A/N: Thank YOU for all your lovely feedback. It truly has made my days. Though if I don't get one from fwuzzfwuzz pretty soon…
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"So the bathroom's down the hall; you'll be staying in the room on the right. And the kitchen's right over here." Adam had barely caught any of Flack's directions as he soaked in the surroundings of the detective's apartment.
Adam tried not to think why he found Flack's cleanliness to be so surprising. In the middle of the two room-one bathroom apartment was a large living room with a long white couch lining the west wall and a superior entertainment system opposite the sofa. Gray pillows and navy blue knick-knacks nicely accented the place, begging the question if Flack had hired an interior designer or secretly had an "eye" for good decorating. Just past the furniture, on the north wall, were two windowed doors which opened up to a balcony/fire-escape, overlooking the murky Hudson River.
"Hey, did your leg get shot too, pal? Keep movin'." Danny ordered from behind him. The dirty blonde detective stood impatiently behind Adam with two, brown boxes full of case files. The lab tech awoke from his brief examination to scoot out of the way. Even with Danny's enormous arms, Adam knew nobody could withstand the weight of over ten years of case files for very long.
Once his path was clear, Danny walked haltingly over to the tall breakfast nook that served as Flack's general dining area. He set down the boxes with a grunt, coughing as a cloud of dust blew in his face upon impact with the dark wood table.
Flack patted Danny on the back. "We'll ignore those for now. Wanna help me start dinner?" Adam figured this was a normal request between the two occasional work partners, for between coughs from the settling dust, Danny nodded in agreement.
"Sure, no problem." Danny sniffed then turned to Adam. "Chicken parmesan good with you, buddy?"
"Uh-Yeah," Adam nodded, looking down habitually.
Flack was tugging his tie undone as he said to Adam, "Go ahead and unpack your things in the room. Dinner'll be done at six."
Danny grinned. "That a challenge, Flack?"
"Yeah, Messer, you up to it?" Flack said, smirking back with a glint in his eyes. Danny chuckled and the two detectives walked into the kitchen, abandoning Adam to figure out which room was his and which belonged to the blue-eyed man.
One hand holding Scabbers' cage and the other strung up in a relentlessly itching sling, Adam poked his head inside one of the rooms. Definitely Flack's, Adam decided as he spotted the slightly messed up bed and the other signs of obvious living-in. That is, unless Flack used his guest room regularly, but that was doubtful.
Although the young man was aware of the room's ownership boundaries, Adam found himself stepping past the doorway for further investigation. Snooping was in his veins, the scientist figured, but Flack wasn't the best person to pry into.
He was usually packing heat.
Pointedly ignoring that particular detail, Adam walked closer to the black dresser at his right, studying the miscellaneous objects placed atop it. He recognized Flack's sister in a polished silver-framed photo as she waved on a bridge in a sunny area very much not New York. Next to it were some post-its, prescription bottles for pain (probably from the accident, Adam recalled, thinking back on the explosion from which Flack had almost died), and a signed hockey puck on a small, red wood pedestal.
Adam continued to observe the sports posters, art, and various other objects located around the room, careful not to touch or move anything (as if he could with his two out-of-commission hands). The lab tech couldn't help a small smile at the goofy picture of all his coworkers, enclosed in a small picture on the detective's nightstand next to his large, king-sized bed.
While he studied the faces of his delighted coworkers, his foot kicked a box of some sort under the bed. His curiosity piqued, Adam sunk to his knees and gently set Scabbers on the plush cream carpet beside him. He pulled the striped gray and blue bed skirt up and reached underneath, pulling out a weighty and aged Converse-sneaker box. Sitting on his knees, Adam debated whether to open it or not. From the corner of his eye, he caught Scabbers giving him a judgmental look.
"It's under his bed, practically in plain sight," he said to the rat, something he did occasionally much to his sanity's concern. Holding his breath, Adam used his uninjured hand to lift the top of the box. There inside Adam made a startling discovery:
Comic books.
