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.crack!fic: It's Alive - D/M 4.5
Title: It's Alive
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M. In a strange and disturbing way.
Ratings/Warnings: PG13-ish?
Disclaimer: Without a Trace belongs to other people. Alas.
Advertisements: crack!fic written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nekosmuse's International Manny Month Challenge.
Previous parts: 01; 02; 03
Notes: Apologies for the delay between posts. It's been one thing or another here for the past week... and will continue to be for the next month and a half :/ Feh.
CHAPTER FOUR
Vivian Johnson was suspicious.
Martin and Danny had been acting very strangely – and this was saying something – ever since their encounter with the still-missing Dr. von Birkenstock. Her suspicions had been aroused from the start, when Danny had hung up on her with the obviously fake excuse that someone was at his door, and they’d only been growing since. And watching Danny devouring that cheeseburger like Martin was going to fight him for it – which might have been a possibility, actually – was but the latest in a chain of incidents.
On Monday, she’d caught Martin making a comment that would normally have come out of Danny’s mouth, and would have made Martin himself go red and speechless for a moment before retaliating. Later that day she’d seen Danny going out of his way to avoid Sam, who’d been prowling around the office in search of Martin, and she could have sworn she’d heard Martin muttering – fluently – something in Spanish.
And unless Danny was giving him private lessons – which was an interesting line of speculation, actually – there was no way Martin should have been speaking, or muttering, it that well.
Of course she’d given the two of them the opportunity to tell her what was going on and to confess, but they both blinked innocently at her and insisted that they were fine and why would she think anything was going on?
Now, Vivian had a teenaged son of her own, and she knew what they were like, trying to keep secrets: completely obvious about it. And considering boys did not change much between fourteen and thirty-four, she felt she had a pretty good read on Martin Fitzgerald and Danny Taylor.
So on Wednesday she sat at her desk and pretended to ignore the two of them whispering like criminals until Jack had her and Sam go to check in with the hospital again, and while Sam drove she distracted herself with planning out how to extract the truth from the both of them.
* * *
“Martin, I would like you to come home for Thanksgiving.” The request didn’t sound like a request so much as a direct order.
Danny stared at Victor, who was staring back at him.
“Martin, are you okay?”
“Uh. Yeah.” No, no he definitely was not. He was not having a conversation with Martin’s father. With Victor fucking Fitzgerald. How the hell would Martin handle this?
“You don’t look well,” Victor said. And was that concern?
“Fine. I’m fine, sir.” Wait. Fuck. “I mean, Dad.”
Victor blinked, opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it again. Waited a moment before saying, “You’ve been working very hard, and I know there was some incident recently involving your current case. It would be best if you came home for the weekend to see the family.”
Considering how stressed-out Martin got when someone so much as breathed a word about his family, Danny thought the last thing Martin needed was a long weekend with them. But what the hell was he supposed to do? Family was family.
“Er, yeah. Sure, I’ll come,” he said. Martin, please don’t kill me.
“You’re coming?” Victor asked, and yeah, that was disbelief right there.
“Why not?”
“You haven’t had Thanksgiving with us for the past six years, Martin.” Definitely suspicious now. Victor crossed his arms over his chest, and Danny experienced the full force of a Fitzgeraldian glare – stony, cold, and assessing. “Why now?”
“Er. Well, like I said, why not?”
Victor sighed. “Very well. I’ll book your ticket. You should get back to work.”
Danny did not need to be told twice.
* * *
Across town, Martin was hoping that the building around them would spontaneously collapse, or a hole would open beneath him and swallow him up. He and Jack were in the neighborhood close to where von Birkenstock had ambushed Danny and him, interviewing a collection of workers who had heard and reported the maniacal laughter a week earlier.
Martin was listening attentively to one of the women, nodding occasionally but not interrupting. When she finally wound down, he thanked her and turned back to Jack.
“I don’t understand a word she said,” he confessed.
“What do you mean, you can’t understand her?” Jack barked. “She spoke Spanish, didn’t she?”
“Well, see, there’re different kinds of Spanish, Jack…”
Jack was staring at him with his “you have got to be fucking kidding me” expression.
The hole could open up any time now. Any time now, it really could.
* * *
Danny was sitting at the conference table when Martin walked in, looking like… Martin knew that look, because he’d seen it staring back at him in the mirror over the sink in the men’s bathroom on a few occasions.
“You talked to my dad, huh?” he asked, careful to keep his voice low, collapsing into the chair next to Danny. “Sorry about that.”
Danny rolled his eyes, but said nothing.
