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.fic: The Technology -WaT/Now & Again crossover (D/M: PG13) 1.4ish
Title: The Technology
By: HF
Emai: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13-ish. Strange, possibly crackfic.
Disclaimer: Without a Trace belongs to CBS &c. And the fangirls were sore aggrieved. Now & Again belongs to CBS too. This also grieved the fangirls sorely.
Advertisements: Crossover with Now and Again. Title is a reference to The Six Million Dollar Man. You know, "We can rebuild him. We have the technology."
Challenge stuff: for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
wordclaim50, #23 (Crossover). My word is "find."
What you need to know to read this fic:
-Michael Wiseman is a former insurance exec who died under strange, vaguely drunken circumstances and whose brain was transplanted into the body of a genetically-engineered man (courtesy of Dr. Theodore Morris). He now lives a life of both high adventure and incredible boredom, as the whole "super-soldier" thing is very Confidential.
-Theodore Morris likes show tunes, science, and sarcasm. He and Rodney McKay would be cute together.
-Martin Fitzgerald and Michael Newman look an awful lot alike. It's scary how much alike.
Notes: I started this fic ages ago. Like, way way back--before S3 ended, even before I started working on the "A Long Time Coming" universe (which has since taken over my brain), but the story never really came together in any meaningful sense until now. It's still a bit wavery, but I hope that having it out in the world will inspire it (and me) to bring things together.
Seeing as it's been eons since I've seen N&A, I'm going almost entirely on memory. Just to let you know. And a quick bit of trivia: the first fanfic I ever wrote was for N&A. Crazy, huh?
CHAPTER ONE
“Hey, how do I look?”
“Pretty fly, for a white guy.” Danny smirked at Martin in his running clothes and piled an arrestingly large amount of cream cheese on top of his bagel. “I have to go in early... never did get that report done last night.”
“Well, if some sex-crazed maniac hadn’t molested me in the copy room, maybe you would have gotten that report done.” Martin draped himself over Danny’s back, pushing him into the counter, liking the crisp slide of Danny’s coat across his t-shirt, the faint sound of protest Danny made at the possibility of his suit being wrinkled.
“Hmm...” Danny chewed his bagel thoughtfully. “How many times this month has that happened?”
“Three times at least.” Martin snaked a bit of cream cheese off Danny’s bagel and licked his finger thoughtfully. “Maybe four.”
“You’ve got a problem, my friend.”
“I’ll have to turn him in for sexual harassment... Improper touching and importunate advances.”
“‘Importunate advances?’” Danny echoed, tone laced with disbelief. “What was ‘importunate’ about it?”
“Sounds impressive and legal, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds like you should probably start running right now.”
* * *
Martin tried to keep his pace to a well-disciplined jog, but rare early-morning exuberance and adrenaline sent him along at a faster clip than usual. The air was chill, and a bit of freshness lingered under the omnipresent city smells of ozone and humanity, and that only made him feel better – he loved the fall, the quick burn of air as he breathed in, the flash of steam as he breathed out, matching breath to footfall.
He was so caught up in the rhythm of breath and stride that at first he didn’t notice the three men in black suits pacing him on the other side of the street. When he looked up to glance up and down the cross street, he saw them on the opposing sidewalk, all of them trying to look casual and unconcerned, like they weren’t interested at all in what Martin was doing. That they kept looking over and then whispering into the radios hidden under their jacket cuffs didn’t help the whole “act casual” thing.
He hit the button for the crossing light with more force than necessary, knowing that all the pedestrian crossing lights were computerized now, and it didn’t matter what he did; the light would change when it wanted to.
Swallowing his unease and crossing against the light, Martin loped across the street and into the park, cautiously stealing a glance over his shoulder.
They were following him, stopping traffic at the crosswalk, one man dodging out of the way of an improbably large SUV. Its driver honked her horn indignantly, and Martin heard one of the men – he was pretty sure it was one of the men – swear in response.
