FIC: Instinct - PG-13, part 2 of 6
TITLE: Instinct
AUTHOR: Roseveare, t.l.green@talk21.com
RATING: PG-13
LENGTH: 20,000 words approx
SUMMARY: When Jake screws up badly on a mission, other factions at the NSA take the opportunity to push forward modifications to the Nanite Program.
NOTES: Set after 'Arms and the Girl'. Thanks to kattahj for the beta!
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 2
Jake groaned into the surface of the examination table as Diane's warm hands prodded at one of the more-sore-than-the-rest-of-him spots on his back. "Can the nanites heal bones?"
"Well, yeah, in theory. And I guess since it looks like you have a couple of cracked ribs here, we're gonna be finding out in fact."
She didn't have to sound so chirpy about it, and Jake found himself in no great mood to appreciate the spirit of scientific enquiry. She seemed to understand because a moment later she patted him gently on the shoulder, managing to find one of the very few scraps of his flesh that was still vaguely pink. "You'll be fine. The nanites will heal this superficial damage in no time at all. Okay, there's a lot of it, and it's... quite an achievement when you consider how you weren't even supposed to be in the thick of the action, but even the ribs and that wrist shouldn't take more than a day or two before they're good as new." She patted his shoulder again and then spoiled it by adding, "I'm pretty sure."
"Thank you so much," Jake grunted. Giving in to gravity, he sagged forward over the table, resting his forehead on the arm that hadn't been stood on by a heavyweight thug. He was aware of low-level activity from the nanites starting to fix things already.
Diane's footsteps made their way around to the front of the examination table, and he lifted his head to find her standing there with her arms crossed and her face scrunched up, looking down at him with a fond exasperation. "You seem to be spending an awful lot of time in here. Soon I might start to think you're being all stalker super-nanite guy and really, really desperate for more of my company."
He gaped at her, and felt a bit of a jerk as she coughed and ducked her head, embarrassed, to hurry on; "Seriously, you need to try to get beat up less. Make the effort, okay? Not that it isn't getting us loads of really great data on how the nanites function - 'cause it is - but seeing you bleed all over the place every Tuesday? Kinda getting to be a drag. So if you could cut it out, just for me?"
"It's not actually intentional," Jake said meekly.
Diane shrugged and sniffed. She turned back around to one of her monitors, holding her shoulders rather stiffly.
"Thanks," Jake tried, because he felt he ought to say something, "For patching me up... every Tuesday." He pulled himself up on his elbows and hissed a bit as abused nerve endings let their protests be heard. "Look, I'm sorry. It's like, the last thing I need right now is for you to be mad at me, too, right?" He tried a smile, but it still went down like a stone.
Turning with a sigh, Diane glowered at him with her head cocked to one side. "Lou's not mad at you, Jake. She's just... okay, she's mad at you. But just give her a bit of time. It's not like you gave the whole of SatOps the biggest trauma of their lives or anything, almost getting beaten to death not three miles away, right in front of their... ears. She's mad because you gave her a scare. She cares about her people... for some reason, even you."
"I... think it might be worse than that. Diane, I think this might be it," Jake confided, lowering his voice to a hiss.
"It?" she whispered back, looking baffled.
"It. You know. It. Finito. Kaputt. Sayonara, Agent Foley. That, what happened out there today, that was a fucking disaster. Worse, that was a disaster the whole of SatOps had ringside seats for the major part of. I am so done. I'm not coming back from this one. This whole agent thing, it isn't going to work, and I..."
...Am so screwed, he finished in his head, because he couldn't bring himself to say it to Diane's suddenly stricken face. And so incredibly scared, although that one he hadn't been about to admit to. Somewhere, he'd lay odds, the government already had prepared a secure, low-tech, underground bunker with his name on it - Jake Foley, NSA Lab Rat, Failed Super-Agent, and Threat To National Security. Soon as he proved he couldn't cut it, he was gonna be moving in. And if the day's events proved anything, surely it was that he couldn't cut it.
Diane's expression flickered and changed. She pouted and slapped him sharply on the cheek. "No. That's not going to happen. Don't even think it."
"Like I could not think it? And, hey! They actually didn't get that bit." He rubbed his face.
"Oh, you giant baby, it's not like the nanites won't fix that in, oh, two seconds flat." Her words stumbled with guilt and anger.
