Getting there...still with it...haste makes waste, yes?
Those who missed previous parts are advised to read the entire story so far. For those who have been keeping up, a brief reminder of where things stand:
Hobbes and Claire broke Darien out of the asylum and brought him to Eberts's apartment, a temporary safe-house at best. Claire's new counteragent restored Fawkes's sanity, but he still has to deal with the repercussions of long-term QSM, not to mention what the CIA made him do. As a result of the trauma Darien has lost the ability to become invisible, but that's but the least of his problems...
This part was written to the Rurouni Kenshin soundtrack...which doesn't have much to do with anything, but the Kyoto arc background music rocks, and one piece does remind my sister of that new kickin' violin BGM in I-man...
For the Good...
part 10
When Darien awoke that morning, Hobbes was sitting in the chair by the bed, exactly where he had been the night before. He apparently had been waiting for Darien to open his eyes, because Fawkes had barely done so when his former partner clapped his hands together briskly and said, "Great to see you up! How ya feeling?"
"Better," Darien replied, somewhat bemused but honestly. "A lot better." He frowned suspiciously. "You been there the whole night?"
Hobbes shook his head. "Nah, Claire made me sack out on the living room couch. Said she didn't want me to wake you up snoring. 'Course you were sawing wood a lot louder than me at the time, but as rule I don't argue with women with MDs. So she slept on the cot in here. Now she's putting together breakfast--you awake enough to eat?"
"Sure," Darien agreed.
"Then I'll go get room service. Claire and I were waiting to eat with you."
"Oh." Darien ran one hand through his hair, grimaced when his fingers tangled in the oily strands. He didn't want to think about what the mess on top of his head must look like; it felt bad enough. Definitely in need of some serious, no-holds-barred grooming. "What time is it, anyway?"
"About ten A.M. You got over twelve hours--hope you're feeling rested." Hobbes grinned, but there was a definite hint of concern in his careful study of his former partner. More than just worry for his health, Fawkes suddenly believed. Bobby was stressed, and since Darien was feeling better by the minute, it probably wasn't about him. Hopefully. Unless Claire and Bobby were hiding something from him...
No, they wouldn't. Not about his health, anyway. He wouldn't put it past them to conceal other things...he was an invalid, after all, not to mention a recently-escaped mental patient. Walk on eggshells and all that. And hell, they might be right-by his count he'd freaked out three times yesterday, couldn't be sure he wouldn't lose it again for who knows what reasons. It was just...hard to believe any of this was even real. Waking this morning he'd almost expected to be back in the hospital, everything of the last couple days just a dream. Kept almost expecting a strange doctor to walk through the door and give him something to take away the hallucinations...which he didn't want gone.
Falling asleep last night, he had decided it didn't matter if all this was only in his mind. Screw reality. An escape that was only in his head was better than being in that place another day. And his friends were here...
That convinced him more than anything else. Hobbes, Claire, even Eberts--he doubted he could imagine them so completely. His imagination wasn't that...creative.
Like Hobbes watching him now, with that furrowed-brow glower, like a bulldog might lay on a stranger accompanying its master. Dubious about the immediate situation but with most of his mind on higher concerns.
"Hey, man, I'm fine," Darien said, reassuringly he hoped. "Or at least I'm getting better. Where's that food?"
Hobbes shook himself out of his thoughts, nodded and stood. "Coming up. Will be right back with Claire."
"What about Eberts?"
"It's Monday," Hobbes explained. "He's at work. Agency chief accountant, you know."
"Really?" Darien tried to remember if he had known that or not. Then another issue occurred to him--"Hey, what about you and Claire? Why aren't you in, too?"
"Ah..." Hobbes's shrug was elaborately casual, a little too markedly indifferent for Darien's liking. "I called in sick. Said I'd try to be there this afternoon, if I was feeling better." He grinned at Darien again. "Pissing off the current partner's a hobby of mine, ya know. Skipping class is guaranteed to get his goat. The director doesn't like it either, so that's two birds with one stone. Definitely worth it."
Darien eyed him sharply, picking up at least part of what he was leaving out. "You don't need to babysit me."
"I know, I'm not," Hobbes brushed it off.
"I mean, I'm a grown man."
"Yeah, I know, you're a big guy. You can take care of yourself. I'm not babysitting, I'm just...sticking around."
"Sticking around."
"You know. Staying close. Just 'cause."
"You don't need to."
"I know."
"I'm okay."
"Yeah, I know. You're fine, Fawkes."
"I am."
"I know."
