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.fic: The Technology - WaT/N&A x-over (D/M PG13) 4.5
Title: The Technology
By: HF
Emai: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13-ish.
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.
Previous chapters: 01 (with all pertinent notes); 02; 03
Notes: I owe my soul, and part of this chapter, to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
smilla02. Thanks to her, I spent some of my weekend revisiting part of my fangirl past and that (in conjunction with a few other things) has made me incomparably happy.
CHAPTER FOUR
“What do you mean that footage is unavailable?”
“’Zactly what I mean, lady,” George Cavaleri grunted, irritation and the scent of old fish rolling off him in waves. “It ain’t available.” He looked up from his cash register and eyed Danny suspiciously. “Same goes for your partner, too, if he wants to ask.”
Viv drew herself up and Danny stepped back.
“You had damned well better give me a better reason than it ain’t available,” Viv said, her tone deceptively flat and only an idiot would think Viv wasn’t furious. “And you’d better give it to me in less than five seconds, or I will have you detained for obstructing a federal investigation...” she paused, gaze sweeping around the grimy store before returning to fix on Cavaleri “... and I’ll report you to the Health Department for violating code.”
“Look, when I say I ain’t got the video,” Cavaleri said after a moment, grimacing and displaying a mouthful of questionable-looking teeth, “I mean I ain’t got it. Some suits came by few hours ago, practically shoved a gun in my face so’s I’d give ‘em the tape, and I did. When I asked what they wanted it for, one of ‘em said it was confidential national security stuff – and if I told anyone, I’d be at the bottom of the East River.” He spat. “You think it’s terrorists?”
“I don’t think so,” Viv sighed. “Thank you for your time.”
“You’re welcome.” Cavaleri jerked his head in the direction of the front door, indicating that they were welcome to leave. “Always happy to help the feds.”
Danny stalked out ahead of Viv, pushing the door open with more force than strictly necessary; the door rebounded violently, glass trembling in the frame, nearly slamming shut in Viv’s face. She caught it with her elbow instead.
“You need to calm down, Danny.” Not a suggestion, reinforced as it was by Viv’s glare. He rolled his eyes at that, too frustrated, too on the edge of being to scared and angry to do anything rational to listen to her. She walked next to him in silence for a moment, apparently content to let him seethe.
“Viv,” he said at last, unable to keep it bottled up, because goddammit it was almost eight at night and Martin was missing, “Viv, this is the fifth place we’ve been to, and we’ve gotten the same answer – either no one’s cameras were working, or they were off, or the tapes were gone.” Danny paused, reached for breath and calmness, was not surprised when they didn’t come. “Something seriously fucked up is going on here.”
To his surprise, Vivian nodded and hmmm-ed in agreement. “I’ll call Jack, tell him what we’ve found out – or haven’t found out; he’ll need to talk to Victor, I guess. You should call Sam, see if she’s gotten anything from those traffic cameras at all, or if they’re having the same luck.” Also not a suggestion, a subtle warning to make himself useful.
With a strange sense of inevitability, Danny called Sam and listened as she told him Valenti and his team had been fighting with the Department of Transportation to get the footage Viv had wanted, something bureaucratic and nastily complicated that left Sam snarling by the end of it. And he’d known, even when hunting through his speed-dial for Sam’s cell number that this was the news he’d get, that no, sorry, the only things that can help you figure out what the fuck is going on are the things you can’t get.
He reported this to Vivian, who nodded thoughtfully, and he couldn’t believe she was so steady, when he felt like he was going to break apart. Stupid and dangerous to be acting like this, he told himself, stupid because Martin had almost died and hadn’t, and he certainly wasn’t going to die this time, dangerous because if Danny didn’t get his act together soon he’d screw something up or blow the case – blow any chance of finding Martin to hell – and he couldn’t ever live with that.
Couldn’t even live with the thought of that, and he made himself turn away from the thought, back to what Viv was saying.
“This is probably related to our difficulty in finding eyewitnesses,” Viv told him, peering down the street for their car. “And I’m thinking that Jack is going to have to get something out of Victor, sooner rather than later.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Danny agreed, strangely relieved to hear his own words, like there was something, finally, happening.
