A/N: I'd like to thank everyone for reviewing one more time, and to PoPCoRn and Happy who I couldn't thank directly. I can't promise the next update will come anytime soon. My job is being really crappy with my schedule. So with having to work every other day from nine am to eight thirty doesn't allow me a lot of writing time, but I will try to write a little every day. And you guys won't find out about the letter until much later, sorry. Until then, enjoy!

Chapter Ten

It was Saturday, Saturday night to be exact. Parker should've been standing by the microwave, watching as the digital numbers counted down to zero and listening to the nice little pops that came from corn kernels as they heated up. She should've been in her kitchen, in her pajamas, preparing a multitude of snacks. In the living room her mother should've been setting up board games, first Pictionary and then later Monopoly. Her father should've been emerging from his basement lab, taking off his trademark lab coat and spewing it haphazardly over the couch.

Saturday should've been game night.

It had been a tradition as long as she was old enough to count to have game night every Saturday. As she got older she started to think that game night was a little lame and only a ploy to get her to stay in, but she never failed in missing one. Now, her Saturday night was not being spent in comfortable pajamas and snacking on popcorn while accusing her father of cheating. Instead she was sitting Indian style surrounded by scattered papers, all with her shoddy scrawl on them. A pencil was captured between her teeth, another tangled in her hair as her hazel orbs studied what she hoped was a solution.

It was a stretch from Saturday night's board game extravaganza, but it was all she could do to keep herself from falling into a dark pit of grief. Working on unraveling the mystery of the letter was keeping her blissfully unaware of her surroundings. An elephant could've decided to stop by and Parker wouldn't have batted an eye. All that mattered was decoding the insanely numerous amount of dots that some mystery person from the Network sent to her father.

Groaning in frustration, Parker bit down on the pencil in her mouth. It still wasn't making sense to her. All she was coming up with was a bunch of seemingly Order of Operation problems, all of which led to nowhere. Parker just kept getting more numbers. Numbers, numbers, and more numbers that didn't seem to lead anywhere. She was consumed by them, composite, even, odd, factors to the tenth power, dividing them, multiplying them, adding, subtracting, coming up with negatives and rounding up.

All of it was making her head spin and her eyes were starting to cross from staring at the white of the paper too long. Parker refused to take a break though, because the sooner she figured things out the sooner her parents death wouldn't be in vain. Granted whether she figured everything out or not her parents' murder would still be senseless. All she could do for them was what she was doing right then and that was uncovering the muck. Using all the intelligence she could muster and throwing it towards revealing the coded message. Once she did that, where she would go from there she didn't know.

Absentmindedly, she rubbed her shoulder. It felt a little tender which was something she paid zero attention to. What was currently being added to her growing pile of fears was what she was going to do long after everything had been done and figured out. She wondered whether or not she'd be able to return to a normal regular average life. All of them, her fears, were thrown in a mental bag to be opened and prodded at later in time. Every once in a while something would escape the bag and threaten to send her off track but for the most part she was trying to keep a clamp on it.

Parker frowned and wrote out another number. A math problem just seemed to make sense with all the operations, and the symbolism of the dots. Why wasn't it adding up? And if by the far chance that it was, what was it adding up to? Parker gnawed at her pencil in pure unbridled frustration.

Something slammed itself down in front of her causing her to lurch back. Instead of looking at multiple papers with her writing on it, she was looking at a neat white Chinese food box. Focusing her eyes up, Griffin was standing in front of her and all her papery mess. He held out a pair of chopsticks wrapped in plastic. Parker took a second to scrutinize Griffin's face and found none of the irritation that was normally there.

"Here."

Parker looked at the chopsticks warily. "Thanks, but I'm not hungry," the pencil fell from of her mouth when she spoke.

Griffin dropped the chopsticks onto a mound of papers and much to her surprise he seated himself across from her. She watched as he swept away some of her clutter uncaringly and settled his own box of food onto the trunk/coffee table. Griffin opened the flaps to his box of food and peered inside. Parker continued watching inadvertently, her breathing slowing to a stop. She had no idea why Griffin seemed so intriguing to her, she had no idea why she felt so compelled to watch him, why he seemed so…

Griffin's eyes darted up catching her staring. Parker gained her ability to breathe again and dropped her eyes back down to her work. She really should've been keeping her focus. Parker pushed aside the white box before her, ignoring the tantalizing smell that came from it and recaptured her pencil. Griffin watched as she submerged herself back into the mystery of the dots, which he found incredibly stupid.

