Title: Family
Author: Gatsby
Fandom: Warehouse 13
Genre: General
Spoilers: Post-"MacPherson."
Ships: Ever-so-slightly implied Mrs. F/bodyguard.
Rating: G
Warnings: Nothing really.
Summary: "In their absence, the bed and breakfast seemed like the corpse of a building, lifeless and soulless." One-shot, directly following "MacPherson." First posted on LJ 09/25/09
Family
It had taken them hours to escape the tattered remains of the Warehouse. They returned, limping, to the B&B to find Mrs. Frederic waiting for them. She filled them in while they sat in stunned, exhausted silence.
Leena and MacPherson were on the run.
Pete kept trying to understand how it'd happened, almost wondering if Mrs. Frederic was wrong, but that thought made him nervous, made his head pound. He wasn't sure how she knew; he didn't really care, because not only was Leena gone, but Claudia had disappeared, and above all, Artie was still "missing," and Pete was pretty sure that meant dead. In their absence, the bed and breakfast seemed like the corpse of a building, lifeless and soulless.
"I don't know if I can stand this," he said to Myka. "It's . . ." He didn't finish, but the word lonely echoed in his head like footsteps in an empty room.
She ignored his comment. "Is Mrs. Frederic staying at the B&B?" she hissed at him, moments before the nameless bodyguard appeared and joined them at the table, sitting stiffly as he usually stood.
"Well, at the B," Pete answered. "Not so much the breakfast part, what with evil Leena and everything."
"Yes, Pete. Breakfast is definitely the main concern here at the moment."
"I'm just saying." He picked at his Chinese takeout. "What'll happen to this place without Leena?" He closed his mouth, tasting other questions on the tip of his tongue. What will happen to the Warehouse without Artie? What will happen to Claudia wherever she is? What will happen to us?
"The bed and breakfast chooses its proprietors," came the clipped tones of Mrs. Frederic behind him, and he jumped, scattering fried rice across the table. "She's hardly the first to own it or to leave it."
"Chooses its own?" he repeated, trying to sweep the mess into his cupped palm. "How does that work?" He had a vague image of Leena like King Arthur drawing a frying pan from the stone. Mrs. Frederic was gone before he'd even finished the question.
He exchanged a glance with the bodyguard, or tried to, but the bodyguard didn't really glance so much as stare fiercely, so he shrugged instead. "Szechuan pork?" he said, and offered a white box to the other man across the table.
He took it, and silence settled over the room.
Pete woke early with a vague hollowness in the pit of his stomach. He assumed it was hunger and sat up, at first thinking he'd ask Leena to make scrambled eggs, then remembering that she wasn't there. With a sigh, he started down the stairs, hoping Claudia hadn't already snagged the last of the Fruity Pebbles, then remembering that she wasn't there.
Surprises waited in the dining room. Someone had set out a huge basket of muffins, fresh from the oven. Also, Artie slouched in a chair, bruised and scabbed over and quite thoroughly alive. When he heard Pete enter, he looked up from his plate, arching one heavy eyebrow.
"You're not dead," Pete said, flabbergasted.
Artie gave him a long, sardonic look.
"Okay, obviously." He took a muffin, still staring at Artie. "But—how?"
"Huh? Oh. This." He set down his knife, reached into his shirt pocket, then half-dropped, half-threw something onto the table that rang out like a coin.
Still groggy, Pete blinked at the Phoenix for a moment, then at Artie again, then grinned broadly. It felt like the first time he'd smiled in years; yesterday was forever ago. He dropped into a seat beside him. "Well, it's good to see you, man. Really—just—good to see you. You're caught up on everything, right?"
Artie nodded reflexively, then once again as he processed the question. "Mrs. Frederic told me. You and Myka obviously got out okay."
"Yeah, you know. Myka read the manual, she knew all the other exits. You still look awful," he added cheerfully.
"Uh-huh." His voice sounded hoarse and distant.
