AN: Hey readers! Sorry I'm a two months late, finals took more out of me than I expected so I wasn't quite able to get the writing done like I said I would while I was at school. I'm at home now and instead of having the absolute gobs of free time like I expected, I've been doing yardwork.
Constantly.
Also, my parents are of the opinion that fanfiction is where nerds get their rocks off, so writing/reading it is frowned upon. As such, the time during the day that I do get to write is spent working on my original fiction and writing any of my ff is relegated to late at night when my yardworked out body is yelling at me to sleep. I do not think I can adequately express the number of times in the last two months I've gone to bed meaning to write only to pass out as soon as my head hits the pillow.
My sincerest apologies.
I would make promises about my writing schedule, but I won't, because I haven't been able to keep to them, however, I will be making my best efforts to get the chapters to wrap this episode and the ones based on 'Primal' out as soon as I can.
Oh! One final note before I shut up so you can read, there are asterisks (*) on certain sciencey words. For those of you who do not science/do not know what they mean, I have included definitions! You can find these in the end of chapter notes.
The first days after Callister's funeral passed relatively slowly, interrupted only by a steady stream of callers and casserole-bringers, mainly those who had been unable to come to the funeral. Zoë went back to school the next day, her absence excused by the principal without any discussion given her participation in the funeral. Nathan remained sleeping in the spare bedroom.
When the majority of the calls had tapered off on Saturday, the fourth day after the funeral, Jack sent Zoë to spend the day with friends and the two men set out for Portland to collect Nathan's car. They chattered as Jack drove the nearly six hours north, sometimes about nothing, but often about the implications and possible interpretations of several of the Star Trek episodes they had watched over the preceding four days.
They found Nathan's car in a parking lot across the road from the bus station. Jack tried as hard as he could to keep the other man's attention away from the terminal and the rows of busses parked there as they checked the car for damage, but it was hard and on several occasions he caught Nathan staring blankly across the road. Once they'd collected the car, they stopped for a late lunch at a local diner before beginning the long drive back. Jack had spent the entire trip with one eye on the road and one eye on his rear-view mirror watching Nathan's car.
It was a long time after ten when they returned to Eureka and Jack was startled to see Nathan turn down the street towards the bunker instead of towards his own house. Jack didn't mind, rather he was still faintly surprised that Nathan wanted to spend time with him. They'd been at each other's throats often enough that a week ago, Jack would probably have cuffed him at the first legal opportunity and had him sit in a cell for a few hours.
Nathan returned to his house Sunday night so he could get ready to go back to GD the next day.
Jack returned to sheriffing without a hitch. Or much of one. By Eureka standards.
He had to arrest eight people that Monday for somehow switching the minds of one of the paranoia-drug chimpanzees and Taggert. It had been somewhat amusing at first that it had taken more than sixteen hours for anyone to realize the switch had been made. Then the monkey-brain in Taggert's body had begun flinging feces.
It took almost no time at all to figure out which chimpanzee contained Taggert's mind, then only a few minutes to switch them back, at which point Taggert disappeared into his lab, face blazing red.
Nathan's Monday had not been good. There had been three opinions among the people that had become clear as the day progressed. The first caused him no bother, a majority of people treated him as if he was Nathan Stark and needed to be obeyed and scurried from. The second was a bit more bothersome, that he was to be pitied and treated with cautious words and gentle tones. The third had set him into the beginning stages of a blinding-red fury. Some, like the scientists who had switched Taggert and the chimp, had taken it upon themselves to completely bypass Nathan's authority and preform dangerous unapproved experiments.
Nathan's furious bellows at the eight scientists rattled the windows on every office in the rotunda and echoed down the halls. He'd roared, red-faced and spraying spittle at them, slowly advancing until they were cornered against the wall below his office. A gentle touch from Jack diffused much of his anger and he backed away. There was, however, a vicious glint in Nathan's eyes as he helped cuff the eight scientists together and load them into the transport van Henry had been kind enough to provide.
