Eureka/Pushing Daisies FF: We Only Seek to Answer (Jack&Nathan, Ned/Chuck; PG-13)
Title: We Only Seek to Answer
Fandom: Eureka/Pushing Daisies crossover
Characters: Jack Carter, Nathan Stark, Allison Blake, Ned, Chuck. Brief mentions of almost all of both shows other characters.
Pairings: If you squint maybe Jack/Nathan pre-slash; Chuck/Ned to the same level as the show.
Rating: PG-13 for some death-description and mild sexual implication.
Length: 5,600 words
Disclaimer: Pushing Daisies belongs to Bryan Fuller and people not me. Eureka belongs to Andrew Cosby, Jaime Paglia and people not me.
Spoilers: S1 of Pushing Daisies and S1&2 of Eureka.
Summary: The universe asks the questions, we only seek to answer. Nathan Stark tries to explain The Pie-Maker.
AN: This is Eureka: "The best minds in the US are tucked away in a remote town where they build futuristic inventions for the government's benefit."
This is Pushing Daisies: "A man has the power to bring dead people back to life."
In retrospect there may have been easier show-philosophies to meld.
For smallfandomfest for the prompt: Pushing Daisies/Eureka, writer's choice, science is a fairy tale
I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Don't ask questions of fairy tales.
- Jewish Folk Saying
*
Jack Carter was thirty seven years, three months, and six days old. He was about to have what would be, in anyone else’s life, an unusual day. Thankfully, he had stopped dividing his days into usual/unusual approximately two years, seven months, and three days ago. However, if he had still been ranking, this one would certainly be in the top twenty.
Jack gaped, but it was Nathan who actually dropped his PDA. Jack had seen many a gruesome sight in mortuarys over the years, but this had them all beat. Not for gruesome, though it was that too, but more for the sheer unadulterated lunacy of the picture.
The corpse on the drawer had been a relatively attractive hispanic male in his late thirties. This was before he had been run through by several hundred stalks of maize. Stalks of maize which were now blooming to full fruit and waving in the slight breeze.
Also waving, quite happily, was the corpse.
Standing around the mortuary drawer were: a caucasian male in his late twenties, a black male in his mid-forties, and a caucasian female in her late twenties, who was wearing a yellow raincoat.
“Emerson,” hissed the other man, “Can you maybe…?”
“Can I maybe, what?”
“I can’t go. I have the stopwatch. And you’re very proximate, so I’d thank you not to-”
“I’m asking the questions. Get your girl to deal with them.”
“Chuck?”
The girl in the raincoat, whose name was apparently Chuck, held her hands in the air when she walked towards them. “Now, I’m sure this must all look very strange, but if you’ll both just-”
Behind Chuck, the other two were interrogating the corpse. Emerson said, “Talk fast, ‘cause all this commotion is cutting into your minute. Was this an accident, or do I need to walk the streets looking for some eco-maniac Poison Ivy wannabe? And if it was an accident, how the hell do you not notice you’re turning into plantfood?”
The corpse raised himself up on his elbow and pointed at Stark. “Ask him.”
The facts were these: Doctor Fructo Florez had discovered, at eight years, four months, and twenty-six days old, that he was not like other children. At a young friend’s birthday party, while his compatriots argued about the size of their share of the cake, Fructo simply wondered how he could go about making the cake bigger. By the age of twenty-two, he was the world’s foremost expert in cultivating transgenic food crops. At twenty-six, he met Nathan Stark, newly in possession of his first doctorate, in a small town called Eureka. At thirty, he started a world tour of developing nations, hoping to refocus his efforts where they were truly needed. And at forty-four years, six months and eleven days old, he died when his final experiment went horribly, horribly, wrong.
Everyone turned to look at Stark. Nathan sighed. “You always were an idiot.”
“Fifty-six,” the young man shouted, inexplicably, and tapped the corpse’s hand. The corpse of Doctor Fructo Florez turned back into a regular, non-talking, kind of corpse.
“You wanna explain that?” Emerson asked, walking towards Stark, “Or should I just call the cops right now?”
Jack stepped in front of Nathan, and used his arms to keep them apart. “Look, buddy, I don’t know how things work here, but where I’m from, cops tend to look a little disbelievingly at stories that start ‘the murder victim told me that guy did it’.”
“Actually…” Stark said.
“Not now,” Jack replied.
The girl waved a hand at Stark angrily. “What kind of thing is that to say as the last words a person gets to hear? ‘You always were an idiot’. That’s terrible!”
She was interrupted by her friend. “Chuck, I’m not really sure this is the time.”
“Ned!”
Ned said, “I’m not saying I don’t agree that what he said was a pretty bad thing to hear right before you die again, but we really should-”
Jack broke in, “Okay. Let’s fix this right now.” He pointed down at his chest. “Jack Carter, US Marshal.” He waved a hand to his right. “Doctor Nathan Stark, with the authority of the Department of Defence. Your turn.”
“Um… Ned? Pie-Maker. This is Chuck; she keeps bees on our roof. Emerson’s a private investigator.”
Nathan smirked. “With a sideline in resurrection? And reward collection, I assume, or are you just three concerned citizens?”
“We prefer to think of that as the sideline,” Chuck said. “The temporary resurrection is really more to ensure justice is served, and to let the victim express whatever they might need to say.”
“For you, maybe,” Emerson growled.
Jack sighed. “This isn’t helping. He was dead. Like, foliage through all the important organs, dead. How did you get him talking? And is there anywhere else we could have this conversation? The corpse is starting to freak me out.”
Ned looked at Chuck. “Pie Hole?”
Chuck nodded. “Pie Hole.”
* * * *
Nathan Stark was forty years, nine months, and eighteen days old. He was the leading expert in three separate branches of astrophysics, seven branches of applied mathematics, and four branches of theoretical physics. And contrary to what Jack Carter might think, Nathan had some pretty strong opinions on what was possible and what was impossible, in scientific terms. Cellular regeneration: possible. Time travel: possible within limited parameters. Teleportation: possible with safeguards. Resurrection: theoretically possible for a limited period, assuming an intact brain. Permanent resurrection was impossible.
“Okay,” Carter said, “but she’s talking, Stark.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m saying, she’s clearly alive. So can we just accept that and move on?”
“No.”
Jack threw up his hands in despair. The tiny blonde behind the counter hurried to his side and fluttered nervously. Jack smiled at her, and she smiled back, as women were wont to do.
She asked, “Can I get you something? I can strongly recommend the pear and walnut honey pie. Made fresh today with our own honey.”
Jack said, “You know what, that sounds great. Nathan?”
Nathan was going to develop a complex, with the speed Jack shifted between ‘Stark’ and ‘Nathan’. He said, “No. Thank you. Just a coffee. Black as you can make it.”
“She doesn’t know,” Ned said urgently, watching Olive walk away.
“I’m sorry?”
“Olive doesn’t know,” Chuck explained. “She thinks I faked my death.”
“So she does know you’re supposed to be dead?” Nathan asked.
Emerson scowled and answered, “She watches the news. Dead-girl here was kind of a big deal. You alphabet boys don’t get television?”
“We’re not CIA,” Jack said. “But we really should…” He turned to look at Nathan. “What are we doing here? We were supposed to find out what killed Dr Florez. And I’m still not sure.”
Nathan said, absently, still watching the dead-girl fail to keel over, “He did his job too well.”
“Huh?”
