Reviewers -
Sphinx - They should keep clicking along merrily from here on out. Maybe.
Helena and Harry potter - I don't know if I'd call what Nate's doing being a bastard. You have to remember, this is a man who has been hurt, badly, both physically and emotionally. He's not sure how he's supposed to act anymore to prevent more pain. I'm glad you're enjoying it so far, though!
stella - the confusion should go away eventually, I think. Hee.
III
Alec has a game he plays. It's a game he plays with everyone, whether they know it or not. Customers, employees, it doesn't matter to him.
Sophie is Scheherazade. She's told him a thousand different stories about what she did before the cube, back when she was Catherine. Each time, her dark eyes dance, her elegant smile curls, both daring him to call her on her lies, sing out the truth.
He's never done either, because he doesn't want her stories to stop.
Parker is Alice, and not just because of her real first name, but because she always seems as if she's just fallen into this world from the other side of a rabbit hole: wonder at the ordinary, uncertainty at routine.
If she's Alice, her real world must have been infinitely stranger.
(Her boyfriend, Todd McSweeten, is just as easy. No brains. But the sappy, swoony way he looks at Parker every time she's not looking is a positive indicator of a heart. So, he's the Scarecrow.)
Eliot took him a couple weeks, but when he did – Aragorn – Eliot had laughed and laughed and laughed, and when he was done laughing, he said: "It's all the lurking, right?"
Actually, it's more all that is gold does not glitter, more his mind and his strength and his control when Alec knows what those hands can do, but he just nodded, grinned.
"Lurker."
Alec realizes Nate's going to need a character when he staggers in at half-past nine for the third day in the row with another ream of paper, a drawing compass and a T-square.
Somehow, he suspects it's going to be a challenge.
Alec watches him all afternoon – because Nate stays all afternoon, camped out at table two long after the sun's moved. He doesn't stop drawing, either, filling the sheets of paper (black this time, and thick, like cardstock) with electrical circuits and motherboards. It looks like he's designing a computer – and an old one, nothing like Alec's tablet, more like the first one Alec built – from memory.
There's something familiar about the older man, something Alec can't put his finger on; but he's seen him before, somehow. It's making him curious, but he doesn't want to crowd, so he stays behind the counter.
It's three and business is slow by the time Alec glances at Eliot. Eliot just gives him a nod, and Alec moseys out from behind the counter with an Italian soda and a bagel.
He doesn't head straight for Nate's table. He carts them around the room with him; stops in the lobby first to brush flower debris out the front door, wipe kiddy fingerprints off the glass and to check the book donation box. There's actually a sizable pile there, and he gathers them up to serve as a wall, a prop in finally meeting the mysterious Nate Ford. And, for once, it's a promising pile: Slaughterhouse 5, The Hunger Games, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an old, antique travel guide to Mexico and a couple battered Star Trek novels.
He plops books, bagel and cup down on Nate's table, noting with some discomfort the way Nate jolts at the sound, glances up, looks away. He's not, however, discouraged from pasting on a bright smile.
"Hi!"
Nothing.
"I'm…Alec Hardison."
Nothing, again. Nate's back at his drawing. He doesn't look up from the white-line diagram, sketched with the chalk-pen Alec's fairly certain he swiped from their specials board. His strokes are quick and certain, like there are already lines in place that he just needs to trace over.
It's fairly impressive, actually, because whatever he's drawing is mad complex.
"I'm the landlord?" he tries again. Nate goes still, flipping his diagram over and staring at the backs of his hands.
"Ah." His voice is low and slightly rough, but nothing like Eliot's growl, expressive enough that Alec thinks he'd be a good reader- he sounds normal enough, but there's still something tightly wound and tense in his shoulders and the set of his jaw, and though he's not sure why, that realization sets Alec's teeth on edge.
"It's good to finally meet you face to face," Alec says, holding his hand out. Nate hesitates a second before he reaches out and takes it. His hand is cold, dry, and Alec can feel it shaking – but the six empty coffee cups lined like soldiers on parade at the very edge of the table might just account for that.
"Likewise," Nate says, after another awkward pause where he doesn't let go of Alec's hand. It's like he's forgotten how to speak: the breaks between words are too long, the eye contact too fleeting.
Alec sits there, picking parts off his bagel as Nate just…plays with his pencil, stares at his papers, looks out the window where it's still not snowing.
(Parker's starting to take it personally. "By the third day of December," she says…demands, "I should have snow up to my knees!" She's already decorating Megabite with coffee filters cut into snowflakes. He keeps having to sweep up slivers of paper from the floor.)
"If you don't mind me asking," he finally says, after a long silence that is every bit as awkward as Sophie assured him it would be, "why'd you pick here? To move, I mean."
"Rent was cheap."
Alec raises an eyebrow, spins his cup on the table. "I've seen cheaper."
Nate hesitates, looks at him for a second, and looks away. "I liked the location."
The mid-afternoon sun is still pouring through the greenhouse glass high above them like ethereal honey, bathing the city in molten gold. There's a stretch of sidewalk outside, and then the buildings falls away, nothing but plains and trees until the wall of the botanical gardens and the experimental fields and, far beyond them, the walls of the city itself.