“This was about Thanksgiving, right?”
“Yeah.” Danny sighed. “Um, you’re going this year, by the way. Or maybe I am.”
“My streak had to end eventually.” At least he’d avoided Lisa and Preston’s two kids during the food-flinging, shrieking toddler stage, he told himself. But Danny looked really upset, upset beyond the ‘I just had a conversation with Victor Fitzgerald’ breed of upset. “Don’t worry, man. It’s cool.”
“No, it’s not cool,” Jack’s voice said from behind them.
Danny and Martin whirled around, and yeah – with Jack standing there scowling, Viv with her arms crossed and that ‘I know something about you that you don’t know’ expression, Sam peering at Martin (i.e. Danny) speculatively – the jig was up.
Somewhat later
“I honestly don’t believe this.” Jack had the palm of one hand pressed against his eyes. “I honestly don’t.”
“You switched bodies,” Sam repeated for the fiftieth time since Martin and Danny had confessed. “Is that even possible? I mean, how the hell does that happen?”
“I knew it,” Viv said with great satisfaction. “I knew you two weren’t acting like yourselves.”
Danny didn’t know whether or not to be relieved that Jack hadn’t called for a psych consult. He supposed he should be relieved, because he and Martin weren’t being taken away in straitjackets… though Martin looked like he wouldn’t mind a shot of something stiff and psychoactive to take the edge off.
“So did he remove your actual brains and transplant them?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Martin told her.
“What are we going to do about payroll? Social Security?” Jack had removed his hand from his eyes and was now absently shredding a piece of paper. “Do they have to have their names changed?”
“That’s not the point, Jack,” Sam said irritably. “The point is, if Martin is Danny and Danny is Martin – ”
“Did you boys honestly think you were going to get away with it?”
“No, Viv,” Martin and Danny said, meekly and in concert.
“What would we call you guys? Manny Fitzlor? Dartin Taygerald? What?” Jack had both hands plastered to his face now, and was mumbling into them.
“ – then Danny was the one who was talking to me the other day.” Sam rounded on Martin, glaring fiercely. “You told Danny we broke up?”
“Don’t even think about it,” Martin said to Jack, sounding strangled. “And I didn’t tell Danny anything.”
“I can’t believe you actually thought you’d be able to fool me.”
“We didn’t,” Danny assured Viv. “I swear, we didn’t think that for a minute.” Actually, they’d managed to convince themselves Viv wouldn’t notice, which wasn’t quite the same thing as trying to fool her.
“Okay! People!” The slightest edge of panic destroyed the decisiveness of Jack’s tone. “Okay. We need to figure this out. Obviously Martin and Danny can’t spend the rest of their lives in each other’s body. And I can’t explain to Victor that something’s happened to Martin… again.”
Danny wanted very much to say that he had no problem with that in other senses of the word, but kept quiet.
“Well,” Viv said, “the only way we’re going to get Danny and Martin back to normal is to find Karl von Birkenstock.”
“And no one’s seen him since Friday,” Sam added.
“We don’t know that for sure, because someone neglected to tell me he couldn’t speak Spanish,” Jack said, glaring ferociously at Martin.
“Then we’ll go back and reinterview them,” Viv said calmly.
* * *
All five of them ended up going down to the warehouse district again, and while the manager of the building Martin and Jack had visited earlier wasn’t happy to let his workers have another break to talk to the government, within ten minutes they had their information.
“Von Birkenstock’s gone upstate,” Danny said, climbing back into the squad car as Martin started it up. “The supervisor remembers a black hearse driving by someone sounding like the Doc shouting ‘upstate’ in this weird sort of cackle.”
“Wonderful. So that narrows it down… to the rest of the fucking state.”
“Not necessarily,” Jack said from the passenger seat.
* * *
The five agents were standing at the bottom of a steep, craggy hill, staring up at the half-ruined castle on top of it. The brisk October breeze was rapidly picking up and becoming colder, blowing gray, ominous clouds against the sky, and the trees lining the path up the hill twisted their bare branches painfully. Behind them, an ancient rusty gate creaked on its hinges as the wind shook it back and forth.
[For the benefit of any readers who may never have encountered this sort of thing before, I should say that this is not a nice place. In fact, it is the typical habitation of mad scientists.]
“There’s actually an abandoned castle in Schenectady?” Danny asked no one in particular.
“Don’t question it,” Jack said irritably. “Let’s go up.”