He sped up, caught sight of a knot of joggers around a bend in the footpath, their neon outfits flashing through the tangle of ill-disciplined oaks and underbrush. A narrow trail ran through the trees, a shortcut that would bring him out behind the joggers – he’d be able to loop around them, maybe find help if anyone had a cell phone, or at least lose his pursuers in the crowd.
The men were coming closer; he ran faster, nearly plowing into a ragged-looking woman and her greasy duffle bag. Almost there; he ignored her rough curse, the voices of the men that were even closer now.
He’d made the treeline, the joggers were just now passing not thirty feet in front of him on the other end, and God, he was going to make it. He sped up, breath coming short with adrenaline and relief.
Behind him one of the men shouted something – he couldn’t make it out, hearing only the rasp of breath in his lungs and his own heartbeat – and then he heard a dull hissing noise.
Something hit him in the thigh, a sharp and stinging impact. He took one stride and then another, a faltering third, and then fell.
* * *
Danny Taylor pulled himself into the office in time to finish his report on their last assignment before Jack could start making a federal case of it. He didn’t want any extra attention being drawn to the fact that he was turning in his Rowlings case notes barely under the deadline, as he wasn’t completely sure he’d be able to tell Jack that he’d spent twenty minutes yesterday working Martin up in the file room and still be able to keep his job.
Not that Jack could really throw stones in the “illicit office affair” department, but Danny wasn’t about to take any chances.
Sam and Vivian were in already, laughing about something over coffee and a pile of papers. Jack was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Martin.
Very casually, Danny asked about this.
“Jack’s meeting with Van Doren,” Sam said, darting a significant glance at Viv. It was, Danny thought with no small amount of alarm, very much like one of those Girl Looks, the ones women used whenever they wanted to say something they felt a guy shouldn’t hear.
“And we haven’t seen Martin,” Viv added. Was that a slight emphasis on we? Danny peered at her suspiciously, but Viv only smiled back – in that way that said she knew a lot more than she was planning on telling him, and was going to let him squirm for a while – and sipped her coffee.
Sighing, Danny dumped his stuff down at his desk and tried to ignore Viv’s very emphatic silence as he began to work on the Rowlings report. Martin would be in any minute now, he was pretty sure, and then maybe Viv would turn some of that scariness on him instead.
As it happened, however, Martin didn’t show up by ten, which was when Jack escaped from his meeting with Van Doren. He wasn’t in by eleven, either, and Danny was seriously starting to worry. He’d made a couple (okay, a lot more than a couple) of surreptitious calls to Martin’s apartment and his cell phone, wondering if he’d stopped there before heading in to work.
The messages he’d left had started out as casual, unconcerned affairs. The last one was, he was fairly sure, borderline hysterical. And the worst part, Martin not returning his calls aside, was that Danny knew Viv had caught on. Viv, and very likely Jack, who had taken to watching him whenever he thought Danny wasn’t looking. This was slightly better than Viv, who was always watching, whether Danny was looking or not.
“You okay, Danny?” she asked, not long past noon as Danny was crumbling the bread of his sandwich into useless fragments.
“Fine,” Danny said forcefully and not at all convincingly.
“Think maybe Martin took a personal day?”
“He would have told me,” Danny said. Froze when he heard what had just come out of his mouth and struggled to find some way to amend that, realized that he couldn’t and that Viv was smiling at him with a mixture of concern and triumph.
No, not at him, but at someone behind him. Danny swiveled in his chair, and oh God, Jack was standing right there on the other side of his desk, watching him with that awful, neutral Jack expression that could mean anything from indifference to murderous rage.
“Um, Jack... I...” He struggled for some kind of plausible explanation, but couldn’t manage a coherent thought beyond God, they know. They both knew, and sudden fear about what that could mean competed with fear over what could have happened to Martin. “Jack...” he tried again.
Jack gestured for silence and Danny, who was mostly producing incoherent sounds anyways, shut his mouth. “You know what he was planning on doing this morning?” Jack asked, voice utterly devoid of anything resembling emotion.
“A run,” Danny said miserably. “He was going for a run.”
