The Best Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Jess Parker
Title:The Best Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Jess Parker
Word Count: 5021
Rating: K
Characters/Pairing: Jess/Becker, various other ARC characters
Warnings: None.
Spoilers: Post series 5.
Authors Notes: This is a secret santa for Pinkcat! Sorry it's so late in the day! Also, unbetaed, so all mistakes are my own.
When it happens, it happens fast.
Jess is still determinedly making her way into the building’s security cameras when there is high-pitched screaming coming through her comm, followed by several yells of ‘Becker’ and the sound of panic.
She feels quite intimately familiar with the sound of panic.
“Becker!” She demands, her feminine voice pitched even higher than usual. “What’s going on?” She asks again, uselessly, staring only at lines of code on her screen.
“He’s hurt, Jess,” Abby pants loudly in her ear. “We need emergency medical assistance.”
Her hands are shaking as she patches through to the medical bay and twists her chair around to face the other monitor, so that she can pick up their location. This is why they hired you, she tells herself firmly. Because you’re good in a crisis. Don’t let yourself down now.
“Urgent medical assistance required in the field,” Jess speaks again, probably startling all of the poor medical personnel. Normally she would announce herself or something, but the only two words she can think are ‘Becker’ and ‘hurt’. “I’ve programmed their location into your GPS.”
“Thanks, Miss Parker,” the chief of the medical wing spoke back to her after an instant. “We’re on our way.”
She wants to sit back in relief, like she would with any other teammate, because she has done all that she can do. Becker, with the help of the rest of the team, will have to hold out until the medical team get there. She learnt very early on that worrying needlessly was a waste of everybody’s time.
But she cannot recline in her comfy chair and continue tapping out code until she finds her way into the building’s security tape. Instead, she finds herself clutching her penguin-shaped stress ball far too hard to be healthy.
Snap out of it. She’s the best field coordinator in the UK, goddamnit. She won’t lose her cool because some co-worker she has a mild crush on has been injured in the field.
Who is she kidding? The world and his wife knows that her feelings for Becker are much stronger than just a mild crush.
“Jess?” A voice enquires from behind her, and she jumps what feels like a foot in the air. It shows how jumpy she is; Lester doesn’t usually have the power to surprise her so badly.
She inhales, fixes an appropriately sombre half-smile on her face and swivels around in her chair. “What can I do for you?” She asks sweetly.
His eyebrows crinkle in that way he has of showing his confusion. Damn. That had been far too polite. “Lester,” She prompts after a second, too quick to allow him to reply.
“What’s going on?” His eyes dart from one of her screens, where the video feed from the security tapes is now finally showing to the middle, where her GPS map is still up, to the end which is constantly running the algorithm Connor had written three years ago to detect anomalies.
“Becker’s injured,” she tries her best to say it as brusquely as possible, but all of the blunt deliveries in the world can’t stop her voice from breaking or hide how choked up she is.
She feels a rare, almost-comforting hand on her shoulder. James Lester has not got to where he is today (wherever that place may politically be) through ignorance of other people’s expressions. She allows herself to sniffle miserably for a second, and then straightens her spine and concentrates all her energy on field coordination.
“Abby?” She asks, checking the other woman is still communicable by comm. Her voice is disgustingly nasal and she thankfully takes the tissue which Lester offers her and blows noisily. “I have a visual on the creature… It’s on the second floor, fifth corridor…”
The first sign that Jess gets that the medics are back is when they crash through the doors and keep going, through into the next corridor.
It is not the most subtle of entrances, only enhanced by the stretcher which they are towing along with them. Two of Becker’s men are running behind the medics, followed by Lester who is striding uncomfortably quickly in his Italian leather shoes and neatly pressed shirt. She hurriedly gestures at one of the tech supports, who is always just wandering around, to take over and jogs after the procession herself.
Inevitably she and Lester fall behind. Middle-aged men wearing ties and young girls balancing on two-inch heels move at around the same pace, so they speed walk along the corridors and up the stairs together.
“Did you see him?” She demands of her boss as she shoves open another ‘Authorised Personnel Only’ door.