"What is it, Diane?" Jake asked, confused. He didn't think it'd be a good time to point out the nanites were slightly overtaxed at the moment. But he'd thought his concerns might merit sympathy rather than fury from his best ally in the NSA camp.
She jabbed a finger in his face. "You - you are so oblivious. All this failure and doom and gloom and... it's all about you - you - you... You are my project, mister. You don't think I'm scared, too, for... for the future of my project? Without the whole you coming in here and rubbing my face in it part?"
Jake blinked. "Are we talking about science here?" he tried tentatively. "'Cause the impression I had, the NSA love the nanites. They just don't like me."
"Oh, sure, 'cause I want to be that scientist. Unwilling human subjects and... that's so my ambition, to emulate Dr Mengele." She choked and half turned away before stopping and, with her eyes averted, waved her finger at him again warningly. "You - stay right there. I'm not finished." Then she stomped off to rummage in a store cupboard at the far end of the lab, her back to him.
"Uh," Jake said. Hey, that was eloquent. "What I mean to say is, I'm sorry. And... I can't see you doing that. The Mengele thing. Honestly."
"One word--" She brandished the finger again over her shoulder, still not turning around "--Contract."
"Oh." Jake sagged back to the examination table, feeling disillusioned, and winced because even lying on his front hurt. "It was pretty bad, then?" he asked cautiously. "From SatOps?"
"I wouldn't know," she said curtly. "I wasn't there."
Three floors above a door slammed and Jake's enhanced hearing snapped into focus on Kyle's smooth voice as the agent said, "All right, it was a mess, but he tried. It almost worked. By the sounds of things, we'd had no chance at all without Jake on the scene - Cross was ready to detonate." Kyle's voice sounded tired and strained. Jake felt a keen stab of guilt.
"Fine." Lou, on the other hand, sounded crisp and merciless even through three floors of vents. "I'm not blind to the fact we'd be looking at a lot more casualties if he hadn't given us the time to get those people out. But for half a billion, the people upstairs are looking for more than a glass half full. They're still not seeing the results they want and I am running out of excuses not to push this program to the next stage."
"Tell me we're not going back there again," Kyle said, with a heaviness that was ominous.
"Damn it, Kyle", Lou snapped, her temper crumbling. Jake couldn't remember her taking that tone before with Kyle. "I have an agent in the ICU with a bullet in his gut from the gun that was issued to Jake. He had them at gunpoint and he couldn't hold them."
"Issuing him a firearm was a mistake," Kyle said, unflappable as ever. "Obviously we acted prematurely. For the time being at least, the last thing we want is to have Jake relying on a gun. Or for us to be relying on Jake having a gun. Let's face it, a couple of month's training isn't much to harden a guy to actually pulling the trigger, and the nanites allow him to handle plenty of situations without a firearm with a better chance of success than any other field agent."
"Oh yeah." Jake could practically see Lou's sharp nod and the roll of her eyes. "You bet your ass we are taking away the gun. The next time the kid tries to take on four-to-one odds with it he might actually succeed in getting himself killed. I swear to God, he still thinks this all works just like in the movies."
"As Jake did say--" Kyle coughed, intermingling a trace of morbid laughter "--He distracted them."
"You read that report?" Oh, and now he was getting such a clear visual on the Sardonically Arched Eyebrow, even as he tried to bury his face further into the examination table. In fact, disappearing into the floor was started to look really good. He could start to hate nano-hearing.
"On the way over from the hospital. Carver kept me posted on my palm."
Lou grunted. "I think Carver emailed that report to everyone with security clearance, and probably her mother besides. In fact, in ten years' time it'll probably still be circling the internet along with the Neiman Marcus Cookie Legend."
"I guess he was pretty out of it."
Jake would have been silently blessing Kyle for the discomfort in his voice, except he was frantically trying to remember what the hell he'd put in the report. They had to be exaggerating, right? He hadn't been that out of it, had he?
...Ah. Well, maybe he had. It was possible there were one or two things in there that he wouldn't have written with a clearer head.