“We’ll start from there then,” Jack said, as though he hadn’t just heard Danny out himself and his coworker. “Viv, could you give Sam a call and have her come back up? Tell her what’s going on while I...” He trailed off and fixed a meaningful look upon Danny, who fought the impulse to fidget, “... while I talk to Agent Taylor here.”
“Sure thing, Jack.” Viv spared a moment to place a reassuring hand on Danny’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Danny.”
“Yeah,” Danny muttered as he watched her bend over her desk to call Sam. He dragged himself up and followed in Jack’s wake, ignoring Viv’s concern. “Yeah, whatever.”
Jack shepherded Danny inside his office and closed the door. Danny fell into his seat with a determined insouciance and watched as Jack sat down, put his glasses on and shuffled papers, took his glasses off and stared at the papers he’d finished disarranging. Danny knew the interrogation trick – make the suspect wait and try to guess what was going on, give him time to imagine the horrible, mysterious things the federal government could do to him – and forced himself to calmness, saw Jack watching and caught the dry grin on his supervisor’s face.
“I don’t think I need to tell you that sleeping with Martin is not one of your better ideas.” Other than the barely-there smile, Jack seemed utterly absorbed in a paper-clipped report.
“Not one of my worst ones, either,” Danny said.
Jack nodded meditatively and tapped his pen on his desktop. “Do you remember Patrick Kent?”
Danny blinked. “Kent? The San Diego case... yeah, I do.” He wasn’t likely to forget it, and he knew that Jack knew it. Just needed a little breaking in. And if Danny Taylor had been the blushing stammering virgin type he would have blushed and stammered, but he wasn’t, and didn’t. Not that there’d been any breaking in involved on that particular trip, but it had been the first time Danny’d thought there might be something there.
“Same deal: sleep with the son, the father’s in bed with you.” Jack set down the report and looked directly at Danny over the frames of his glasses, dark eyes intent. “I know Martin doesn’t want it that way, but in point of truth, that’s how it is.”
“I know that, Jack.” Impatient, but Danny did know; he’d known it from the second he’d set out to get Martin into his bed. Or Martin’s bed, as it turned out. “We’ll deal with that when we have to.”
“They all say that.” Jack sighed, clicked his pen twice and set it down. “You know that your relationship will most likely come up, with Martin’s disappearance under investigation.”
“Yeah.” Danny stared down at his hands, wondering when he’d folded them together. Far too tense, and he made himself relax. “Look, Jack, I’m not asking you to violate procedure, but could you not bring it up unless it’s necessary?”
“Of course.” Jack’s expression didn’t say whether he approved or disapproved of the entire Martin-and-Danny affair. “But I will, if I have to.”
“Yeah,” Danny mumbled. “Okay.”
“In the meantime,” Jack continued, “I need you and Viv out in the field, canvassing the area Martin was last seen. Sam’s going to go through phone records, and I... well, I get to talk to Victor.”
This was almost enough to make Danny feel bad for Jack, and almost enough to make him grin. Almost but not quite, though he forced something resembling a smile to his face before launching out of his chair and heading for the door.
* * *
God in Heaven, his head hurt.
The rest of him felt like it didn’t even exist, insubstantial and wavering, like he didn’t even really have a body, and that would have terrified him if he had the energy to be terrified. But his head was all too real; it hurt, cruel stabbing pains that made him close his eyes against them, radiating outward from some point directly behind his temples. Not that the darkness helped, pain manifesting itself as flashes of white and red light against his eyelids. Reflexively, he groaned and tried to turn away from it.
“Ah, Agent Fitzgerald... open those pretty eyes.”
The voice was deep and rich, singsong and completely surreal, coming from somewhere just above Martin’s head. It also hurt, making his head throb in time with the syllables. Very carefully, he opened his eyes – the tiniest squint, and even that hurt like a bitch – and a dark face swam into view.
“You won’t remember this, I’m afraid,” said the deep voice, “but I’d like to apologize. Agent Number One is... well, he’s a little overzealous.”
Overzealous? Martin wanted to ask, but keeping his eyes open was suddenly and incredibly difficult, and as they slid shut again he toppled into sleep, the dark, mysterious face swallowed up by blackness.