The muffin was light and sweet, almost cakelike. Pete took a second one, and wondered where they'd come from. Certainly not Artie, who could barely move with all his aches and bruising, who barely seemed to notice where he was or what he was doing. "Well, things are looking up," he said, taking a napkin and willing it to be true.
Artie shrugged, then winced. "MacPherson," he answered, like a bleak proclamation. "He's still at large."
In the sunny dining room, with a mouthful of muffin, with Artie alive, MacPherson had for a moment seemed like an old ghost story—terrifying the night before, half-remembered nonsense in the light of day. But Artie was real, and grim, and in the space of five words the threat returned like a haunting, hovering over their heads.
Pete didn't finish his second muffin.
The B&B was crowded as usual—more than usual—but without Claudia's laugh echoing in the hallways or Leena's cool presence in the living room, still maintained that eerie emptiness.
So Pete chose not to be there. The Warehouse wasn't accessible yet, which meant he and Myka couldn't go out in the field, either, to burn off the restless, furious energy trying to fill the hollow in his abdomen. Instead he spent the afternoon roaming the town on foot, wandering past shops, kicking up tiny dust storms and watching them settle. He passed Mrs. Frederic's bodyguard on the street a few times; they exchanged nods, but never spoke.
He returned to the horribly silent building well after the sun had set and all the lights were out, except for Myka's spilling yellow from the crack under her door. He knocked lightly, not wanting to go to sleep because he would wake up to the same nagging pang.
"I was wondering if you were back yet," she said in greeting, and leaned in her doorway. She wore baggy pink pajamas, her hair still damp from her shower but drying frizzily around her temples. "You shouldn't just run off like that, you know."
He shrugged. "You doing okay?"
"Yeah," she said, but shook her head. "I'm still sort of . . ."
"Annoyed?" he offered.
She closed her eyes for a moment. "We're not any better off than we were a week ago. In fact, we're worse." She pulled back her hair. Something in the house creaked. "Now not only do we not have MacPherson, but, well, have you seen Artie?"
"Not since this morning. He looks pretty beat up, but—"
"He looks lost." If it hadn't been Myka he would have thought she sounded a little lost herself. "He loves the Warehouse, Pete, and Leena grounded him, and so did Claudia, and now he's lost all of them."
Myka knew about losing people.
For a moment they stood, facing each other but not quite looking at each other, and Artie's losses hung between them as heavily as their own.
"And so did we," she added, unnecessarily.
"Come on," Pete said, grabbing her arm then and dragging her into the hallway. "There's ice cream in the freezer. It's time for emergency fudge ripple."
"Ice cream isn't going to fix it," she said, but she was smiling now, a cautious, testing smile.
"No," he agreed, and he didn't smile. "It's not."
He dreamed that his father sat alone in the Warehouse office, and when he tried to speak his voice echoed and shattered and burned to the ground. Pete woke in a pool of sweat, all twisting sheets and a feeling like suffocation. The silence filled his ears, invaded his lungs, and he choked and half-fell out of bed to escape.
Beside him the clock blazed 5:30, which was early but not too early, and with a mind full of his father's broken voice he crept downstairs.
The kitchen light was on, and he wondered if he'd forgotten to turn it out last night. But when he went in to check, he forgot his dream and stared, wondering if he was still asleep.
Mrs. Frederic's bodyguard stood at the counter, dressed in his usual nondescript suit, over which he had tied a blue apron. He held a mixing bowl under his arm like a headlock, stirring the contents.
"Pancakes," he answered Pete's silent confusion without looking up.
Something dawned on him. "Did—did you make those muffins yesterday?"
He set the bowl on the counter, pushing it back with a slight scraping sound. "Uh-huh."
"Oh." Pete wasn't entirely sure what to say. The apron wasn't Leena's, he noticed distantly, and wondered if the bodyguard had brought it with him. "Well, they were good. Thanks."
