A/N: Read, review, and repeat. Or maybe not repeat. Whatever.
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They pulled up in front of a shady warehouse near the docks, a place where most crimes liked taking place. Adam explained to Flack how Rob had confided in him that the insulation in the warehouse walls and ceiling would make an excellent studio someday.
"This has gotta be the place." Adam said, ogling the expansive wooden structure and wondering what beheld behind its massive, wood-paneled entrance.
Once Flack and Adam exited the detective's black, undercover cruiser, Flack immediately went into police mode.
"Okay, I'm going to enter in to the side while you act as a diversion from up front."
"That's always a wonderful role, but I think you mean negotiator," Adam pointed out. And Flack paused to give the other man a quizzical look. "He's my friend. I'm supposed to convince him to give it up."
"Riight, you do dat." Flack said in his sarcastic New York accent, obviously not believing the nerdier half of their pair was going to valiantly stop the sting with words alone. "And while you're talking to him, I'm going to get in position to take a shot if need be." He paused before giving the younger man a meaningful look, "And, Adam?"
Adam stopped nervously eyeing the building to turn his full attention on the taller detective. "Yeah?"
"I want you to be careful. No hero acts. If this guy's as dangerous as you say he is, I have a feeling that there's going to be a whole lotta shots fired."
"Right, I'm cool with that," Adam assured the other man in what he hoped was a confident tone of voice (he was pretty sure it didn't sound like that though). Flack simply nodded in reply and signaled to where he was walking to.
"Okay, let's go then." Flack said, but Adam seemed apprehensive. The detective laid a strong hand on his shoulder, giving Adam a leveled stare. "Look, you're going to do fine. You're braver than we give you credit for. Even without your detachable gun."
Adam grinned nervously at his own words. They sounded funny coming from the usually serious detective. "Eh heh, then what are we waiting out here for?"
After a few moments to get in position, the makeshift partners found themselves on opposite sides of the warehouse. Adam was currently trying hard not to pass out from hyperventilation. He tried to focus on the words Flack said about being brave. Flack was the bravest person he knew; all the guy's pain meds were a testament to that. If a man like Flack could say that to him, maybe there was more to Adam that he himself wasn't even seeing.
Steeling himself, Adam opened the doors just in time to find Rob screwing something on a control panel that looked to be the mechanism responsible for powering the huge tank-like weapon on the middle of the ground floor. Adam could only assume that the huge tank was the laser and was seriously wondering how such parts were made available to the public.
Crazy guys always knew how to get their hands on the good stuff.
Speaking of crazy, Adam thought to himself as Rob smirked at him with a sort of self-satisfied look in his eyes. He was obviously taking Adam's shocked expression for "awe-inspired" rather than "Rob-really-is-an-obsessive-psycho."
"So glad of you to make it, Adam, old friend. I had our old buddy Hal looking for you," Rob said, swiping a hand through his longish blond hair. Rob had evidently lost weight from the last time Adam saw him, which wasn't a good thing since the guy had only been 120 tops back in university. He now looked ten times the deranged recluse with his gaunt face and loose-fitting apparel.
"Seems like he wanted to do a bit more than 'looking' with a blade like that," Adam replied, still watching the other man with unease, thinking back to the chilling weapon Hal had been blazoning.
"Oh, Hal would never hurt you. The blade was just a precaution in case you still had the same feelings about my project like you did the last time," Rob said, his eyes sparking a bit at the still sore memory.
Adam appeared to be recounting the same memory. "Was the blade just a precaution when Hal stabbed that man to death? Or when he killed that girl?"
"They knew too much. They both saw me and him together that night and I had to make sure all the loose ends got tied up. You understand, don't you, Adam?"
Adam didn't. He was still boiling at the fact that Rob had seriously just referred to Christine as a "loose end." -As if she were just "written off" and not really killed. That's when he said those five little words that you really shouldn't say to a psycho. "God… You really are a psycho."
