Author: Vikki
Rating: G
Disclaimer: The SMK characters and the Agency belong to Warner Brothers, Shoot the Moon Productions, and a bunch of other folks more fortunate than I. I am merely borrowing them for fun without profit. This story is mine, however, so please don't reproduce without my permission. (Oops. Dr Quorn is a figment of my imagination. I probably should have mentioned that before.)
Summary: Written in response to a request for an epilogue to "It's DeJaVu" : Lee tries to remember the interrogation. This probably won't make much sense to anyone who hasn't read the previous story.
Thanks to Tricia and Kara, who were kind enough to review this story
for me and offer their advice and encouragement.
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Lee Stetson walked up the hallway toward the Q Bureau, a spring in his
step and a smile on his handsome face. 'I must be developing a tolerance
to that truth serum,' he mused. After the other four drug trials,
he hadn't been fully conscious until late afternoon - and then he had felt foggy and exhausted for the entire evening. He hadn't even been able to drive himself home, much to his chagrin. Billy had to assign two agency trainees to escort him, one to drive his
car and the other to give his driver a ride back to the agency. But
not today! Today, he had been fully alert by 1pm, and he felt fantastic,
almost euphoric. Like he had just awakened from a long, peaceful
night's sleep full of pleasant dreams and was looking forward to... To what? He didn't know. He didn't recall anything he had looked
forward to recently, and most of his dreams were more disturbing than pleasant. Especially the ones involving his partner, Amanda King. 'Stop right
now, Stetson,' he chided himself. 'I am not going there! It's
bad enough that I have thoughts like that while I'm asleep. I am
NOT going to have them while I'm awake. How could I possibly have
dreams like that about Amanda, for God's sake! I really need to spice
up my social life.' He made a mental note to look through his little
black books tonight and line up a date for Friday.
As he entered his office and sat at his desk, Lee shook his head and
forced his mind back to the drug trials. He marveled again at how
terrific he felt. It must have been a really easy interrogation,
he decided. Maybe Billy had assigned one of those trainees to do
it. He thought one of them had mentioned a class in Interrogations.
Lee closed his eyes and concentrated. As he had done after each
session, he tried to remember something, anything, about the day's interrogation,
but his mind remained stubbornly blank. Thinking about the interrogations
was pointless. He hadn't even been able to remember who had
conducted them, although he suspected that Francine had done the third
one. She had avoided him for days afterwards and had shot him disgusted
looks at every opportunity. She had probably taken it as a
personal insult if she hadn't been able to get any information out of him - which she obviously hadn't, or he wouldn't have been subjected
to two more interrogations. He hadn't picked up a single clue
from anyone other than Francine. Dr Quorn was always cheerful but
guarded as he put the needle into Lee's arm in the morning and released
Lee from the Lab in the afternoon. Billy had been just as uncommunicative
when Lee checked in with him before and after each session. The only
exception had been this afternoon, when Billy sputtered into his coffee
cup as Lee said that he felt great and wouldn't need a ride home.
Lee had tried a couple of times to get Billy fill him in on the findings
of the project, but his section chief had told him the results were "need
to know" - and Lee didn't need to know. Lee
had argued the point. After all, he hadn't volunteered to be a guinea
pig: Billy had ordered him to participate. Lee didn't like
the idea of people playing around inside his head. It made
him uncomfortable enough to have no control over the process; why
couldn't he have access to the results? The other agents at
least knew they had broken, since they had been released from the study
before the arbitrary "five interrogation limit" set by Dr Quorn. Lee didn't even know that much. Well, he must not have broken in
the first four sessions, but he didn't know what had happened this morning.
Lee was still sitting at his desk, frowning with his effort to remember,
when the office door opened. Amanda King paused in the doorway and
smiled hesitantly. "Hi," she said. "I finished the Jordak report
, and I thought you might want to look it over before I give it to Mr Melrose."
"Oh, yeah. Thanks. " Lee grinned. For some reason,
it felt really good to see Amanda. She always managed to make him
feel better when something was bothering him. As he reached for the
folder Amanda was holding, he noticed she was looking particularly pretty
today. He also noticed she was acting a little shy; as he looked
at her steadily, a slight blush stained her cheeks.
