Title: Swimming Through Snow
Author: "dodo31" on LJ, "2k" on ff.n
Rating: K+
Characters: Claudia, Pete, Juliet O'Hara (Psych), Artie, Bodyguard. Undertone of Cladia/Artie.
Spoilers: Warehouse 13: Everything through MacPherson, goes AU about a minute before the episode ends. Psych: AU after Psy vs. Psy.
Summary: On a morning in July, two years after they go into hiding to escape MacPherson, someone knocks on their door.
Notes: Cracky sort-of-crossover with Pysch that sprouted in my head like a weed while I was really bored in my 8 am Anatomy & Physiology lecture. Originally I was reluctant to post this because I'm so out of practice with writing longer pieces, but it won my heart over. I have plans for more in this little universe, but I'm not going to make any promises in case someone actually likes it and wants a sequel and I don't manage to follow through. Crossover is so minor that putting it in the "crossover" section would only serve to disappoint the Psych fans.
--
The knock on the door comes as a complete surprise to Claudia. They'd purposefully chosen a house 20 miles down a dirt road that was itself more than five miles from the limits of the nearest village. The only people who knocked on their door were really, really lost hikers and the occasional neighbor that wanted to argue about which side of the property line a tree would fall on.
"Claudia Patterson?" asks a sharply dressed woman when Claudia swings open the green wooden door, leaving the screen door in place. She's blonde and pretty, light colored eyes shining from a pale face. To her right stands Pete Lattimer, which is probably one of the biggest shocks she'll receive this decade. He looks exactly like she remembers, muscles and short brown hair, and when she focuses on his face and sees him looking back at her she's struck with something that feels a bit like home.
Except he looks at her as if he doesn't see her, or perhaps doesn't want to see her, and the words out of his mouth are as informal as she's ever heard him direct towards her since she first began working at the Warehouse. "I'm Agent Lattimer and this is Agent O'Hara. We're with the Secret Service and we have a few questions for your husband."
They flash her their badges and ID and Claudia finds herself with no choice but to prop open the screen door and invite them in out of the rain. "He called me a few minutes ago, saying he was on his way back from town. Want some coffee and cookies while you wait?"
Pete's response is an enthusiastic yes please, and O'Hara is either better or worse at dealing with him than Myka was because she doesn't even try to argue.
As they make their way to the kitchen she sees the Agents scoping out her front hall and living room. The décor is eclectic and vaguely steampunk; Claudia sometimes jokes about how it's like the Warehouse had a baby with the B&B and abandoned it to raise itself in the middle of the woods. A few inconspicuous artifacts dot the bookshelves that line nearly every wall, something no one but she and Artie and maybe Pete or Myka would notice. Vaguely, she wishes that she'd had the foresight to put them away but writes the thought off as too irrational.
--
"You met your husband while attending the University of California, Irvine, right?" Agent O'Hara asks as Claudia hands her a blue ceramic plate with two fresh oatmeal raisin cookies on it. They're all already holding mugs of the coffee she'd put on in anticipation of Artie's return.
"Yup," she says, putting more cookies on another plate for Pete. "But I thought your questions were for Artie?" Their meeting at UCI had been part of the cover story Mrs. Frederic had cooked up for them. A professor and his undergraduate physics student falling in love and moving across the country to get away from public derision they had faced. At the time they'd laughed and been appropriately awkward about it and, though the idea of their marriage had become more and more truthful over the past two years, she still found the thought of discussing it with Pete about as comfortable as she imagined sticking her hand into a fire might be.
"It's just personal interest," the Agent says, and Claudia's pretty sure it's not. "I grew up in Irvine and was a cop in Santa Barbara for years. It's nice to see someone else from SoCal this far East."
"That's where you worked with that... psychic, right?" Pete asks, and she finds herself listening to the two Agents start bicker about someone named Spencer who may or may not be an actual psychic. Pete still won't look at her as if he's seeing anyone but a stranger.