“He was trying to create food crops that could pull more nutrition out of barren ground. They did it too well. Converted anything they could reach into food supplies - including him.”
“Okay, that’s disgusting. So…?”
Nathan looked at Ned and Chuck. “You need to come with us.”
It was amazing how quickly they moved - Ned and Chuck backing away from the table, his arm protectively in front of her, a solid inch away from touching. Nathan took a moment to savour it - only Fargo was still that afraid of him back in Eureka. His cachet had faded a little now that he was the maverick head researcher, and not the all-seeing, all-knowing Director.
Jack glared. “You could have phrased that better.”
* * * *
There were many places in the world where Ned and Chuck’s situation would not have been believed. In Eureka, however, questions tended to bottom out at ‘why’, not ‘what.’
“Explain this again,” Allison said. Her dark eyes were wide and not amused. Jack forgot sometimes that she was a medical doctor - people coming back to life was pretty big news for her field.
Nathan jerked his head at Ned in command. Ned sighed and touched one finger to the dead fly. It twitched, and flew off around the room.
Allison opened her mouth to speak; Nathan held up his hand to stop her.
Ned was timing out the seconds. At sixty exactly, in the glass vivarium beside the workbench, one fly dropped to the bottom.
“That’s impossible,” Allison said. “And this woman,” She turned to Chuck, “he did this to her?”
Chuck smiled: happy, sunny, glad to be alive. “He woke me up.”
Ned smiled back at her: shy, furtive, uneasy with her shining adoration. Jack clapped him on the shoulder in a substitute for the comfort his girlfriend was trying to convey with her eyes.
Allison said, “And you never thought to test it? To come to someone who could find out…”
The other scientists in the lab started talking, overlapping with each other: “didn’t run the proper tests, find out the limits, talk to someone who might…”
Jack raised his hands to stop the clamour, dulling them down just in time to hear Ned speak.
“Why… why would you think I didn’t test it?” This was the loudest Jack had heard the young man speak. “The first day it happened my mom died and so did Chuck’s Dad and it was my fault. I got sent away to school and no one ever came to pick me up and you think I didn’t try to find out how it worked? I was nine, and I filled a room with bottles of fireflies and I ran test after test to make sure I knew the rules and would never break them. First touch life. Second touch dead, again, no chance of reawakening. Sixty seconds in between where it doesn’t interfere with the fabric of the universe. Or let it slide, and see who gets killed by random proximity.” He took a breath.
“Okay,” Jack breathed. “Okay, let’s all just…” He laid his hands on Ned’s shoulder again, more for him than Ned this time. Ned shifted under his grip. “Okay.”
Nathan was looking at him. Nathan was Jack’s first best indicator of whether he should be freaked out by whatever was going on. Jack blinked into Nathan’s pale blue eyes. Okay, so a little freaked out then.
Jack said, “You guys have your readings?” The lab guys nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. “Let’s take a break then.”
* * * *
Allison didn’t quite know what to do in the face of such determined opposition. Chuck was a beautiful, intelligent woman, who nevertheless believed that rather than being a medical marvel, Ned was her knight in shining armour.
“Tell me again,” Allison said.
Chuck smiled. Allison wouldn’t deny that the girl was happy, however unconventional her relationship was. Chuck said, “I was on a cruise, and someone came up behind me and put a bag over my head. When I woke up I was lying in a coffin.”
“That must have been awful.”
“It was. For a little while, what with the yelling and falling and not knowing why I was there or who the man was.”
“Ned?”
“Uh-huh. But then it was him, and he was going to kiss me to send me back, but he didn’t.”
“He changed his mind?”
“He says he thinks the world is better with me in it. And it’s not that I’m in favour of random proximity homicide, and if he had asked me beforehand I would have told him not to do it…”
“But since he did…?”
“But since he did I figure why not enjoy it? It seems like it would be rude not to. He gave me a second chance at living. He’s kind of my Prince Charming.”
Chuck laughed a little as she said it, as if it were almost a joke. But her eyes gave her away. It was as though she knew it should be a joke, knew that it would sound ridiculous, but believed it anyway. It was a personal article of faith: Chuck had been dead, and Ned - her first love - had willed life back into her.
Allison Blake was not a believer in fairytales. She was thirty-eight years, one month and nineteen days old, and already both a widow and a divorcee. There are only so many happy-ever-afters a woman will watch turn sour before she closes the book.
* * * *
Jack Carter did not believe in fairytales either. He did, however, believe in a great many other things, including aliens, the jinxing properties of the words ‘awfully quiet today’ and that anyone who talked about a no-hitter while it was in progress should be beaten with his bat.
Nathan said, “Her tests show evidence of cellular decay. If she wasn’t walking around with a beating heart and brain activity, we would say she was dead.”
Jack hummed. “How… how much cell decay? I mean, are we talking necrophilia?”
Nathan looked at him. “Who exactly is the ‘we’ in that sentence?”
“I’m just wondering if…”
“Carter. Carter, tell me you haven’t developed a thing for the dead girl.”
“No! No. I mean, she’s obviously… she’s a pretty girl, but she’s…”
Fargo, perched on the edge of the bench, started musing out loud. “Actually, it’s a fairly common phenomenon. Well, if you think of Chuck in terms of immortality rather than… you know - death. She doesn’t seem to have aged since she was reanimated. So, in a sense, she’s closer to a vampire than a zombie. And vampires are quite often portrayed as objects of… of lust, or of well-”
“Fargo. Does this really need to turn into another-?”
“Or there’s ‘Snow White’, who’s brought back from death. ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Eurydice was pursued into the Underworld, although Orpheus didn’t manage to bring her back. And that’s without even considering the biblical-”
Jack put his hand over Fargo’s mouth. Fargo tried to speak anyway, but Jack was pretty good at silencing him by this point. Stark looked at him curiously. Jack said, “I don’t need people getting stirred up. You remember what happened last time?”
“You can’t seriously believe…”
“I don’t. I think you guys are going to explain this, like you always do. But until that happens, I don’t need our visiting resurrectionist developing a cult following.”
Jack let go of Fargo and walked to the door. Fargo looked very much like a man who was dying to bring out some more stories of undead (alive-again) lust. Stark looked like a man who wanted to kill Fargo. In short, despite the presence of their very own walking Lazarus machine, nothing much had changed.
Walking with Stark back to his own lab, Jack said, “You know, for a military-industrial complex full of geniuses, you’re missing one really obvious solution.”
“So help me, Carter, if you say full-body condom one more time…”
“I’m just saying! Maybe you’re not thinking straight what with the big screwed up fairytale parts of the story.”
“Actually, this is quite in keeping with the original versions of most of those stories.”
“Well, Zoe was brought up on the Disney versions and she thinks the whole thing is just too romantic for words. So can you fix it please? She wants to see one good kiss before they leave.”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “We have slightly loftier ambitions. Lab testing starts on Monday, if Allison can convince the idiot to agree.”
Personally, Jack kind of understood Ned’s reluctance to let the Eureka scientists anywhere near him. They were good at fixing near-death, end-of-the-world scenarios, but they were just as good at starting them. They were also a group of people who’d never met a God they didn’t want to play. If Jack was a miracle, even a somewhat cursed one, he might not trust them either.
* * * *
Ned was an anomaly they didn’t know how to replicate. His effects on the world around him could be observed but not repeated or prevented. Half of Section Six seemed to be in the lab with Ned, watching him revive and kill ants. Taggart was standing right at the front; Allison stood beside him.
