Title: My Soul To Keep
Part Three: When The Wind Blows
Author: Roguie/ SunSpecOps/ Danae Bowen
Fandom: Eureka
Genre: Romance, Hurt/Comfort
Characters: Jo/Zane, ensemble.
Rating: T… with a strong "ish".
Spoilers: Everything up to I'll Be Seeing You
Summary: When a random experiment goes horribly awry, Jo is caught in the center. When fate altered her life the last time, a small piece of her had died. When her friends conspire to fix what had broken, can her heart handle it a second time around? Entirely AU after IBSY.
Disclaimer: Eureka obviously doesn't belong to me, I just like to borrow the characters and mutate their inner voices. Please don't sue; my house is small, my car is useless and my dogs are pains in the arse, but they're all I have.
A/N: Here we are, still going strong. :D Thank you so much for your reviews, and Purple, yes, people in my stories do tend to be heavy sleepers. Not half as much fun otherwise. :P As to your happy ending… eeehmmm… yeah, we'll see what Zane and Jo have to say for themselves, perhaps a strong maybe?
A/N2: Ah ha! There is a point and plot to this fiction… and here is where you find out why this won't be a short little tale. Not much action in this part, honestly, this part and the next are still the build up to the actual Zane and Jo fun. Part Five… that'll be when it's more of a shipper fic. :D Part Four is already being edited, so with luck it'll be up no later than Monday or Tuesday. Of course, I meant to have this one up twelve hours ago and well… yeah, honestly? A Firelands raid took precedence, sorry.
A/N3: Reviews inspire my muse; I find Jo and Zane like a drug to her, but if they're the drug, reviews are the devil's whisper putting that needle in her arm. Please don't leave me hanging, and I promise in return that I won't leave you hanging.
~~~E~~~
The first thing she was aware of was the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor that sat next to her head. Before she opened her eyes, she forced herself to concentrate on her body, silently checking each extremity. When only a dull ache met her silent probing, albeit a dull ache that covered every inch, she tested her fingers, surprised to find one hand held down with light pressure. A smile tugged at her lips as she wondered what time it was and whether he'd been here all night.
"Zane?" Her voice cracked roughly and she pried open her stiff eyelids.
Carter's concerned smile met her gaze as Global Dynamic's infirmary swam sickenly into view. "Nope, sorry, hope I'll do."
Her eyes flickered with disappointment, and she turned her head, half expecting to find Zane pacing the hallway. Every time he'd done something stupid, she'd waited at his bedside for him to waken, the sudden shine of tears in her caramel eyes told Carter she'd held onto the hope that he'd do the same.
"Sorry, Jo. He's helping with the cleanup of the living energy thing. I guess they needed one of his contraptions to contain the spark before it overloaded anymore systems."
She chuckled wryly, reaching for the glass of water by her bedside as she struggled to sit up, frowning as her body fought the effort and her head spun with the movement. "Is that what happened to me? System overload?"
He smiled, reaching his arms around her and helping her up, fluffing her pillow behind her, helping her settle in. "Little bit." He winked. "We always knew you were shocking, Jo. You really didn't need to go quite so far to prove our point."
"Funny." Her grin was short but bright, and then her eyes flicked to the door once again, seeing no one, and her face fell. "Is he pissed?"
Jack's brow furrowed in confusion. "What? Zane? Nah, you know him. He's in his glory chasing that spark all around the guts of GD. Thing's shocked him like twenty times, but he's still after it. The skin healing thing Alli has is gonna get a major workout when he gets back, and you should see his hair. I think he's taking it personally; he's gone all Captain Ahab on it." He smiled down at her, squeezing her hand, swiftly changing the topic when her eyes filled with sudden concern. "I'm gonna get Allison to check you out." His expression turned stern. "You don't move."
"Yeah, yeah." She flashed him a small grin and reached for her bag on the nightstand. "My phone get fried?"
He looked back. "Nah, it was on your desk. Allison moved it to your bag when she packed some things for you. Your tablet, however, is toast."
Her eyes flickered something unreadable. "My tablet?"
"Yeah. Henry says the spark jumped to it when you shut down it's containment field… and none of this matters right now. Let me get Allison."
Her phone lay in her bag, exactly as promised. She grinned and quickly scrolled down to Zane's name; at least she could let him know she was awake.
"Hey," she typed quickly. "Carter says you've been at it for hours. You caught that thing yet?"
There was a long pause, long enough that she began to wonder if he was going to answer at all. When the response came, however, it wasn't quite what she'd been expecting.
"Even from your hospital bed? Nice."
She frowned, sending back a quick text of ?
Which earned her a response of, "How about you let me finish cleaning up your mess? This is one for the books."
Unsettled she tossed her phone into her bag again, struggling to control the tears that suddenly dampened her eyes.
What the hell had she missed?