* * *
Not, he thought once he and Viv were back at the office, things would keep happening, running as they did into the stone wall of bureaucracy and the immovable object that was Victor Fitzgerald.
“Something is going on here,” Jack said, glaring at Victor from across the conference table, “and it somehow involves my agent – and your son – and Victor, if you know anything you need to tell me now.”
They’d been doing this for the better part of an hour, four of them – Jack, Viv, Danny, and Victor – holed up in the conference room, with Sam and Elena still out in the office sifting through the small and utterly useless pile of evidence they’d managed to collect. Victor sat at the head of the table, hands clasped and face utterly inscrutable – utterly and frustratingly Fitzgeraldian. And this was something Danny still dealt with every day, worse though, because at some point (he didn’t know when, or where, or even how) he’d figured out how to read Martin and his silences.
But Victor... he was looking at Jack – hadn’t even acknowledged Viv or Danny past a cursory nod when they’d come in – as calmly as though this weren’t the next thing to an interrogation, like his son wasn’t missing, like none of this was happening. Like he hadn’t been stonewalling them for the past forty-five minutes, refusing to explain why the security and traffic camera footage was gone, who the men in the suits were, and Danny couldn’t get past that.
“Look, if you’re conducting your own investigation, you can tell us,” Jack said, voice tight with frustration, skirting the edge of insubordination. “And we’ll back off – ” this with a quick, involuntary glance at Danny, who forced himself not to react, “ – or we’ll help, cooperate, whatever you want. Our only concern is making sure Martin is safe.”
“I’ve told you,” Victor said, all infinite and infuriating patience, “that –”
“We got him!” Sam burst into the conference room, cutting off whatever Victor had been about to say. “Whoever was beating you guys to the video cameras missed one – this old hole-in-the-wall bodega. Valenti’s team just got it in, and well...” She trailed off, glancing between Victor and the rest of her team, gaze sliding over to Danny and almost... sympathetic? Relieved? Danny desperately wished she was looking somewhere else, not at him, the silence in the room building into something significant.
Victor was staring at Sam, eyes narrowed in disapproval and surprise.
“Let’s see them, Sam,” Jack said, before Victor could do anything.
Sam pulled a handful of stills out of a folder and passed them around. Victor took one automatically, blinking at it in surprise and something very like dismay. Danny took his copy, stared down at the grainy, slightly blurred picture, heard his own soft exhalation – shock, disbelief, disappointment – added to the others.
Because that wasn’t Martin in the video still. Or it was Martin and wasn’t at the same time, a hundred similarities and a hundred differences that Danny could pick out: the hair a little different, spiky and Martin hadn’t worn it that way in a while, wrong clothes (like he’d told Jack when they’d gotten back to the office), the body different – despite the bad quality of the photo Danny could see that, not the same body he’d seen thousands of times – and the face thinner, younger-looking somehow.
But it could be Martin, if all you had was a picture to go on and didn’t know him as well as Danny did.
He looked up, saw Jack peering at him quizzically, and Danny offered him a quick, negative shake of his head. Jack sighed.
“Elena also got descriptions of the men witnesses saw in the area,” Sam said into the tense silence, “and we’re running sketches against federal employee databases.”
“You won’t find anything,” Victor said absently, still staring down at the photograph. “Tell Agent Delgado to stop what she’s doing... You and she will be wasting your time, otherwise.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing all fucking day,” Danny muttered.
Not softly enough, because Victor whipped back around to glare at him.
“Do we have a problem here, Agent Taylor?”
“We do, sir,” Danny said, and he knew he was being sarcastic and insubordinate, couldn’t help it and didn’t want to, “I – we’ve – been out all day looking and all we’ve found is a bunch of fucking secret – ”
“Danny,” Jack said repressively, and Danny fell silent.
Victor eyed him, assessing and unnerving, and Danny forced himself not to flinch from that cool examination. He had no idea what Victor was seeing – didn’t know if he wanted to have an idea—but whatever Victor saw seemed to please him. Or, at least, not displease him; he only nodded thoughtfully and stood, turning to face each of them in turn.
