Mint On The Pillow
Author's Note: Please forgive my painfully slow updating of this fic... I'm in the process of moving to Australia. No excuse, really... but well, I beg your indulgence whilst I try to both write and pack in double quick time!
Part Seven - In The Event Of My Death...
Saturday... finally. Miss Parker decided she could officially call this one of the worst weeks of her life. No one got killed, but apart from that...
At 11am, she figured she should probably get up. She'd been awake for hours, unable to quiet her mind. The agony was that she simply couldn't draw a definite conclusion. No matter what she told Sydney, her mind changed on the subject of that night, and Jarod in general almost hourly. Well, she told herself, today is Saturday, one day when work WILL NOT invade my time. The realistic part of her mind knew it wasn't true, but at least it made her get out of bed.
She took a long shower, and was just on her way to the kitchen, dressed in a warm bathrobe, when there was an insistent knocking on her front door. She opened it to find Broots, of all people, staring back at her. He was obviously about to say something, but he was caught by her unprofessional appearance and couldn't seem to raise his eyes to hers.
"You should see me without the robe," she taunted cruelly, well aware of the geek's crush on her. He gulped visibly and cleared his throat.
"M-miss Parker, you aren't answering your phone."
"I unplugged it," she leaned forward a little, her voice low, "I didn't want to be disturbed."
Broots backed away from the warning in her voice. Man, he was going to get it on Monday morning!
"Um, Sydney was trying to reach you. He said he couldn't wait for you but you should follow him to Minneapolis."
Parker felt her stomach knot up. What had the prying shrink dug up now?
"He said to tell you it's about Romeo...?" Broots delivered the bizarre message, still wondering at the secrecy with which Sydney had entrusted it to him. Perhaps Romeo was another ward of the Centre, or some kernel of Miss Parker's foggy past... He looked back to Miss Parker, who had gone pale at the mention of the name. She also had that look like she was about to strangle someone.
"Look, err, don't shoot the messenger and all that," he said hurriedly, "Anyway, I've gotta get back for Debbie's netball practise..." He practically bolted back to his car, leaving Miss Parker with her mystery. These were the days he thanked god for having a normal life, or as normal as working for the Centre would allow.
- - - - - - - - - -
Sydney was usually an extremely calm person. Psychiatry was not the sort of profession which attracted the judgmental or panicky. But this was not an ordinary morning, and his patience was being pushed to the limit as the plane kept circling, waiting for the disorganisation of a control tower glitch to be sorted out. For the umpteenth time he cursed his bad judgement at taking a commercial flight. If he was in the Centre jet they'd have put down at a private airfield hours ago... but to requisition the jet required an explanation he was not willing to give.
With dawn just beginning to tinge the horizon, Sydney could see the city of Minneapolis stretched out beneath. He may have found it beautiful, except that he knew somewhere in that urban sprawl there was a hospital in which Jarod lay dying.
"Come on, come on!" he muttered under his breath, "Merde!"
"French, huh?" said the crisp-suited businessman beside him.
"Belgian," he replied absently, "What the hell is taking so long!"
"Calm down, buddy, we'll be on the ground in no time. Honestly, I'm in no hurry to get to my appointment. How about you?"
The young man's cheerfulness irritated Sydney more than he thought possible. He turned to him with a hard look.
"My son is dying."
- - - - - - - - - -
Parker drove with one hand on the wheel, the other clasping her cell phone to her ear. For the third time in an hour, she was getting Sydney's infuriatingly polite voicemail message.
"Syd, you're the one who wanted me to come urgently, you could at least answer your damn phone!" She yelled after the beep, "Anyway I'm on my way to the airport, and I'll be in Minneapolis in four hours, okay?"
She tossed the phone angrily onto the passenger seat. The familiar constant ache from her stomach ulcer was becoming a persistent stabbing under the pressure and the fear of whatever it was had gotten Sydney so worried he would just take off without her. He wasn't exactly prone to impulsive behaviour, but then, where Jarod was concerned, Parker knew where Syd's true loyalties lay. After all they had uncovered together about the secrets festering at the heart of the Centre, she had no illusions about him still working to bring the Pretender in. That was her job.
