A loud knocking on her front door woke Miss Parker up at 2:43 AM, she cursed out whomever dared to wake her at this ungodly hour. Grabbing the gun from under her pillow she stumbled down the stairs and peeked through the peephole. Confused, she unlocked the door and threw it open, "Jarod?" She asked, unsure whether to raise her gun. The Pretender stood before her, hunched over clutching his side, his hands covered in blood. All color seemed to have left his face, "I needed to…" he whispered and then collapsed in front of her. She dropped her gun and barely managed to catch him before he landed on the floor, "Jarod!" They stumbled to her couch and she carefully rolled him on the side he hadn't been holding and inspected whatever wound was soaking his black T-shirt. Several lacerations and bruises covered his torso, the biggest one was bleeding, but not so much it was going to make him lose consciousness or explain his collapse.
"Jarod, what the hell happened?!"
He gasped for breath, "I was poisoned, I don't have much time left." He swallowed, "So, I just needed you to know that…I love you…" He raised his hands to touch her cheek, cupping it gently.
Her hands froze on his torso, and her eyes flew up to his, "Jarod, no…" She shook her head a little in disbelief.
"And I know you can't accept your feelings for me, but I bought us a little house. It's a little place near Portland. I was hoping that maybe, one day, we could've lived there…together. Far away from here, when all of this was over, but it's going to be yours when I die anyway. You see I was making all these plans to get you out, so you would have something to turn to." He coughed, his face contorting in pain.
He took her hand that was still hovering mid-air and looked at her in what she would only describe as half a delirium, "You must know it was all for you. I could have left without a trace knowing Sydney would be fine, But you…I needed you back. Needed you to be safe and loved, away from that place." He gasped for air and closed his eyes for a second, clearly exhausted. "Almost succeeded with Thomas. I would have taken my time so they had no reason to bring you back. But I would have disappeared nine months after you had moved to Oregon with him."
She opened her mouth, but no words came out, tears that had been formed in the pools of her eyes were now streaming down her face. "You're not doing this to me now…"
"I know, I'm selfish for coming here, I'm so sorry, but I needed to see your beautiful face one… last time…" His lips turned up in a little smile before passing out, his hands falling limb to his sides.
"No, no, no, no ... .Jarod stay with me, please Jarod! You're right I couldn't… I'm sorry!" She begged him while shaking him, but he was unresponsive. She flew to the phone, dialing the number quicker than her phone could handle.
"Come on, pick up, pick up, pick up." She prayed, her whole body shaking.
"This is Sydney." Came the sleepy voice of the psychiatrist.
"Sydney! You need to come over now!"
"Miss Parker, is everything alright?"
"No, it's…him. Please just hurry! Bring your medical bag! It's an emergency!"
Alarmed by the nature of Miss Parker's phone call and understanding that the man she was referring to was Jarod he broke several traffic laws to get to her house.
He found the door open and Miss Parker huddled over an unconscious Jarod on the couch. "Jarod?!" "He's not responding and I can barely find a pulse, but he is breathing. He just came stumbling in and then collapsed. He has lacerations and bruises but none so severe that it would explain his current state." She started pacing and raking her hands through her hair as Sydney listened for a heartbeat and monitored his breath. "Please Syd, he said…he said he was dying. That he was poisoned?"
"His heart rate is very slow, as is his breathing. Usually, poison makes the heart rate go up significantly." He opened up Jarod's eyelids inspecting the pupils with a little light.
"He was also shivering before he passed out and seemed drowsy." Parker offered.
"While he seems stable for now, something is definitely influencing his central nervous system. Did he give you any clue as to what he was poisoned with?"
She shook her head, "None."
"Did he bring anything with him?"
"Nothing but what he's wearing."
Sydney went on to search Jarod's pockets and retrieved a small unlabeled bottle in his pocket. "Hopefully this can give us some answers. I'll be going to the lab to have this analyzed immediately."
This shook her up, "You're leaving him with me?"
"As I said, he's stable for now, I have no direct concerns as to him dying on us as quickly as he thought he would. There is nothing we can do for him at the moment. Just monitor his breathing and heart rate if it will assure you. When anything changes, call me at once."