There were at least fifty of them in the weathered black box, all neatly stacked and in protective plastic covering. Being the uber-geek that he was, Adam immediately recognized most of the titles on the covers that he thumbed through.
Adam shook his head as he spotted one of his favorites. This was crazy. Who knew a tough guy like Flack was actually a closet nerd like Adam? For this reason, the scientist thought it best to take a closer look under the bed. Sure enough, there were five or six other boxes exactly like the one Adam had opened in front of him. The young man chuckled quietly to himself at the irony.
"Ahem." Adam's smile fell instantly at the sound and his breath caught in his throat. The scientist could feel the hairs rising at the base of his neck, like a prisoner of war awaiting the swing of the axe on his neck. –Except now it was a very, very intimidating detective and instead of an axe it would either be beating him to a pulp or adding another hole to Adam's growing collection.
Flack stepped around and looked mildly surprised to see the young man had intentionally dug under his bed to find his comics. Adam dared a quick glance up at him, feeling awkward and uneasy under the heat of his patronizing stare.
"See you found my stash," Flack pointed out, his brow still creased in discontent. Adam looked down at the pile of comics stacked carelessly in his lap, looking very much like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Adam shook his head.
"I-I'm so sorry, Flack. I couldn't find the right room, so I went in here. And-And I shouldn't have been so nosy, but I saw this box-and-I opened it. It was wrong. I'm really sorry-And-" At this point, Adam looked very close to passing out from hyperventilation. So much so, Flack became increasingly worried for the young man.
He knelt down next to him and rested a placating hand on Adam's shoulder. "Hey, hey, it's okay. Just calm down." Adam closed his mouth, now breathing heavily through his nose, chancing another wary glance up at the other man. Flack tried his best to plaster a comforting smile on his face, anything to calm the upset young man. "Yeah, I like comic books; I don't see anything wrong with that, do you?"
Adam hurriedly shook his head. "No, not at all. I-I actually like them too."
This evidently surprised the other man, who thought, by what he saw at the lab tech's apartment, Adam only bothered with heavy, perplexing books about genetics and science. Flack's fake smile turned into a thoughtful frown as he pulled his hand off Adam's back and crossed his arms. "Really? What're your favorite covers?"
Adam looked down at the covers in his hand, considering, "Ironically, a lot of these ones."
"No joke?" The detective was somewhat suspicious Adam might've just been saying that so he would avoid whatever notions he had about Flack's temper.
"Would I have risked pulling them out if I didn't like them?" Adam almost smiled but it faltered when he realized he just drew attention to his crime again. Stupid, stupid…
Flack smirked and scratched the back of his head. "Guess not." Adam bit his lip, still ill at ease in such close proximity of the other man. He didn't know how else to feel since his expectations of being fatally injured had fallen through. "Tell you what; go through those if you want. There's some more under the bed, too."
"Oh yeah, I know," Adam would've strangled himself had his other arm not been handicapped. Why did he struggle to say words and when he actually thought of something to say, it seemed to be perfectly stupid.
Flack rubbed his hand over the short hairs on the back of his head, resisting the urge to grin as Adam made an animated display of mentally beating himself up. Poor kid. It bothered Flack how someone so brilliant like Adam could be so insecure and unsure about himself. "Good. Your rooms down the hall by the way. Don't forget your rat." God forbid Adam leave the creepy beast inside his room.
Flack left shortly after, not worried about Adam messing with anything else. Sorry to say, he was sure the young man had already given himself a better reprimand than Flack could ever offer.
The detective returned to the kitchen where Danny was tapping various spices into the pot of steaming pasta. Flack read the clock: 5:50- Looks like they met the deadline. Danny glanced up from his work to observe the other man.
"Thought you were going to change," The blonde-haired man said, staring pointedly at the light blue dress shirt Flack had left to change out of (He had already stained it with some of the sauce, unfortunately).