Before Jack had even returned to GD to assist with the evidentiary portion of the redaction of the eight scientists and their transfer to federal prison, Nathan had peons scuttling away from him in terror. Even some of the department heads were tucking against walls in a vain attempt to disappear as Nathan stormed past with Jack near-jogging to keep up.
After a couple minutes of angrily storming through the halls, Jack felt Nathan's mood change, going from near-murder to a grim contentment.
"Making them scurry makes you feel better, doesn't it?" Jack asked as they strode into Nathan's office.
Nathan flopped into his chair seeming to almost completely diffuse. He let his head drop back over the top of the head rest. "A little." He sighed and sat up. "They thought they could bypass me."
Jack could almost sense Nathan's anger begin to ratchet back up.
"I showed weakness and they took advantage of me," Nathan growled, dropping his head to his arms folded on the desk surface
Sighing, Jack dropped into the seat opposite the scientist. "We've talked about this. Crying for your son isn't weakness, Nathan. You were at his funeral. And it's only been ten days."
Nathan grunted his concession, a somewhat hollow sound echoing in the hollow space between his arms and the desktop.
"Besides," Jack continued, "The scientists aren't acting any differently than usual. How often do the ones who fuck up, I mean really fuck up actually ever come to you to get approval for their psychotic projects before blowing the town up?"
Nathan snorted.
"No, seriously," Jack insisted, "except for the stuff the kid used for his speed-drug rampage, you haven't approved any of the problem projects I've been called in to fix." He leaned forward, "Before you get all grumpy, nine-and-a-half out of ten calls I answer are either domestic stuff or scientists who think things have been stolen. Otherwise it's shit like today… Or, you know, Fargo pushing buttons."
Sitting up and looking back at Jack, Nathan's face softened. "Huh," he grunted, "You would think the inhabitants of Eureka would be more… peaceful."
Jack laughed. "Nathan, Eureka means 'I've found it' not 'I play well with others.'"
Nathan chuckled silently for half a second before his deep laugh filled the room. Jack joined him for a moment before Nathan stopped, wiping his eyes.
"You ready to help fire some scientists?" Nathan asked.
Jack grinned. "Always."
Nathan matched his grin and pressed the button on his intercom, calling Fargo to bring in the paperwork.
The next two weeks passed quietly; after Nathan's explosion and the near-immediate redaction of the eight scientists, nobody seemed ready to do anything to provoke his wrath. This, of course, meant that the entire town had gone nearly silent. Eureka was so quiet that even the people that normally called with their domestic issues weren't calling the Sheriff's Office; it was so quiet that Jo had brought in a kit and was painting a landscape at her desk and he was listening to a recap of the previous week's town meeting.
"Carter."
Jack jerked up from the coffee maker to see Allison striding toward him, her face tight and pinched with annoyance.
The relationships between he and Allison, as well as that between she and Nathan, which had been strained by her easy dismissal of Callister as a person, had been mended over the interceding three weeks. The blatant disapproval she now held on her face had nothing to do with that.
"What'chya doing?"
He carried the coffee back to his desk. "I'm the Sheriff. I'm… sheriffing."
She gave him a flat, unamused smile. "Mh. You were supposed to meet me at Global half an hour ago for your physical."
Jack felt a slight pang of guilt for having blown her off so deliberately, but he really didn't want that physical. "Yeah, good news, I gave myself the physical, and I'm in perfect health."
"Alright," Allison said sharply, "it's mandatory. You can't be insured by Global without one."
"Yeah, now's not a good time. We're really, really, super busy," he said.
Allison looked pointedly over to where Jo was painting, then turned back to him. "Okay, this is the third time you've put this off. What's up?"
Jack walked from behind his desk to sharpen a pencil in the old-timey sharpener on the wall behind Allison, the one he'd purchased and installed as a reminder that an analogue world existed out there somewhere. The first two times had been before Callister. The first days after saving Nathan and the second time after the space-death-laser debacle. "You really want to know?"
"No," she countered, half amused, mostly annoyed as she turned to face him. "I just really enjoy our morning banter."