--
Twenty minutes later, Claudia is trying to convince the coffee machine that it wants to brew another pot. It's aging and temperamental, the least modern thing in their white-walled kitchen, and she's about ready to give up when the bang of the front door slamming shut announces Artie's arrival.
To his credit, not that he could rise much higher in Claudia's esteem, he doesn't look surprised when he ses the federal Agents standing in their kitchen.
"Make the house clean enough," he says, making eye contact with Pete, the phrase sounding like a question he doesn't really want to know the answer to.
O'Hara looks between the two men as if they've grown extra heads. Claudia knows exactly what's going on but half wishes she didn't: She likes secret phrases and code words as much as the next incredibly intelligent young woman, but knowing that what's said next will determine if this is a life or death situation or just a social call kind of takes the fun out of it.
"And earn a bag of wooden nickels," Pete says, still seated even though O'Hara has risen to her feet, and the creeping feeling of dread that had wormed its way into the pit of her stomach explodes into full-fledged worry. "We need your help, Artie."
There were three different phrases he could have responded with, and that's by far the worst possibility. It means that someone's been taken or killed by MacPherson, and since Pete's standing here without Myka she can guess who the someone is.
"Myka's at the Warehouse with Joshua, holding down the fort," he says as if he's reading Claudia's mind.
"Then who--" Artie begins, and Claudia barely gets her mouth open before they're cut off by O'Hara. She's gone from seeming a bit confused to looking visibly angry, fists delicately balled up at her sides as she breathes deeply.
"Care to tell me what's going on, partner?" The emphasis makes Claudia think that they haven't been working together for long.
Pete shakes his head. "Not right now, no, partner." His emphasis carries the weight of someone with authority over her and she's apparently an Agent who plays by the book because she stops talking and looks a little less annoyed. "Get your coats, I've got a special flight for us out of a regional airport and it'll take us a while to get there. I'll try to explain on the way."
"Middle of July right now, Pete, we don't need coats," Claudia says but she grabs her favorite grey jacket and Artie's ancient brown duster off the hooks by the back door anyway.
--
The ride to the airport is anything but quiet, detailed briefings about the situation combined with filling in Pete's brand new partner, assigned so close to the disappearance that there wasn't time for the Warehouse tour. The twisting mountain roads themselves didn't aid the discussion, and after a few particularly sharp bends in a row, Claudia is starting to feel more than a little ill.
"Let me get this straight," O'Hara says, perched next to Claudia on the back seat of the black rental sedan. "You two are Secret Service Agents hiding from some crazy British guy who wants you dead and now he's kidnapped your-- our boss? And Agents Lattimer and Bering didn't hide with you because they couldn't force their families to go with them? And you're not regular Agents, because you work for a secret underground warehouse that collects strange objects?"
"Name's Pete, Juliet, Pete. Stop calling me Agent Lattimer, I'm not your boss." Privately, Claudia thinks the name Juliet doesn't fit her. She's lacking the foolhardiness that Shakespeare's Juliet had, but maybe that's a good thing. "And yeah, that's pretty much it. Our families were already compromised, and leaving them without protection didn't seem like a good idea."
Juliet is obviously beyond puzzled now, staring at the middle-distance between her and the dark grey back of the passenger's seat as if that square foot of air holds all the answers to her questions.
Claudia raises her hand and wiggles it a bit, as if she's in grade school and waiting for a teacher to call on her. Sometimes around people from the Warehouse she feels like she's in grade school. "I'm not actually from the Secret Service. Just tech girl."
"There's nothing 'just' about you, Claudia," she hears Artie mumble from the passenger's seat and she reaches in front of Juliet to give him a hard pinch on the shoulder.
Pete laughs, surprisingly heartily for someone whisking two people out of hiding to go save their may-or-may-not-be-immortal-better-not-put-it-to-the-test boss. "So it's not just your cover story," he says, making her blush. "You're actually married. Myka's not going to believe this."