Darien tried not to smile. Failed, even as he sighed, "...Thanks, Bobby."
***
Hobbes arrived at the Agency building ten minutes before noon, which wasn't the latest he had come in before. Especially not when he had given them warning. He had sick hours to burn. Hell, for all they knew he could have been on his deathbed. His alleged partner Lewis, however, was not a sympathetic soul. The man glared daggers when he walked into their office.
Not that Hobbes could completely blame him; judging by the paper-covered condition of his desk, Lewis had been wrestling with red tape all morning. That chore was enough to make a saint swear like a character in a Tarantino flick. A good part of his anger probably wasn't even directed at Hobbes; Bobby was just a convenient target.
Indeed, Lewis's annoyed flush faded when he got up to fetch a cup of water from the bubbler. On the way back to his desk he stopped to stand over his partner's chair, gazed down at him coolly while Hobbes switched on his computer and checked his e-mail.
"You don't sound sick," the younger agent said dourly.
"Well..." Hobbes leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and donned his best cat-post-canary smirk. "There's illnesses, and then there's, uh, bugs."
"Bugs."
"You know. Mysterious itches...the kind that need special treatment. Such as from a nurse, mmm, five-eight, long black hair, all the right...medicine." His hands described significant curves in the air.
Lewis snorted. "Sounds like your weekend went better than mine, anyway."
He couldn't resist. "Well, some guys got it..."
But for once, Lewis ignored it. "We both missed some excitement, though," he remarked suddenly, not quite off-hand.
"Oh?" Hobbes felt a twinge, nothing specific, but the hairs on the back of his neck prickled at the odd tone.
"Yeah. Friday night this guy escaped an LA mental hospital. Thing is, they think one of ours might have helped him do it--you know that scientist, right, the woman with the basement lab. You worked with her, the, uh..."
"The Keeper," Hobbes supplied, hoping his mouth didn't sound as dry as it had become.
"Yeah, the Keeper. See, the guy who escaped used to be one of ours, too. An ex-Agent. And the Keeper was his personal doctor. Seems that she's gone--didn't come to work today, and when they checked out her house it had been cleared out--everything was there, except the important stuff. Clothes and her laptop. Ditto with her bank account, closed out electronically over the weekend."
"They checked this out already."
"Hey, we're nothing if not thorough. As soon as the guy went missing, she was the number one suspect, apparently. Never been much of a team player, it sounds like. Far as I know they don't have proof positive she's involved, but it seems likely." Lewis threw him an unreadable glance. "When you called in sick I wondered..."
"What?" Hobbes rolled his eyes and prayed to whatever deity might govern deception that his acting skills had improved since high school drama. "I'd risk losing my job for some nut in the loony bin?"
"Well, apparently, from what I've heard tell, you know this guy," Lewis replied.
"Know him?" Disbelieving curiosity. Oh yeah, this had to be his best performance yet.
"Man by the name of Darien Fawkes."
Hobbes made a show of surprise, not too extreme. He was smart enough to have mostly deduced it already, wasn't he? God, he hated trying to second-guess himself. "Fawkes? Oh yeah, I was his partner for a bit. Ex-con, real screw-up. Forgot he was institutionalized."
"But he and this Keeper might've run off together."
"Fawkes and the Keeper? No way. Keeper's a real class act...she'd never go for the likes of Fawkes."
Lewis cocked his head. "Never heard you mention him before...so you were partners for a while?"
Hobbes really didn't care for the shrewd discernment on the other man's face. "A year or so. Not much to say. He transferred to the CIA and I haven't seen him since."
"Huh." Lewis turned away, returned to his desk and picked up his pen. Put it down again and remarked, "So, Fawkes give you trouble? Did you help get him committed?"
With tremendous effort Hobbes kept his teeth from grating together. "No. Not really. Like I said, he went to the CIA. They're the ones who put him away, I guess."
"Know why?"
Hobbes rubbed his eyes. "Look, you want the truth? I can't tell you. It's classified. The Agency..." He realized his voice was rising, brought it under control again. "Fawkes was a special project. That's how he was connected with the Keeper. Medical stuff. They put me with him because I'm one of the Agency's most trusted agents. Which is why I'm not spilling anything now--he's no longer under the Agency. Not our business anymore--we were told to forget everything about him. So I have. That's it. End of story."
"I see." Lewis grasped his pen again, held it poised over the sheet before him, not writing. "So you really don't know what happened to him."
"Not my business," Hobbes repeated. He watched Lewis's pen hover above the page, raised his eyes to see Lewis's own on him, narrowed thoughtfully. Abruptly impatient with the tension, Hobbes snapped "If you've got something to say, say it."