All of them trudged slowly up the forbidding, treacherous hill, Jack pausing to help Sam, whose boot heels kept getting stuck in the cracks between the cobblestones. It took them a while, but eventually they got all the way up to the door and, just as Viv was about to knock, the huge oaken doors swung open with a deep, forbidding groan.
“Um, we should probably draw our weapons,” Martin said.
“Good idea.” Jack pulled his gun and peered around the edge of the door into the blackness beyond it. “Dr. von Birkenstock?”
“Yessss, it is I.”
“Oh my God, that’s him!” Martin said. “That’s the guy who… who…”
“Ah! My experiment vas a suk-sess, then!”
And, all of a sudden, Dr. Karl von Birkenstock was right there in the doorway, wild white hair blowing in the wind, eyes alight with manic happiness behind a pair of cracked spectacles, clapping rubber-gloved hands together.
“My life’s verk,” he cooed, beaming. “Eegor, zee transfer verked! It verked! Und they live, Eegor! They leeeeve!”
“Oh, my God,” Danny mumbled. “He really is a mad scientist.”
“I am not mad at all,” von Birkenstock said crossly. He glared at Danny. “Seemply becos I vant to transfer ze consciousness of a man from one body into anozer, und vice versa, does not make me mad.”
“Issues of mental disease or defect aside,” Jack interrupted, “I need you to put my agents back the way you found them.”
“Please,” Vivian added.
“Ah, vell… you see, zat might be a problem,” von Birkenstock said slowly, all traces of mania fading away. Even his hair seemed subdued all of a sudden. “As it happens, I hof not perfected ze reversal mechanism yet. In fact, ze last two test subjects… vell, I am afraid zat they are not, vell, to tell ze truth, Agent Malone… Zey think zat they are both ducks.”
“Ducks?” Martin squeaked.
“Ducks,” affirmed von Birkenstock sadly. “Mallards.”
“Why in God’s name would you do something like this anyway?” Jack demanded.
“Vell,” von Birkenstock said thoughtfully, “vy not?”
-tbc!-
Now, as lovely as this evening has been (thank you, Neko), I'm going to sign off and maybe go to bed. Am so very tired. *collapse*
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M. In a strange and disturbing way.
Ratings/Warnings: PG13-ish?
Disclaimer: Without a Trace belongs to other people. Alas.
Advertisements: crack!fic written for
nekosmuse's International Manny Month Challenge.Previous parts: 01; 02; 03
Notes: Apologies for the delay between posts. It's been one thing or another here for the past week... and will continue to be for the next month and a half :/ Feh.
CHAPTER FOUR
Vivian Johnson was suspicious.
Martin and Danny had been acting very strangely – and this was saying something – ever since their encounter with the still-missing Dr. von Birkenstock. Her suspicions had been aroused from the start, when Danny had hung up on her with the obviously fake excuse that someone was at his door, and they’d only been growing since. And watching Danny devouring that cheeseburger like Martin was going to fight him for it – which might have been a possibility, actually – was but the latest in a chain of incidents.
On Monday, she’d caught Martin making a comment that would normally have come out of Danny’s mouth, and would have made Martin himself go red and speechless for a moment before retaliating. Later that day she’d seen Danny going out of his way to avoid Sam, who’d been prowling around the office in search of Martin, and she could have sworn she’d heard Martin muttering – fluently – something in Spanish.
And unless Danny was giving him private lessons – which was an interesting line of speculation, actually – there was no way Martin should have been speaking, or muttering, it that well.
Of course she’d given the two of them the opportunity to tell her what was going on and to confess, but they both blinked innocently at her and insisted that they were fine and why would she think anything was going on?
Now, Vivian had a teenaged son of her own, and she knew what they were like, trying to keep secrets: completely obvious about it. And considering boys did not change much between fourteen and thirty-four, she felt she had a pretty good read on Martin Fitzgerald and Danny Taylor.
So on Wednesday she sat at her desk and pretended to ignore the two of them whispering like criminals until Jack had her and Sam go to check in with the hospital again, and while Sam drove she distracted herself with planning out how to extract the truth from the both of them.
“Martin, I would like you to come home for Thanksgiving.” The request didn’t sound like a request so much as a direct order.
Danny stared at Victor, who was staring back at him.
“Martin, are you okay?”
“Uh. Yeah.” No, no he definitely was not. He was not having a conversation with Martin’s father. With Victor fucking Fitzgerald. How the hell would Martin handle this?
“You don’t look well,” Victor said. And was that concern?
“Fine. I’m fine, sir.” Wait. Fuck. “I mean, Dad.”