- - - - - - - - - -
Sydney hurried through the dully-painted hospital maze, following signs for the ICU. He wanted to sprint all the way there, but had already been reprimanded once for running through the entrance lobby.
At last he located the right room and looked in through the window. Seated by the bed was the boy who had called him, Karl, accompanied by another of Jarod's psychiatry students.
He remembered Miss Parker's earlier tirade on the humiliation of once again being a pawn in the Pretender's games. She had gone to the university expecting to get intel on his whereabouts and instead found herself bombarded with deeply personal questions, as Jarod had told the students to evaluate her as their end-of-term assignment!
Just to the right of the door hung Jarod's medical chart on a clipboard. Sydney glanced at it and immediately did a double-take on the name: Jarod Sydney. He smiled sadly at the joke.
"You'd be Sydney then?" the voice made him start, and he looked up into Karl's weary face and nodded.
"Yes. Thank you for calling me."
"It wasn't up to me," Karl's voice was low, "Jarod left a note. I suppose you people needed to be notified that the chase is over, huh."
Sydney's heart almost stopped at that. "He's... dead?" He wouldn't believe it, he couldn't. He craned to look past Karl into the room. Jarod lay still as a corpse, but he couldn't see the monitor...
Karl steeled himself for the lie. He would tell Sydney that Jarod was dead; he and Suzie had decided that last night. It was the only way to protect their friend. As it was Jarod may not live out the day, but if anyone from the Centre believed him to be alive, even barely, they'd take him away...
Just tell him! Karl looked at the old man; his whole body tense with grief, his eyes desperate, and knew that he could not. He put a hand on Sydney's shoulder.
"He nearly died last night, but they resuscitated him. The doctor's fairly certain he won't make it," his voice croaked as he spoke.
Sydney nodded, his expression hollow, and went into the room. The girl who sat at the bedside jumped up as he entered, glaring at him with undisguised contempt. Sydney suspected they had watched the DSAs; now he was certain of it. Somehow the thought that she saw him only as a monster who kept a child imprisoned for research cut him to the core. He wanted to apologise, to beg her understanding, but she strode quickly out of the room.
Exhausted with worry, he sat down beside the bed and looked at Jarod, at the boy genius he had raised, at the man who had spent so little time out in the real world, but had made such a difference to so many.
"Jarod," he spoke gently, "It's Sydney. You're safe here, I promise. I won't let anyone find you. I know you can survive this, just... take your time."
Sydney took Jarod's hand, remembering with a pang of grief how many times he'd sat like this holding the hand of his comatose brother, Jacob. Why was he always the one sat beside dying loved-ones? He felt keenly that, for his crimes, it should be him lying there now.
He looked intently at his pupil's face, noted how the serious expression he had worn all his life still lingered. In the years since Jarod had escaped, Sydney had only seen him face to face a few times, and every time his first thought had been to make sure he was okay. In the beginning, he had hoped Jarod could simply be persuaded to come back to the Centre, because Sydney feared for his mental health outside the only environment he had ever known. Now he knew more about the Centre's dark dealings, he had come to loathe his employers more than ever and secretly prayed that they would never catch their prize subject. In his own small way Sydney worked to discover Jarod's true identity, to make amends for his past deeds. But all that would for nothing if he died.
He reached into his inside pocket and brought out a set of rosary beads that had belonged to his mother, bowed his head low, and began his fervent pleas to God to spare Jarod's life.
Suzie watched from outside, a battle of opinions raging inside her. Ever since she first saw the discs she had made up her mind about what kind of man Sydney was: cold-hearted, unscrupulous and manipulative. That a psychiatrist would ever willingly participate in experiments on children, knowing the lasting effects on the developing mind... it made her sick, and so angry she felt sure she would want to strangle this man on sight, but now...