~~~E~~~
Well. That hadn't gone quite the way he'd expected. He'd been crawling around in Global's air shafts for hours, chasing that damn spark that kept finding place after place to avoid him. Being honest, Zane had to admit he was getting a little pissed. His fingers ached, his toes ached, the tip of his nose ached, and the ends of his hair were singed beyond repair.
He could've just given maintenance the containment unit; he'd designed it a year prior as a method of power surge containment. The motherboard inside the box was especially conductive, designed to lure any excess of electricity into it. The lead shielding surrounding that board was designed to trap and contain the flow of electricity until it could be safely dispersed at a later time. In a building as reliant on computer technology as was Global Dynamics, alternate methods of power surge dispersal were in desperate need. He had just never figured on chasing around a shock that wanted to avoid capture. The last time it had zapped him and avoided the box, Zane began to wonder exactly how advanced the A.I. technology within it had become. It seemed to be expecting and avoiding every move Zane was making, and his temper was currently balanced on a very thin thread.
When Jo's text came through, the first thing that shot through Zane's mind was relief. A silent thank you shot out into the universe, against his will but it was still out there. Of course, the spark took the moment he pulled out his PDA to use it as a conductor, shocking him again before finding escape into the next maze of ventilation shafts. Zane's teeth clicked together, his fingers closing angrily around the tiny PDA as a low string of curses slipped past his lips.
He probably should have thought before answering Jo's text. Unfortunately, it was knee-jerk for him to fire off something nasty, cringing only when she quit responding. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, cursing himself silently.
With dark eyes he refocused on the spark, grit his teeth and set out after it with a renewed determination. He'd catch the damn thing first, and apologize later. How much worse could it get?
~~~E~~~
It took Allison a full half hour to finish checking over Jo. Her reflexes were sluggish, but would come around in time, her fine motor control seemed undamaged, eyesight and hearing were normal, and though Jo herself questioned her ability to answer prior to the accident, 26x26 was indeed 676 and she'd answered quickly. She knew her name, her dad's name, the names and birthdays of her brothers, where she'd grown up and various details of life in Eureka.
Carter and Allison, however, shared a look of concern when her eyes continued to shift towards the empty door, unable to give up the belief that Zane would appear at any moment.
"You sure you're okay, Jo?" Carter's eyes darkened as he recognized the hurt and confusion radiating off of her in waves.
"Yeah," she muttered. She looked up at their worried expressions, rolled her eyes and shrugged. "I don't know. Zane's being weird."
"It's Zane," Carter grinned. "Define weird."
She shrugged again. "Cold. Put out. I don't know. It's like we've had a fight and I can't remember it."
Carter's entire body deflated as he started putting two and two together. It was with great trepidation that he asked his next question, hoping against hope he was mistaken. "Jo… what do you remember about the last six months?"
When the first memory to escape her was the infected ice that had spread throughout Global, his fingers moved to the bridge of his nose and he groaned quietly.
"Aw, crap."
At the stricken look on Carter's face, Jo's jaw clenched and her heart beat spiked dangerously high. "Carter?"
"Jack," Allison warned him with a cautious tone.
"What?" Both heads snapped towards her, and monitors started beeping frantically.
"Slow it down," Allison shook her head, watching as Jo's normal complexion paled and her body began shivering uncontrollably. Her fingers gently circled Jo's wrist, watching the heart monitor as she physically counted the throbbing pulse. Concern filled her eyes as she moved to retrieve a small bottle and syringe from a nearby cooler. "Too much, too fast. Her body is still trying to cope with the shock to her system." She injected something into Jo's IV drip, smoothing back the younger woman's hair before stepping away. "Just something to help you stay calm," she promised.
Nodding in satisfaction as Jo's eyes glazed over almost instantly, Allison swung around to place her hand against Carter's chest. "Slow. No details."
"How do I explain this to her, again?"
"Explain what to me?" Jo struggled against the affect of the drug, digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands as she fought to stay aware. She shifted her gaze between her friends, blinking, licking her lips as she grew drowsy. She shook her head, refocused, and gritted her teeth with pure determination as she waited for someone to answer her.
Allison sighed. The last few months had been filled with nothing but pain for Jo. They'd seen her shock, seen her sorrow, seen the complete evisceration she'd lived through when Zane had turned those cold blue eyes upon her and reminded her that he thought no more of her than any prisoner would think of his warden. He'd broken her heart, shattered it into so many pieces that they had just barely managed to put her back together when this happened. Neither one of them looked forward to the idea of putting her through that again.
"Carter?" Jo's voice slurred softly, her dark eyes looking suddenly very lost when no one would answer her questions. "What's going on?"
No one noticed the shadow that slipped past the doorway, hovering close enough to hear the confusion and barely subdued panic in Jo's voice. From his vantage point, he watched as Carter forced a smile, brushed Jo's hair back and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead.
"The whole ice with black lines thing was quite a while back, Jo. Looks like you may have lost some time." He smiled down at her reassuringly before casting a worried glance in Allison's direction.
