Nothing Left To Lose 4/8
Title: Nothing Left To Lose
Author: flamingo_bandit
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Spoilers: Post-“MacPherson.”
Ships: Artie/Claudia
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None so much
Summary: Claudia runs from her fears. Artie searches for his. Chapter 4 of 8.
Shout-outs: Joss Whedon, because Claudia and I stole a line from Firefly (cited below). And, of course, theredoormouse, because a luchador is always prepared for battle.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The door creaked open and Artie huffed back into the room. Claudia tore her eyes from the screen, where there had been frighteningly little progress in the last hours.
“I made coffee,” she said; her voice sounded reedy to her own ears, trying to thank him without having to thank him.
“No time.” Artie held out a gas station coffee cup like a peace offering, his other hand clutching a paper bag like he usually gripped his leather one. “We have to go.”
Immediately she closed her laptop and slid it into her bag. “Where?”
“Missouri,” he answered. “It might be a trap but at least it’s a direction. I don’t want to stay so close to the Warehouse.”
Or what’s left of it, she thought but didn’t say, and accepted the coffee. “Thanks,” she said, cupping her palms into its warmth. “And how are we getting there?”
“Huh? Oh. I got a car.” He tilted his head towards the door. “Come on.” She followed him out, then stopped in her tracks, staring.
A massive van loomed alone in the parking lot. The sliding side door was dented dramatically, and rust crept up the sides like growing flame. What paint remained had perhaps once been a cheerful sort of maroon, but from age and dust, now appeared roughly the color of a blood clot.
“What?” he asked, looking back to see what was taking her so long.
“You paid money for this?” she asked. “On purpose?”(1)
He followed her gaze. “I had to find something I could get with cash. No paper trail. It was either this or a tractor.” He sounded a defensive, and she thought about his own meticulously-kept vintage convertible and decided to drop the subject.
“All right. It’s not the Batmobile, but as long as it runs.” She hesitated. “It does run, right?”
“Just get in,” he told her irritably, then headed for the motel office to check out.
She pulled the passenger door open with some effort-it stuck-and pulled herself up into the van. The seats were threadbare, there was a sticky patch on the upholstery inside her door, and the whole van smelled faintly of dog. She rolled down the window and vowed not to say anything.
Artie returned, rocking the van slightly as he climbed in and settled into the driver’s seat, then handed her a fistful of maps and the grocery bag. “Have a muffin,” he told her, and with only the faintest whimpering protest, the engine started up. They drew out of the lot, clipping the curb (“Sorry,” he muttered with a wince) and then abruptly the town ended.
“So,” Claudia said, opening the South Dakota map. “Where to?”
It turned out that he didn’t need her to navigate. Avoiding freeways for reasons of his own, he took a turn onto a winding, empty road as though he’d been there a thousand times. They settled southeast, into an early sun that already produced beads of perspiration somewhere near her hairline. A dull ache settled somewhere near her temples, from the heat or the severe sunlight or the all-nighter she wasn’t sure, and she nearly closed her eyes but shook her head and dug out the Missouri map instead. Artie hadn’t gotten much sleep either-thanks to her-and if he could stay awake and drive, she could stay awake and keep him company, stay awake and continue with the precious little information she’d collected. She decided this, and tried not to picture herself passing other, more delicate information to MacPherson.
She leaned low over the maps and her notebook, oblivious to fields of soybeans and scattered, sickly cattle. Wind whipped past her ear, and they didn’t speak. She reached out and flicked on the radio, startling Artie (“Sorry,” she muttered with a wince); several minutes of searching revealed only static and a few faint suggestions of a country station, and she turned it off again, and tried not to picture herself stealing from the Warehouse.
She traced along lines in the map, circled towns, and tried not to picture herself releasing a criminal from a place she couldn’t remember being.
“You know,” Artie said hesitantly; she jerked out of a doze that she hadn’t realized she’d fallen into. He was focused intently-too intently-on the road before him. “If you want to talk. About things.” He glanced briefly at her, pretended not to. “You can do that.” He cleared his throat. “Not that you have to,” he added quickly.
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I think I’m good, old man, but thanks for the awkward offer.”