"Bet Leena won't either. Or she had Artie pegged as a cradle-robber the whole time." She intends it as a joke, but as soon as the words leave her mouth and she sees the expression on Pete's face she knows something she just said was a mistake. "What?" she asks, scooting forward on the seat to try and get a better look at him from an angle not through the rear view mirror. "What aren't you saying?"
"Leena's working for MacPherson," he says, and she feels the breath leave her lungs as if she's been sucker punched. "Has been all along, but we only realized it when she snatched Mrs. F from under our noses."
After the initial shock, Claudia's reaction is an exultant thanks to whatever higher power is out there that she wasn't the sleeper agent after all. She feels guilty for a split second before deciding that if Leena's a traitor she has no reason to not think bad of her. She's pretty mad, actually, because that's her team, her family Leena's betrayed, and apart from Artie and Joshua she can't think of anyone she could possibly love more.
Joshua. That thought gets her remembering something Pete said back in the kitchen. "Joshua's at the Warehouse?"
Pete nods, expression still as grave as it had been when he was talking about Leena. "Six months ago MacPherson went after him at CERN with an artifact, the same way he went after Myka's parents. We brought him to the Warehouse to keep him safe." Claudia opens her mouth to say something else, ask for specifics, but he silences her with a look several times more mature than she remembers him capable of. "You'll see him when we get there."
Artie has turned halfway around in his seat to look at her and they exchange a glance. They've gotten good at nonverbal communication while they've been living up here; for the first month neither felt like saying much of anything. This look he gives her now tells her to count her blessings and she nods, resolving not to press the issue right now.
As it turns out, she wouldn't have had time to even if she hadn't listened to Artie. Pete turns from the winding, 2-lane highway they were following onto a smaller road, a sign at the intersection advertising an airport and a café.
--
When they reach the parking lot, Juliet follows her worried gaze to the small plane sitting on the runway, clearly visible through a chain link fence. "If it makes you feel any better, we flew in on it and arrived just fine," she says, but unsurprisingly it doesn't.
Inside, Pete and Juliet flash their badges and Mrs. Frederic's bodyguard waves them away from the small security station, taking up a corner of the green and beige room. He leads them past the check-in counter to a silver colored door that looks like it's come straight off the front of someone's garage. The small room they pass through is obviously used for storing baggage, and in three steps they're outside again, face-to-face with the tiny propellor plane.
"He wasn't with Irene when she was taken?" Artie asks Pete quietly and there's a couple seconds' pause as he tries to figure out who Irene is.
"No," he says, careful to try and avoid catching the ear of the man they're talking about even though there's probably nothing the quiet man misses. "I think he blames himself. He trusted Leena as much as the rest of us, maybe more. They had a sort of... bond." Claudia thinks he means the bump-and-grind kind of bond.
The pilot standing next to the plane is short and thin and looks at her in a way that makes her skin crawl. Artie steps in front of her, glaring at him, but that just turns the look into a lewd grin.
After that exchange, the plane ride is tense, the sound of the small plane halts conversation but the unspoken words buzz around anyway, angry hornets bouncing off the wall of the tin can they're flying in.
--
Landing in South Dakota is a shock. They emerge from above the white-grey masses of fluffy clouds into a winter wonderland. Large flakes of snow fall from the sky, sticking to the runway, and Claudia is suddenly concerned for their lives. But the skeezy pilot lands them safely and soon she's standing outside the plane shivering, grateful Pete had told them to bring their coats.
"Isn't it the middle of July?" she asks him, not thinking as she grabs Artie's hands and rubs them together with her own, trying to warm up.
Pete looks at them and laughs at the picture they must be presenting, grumbling old man with his fingers being warmed by an irritated young woman, and in his look she sees the bit of home she thought she'd glimpsed earlier as he stands in the doorway. He's looking at them now, not just through.
"Mrs. F isn't all we have to worry about," he says with an enigmatic grin, and behind him Juliet and the Bodyguard are scowling at the icy ground.
"Tell me you haven't been playing with the snowglobe," Claudia scolds, dragging Artie with one hand and Pete with the other towards the nearest shelter.