Sometimes, on a good day, he can see the Atlantic from the roof.
"Gotcha there." He looks around the café, adding with a wry grin, "and you picked the table with the best view, too." Nate doesn't say anything. He just looks at Alec like he's just pointed out the obvious. Somehow, Alec can't help but be reminded of his first awkward date, and he almost laughs.
But then his phone buzzes. The sound is echoed throughout the shop and he starts to stand- until Eliot waves for him to stay put. The message reads, simply: channel nine.
Eliot flips on the TV, punching it once in the side when the screen is static, and Alec sighs when it clears. Monica Hunter's on and the graphic above her head is blinking: Cloudy With A Chance of Raptors. The line wasn't funny the first six times they used it. It's not any funnier the seventh.
"Alright, folks," Parker says from the barista station in her scary official voice, the one she's only allowed to use in actual states of pending emergency. "We're gonna have to ask you to leave."
No one knows, still, how the dinosaurs started. They just know they can't get rid of them, and there are some days when not even the Institute can corral them.
Like, apparently, today.
Their patrons gather their things, look at the maps flashing on the walls, projected by the TV set, debating and teasing one another as they file out. The raptors are still in the southwest; it'll be a good hour before they get even close to here; long enough for them to get home off the streets.
The window glass is thick, so they're not worried about them, but Parker and Eliot start locking the doors, closing the windows in the back that they usually keep open (the building's awesome, the stove in the kitchen? Not so much), dragging the al fresco tables back into the storage yard. Alec watches them move with a moment of pride before he looks back at Nate –
Who looks as if he's ten seconds from fainting.
"Hey, hey, breathe, man!"
Nate sucks in a shaky breath, dark blue eyes wide and haunted and two seconds away from a complete panic attack. There's a jagged line of white across his careful diagrams, thick and jerky, like he jumped at the story. Like he's terrified of the raptors.
The dinosaurs haven't killed anyone yet; they're more a nuisance than anything, but they've all got an irrational fear or two. Maybe this is Nate's. He draws another breath, and Alec has to resist the urge to reach out and take his hand, try and soothe away the tremors. A third breath, deep, almost smooth. Almost fine.
"There," Alec says -as if this is completely normal- when Nate inhales again, through his teeth, some of the color in his face coming back. "There. There y'go. That's better, right?"
Nate nods, but Alec's not entirely convinced, and so he keeps talking, craning his neck to look as Parker flips the sign to Closed, as Sophie comes prowling down the street, inviting herself to the party.
"It's cool, it's all cool. This place is practically raptor-proof, so long as you've got the doors locked. They've not learned to pick the locks yet, I think their claws are too lo-"
Snap.
He jerks back to look at Nate. The chalk-pen is in two halves now, and the color that Nate had regained is completely gone. He's not pale – he's white, and his dark curls are stark against his skin, brown and silver and grey in patches, like a rabbit's pelt.
"Nate. Nate, Nate Nate. Breathe."
"Talk about something else." It comes out harsh, but Nate's got his head lowered now, his forehead pressed to the table, he's not looking and he's at least trying to breathe, so Alec does.
"Somethin' else? Ok, ok, I can do somethin' else, no Jurassic Park, I got it." He looks at the shelf, reading through the titles, labeling them in his mind, and then he brightens.
"Y'ever read any of the Star Wars books?"
It takes twenty minutes of rambling about the Extended Universe, but when Nate bursts out laughing at his (maybe, just a little exaggerated) imitation of a Gungan Jedi, Alec knows he's succeeded.
"They, uh." Nate says, once he stops laughing, the sound tinged faintly with hysterics by the time he's done, "They sound like…quality literature, all 'round, and you do an excellent retelling, I'm sure." He rubs at his eyes, and Alec grins, broadly. Just a bit proudly.
"That they are," Alec says. "But I assume, judging from your reaction, that you've not read any of these highbrow novelizations?"
Nate reaches out a hand; it's still trembling, and his face is still pale, but Alec's trying so hard to ignore it, to give the other man some dignity. "That. Now, that's a good book," he says, prodding halfway down the stack.
Alec looks. Slaughterhouse 5.
"Yeah? I've heard good things."
"It used…used to be my best friend's favorite book." There's a ghost of a smile -more real than the hysterical giggles- that soon fades back into the haunted pale, but it's enough that Alec is suddenly struck with the conviction that he wants to see that smile a lot more; just like he'd like to hear him read. But he remembers the professor, and keeps that in like everything else. "We, uh. We read it in high school."
"I…never actually went to high school." Alec's confession comes out quick, rushed, and then he's moving on, trying not to laugh nervously. The first glint of interest he's seen in three days has just flickered to life in Nate's blue eyes. "But someone gave us these, and…well. I don't like to have anything on those shelves that I haven't read."
Nate turns to look at the crammed-full, looming bookshelves again. Alec feels the old mingled pride and embarrassment. "I did not have a very active social life for awhile," he says by way of justification. "I changed that."
"God grant me the serenity," Nate says slowly, "to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference."
It sounds like a quote, but somehow, Alec isn't convinced Nate's talking to him.