Victor blinked, opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it again. Waited a moment before saying, “You’ve been working very hard, and I know there was some incident recently involving your current case. It would be best if you came home for the weekend to see the family.”
Considering how stressed-out Martin got when someone so much as breathed a word about his family, Danny thought the last thing Martin needed was a long weekend with them. But what the hell was he supposed to do? Family was family.
“Er, yeah. Sure, I’ll come,” he said. Martin, please don’t kill me.
“You’re coming?” Victor asked, and yeah, that was disbelief right there.
“Why not?”
“You haven’t had Thanksgiving with us for the past six years, Martin.” Definitely suspicious now. Victor crossed his arms over his chest, and Danny experienced the full force of a Fitzgeraldian glare – stony, cold, and assessing. “Why now?”
“Er. Well, like I said, why not?”
Victor sighed. “Very well. I’ll book your ticket. You should get back to work.”
Danny did not need to be told twice.
Across town, Martin was hoping that the building around them would spontaneously collapse, or a hole would open beneath him and swallow him up. He and Jack were in the neighborhood close to where von Birkenstock had ambushed Danny and him, interviewing a collection of workers who had heard and reported the maniacal laughter a week earlier.
Martin was listening attentively to one of the women, nodding occasionally but not interrupting. When she finally wound down, he thanked her and turned back to Jack.
“I don’t understand a word she said,” he confessed.
“What do you mean, you can’t understand her?” Jack barked. “She spoke Spanish, didn’t she?”
“Well, see, there’re different kinds of Spanish, Jack…”
Jack was staring at him with his “you have got to be fucking kidding me” expression.
The hole could open up any time now. Any time now, it really could.
Danny was sitting at the conference table when Martin walked in, looking like… Martin knew that look, because he’d seen it staring back at him in the mirror over the sink in the men’s bathroom on a few occasions.
“You talked to my dad, huh?” he asked, careful to keep his voice low, collapsing into the chair next to Danny. “Sorry about that.”
Danny rolled his eyes, but said nothing.
“This was about Thanksgiving, right?”
“Yeah.” Danny sighed. “Um, you’re going this year, by the way. Or maybe I am.”
“My streak had to end eventually.” At least he’d avoided Lisa and Preston’s two kids during the food-flinging, shrieking toddler stage, he told himself. But Danny looked really upset, upset beyond the ‘I just had a conversation with Victor Fitzgerald’ breed of upset. “Don’t worry, man. It’s cool.”
“No, it’s not cool,” Jack’s voice said from behind them.
Danny and Martin whirled around, and yeah – with Jack standing there scowling, Viv with her arms crossed and that ‘I know something about you that you don’t know’ expression, Sam peering at Martin (i.e. Danny) speculatively – the jig was up.
Somewhat later
“I honestly don’t believe this.” Jack had the palm of one hand pressed against his eyes. “I honestly don’t.”
“You switched bodies,” Sam repeated for the fiftieth time since Martin and Danny had confessed. “Is that even possible? I mean, how the hell does that happen?”
“I knew it,” Viv said with great satisfaction. “I knew you two weren’t acting like yourselves.”
Danny didn’t know whether or not to be relieved that Jack hadn’t called for a psych consult. He supposed he should be relieved, because he and Martin weren’t being taken away in straitjackets… though Martin looked like he wouldn’t mind a shot of something stiff and psychoactive to take the edge off.
“So did he remove your actual brains and transplant them?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Martin told her.
“What are we going to do about payroll? Social Security?” Jack had removed his hand from his eyes and was now absently shredding a piece of paper. “Do they have to have their names changed?”
“That’s not the point, Jack,” Sam said irritably. “The point is, if Martin is Danny and Danny is Martin – ”
“Did you boys honestly think you were going to get away with it?”
“No, Viv,” Martin and Danny said, meekly and in concert.
“What would we call you guys? Manny Fitzlor? Dartin Taygerald? What?” Jack had both hands plastered to his face now, and was mumbling into them.
“ – then Danny was the one who was talking to me the other day.” Sam rounded on Martin, glaring fiercely. “You told Danny we broke up?”
“Don’t even think about it,” Martin said to Jack, sounding strangled. “And I didn’t tell Danny anything.”
“I can’t believe you actually thought you’d be able to fool me.”
“We didn’t,” Danny assured Viv. “I swear, we didn’t think that for a minute.” Actually, they’d managed to convince themselves Viv wouldn’t notice, which wasn’t quite the same thing as trying to fool her.