With that he left her, leaving her once again alone with the man who had just professed his love for her thinking he was at death's door. His last moments and he came straight to her.
The first half hour she couldn't stop herself from shaking and keeping a constant touch on his wrist to assure herself he was still alive, watching his chest lift ever so slightly. But the adrenaline wore off and she took it upon herself to get her pillow and blankets to install herself next to him on the floor.
Finally after what seemed like forever Sydney called. "What?" She tried to answer the phone as normally as she could manage, but she felt anything but normal holding Jarod's wrist to monitor his pulse.
"The content of the bottle he was carrying was a barbiturate called sodium thiopental, but it's better known as sodium pentathol, which you know as…"
"Truth serum…" she finished.
"Precisely, with what is missing from the bottle I expect him to wake up in eight to ten hours or so, he will be completely fine, but he could still be nauseous, dehydrated, drowsy, and hypotensive when he wakes up."
"So, he's not dying?" She let out a nervous chuckle, "Is by any chance amnesia also a side effect? Cause that would be fantastic…"
"Well, actually yes," she could almost hear the old man frown on the other side of the line, "How did you know?"
She sighed, "I didn't, I was just praying it was." She let her fingers glide over his arm, and her eyes went to his face which seemed way too peaceful for someone who assumed he was going to die. "He's going to be asleep for quite some time then?"
"Yes, it would be very hard to wake him, but there is another development you should know about. Broots just called me, Jarod was sighted near Blue Cove and will probably call you in when he has summoned the courage to do so."
She let out an even deeper sigh, rubbing a hand over her face, "Just perfect, exactly what this night needed, another dramatic turn of events. "
"Miss Parker, what are you going to do?" Sydney asked her, his voice thick with concern for the man next to her on the couch.
She interlaced her fingers with Jarod's and held them up to her lips, "What I do best Syd, going to work and pretending it's all business as usual. I'll see you soon." She put the phone down, her eyes focused on the smallest movement his chest made while breathing, and wondered if she would be able to forgive herself if anything happened to him as she was away.
Broots indeed managed to summon the courage to call her five minutes later, he'd been vague as usual but adamant she should come to the Centre because Jarod could be very close. Thirty minutes later she'd gotten dressed and put herself enough together to leave the house, with an anxious heart she'd taken one last look at Jarod before closing her front door behind her.
"There better be a reason why I'm here at 6 A.M., Broots. What have you got?" She snapped at him while entering the lab.
"So, security picked up an image of Jarod. He was caught speeding about three miles from Blue Cove. At first, we thought it was a false lead, thinking Jarod would never be so careless as to let himself be seen so close to The Centre. I took the time to look for any other signs from him in a fifty-mile area and I found this," he started a video, "There was a raid on some local mobsters by the FBI in Millsboro, and two local cops were also involved and at least partly responsible for the death of a young couple. It's a classic Jarod setup, but he didn't know about the cops' involvement and got caught. The FBI was missing their undercover agent and sent out this footage to local police stations to help find him, it was definitely Jarod."
The surveillance tape showed Jarod being dragged into the room and dumped before an overweight middle-aged man with a receding hairline and more golden jewelry than would get him taken seriously anywhere else. The man was holding two bottles.
"We beat him up, boss, but he's not talking."
"That's okay, we'll make him talk." The man spoke in a thick Italian accent.
The man kneeled down to Jarod's level who was being restrained by two men. "You're going to tell us where the money is." He simply stated, but Jarod looked very unimpressed by the man.
"You see, I've got myself a little poison here," he held up one of the bottles, "you have about fifteen minutes to live once it's in your bloodstream unless, of course, we give you the antidote," he said holding up the other bottle.
"What's it gonna be? Are you going to tell us, or will you rather die?"
Jarod still looked like he couldn't care less about the man's threats and didn't respond.
"Last chance…" The man stared at Jarod for a second, waiting for an answer, "Alright, have it your way," he snapped his fingers and another man appeared. He handed him the first bottle, "Jack, inject him. Let's see if he's really willing to play with his life."
"No!" Jarod wrestled with the men holding him but couldn't prevent them from injecting him. Then suddenly he did manage to break free, knocking out the three men but when Jarod went for the mobster boss he dropped the second bottle on the ground, shattering it into a million pieces.