“All right. It’s just that you were-you were pretty, uh, shaken last night. With good reason.” He caught her eye in another sidelong glance. “I meant everything I said,” he told her, voice a little stronger. “I still trust you.”
She expelled a breath of air she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “I don’t,” she admitted, staring out the windshield. Her eyes landed on a Welcome to Nebraska sign, and she wondered how long she’d been asleep.
“We both know that if this happened, you had no choice,” he said firmly.
She sighed. “I know that, Artie, I do, it just creeps me out.” She fiddled with the map, took a deep breath. “I just don’t like having to wonder whether or not what my brain is telling me is the truth.” She glanced up, making sure he understood what she meant, half-hoping he didn’t.
Claudia didn’t exactly keep her time in the psych ward a secret, but she always found it interesting to see how many methods people had of not talking about it. Leena recognized a sensitive topic and didn’t bring it up. Myka decided it was none of her business and didn’t bring it up. Pete teased her about everything but studiously avoided words like “crazy” and didn’t bring it up. She wasn’t sure Joshua knew it had even happened and tried not to resent him for that. And anytime someone alluded to those six months of her life, someone changed the subject; frequently it was her.
Artie was the only person she could remember bringing it up to her face. They’d been busy rescuing Joshua at the time, so it wasn’t like they’d had a touchingly in-depth heart-to-heart about it, but that still stuck in her memory months later: the gentleness in his voice, the raw kindness behind it. She still wasn’t sure whether he’d been sympathizing or apologizing, or maybe a little of both.
Now he didn’t speak, his eyes still on the road, but one hand reached out, clumsily slid over hers on the armrest. He squeezed her fingers with that same tender concern, and she closed her eyes, embarrassed and grateful.
“It’s fine, you know,” she said. It felt better to be the one reassuring him, but he clutched her hand tighter. When she looked up, he had a death grip on the steering wheel, glaring ahead through the windshield, and her eyebrows shot up. “Seriously, Artie, it’s okay. Chill.”
“It is not okay.” She dropped his hand, openly staring at him now. “MacPherson has a lot to answer for.” His voice was low, and dangerous.
Claudia wasn’t much of a planner. She usually focused on one goal and strove to reach it; she rarely thought about what happened next. With Joshua, she’d only considered the necessity of saving him-she hadn’t thought about what to do with him once he was back, and she’d been grateful to Artie turning up to take both to Leena’s. Now she was searching for MacPherson, considered only the goal of finding him.
For the first time, she realized what would happen once they did.
Now she found herself asking about it. “By the way. Do we have a strategy? Or, uh, assets?”
“You, me, a van and a gun,” he answered wryly. The last word sent a shiver of frisson down her spine.
She straightened her posture, trying to toughen up, and struggled to force a businesslike tone. “What about artifacts?”
“No.” He slammed the breaks, swiveling to face her. “No artifacts. We are not with the Warehouse, we do not have a right to artifacts for personal use.” His eyes were sharp behind his glasses. “That’s what he does.”
“Okay,” she said, shrinking back, eyes wide, half-raising a hand as though to ward off the verbal blow. “Okay. I get it. Nothing Warehousey.”
He turned back to the road, and her fingers curled towards her palm, attention still focused warily on him. She’d always seen him at his core as intensely compassionate; now that image was obscured by an equally intense fury, and she pulled her gaze away, not wanting to see him like that.
She leaned against the window for a long time, staring, sometimes nodding off. Nebraska’s summer crops stretched in all directions, flat and faded, the tender green promises of spring long since subdued by an abrasive summer sun. The hours stretched just as unendingly, the quiet fading from tense to exhausted. They stopped briefly at another grungy gas station. Thinking back to that morning’s muffin she bought a cheap prepackaged sandwich for the road, but the bread was spongy and dry on her tongue, and Artie wasn’t eating anything, and she threw most of it back into the bag.
She brushed the crumbs from her lap, chancing another glance at Artie. He no longer seemed furious, but worn. He focused on the road too single-mindedly for her to offer to take the wheel and risk further snapping, but she suspected he was doing all the work and felt guilty.
