Jo receives a mysterious package in the mail- and its presence alters her, literally. Unable to explain what's happened to her through science, Fargo turns to a friend of his at Warehouse 13 for some answers. A Jo/Zane romance in progress.
Eureka and Warehouse 13 Cross-Over Fanfic. Takes place about a week after episode 4.09- I'll be seeing you. Rated T for later violence. I own none of the characters in Eureka or Warehouse 13, but I would like Jo Lupo to be my friend.
You don't know Jo
Chapter 1
Vincent had outdone himself this morning, Jo thought to herself as she sipped her morning vinspresso. After her normal morning run she'd been able to stop by café diem and grab a muffin with Sheriff Carter before she headed to work. It was a routine that they had started ever when they had switched timelines- meeting for breakfast before the workday. Now that they no longer worked together, they found time to get together a few times a week to catch up and she'd come to enjoy it. That and Vincent's blueberry muffins.
She had finally moved back into her own place just three days before, and it was taking some adjusting to being on her own again. Between the noisiness of Carter's home, S.A.R.A.H and now Zoe home for the summer months, the house had seemed so crowded until she was back in her own place. Suddenly she found that she couldn't get used to all of the quiet, even if she did like having her own space. 'It was just going to take some adjusting', she thought, 'its not as if we haven't been doing enough of that in the past few months'. She was never fully going to adjust to this timeline. The demands of the job provided new challenges in her life, but the solitude was something that she wasn't sure that she could cope with. It had taken so long for her to find someone who she could trust to lean on, and now that she didn't have him anymore she was finding the world a very lonely place.
Zane. She'd been avoiding this-Zane all week, ever since that disastrous moment last week in the sheriff's office. It was her fault, she knew it. The hallucinations weren't something that she could control, but they had wreaked havoc with her life, so much so that now he knew her secret, and to prove a point he had kissed her.
Jo got on the elevator and pushed the sixth floor button to head to her office and closed her eyes as the elevator began moving to her floor. For just a moment last week she'd forgotten and had kissed him back. It had felt so much like her Zane and she had been so caught off guard by what he had done that it had taken her a moment to stop. Zane had given her the funniest look and before he could say too much more they were interrupted by Zoe. Jo still didn't know how she felt about the interruption. There were no more answers that she could have given him and lord knew he would have continued to push for them if Zoe hadn't come in, but Jo hadn't been in any form to fight back after that kiss. It had rattled her deeply and she still didn't know what she was going to do about it. She had contemplated leaving Eureka for a day or two, thinking that the problem might go away with her if she left. Zane really didn't have any proof about the others, but he had plenty of it when it came to her. But she discarded that idea finally yesterday and had spent most of the evening in her gym coming up with a new plan. The time for avoiding Zane was past. She needed to seek him out and get the ball back in her court. He wasn't the sort who was going to go and rattle the information off to anyone attention unless it suited him, so she was just going to have to make sure that it didn't benefit him to do so. She hated to think of it as giving into blackmail, but perhaps they could find a way to be reasonable.
Jo finally got to her office door and as she pressed her thumb print to open it her second in command former Army Major Chris Hale came walking up to her.
"Morning ma'am," he said briskly handing her the morning's stack of memo's, and the mail.
"Hale," Jo greeted him. "Any incidents last night that I need to be aware of?"
Hale ran through the checklist from the night before, and Jo half listened while she walked to her desk, and turned on her computer and equipment while Hale explained about the small fluctuations they found in Section 2 and the scientist who had accidentally locked himself in his lab and needed to be rescued. Jo knew that if there'd been anything truly serious she would have been called in.
Jo nodded as he finished his verbal report. "Make sure to have the incident reports on my desk before the end of the day, and please check over the new rotation schedule that I sent you. I want to take a closer look at the shifts that we have had ongoing for the past few months."
Hale agreed but not before Jo caught a slight grimace, just slight enough to indicate displeasure, but not enough to call him on it.
Jo dismissed him and he left her office. She continued sipping her coffee and wondered if she needed to have a talk with Hale about his attitude. According to the reports that she had, he had earned the job as second in command shortly before she herself was appointed to the head of GD. He'd been passed over for the promotion and Jo had been given the job instead. Having been in his shoes before when Carter came in she was trying to be understanding, but she needed to believe that she could trust that he wouldn't undermine her. Deciding to give him a few more days before she spoke with him, she turned her attention to the morning schedule.
Her day was going to be busy. She had a meeting with the Head of Section 5 to discuss some upcoming shifts in lab assignments, and she had two meetings to discuss security protocols with lab directors in Section 2 whose teams kept violating safety procedures with their experiments. She still needed to make time to speak with Zane and decided to make that her top priority that morning after she dealt with the mail.
She rifled through the letters that had come in- requisition catalogs for equipment, hard copies of incident reports, and then she came to a small brown parcel at the bottom. There was no return stamp on the outside, which meant that it was a hand delivered item. Not unusual given that packages often came from the DOD in couriered bundles and were given out on site by hand. She took the top off the box and shook out the contents into her hand.