Nathan stood to one side, watching. This wasn’t his area of expertise, but he tended to get called in when Global Dynamics needed to explain the inexplicable. They had scanned Ned. They had run blood works. They had carried out every non-invasive test they could think of, as well as a few slightly invasive ones, and a couple made up especially for the occasion. They found nothing. All the evidence of what he could do was tied up in the doing of it.
The EM reader picked up something, at the moment of resurrection, but it was barely a transference. It couldn’t explain life from no life. They had decided to run another test anyway. Carter had laughed and said, “So you don’t know why it happens, but you’re going to play scientist anyway? This is why so many of your experiments end in explosions.”
It would go like this. Something passed at the moment of contact, even if Eureka’s scientists couldn’t tell what it was. A spark of life passed from The Pie-Maker into the corpse. And they assumed, as those very clever often do, that they could stop it.
Allison hung the device around Ned’s neck. It had been designed originally as a way of insulating the human body against electrical charge. It was expensive (and dangerous) to run, and really no more effective than standard techniques. The scientist responsible had been reassigned, and had left Eureka eighteen months before. It was a pity - Nathan could have used the assistance when he re-purposed it to stop electrical charge passing from the body. It should stop any interaction beyond basic touch and warmth.
The girl was standing close to Ned. Nathan couldn’t understand that. If he knew that the slightest of accidental brushes of skin would kill him, he wouldn’t stick around. But she stood there, faithful and smiling. Chuck looked at Ned and said, “Go on. Try it.”
Ned peered down at the dead ant Taggart had isolated in the container. He brushed it gently with one finger. It sprang to life, scuttering purposefully around the jar.
Nathan sighed. “Let’s try turning it up.”
Allison said, “It’s already nearly at-”
“Let’s try anyway.”
She reached for the device and thumbed the dial to turn it to full.
Ned counted out the last of the sixty seconds, and another ant died in the larger enclosure.
Nathan nodded. “Try the first one again.”
Ned put his hand back into the jar, and touched the reanimated ant. It jerked to a stop, dead.
Taggart whistled through his teeth, and Nathan turned to look at him. Taggart was pointing at the big case. “Look at that,” he said. “All his little comrades too.”
The enclosure was entirely still; every ant in it had died where they stood.
Chuck put a hand to her mouth, and Ned looked sick. Ned backed his way through the crowd and fled from the lab. Chuck advanced towards Nathan.
Nathan waved a hand dismissively at the lab techs and scientists. “Analyse the readings and have them distributed. I expect to see initial results before I leave the building this evening.” He steered Chuck to the corner of the lab, not surprised when Allison and Taggart didn’t leave with the others.
Chuck pointed at the dead ants. “You see what happens?”
“It was the first attempt. Frankly I would have been surprised if something like that hadn’t happened.”
“You didn’t tell Ned! He takes these things very seriously.”
“Which was precisely why I didn’t tell him. We can’t rule out the possibility of a mental component.”
“It’s not about that. He doesn’t like messing with the rules.”
“The rules.”
“Dead. Alive. Sixty seconds. Do you listen to anyone else at all?” Off to the side, Taggart snickered.
“You do realise,” Nathan said, “that those rules are completely arbitrary. Something else has to be acting on him. Sixty seconds is-”
“Sixty seconds makes sense. Ninety-three seconds would be arbitrary. Sixty seconds is how long it takes to ask the questions. It’s one full passage of a second hand and that makes sense to me. You don’t get more than that without giving something else up.”
Nathan looked at her. “By that you mean the proximate death.”
“Yes!”
“That’s just another thing that makes no sense.”
“It does.” And she was near tears now, trying to make him understand. Chuck touched the crook of his elbow, very lightly, in a plea. “It does. It’s just how it works. The universe needs a balance. Isn’t that science? Conservation of… something?”
“It’s the first law of thermodynamics. ‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another’.”
“See?”
“That doesn’t mean…”
“Intuitively,” Chuck persisted. “It makes sense. You don’t get to bring a life from nowhere. You make a new one, you have to take one. Ned’s allowed a little grace period, but after that it’s stuck until he does it again.”
Taggart interrupted them. “Laws of nature, Stark. Start interfering with those there’s no telling what’ll happen.” He pointed at Chuck, and Nathan cursed once again that Taggart was too good a scientist to be thrown out for insanity. Taggart said, “Your boy’s a black hole. Everything around him goes hinky and the universe doesn’t like it.”
Nathan was starting to think Carter might have been right to try and stop the spread of this revivalist nonsense. Nothing with so direct an effect on the world could be so hidden from scientific testing. They would find the evidence soon enough. He told Chuck so: “The universe doesn’t care about Ned. We do.”
She shook her head. “You only care about figuring out how he does it.”
“It’s important that we know. This could be the most important biomedical breakthrough since-”
Chuck snapped, “Stop trying to explain him out of the world.”
* * * *
Allison found Chuck in Café Diem. She was watching Ned, who had somehow talked his way behind Vince’s counter, and through the door Allison could see him rolling pastry and talking to himself.
Chuck smiled when Allison sat beside her. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Is your boss mad?”
“Nathan? He’s not my… He’s fine. Not used to people saying no to him.”
“You did,” Chuck pointed out.
“I’m not even going to ask how you know that. I’ll just murder Vince later.”
Chuck laughed, and when Ned heard her, he looked through the door, quickly, and then smiled back down at his rolling pin. Chuck smiled at her coffee.
Allison said, “Don’t you want to try?”
“Did you ever get something you didn’t deserve? Something that wasn’t yours to begin with, something that gave you a second chance to get things right?”
Allison frowned. “My son. Kevin. He’s… he was kidnapped. When I got him back it was like… it was like I got him back from the dead.”
Chuck reached across the table to take Allison’s hands in her own. She squeezed, and murmured a soft apology. Then she smiled, and Allison met her eyes. Chuck said, “If it works, then yay. If not, then I’m okay with what I have.”
“You can’t touch him. Can’t kiss, can’t…”
“We’re both alive.” Chuck shrugged. “We’re alive and happy and together. Even if we’re not… together. Sometimes it seems like that’s more than anyone else I know has. I’m living someone else’s happy ending, so I guess I think I already have more than I deserve.”
“But… never?”
There was something sad in Chuck’s eyes, and she looked away from Allison. But she leant in, and whispered. “Sometimes. Not even whole days. Just whole moments. When I’m watching him and he’s so sad and I think, maybe it would be worth it for one good kiss.”
Allison had not meant to pry that secret from Chuck’s lips. It had not occurred to her that the question could be misinterpreted as anything other than: have you thought about someone else? There had never been anyone whose kiss had been worth trading her life for. She wasn’t that kind of woman, and right at that moment she was glad for it.
Ned had walked up behind them. Allison hadn’t noticed. He placed a pie in front of Chuck, who gasped at his sudden appearance.
Ned looked at Allison. “Tell Dr Stark I’ll try it again.”
* * * *
Attempt number two went something like this: rather than trying to block the energy transfer, the Global Dynamics team attempted to neutralise it by simulating the transfer in the opposite direction. Equal but opposing forces cancel each other out, in science as well as story telling. The problem is, it helps to know what your forces are first.
Nathan had assembled the same team of scientists in the same room. Taggart had managed to acquire yet more ant corpses. It was convenient PETA had no idea Eureka existed.