Something in Rob seemed to snap as his smirking face darkened into that of a dark frown and stony expression. "If that's how you really feel, Adam. I suppose there's no use in keeping you around for a demonstration. Might as well move you to the front of the line as a test subject."
Adam wasn't sure what Rob was talking about until the tank's barrel was shifted in his direction and the noise started pouring out in a concentrated dose towards him. The only thing he remembered was the paralyzing feeling of having his eardrums being assaulted by the worst noise he had to ever endure. It literally felt as if his skull were going to crack from just the sound alone!
After three minutes of writhing on the floor and releasing screams that couldn't be heard over the piecing noise, a great weight pushed him roughly aside, slamming him on the concrete farther away, and suddenly, instant relief.
The world was normal sounding again and the pressure in Adam's skull instantly subsided. But his stress level was still through the roof as he heard Flack's deafening screams replace his own. He turned to see the blue-eyed detective struggling on the floor, the laser pointedly tracking his every movement. Adam's eyes widened in horror when he saw Flack's bleeding ears as the sound released an increased pressure into his head.
Adam turned his head up to the overhead stair landing, seeing that Rob, the lunatic, was just cackling in the corner, enjoying the detective's foiled rescue strategy. Adam's face grew hot with fury at the man's amusement in his friend's pain. With uncharacteristic skill, Adam grabbed Flack's gun that had clattered at his feet during the fall, pointed it directly at Rob, and pulled the trigger.
Rob tumbled to the ground with a shriek that sounded like a dying Valkyrie. Totally ignoring the other man's cries that Adam had "shot his fucking leg off", Adam made his way to the control panel. Fortunately, because it was, after all, his algorithm, the lab tech was able to crack the system quite quickly, successfully shutting off the tank's sound blast.
Adam watched as the sound stopped and Flack collapsed to the floor. The sight was completely terrifying and Adam felt as if his body were drawn to the other man's like a magnet, for one second he was on the platform with the control panel and the next: he was hovering over the detective's prone form, trying relentlessly to revive the older man back into consciousness.
Finding any movement too dangerous and his pleading to be futile, Adam searched the man's trench coat he was still wearing until he found the phone. With shaky hands, he dialed the number that connected him straight to the police dispatch (there were at least some perks to having a detective's phone, even if it meant the detective was currently too unconscious to use it).
"I-uh-I really need some backup over here. I'm at…" Adam gave the correct badge number and location of the officer down because it was something he memorized just in case situations like these happened. Not that he ever expected he'd be the one to deal with them personally, but here he was. So it turned out to be time well spent.
Once he hung up, Adam was left to deal with Rob's moans from the back of the room. The psycho was probably suffering from a major GSW to his leg, potentially losing a lot of blood, but Adam's only concern was the still on the unconscious Flack. Nothing would make the detective come to and the blood still rolling out of his ears did nothing to sooth Adam's nerves.
For now, he could only wait, hope, and pray for help to come faster.
"C'mon, Adam, you've got to see the paramedics," Adam's world returned to the present and he started, turning around. When had Mac and Stella gotten here? His ears must have suffered more than he thought because the sounds of the paramedics' sirens were barely audible. Only those in close range, such as Stella, who was currently staring at him with her large, concerned eyes, were able to be heard.
"No, Flack-" Adam began, and watched to see the man who had protected him the entire way through being loaded onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance. Adam made to follow but Mac stopped him with a hand on his chest.
"He'll be okay. For now, focus on getting yourself checked out." Mac told him, but Adam remained unconvinced, his eyes still regarding the ambulance with sadness and regret. He wanted so badly to make sure Flack was okay, just like Flack had done for him.
"C'mon, Adam, you've got a lot of blood coming out of your ears. Please," Stella implored of him. Adam touched the side of his head and finally noticed the wetness at the nape of his neck. And all this time he had thought it was sweat.
With great reluctance, Adam allowed Stella to load him into the back of the second ambulance, not even bothering to spare a glance at the scene behind him, already knowing it would haunt his nightmares enough in the future.