He heard Lou's huff of breath. They were a few corridors away, voices ringing with the tinny echo of the opening lift. He heard the 'ping' of the doors. Lou said, "I have no intention of bringing out the Agent Program unless I have no other choice. You know I'm not in love with the idea of tampering with this technology. And I know how Diane feels about it, when the nanites' current state of stability in Jake's system is so much more than we had dared hope for. But the brass are keen to try it, and I do consider that it's better than the alternative - for Jake in particular. There may come a point when it's simply the best choice."
"Lou--" Kyle made some kind of gesture; his clothes rustled with the motion. Probably it was meant to indicate that they were nearing the lab where the guy with the super-senses was crashed out. It was kind of cool how everyone underestimated the nanite hearing, even here. Except when it meant Jake ended up hearing things that he'd really, really, really rather not.
He raised his head, senses limited once again to the confines of the lab. Diane was looking at him oddly and he thought he might have been clocked, but she didn't say anything as Lou and Kyle stalked through the door, looking kind of as though they'd stepped out of a Tarantino movie, purposeful and grim and like they were just done committing a whole bunch of violence. Jake would kill to look that cool walking into a room.
He wasn't sure whether Kyle's cast arm detracted from the effect or enhanced it. Jake sat up quickly, ignoring Diane's Glare of Death from the sidelines. "Hey, are you okay? They said you were caught in the blast, but not - man, I am so, so sorry..."
"Jake." The eyebrows went up in that way he'd long since learned meant, 'Jake, you're embarrassing yourself'. "I'm fine. Two dead civilians and the agent in ICU, not so much."
"We need to talk about realistic expectations in the field and what happens when you let James Bond movies determine your strategies," Lou said.
Jake groaned. "Is there any way that we can do this scene over, where this time I'm unconscious and we leave this till morning?" Two civilians dead was one more than earlier. How many more to follow? How many more had he let die? At least, he thought, Agent Cayman was still hanging in.
"We could," Lou said. "And I could ask Diane over there with the palm pilot that reads your vital signs if you were shamming like a weasel to avoid facing up to the fiasco that was your performance in the field today."
"Lou," Kyle said unhappily. She rolled her eyes, but something in them passed on a sort of permission. Kyle turned to Jake. "I'm not going to pretend it wasn't a mess, but for the record, I need you to keep in mind there are worse things than trying and failing."
"Not when you answer to my boss," Lou said.
***
He had a meet that evening with Sarah that had been set for weeks and, whatever her activities in the hours preceding it, they didn't include having her cellphone switched on. Otherwise there was no way Jake would have been pried out of his apartment again short of fire or Lou sending a heavily armed team of agents to his doorstep. Again. Well, maybe not the fire.
The bar Sarah had chosen was quiet and scruffy and a good way removed from the kind of place where he might expect her or her peers from work to hang out. That was probably the point. In fact, Jake supposed that Sarah would have probably made a great secret agent. Better than him, no doubt.
He pushed his way through the bar to join her where she was already ensconced at a table with a couple of beers. He was a little late, but she didn't look like she'd been waiting too long.
Spider-man, he told himself, never owned a gun... But then he's got webs to shoot at people, not to mention sticking to ceilings and the fact he can practically fly from rooftop to rooftop on those babies... Ohhhh, man, would flying be handy. I totally need to ask Diane for better nanites, 'cause I'm thinking I got the fuzzy end of the lollipop on the super powers stakes.
The more cynical side of his brain reminded him that even were it possible, stuff like that would've required of him something vaguely resembling co-ordination, and was he out of his freakin' mind?
"Are you all right?" Sarah waved a hand in front of his face, and laughed worriedly. "You looked a million miles away. I said your name three times."
"Uh. Sorry. Hi." He slid into the seat opposite her. If his conversational skills were going to max out at that level for the evening, he might as well have offended her so much she'd never speak to him again by standing her up and staying at home, asleep, with the end result much the same.
"Here." She placed the extra beer before him with a flourish. "The answer to all life's worries... you are all right? Jake - oh my God, what happened to your face?" The bruising was already fading, so he figured it a pretty good thing she hadn't seen it earlier. "Did someone do this to you?"
"What? No! No, no - nothing like - I just - I had an accident at work. I fell and landed... uh, I had kind of a lousy day today." He scrubbed his hands through his hair and tried not to flinch as his fingers caught a contusion on his scalp. There was only so much he could pass off to an innocent accident. At least his clothes covered up the rest of the damage.