Allison enabled the Mark II and stood back. Ned closed his eyes before touching the first dead ant. He didn’t see the delay - brief but discernable - between touch and reanimation.
Amid the flurry of scientists arguing over the recorded data, Nathan stood still. This was it. This was the hint that there was something to be achieved, and something to be commanded. This was why Eureka existed - this half-second’s pause between life and death, under their control.
The sixty-second mark passed, but the noise was so great that it took Taggart to tell Nathan what had happened. He could see Ned flinch when Taggart shook his head, pointing at the tank of recently-alive ants.
Nathan said, “We’re going to work on that part.”
Fargo peered through the doorway and Nathan cursed. “Doctor Stark?”
“What is it?”
“You asked me to tell you if-”
“Just spit it out.”
“Other labs using animal subjects? Two floors up and down from this lab?”
Nathan put his hand to his head and rubbed circles against his temples. “What did we lose?”
“Well. After your memo, most of the more sensitive experiments were moved out of radius. But we still-”
Ned interrupted, “What happened?”
Fargo looked at his shoes and answered, “Some more insects. A dozen or so rats. And three guinea pigs.”
On the whole, that was less than Nathan had been expecting.
Ned shook his head. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen.” He looked at Chuck for encouragement.
Chuck said, “It’s never jumped up from insects to animals before.”
Nathan brushed them off. “The energy being blocked has to go somewhere. We predicted this.”
“You predicted that I could end up killing someone? Could it have moved up to people? I bake with flowerbeds in the kitchen so there’s always something there. If it’s going to move so that Chuck or Olive or-”
“It was highly unlikely.”
Ned backed away towards the door, Chuck following. He said her name quietly. Nathan couldn’t hear what she said back.
A moment later, Ned raised his voice enough that Nathan could hear again, “-don’t need to. If you think we should…”
“No,” she said. “Not if it makes you unhappy.”
Nathan could see where this conversation was going and tried to break in before it got to the point of no return.
Chuck talked over his protest. “What we have is enough, Ned. You and me? I’m happy.”
And she was, that was the worst thing. If he could have got the girl on his side maybe they wouldn’t have needed to resort to this. The pair of them headed towards the door, making excuses and murmuring apologetic goodbyes. Nathan nodded at them as he tapped graphs of the latest results into new shapes on the screen.
When the door closed behind them he turned to Allison and said, “You can’t let them leave.”
“Nathan!”
“This is important. This is scientific knowledge we don’t have and we do need. You can’t just let them walk.”
“I can’t stop them.”
“Just tell the military they represent a threat.”
“They don’t, Nathan. They only person Ned’s a threat to is Chuck and as far as the government’s concerned she’s already dead. He’s not hurting anyone.”
Fargo stepped forward and said, “Unless he creates himself a zombie army.”
Nathan and Allison ignored him. Nathan said, “Ally, we can’t just let him go without finding out how it’s happening.”
She sighed at him. Her expression was knowing, and sad, and touched with just a little pity. “Nathan. They don’t want to risk it, and I won’t try and change their minds. I’m not locking them up just to service your need to know.”
Nathan slammed the door on the way out, seriously contemplating punching a wall. Or Fargo, if he didn’t stop bouncing up and down at Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan turned to him and demanded, “Get me the Sheriff’s office.”
* * * *
Jack didn’t need to go looking for Nathan. He waited in the Sheriff’s Department and, when Nathan came storming in, jerked his head at Jo.
Naturally, she chose this moment to ignore him. He had made her give up a lunch date to play escort and get Ned and Chuck to the bus station. Jo wasn’t really a fan of babysitting tasks, particularly when Jack told her to take the back roads and wouldn’t explain why.
Jack growled, “Jo.”
“Yes?”
“Doctor Stark and I are just going to take a walk. Unless you have somewhere else you need to be?”
“Nope. Of course, you could just stay and have your talk here.”
“Yes, Carter,” Stark replied, fists clenched at his sides, “Why not tell your Deputy why you superseded my order?”
Jack tried his best to keep his tone even. “Because, Stark, you don’t actually give me orders. I work for the United States government to enforce the law in this town.”
“You-”
“And,” Jack continued, before Stark’s interruption could hit full swing, “I occasionally take instruction from Allison when the scientific import escapes me. She told me not to hold them.”
“The two of them represent a scientific leap that you couldn’t hope to make sense of, so how you imagined that you understood enough to make that call-”
“As I said,” Jack put his hand on Nathan’s shoulder. “Allison made the call. I just agreed with her. Let’s take this somewhere else before you cause a scene you’ll regret in the morning.” He steered Nathan towards the door.
Jo smirked at them as they left. Jack wished her many, many 3 a.m. crazy-calls. On the way out, the telephone rang, and the look on her face after she picked up made him think maybe the universe was on his side for once.
Nathan allowed himself to be walked to Jack’s car, but put up a protest when Jack opened the door. “I don’t need you to drive me home.”
“I’m not.”
Nathan was still just pissed-off enough that he got into the car rather than start a conversation. Jack slid into the driver’s side and waited for Nathan to put on a seatbelt before driving away.
There weren’t enough driving roads in Eureka that their destination was a mystery for long, but Nathan said nothing. When Jack pulled up outside the bunker, Nathan just looked at him accusatorily.
Jack walked the door. He spoke to Nathan without looking over his shoulder. “Come inside. S.A.R.A.H.’s recorded some ‘Penn & Teller’. You can watch it with me and prove how much smarter you are by telling me how the tricks are done.”
Nathan said, “A seven year old could tell you that.” But he walked down the steps into the bunker behind Jack.
A few beers and some bad television later, Nathan set his glass down with a clatter. “How can you just accept this?”
Jack shrugged. “No one died. I call that a happy ending.”
“Jack.”
“Listen, okay? You’ll get it. One day you’ll be… taking a shower drawing equations in the steam and it’ll come to you. But for now, can you just not freak out on me?”
“I need to-“
“Nathan. It’s okay that you don’t know.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yeah, it is. For now, he’s not doing anyone any harm, and he doesn’t want to risk her trying to change it. I’m… listen to me, Nathan,” Nathan’s focus had been drifting, back to revealing the unknowable and the threshold of revelation. Jack said, “I’m okay with knowing that you’re going to figure it out someday. No one needs you to understand it right this minute.”
“It doesn’t make sense. On any level, it’s just completely…”
“I know. But it will.” With the hand resting along the back of the couch, Jack patted reassuringly at Nathan’s shoulder. “You’re a smart guy.”
“True.”
“Also, Ned left Vince the recipe for the cup-pies with the honey crust.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah. So can we worry about the laws of nature tomorrow?”
Nathan glared at him, and didn’t answer. But he picked up his glass and came back with a refill. He slumped beside Jack on the couch, paused for a moment, and then slipped off his jacket and tie. In his pocket, his PDA made a sad ‘blip’. Nathan said, “E-mail with some lab results. Nothing serious,” and let Jack change the TV channel. Jack had decided that bad sci-fi with plenty of plot-holes was just what the doctor ordered. Nathan needed some questions he could answer, and Jack was okay with doing the asking.
Neither the Pie-Maker and the Bee-Keeper, nor the Sheriff and the Scientist lived happily ever after. Nevertheless, they lived. Most days, that was quite enough.
FIN.