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Flack awoke in a numbed daze. He looked to the right and felt like smiling at the morphine drip currently connected to his arms. It had been awhile since the pain in his ribs from the explosion wasn't bothering him, and he knew there had to be heavy drugs involved if this were the case now.
Still, the niggling thought of how he got the drip in the first place finally manifested to the point that he was now alert enough to realize he was in the hospital.
Sitting up with an uneasy hold on the side bar, Flack was now fully aware of just how he got here since the last thing he remembered was the sonic boom trip he took when he tackled Adam out of the way of the laser's sound wave blast (He really ought to think up a better name for that so he didn't end up sounding stupid in the report).
Speaking of the geek, Flack thought with an amused grin. Adam was lounged back in the chair beside his hospital bed, snoring softly. The detective reminisced on how it had been the completely opposite situation only a few days ago but focused more on waking the snoozing CSI up then the irony of situations.
"Adam," Flack said and immediately grasped his throat. Wait… Why wasn't anything coming out? Obviously, something came out because Adam started awake at some noise. And when he caught sight of a now conscious Flack, he said something with great enthusiasm, but… Flack couldn't hear any of it.
A look of realization dawned on Adam's face at what must have been a very confused look on Flack's own. Hurriedly, he searched inside the side table for a piece of paper and pencil. When Flack caught sight of what Adam was hurriedly scribbling, his heart started pounding uncontrollably.
"You're deaf… Not permanently though!" Adam wrote hastily at Flack's start. Flack calmed down some, still tense from having his entire detective career flash before his eyes. No way could he be a cop without his earsf.
He gestured with his fingers for Adam to hand the pen over. Adam obliged, giving the paper to him as well. "How are you doing?"
Adam rolled his eyes once he they landed on the neat scrawl. Figures the moment Flack would figure out he would live without serious damage, he'd turn to probing others. That guy seriously never let the detective act go. Adam was pretty sure it wasn't an act anymore though. It was probably engrained in Flack to be the cop that did it all because it was the right thing to do.
"Fine. Got some ear damage too. No biggie," Adam wrote back with a shrug.
"Casual indifference," Flack wrote with a bemused grin at Adam's actions. "Starting to sound like a real hero."
"I'll stick with being an action figure any day. Let's leave that real hero stuff to you, okay?" Adam wrote back with a laugh that Flack could see but couldn't quite hear.
A sudden realization hit Adam and he hurriedly ducked into his shoulder bag at the foot of the chair and pulled out a PSP, quickly handing it off to Flack in exchange for the notepad to write on. "No ears required, see?"
Flack nodded and smiled in thanks to the lab tech. He took the pen and paper to write something down that had been bugging him since he saw Adam again.
"I'll bet you'll be happy to get away from me now that we got the killer." Flack wrote and watched as Adam's face fell a little as he read the insinuation.
The young man looked at him with a shake of his head and hurriedly scribbled, "And miss out on all this excitement? You're just going to be stuck with me, Flack-dog."
Flack laughed at the nickname, maybe too loudly because the nurse came in and reprimanded the both of them. Not that Flack could hear either of it. Instead, he wrote a farewell to Adam, who in reply threatened his life if anything were to happen to his precious handheld device.
"I'm entrusting you with it. Don't let me down," Adam wrote and this time, Flack rolled his eyes.
After Adam left, Flack couldn't help the feeling of loneliness from biting at him. He found it hard to imagine a time when he couldn't get along with such a cool guy like Adam, but realized it had only been two days ago when he was sitting awkwardly in the car with the tech, struggling to come up with a conversation topic.
It was funny how people so opposite could find such a strong common ground. Guess it was true what they said about attraction. It made Flack happy to give people the benefit of the doubt and more reason to want to protect their lives. Just like Adam did for him…
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A/N: That's the stinkin' ending. Seriously, I am not proud of this chapter, but I thought I owed Kristine some sort of conclusion. I will be posting an epilogue shortly. So stay tuned! Oh, yeah, please review!