"You're a dead man." He said before Jarod took him down in one punch. Jarod stared at the pieces for about a second when he seemed to have made a decision, grabbed the first bottle from the man who injected him, and ran out.
"It seems he drove straight to Blue Cove, and that ticket he got for speeding, oh boy was he driving fast. Like insanely fast, he was clocked at 118 mph."
"Well he was a race driver once," Sydney commented.
"Yeah, but even those guys usually don't drive this fast on a normal road. At least I hope not."
Sydney glanced at Miss Parker who was staring blankly at the screen, "Any idea where he was headed?" He asked the technician.
Broots shook his head, "No, he only took seven minutes to get to Blue Cove, but there he just vanished. There are no traffic cameras to give us any clues, the trail kinda ends there. But I thought maybe he would try and get to the Centre to use our labs or something, except if he only had fifteen minutes to live he's probably dead by now…" He looked up at Miss Parker for any reaction, "I already sent out several sweeper teams to go through all the air vents in this place and a few others to search Blue Cove, but so far they have found nothing."
Parker rolled her eyes, "Those sweepers are as useful as a squad of stormtroopers, they miss everything." She looked at Sydney, "Sydney, go to the labs, maybe Jarod has once again managed to get into The Centre undetected and stolen something to cure himself. And you…" Her cold eyes shifted to Broots, "are going to find out where his last lair in Millsboro was and send in a sweeper team to retrieve any items. If we're lucky we might find a case of DSA's."
"You're not worried he's dead?" Broots asked, staring at her in unbelieve.
"Jarod's too lucky to just die of a little poison. Our labrat has more lives than a street cat, he'll turn up again, probably rubbing our noses in it that we missed him here on our own turf." She started walking towards the door, "I'll be in my office, keep me informed of everything."
Broots could barely keep his mouth shut before the door closed behind her. "Jarod could be dead, could she at least pretend to even care a little bit?! What is up with her? She was just becoming a little bit more human these last months and now it's back to the ice queen again!"
"Perhaps she had a rough night," Sydney commented dryly, "I'll be going to the labs and talk to her afterwards."
Broots threw his hands up in frustration, "Please do, if anyone needs a shrink in this place it's her." Sydney started making his way out of the simlab when he heard Broots' confused voice behind him, "Did Miss Parker just make a Star Wars reference?"
Sydney knocked on the door to her office, "Miss Parker?"
She let out a long sigh, knowing this was not a conversation that she could avoid, "Yes, Sydney?" She said sitting behind her desk.
He closed the door softly behind him, "If I hadn't been with you last night I might have believed your little charade this morning."
"Well, that was the general idea." She answered flatly.
"Broots is still upset with you for not seeming to care that Jarod may be dead."
"It's safer for him not to be involved in this." She said staring at the picture of her mom and her that was sitting on her desk. "For him and his daughter."
"And what about yourself?" He asked.
"I'll be fine, Sydney." She said without managing to convince him or even herself.
"He thought he was dying and he drove like a madman to come to you. Not to the Centre to try and save his own life, not to me who he sees as a father figure, but to you. The last thing he wanted was to reach you… what did he say to you?"
She finally raised her eyes at him and opened her mouth to speak but words failed her, she closed it again, giving him a sad smile instead. Tears started appearing in her eyes, her lip once again quivering.
Sydney took a moment to study her, "while I do not pretend to know everything that is going on between the two of you, perhaps this could be a turning point in the relationship between yourself and Jarod?"
She laughed between sobs, "Turning point…" she wiped away a tear that had escaped her and let out another chuckle. "You're right Syd, that might just be it."
She stood up from behind her desk walking towards him, "I'll be going home, if anyone asks tell them I'm out looking for Jarod. I have a U-turn to take." She gave him a wide smile and, to the surprise of the psychiatrist, hugged him. "Thank you, Sydney," she whispered and practically ran out the door.
A/N: This idea came to me and I decided to procrastinate on this story instead of editing my other one. I thought it would be a one-shot, but it has another chapter, because boy oh boy do these two need to talk...