"It really looks it." Sarah was all over him with a kind of doe-eyed sincerity that would've been really, really good any other time. She touched his wrist in concern and an electrical jolt - of pain - fizzed up through his arm to drive a spike through the centre of his skull. "Maybe you shouldn't be here, Jake. You look really grey."
Jake wholeheartedly agreed. "No. I wanted to come." He took the beer in both hands, weight supported in the left, because it rescued his wrist from Sarah.
"You wouldn't hide anything from me, would you? If you're in some kind of trouble, I know people, maybe I can help. Those look like knuckle-marks to me..."
"They do? Guess I missed my cue when I could've been telling you how you should've seen the other guy..." Jake laughed weakly. "Sarah, I'm fine. Come on, you know me. Am I really the kind of person that gets pounded on by some bunch of guys?"
She smiled a little wickedly, seeming finally to relax. "I don't know, you do work at the NSA now. For all I know, you could be an undercover spy with a license to kill."
License to screw up, more like, Jake thought, laughing heartily along with her.
"So, what have you been doing this week that didn't involve beating yourself up with the furniture?" Sarah continued. "Save the world from any evil geniuses? Take down any terrorist masterminds?" Her humour clouded slightly; she'd heard the news. Of course she had - half of DC could still see the last of the smoke plumes rising up on the air.
"Not today." And isn't that the truth? "I did apprehend a really nasty offline server."
"Oh yeah?" Sarah's eyes glittered with humour at the fantasy.
"Meanest critter I ever did see." Laughing, Jake drank down half of his beer in one go. His aches were starting to fade a little more into the background. Obviously the human contact - or just Sarah-contact - was doing him good.
"We should do this more often."
He almost choked on his beer. "You think?"
"Yeah. I hardly ever see anybody from college any more. You know how you lose contact and suddenly three years have gone by and you don't even know all your old friends anymore. I think that's sad."
Jake swallowed. "Keeping in touch is good."
He was hoping she'd continue in that vein in the more specific, but instead the conversation meandered around to gossip about her job and some satirical commentary on the aides in the office of an arch-rival that he'd have preferred to think Sarah a bit above, After maybe half an hour she stopped halfway through a sentence and said, "What did happen to you at work today, Jake? Seriously, I don't think you can have heard a word I've said. I think you're somewhere else entirely, tonight." She stared at him, a bit too keenly perceptive. "It was bad, wasn't it?"
"I--" With that look in her eyes, he didn't see much point in trying to lie. "Look, I can't really talk about it, you know? Not - not with details. But I screwed up at work. Really screwed up. And someone got hurt - people got hurt, and one of them was a friend of mine. I feel kind of crappy right now. I would've called - I didn't want you to see me like this - but..."
Sarah's stare had turned to surprise. Whatever she'd been expecting, this wasn't it. He felt awkward again all of a sudden.
"You screwed up at work... at the NSA... You mean on the NSA computers?"
Jake blinked, and tried for a desperate save. "Yeah. And do you know, you wouldn't think that stuff - computer stuff - could get people hurt. But information age and everything... I can't really talk about it. You see? Not outside work. And the guys inside work are all pissed at me, which makes things... sorta... difficult."
He'd dried up, but she was looking at him with sympathy. "You've told me enough. I know you're good at what you do - hey, you've fixed my Dread Machine enough times. You know this wasn't your fault, not in that way. Everyone makes mistakes, and I'm sure those assholes at the NSA know it too. On the inside at least. Don't let them get you down." She pushed both their drinks aside and stood up. "I've also seen enough tonight to know you should be at home, Jake. Let me call you a taxi. We can share."
"That's not--" His brain called the pause, and said to his libido, 'Oh yeah?' "--That sounds like a really good idea," he admitted.
Fuzzy-headed as Sarah led him to the taxi, he thought with some belligerence, 'This never happens to Spider-man.'
He seriously needed a new metaphor, 'cause Spider-man was a dork and this was still making him feel inadequate by comparison.
The events of the day had probably been only slightly less embarrassing than weaving his way to the door after Sarah delivered him to the deli, while she watched in concern from the cab.
He staggered upstairs and slumped face-first onto the bed and into the depths of a coma that even Lou and her NSA team, with their noisy black boots and automatic weapons, would have found impossible to drag him from.