He crammed the pencil in the sharpener and began turning the crank, knowing as he looked back at her straight-faced, that the sound would annoy her just as much as it had any of his teachers growing up. He blew the dust off sharply and turned around. "Because I don't want to die."
"Isn't that the whole point of taking the physical, Carter?"
"No, that's tempting fate. Insure a cop today, he takes a bullet tomorrow."
"Oh," she laughed, "What are you, superstitious?"
"It's not superstition if it's true," he remarked. "Which it is."
"Okay," she said, all amusement gone from her demeanor, "you're not grasping the point here: You don't take the physical, you don't have a job. So strip, we'll just do the physical here."
Jack looked around, one part of attempting to process what Allison had just said and one part mortified at the suggestion. "Excuse me?" he managed as he caught a glimpse of Jo smirking at her easel.
"Well we all have a past, this was mine, so, um," she snapped her fingers as if to hurry him up, "time's a wasting. Drop 'em."
He crossed his arms and pulled himself up. "Ahhh… I'm gonna need to see some credentials, if you are a doctor."
"Was," she said, mimicking his posture, smiling slightly, "a doctor before Kevin was born, but I think I still remember where all the main parts are. So drop your pants."
Jo snickered and Jack met Allison's gaze full on. "Yeah, no. There'll be no pant dropping without a nice dinner and many, many cocktails," he said, smiling slightly at her to soften the barb.
She returned the smirk and they both jumped slightly when the phone rang. He gave her a defiant smile and walked away, grabbing his pencil first as Jo answered the phone.
Carl Carlson was not what Jack expected. He'd met plenty of odd scientists, but this man was by far the strangest. In fact, he was just as unsettling as many of the people Jack had needed to work with in his days as a Marshal. The man's posture in the door when he'd first arrived had cemented that and Jack approached him like he would have and slightly insane witness. Or frightened wild animal.
Certainly the almost instinctive lurch backwards into the protection of his house when Jack had taken a step toward him spoke to that. Carlson's severe germophobia, however, was something Jack had seen quite often among the some of the more intense biologists at GD.
What was more interesting was Beverly Barlowe's sudden appearance. The therapist had been largely missing since their explosive fight at the bunker the night of Callister's death. Her fixated interest in Carlson made Jack slightly uncomfortable as did her near-complete dismissal of him.
Despite her flaws and Jack's nagging suspicion that there was something odd about her, she did seem to know how to calm Carlson down.
He'd tried to get out of going to Carlson's lab with him, partially because he really wanted to finish that coffee he'd made but not gotten to drink back in his office, and partially because bad things sometimes happened when he went down to the labs and Carlson looked to be the sort of person to cause, although accidentally, bad things to happen.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled as Carlson boarded the elevator car and Jack turned to see a pissy-looking Allison and a very focused but distant Nathan walking towards them. Although he wanted to talk to Nathan since they hadn't in almost four days, the threat of the physical and the insurance made him jump on the elevator with Carlson as a lie about not being able to get enough of the Eureka's science tumbled out of his mouth.
A sharp call of "Carter!" followed them as the elevator doors began to shut.
"So, uh, what is this breakthrough?" he asked and though only using the man as an evasion tactic, was happy to see a delighted smile cross Carlson's face.
"It's a remarkable thing!" Carlson said, obviously happy to have someone to explain his project to. Based on both Jo and Beverly's attitude toward him, Jack could guess that nobody had taken the man serious in years. "What I'm working on will revolutionize the future of medicine. It might even make a profession like yours a bit safer."
Jack chuckled. "Is it some way to overwrite Fargo's button pushing thing?"
Carlson waved him away. "No, no, nothing like that. I'm in cellular programming- genetics. That project would be in neurology. I'm working on cellular regeneration."
"Like the Doctor?" At Carlson's confused look Jack amended, "Like Time Lords. Zoë, uh, my daughter watches Doctor Who."
"Sort of," Carlson said, "Nowhere near that scale, though. I'm not that good. Yet. What I'm doing is a bit more like what happens when a lizard re-grows its tail or new skin forms over a healing injury, except instead of being a non-manipulable cartilaginous structure or an aligned collagen tissue matrix-"
Jack cut him off. "A what? I'm sorry."