"Huh?" Flack was busy mulling over thoughts of Adam while setting the table he didn't catch onto Danny's question until he noticed his colleague staring pointedly at his shirt. Flack looked down at the shirt questioningly, awaiting revelation to dawn on him, which it did five seconds later. "Oh, yeah, guess I got distracted."
"Must've been pretty distracting if you forgot to change your shirt." Danny mused, grabbing the square-shaped plate Flack was holding to pile it with the chicken and pasta.
"It was just Adam." Flack said, crossing his arms and leaning against the granite counter. "I'm still not sure about this, Danny. Know I'm protectin' him and everything, but I've never dealt with anything like this before. It feels like he's on a totally different planet half the time."
Danny placed the finished plate on the table and grabbed another to heap with food. "Look, I wanna say he'll come around and everything will be all right, but that's just not Adam. He's not a regular-type guy, and you learn to appreciate it."
"You tellin' me you like it when he freaks out and turns weird on you? " Flack inquired doubtfully.
"Kiddin'?" Danny scoffed. "I want to tear out my hair when it takes him an hour to tell me one sentence."
"And considering you don't got a whole lot left…" Flack grinned.
"Watch it," Danny warned, sending a mock glare to his partner. "Just sayin', Adam's got a lot more under the surface than he gets credit for. He's the funniest guy I know, even if most of his jokes go totally over my head."
"With height like that, I think all jokes make it over there." Flack couldn't help himself; he was probably the only one who could get away with saying that.
"I'll remember that next time you need backup, man," Danny bit back. Flack just gave him another cheeky grin.
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After the three of them finished the appetizing dinner, they settled down in the living room to pore over the different files, trying to identify similar cases. Adam was stuck with looking through nearly one thousand different mug shots and files of different suspects, all of similar shapes, bone structures, and facial characteristics.
Adam had a clear picture in his head of what the killer looked like, a fact that forced him to room with Flack in the first place. The problem was, the pictures out of his head kept getting blurry and fading out of focus.
The young man shook his head again, the suspect on the glossy paper looked like the blob for a moment there. Adam adjusted himself on the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, picture only five inches from his face. He still wasn't positive if this was the guy or not. He hadn't had luck with the past two hundred pictures so he placed it in the negative pile.
Near Adam with his work strewn messily across the low-set coffee table sat Danny who had taken off his glasses to rub tiredly at his itching eyes. Flack sat a few feet away at the table they had eaten dinner, now trying to chew through the enormous pile of case files. Both men had changed into matching white wife-beaters, but Adam was too distracted with his internal functions to worry about his outward appearance.
The drugs had almost completely worn off by now, leaving Adam with a dull and severe ache in his shoulder. His breaths continued to shorten, and the bandage covering his opened stitching was beginning to feel slightly damp. That coupled with his already drooping eyes and frayed nerves left Adam an overwrought mess. He had to get out of the room or risk collapsing in it, leaving Danny and Flack to pick up the pieces.
Trying to control the shaking in his voice, Adam announced he was going to bed. He inwardly grimaced at how pathetic that sounded, leaving the two detectives to do the work while got to hit the sack, but, strangely enough, Danny and Flack understood and actually encouraged the action. Adam almost felt compelled to protest at the how readily they were to send him off to bed, but doing that risked expending the last of his already empty energy sources.
In as normal a walk he could manage, the lab tech turned down the hall to his temporary living space, a small room with the white walls, dresser, and bed combo all done up in blue and gray accents. Adam didn't have time to ponder how unusually coordinated the whole house was because it felt like hell had switched locations from the core of the earth to the inside of his body.
Adam almost wasn't successful in walking the short distance from the doorway to the bed. With heavy breaths and a sweating head, he climbed on top of the bed and finally sunk into a feverish, fitful sleep.
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A/N: A bit on the short side, but it's leading to something soon! Promise! Please drop a review by. I love the ones I've been getting for this story. I don't often hear much about Don/Adam; so I find them interesting.