Lewis didn't blink. "It's nothing. Just, I've heard you complain about your partners going back to your time with the Bureau. But I've never even Fawkes's name from you."
"Classified, like I said." Hobbes tersely replied.
"Like that's stopped you before." There was something in Lewis's face he didn't quite recognize. A thoughtful look of concentration, as if he were assembling something in his mind, piecing together a puzzle with missing pieces. The man didn't say anything more, however, and Hobbes reluctantly attempted to turn his attention to his e-mail. Spam, spam, chain letter, something from the boss he couldn't concentrate on well enough to understand, spam...
"Hey, Hobbes," Lewis broke the silence after a couple minutes. "Can you come over here, take a look at this?" He waved a paper in his direction.
Sighing, Hobbes made himself rise from his chair--rather than leaping out of it, and out of his skin while he was at it--and stride nonchalantly across the office to his partner. "Yeah--"
Lewis hunched over his desk, forcing Hobbes to do the same to get a look at the page he was indicating. While he squinted in confusion at the tiny print, Lewis spoke, almost in his ear, tersely, "They know it's someone in the Agency besides the Keeper. They're searching everyone's house, without warning. They searched my place this morning."
Hobbes jerked back, controlling his shock too late to hide his culpability.
Lewis studied him for an instant, nodded to himself, then glanced significantly at the wall clock. "Hobbes, isn't it your lunchtime?"
"What--uh...yeah..." He tried to meet his partner's eyes.
Lewis didn't allow it. "Good luck," the other agent whispered, almost inaudibly, and bent back over his paperwork. As Hobbes opened the door he said, a little louder, "Good-bye, partner."
Slightest stress on the final word--not sarcasm for once, but like he meant it. Hobbes looked back, saw Lewis had lifted his head. "Thanks," Bobby mouthed, hoping his sincerity showed on his face, and then the door closed. Like a rocket Hobbes was off, heading for the cafe across the street, with the payphone hopefully outside of the Agency's surveillance.
***
What a difference a night of real sleep made. A daring escape, an injection of counteragent, and twelve hours' complete, undisturbed rest, and he was actually feeling human for the first time in too long. And the shower was a great help. Darien braced his arms against the slick tile wall and let the hot water pound down on him, reveling in the simple freedom to stand here as long as he wanted, even after all the soap and shampoo had whirled down the drain. No one timing him, no one watching, no one to turn off the water except for him, when he chose.
The simple freedoms were the most important. All the little things. His standards had definitely fallen. When he had gotten up this morning he had felt pretty good about just walking across the room without relying on the wall for support, and then had been annoyed at himself for feeling good about such a trivial thing. This invalid deal was for the birds.
Claire at least made it tolerable. She didn't offer unwanted help, and her encouragement was professional, medically focused, not degrading to his pride. Her face had lit up when he took his first steps, but she didn't break into applause or anything humiliating, just smiled and said, "That's an excellent sign. You're well on the way to a complete recovery."
Complete recovery--as if he had been deathly sick or mortally injured, not just victim of a chemical imbalance which put him out of his skull. She had laid it out for him plainly. The weakness and the tremors were from the drugs. Everything else--nightmares, panic attacks, inability to quicksilver--was the aftermath of what had been going on in his head for the last couple years. Physically he was getting over it. The mental stuff would take longer. But she was giving him a chance to adjust at his own pace. Not babying him.
Though he didn't know if he could sleep without someone watching over him...
He finally left the shower, slipped into the clean sweats and t-shirt Claire had provided. As he came out of the bathroom, toweling off his hair and irritated because he couldn't recall the second verse of Kryptonite, he heard the telephone trill. "You gonna get that?" he asked Claire, who was seated on the cot in the guestroom reading a magazine.
She shook her head. "We don't want anyone to know I'm here. It would be detrimental to Eberts's reputation."
"Sure it wouldn't be harder on yours, to be caught hanging out at his place?" Darien joked, as the phone rang again.
Following the third ring the machine picked up. After the tone a familiar voice came on. "Hello? Yeah, I'd like to order a pizza, one with everything, extra cheese, hold the mushrooms--"
Claire ran for the phone the moment she heard the voice, Darien right behind her. She picked up the receiver, answered, "Bobby?" Her tone was as cool as she could manage, stiffly accented. "What's wrong? Does someone suspect us?"