The monitor beeped as Jo's heart surged again. Allison frowned and increased the sedative drip slightly to compensate for Jo's internal battle against the drug. She glared at Carter, warning him silently to keep quiet, and he understood. Her body was still recovering, her heart beat still erratic, her mind still hazy. Emotional shock was the last thing she needed.
"It's fairly common with severe electrical shock, Jo. Short term memory damage is actually one of the main symptoms seen during recovery." Allison smiled reassuringly. "It's one of the factors that makes it such a popular tool in early psychiatric treatments; damage the memory, erase the cause of the insanity symptom - at least, that was the idea behind it. Studies have proved that a controlled, sustained shock can target specific areas of the brain, specific memories and erase them as though they've never happened." She paused, frowning slightly. "We've got a few studies involving memory structure undergoing testing right now, I'll look into some of the programs and see if there's anything we're working on that could be of help. In the meantime, try to look on the positive side of things. Your memory loss is pretty specific, we'll run some more tests, but if you remember the black striations, then you've lost no more than a year. Any large scale damage would have seen a greater ripple of memory loss, or repeated short term memory loss, which indicates that we can at the very least contain the damage if not attempt to reverse it."
Carter mimicked Allison's reassuring smile, nodding quickly. "See, could've been much worse."
"Yeah, easy for you to say, you remember the last year of your life." Her voice was unsure, her words slow.
He snorted softly, rolling his eyes. "Yeah. Not the greatest thing I can think of, Jo."
"Anything big I should know about?" Jo murmured quietly, her now completely unfocussed eyes resting on the door where she'd could have sworn she'd seen something move.
Carter shifted uncomfortably, scratching the back of his neck. "Ah. Well. Y'know. Too much to go over just now. This is Eureka, after all."
Uncertainty was the only emotion that Jo Lupo didn't handle well, and even her dulled senses caught the hesitation in Carter's voice. With the sedative coursing through her bloodstream, her defences were lowered and her eyes filled with unshed tears as a series of the worst possible things to forget ran through her mind. The drug calmed her body's reaction to her panic, but it couldn't calm the emotional turmoil that burned in her unsteady gaze as she zeroed in on the number one thing that suddenly didn't feel at all right.
"Carter? Where's Zane?"
No one in the room could miss the break in her voice, the instant, all encompassing vulnerability that filled each word; even without looking, each person could hear the tears that were threatening to fall. Jo Lupo, for a single moment, was tiny and terrified, caught somewhere that she didn't understand without the one person she knew could pull her through it, no matter what.
Carter hesitated. That was the one question he could only answer with platitudes for so long, the one question he had no words to explain. He looked to Allison for help, who could only shrug helplessly. There was no good decision to be made here.
"Yeah, Jo, about that…"
Thankfully, it was also the one question that was taken out of his hands.
"I'm here, JoJo."
Carter and Allison turned in place, twin expressions of surprise and confusion crossing their features, each lifting a single eyebrow in question as Zane quietly handed Carter the specially designed box containing the living blue spark before he settled himself at Jo's side.
"Hey." Jo whispered a little uncertainly, her fingers instinctively reaching out to wrap themselves in Zane's warm hand.
"Hey, sorry I'm late," he offered, just as quietly.
The brilliant smile that crossed Jo's face, the sudden and complete relaxation that finally quieted her heart and neural monitors and the gentle fluttering of her eyelids as she gazed up at him for long moments before succumbing to the sedative she'd been fighting put Allison and Carter at ease. The lift of Zane's eyebrow, however, mere minutes later, when the machines confirmed that Jo was well and truly unconscious once more, drove ice water through their veins.
"Anyone care to tell me what the hell this is about?"
They could lie about her asking for him, after all Allison had heavily sedated her, leaving Jo far from being in her right mind. They could fabricate stories and reasons behind everything they'd said while Zane had been lurking in the shadows, covering for each other had become disturbingly simple in the months of late. What they couldn't sweep away, however, was the instinctive reaction of Jo's body to Zane's very presence. It couldn't have been any plainer if it had been sky written over Eureka in red and gold lettering: no matter what hell may lay ahead of her, everything in her world was set right when he was at her side. The machines didn't lie, and they told Zane a tale in greater detail than either Carter or Allison could explain around.
Carter sighed. Hello rock, have you met hard place?
"I'll call Fargo," Allison murmured, moving slowly towards her office.
"Yeah, better call Henry, too. Could use his help on this one."
It was going to be one of those days.
~~~TBC~~~
In the next part:
How do you explain to a super genius you're not even sure you can trust, that the life he's living hadn't always been his and the girl who's hand he held hadn't always been his adversary?
Sometimes, the only way to tell a story was to start at the beginning.
"Someone get a hold of Vincent," Carter muttered, "We're gonna need beer. Lots of beer." he looked back at Zane who was, for once, waiting patiently. "In fact, tell him to bring a keg."
Coming Soon!