Zane heard the quiet beeping of the alarm on his computer monitor go off, and he blinked his eyes blearily as he read the message. J. Lupo-Online. His mind suddenly alert, he quickly erased the message and looked around the lab to make sure that no one had noticed. It was still early and there were only a small handful of people in the room, and none were paying him any attention. He'd already been in the office for the past two hours pretending to work while he waited for Jo to arrive so that he could find a way to speak with her, It had been more than a week now since they'd last spoke and she was still avoiding him; she'd gotten really sneaky about it too. When he'd tried to stop her in the gym she had slipped out the back door. When he tried to intercept her on her morning run she'd lost him down a side street. He'd almost caught her on the rotunda two days ago, but she'd managed to slip into an elevator before he could reach her.
So he'd been forced to turn to less legitimate ways of finding out where she would be. He'd hacked into the mainframe and placed a tracer on her computer so that he would be notified when she logged into her computer. He'd also made a point of checking out her schedule and saw that he'd have about an hour before she had her first meeting. 'That would have to wait,' he thought, 'because they had a lot of talking to do.'
He yawned widely and ran his hands over his face as he tried to focus. He was exhausted. He hadn't slept much since their conversation the week before. He snorted to himself, 'yeah right', it was the memory of the conversation that kept him awake at night. He walked over to the coffee pot and poured the remains of what sadly wasn't anything close to vinsperesso into his mug. He sipped and grimaced at the bitter taste as he willed the caffeine to keep him going for just a little longer. He needed to have his wits about him when he spoke to Lupo this morning, and lately they had been failing him. It wasn't just the conversation that was causing him to lose sleep, although finding out that the 'enforcer' secretly had feelings for him was trippy enough, but the discovery of the ring that she had thrown at him proved that there was an alternate universe, or timeline depending on how you looked at it, and that Jo wasn't from this one. She wasn't alone either by his count. He'd been seeing too many weird things going on with several of Eureka's more prominent scientists, and the sheriff, but they weren't his biggest concern right now. Jo was. If he was correct, and he was sure that he was, Jo Lupo was from a timeline where she was in love with him, and given the fact that she had his grandmother's ring, he had loved her enough to propose. Dealing with the understanding of that alone was a heady subject, but the real reason that he was loosing sleep was because of that kiss.
He'd come to some pretty big conclusions as he'd sat there in that jail cell all day, and the majority of his thoughts had been about her. He'd made a point just last week of going down to the Eureka bank and checking his security deposit box; his grandmother's ring had still been inside. He'd originally planned to leave the other one inside, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Its mere existence was too big of a clue. So instead he found himself carrying it around in his pocket. He suspected that if he analyzed it he would have found it to be identical down to the molecular level. But doing that would raise too many questions when he himself still had so many that needed to be answered. He needed to talk to Jo so that they could figure out what they were going to do.
He got on the elevator and pressed the sixth floor button. He pinched the bridge of his nose as the elevator began to move as he focused on what he was going to say. 'Yeah,' he thought to himself, 'say to Lupo, not do'. He'd had several sleepless nights thinking about that kiss. And when he was able to sleep he'd been plagued by very erotic dreams featuring GD's Head of Security. He still wasn't entirely sure why he had kissed her. At first it had been to prove a point. He wanted her to know that he was lying and that he knew I;, but If he was honest with himself, which he admitted he rarely was, he had been wanting to kiss her for a very long time, and faced with the opportunity he couldn't help himself. He was never good with having unsolved mysteries right in front of him, and that kiss had become the largest piece of a puzzle that had been plaguing him ever since he came to Eureka.
He had been infatuated with then-deputy Lupo ever since he arrived. He just got such a kick out of riling that usually calm demeanor, that and she was hot. He'd flirted with her for weeks before finally asking her out. She didn't say no, but she never said yes either which made him continue to ask. The day he heard about her new job at GD he was one of the first to congratulate her and he surprised her by asking her out to brunch. To his surprise she finally agreed to go out with him.
The date had begun well enough, but somewhere during brunch her face lost its usual animation and she turned down his offer of staying for coffee. As she left he realized that she'd forgotten the rose that he'd brought her, and he moved to follow her outside. As he opened the door he spotted General Mansfield lecturing her just on the sidewalk outside. He'd only caught a few words before he realized that the General was expressing his disapproval of her associating with known felons when she was about to take such a pivotal role at GD. Zane listened to his stern warning to her about how everything that she did from then on was going to be under scrutiny and that she needed to check her priorities. Jo never saw that he heard what the General had said, and he never asked her out again. After that day they barely spoke, and whenever she did speak to him it was with cool professionalism. He had grown bored with Eureka after that. He was always going to be viewed as the screw-up, the felon, and no matter what he did it was never going to change anyone's mind. His boredom at work grew into harmless pranks- screw them if they can't take a joke, and he quickly found himself booted from one boring project to another. Another boring day in Eureka, but anywhere was better than prison, or so he tried to tell himself. He was bored out of his flipping mind, or at least he had been until he'd been sitting in the sheriff's jail cell and Jo Lupo had walked in and said that she would marry him.