AN2: I've done my best not to come down in favour of either the fantasy or the science, but as I tend towards a somewhat rational bent, I'm not sure how well that came off. Thoughts are always appreciated. And I will award many cookies to the person who finds the inexplicable Angels in America reference :)
Fandom: Eureka/Pushing Daisies crossover
Characters: Jack Carter, Nathan Stark, Allison Blake, Ned, Chuck. Brief mentions of almost all of both shows other characters.
Pairings: If you squint maybe Jack/Nathan pre-slash; Chuck/Ned to the same level as the show.
Rating: PG-13 for some death-description and mild sexual implication.
Length: 5,600 words
Disclaimer: Pushing Daisies belongs to Bryan Fuller and people not me. Eureka belongs to Andrew Cosby, Jaime Paglia and people not me.
Spoilers: S1 of Pushing Daisies and S1&2 of Eureka.
Summary: The universe asks the questions, we only seek to answer. Nathan Stark tries to explain The Pie-Maker.
AN: This is Eureka: "The best minds in the US are tucked away in a remote town where they build futuristic inventions for the government's benefit."
This is Pushing Daisies: "A man has the power to bring dead people back to life."
In retrospect there may have been easier show-philosophies to meld.
For smallfandomfest for the prompt: Pushing Daisies/Eureka, writer's choice, science is a fairy tale
I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Don't ask questions of fairy tales.
- Jewish Folk Saying
*
Jack Carter was thirty seven years, three months, and six days old. He was about to have what would be, in anyone else’s life, an unusual day. Thankfully, he had stopped dividing his days into usual/unusual approximately two years, seven months, and three days ago. However, if he had still been ranking, this one would certainly be in the top twenty.
Jack gaped, but it was Nathan who actually dropped his PDA. Jack had seen many a gruesome sight in mortuarys over the years, but this had them all beat. Not for gruesome, though it was that too, but more for the sheer unadulterated lunacy of the picture.
The corpse on the drawer had been a relatively attractive hispanic male in his late thirties. This was before he had been run through by several hundred stalks of maize. Stalks of maize which were now blooming to full fruit and waving in the slight breeze.
Also waving, quite happily, was the corpse.
Standing around the mortuary drawer were: a caucasian male in his late twenties, a black male in his mid-forties, and a caucasian female in her late twenties, who was wearing a yellow raincoat.
“Emerson,” hissed the other man, “Can you maybe…?”
“Can I maybe, what?”
“I can’t go. I have the stopwatch. And you’re very proximate, so I’d thank you not to-”
“I’m asking the questions. Get your girl to deal with them.”
“Chuck?”
The girl in the raincoat, whose name was apparently Chuck, held her hands in the air when she walked towards them. “Now, I’m sure this must all look very strange, but if you’ll both just-”
Behind Chuck, the other two were interrogating the corpse. Emerson said, “Talk fast, ‘cause all this commotion is cutting into your minute. Was this an accident, or do I need to walk the streets looking for some eco-maniac Poison Ivy wannabe? And if it was an accident, how the hell do you not notice you’re turning into plantfood?”
The corpse raised himself up on his elbow and pointed at Stark. “Ask him.”
The facts were these: Doctor Fructo Florez had discovered, at eight years, four months, and twenty-six days old, that he was not like other children. At a young friend’s birthday party, while his compatriots argued about the size of their share of the cake, Fructo simply wondered how he could go about making the cake bigger. By the age of twenty-two, he was the world’s foremost expert in cultivating transgenic food crops. At twenty-six, he met Nathan Stark, newly in possession of his first doctorate, in a small town called Eureka. At thirty, he started a world tour of developing nations, hoping to refocus his efforts where they were truly needed. And at forty-four years, six months and eleven days old, he died when his final experiment went horribly, horribly, wrong.
Everyone turned to look at Stark. Nathan sighed. “You always were an idiot.”
“Fifty-six,” the young man shouted, inexplicably, and tapped the corpse’s hand. The corpse of Doctor Fructo Florez turned back into a regular, non-talking, kind of corpse.
“You wanna explain that?” Emerson asked, walking towards Stark, “Or should I just call the cops right now?”
Jack stepped in front of Nathan, and used his arms to keep them apart. “Look, buddy, I don’t know how things work here, but where I’m from, cops tend to look a little disbelievingly at stories that start ‘the murder victim told me that guy did it’.”
“Actually…” Stark said.
“Not now,” Jack replied.
The girl waved a hand at Stark angrily. “What kind of thing is that to say as the last words a person gets to hear? ‘You always were an idiot’. That’s terrible!”
She was interrupted by her friend. “Chuck, I’m not really sure this is the time.”
“Ned!”
Ned said, “I’m not saying I don’t agree that what he said was a pretty bad thing to hear right before you die again, but we really should-”
Jack broke in, “Okay. Let’s fix this right now.” He pointed down at his chest. “Jack Carter, US Marshal.” He waved a hand to his right. “Doctor Nathan Stark, with the authority of the Department of Defence. Your turn.”
“Um… Ned? Pie-Maker. This is Chuck; she keeps bees on our roof. Emerson’s a private investigator.”
Nathan smirked. “With a sideline in resurrection? And reward collection, I assume, or are you just three concerned citizens?”
“We prefer to think of that as the sideline,” Chuck said. “The temporary resurrection is really more to ensure justice is served, and to let the victim express whatever they might need to say.”
“For you, maybe,” Emerson growled.
Jack sighed. “This isn’t helping. He was dead. Like, foliage through all the important organs, dead. How did you get him talking? And is there anywhere else we could have this conversation? The corpse is starting to freak me out.”
Ned looked at Chuck. “Pie Hole?”
Chuck nodded. “Pie Hole.”
* * * *
Nathan Stark was forty years, nine months, and eighteen days old. He was the leading expert in three separate branches of astrophysics, seven branches of applied mathematics, and four branches of theoretical physics. And contrary to what Jack Carter might think, Nathan had some pretty strong opinions on what was possible and what was impossible, in scientific terms. Cellular regeneration: possible. Time travel: possible within limited parameters. Teleportation: possible with safeguards. Resurrection: theoretically possible for a limited period, assuming an intact brain. Permanent resurrection was impossible.
“Okay,” Carter said, “but she’s talking, Stark.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m saying, she’s clearly alive. So can we just accept that and move on?”
“No.”
Jack threw up his hands in despair. The tiny blonde behind the counter hurried to his side and fluttered nervously. Jack smiled at her, and she smiled back, as women were wont to do.
She asked, “Can I get you something? I can strongly recommend the pear and walnut honey pie. Made fresh today with our own honey.”
Jack said, “You know what, that sounds great. Nathan?”
Nathan was going to develop a complex, with the speed Jack shifted between ‘Stark’ and ‘Nathan’. He said, “No. Thank you. Just a coffee. Black as you can make it.”
“She doesn’t know,” Ned said urgently, watching Olive walk away.
“I’m sorry?”
“Olive doesn’t know,” Chuck explained. “She thinks I faked my death.”
“So she does know you’re supposed to be dead?” Nathan asked.
Emerson scowled and answered, “She watches the news. Dead-girl here was kind of a big deal. You alphabet boys don’t get television?”
“We’re not CIA,” Jack said. “But we really should…” He turned to look at Nathan. “What are we doing here? We were supposed to find out what killed Dr Florez. And I’m still not sure.”
Nathan said, absently, still watching the dead-girl fail to keel over, “He did his job too well.”
“Huh?”
“He was trying to create food crops that could pull more nutrition out of barren ground. They did it too well. Converted anything they could reach into food supplies - including him.”
