to follow after him, still halfway holding onto his arm.
From the noises he was making, Nathan surmised that Martin’s imagination was not so happy a place as Carter’s. The floor cracked underneath them.
“Did he start an earthquake?” Carter asked.
“It is his speciality.”
“Yeah, well, my speciality’s…” Carter sputtered for a second, lost for words, and Nathan would have mocked were it not for the burst of gunfire above his head. Above his head at that point only because Jack had shoved him to the floor.
Jack turned Nathan’s head gently from side to side. “You okay?” he asked, obviously checking for concussion, or shock, or a bullet hole he hadn’t noticed.
“Do that again and I’ll make you wish earthquakes were the worst thing you’ll be locked in here with.”
Carter’s face closed off, even as he offered Nathan a hand to get back to his feet.
Three turns of the corridor later, the screen behind the unmanned security desk was flashing a message.
Dr Stark? Sheriff Carter?
The VR is spreading out into the building. You need to get to the mainframe and shut it down manually. Head right from this terminal, left at the next branch, straight ahead through the conference room, then up the stairs. Soon? I don’t want to die in Bizarro-Portland.
- D Fargo
Another yell. To the left, naturally.
Carter said, “We have to get to Dr Banks.”
“We have to get this thing turned off.”
“Stark.”
“Carter.”
“How much damage can it really be doing out there?”
“Don’t ask questions like that unless you really want to know the answer.”
“Damn it, Nathan! Can we split up?”
“Not if you want this fixed. Look… he’s probably fine. Or he will be, when we get the VR turned off.”
Carter sighed in disgust, though it was impossible to know if it was at Nathan or himself. But he followed Nathan, following Fargo’s instructions. He shoved his way through the doors which might or might not have been real, and turned switches which certainly were real, when Nathan asked him to.
And at the end, when the unreality flickered out to reveal the crumpled corpse at the other side of the room, Carter muttered, “Damn it, Nathan,” and walked away.
* * * *
There was a moment at the funeral where Nathan could have fixed things, even if he still wasn’t sure what it had been before it was broken.
Jack stood at the graveside, formal in a dark suit that screamed ‘Town Sheriff’ as much as the uniform. Zoe stood beside him, and wrapped an arm around his back. Nathan was close enough to hear Jack say, “I’ve been to more funerals the two years here than my whole life in LA.”
Zoe nodded into his shoulder. Jack looked up across the grave, and caught Nathan’s eye. Nathan dipped his head in acknowledgement of the situation, or of the sentiment. He was too far away to try a sentence like, “You know it was still the right call,” but Jack saw it in his expression, and frowned.
Allison came up behind them, bridging the gap with one hand on each of them. “Do you guys want to get coffee and go over these reports?”
Jack said, “You have mine.”
“Jack-”
“I have work to do.”
Jack walked away, his daughter a half-step behind him, and Nathan was left to try and explain to Allison why Jack was taking this personally again all of a sudden. Like he had said, they were used to funerals here. Nathan shrugged off her questioning. Some deaths hit harder than others - that was all. The ones where you knew the victim, the ones where you should have been the victim, and the ones you should have stopped. There were the ones that were actively your fault, of course, but Eureka had surprisingly few of those by this point. Accidents, and lesser evils, and a few murders, but not much gross negligence. Their collateral damage was about as limited as it was going to get. Carter tended not to see it that way.
From the look on Allison’s face, he had said some of that last part out loud. When she left with his report, she patted his shoulder, thought about it a moment, and then kissed his cheek. “Don’t stay out too late.”
Nathan nodded, but the next time he looked up, Café Diem was considerably emptier, and the skies outside were dark. He was approximately three and a half hours away from figuring out exactly where Banks had went wrong, got himself killed, and nearly killed the rest of them with him. Vincent set a coffee down in front of him, and placed a muffin beside it.
Nathan said, “I didn’t ask for-”
“Compliments of the Sheriff.”
He couldn’t help looking up and around, to see how Jack Carter had got in here without being noticed. It took longer than it should have to ascertain that he really wasn’t there.
Vincent said, “Sorry, Dr Stark, he just left. He didn’t say much, not after this afternoon, but he did ask how long you’d been sitting there.”
“And you told him?”
“Well… yeah. Was I wrong?”
“Hmm? No, Vincent, it’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
Between Vincent’s too-nonchalant agreement, and Nathan’s own inability to think past the problem, it took him closer to four hours to finish.
* * * *
“Well,” Jack said, “you and I are just working through the classics, aren’t we?” They were the first words Carter had addressed directly to Nathan in a week. However, seeing as the pair of them were currently, presumably, the only three-inch men in the world, he didn’t really have a lot of choice.
“Which classics would those be?” Nathan asked.