“I can’t tell you much,” he said after a moment, “because I don’t know much myself, but I can tell you that the man in this picture,” Victor tapped a copy of the still, “isn’t Martin.”
“We know that,” Danny said, shrugged off the hand Jack placed on his forearm – restraining and admonitory, don’t get fresh with the Deputy Director, and Danny didn’t care. Victor didn’t even look at him this time, only picked up the photo and peered down at it thoughtfully.
“So if that’s not Martin, who the hell is it?” Viv asked, not even bothering with respect and Danny waited for Victor to snap at her.
He didn’t, only shifted and looked away. “That, Agent Johnson, I’m not at liberty to say.”
* * *
Martin was pretty sure it was nighttime, or close to it. Hard to tell, seeing as he had no window and Dr. Morris refused to tell him anything other than that he was safe “for the time being,” enough portentousness thrown in to suggest that Martin’s fineness was possibly a temporary state. He was hungry despite the tranquilizers and his more or less complete immobility, but there was no sign of food, either; the last time Morris had come (his fifth visit, Martin guessed), Martin had asked for something to eat and Morris had pointedly ignored him.
He was pondering another nap – because there wasn’t much else to do, with no way out and no food in sight – when the door shook violently on its hinges, nearly coming off with the force of something striking it, muffled thump of something banging against reinforced metal. Martin pushed himself up in alarm, looked around for something to defend himself – and of course there wasn’t anything except for the IV stand – and even as he fumbled with the tape keeping the needle in his arm he heard a thump, a metallic clatter, click as the doorknob turned, a soft and oddly apologetic voice drifting through the half-open door.
A thin trickle of blood worked down his arm but he ignored it, attention riveted on the doorway and the man backing through it.
The door opened the rest of the way, and the man turned around, and –
“Holy Christ,” Martin whispered, once he could breathe again.
“Just Michael Newman,” the guy with his face said, dropping into the chair next to Martin’s bed, lacing his fingers together and peering at him with a faintly apologetic expression. “You must be Martin Fitzgerald.”
Martin couldn’t even nod, could only stare at him for a long moment, caught by sudden thought that this was like looking at one of his college pictures come to life, back when a workout didn’t mean walking endless miles over city streets and dodging bullets. Not that he’d ever looked this good – even under the jacket and shirt he could pick out the evidence of a pretty impressive body, not the kind you get from swimming – and not that he’d ever dressed like this, either, stylish leather jacket and trousers, and what the hell was that saying?
Like me, only younger and better-looking.
He was aware, uncomfortably so, that the other... other him-who-wasn’t-him was studying him in turn, like being inspected by his own reflection. Blue eyes like his, only not quite, something different in them than in the ones he saw in the mirror every day.
“You’re the secret project,” Martin said.
“Dr. Theodore Morris’s Science Fair exhibit.” Not quite his voice, either, a little lighter, not as tired-sounding, but enough his to be disconcerting all over again. “You can call me Michael, though.”
“So what’s so secret? The government cloning people now or something?” And if he hadn’t watched The X-Files obsessively he would not be considering this as a serious possibility.
Newman shrugged and offered him a smile, conspiratorial and apologetic but not about to tell him anything. And this was insane, or close to it, Martin sitting in a hospital bed having a conversation with himself, listening to his reflection explain that he couldn’t tell Martin much about what was going on, because if he told Martin he’d have to kill him, but the only thing Martin could do was nod and go along with it.
“Listen, I’m...” The other him – Newman – winced. “I’m sorry about all this.” He waved a hand, indicating the hospital room, the absent Dr. Morris, the events of the past day. “It’s kind of my fault.”
“Don’t remember you being one of the guys who shot me,” Martin said faintly.
“Well, y’see... The Doc kind of likes me on a short leash.” Newman shrugged. “It gets kind of boring after a while, eating vegetable glop and running on my treadmill, and I’ve got a – well, I guess I got a pretty good case of cabin fever. Had to skip out for a bit before I went crazy... I sort of took an unscheduled detour when I was supposed to be out on a supervised run. Those guys who chased you were following me.”
“You always have guys with rhinoceros tranquilizer following you around?”