The other man didn't answer, and after a moment, Pete turned around and returned to his room, taking it as a sign that 5:30 was, in fact, too early.
Somehow now, the silence of his room didn't seem as suffocating.
"You don't eat sugar," Pete reminded Myka.
She glanced up from her second stack of pancakes, looked around for the bodyguard, then whispered, "Well, I don't want him to think I don't like them."
"Sure," he answered, watching her cut into them with the side of her fork. "You're just trying not to hurt his feelings, that's all."
"Something smells good in here," Claudia announced, dropping her bag on the floor of the dining room. The sound rang out like an alarm.
Pete leapt up without thinking, nearly knocking over his chair. "You're back!" he said, steadying it.
She had circles under her eyes. "Sure looks that way," she answered, standing tense and guarded, pushing limp hair out of her eyes.
"We were worried about you," added Myka, briefly abandoning her breakfast.
Claudia's shoulders relaxed almost imperceptibly. "So," she said, with a fleeting almost-smile that wasn't sure if it belonged, "you don't—you don't think I was helping him? I mean, I wasn't. But Leena . . ."
Pete and Myka looked at each other at the mention of Leena's name.
"We have a lot to catch you up on." Pete steered her towards the table.
Pete bounded up the stairs two at a time, nearly colliding with Mrs. Frederic, who simply arched an eyebrow at him. He winced anyway.
"Sorry. Uh. Claudia's back."
"I know," she answered, and he didn't ask how. "I was just going to brief her."
"We already did that," Pete said, suddenly a bit apologetic.
"I know," she said again, and started back towards the stairs.
"Your bodyguard makes really good pancakes."
She glanced up then. "If you're very, very fortunate," she said in those same even, imperious tones, "tomorrow he will make French toast." She turned and continued down the stairs.
Pete stared after her, then turned back to the hall. "Does that mean he's made her breakfast before?" he asked Artie. "Why?"
Artie just looked at him, and then every single possible implication sank in.
"You know what?" he said then. "I'm going to never, ever think about this again. By the way, Claudia's here. You might want to catch her before she storms off again to kill Leena." He escaped to his shower, leaving Artie alone in the hall.
They ate dinner together that night, the entire remaining Warehouse crew.
No one mentioned MacPherson.
Instead, Pete teased Myka, who still looked tired, and Claudia, who still looked watchful and a little cautious.
No one mentioned Leena.
Mrs. Frederic disappeared halfway through, and he found that he almost missed her, though not enough to want her back.
No one mentioned the bodyguard in the kitchen.
Artie was still bruised and aching, unsure what to do now that he wasn't busy with Warehouse affairs, but he dug into his shepherd's pie with gusto and laughed in a few of the right places, and when they cleared the table to play cards he remained, but didn't play.
No one mentioned the way his eyes kept flicking to the window, to Leena's empty chair, to Claudia and Pete and Myka like he needed to make sure they were there.
Then Claudia, with a ghost of her usual swagger, claimed he was afraid he couldn't keep up in his old age, and he took the challenge and openly smirked when he won the first hand.
"You know," Artie said conversationally, adjusting the cards in his hand. "Mrs. Frederic's going to have to find a new bodyguard."
"Why? What's wrong with that one?"
"The B&B chooses its keepers."
Another clattering sound from the kitchen answered as though on cue, and once it sunk in, Pete laughed so hard he dropped his cards. Rushing to grab them he knocked over Myka's and they had to deal again.
No one mentioned how this felt like healing, how Pete nearly forgot that just days ago, the world had gone to hell, how just this morning he'd woken in fear of lonely places.
Now he looked around the table, examining faces; theirs were all focused on their cards except Claudia, who met his gaze straight on and half-smiled an understanding.
No one mentioned how their odd little family might have been shaken, broken, frightened, but they were together. Right now, that was all that mattered.
Laughter and voices replaced the suffocating silence; they huddled together and sought to fill the empty spaces.