Uncertainly, she stretched down and picked up the maps from where they’d drifted to the floor, crunched under her sneakers. She returned to work in earnest silence, trying to distract herself with calculation. She focused on directions MacPherson could have gone from the Warehouse, how far he could have gotten. It felt like a math problem: one ruthless madman leaves the station at noon going 60 miles per hour, a second ruthless madman leaves at four PM going 45 miles per hour. At what time do they crash and burn?
At some point while she studied, the sun-bleached monotony of Nebraska had given way to the twilight monotony of Missouri. Hills cut through the landscape now, and there were fewer cornfields and more skinny, dusty horses, and an alarming number of abandoned farmhouses, sagging in on themselves but never quite caving. The sun set, but the summer night air still smoldered.
She checked the map, this time for location rather than theory. “ETA about two hours from now,” she announced, the first whole sentence uttered in the van since the morning’s argument, if it could be called an argument. “If we could find a Wi-Fi spot I can double check a few things.”
“Not a bad idea,” he said, voice a little hoarse but calm again as usual. “Should keep an eye out for a motel anyway.”
It was another silent half hour before they found one. Its peeling letters advertised free high speed Internet, and first c in the glowing “vacancy” sign flickered irregularly. They got keys from a balding man who spoke too loudly at Claudia, and once again they set up temporary base in a bland motel room.
Claudia sprawled on the bed with forced casualness; Artie occupied himself staring, head tilted, at a painting over his bed of a lopsided ship. “I still have her vacation home saved and everything,” she assured him, because stationary silence felt heavier than silence on the road, while she clicked her way back into Carol’s information. “I just want to double-check . . .”
She trailed off as the page finished loading, and then let out a string of expletives.
“What?” He circled his bed to stand next to hers, and she tilted back the screen to show him.
“It’s gone,” she said, unnecessarily. “All of Carol’s stuff online. All of it.”
He sat next to her, leaning over her to stare. “They know,” he said thinly. “They know.”
She swallowed hard, closed her computer. “Yeah,” she said, staring at the plastic surface. “Sure looks that way.”
====
(1) from Firefly, episode 8, “Out of Gas.” You know damn well Claudia's a Whedon fan.
Author: flamingo_bandit
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Spoilers: Post-“MacPherson.”
Ships: Artie/Claudia
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None so much
Summary: Claudia runs from her fears. Artie searches for his. Chapter 4 of 8.
Shout-outs: Joss Whedon, because Claudia and I stole a line from Firefly (cited below). And, of course, theredoormouse, because a luchador is always prepared for battle.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The door creaked open and Artie huffed back into the room. Claudia tore her eyes from the screen, where there had been frighteningly little progress in the last hours.
“I made coffee,” she said; her voice sounded reedy to her own ears, trying to thank him without having to thank him.
“No time.” Artie held out a gas station coffee cup like a peace offering, his other hand clutching a paper bag like he usually gripped his leather one. “We have to go.”
Immediately she closed her laptop and slid it into her bag. “Where?”
“Missouri,” he answered. “It might be a trap but at least it’s a direction. I don’t want to stay so close to the Warehouse.”
Or what’s left of it, she thought but didn’t say, and accepted the coffee. “Thanks,” she said, cupping her palms into its warmth. “And how are we getting there?”
“Huh? Oh. I got a car.” He tilted his head towards the door. “Come on.” She followed him out, then stopped in her tracks, staring.
A massive van loomed alone in the parking lot. The sliding side door was dented dramatically, and rust crept up the sides like growing flame. What paint remained had perhaps once been a cheerful sort of maroon, but from age and dust, now appeared roughly the color of a blood clot.
“What?” he asked, looking back to see what was taking her so long.
“You paid money for this?” she asked. “On purpose?”(1)
He followed her gaze. “I had to find something I could get with cash. No paper trail. It was either this or a tractor.” He sounded a defensive, and she thought about his own meticulously-kept vintage convertible and decided to drop the subject.
“All right. It’s not the Batmobile, but as long as it runs.” She hesitated. “It does run, right?”
“Just get in,” he told her irritably, then headed for the motel office to check out.