“Okay, that’s disgusting. So…?”
Nathan looked at Ned and Chuck. “You need to come with us.”
It was amazing how quickly they moved - Ned and Chuck backing away from the table, his arm protectively in front of her, a solid inch away from touching. Nathan took a moment to savour it - only Fargo was still that afraid of him back in Eureka. His cachet had faded a little now that he was the maverick head researcher, and not the all-seeing, all-knowing Director.
Jack glared. “You could have phrased that better.”
* * * *
There were many places in the world where Ned and Chuck’s situation would not have been believed. In Eureka, however, questions tended to bottom out at ‘why’, not ‘what.’
“Explain this again,” Allison said. Her dark eyes were wide and not amused. Jack forgot sometimes that she was a medical doctor - people coming back to life was pretty big news for her field.
Nathan jerked his head at Ned in command. Ned sighed and touched one finger to the dead fly. It twitched, and flew off around the room.
Allison opened her mouth to speak; Nathan held up his hand to stop her.
Ned was timing out the seconds. At sixty exactly, in the glass vivarium beside the workbench, one fly dropped to the bottom.
“That’s impossible,” Allison said. “And this woman,” She turned to Chuck, “he did this to her?”
Chuck smiled: happy, sunny, glad to be alive. “He woke me up.”
Ned smiled back at her: shy, furtive, uneasy with her shining adoration. Jack clapped him on the shoulder in a substitute for the comfort his girlfriend was trying to convey with her eyes.
Allison said, “And you never thought to test it? To come to someone who could find out…”
The other scientists in the lab started talking, overlapping with each other: “didn’t run the proper tests, find out the limits, talk to someone who might…”
Jack raised his hands to stop the clamour, dulling them down just in time to hear Ned speak.
“Why… why would you think I didn’t test it?” This was the loudest Jack had heard the young man speak. “The first day it happened my mom died and so did Chuck’s Dad and it was my fault. I got sent away to school and no one ever came to pick me up and you think I didn’t try to find out how it worked? I was nine, and I filled a room with bottles of fireflies and I ran test after test to make sure I knew the rules and would never break them. First touch life. Second touch dead, again, no chance of reawakening. Sixty seconds in between where it doesn’t interfere with the fabric of the universe. Or let it slide, and see who gets killed by random proximity.” He took a breath.
“Okay,” Jack breathed. “Okay, let’s all just…” He laid his hands on Ned’s shoulder again, more for him than Ned this time. Ned shifted under his grip. “Okay.”
Nathan was looking at him. Nathan was Jack’s first best indicator of whether he should be freaked out by whatever was going on. Jack blinked into Nathan’s pale blue eyes. Okay, so a little freaked out then.
Jack said, “You guys have your readings?” The lab guys nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. “Let’s take a break then.”
* * * *
Allison didn’t quite know what to do in the face of such determined opposition. Chuck was a beautiful, intelligent woman, who nevertheless believed that rather than being a medical marvel, Ned was her knight in shining armour.
“Tell me again,” Allison said.
Chuck smiled. Allison wouldn’t deny that the girl was happy, however unconventional her relationship was. Chuck said, “I was on a cruise, and someone came up behind me and put a bag over my head. When I woke up I was lying in a coffin.”
“That must have been awful.”
“It was. For a little while, what with the yelling and falling and not knowing why I was there or who the man was.”
“Ned?”
“Uh-huh. But then it was him, and he was going to kiss me to send me back, but he didn’t.”
“He changed his mind?”
“He says he thinks the world is better with me in it. And it’s not that I’m in favour of random proximity homicide, and if he had asked me beforehand I would have told him not to do it…”
“But since he did…?”
“But since he did I figure why not enjoy it? It seems like it would be rude not to. He gave me a second chance at living. He’s kind of my Prince Charming.”
Chuck laughed a little as she said it, as if it were almost a joke. But her eyes gave her away. It was as though she knew it should be a joke, knew that it would sound ridiculous, but believed it anyway. It was a personal article of faith: Chuck had been dead, and Ned - her first love - had willed life back into her.
Allison Blake was not a believer in fairytales. She was thirty-eight years, one month and nineteen days old, and already both a widow and a divorcee. There are only so many happy-ever-afters a woman will watch turn sour before she closes the book.
* * * *
Jack Carter did not believe in fairytales either. He did, however, believe in a great many other things, including aliens, the jinxing properties of the words ‘awfully quiet today’ and that anyone who talked about a no-hitter while it was in progress should be beaten with his bat.
Nathan said, “Her tests show evidence of cellular decay. If she wasn’t walking around with a beating heart and brain activity, we would say she was dead.”
Jack hummed. “How… how much cell decay? I mean, are we talking necrophilia?”
Nathan looked at him. “Who exactly is the ‘we’ in that sentence?”
“I’m just wondering if…”
“Carter. Carter, tell me you haven’t developed a thing for the dead girl.”
“No! No. I mean, she’s obviously… she’s a pretty girl, but she’s…”
Fargo, perched on the edge of the bench, started musing out loud. “Actually, it’s a fairly common phenomenon. Well, if you think of Chuck in terms of immortality rather than… you know - death. She doesn’t seem to have aged since she was reanimated. So, in a sense, she’s closer to a vampire than a zombie. And vampires are quite often portrayed as objects of… of lust, or of well-”
“Fargo. Does this really need to turn into another-?”
“Or there’s ‘Snow White’, who’s brought back from death. ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Eurydice was pursued into the Underworld, although Orpheus didn’t manage to bring her back. And that’s without even considering the biblical-”
Jack put his hand over Fargo’s mouth. Fargo tried to speak anyway, but Jack was pretty good at silencing him by this point. Stark looked at him curiously. Jack said, “I don’t need people getting stirred up. You remember what happened last time?”
“You can’t seriously believe…”
“I don’t. I think you guys are going to explain this, like you always do. But until that happens, I don’t need our visiting resurrectionist developing a cult following.”
Jack let go of Fargo and walked to the door. Fargo looked very much like a man who was dying to bring out some more stories of undead (alive-again) lust. Stark looked like a man who wanted to kill Fargo. In short, despite the presence of their very own walking Lazarus machine, nothing much had changed.
Walking with Stark back to his own lab, Jack said, “You know, for a military-industrial complex full of geniuses, you’re missing one really obvious solution.”
“So help me, Carter, if you say full-body condom one more time…”
“I’m just saying! Maybe you’re not thinking straight what with the big screwed up fairytale parts of the story.”
“Actually, this is quite in keeping with the original versions of most of those stories.”
“Well, Zoe was brought up on the Disney versions and she thinks the whole thing is just too romantic for words. So can you fix it please? She wants to see one good kiss before they leave.”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “We have slightly loftier ambitions. Lab testing starts on Monday, if Allison can convince the idiot to agree.”
Personally, Jack kind of understood Ned’s reluctance to let the Eureka scientists anywhere near him. They were good at fixing near-death, end-of-the-world scenarios, but they were just as good at starting them. They were also a group of people who’d never met a God they didn’t want to play. If Jack was a miracle, even a somewhat cursed one, he might not trust them either.
* * * *
Ned was an anomaly they didn’t know how to replicate. His effects on the world around him could be observed but not repeated or prevented. Half of Section Six seemed to be in the lab with Ned, watching him revive and kill ants. Taggart was standing right at the front; Allison stood beside him.