-tbc-
You'd think a short crackfic would be easy, but no. *eyeroll*
By: HF
Emai: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13-ish. Strange, possibly crackfic.
Disclaimer: Without a Trace belongs to CBS &c. And the fangirls were sore aggrieved. Now & Again belongs to CBS too. This also grieved the fangirls sorely.
Advertisements: Crossover with Now and Again. Title is a reference to The Six Million Dollar Man. You know, "We can rebuild him. We have the technology."
Challenge stuff: for
wordclaim50, #23 (Crossover). My word is "find."What you need to know to read this fic:
-Michael Wiseman is a former insurance exec who died under strange, vaguely drunken circumstances and whose brain was transplanted into the body of a genetically-engineered man (courtesy of Dr. Theodore Morris). He now lives a life of both high adventure and incredible boredom, as the whole "super-soldier" thing is very Confidential.
-Theodore Morris likes show tunes, science, and sarcasm. He and Rodney McKay would be cute together.
-Martin Fitzgerald and Michael Newman look an awful lot alike. It's scary how much alike.
Notes: I started this fic ages ago. Like, way way back--before S3 ended, even before I started working on the "A Long Time Coming" universe (which has since taken over my brain), but the story never really came together in any meaningful sense until now. It's still a bit wavery, but I hope that having it out in the world will inspire it (and me) to bring things together.
Seeing as it's been eons since I've seen N&A, I'm going almost entirely on memory. Just to let you know. And a quick bit of trivia: the first fanfic I ever wrote was for N&A. Crazy, huh?
CHAPTER ONE
“Hey, how do I look?”
“Pretty fly, for a white guy.” Danny smirked at Martin in his running clothes and piled an arrestingly large amount of cream cheese on top of his bagel. “I have to go in early... never did get that report done last night.”
“Well, if some sex-crazed maniac hadn’t molested me in the copy room, maybe you would have gotten that report done.” Martin draped himself over Danny’s back, pushing him into the counter, liking the crisp slide of Danny’s coat across his t-shirt, the faint sound of protest Danny made at the possibility of his suit being wrinkled.
“Hmm...” Danny chewed his bagel thoughtfully. “How many times this month has that happened?”
“Three times at least.” Martin snaked a bit of cream cheese off Danny’s bagel and licked his finger thoughtfully. “Maybe four.”
“You’ve got a problem, my friend.”
“I’ll have to turn him in for sexual harassment... Improper touching and importunate advances.”
“‘Importunate advances?’” Danny echoed, tone laced with disbelief. “What was ‘importunate’ about it?”
“Sounds impressive and legal, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds like you should probably start running right now.”
Martin tried to keep his pace to a well-disciplined jog, but rare early-morning exuberance and adrenaline sent him along at a faster clip than usual. The air was chill, and a bit of freshness lingered under the omnipresent city smells of ozone and humanity, and that only made him feel better – he loved the fall, the quick burn of air as he breathed in, the flash of steam as he breathed out, matching breath to footfall.
He was so caught up in the rhythm of breath and stride that at first he didn’t notice the three men in black suits pacing him on the other side of the street. When he looked up to glance up and down the cross street, he saw them on the opposing sidewalk, all of them trying to look casual and unconcerned, like they weren’t interested at all in what Martin was doing. That they kept looking over and then whispering into the radios hidden under their jacket cuffs didn’t help the whole “act casual” thing.
He hit the button for the crossing light with more force than necessary, knowing that all the pedestrian crossing lights were computerized now, and it didn’t matter what he did; the light would change when it wanted to.
Swallowing his unease and crossing against the light, Martin loped across the street and into the park, cautiously stealing a glance over his shoulder.
They were following him, stopping traffic at the crosswalk, one man dodging out of the way of an improbably large SUV. Its driver honked her horn indignantly, and Martin heard one of the men – he was pretty sure it was one of the men – swear in response.
He sped up, caught sight of a knot of joggers around a bend in the footpath, their neon outfits flashing through the tangle of ill-disciplined oaks and underbrush. A narrow trail ran through the trees, a shortcut that would bring him out behind the joggers – he’d be able to loop around them, maybe find help if anyone had a cell phone, or at least lose his pursuers in the crowd.