She pulled the passenger door open with some effort-it stuck-and pulled herself up into the van. The seats were threadbare, there was a sticky patch on the upholstery inside her door, and the whole van smelled faintly of dog. She rolled down the window and vowed not to say anything.
Artie returned, rocking the van slightly as he climbed in and settled into the driver’s seat, then handed her a fistful of maps and the grocery bag. “Have a muffin,” he told her, and with only the faintest whimpering protest, the engine started up. They drew out of the lot, clipping the curb (“Sorry,” he muttered with a wince) and then abruptly the town ended.
“So,” Claudia said, opening the South Dakota map. “Where to?”
It turned out that he didn’t need her to navigate. Avoiding freeways for reasons of his own, he took a turn onto a winding, empty road as though he’d been there a thousand times. They settled southeast, into an early sun that already produced beads of perspiration somewhere near her hairline. A dull ache settled somewhere near her temples, from the heat or the severe sunlight or the all-nighter she wasn’t sure, and she nearly closed her eyes but shook her head and dug out the Missouri map instead. Artie hadn’t gotten much sleep either-thanks to her-and if he could stay awake and drive, she could stay awake and keep him company, stay awake and continue with the precious little information she’d collected. She decided this, and tried not to picture herself passing other, more delicate information to MacPherson.
She leaned low over the maps and her notebook, oblivious to fields of soybeans and scattered, sickly cattle. Wind whipped past her ear, and they didn’t speak. She reached out and flicked on the radio, startling Artie (“Sorry,” she muttered with a wince); several minutes of searching revealed only static and a few faint suggestions of a country station, and she turned it off again, and tried not to picture herself stealing from the Warehouse.
She traced along lines in the map, circled towns, and tried not to picture herself releasing a criminal from a place she couldn’t remember being.
“You know,” Artie said hesitantly; she jerked out of a doze that she hadn’t realized she’d fallen into. He was focused intently-too intently-on the road before him. “If you want to talk. About things.” He glanced briefly at her, pretended not to. “You can do that.” He cleared his throat. “Not that you have to,” he added quickly.
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I think I’m good, old man, but thanks for the awkward offer.”
“All right. It’s just that you were-you were pretty, uh, shaken last night. With good reason.” He caught her eye in another sidelong glance. “I meant everything I said,” he told her, voice a little stronger. “I still trust you.”
She expelled a breath of air she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “I don’t,” she admitted, staring out the windshield. Her eyes landed on a Welcome to Nebraska sign, and she wondered how long she’d been asleep.
“We both know that if this happened, you had no choice,” he said firmly.
She sighed. “I know that, Artie, I do, it just creeps me out.” She fiddled with the map, took a deep breath. “I just don’t like having to wonder whether or not what my brain is telling me is the truth.” She glanced up, making sure he understood what she meant, half-hoping he didn’t.
Claudia didn’t exactly keep her time in the psych ward a secret, but she always found it interesting to see how many methods people had of not talking about it. Leena recognized a sensitive topic and didn’t bring it up. Myka decided it was none of her business and didn’t bring it up. Pete teased her about everything but studiously avoided words like “crazy” and didn’t bring it up. She wasn’t sure Joshua knew it had even happened and tried not to resent him for that. And anytime someone alluded to those six months of her life, someone changed the subject; frequently it was her.
Artie was the only person she could remember bringing it up to her face. They’d been busy rescuing Joshua at the time, so it wasn’t like they’d had a touchingly in-depth heart-to-heart about it, but that still stuck in her memory months later: the gentleness in his voice, the raw kindness behind it. She still wasn’t sure whether he’d been sympathizing or apologizing, or maybe a little of both.
Now he didn’t speak, his eyes still on the road, but one hand reached out, clumsily slid over hers on the armrest. He squeezed her fingers with that same tender concern, and she closed her eyes, embarrassed and grateful.
“It’s fine, you know,” she said. It felt better to be the one reassuring him, but he clutched her hand tighter. When she looked up, he had a death grip on the steering wheel, glaring ahead through the windshield, and her eyebrows shot up. “Seriously, Artie, it’s okay. Chill.”
“It is not okay.” She dropped his hand, openly staring at him now. “MacPherson has a lot to answer for.” His voice was low, and dangerous.