“Okay! People!” The slightest edge of panic destroyed the decisiveness of Jack’s tone. “Okay. We need to figure this out. Obviously Martin and Danny can’t spend the rest of their lives in each other’s body. And I can’t explain to Victor that something’s happened to Martin… again.”
Danny wanted very much to say that he had no problem with that in other senses of the word, but kept quiet.
“Well,” Viv said, “the only way we’re going to get Danny and Martin back to normal is to find Karl von Birkenstock.”
“And no one’s seen him since Friday,” Sam added.
“We don’t know that for sure, because someone neglected to tell me he couldn’t speak Spanish,” Jack said, glaring ferociously at Martin.
“Then we’ll go back and reinterview them,” Viv said calmly.
All five of them ended up going down to the warehouse district again, and while the manager of the building Martin and Jack had visited earlier wasn’t happy to let his workers have another break to talk to the government, within ten minutes they had their information.
“Von Birkenstock’s gone upstate,” Danny said, climbing back into the squad car as Martin started it up. “The supervisor remembers a black hearse driving by someone sounding like the Doc shouting ‘upstate’ in this weird sort of cackle.”
“Wonderful. So that narrows it down… to the rest of the fucking state.”
“Not necessarily,” Jack said from the passenger seat.
The five agents were standing at the bottom of a steep, craggy hill, staring up at the half-ruined castle on top of it. The brisk October breeze was rapidly picking up and becoming colder, blowing gray, ominous clouds against the sky, and the trees lining the path up the hill twisted their bare branches painfully. Behind them, an ancient rusty gate creaked on its hinges as the wind shook it back and forth.
[For the benefit of any readers who may never have encountered this sort of thing before, I should say that this is not a nice place. In fact, it is the typical habitation of mad scientists.]
“There’s actually an abandoned castle in Schenectady?” Danny asked no one in particular.
“Don’t question it,” Jack said irritably. “Let’s go up.”
All of them trudged slowly up the forbidding, treacherous hill, Jack pausing to help Sam, whose boot heels kept getting stuck in the cracks between the cobblestones. It took them a while, but eventually they got all the way up to the door and, just as Viv was about to knock, the huge oaken doors swung open with a deep, forbidding groan.
“Um, we should probably draw our weapons,” Martin said.
“Good idea.” Jack pulled his gun and peered around the edge of the door into the blackness beyond it. “Dr. von Birkenstock?”
“Yessss, it is I.”
“Oh my God, that’s him!” Martin said. “That’s the guy who… who…”
“Ah! My experiment vas a suk-sess, then!”
And, all of a sudden, Dr. Karl von Birkenstock was right there in the doorway, wild white hair blowing in the wind, eyes alight with manic happiness behind a pair of cracked spectacles, clapping rubber-gloved hands together.
“My life’s verk,” he cooed, beaming. “Eegor, zee transfer verked! It verked! Und they live, Eegor! They leeeeve!”
“Oh, my God,” Danny mumbled. “He really is a mad scientist.”
“I am not mad at all,” von Birkenstock said crossly. He glared at Danny. “Seemply becos I vant to transfer ze consciousness of a man from one body into anozer, und vice versa, does not make me mad.”
“Issues of mental disease or defect aside,” Jack interrupted, “I need you to put my agents back the way you found them.”
“Please,” Vivian added.
“Ah, vell… you see, zat might be a problem,” von Birkenstock said slowly, all traces of mania fading away. Even his hair seemed subdued all of a sudden. “As it happens, I hof not perfected ze reversal mechanism yet. In fact, ze last two test subjects… vell, I am afraid zat they are not, vell, to tell ze truth, Agent Malone… Zey think zat they are both ducks.”
“Ducks?” Martin squeaked.
“Ducks,” affirmed von Birkenstock sadly. “Mallards.”
“Why in God’s name would you do something like this anyway?” Jack demanded.
“Vell,” von Birkenstock said thoughtfully, “vy not?”
-tbc!-
Now, as lovely as this evening has been (thank you, Neko), I'm going to sign off and maybe go to bed. Am so very tired. *collapse*
no subject
Whee! Viv would so totally figure it out. I love this. Love this love this love this so damn much. And is it wrong to say I love von Birkenstock? And thank God you updated, because I was about to start
begging shamelesslydemand more.OMG, hee. You're so getting fic as a reward. Dammit, where's that fic where Danny meets the Fitzgeralds?
no subject
Was quite delirious with slashiness and happiness, reading that. And I still grin bizarrely, thinking about it.
And is it wrong to say I love von Birkenstock?
Of course not! Mad scientists deserve to be loved, just as much as the next character :D