Chapter 1 here.
AUTHOR: Roseveare, t.l.green@talk21.com
RATING: PG-13
LENGTH: 20,000 words approx
SUMMARY: When Jake screws up badly on a mission, other factions at the NSA take the opportunity to push forward modifications to the Nanite Program.
NOTES: Set after 'Arms and the Girl'. Thanks to kattahj for the beta!
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 2
Jake groaned into the surface of the examination table as Diane's warm hands prodded at one of the more-sore-than-the-rest-of-him spots on his back. "Can the nanites heal bones?"
"Well, yeah, in theory. And I guess since it looks like you have a couple of cracked ribs here, we're gonna be finding out in fact."
She didn't have to sound so chirpy about it, and Jake found himself in no great mood to appreciate the spirit of scientific enquiry. She seemed to understand because a moment later she patted him gently on the shoulder, managing to find one of the very few scraps of his flesh that was still vaguely pink. "You'll be fine. The nanites will heal this superficial damage in no time at all. Okay, there's a lot of it, and it's... quite an achievement when you consider how you weren't even supposed to be in the thick of the action, but even the ribs and that wrist shouldn't take more than a day or two before they're good as new." She patted his shoulder again and then spoiled it by adding, "I'm pretty sure."
"Thank you so much," Jake grunted. Giving in to gravity, he sagged forward over the table, resting his forehead on the arm that hadn't been stood on by a heavyweight thug. He was aware of low-level activity from the nanites starting to fix things already.
Diane's footsteps made their way around to the front of the examination table, and he lifted his head to find her standing there with her arms crossed and her face scrunched up, looking down at him with a fond exasperation. "You seem to be spending an awful lot of time in here. Soon I might start to think you're being all stalker super-nanite guy and really, really desperate for more of my company."
He gaped at her, and felt a bit of a jerk as she coughed and ducked her head, embarrassed, to hurry on; "Seriously, you need to try to get beat up less. Make the effort, okay? Not that it isn't getting us loads of really great data on how the nanites function - 'cause it is - but seeing you bleed all over the place every Tuesday? Kinda getting to be a drag. So if you could cut it out, just for me?"
"It's not actually intentional," Jake said meekly.
Diane shrugged and sniffed. She turned back around to one of her monitors, holding her shoulders rather stiffly.
"Thanks," Jake tried, because he felt he ought to say something, "For patching me up... every Tuesday." He pulled himself up on his elbows and hissed a bit as abused nerve endings let their protests be heard. "Look, I'm sorry. It's like, the last thing I need right now is for you to be mad at me, too, right?" He tried a smile, but it still went down like a stone.
Turning with a sigh, Diane glowered at him with her head cocked to one side. "Lou's not mad at you, Jake. She's just... okay, she's mad at you. But just give her a bit of time. It's not like you gave the whole of SatOps the biggest trauma of their lives or anything, almost getting beaten to death not three miles away, right in front of their... ears. She's mad because you gave her a scare. She cares about her people... for some reason, even you."
"I... think it might be worse than that. Diane, I think this might be it," Jake confided, lowering his voice to a hiss.
"It?" she whispered back, looking baffled.
"It. You know. It. Finito. Kaputt. Sayonara, Agent Foley. That, what happened out there today, that was a fucking disaster. Worse, that was a disaster the whole of SatOps had ringside seats for the major part of. I am so done. I'm not coming back from this one. This whole agent thing, it isn't going to work, and I..."
...Am so screwed, he finished in his head, because he couldn't bring himself to say it to Diane's suddenly stricken face. And so incredibly scared, although that one he hadn't been about to admit to. Somewhere, he'd lay odds, the government already had prepared a secure, low-tech, underground bunker with his name on it - Jake Foley, NSA Lab Rat, Failed Super-Agent, and Threat To National Security. Soon as he proved he couldn't cut it, he was gonna be moving in. And if the day's events proved anything, surely it was that he couldn't cut it.
Diane's expression flickered and changed. She pouted and slapped him sharply on the cheek. "No. That's not going to happen. Don't even think it."
"Like I could not think it? And, hey! They actually didn't get that bit." He rubbed his face.
"Oh, you giant baby, it's not like the nanites won't fix that in, oh, two seconds flat." Her words stumbled with guilt and anger.