At first he'd thought that she'd been playing some sort of prank on him. She'd looked so confused he wondered if she'd been the victim of another experiment go wrong- it certainly happened frequently enough around there. He'd brushed it off, he remembered, and proceeded to do what he normally did when he saw her which was needle her as much as he could. Over the next few weeks as he began noticing changes, he started to wonder if he'd been the one who was going nuts. Ever since she had taken the job at GD she only ever called him Donovan. It pissed him off that she wouldn't use his name and she knew it, which was why she did it. It was why he admitted he called her Lupo instead of Jo. But lately it was like she had forgotten and she had been calling him by his name. The first time she'd done it, it had taken him a little while to realize it. She'd come down the NLWP's lab where he'd been working on immobilization mines. She looked so uncomfortable that he couldn't help but needle her like always, but she hadn't responded to his digs. Fargo had looked so smug that he couldn't resist trying to bean him with the bean bag rifle, but Lupo had caught it inches from his face without any effort. He didn't realize it until a few minutes later that she had called him 'Zane' instead of 'Donovan'. Less than an hour later the whole day got very fuzzy and he had trouble remembering all of it. He was pretty sure that Lupo had been there, but he wasn't really clear on it. It was only the first of many things about her behavior that weren't adding up.
The elevator doors opened and he walked down the hall towards Jo's office. He'd certainly been called in there more than a few times. He stood outside the door, hands buried in his pockets as he tried to stay calm and focused on getting answers. Who was he kidding, he chided himself- he was neither calm nor focused and he went with plan B- and charged right in.
He knocked as he entered, but found it unnecessary as her office was empty. He swore under his breath, he must have just missed her-again. He walked over to look at her desk. Her computer was still on, and piles of unfiled reports and mail covered the normally neat-as-a-pin desk. It looked like she had just up and walked away in the middle of opening the morning mail. On the top of the pile there was an empty small brown box. He had just decided that he would grab a seat and wait for her when he heard the noise- a quiet, snuffling sound. It reminded him of an animal and he looked behind the chairs to see if one of the lab animals had escaped again. He frowned as he looked. If there was indeed such an escape then he was sure to be the first in line to be questioned. If it weren't for the fact that he was sure that she'd sic her second in command on him he would have already done it in order to talk to her.
The noise was soft but steady and the only place left in the room was under the desk, so he bent his knees and looked beneath the large wide desk. Instead of an animal he found himself looking at a little girl. She was wearing a pink ballerina costume, and matching ballet shoes. Her hair was done up in curly pigtails and there was a purple ribbon tied to one of them. Tears streamed silently out of her large brown eyes and down her face as she sniffled.
Zane's eyebrows flew up in surprise. "Hey," he said softly not wanting to scare her. "What are you doing under here?"
"Daddy is going to be so mad at me," she said quietly with a little hiccup, as she knelt beneath the desk. "I just wanted to wear it for a little while," she said pleadingly. "I know I'm not supposed to."
It wasn't very often that Zane found himself in the company of children, and he sat down on the floor trying to figure out what to do. He decided finally that his problem with Jo could wait a minute and he picked up his phone to call her. When it went to voicemail he was annoyed that she was still ignoring him. "Come on Jo", he bit out angrily as her voice said to leave a message. "Lupo, we need to talk. I'm in your office and there's a kid in here."
The child in question peered out at him and asked in a quiet voice. "Are you mad at me?"
Zane tried to make his voice sound calmer, he didn't want to scare her. "No, I'm not," he assured her." Why don't you tell me who your dad is and we'll call him and tell him where you are." He offered.
If possible, her eyes grew wider, "My dad is the Colonel," she said quietly.
'Great' Zane thought, 'its probably one of Mansfield's guys.' "Colonel who," he asked her as patiently as he could. "What's your name?"
The little girl rubbed her runny nose on the back of her hand while a small silver charm bracelet dangled from her wrist. "I'm Josefina Lupo," she said, "but my mommy calls me Jo."
Zane froze and stared at the little girl. He marked the dark curcly hair, and the light olive complextion of her skin, and shook his head in disbelief.
She blinked owlishly at him, and gave him a small smile; she was missing a front tooth. "What's your name?" she asked.
Zane merely sat there trying to figure out what the hell was going on. "Shit", he said, swearing under his breath, but the little girl heard him and frowned.
"That's a bad word," she told him. "My mommy says that you're not supposed to say words like that."
Zane swore again and picked up his phone and dialed, his eyes never leaving the little girl. "Dr, Blake," he said into the phone. "It's Zane. Can you come to Lupo's office right away? I think we have a problem."
I hope that you enjoyed my version of why Jo and Zane had never gotten together in this timeline. I like blaming things on Mansfield. For inquiring minds- Zoe is still around, like any guy Zane hasn't said anything to her yet, but our girl Zoe isn't stupid. You'll see her in later chapters. More from our Warehouse 13 gang also in later chapters. I hope you enjoy- I'm just getting warmed up.