“More or less.” Newman paused. “They’re the leash.”
Okay, that was a hell of a leash – and enough of a clue for Martin to guess at something of what was going on. Newman was watching him expectantly, seeming to catch on to what Martin was thinking.
“Think The Six Million Dollar Man, adjusted for inflation,” Newman said, voice dropping a notch, and Martin nodded.
“Do you know... know why?” Martin pointed to Newman’s face, his face, back to himself again. The abrupt, paranoid thought that his father had something to do with this flickered through Martin’s mind, and he resolutely pushed that possibility to the side. This situation was insane enough without adding to it.
“The Doc never tells me anything, but if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you,” Newman said, actually sounding regretful. “Safer that way, you know?”
Yeah. Yeah, Martin did know.
“So... they’ve got you eating vegetable glop, huh?” he asked.
“And other stuff I don’t want to think about,” Newman agreed. “Most days I’d kill for a Snickers bar. Don’t even ask me what I’d do for a hamburger.”
“That sucks.” And it did. Martin tried to conceive of a world without Snickers bars and hamburgers, and found he couldn’t.
“You sound like my – ” Newman stopped short, mouth thinning, pain there and Martin had to look away. When he looked back, Newman was absently rubbing at his left ring finger where a wedding ring would have been, a habitual gesture Martin recognized from years of detective work. Married then, or had been once, and that was another difference.
He thought, unexpectedly, of Danny, wondered how the hell he was going to get back to him.
“Listen,” Newman said after a moment, getting to his feet, “I gotta get moving... The Doc doesn’t know I’m here, but he will pretty soon. And if he finds us talking, well, it’s not going to be pretty.” He peered down at Martin, smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
“So long as Dr. Morris doesn’t take care of me first,” Martin said dryly.
“Aw, the Doc isn’t so bad, once you get used to him.” Newman paused. “Though getting used to him’s the hard part,” he added thoughtfully.
Martin didn’t know what to say to that, only nodded and told Newman to, if at all possible, stay away from Queens on future runs.
“Sure thing,” Michael Newman said. And smiled and walked out.
-tbc-
By: HF
Emai: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M
Rating/Warning: PG/PG13-ish.
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.
Previous chapters: 01 (with all pertinent notes); 02; 03
Notes: I owe my soul, and part of this chapter, to
smilla02. Thanks to her, I spent some of my weekend revisiting part of my fangirl past and that (in conjunction with a few other things) has made me incomparably happy.CHAPTER FOUR
“What do you mean that footage is unavailable?”
“’Zactly what I mean, lady,” George Cavaleri grunted, irritation and the scent of old fish rolling off him in waves. “It ain’t available.” He looked up from his cash register and eyed Danny suspiciously. “Same goes for your partner, too, if he wants to ask.”
Viv drew herself up and Danny stepped back.
“You had damned well better give me a better reason than it ain’t available,” Viv said, her tone deceptively flat and only an idiot would think Viv wasn’t furious. “And you’d better give it to me in less than five seconds, or I will have you detained for obstructing a federal investigation...” she paused, gaze sweeping around the grimy store before returning to fix on Cavaleri “... and I’ll report you to the Health Department for violating code.”
“Look, when I say I ain’t got the video,” Cavaleri said after a moment, grimacing and displaying a mouthful of questionable-looking teeth, “I mean I ain’t got it. Some suits came by few hours ago, practically shoved a gun in my face so’s I’d give ‘em the tape, and I did. When I asked what they wanted it for, one of ‘em said it was confidential national security stuff – and if I told anyone, I’d be at the bottom of the East River.” He spat. “You think it’s terrorists?”
“I don’t think so,” Viv sighed. “Thank you for your time.”
“You’re welcome.” Cavaleri jerked his head in the direction of the front door, indicating that they were welcome to leave. “Always happy to help the feds.”
Danny stalked out ahead of Viv, pushing the door open with more force than strictly necessary; the door rebounded violently, glass trembling in the frame, nearly slamming shut in Viv’s face. She caught it with her elbow instead.