"What is it, Diane?" Jake asked, confused. He didn't think it'd be a good time to point out the nanites were slightly overtaxed at the moment. But he'd thought his concerns might merit sympathy rather than fury from his best ally in the NSA camp.
She jabbed a finger in his face. "You - you are so oblivious. All this failure and doom and gloom and... it's all about you - you - you... You are my project, mister. You don't think I'm scared, too, for... for the future of my project? Without the whole you coming in here and rubbing my face in it part?"
Jake blinked. "Are we talking about science here?" he tried tentatively. "'Cause the impression I had, the NSA love the nanites. They just don't like me."
"Oh, sure, 'cause I want to be that scientist. Unwilling human subjects and... that's so my ambition, to emulate Dr Mengele." She choked and half turned away before stopping and, with her eyes averted, waved her finger at him again warningly. "You - stay right there. I'm not finished." Then she stomped off to rummage in a store cupboard at the far end of the lab, her back to him.
"Uh," Jake said. Hey, that was eloquent. "What I mean to say is, I'm sorry. And... I can't see you doing that. The Mengele thing. Honestly."
"One word--" She brandished the finger again over her shoulder, still not turning around "--Contract."
"Oh." Jake sagged back to the examination table, feeling disillusioned, and winced because even lying on his front hurt. "It was pretty bad, then?" he asked cautiously. "From SatOps?"
"I wouldn't know," she said curtly. "I wasn't there."
Three floors above a door slammed and Jake's enhanced hearing snapped into focus on Kyle's smooth voice as the agent said, "All right, it was a mess, but he tried. It almost worked. By the sounds of things, we'd had no chance at all without Jake on the scene - Cross was ready to detonate." Kyle's voice sounded tired and strained. Jake felt a keen stab of guilt.
"Fine." Lou, on the other hand, sounded crisp and merciless even through three floors of vents. "I'm not blind to the fact we'd be looking at a lot more casualties if he hadn't given us the time to get those people out. But for half a billion, the people upstairs are looking for more than a glass half full. They're still not seeing the results they want and I am running out of excuses not to push this program to the next stage."
"Tell me we're not going back there again," Kyle said, with a heaviness that was ominous.
"Damn it, Kyle", Lou snapped, her temper crumbling. Jake couldn't remember her taking that tone before with Kyle. "I have an agent in the ICU with a bullet in his gut from the gun that was issued to Jake. He had them at gunpoint and he couldn't hold them."
"Issuing him a firearm was a mistake," Kyle said, unflappable as ever. "Obviously we acted prematurely. For the time being at least, the last thing we want is to have Jake relying on a gun. Or for us to be relying on Jake having a gun. Let's face it, a couple of month's training isn't much to harden a guy to actually pulling the trigger, and the nanites allow him to handle plenty of situations without a firearm with a better chance of success than any other field agent."
"Oh yeah." Jake could practically see Lou's sharp nod and the roll of her eyes. "You bet your ass we are taking away the gun. The next time the kid tries to take on four-to-one odds with it he might actually succeed in getting himself killed. I swear to God, he still thinks this all works just like in the movies."
"As Jake did say--" Kyle coughed, intermingling a trace of morbid laughter "--He distracted them."
"You read that report?" Oh, and now he was getting such a clear visual on the Sardonically Arched Eyebrow, even as he tried to bury his face further into the examination table. In fact, disappearing into the floor was started to look really good. He could start to hate nano-hearing.
"On the way over from the hospital. Carver kept me posted on my palm."
Lou grunted. "I think Carver emailed that report to everyone with security clearance, and probably her mother besides. In fact, in ten years' time it'll probably still be circling the internet along with the Neiman Marcus Cookie Legend."
"I guess he was pretty out of it."
Jake would have been silently blessing Kyle for the discomfort in his voice, except he was frantically trying to remember what the hell he'd put in the report. They had to be exaggerating, right? He hadn't been that out of it, had he?
...Ah. Well, maybe he had. It was possible there were one or two things in there that he wouldn't have written with a clearer head.