Was it possible Amanda had done the interrogation? The idea seemed
absurd, but why else would she be looking at him that way? They were
friends; there was no reason for her to be self-conscious around
him. Unless she was hiding something... Setting the folder down,
he eyed her casually for a moment longer before asking nonchalantly, "So,
what have you been doing today?'
Lee thought Amanda looked guilty for a split second, but she responded
quickly. "Oh, well, I've been working on that report for almost three
hours. It really shouldn't have taken so long, but I had trouble
reading your handwriting on a couple of pages of notes, and then I accidentally
hit the delete button and had retype part of it. And then I went
over to steno to see if they had finished the wiretap transcription
you wanted to attach, but they hadn't even started it, so I did it myself." Amanda shrugged and gave him a nervous smile.
Watching her closely, Lee didn't think she was lying . When he
had stopped in the Q Bureau this morning before heading down to the Medical
Lab, the file had been on his desk, and the report hadn't even
been started. He was certain it would have taken *him* over three
hours to turn his notes into a coherent report. Besides which,
Amanda almost never told him out and out lies; most often, if she
didn't want to admit something, she changed the subject or "answered" his
question with a question of her own.
On the other hand, she usually rambled when she was flustered, and one
of her hands was nervously twisting her heart-shaped pendant. For
a moment, he was distracted by the vision of her slender fingers against
the deep red of her sweater. Red was a good color on her. It
brought a warm glow to her skin and darkened her soft, brown eyes. Thinking of her eyes caused hazy memory to float through his mind, but
he couldn't quite bring it into focus. Shaking his head again in
an effort to clear it, he decided to steer the conversation into safe territory. "Is that a new sweater?"
"This sweater? Oh, uh, yeah. I just bought it last night. There was a big sale at Arlington Mall. A lot of stores had 50% off sales, and Mother really wanted to go. She thought we might be able to find some new jeans for the boys; they really wear out jeans fast. " Amanda stopped suddenly in mid-ramble and smiled apologetically. "That's probably more than you needed to know."
"No problem," Lee said slowly. For some reason, now that
he thought about it, her sweater looked vaguely familiar. He was
almost certain he had seen it before, but if she had just bought it last
night.... No, he was being ridiculous. She couldn't have
done the interrogation and the report at the same time. But
why was she acting so nervous?
Picking up the folder, Lee began to glance idly through the neatly typed
pages. As he did so, he could sense Amanda backing slowly toward
the office door. "Well, I'm sure you're busy, and I don't want to
bother you, so I'll just be going," she said.
Lee spoke without thinking. "You're not bothering me. I like having you, uh." He paused, slightly confused by the thought
he had almost revealed. Looking across at Amanda, he
could see that her eyes had widened. "I mean," he began again,
"I like having someone to type up my reports."
"Right. Thanks. I'm glad I could help. Look, I have
to get going. Mr Melrose told me I could take off a couple of hours
early today. I have a parent-teacher conference at Jamie's school. But I promise I'll finish the Waterhouse report for you first thing
in the morning." Without waiting for him to respond, she quickly
slipped out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.
Promise? Promise? Lee's brow furrowed in concentration as
he again tried to focus on a shadowy memory. Hadn't Amanda promised
him something else? For the life of him, he couldn't recall what
it might have been. With a sigh, he decided he must be more tired
than he had realized. He would go home and take a nap. Thinking
of his earlier plan to spend the evening with his little black books, he
decided he wasn't feeling up to the effort. Maybe he would invite
Amanda to have dinner with him Friday night. Yes, that was just what
he needed: a nice, relaxing dinner with a good friend. And
maybe she had heard something about the DeJaVu research. She was
really good at picking up bits and pieces of information around the Agency; she even did data entry for the Medical department occasionally, when things
were slow in Field Section. Well, if she knew something, he would
get it out of her. He grinned as he grabbed his car keys and headed
toward the office door. First, he would need a good bottle of wine....
The end.