"I know you're all into the revenge thing, but do you think I really enjoy playing the part of your nanny?"

Without looking up, Parker sulked. "Not revenge and where does the analogy of the nanny play in?"

"Twice," Griffin held up two fingers even though Parker was not looking. "I've had to check to see that you were still functioning upstairs."

"Of course I am if I wasn't then I wouldn't be trying to figure this out." Parker still didn't look up. She scribbled a number onto more paper.

"No, no, no," Griffin shook his head and began banging his own plastic wrapped chopsticks against the trunk. The sticks punched holes through the plastic freeing themselves. "That right there is revenge. If I've ever seen it."

Parker paused in mid calculation, her hand seizing up over the paper. "What do you mean?" It was a question she almost didn't pose. Griffin's brutal truths were something she wasn't in the mood for at the moment.

Griffin dug around his box of food with his chopsticks and ignored Parker's hesitant air. He shrugged as if what he was about to say was no big deal. "You plunging yourself into finding out what all this dot shit is about is revenge," he said the word slowly. "If you were using your head, had all the lights on upstairs, you'd know before trying to figure out what the hell all this means you'd try taking care of yourself. Last thing you ate were the fries off my fucking plate. And when have you slept?"

Parker bit her lip and momentarily abandoned her work. She knew where he was getting at. It made sense. It made perfect sense, but she wondered why he was saying it. "Why do you care?" The question slipped past her lips before she could stop it.

"Again, don't really want to be your nanny."

"Then don't." Parker resumed working.

"Oh don't be a bleeding dimbo." Griffin lifted a shrimp with his chopstick and stuffed it in his mouth.

Again, Parker looked up from what she was doing. "Huh?"

"You driving yourself into the deep end does me no good," he pointed his chopsticks in Parker's direction. "If you haven't forgotten, you're supposed to have something that Paladins want to get their hands on."

There it was. The reminder of why she was in the very spot she was now sitting in. The reason why Griffin was tolerating her in his beloved lair. She was an asset to his side of this forever ongoing battle between Paladins and Jumpers. Parker let it fly past her head though; reminding herself of the circumstances Griffin had been living his life in. For the briefest of seconds Jack's winking face popped into her head.

Parker decided on focusing more on Griffin's speech than anything that might prove upsetting to her. "No, I-I know that. I was more or less confused on- dimbo? Don't you mean bimbo? Not that my curiosity is condoning being called either of the─"

"What? No I meant- Forget it. My main point is that you're no good to me if you bring half your ass to the table."

Parker nodded. It was fair enough and with everything she'd witnessed, all the violence, what Paladins were capable of she found it reasonable enough of a statement. What she was afraid of the most was her having anymore interactions with Paladins. As dangerous as the situation she was in was, she thought that figuring out any code was the extent of her involvement, that and figuring out what it was she had that was of so much value, because her father had no idea about the letter she'd inadvertently had in her backpack.

"All I have to do is figure this," she gestured towards all her papers. "Out and that's it on my end right?"

"You're in it deeper than that, sweetheart." Griffin starred down into his box. "They're after you. Meaning you won't be able to step one foot out there without throwing up caution.

Parker leaned her cheek into her hand. It was the answer she knew was coming but didn't at all want. Maybe how ever much she was involved didn't matter. Maybe the faster things came to light the faster everything would be over. Then she could salvage up some sort of life that hopefully didn't include living in fear.

Parker felt the deep rumble in her stomach and she knew Griffin could probably hear it. He was right when it came to taking better care of herself, though she'd never admit that. He struck her as the kind of guy who didn't need comments like that inflating his head. She watched Griffin stand and chuck his Chinese food box into the trash. He then plucked a random drawing of who she thought was an alright guy from the wall and ambled over towards where a dartboard was hung.

Parker slid the box of Chinese food towards her with disheartened eyes and peeled back the flaps. Her mother hated Chinese food; it was the sole reason her family never ate it. Onto the dartboard Griffin was tacking on his sketch of Roland. "You figured it out yet?"

Parker fingered the chopsticks. "Do you have any forks around here?" She hadn't so much ignored Griffin's question as she did giving her stomach the benefit of the doubt before answering his question.