He heard Lou's huff of breath. They were a few corridors away, voices ringing with the tinny echo of the opening lift. He heard the 'ping' of the doors. Lou said, "I have no intention of bringing out the Agent Program unless I have no other choice. You know I'm not in love with the idea of tampering with this technology. And I know how Diane feels about it, when the nanites' current state of stability in Jake's system is so much more than we had dared hope for. But the brass are keen to try it, and I do consider that it's better than the alternative - for Jake in particular. There may come a point when it's simply the best choice."
"Lou--" Kyle made some kind of gesture; his clothes rustled with the motion. Probably it was meant to indicate that they were nearing the lab where the guy with the super-senses was crashed out. It was kind of cool how everyone underestimated the nanite hearing, even here. Except when it meant Jake ended up hearing things that he'd really, really, really rather not.
He raised his head, senses limited once again to the confines of the lab. Diane was looking at him oddly and he thought he might have been clocked, but she didn't say anything as Lou and Kyle stalked through the door, looking kind of as though they'd stepped out of a Tarantino movie, purposeful and grim and like they were just done committing a whole bunch of violence. Jake would kill to look that cool walking into a room.
He wasn't sure whether Kyle's cast arm detracted from the effect or enhanced it. Jake sat up quickly, ignoring Diane's Glare of Death from the sidelines. "Hey, are you okay? They said you were caught in the blast, but not - man, I am so, so sorry..."
"Jake." The eyebrows went up in that way he'd long since learned meant, 'Jake, you're embarrassing yourself'. "I'm fine. Two dead civilians and the agent in ICU, not so much."
"We need to talk about realistic expectations in the field and what happens when you let James Bond movies determine your strategies," Lou said.
Jake groaned. "Is there any way that we can do this scene over, where this time I'm unconscious and we leave this till morning?" Two civilians dead was one more than earlier. How many more to follow? How many more had he let die? At least, he thought, Agent Cayman was still hanging in.
"We could," Lou said. "And I could ask Diane over there with the palm pilot that reads your vital signs if you were shamming like a weasel to avoid facing up to the fiasco that was your performance in the field today."
"Lou," Kyle said unhappily. She rolled her eyes, but something in them passed on a sort of permission. Kyle turned to Jake. "I'm not going to pretend it wasn't a mess, but for the record, I need you to keep in mind there are worse things than trying and failing."
"Not when you answer to my boss," Lou said.
***
He had a meet that evening with Sarah that had been set for weeks and, whatever her activities in the hours preceding it, they didn't include having her cellphone switched on. Otherwise there was no way Jake would have been pried out of his apartment again short of fire or Lou sending a heavily armed team of agents to his doorstep. Again. Well, maybe not the fire.
The bar Sarah had chosen was quiet and scruffy and a good way removed from the kind of place where he might expect her or her peers from work to hang out. That was probably the point. In fact, Jake supposed that Sarah would have probably made a great secret agent. Better than him, no doubt.
He pushed his way through the bar to join her where she was already ensconced at a table with a couple of beers. He was a little late, but she didn't look like she'd been waiting too long.
Spider-man, he told himself, never owned a gun... But then he's got webs to shoot at people, not to mention sticking to ceilings and the fact he can practically fly from rooftop to rooftop on those babies... Ohhhh, man, would flying be handy. I totally need to ask Diane for better nanites, 'cause I'm thinking I got the fuzzy end of the lollipop on the super powers stakes.
The more cynical side of his brain reminded him that even were it possible, stuff like that would've required of him something vaguely resembling co-ordination, and was he out of his freakin' mind?
"Are you all right?" Sarah waved a hand in front of his face, and laughed worriedly. "You looked a million miles away. I said your name three times."
"Uh. Sorry. Hi." He slid into the seat opposite her. If his conversational skills were going to max out at that level for the evening, he might as well have offended her so much she'd never speak to him again by standing her up and staying at home, asleep, with the end result much the same.
"Here." She placed the extra beer before him with a flourish. "The answer to all life's worries... you are all right? Jake - oh my God, what happened to your face?" The bruising was already fading, so he figured it a pretty good thing she hadn't seen it earlier. "Did someone do this to you?"
"What? No! No, no - nothing like - I just - I had an accident at work. I fell and landed... uh, I had kind of a lousy day today." He scrubbed his hands through his hair and tried not to flinch as his fingers caught a contusion on his scalp. There was only so much he could pass off to an innocent accident. At least his clothes covered up the rest of the damage.