The men were coming closer; he ran faster, nearly plowing into a ragged-looking woman and her greasy duffle bag. Almost there; he ignored her rough curse, the voices of the men that were even closer now.
He’d made the treeline, the joggers were just now passing not thirty feet in front of him on the other end, and God, he was going to make it. He sped up, breath coming short with adrenaline and relief.
Behind him one of the men shouted something – he couldn’t make it out, hearing only the rasp of breath in his lungs and his own heartbeat – and then he heard a dull hissing noise.
Something hit him in the thigh, a sharp and stinging impact. He took one stride and then another, a faltering third, and then fell.
Danny Taylor pulled himself into the office in time to finish his report on their last assignment before Jack could start making a federal case of it. He didn’t want any extra attention being drawn to the fact that he was turning in his Rowlings case notes barely under the deadline, as he wasn’t completely sure he’d be able to tell Jack that he’d spent twenty minutes yesterday working Martin up in the file room and still be able to keep his job.
Not that Jack could really throw stones in the “illicit office affair” department, but Danny wasn’t about to take any chances.
Sam and Vivian were in already, laughing about something over coffee and a pile of papers. Jack was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Martin.
Very casually, Danny asked about this.
“Jack’s meeting with Van Doren,” Sam said, darting a significant glance at Viv. It was, Danny thought with no small amount of alarm, very much like one of those Girl Looks, the ones women used whenever they wanted to say something they felt a guy shouldn’t hear.
“And we haven’t seen Martin,” Viv added. Was that a slight emphasis on we? Danny peered at her suspiciously, but Viv only smiled back – in that way that said she knew a lot more than she was planning on telling him, and was going to let him squirm for a while – and sipped her coffee.
Sighing, Danny dumped his stuff down at his desk and tried to ignore Viv’s very emphatic silence as he began to work on the Rowlings report. Martin would be in any minute now, he was pretty sure, and then maybe Viv would turn some of that scariness on him instead.
As it happened, however, Martin didn’t show up by ten, which was when Jack escaped from his meeting with Van Doren. He wasn’t in by eleven, either, and Danny was seriously starting to worry. He’d made a couple (okay, a lot more than a couple) of surreptitious calls to Martin’s apartment and his cell phone, wondering if he’d stopped there before heading in to work.
The messages he’d left had started out as casual, unconcerned affairs. The last one was, he was fairly sure, borderline hysterical. And the worst part, Martin not returning his calls aside, was that Danny knew Viv had caught on. Viv, and very likely Jack, who had taken to watching him whenever he thought Danny wasn’t looking. This was slightly better than Viv, who was always watching, whether Danny was looking or not.
“You okay, Danny?” she asked, not long past noon as Danny was crumbling the bread of his sandwich into useless fragments.
“Fine,” Danny said forcefully and not at all convincingly.
“Think maybe Martin took a personal day?”
“He would have told me,” Danny said. Froze when he heard what had just come out of his mouth and struggled to find some way to amend that, realized that he couldn’t and that Viv was smiling at him with a mixture of concern and triumph.
No, not at him, but at someone behind him. Danny swiveled in his chair, and oh God, Jack was standing right there on the other side of his desk, watching him with that awful, neutral Jack expression that could mean anything from indifference to murderous rage.
“Um, Jack... I...” He struggled for some kind of plausible explanation, but couldn’t manage a coherent thought beyond God, they know. They both knew, and sudden fear about what that could mean competed with fear over what could have happened to Martin. “Jack...” he tried again.
Jack gestured for silence and Danny, who was mostly producing incoherent sounds anyways, shut his mouth. “You know what he was planning on doing this morning?” Jack asked, voice utterly devoid of anything resembling emotion.
“A run,” Danny said miserably. “He was going for a run.”
“We’ll start from there then,” Jack said, as though he hadn’t just heard Danny out himself and his coworker. “Viv, could you give Sam a call and have her come back up? Tell her what’s going on while I...” He trailed off and fixed a meaningful look upon Danny, who fought the impulse to fidget, “... while I talk to Agent Taylor here.”