Claudia wasn’t much of a planner. She usually focused on one goal and strove to reach it; she rarely thought about what happened next. With Joshua, she’d only considered the necessity of saving him-she hadn’t thought about what to do with him once he was back, and she’d been grateful to Artie turning up to take both to Leena’s. Now she was searching for MacPherson, considered only the goal of finding him.
For the first time, she realized what would happen once they did.
Now she found herself asking about it. “By the way. Do we have a strategy? Or, uh, assets?”
“You, me, a van and a gun,” he answered wryly. The last word sent a shiver of frisson down her spine.
She straightened her posture, trying to toughen up, and struggled to force a businesslike tone. “What about artifacts?”
“No.” He slammed the breaks, swiveling to face her. “No artifacts. We are not with the Warehouse, we do not have a right to artifacts for personal use.” His eyes were sharp behind his glasses. “That’s what he does.”
“Okay,” she said, shrinking back, eyes wide, half-raising a hand as though to ward off the verbal blow. “Okay. I get it. Nothing Warehousey.”
He turned back to the road, and her fingers curled towards her palm, attention still focused warily on him. She’d always seen him at his core as intensely compassionate; now that image was obscured by an equally intense fury, and she pulled her gaze away, not wanting to see him like that.
She leaned against the window for a long time, staring, sometimes nodding off. Nebraska’s summer crops stretched in all directions, flat and faded, the tender green promises of spring long since subdued by an abrasive summer sun. The hours stretched just as unendingly, the quiet fading from tense to exhausted. They stopped briefly at another grungy gas station. Thinking back to that morning’s muffin she bought a cheap prepackaged sandwich for the road, but the bread was spongy and dry on her tongue, and Artie wasn’t eating anything, and she threw most of it back into the bag.
She brushed the crumbs from her lap, chancing another glance at Artie. He no longer seemed furious, but worn. He focused on the road too single-mindedly for her to offer to take the wheel and risk further snapping, but she suspected he was doing all the work and felt guilty.
Uncertainly, she stretched down and picked up the maps from where they’d drifted to the floor, crunched under her sneakers. She returned to work in earnest silence, trying to distract herself with calculation. She focused on directions MacPherson could have gone from the Warehouse, how far he could have gotten. It felt like a math problem: one ruthless madman leaves the station at noon going 60 miles per hour, a second ruthless madman leaves at four PM going 45 miles per hour. At what time do they crash and burn?
At some point while she studied, the sun-bleached monotony of Nebraska had given way to the twilight monotony of Missouri. Hills cut through the landscape now, and there were fewer cornfields and more skinny, dusty horses, and an alarming number of abandoned farmhouses, sagging in on themselves but never quite caving. The sun set, but the summer night air still smoldered.
She checked the map, this time for location rather than theory. “ETA about two hours from now,” she announced, the first whole sentence uttered in the van since the morning’s argument, if it could be called an argument. “If we could find a Wi-Fi spot I can double check a few things.”
“Not a bad idea,” he said, voice a little hoarse but calm again as usual. “Should keep an eye out for a motel anyway.”
It was another silent half hour before they found one. Its peeling letters advertised free high speed Internet, and first c in the glowing “vacancy” sign flickered irregularly. They got keys from a balding man who spoke too loudly at Claudia, and once again they set up temporary base in a bland motel room.
Claudia sprawled on the bed with forced casualness; Artie occupied himself staring, head tilted, at a painting over his bed of a lopsided ship. “I still have her vacation home saved and everything,” she assured him, because stationary silence felt heavier than silence on the road, while she clicked her way back into Carol’s information. “I just want to double-check . . .”
She trailed off as the page finished loading, and then let out a string of expletives.
“What?” He circled his bed to stand next to hers, and she tilted back the screen to show him.
“It’s gone,” she said, unnecessarily. “All of Carol’s stuff online. All of it.”
He sat next to her, leaning over her to stare. “They know,” he said thinly. “They know.”
She swallowed hard, closed her computer. “Yeah,” she said, staring at the plastic surface. “Sure looks that way.”
====
(1) from Firefly, episode 8, “Out of Gas.” You know damn well Claudia's a Whedon fan.