Carlson cocked his head. "No need to apologize," he said as the elevator doors opened and they stepped out onto the scientist's floor, "Sometimes I forget I'm talking to people who don't know what I'm talking about." He paused for breath as they made a left turn. "When a lizard grows its tail back, it doesn't grow back the bone, muscle, and nerves it lost in sacrificing the flesh, rather it grows back a- a kind of stiff replacement made out of cartilage, long muscles, and skin. And after an injury when you get a scar, it isn't perfect skin that grows back, it's essentially a biological bandage that has a completely different structure than the skin around it so it's shiny and doesn't stretch. Now," he said abruptly, "You need to put on a clean suit to enter my lab."
"Why?" Jack asked, a bit startled by the sudden change in topics.
"I'm working with complex biological samples and the addition of any foreign genetic or bacterial material could compromise my sample," Carlson explained as he stepped into one of the pass-through sonic sterilization booths Jack had become accustomed to while working in Eureka. There was a buzz that lasted fifteen seconds and Carlson opened the door on the other side and pulled a cleansuit from the wall.
"Come on," Carlson said, shouting a bit to be heard through the thick double glass, "You can't come in until you sterilize."
Jack sighed, walked into the booth, and pulled the door shut behind him. He separated his teeth in his mouth as the buzz, which was bearable from outside the booth, rattled his bones and made him feel like his insides were turning to liquid when he pressed the activation button.
Jack shook his head when the buzz sterilization was over to try to clear the rattling sensation in his ears. He tugged the door open and stomped up to Carlson.
"I hate that," he grouched.
Carlson tipped his head, considering for a moment. "You get used to it," he said quickly, shrugging. "Put that on." He pointed to a second clean suit hanging from the wall.
"Really?" Jack asked, "I just went through the sanitizer."
Shaking his head, Carlson said, "I can't risk fibers from your clothes or any of your hair falling in the lab."
Jack frowned. "But won't the suits drop stuff?"
"Well, yes," Carlson conceded, "But I know the compounds in the clean suit and they won't react with the chemicals in my experiment."
Jack sighed, dropping his head. "Sure, fine. I'll meet you in there?"
"Okay." Carlson nodded sharply and turned into his lab.
Yanking on the too-short pants, the too-big too-short labcoat, the weird white cap, and the stupid blue over-booties, Jack strode into the lab. It was primarily empty; much less cluttered than any of the biological labs he'd been into. There was only a lab bench, a single shelving unit full of chemicals, what appeared to be a massive centrifuge* (yes, Jack knew what that was and how to pronounce it), and a collection of animals in very large cages.
Carlson stood by the lab bench preparing chemicals in a long test tube so Jack took the chance to look around at the animals. There were the expected lizards, most with regrown tails, but there were also crabs, frogs, salamanders, and two cages of very… cute mice.
"Hey, Carlson?"
"Yes, Sheriff?"
"The lizards I get, but the other animals? I remember reading somewhere that mammals don't, uh, regenerate."
"Oh," Carlson responded over his shoulder. "The African spiny mice*, Acomys kempi and Acomys percivali, can almost completely drop their skin and regrow it without scarring. Fascinating. They make a much better model species for mammals than lizards do."
"Uh huh," Jack nodded slowly. "And, uh, the salamanders?"
"They can regrow a whole manipulable limb. Most advanced vertebrate that can."
Jack stared at them a minute before turning to see Carlson approaching the centrifuge in the middle of the room. He ambled toward the machine, hoping to see whatever science Carlson was going to be doing. A chameleon in a large tank caught his attention and he bent down to look for a moment before wandering up behind Carlson.
"Could you- could you step back please?" Carlson asked.
He took a step back, not wanting to cause trouble, then shuffled forwards.
"I sai- I said step back."
Jack nodded pinching his nose as he took two steps back. Carlson turned and he lifted his arms in a silent question. Carlson rolled his eyes and went back to his work, lifting a micropipettor* from a rack on the table with the centrifuge, clipping on a new tip from a box, setting an amount by twisting a dial below the plunger on the top of the device, and drew a small amount of fluid into the tip.