“Only a glimpse,” Lester replies and refuses to elaborate, causing the snakes writhing in Jess’s stomach to multiply.
Then finally they are at the medical bay and she pushes the door open urgently, only for it to bang against the opposite wall and rebound towards her, forcing her to break into a half-run to avoid its oncoming path. But that doesn’t matter, and nor does the fact that these shoes really weren’t designed for speed walking or how the sterile smell of the medical bay makes her want to throw up in the nearest rubbish bin.
All that matters is Hilary Becker. And she can’t even bring herself to chuckle at his first name like she always does, even half-heartedly.
He’s conscious, which she wasn’t really expecting. Conscious and batting weakly at the emergency staff’s hands as they begin to work on his injuries, which appear to be two deep cuts to his sort of stomach area. She hears lots of medical terms in that minute in which she is allowed to stand there gormlessly, watching five scrubbed-in doctors in action, like ‘lacerations’ and ‘high risk of sepsis’. But Becker gestures weakly at her and Lester, who is still standing beside her, and somebody manages to interpret that as a request to remove them from the vicinity.
“We need to minimise the potential exposure to bacteria,” the nurse explains sympathetically as she marches them towards the door. “Sorry!” She shrugs, not sounding at all apologetic as the door slams and locks automatically. The light beeps orange. Jess knows what that means, having studied every facet of the technology of the building. It means ‘Restricted Access’; but it is much more efficient than any obnoxious sign.
It means that she and Lester, if they were stupid enough to try and swipe their access cards, would be denied. But of course, all medical personnel are on the access list. Right down to the soldier trained in slightly more intensive first aid than everybody else in the field. But she is not. Nor is Lester. Or Abby. Or Connor. Or Becker himself, in fact.
And if he was on the outside, desperate to see any other injured teammate like they are now, that would actually matter.
Lester seems relieved. “It’s just a scratch,” he breathes out, tension visibly leaving his body while Jess knows it must still radiate from hers. “He’ll be fine.” Jess isn’t sure who he is speaking too, because his words seem to be having a much more cathartic effect on himself than they seem to be having on her.
She settles by the wall, fully intending on leaning there for a while until some kind nurse takes pity on her and lets her back in the medical bay. But her knees give out and she slides down the smooth painted wall. Lester only looks down at her.
Connor, she thinks, would have definitely sat down next to her. Abby, too. Matt… perhaps. But Lester, no, never. He wouldn’t dirty himself by sitting on the floor. He is a man of government, of dignity, a man of striped shirts and tie clips. He will not sit on the floor beside her (however clean the staff keep it) and wait.
She’s never proclaimed to be any sort of judge of character, good or bad, so she hopes to be surprised by her boss. But she isn’t, and he gives her a look instead. “There’s a kettle in the break room,” he says, but it is more of an order than a suggestion. “Some tea might settle your nerves.”
Jess notices that he does not offer to make the tea himself, or even accompany her there. It doesn’t matter - she isn’t going to be moving from this spot for a long time regardless.
There is a silence and she just stares at the patch of the floor to the left of his foot. She is a friendly, amicable person. He probably expects her to politely accept or decline. But she merely sits on the floor and does not say a word.
“Suit yourself,” he walks off.
Then she remembers that he is used to dealing with stubborn employees.
Time passes. Slowly, but it passes. Jess gets up, walks around to keep her circulation going. Connor drops by after an hour, shares a smile and a few words with Jess, peers through the glass (but Jess knows that he can’t see anything) and then leaves. He must have told Abby about the futility of visitation but she comes anyway, around lunchtime.
“Here,” she holds out what looks like a Panini or ciabatta (something in that family anyway) and Jess bites into it hungrily, tasting cheese and the distinct sweetness of caramelised onion. She hadn’t had time for breakfast that morning and was going to grab a coffee and pastry from the break room. But then the sequence of events which had led up to Becker being hurt had begun and she had gone without food.
Abby slides down the wall next to her, the first to do so, and out of politeness Jess offers her a bite of her lunch. “Thanks,” she says, shaking her head and producing her own. “Lester called me into his office,” she relates after a moment through a mouthful of bread. “He made awkward conversation for about thirty seconds before oh-so-subtly mentioning that you were down here and too stubborn to move.”