“You need to calm down, Danny.” Not a suggestion, reinforced as it was by Viv’s glare. He rolled his eyes at that, too frustrated, too on the edge of being to scared and angry to do anything rational to listen to her. She walked next to him in silence for a moment, apparently content to let him seethe.
“Viv,” he said at last, unable to keep it bottled up, because goddammit it was almost eight at night and Martin was missing, “Viv, this is the fifth place we’ve been to, and we’ve gotten the same answer – either no one’s cameras were working, or they were off, or the tapes were gone.” Danny paused, reached for breath and calmness, was not surprised when they didn’t come. “Something seriously fucked up is going on here.”
To his surprise, Vivian nodded and hmmm-ed in agreement. “I’ll call Jack, tell him what we’ve found out – or haven’t found out; he’ll need to talk to Victor, I guess. You should call Sam, see if she’s gotten anything from those traffic cameras at all, or if they’re having the same luck.” Also not a suggestion, a subtle warning to make himself useful.
With a strange sense of inevitability, Danny called Sam and listened as she told him Valenti and his team had been fighting with the Department of Transportation to get the footage Viv had wanted, something bureaucratic and nastily complicated that left Sam snarling by the end of it. And he’d known, even when hunting through his speed-dial for Sam’s cell number that this was the news he’d get, that no, sorry, the only things that can help you figure out what the fuck is going on are the things you can’t get.
He reported this to Vivian, who nodded thoughtfully, and he couldn’t believe she was so steady, when he felt like he was going to break apart. Stupid and dangerous to be acting like this, he told himself, stupid because Martin had almost died and hadn’t, and he certainly wasn’t going to die this time, dangerous because if Danny didn’t get his act together soon he’d screw something up or blow the case – blow any chance of finding Martin to hell – and he couldn’t ever live with that.
Couldn’t even live with the thought of that, and he made himself turn away from the thought, back to what Viv was saying.
“This is probably related to our difficulty in finding eyewitnesses,” Viv told him, peering down the street for their car. “And I’m thinking that Jack is going to have to get something out of Victor, sooner rather than later.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Danny agreed, strangely relieved to hear his own words, like there was something, finally, happening.
Not, he thought once he and Viv were back at the office, things would keep happening, running as they did into the stone wall of bureaucracy and the immovable object that was Victor Fitzgerald.
“Something is going on here,” Jack said, glaring at Victor from across the conference table, “and it somehow involves my agent – and your son – and Victor, if you know anything you need to tell me now.”
They’d been doing this for the better part of an hour, four of them – Jack, Viv, Danny, and Victor – holed up in the conference room, with Sam and Elena still out in the office sifting through the small and utterly useless pile of evidence they’d managed to collect. Victor sat at the head of the table, hands clasped and face utterly inscrutable – utterly and frustratingly Fitzgeraldian. And this was something Danny still dealt with every day, worse though, because at some point (he didn’t know when, or where, or even how) he’d figured out how to read Martin and his silences.
But Victor... he was looking at Jack – hadn’t even acknowledged Viv or Danny past a cursory nod when they’d come in – as calmly as though this weren’t the next thing to an interrogation, like his son wasn’t missing, like none of this was happening. Like he hadn’t been stonewalling them for the past forty-five minutes, refusing to explain why the security and traffic camera footage was gone, who the men in the suits were, and Danny couldn’t get past that.
“Look, if you’re conducting your own investigation, you can tell us,” Jack said, voice tight with frustration, skirting the edge of insubordination. “And we’ll back off – ” this with a quick, involuntary glance at Danny, who forced himself not to react, “ – or we’ll help, cooperate, whatever you want. Our only concern is making sure Martin is safe.”
“I’ve told you,” Victor said, all infinite and infuriating patience, “that –”
“We got him!” Sam burst into the conference room, cutting off whatever Victor had been about to say. “Whoever was beating you guys to the video cameras missed one – this old hole-in-the-wall bodega. Valenti’s team just got it in, and well...” She trailed off, glancing between Victor and the rest of her team, gaze sliding over to Danny and almost... sympathetic? Relieved? Danny desperately wished she was looking somewhere else, not at him, the silence in the room building into something significant.