"Don't know how to use chopsticks do you?"

Parker shook her head. "My family wasn't really into the whole oriental eating thing."

"Well your just gonna hafta make do. Now have you figured those out yet," Griffin asked with a handful of darts and gesturing to her paper stacks.

Parker tried holding her chopsticks with little success. "No, I haven't figured it out, gimme some more time."

"Fine," Griffin shrugged. He threw the first dart towards Roland's sketched forehead. "Fair enough, but could you possibly speed things up? Just a-just a little? Kiiiiiinda want my lair back."

Getting the chopsticks steady in her hand, she tried scooping up the noodles inside the box with them. How a person could eat noodles with sticks she didn't know. Who'd even thought of eating noodles with two sticks? She mentally cursed Griffin for ordering noodles and not asking for a fork. "Where'd you order from where they don't have forks, China," she muttered below her breath, this time ignoring Griffin totally. She stopped complaining as the noodles slipped from her sticks. He probably had ordered from some place in China.

The sound of darts hitting the dartboard reminded her of some of the sounds that use to float up from the basement in her house. She never really knew what her father did down there, which was now so blatantly obvious, but there were times when she was younger when she'd sneak down there just out of curiosity. Of course her stealth skills hadn't been too great when she was younger, always leading into her being detected by her father. Sometimes he told her to go back upstairs and other times he didn't mind her company, those were the times he allowed her to play with the mice, or to help by passing him certain tools. She remembered the feeling of usefulness that she used to get when helping her father.

Fighting the ever nagging, never dimming urge to mourn her parents, she abandoned her chopsticks after having failed to pick up her food with them two times too many, and decided to focus on something else. Something else that proved to be helpful in not forgetting about what'd happened, but diverted her attention was what she decided to turn her concentration to.

"So…what's the deal with Jack?" Because engulfing herself in Griffin's life was proving to distract her from the painful memories of her own, she did so without much hesitation. Prying into practically a stranger's business was something she would've never done before, but with the new unwanted turn her life had taken, some things were bound to change her.

"Fancy him?"

Parker took to picking up the noodles with her fingers and grimaced. Not at the fact that she was eating with her hands, but at the mere prospect of having a crush on Jack. Jack seemed to be a nice enough person, but his style didn't exactly make him easy on the eyes; at least it hadn't for her.

She made a chocking sound before answering. "No. I just was curious to know why he hangs around a guy who likes isolation."

"Let's get one thing straight," Griffin said firmly before throwing another dart. "We're not doing that."

"Not doing what?"

"Bonding, trying to make some sort-some sort of a connection. It's not happening. This thing is going to get figured out and then we're going our separate bloody way." His somewhat of a declaration was accented by the sound of another dart being thrown at the drawing of Roland.

Parker wanted to believe what he was saying was just to distance himself from her. She would love to have thought that after figuring out the mystery of the letter, she'd have a home and two parents to run to. She wished that she was just living some sort of revolting dream and when she woke up her mom would be in the kitchen waiting to hear about how awful it was while offering her a package of pop tarts. This wasn't the case though and she had the unsolicited task of settling into what was now her reality.

And if she had to settle she was going to do so the way she wanted, accepting as many forms of distraction as were presented.

"Soooo, Jack's your ally? Best friend?" Parker chose to let Griffin's goals float over her head as she plucked up more noodles with her fingers and fed herself like a bird fed its little hatchlings. As a delayed after thought she added, "Lover?"

Griffin threw his last dart, it landing dead in the middle of Roland's forehead and he groaned out his frustration. "Look, Jack is just some crazy idiot I met a while back. He was trying to rob some bar I was in and sense then he's kinda just stuck around, okay?"

"What was he talking about when he said he jumped a statue to some island?"

Griffin stalked away from the dart board, "He's got some kind of thing for trying to jump stuff bigger than him."

"You guys can do that? Teleport inanimate objects that are large," Parker asked licking her fingers.

"Yeah."

Parker could hear him rummaging around, but paid it no mind. A second later a plastic fork came sailing her way, hitting her on the forehead.

"Use a fork, disgusting."

Parker looked up at him shaking his head and watched as he disappeared from her view, jumping to somewhere unknown.

"Nice chatting with you too," Parker grumbled picking up the plastic utensil.