Carlson looked back at Jack, holding the micropipettor perpendicular to the bench, tip down. "I'm attempting to achieve adhesion affinity gradient in the proximal blastemal* cells in human tissues."
Jack nodded, an appraising twist to his lips. He hadn't understood a word of what Carlson had just said. Or rather, he had understood what he was saying, but not what it actually meant. "I'm glad someone's on that," he said lightly.
He just barely heard the irritated half-hiss Carlson replied with before saying, "Yes. You know when a lizard loses its tail, it grows back. It's called cellular regeneration."
"We covered that on the walk here," Jack said quickly.
Carlson turned to him a smug, extremely proud smile on his face. "I'm trying to do that with humans."
Jack stared at him in amazement. "Well that's cool."
Carlson pressed a key and a circular rack filled with test tubes rose up from the centrifuge and he selected one, removing the lid. "Beverley encourages me to take risks and not wimp out when I'm on the verge of something new. Moment of truth." He lifted the micropipettor, still nearly perfectly vertical, above the rack and poised it over the tube. "Fifty microliters. Fifty microliters only."
He depressed the plunger slowly and a small amount of liquid dropped into the test tube. Carlson let out a huffing breath and pressed the ignition on the centrifuge. The rack dropped back down into the body of the centrifuge and began spinning rapidly.
There was a sudden burst of noise from the chameleon and Carlson whipped around to look at it, the now upside-down micropipettor swiped the open tube of chemicals from which Carlson had drawn the fluid into the centrifuge.
"Uh oh," he said quietly.
Jack felt a wave of foreboding and panic wash over him, the kind he'd only ever gotten before a case went sour as a Marshal. "What do you mean 'uh oh'?"
The centrifuge exploded.
Not in the Michael Bay fiery-death kind of way that a piece of electronic equipment should have, but in the crackling-with-questionable-blue-energy Eureka way with a force strong enough to launch him back into a metal rack of animals and Carlson through the lab window.
There was a loud ringing, though whether that was his head or an alarm, Jack couldn't quite decide. His head had connected with an apparently unbreakable sheet of plexiglass on one of the cages and he was looking into another, staring into the baleful eyes of a large charcoal and crème mottled salamander. Jack blinked and the salamander licked one of its eyes.
The ringing was definitely an alarm, he though watching the salamander as it watched him, the sound in his ears was now more of a rushing, wooshing, pounding. Not the pounding, he realized, that and the shouting that he could suddenly hear as his ears cleared of the post-explosion shock were people responding in panic to the explosion.
Jack stood unsteadily, pushing himself away from the tank he'd whacked his head on and grimaced at the large, ugly, mud-colored salamander in the cage behind him. He was glad he hadn't been staring at that one. The two-foot-long creature would have given him nightmares. He turned away from the cages and stumbled across the wrecked lab, only vaguely noticing the chameleon wandering across the remnants of its glass tank as he made his way over to where Carlson was just starting to stir against the linoleum floor tiles. He stepped over the sill of the shattered out window.
"You okay?" he asked, sticking his arm out a bit stiffly when Carlson sat up. Carlson hesitated a moment before taking the proffered hand so Jack could haul him to his feet.
"I believe I am," Carlson said, patting his hands over his torso, checking for injuries.
"Why did it explode?" Jack asked, stretching up and twisting his back side to side.
Carlson shook his head. "I'm not really sure. It was probably an imbalance of chemicals in the reaction- Oh! Doctor Stark!"
Jack turned to see Nathan stalking toward them in full evil-boss-mode, his gaze hard and unforgiving as they bore into Carlson. His eyes softened momentarily with worry as he looked to Jack, and then hardened again as they refocused on Carlson at Jack's nod.
Allison came behind him, her movement somewhere between jogging and scurrying, having to take a much longer stride than usual. Her face was pinched and hard, like Nathan's except her irritation seemed to be focused on Jack rather than Carlson. The two stopped a few feet away in the hall, both with arms crossed in anger.