"It really looks it." Sarah was all over him with a kind of doe-eyed sincerity that would've been really, really good any other time. She touched his wrist in concern and an electrical jolt - of pain - fizzed up through his arm to drive a spike through the centre of his skull. "Maybe you shouldn't be here, Jake. You look really grey."
Jake wholeheartedly agreed. "No. I wanted to come." He took the beer in both hands, weight supported in the left, because it rescued his wrist from Sarah.
"You wouldn't hide anything from me, would you? If you're in some kind of trouble, I know people, maybe I can help. Those look like knuckle-marks to me..."
"They do? Guess I missed my cue when I could've been telling you how you should've seen the other guy..." Jake laughed weakly. "Sarah, I'm fine. Come on, you know me. Am I really the kind of person that gets pounded on by some bunch of guys?"
She smiled a little wickedly, seeming finally to relax. "I don't know, you do work at the NSA now. For all I know, you could be an undercover spy with a license to kill."
License to screw up, more like, Jake thought, laughing heartily along with her.
"So, what have you been doing this week that didn't involve beating yourself up with the furniture?" Sarah continued. "Save the world from any evil geniuses? Take down any terrorist masterminds?" Her humour clouded slightly; she'd heard the news. Of course she had - half of DC could still see the last of the smoke plumes rising up on the air.
"Not today." And isn't that the truth? "I did apprehend a really nasty offline server."
"Oh yeah?" Sarah's eyes glittered with humour at the fantasy.
"Meanest critter I ever did see." Laughing, Jake drank down half of his beer in one go. His aches were starting to fade a little more into the background. Obviously the human contact - or just Sarah-contact - was doing him good.
"We should do this more often."
He almost choked on his beer. "You think?"
"Yeah. I hardly ever see anybody from college any more. You know how you lose contact and suddenly three years have gone by and you don't even know all your old friends anymore. I think that's sad."
Jake swallowed. "Keeping in touch is good."
He was hoping she'd continue in that vein in the more specific, but instead the conversation meandered around to gossip about her job and some satirical commentary on the aides in the office of an arch-rival that he'd have preferred to think Sarah a bit above, After maybe half an hour she stopped halfway through a sentence and said, "What did happen to you at work today, Jake? Seriously, I don't think you can have heard a word I've said. I think you're somewhere else entirely, tonight." She stared at him, a bit too keenly perceptive. "It was bad, wasn't it?"
"I--" With that look in her eyes, he didn't see much point in trying to lie. "Look, I can't really talk about it, you know? Not - not with details. But I screwed up at work. Really screwed up. And someone got hurt - people got hurt, and one of them was a friend of mine. I feel kind of crappy right now. I would've called - I didn't want you to see me like this - but..."
Sarah's stare had turned to surprise. Whatever she'd been expecting, this wasn't it. He felt awkward again all of a sudden.
"You screwed up at work... at the NSA... You mean on the NSA computers?"
Jake blinked, and tried for a desperate save. "Yeah. And do you know, you wouldn't think that stuff - computer stuff - could get people hurt. But information age and everything... I can't really talk about it. You see? Not outside work. And the guys inside work are all pissed at me, which makes things... sorta... difficult."
He'd dried up, but she was looking at him with sympathy. "You've told me enough. I know you're good at what you do - hey, you've fixed my Dread Machine enough times. You know this wasn't your fault, not in that way. Everyone makes mistakes, and I'm sure those assholes at the NSA know it too. On the inside at least. Don't let them get you down." She pushed both their drinks aside and stood up. "I've also seen enough tonight to know you should be at home, Jake. Let me call you a taxi. We can share."
"That's not--" His brain called the pause, and said to his libido, 'Oh yeah?' "--That sounds like a really good idea," he admitted.
Fuzzy-headed as Sarah led him to the taxi, he thought with some belligerence, 'This never happens to Spider-man.'
He seriously needed a new metaphor, 'cause Spider-man was a dork and this was still making him feel inadequate by comparison.
The events of the day had probably been only slightly less embarrassing than weaving his way to the door after Sarah delivered him to the deli, while she watched in concern from the cab.
He staggered upstairs and slumped face-first onto the bed and into the depths of a coma that even Lou and her NSA team, with their noisy black boots and automatic weapons, would have found impossible to drag him from.
Chapter 1 here.