“Sure thing, Jack.” Viv spared a moment to place a reassuring hand on Danny’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Danny.”
“Yeah,” Danny muttered as he watched her bend over her desk to call Sam. He dragged himself up and followed in Jack’s wake, ignoring Viv’s concern. “Yeah, whatever.”
Jack shepherded Danny inside his office and closed the door. Danny fell into his seat with a determined insouciance and watched as Jack sat down, put his glasses on and shuffled papers, took his glasses off and stared at the papers he’d finished disarranging. Danny knew the interrogation trick – make the suspect wait and try to guess what was going on, give him time to imagine the horrible, mysterious things the federal government could do to him – and forced himself to calmness, saw Jack watching and caught the dry grin on his supervisor’s face.
“I don’t think I need to tell you that sleeping with Martin is not one of your better ideas.” Other than the barely-there smile, Jack seemed utterly absorbed in a paper-clipped report.
“Not one of my worst ones, either,” Danny said.
Jack nodded meditatively and tapped his pen on his desktop. “Do you remember Patrick Kent?”
Danny blinked. “Kent? The San Diego case... yeah, I do.” He wasn’t likely to forget it, and he knew that Jack knew it. Just needed a little breaking in. And if Danny Taylor had been the blushing stammering virgin type he would have blushed and stammered, but he wasn’t, and didn’t. Not that there’d been any breaking in involved on that particular trip, but it had been the first time Danny’d thought there might be something there.
“Same deal: sleep with the son, the father’s in bed with you.” Jack set down the report and looked directly at Danny over the frames of his glasses, dark eyes intent. “I know Martin doesn’t want it that way, but in point of truth, that’s how it is.”
“I know that, Jack.” Impatient, but Danny did know; he’d known it from the second he’d set out to get Martin into his bed. Or Martin’s bed, as it turned out. “We’ll deal with that when we have to.”
“They all say that.” Jack sighed, clicked his pen twice and set it down. “You know that your relationship will most likely come up, with Martin’s disappearance under investigation.”
“Yeah.” Danny stared down at his hands, wondering when he’d folded them together. Far too tense, and he made himself relax. “Look, Jack, I’m not asking you to violate procedure, but could you not bring it up unless it’s necessary?”
“Of course.” Jack’s expression didn’t say whether he approved or disapproved of the entire Martin-and-Danny affair. “But I will, if I have to.”
“Yeah,” Danny mumbled. “Okay.”
“In the meantime,” Jack continued, “I need you and Viv out in the field, canvassing the area Martin was last seen. Sam’s going to go through phone records, and I... well, I get to talk to Victor.”
This was almost enough to make Danny feel bad for Jack, and almost enough to make him grin. Almost but not quite, though he forced something resembling a smile to his face before launching out of his chair and heading for the door.
God in Heaven, his head hurt.
The rest of him felt like it didn’t even exist, insubstantial and wavering, like he didn’t even really have a body, and that would have terrified him if he had the energy to be terrified. But his head was all too real; it hurt, cruel stabbing pains that made him close his eyes against them, radiating outward from some point directly behind his temples. Not that the darkness helped, pain manifesting itself as flashes of white and red light against his eyelids. Reflexively, he groaned and tried to turn away from it.
“Ah, Agent Fitzgerald... open those pretty eyes.”
The voice was deep and rich, singsong and completely surreal, coming from somewhere just above Martin’s head. It also hurt, making his head throb in time with the syllables. Very carefully, he opened his eyes – the tiniest squint, and even that hurt like a bitch – and a dark face swam into view.
“You won’t remember this, I’m afraid,” said the deep voice, “but I’d like to apologize. Agent Number One is... well, he’s a little overzealous.”
Overzealous? Martin wanted to ask, but keeping his eyes open was suddenly and incredibly difficult, and as they slid shut again he toppled into sleep, the dark, mysterious face swallowed up by blackness.
-tbc-
You'd think a short crackfic would be easy, but no. *eyeroll*