"Yeah, that's right," Hobbes's tinny voice continued through the machine's speaker. "We got a lot of hungry people here. Everyone wants some. If your delivery boys are as good as you say, they should've left already."
"Damn," Claire murmured. "We'll clear out--be careful, Bobby."
"Yeah, thanks. I'll be expecting you." The line cut off.
No sooner had Claire hung up then she had dashed to the homemade lab in the study. Darien leaned against the doorway and watched as she swiftly, carefully stacked her apparatuses in a couple of brown cardboard boxes. "What can I do?" he asked urgently.
Claire deftly wound a sheet of newspaper around a rack of testtubes to keep them from rattling against one another. "You just prepare yourself--we may have to run. I'm sure they've already been to my house, probably Bobby's as well, but we don't dare go to either in care they're under surveillance--"
A sharp rat-tat-tat sounded at the door. Claire jerked up, her eyes wide. Closing the box, she shoved it under the table, already cleared of her other equipment, and threw a haphazard pile of papers down to conceal the suspiciously neat surface. Then she spun around and started for the study door. "We have to--"
"Hide," Darien said, taking her arm and lowering his voice. "If they have the house surrounded..." He stared at the far wall, adding up his limited knowledge of the apartment's architecture and wishing he had some way to pierce the plaster's opacity. X-ray vision would be as useful as invisibility, wonder if anyone was working on that--
Another knock on the door sounded, and a muffled voice called, "Federal agents. If anyone is inside please come to the door. We aren't making any arrests; this is a security matter."
"Yeah, well, I'm real insecure," Darien muttered. If they were giving warning without charging in, they must not have any concrete suspicions. Which wouldn't do any good if they were discovered. He debated going for the backdoor, changed his mind when another set of footsteps clattered on the back porch. Instead he pulled Claire into the guest room, shut the door silently before scanning the chamber. Blank walls, single closet--no, they'd check the closets first.
"The window?" Claire whispered, but Darien shook his head. Both sides of the house would be in full view of anyone on the street or in the back, and there were agents stationed at either position. Nowhere to run.
But if he tried to make a break for it, and Claire stayed inside--they wouldn't bother to search the house thoroughly; he was their target, after all. Being here might get Eberts in trouble, but if he claimed he had broken in...and Claire and Hobbes wouldn't fall under any suspicion--
"No, Darien," Claire whispered harshly, as if he had spoken that train of thought aloud. When had she added mind-reading to her bag of tricks?
He was expecting to hear the front door get kicked down any minute; instead there was only a soft click of a key smoothly turning tumblers. At his expression Claire murmured, "The Agency routinely duplicates all their employees' keys." She squeezed his arm. "Darien, you hide in here. I'm going to go out and try to convince them--"
"No," he said, in the exact same town she had just tried on him, like berating a disobedient child.
Footsteps in the hallway. No time to argue it out. Darien simply grabbed her arm and hauled her down to the floor, then slid them both under the bed, side by side with his arm still looped under her shoulders. The tip of his nose grazed the box-spring. By carefully turning his head, he positioned one eye to see through the inch gap between the edge of the bedcover and the floorboard.
Within that limited range of sight he watched the door swing open and a pair of black patent leather shoes tramp into the room. Beside him Claire wasn't even breathing, though her body vibrated with suppressed tension. The shoes marched across the floor, out of Darien's vision. He breathed shallowly and silently, listening as the closet hinges squeaked and the door scraped against the floor. The man thumped the back wall, then withdrew. Black shoes tapped back toward the door to rejoin the others exploring the rest of the house.
Then the pair stopped. Claire shivered once, unable to see but listening intently as the footsteps approached again, halted beside the bed--
Oh God...Darien couldn't breathe, couldn't think. He was sure his heart was pounding so loudly anyone up and down the block could hear it, like that corpse's in Edgar Allen Poe's famous story. If only it would stop, if only he could stay hidden, if only he were...
She'd told him it was all in his mind, she'd said he could relearn the old tricks, if ever he was going to, now was the time--
The man was bending down, crouching to take hold of the bedspread, lift the curtain and reveal them like a magician showing off his skills at prestidigitation.
Darien closed his eyes, imagined the ice chill of quicksilver sweeping over him, over Claire shaking beside him, shielding them. Tried to make the imagination so vivid it became reality. He remembered how to do this, remembered every sensation, every impulse. Wasn't it still triggered by fear? He was willing to admit he was a coward, he was terrified, anything if it would save him, would save Claire...
Please, I don't want to go back, I don't want her punished, please, let this work...
/~/~/~/
to be continued...
The end doth approach...is anyone still out there?