"What happened here, Carlson?" Nathan asked sharply.
"The-" Jack started but Nathan cut him off with a hard look. "I'm asking the scientist, Sheriff."
Jack stared at him, surprised by the sudden snap of anger directed at himself. Before any answer could be given, though, Allison said, "I'll take your statement, Jack. In there." She tipped her head toward the lab.
Jack nodded slowly, still a little confused at Nathan's reaction, and stepped back through the blown-out window as Allison walked through the door and bypassed the sonic sterilizers. She entered the lab a few moments after Jack and turned to him with a frown on her face.
"What happened, Carter?"
He noted that she held to the convention of using his last name, something she had reverted to after Callister's death the week previously.
"Carlson was mixing chemicals, trying to change the adhesion-something of the proximal blasto-cells-"
"I know what his project is," she snapped. "What exactly happened?"
Jack barely resisted rolling his eyes. "Carlson was mixing chemicals on top of the centrifuge when the chameleon made a sound and he turned to look. He had the pipettor in his hand and it knocked the test tube of chemicals into the running centrifuge. He said 'uh oh' and then it crackled with electricity and exploded. Carlson was thrown through the window and I was slammed against the wall of animals." He jerked his thumb to indicate the tanks.
"Are you hurt?" Allison asked.
Jack shrugged. "Not really. I hit my head on the one with the monster salamander, but I don't feel like I have a concussion."
Allison pulled a pen light out of a pocket and flashed it across his eyes. "No, you don't have a concussion," she said tucking the light away. "If you'd come to my office for the physical you might not have been hurt physically."
He walked with her, a bit more stiffly now that the moment of adrenaline was wearing off, and huffed, "Well, Dr. Blake, if you hadn't have tried to give me a physical, then I wouldn't have had to go to such extreme measures to avoid it."
"You got lucky, Carter," she warned.
"Well not as lucky as him." He pointed to Carlson who was walking, seemingly unharmed, back into the lab through the now-deactivated sonic sterilizer. He was trying to explain why the explosion had happened to Nathan, but to Jack, despite understanding only the basics of what the short scientist was explaining, it sounded like bullshit. In fact, it seemed to Jack that the only injury Carlson might face was the one Nathan would give him if the scientist kept talking.
Nathan walked past Carlson and unbuttoned his jacket as his gaze bounced off Jack before surveying the destruction. "Allison, I'm gonna need form 395 tack 2-Charlie."
Jack looked between them in confusion as Allison began protesting.
"My call."
Allison frowned and Jack looked back at Nathan.
"He's all yours, Carter."
"All mine?" Nathan left the room so Jack turned to Allison. "Whats- Whats, um, form 395 tack 2-Charlie?"
She sighed. "Revocation of Government property and clearances. Carl is being fired and it is your job as Sheriff to oversee the safe and orderly removal of all ex-employees from Eureka."
Jack stared at her. "What does that entail?"
Definitions!
Centrifuge: An apparatus that rotates at high speed and applies centrifugal force to its contents; used to separate fluids of different densities or liquids from solids i.e. cream from milk or blood cells from plasma. You put your test tubes of samples in a rotating disk with appropriately sized holes in it, put a counter weight in the other side and turn it on. The counter weight is important because if you don't it makes funny sounds and your lab supervisor yells at you.
African Spiny Mouse: Two species of mice, Acomys kempi and Acomys percivali, have the ability to shed up to 60% of the skin on their back. This acts as a defense mechanism, and much like a lizard can drop its tail when captured, A. kempi and A. percivali can shed the skin that a predator has grabbed. They can then regrow hair follicles, skin, sweat glands, fur, and cartilage completely.
Micropipettor: A calibrated instrument into which small amounts of liquid are suctioned for transfer or measurements. The blue sucky-thing Carlson uses to knock over the test tube of clear fluid. If you watch cop dramas/CSI, you've seen them being used for DNA testing. Smaller than a regular pipettor.
Blastema cell: A mass of cells capable of growth and regeneration into organs or body parts.