“Ghostbusters,” Jack said, reminding him, “and now Alice in Wonderland. That one always freaked Zoe out for some reason. I think it was the cat. And this is a girl who’s now completely unfazed by the fact that her house sulks if she forgets to take her lunch to school.”
“Let’s hope she takes her father turning pocketsize equally in her stride.”
“It would help if her father could take that part in his stride.” Jack slumped against the wall.
Nathan sat beside him. “Carter, this isn’t even the strangest thing to happen this week.”
Jack sighed, and then laughed. “No.”
“No?”
“No, you’re right, it isn’t. The second, at best.”
“Okay then.”
“Okay what?”
“What were you doing here in the first place?” Jack had turned up without pretext, somehow tracing Nathan to the lab that wasn’t his. Nathan would have asked when Jack arrived, but there had been that moment of awkwardness before he had been able, and then the equipment’s readings had jumped. There hadn’t been much time to ask after that, what with the height loss and the “we’ll just put you in one of Taggart’s enclosures, for safekeeping.” Nathan was fairly sure Allison had been grinning when she said that, but it was hard to be sure when she towered so much above the two of them.
“I came to see what you were doing,” Jack said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Nathan asked. “You don’t understand or, for that matter, care what I’m doing.”
Jack sighed, and made a face like he wanted to yell, or bang his fist on the wall. Instead he slumped further, so that his shoulder was pressed against Nathan’s. “Are you actually this oblivious, or are you screwing with me? Because I’m starting to think the whole genius thing is just an act.”
Jack had turned to face the other wall, so he wouldn’t be able to read Nathan’s expression of confusion. He shrugged instead, and knew that Jack felt it.
“Should I have started smaller?” Jack asked. He laughed. “No pun intended.”
“Started smaller with what, Jack?”
“I mean,” Jack said, raising his arms to wave ineffectually, “A weekend away from the town - that wasn’t obvious enough? I get that you’re a guy, and maybe just coming to see you and bringing you stuff isn’t good enough, but a goddamn weekend out of town?”
“Carter, I really don’t…”
“This is the last one, okay, I swear. So if you actually are as smart as you say you are, and this has been you trying to spare my feelings or something, it’s time to speak up.”
Jack tilted his head to look at Nathan, face very close all of a sudden, and expression so serious. Nathan knew now, or thought that he did; it made sense now. The thing was, he had been puzzling away without an inkling of a working hypothesis, which was the sort of thing no scientist ever really did. Even if you were just going to be proved hopelessly wrong, everyone needed an idea to start with. What they also needed, naturally, was that one piece of conclusive evidence that proved beyond a shadow of doubt. The piece that turned conjecture into truth, shining and clear. Nathan waited. He closed his eyes, the hint of invitation if Jack needed one.
Nathan could feel the warmth - breath and closer body heat - before Jack’s lips touched his, soft and careful. Testing. Nathan leant back, enough to whisper, “Go ahead.”
Jack stopped. Nathan opened his eyes to see Jack’s hint of a smile. “You really didn’t know?” Jack asked.
“It wouldn’t have been my first guess, no.”
“And now?”
Nathan shifted, probably a tiny fraction of an inch, but at this size it was plenty. Jack gasped, and twisted to match his movement. Nathan said, “Enough invitation for you Sheriff?”
“Won’t they…?” Jack asked, looking up at their currently opaque ceiling.
“Even if they do look,” Nathan said, “what are they possibly going to see at this scale?”
“Now there,” Jack muttered, already leaning in again, “is that Stark intellect that was MIA before.”
He should have taken offence, and might have, any other day. But Jack moved fluidly from angle to angle as if he had been planning this out in his head long before today. And Nathan counted coffees, and inexplicable visits that suddenly made sense, and knew they had another hour or so before anyone would be able to fix their height problem. Sure Allison could decide to look in (and would probably perceive more than he’d implied to Jack), and certainly this was a spectacularly bad idea on both their parts. It was still only the second dumbest he’d been this week, and that was weirdly comforting.
“You know this is a one-time thing?” Nathan asked.
Jack stopped.
“You getting one over on me,” Nathan went on. “It won’t happen again.”
Jack grinned, reaching his hand into Nathan’s shirt and pulling them closer together. “Have to say, I never really pictured you as the ditz in this relationship. It was more you with the science, quantum entanglement, ‘let me show you my grav convertor’…” His other hand slid down, and Nathan’s inarticulacy probably didn’t help his case much. Jack’s smirk was wicked.
Nathan managed, “And what are you doing during all this?”
“Oh, you know,” Jack said, and leant in for another kiss. “keeping you on your toes. Or off them, whichever works for you.”
Off, as it happened, worked just fine for Nathan.
FIN. Title ref is, in fact, 'Alice in Wonderland': "Be patient, is very good advice/ But the waiting makes me curious/ And I'd love the change/ Should something strange begin". And feedback is always appreciated :)