Nathan stood to one side, watching. This wasn’t his area of expertise, but he tended to get called in when Global Dynamics needed to explain the inexplicable. They had scanned Ned. They had run blood works. They had carried out every non-invasive test they could think of, as well as a few slightly invasive ones, and a couple made up especially for the occasion. They found nothing. All the evidence of what he could do was tied up in the doing of it.
The EM reader picked up something, at the moment of resurrection, but it was barely a transference. It couldn’t explain life from no life. They had decided to run another test anyway. Carter had laughed and said, “So you don’t know why it happens, but you’re going to play scientist anyway? This is why so many of your experiments end in explosions.”
It would go like this. Something passed at the moment of contact, even if Eureka’s scientists couldn’t tell what it was. A spark of life passed from The Pie-Maker into the corpse. And they assumed, as those very clever often do, that they could stop it.
Allison hung the device around Ned’s neck. It had been designed originally as a way of insulating the human body against electrical charge. It was expensive (and dangerous) to run, and really no more effective than standard techniques. The scientist responsible had been reassigned, and had left Eureka eighteen months before. It was a pity - Nathan could have used the assistance when he re-purposed it to stop electrical charge passing from the body. It should stop any interaction beyond basic touch and warmth.
The girl was standing close to Ned. Nathan couldn’t understand that. If he knew that the slightest of accidental brushes of skin would kill him, he wouldn’t stick around. But she stood there, faithful and smiling. Chuck looked at Ned and said, “Go on. Try it.”
Ned peered down at the dead ant Taggart had isolated in the container. He brushed it gently with one finger. It sprang to life, scuttering purposefully around the jar.
Nathan sighed. “Let’s try turning it up.”
Allison said, “It’s already nearly at-”
“Let’s try anyway.”
She reached for the device and thumbed the dial to turn it to full.
Ned counted out the last of the sixty seconds, and another ant died in the larger enclosure.
Nathan nodded. “Try the first one again.”
Ned put his hand back into the jar, and touched the reanimated ant. It jerked to a stop, dead.
Taggart whistled through his teeth, and Nathan turned to look at him. Taggart was pointing at the big case. “Look at that,” he said. “All his little comrades too.”
The enclosure was entirely still; every ant in it had died where they stood.
Chuck put a hand to her mouth, and Ned looked sick. Ned backed his way through the crowd and fled from the lab. Chuck advanced towards Nathan.
Nathan waved a hand dismissively at the lab techs and scientists. “Analyse the readings and have them distributed. I expect to see initial results before I leave the building this evening.” He steered Chuck to the corner of the lab, not surprised when Allison and Taggart didn’t leave with the others.
Chuck pointed at the dead ants. “You see what happens?”
“It was the first attempt. Frankly I would have been surprised if something like that hadn’t happened.”
“You didn’t tell Ned! He takes these things very seriously.”
“Which was precisely why I didn’t tell him. We can’t rule out the possibility of a mental component.”
“It’s not about that. He doesn’t like messing with the rules.”
“The rules.”
“Dead. Alive. Sixty seconds. Do you listen to anyone else at all?” Off to the side, Taggart snickered.
“You do realise,” Nathan said, “that those rules are completely arbitrary. Something else has to be acting on him. Sixty seconds is-”
“Sixty seconds makes sense. Ninety-three seconds would be arbitrary. Sixty seconds is how long it takes to ask the questions. It’s one full passage of a second hand and that makes sense to me. You don’t get more than that without giving something else up.”
Nathan looked at her. “By that you mean the proximate death.”
“Yes!”
“That’s just another thing that makes no sense.”
“It does.” And she was near tears now, trying to make him understand. Chuck touched the crook of his elbow, very lightly, in a plea. “It does. It’s just how it works. The universe needs a balance. Isn’t that science? Conservation of… something?”
“It’s the first law of thermodynamics. ‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another’.”
“See?”
“That doesn’t mean…”
“Intuitively,” Chuck persisted. “It makes sense. You don’t get to bring a life from nowhere. You make a new one, you have to take one. Ned’s allowed a little grace period, but after that it’s stuck until he does it again.”
Taggart interrupted them. “Laws of nature, Stark. Start interfering with those there’s no telling what’ll happen.” He pointed at Chuck, and Nathan cursed once again that Taggart was too good a scientist to be thrown out for insanity. Taggart said, “Your boy’s a black hole. Everything around him goes hinky and the universe doesn’t like it.”
Nathan was starting to think Carter might have been right to try and stop the spread of this revivalist nonsense. Nothing with so direct an effect on the world could be so hidden from scientific testing. They would find the evidence soon enough. He told Chuck so: “The universe doesn’t care about Ned. We do.”
She shook her head. “You only care about figuring out how he does it.”
“It’s important that we know. This could be the most important biomedical breakthrough since-”
Chuck snapped, “Stop trying to explain him out of the world.”
* * * *
Allison found Chuck in Café Diem. She was watching Ned, who had somehow talked his way behind Vince’s counter, and through the door Allison could see him rolling pastry and talking to himself.
Chuck smiled when Allison sat beside her. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Is your boss mad?”
“Nathan? He’s not my… He’s fine. Not used to people saying no to him.”
“You did,” Chuck pointed out.
“I’m not even going to ask how you know that. I’ll just murder Vince later.”
Chuck laughed, and when Ned heard her, he looked through the door, quickly, and then smiled back down at his rolling pin. Chuck smiled at her coffee.
Allison said, “Don’t you want to try?”
“Did you ever get something you didn’t deserve? Something that wasn’t yours to begin with, something that gave you a second chance to get things right?”
Allison frowned. “My son. Kevin. He’s… he was kidnapped. When I got him back it was like… it was like I got him back from the dead.”
Chuck reached across the table to take Allison’s hands in her own. She squeezed, and murmured a soft apology. Then she smiled, and Allison met her eyes. Chuck said, “If it works, then yay. If not, then I’m okay with what I have.”
“You can’t touch him. Can’t kiss, can’t…”
“We’re both alive.” Chuck shrugged. “We’re alive and happy and together. Even if we’re not… together. Sometimes it seems like that’s more than anyone else I know has. I’m living someone else’s happy ending, so I guess I think I already have more than I deserve.”
“But… never?”
There was something sad in Chuck’s eyes, and she looked away from Allison. But she leant in, and whispered. “Sometimes. Not even whole days. Just whole moments. When I’m watching him and he’s so sad and I think, maybe it would be worth it for one good kiss.”
Allison had not meant to pry that secret from Chuck’s lips. It had not occurred to her that the question could be misinterpreted as anything other than: have you thought about someone else? There had never been anyone whose kiss had been worth trading her life for. She wasn’t that kind of woman, and right at that moment she was glad for it.
Ned had walked up behind them. Allison hadn’t noticed. He placed a pie in front of Chuck, who gasped at his sudden appearance.
Ned looked at Allison. “Tell Dr Stark I’ll try it again.”
* * * *
Attempt number two went something like this: rather than trying to block the energy transfer, the Global Dynamics team attempted to neutralise it by simulating the transfer in the opposite direction. Equal but opposing forces cancel each other out, in science as well as story telling. The problem is, it helps to know what your forces are first.
Nathan had assembled the same team of scientists in the same room. Taggart had managed to acquire yet more ant corpses. It was convenient PETA had no idea Eureka existed.
Allison enabled the Mark II and stood back. Ned closed his eyes before touching the first dead ant. He didn’t see the delay - brief but discernable - between touch and reanimation.