"Hard to know what to think, isn't it?" Karl spoke her own thoughts out loud as he appeared at her side with two cups of coffee. Suzie took one cup with a grateful nod.
"You're telling me. Remember what the professor told us on the last day? He said, 'The only harmful opinion is a fixed one.' If a shrink can't change his mind, how can he expect his patients to?"
"Sounds like you were paying attention too. I know what you mean. I wanted to hate Sydney, but now it's clear we don't know the whole story." He gestured to the praying Sydney, "That isn't the behaviour of a scientist. He looks more like--"
"A father?" Miss Parker's deep, velvety tone finished Karl's sentence from just behind.
Startled, the students spun round to see the lady they had met ten days ago, her cool grey eyes looking past them and into the dim room.
"Err... Miss... Parker?" Karl ventured. She fixed him with a piercing glare.
"Way to go, Einstein. Now, you had better tell me exactly what is the situation here, omitting all psyche-bullshit! Talk."
Karl gulped and glanced briefly at Suzie before beginning. He remembered their last meeting with the volatile Miss Parker, and how a few caustic phrases had sent some of the more timid of Jarod's students running for cover.
"The, err, Professor was in a hit-and-run on Jude Street, the day after you were here. Suzie found him, but he was really badly injured... dying."
Miss Parker struggled to keep at bay emotions so powerful they threatened to crack her mask of icy professionalism. It had been a rollercoaster of confusion and fear ever since she stepped off the plane. A scruffy boy of around twelve had been waiting at the Arrivals gate, holding a scrawled sign for PARKER. The brat had told her some old man paid him twenty dollars to meet her here and give her a note. The note said simply to go to the hospital; it didn't need to say more.
"What's the prognosis?" she stuttered, trying to maintain her cool detachment, but still aware that these were trainee psychiatrists, bound to spot the flaws in her act.
"It's not good." Karl told her quietly.
She blinked away the forming tears, determined that the infuriating youths wouldn't get an opportunity to play counsellors to her grief, and stepped to the door.
"Right, well, I'm fairly sure recess is over by now so why don't you kids run along?"
Suzie glared hard at Miss Parker and folded her arms, purposefully blocking the door. Miss Parker met her gaze, and the two women stared stubbornly at each other for a moment, both refusing to back down. Karl grasped Suzie's arm lightly, breaking the tension.
"We'll be staying right here Miss Parker," the subtext was clear: they weren't going to let her take him. Like they could do anything to stop me, if I wanted to... Miss Parker thought, but acknowledged the warning in Karl's voice with a nod.
Suzie grudgingly moved aside, and Miss Parker went ahead into Jarod's room.
Sydney looked up as she entered, and as she met his harried eyes she knew exactly how much danger Jarod was in.
"Hell of a thing, Syd. For once we have your lab-rat right here for the taking..."
"Miss Parker, you cannot--" she cut off his insistent plea with a wave of her hand.
"--And we aren't gonna do a damn thing because he's at death's door."
Sydney, half out of his chair, sat back down with a sigh.
"But then, you never really wanted to catch him, did you?"
The shrink didn't look up. "I did once. When he first escaped, all I could think about was getting him back, resuming our work. But that was before I let myself see the truth about what I've been doing all these years, what I've denied him. The chase aside, Miss Parker, even you have to admit he's done wonderful things with his freedom."
"He's a saint," she replied blandly. Her heart screamed at her how insensitive she was being, how she should be comforting Sydney, even trying to talk to Jarod, to encourage him back from the brink, but all that would have to wait until she was alone. No one, not even the shrink who knew her real, feeling self so well, could be allowed to see her break down.
And she knew she would. It was only a matter of time before the dam broke. Ever since their one night together, time she'd been furious with Jarod for not calling her, wounded to the core, sure that any excuse of his would not be good enough. Now the guilt of her own self-absorption welled up and mingled with the fear of truly losing him...
Sydney's eyes were on Jarod's face again, desolate. "A saint perhaps, but for that he would have to die."
End of Part Seven