Victor was staring at Sam, eyes narrowed in disapproval and surprise.
“Let’s see them, Sam,” Jack said, before Victor could do anything.
Sam pulled a handful of stills out of a folder and passed them around. Victor took one automatically, blinking at it in surprise and something very like dismay. Danny took his copy, stared down at the grainy, slightly blurred picture, heard his own soft exhalation – shock, disbelief, disappointment – added to the others.
Because that wasn’t Martin in the video still. Or it was Martin and wasn’t at the same time, a hundred similarities and a hundred differences that Danny could pick out: the hair a little different, spiky and Martin hadn’t worn it that way in a while, wrong clothes (like he’d told Jack when they’d gotten back to the office), the body different – despite the bad quality of the photo Danny could see that, not the same body he’d seen thousands of times – and the face thinner, younger-looking somehow.
But it could be Martin, if all you had was a picture to go on and didn’t know him as well as Danny did.
He looked up, saw Jack peering at him quizzically, and Danny offered him a quick, negative shake of his head. Jack sighed.
“Elena also got descriptions of the men witnesses saw in the area,” Sam said into the tense silence, “and we’re running sketches against federal employee databases.”
“You won’t find anything,” Victor said absently, still staring down at the photograph. “Tell Agent Delgado to stop what she’s doing... You and she will be wasting your time, otherwise.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing all fucking day,” Danny muttered.
Not softly enough, because Victor whipped back around to glare at him.
“Do we have a problem here, Agent Taylor?”
“We do, sir,” Danny said, and he knew he was being sarcastic and insubordinate, couldn’t help it and didn’t want to, “I – we’ve – been out all day looking and all we’ve found is a bunch of fucking secret – ”
“Danny,” Jack said repressively, and Danny fell silent.
Victor eyed him, assessing and unnerving, and Danny forced himself not to flinch from that cool examination. He had no idea what Victor was seeing – didn’t know if he wanted to have an idea—but whatever Victor saw seemed to please him. Or, at least, not displease him; he only nodded thoughtfully and stood, turning to face each of them in turn.
“I can’t tell you much,” he said after a moment, “because I don’t know much myself, but I can tell you that the man in this picture,” Victor tapped a copy of the still, “isn’t Martin.”
“We know that,” Danny said, shrugged off the hand Jack placed on his forearm – restraining and admonitory, don’t get fresh with the Deputy Director, and Danny didn’t care. Victor didn’t even look at him this time, only picked up the photo and peered down at it thoughtfully.
“So if that’s not Martin, who the hell is it?” Viv asked, not even bothering with respect and Danny waited for Victor to snap at her.
He didn’t, only shifted and looked away. “That, Agent Johnson, I’m not at liberty to say.”
Martin was pretty sure it was nighttime, or close to it. Hard to tell, seeing as he had no window and Dr. Morris refused to tell him anything other than that he was safe “for the time being,” enough portentousness thrown in to suggest that Martin’s fineness was possibly a temporary state. He was hungry despite the tranquilizers and his more or less complete immobility, but there was no sign of food, either; the last time Morris had come (his fifth visit, Martin guessed), Martin had asked for something to eat and Morris had pointedly ignored him.
He was pondering another nap – because there wasn’t much else to do, with no way out and no food in sight – when the door shook violently on its hinges, nearly coming off with the force of something striking it, muffled thump of something banging against reinforced metal. Martin pushed himself up in alarm, looked around for something to defend himself – and of course there wasn’t anything except for the IV stand – and even as he fumbled with the tape keeping the needle in his arm he heard a thump, a metallic clatter, click as the doorknob turned, a soft and oddly apologetic voice drifting through the half-open door.
A thin trickle of blood worked down his arm but he ignored it, attention riveted on the doorway and the man backing through it.
The door opened the rest of the way, and the man turned around, and –
“Holy Christ,” Martin whispered, once he could breathe again.
“Just Michael Newman,” the guy with his face said, dropping into the chair next to Martin’s bed, lacing his fingers together and peering at him with a faintly apologetic expression. “You must be Martin Fitzgerald.”