Amid the flurry of scientists arguing over the recorded data, Nathan stood still. This was it. This was the hint that there was something to be achieved, and something to be commanded. This was why Eureka existed - this half-second’s pause between life and death, under their control.
The sixty-second mark passed, but the noise was so great that it took Taggart to tell Nathan what had happened. He could see Ned flinch when Taggart shook his head, pointing at the tank of recently-alive ants.
Nathan said, “We’re going to work on that part.”
Fargo peered through the doorway and Nathan cursed. “Doctor Stark?”
“What is it?”
“You asked me to tell you if-”
“Just spit it out.”
“Other labs using animal subjects? Two floors up and down from this lab?”
Nathan put his hand to his head and rubbed circles against his temples. “What did we lose?”
“Well. After your memo, most of the more sensitive experiments were moved out of radius. But we still-”
Ned interrupted, “What happened?”
Fargo looked at his shoes and answered, “Some more insects. A dozen or so rats. And three guinea pigs.”
On the whole, that was less than Nathan had been expecting.
Ned shook his head. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen.” He looked at Chuck for encouragement.
Chuck said, “It’s never jumped up from insects to animals before.”
Nathan brushed them off. “The energy being blocked has to go somewhere. We predicted this.”
“You predicted that I could end up killing someone? Could it have moved up to people? I bake with flowerbeds in the kitchen so there’s always something there. If it’s going to move so that Chuck or Olive or-”
“It was highly unlikely.”
Ned backed away towards the door, Chuck following. He said her name quietly. Nathan couldn’t hear what she said back.
A moment later, Ned raised his voice enough that Nathan could hear again, “-don’t need to. If you think we should…”
“No,” she said. “Not if it makes you unhappy.”
Nathan could see where this conversation was going and tried to break in before it got to the point of no return.
Chuck talked over his protest. “What we have is enough, Ned. You and me? I’m happy.”
And she was, that was the worst thing. If he could have got the girl on his side maybe they wouldn’t have needed to resort to this. The pair of them headed towards the door, making excuses and murmuring apologetic goodbyes. Nathan nodded at them as he tapped graphs of the latest results into new shapes on the screen.
When the door closed behind them he turned to Allison and said, “You can’t let them leave.”
“Nathan!”
“This is important. This is scientific knowledge we don’t have and we do need. You can’t just let them walk.”
“I can’t stop them.”
“Just tell the military they represent a threat.”
“They don’t, Nathan. They only person Ned’s a threat to is Chuck and as far as the government’s concerned she’s already dead. He’s not hurting anyone.”
Fargo stepped forward and said, “Unless he creates himself a zombie army.”
Nathan and Allison ignored him. Nathan said, “Ally, we can’t just let him go without finding out how it’s happening.”
She sighed at him. Her expression was knowing, and sad, and touched with just a little pity. “Nathan. They don’t want to risk it, and I won’t try and change their minds. I’m not locking them up just to service your need to know.”
Nathan slammed the door on the way out, seriously contemplating punching a wall. Or Fargo, if he didn’t stop bouncing up and down at Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan turned to him and demanded, “Get me the Sheriff’s office.”
* * * *
Jack didn’t need to go looking for Nathan. He waited in the Sheriff’s Department and, when Nathan came storming in, jerked his head at Jo.
Naturally, she chose this moment to ignore him. He had made her give up a lunch date to play escort and get Ned and Chuck to the bus station. Jo wasn’t really a fan of babysitting tasks, particularly when Jack told her to take the back roads and wouldn’t explain why.
Jack growled, “Jo.”
“Yes?”
“Doctor Stark and I are just going to take a walk. Unless you have somewhere else you need to be?”
“Nope. Of course, you could just stay and have your talk here.”
“Yes, Carter,” Stark replied, fists clenched at his sides, “Why not tell your Deputy why you superseded my order?”
Jack tried his best to keep his tone even. “Because, Stark, you don’t actually give me orders. I work for the United States government to enforce the law in this town.”
“You-”
“And,” Jack continued, before Stark’s interruption could hit full swing, “I occasionally take instruction from Allison when the scientific import escapes me. She told me not to hold them.”
“The two of them represent a scientific leap that you couldn’t hope to make sense of, so how you imagined that you understood enough to make that call-”
“As I said,” Jack put his hand on Nathan’s shoulder. “Allison made the call. I just agreed with her. Let’s take this somewhere else before you cause a scene you’ll regret in the morning.” He steered Nathan towards the door.
Jo smirked at them as they left. Jack wished her many, many 3 a.m. crazy-calls. On the way out, the telephone rang, and the look on her face after she picked up made him think maybe the universe was on his side for once.
Nathan allowed himself to be walked to Jack’s car, but put up a protest when Jack opened the door. “I don’t need you to drive me home.”
“I’m not.”
Nathan was still just pissed-off enough that he got into the car rather than start a conversation. Jack slid into the driver’s side and waited for Nathan to put on a seatbelt before driving away.
There weren’t enough driving roads in Eureka that their destination was a mystery for long, but Nathan said nothing. When Jack pulled up outside the bunker, Nathan just looked at him accusatorily.
Jack walked the door. He spoke to Nathan without looking over his shoulder. “Come inside. S.A.R.A.H.’s recorded some ‘Penn & Teller’. You can watch it with me and prove how much smarter you are by telling me how the tricks are done.”
Nathan said, “A seven year old could tell you that.” But he walked down the steps into the bunker behind Jack.
A few beers and some bad television later, Nathan set his glass down with a clatter. “How can you just accept this?”
Jack shrugged. “No one died. I call that a happy ending.”
“Jack.”
“Listen, okay? You’ll get it. One day you’ll be… taking a shower drawing equations in the steam and it’ll come to you. But for now, can you just not freak out on me?”
“I need to-“
“Nathan. It’s okay that you don’t know.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yeah, it is. For now, he’s not doing anyone any harm, and he doesn’t want to risk her trying to change it. I’m… listen to me, Nathan,” Nathan’s focus had been drifting, back to revealing the unknowable and the threshold of revelation. Jack said, “I’m okay with knowing that you’re going to figure it out someday. No one needs you to understand it right this minute.”
“It doesn’t make sense. On any level, it’s just completely…”
“I know. But it will.” With the hand resting along the back of the couch, Jack patted reassuringly at Nathan’s shoulder. “You’re a smart guy.”
“True.”
“Also, Ned left Vince the recipe for the cup-pies with the honey crust.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah. So can we worry about the laws of nature tomorrow?”
Nathan glared at him, and didn’t answer. But he picked up his glass and came back with a refill. He slumped beside Jack on the couch, paused for a moment, and then slipped off his jacket and tie. In his pocket, his PDA made a sad ‘blip’. Nathan said, “E-mail with some lab results. Nothing serious,” and let Jack change the TV channel. Jack had decided that bad sci-fi with plenty of plot-holes was just what the doctor ordered. Nathan needed some questions he could answer, and Jack was okay with doing the asking.
Neither the Pie-Maker and the Bee-Keeper, nor the Sheriff and the Scientist lived happily ever after. Nevertheless, they lived. Most days, that was quite enough.
FIN.
AN2: I've done my best not to come down in favour of either the fantasy or the science, but as I tend towards a somewhat rational bent, I'm not sure how well that came off. Thoughts are always appreciated. And I will award many cookies to the person who finds the inexplicable Angels in America reference :)