Martin couldn’t even nod, could only stare at him for a long moment, caught by sudden thought that this was like looking at one of his college pictures come to life, back when a workout didn’t mean walking endless miles over city streets and dodging bullets. Not that he’d ever looked this good – even under the jacket and shirt he could pick out the evidence of a pretty impressive body, not the kind you get from swimming – and not that he’d ever dressed like this, either, stylish leather jacket and trousers, and what the hell was that saying?
Like me, only younger and better-looking.
He was aware, uncomfortably so, that the other... other him-who-wasn’t-him was studying him in turn, like being inspected by his own reflection. Blue eyes like his, only not quite, something different in them than in the ones he saw in the mirror every day.
“You’re the secret project,” Martin said.
“Dr. Theodore Morris’s Science Fair exhibit.” Not quite his voice, either, a little lighter, not as tired-sounding, but enough his to be disconcerting all over again. “You can call me Michael, though.”
“So what’s so secret? The government cloning people now or something?” And if he hadn’t watched The X-Files obsessively he would not be considering this as a serious possibility.
Newman shrugged and offered him a smile, conspiratorial and apologetic but not about to tell him anything. And this was insane, or close to it, Martin sitting in a hospital bed having a conversation with himself, listening to his reflection explain that he couldn’t tell Martin much about what was going on, because if he told Martin he’d have to kill him, but the only thing Martin could do was nod and go along with it.
“Listen, I’m...” The other him – Newman – winced. “I’m sorry about all this.” He waved a hand, indicating the hospital room, the absent Dr. Morris, the events of the past day. “It’s kind of my fault.”
“Don’t remember you being one of the guys who shot me,” Martin said faintly.
“Well, y’see... The Doc kind of likes me on a short leash.” Newman shrugged. “It gets kind of boring after a while, eating vegetable glop and running on my treadmill, and I’ve got a – well, I guess I got a pretty good case of cabin fever. Had to skip out for a bit before I went crazy... I sort of took an unscheduled detour when I was supposed to be out on a supervised run. Those guys who chased you were following me.”
“You always have guys with rhinoceros tranquilizer following you around?”
“More or less.” Newman paused. “They’re the leash.”
Okay, that was a hell of a leash – and enough of a clue for Martin to guess at something of what was going on. Newman was watching him expectantly, seeming to catch on to what Martin was thinking.
“Think The Six Million Dollar Man, adjusted for inflation,” Newman said, voice dropping a notch, and Martin nodded.
“Do you know... know why?” Martin pointed to Newman’s face, his face, back to himself again. The abrupt, paranoid thought that his father had something to do with this flickered through Martin’s mind, and he resolutely pushed that possibility to the side. This situation was insane enough without adding to it.
“The Doc never tells me anything, but if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you,” Newman said, actually sounding regretful. “Safer that way, you know?”
Yeah. Yeah, Martin did know.
“So... they’ve got you eating vegetable glop, huh?” he asked.
“And other stuff I don’t want to think about,” Newman agreed. “Most days I’d kill for a Snickers bar. Don’t even ask me what I’d do for a hamburger.”
“That sucks.” And it did. Martin tried to conceive of a world without Snickers bars and hamburgers, and found he couldn’t.
“You sound like my – ” Newman stopped short, mouth thinning, pain there and Martin had to look away. When he looked back, Newman was absently rubbing at his left ring finger where a wedding ring would have been, a habitual gesture Martin recognized from years of detective work. Married then, or had been once, and that was another difference.
He thought, unexpectedly, of Danny, wondered how the hell he was going to get back to him.
“Listen,” Newman said after a moment, getting to his feet, “I gotta get moving... The Doc doesn’t know I’m here, but he will pretty soon. And if he finds us talking, well, it’s not going to be pretty.” He peered down at Martin, smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
“So long as Dr. Morris doesn’t take care of me first,” Martin said dryly.
“Aw, the Doc isn’t so bad, once you get used to him.” Newman paused. “Though getting used to him’s the hard part,” he added thoughtfully.
Martin didn’t know what to say to that, only nodded and told Newman to, if at all possible, stay away from Queens on future runs.
“Sure thing,” Michael Newman said. And smiled and walked out.
-tbc-