Jess swallows and suddenly her throat feels a lot drier than it did before.
“We’re all worried about him,” Abby says softly and pats Jess’s hand where it lies on her thigh. “I can take over the stake out.” Jess smiles, the two words abruptly bringing back memories of Chinese takeaway and spontaneous bomb disposal. “I’ll tell you the second there’s any news,” Abby reassures her. Jess bites her lip. If she refuses to leave, it’ll look suspicious. And Jess realises, from the suspect look in Abby’s eyes, that she is expecting Jess to be stubborn and stay, confirming Abby’s little guess about how she feels about Becker.
It is a lot of speculation and panic in five seconds, so Jess surpasses her own expectations when she gets to her feet. “Thanks for the Panini,” she smiles at Abby. Then the smile falls from her face as she looks through the clear glass of the window of the Medical bay door. “The second you hear anything?” Jess confirms, wheeling around to pin Abby with her stare.
“Right,” Abby nods, taking a slurp of takeaway coffee and wriggling into the ground like a dog. Her eyes shut and Jess remembers that the team have been out in the field all morning and must be exhausted. Abby is probably planning to catch a nap.
Every bone in Jess’s body is telling her to stay but she walks away, just about to push through the doors at the end of the corridors, when there is a voice. “Miss Parker?” It says inquisitively. Jess wheels around. The nurse that kicked she and Lester out earlier has poked her head out of the door and is looking with confusion at where Abby is sitting sleepily on the floor.
“Over here,” Jess calls attention to herself, hurrying back over to the medical bay doors.
“He’s out of danger,” she tells them both and Jess breathes a huge sigh of relief. She’s been actively trying to keep the lid on her overactive imagination, but somehow the possibilities had all formed silently in the back of her mind anyway. Knowing that he’ll be fine sends a huge, giddy rush throughout her body and Jess has to resist the urge to sit down on the spot.
“Would you like to see him?” The nurse enquires, and Jess looks at Abby, only to find the other girl looking right back at her expectantly.
Jess’s voice is thick as she replies. “Yes.” Yes. As if there was ever any doubt.
The cliché about people looking small in hospital beds is just evidently untrue, Jess muses as she and Abby pull up chairs next to Becker’s bedside. He still looks as bulky and manly as ever, just uncomfortable as hell with only a sheet to protect his modesty and his abdomen all bandaged up. Jess is somewhat grateful that he is unconscious, though the nurses tell her the sedation will only last so long before he wakes up and is in pain once more.
She doesn’t know what she wants to do. So, ignoring Abby beside her, she slowly reaches over to brush a lock of hair off of his face. His hair is lovely. She has always said so. And of course, the moment her fingers make contact with his skin, his eyes snap open.
She honest-to-God shrieks.
And of course, makes a fool of herself. She can’t help it around Becker. Her usual joviality seems to constantly backfire in his presence and she tumbles backward and falls right off her chair.
Bloody typical. Is it too much to hope for that one day she will be able to conduct herself with dignity and elegance in this particular man’s presence?
“What happened?” Becker asks as she sort-of crawls back on to the chair, face bright red. She follows his line of sight and he is asking Abby anyway, despite her being further away than Jess. Of course he would demand a recounting from reliable, calm, not-at-all foolish Abby.
A doctor bustles in, holding a chart, and answers Becker’s question for her. “Two deep lacerations from a raptor’s claw,” he replies, eyes darting up to the clock as he scrawls down a time. “As well as some haematoma around the torso from where you were knocked back. They’re going to take a good three weeks to heal, and even then we can’t even consider putting you back on active duty for at least four.”
“Dammit,” Becker lets out some rare frustration and hits the bed with a closed fist. “That’s right about Christmas.”
“Mm,” the doctor says, and Jess notices that he is neither interested nor listening particularly closely. “You’ll need someone to monitor you for the first three weeks once we discharge you.”
“I live alone,” Becker replies staunchly. “And I don’t require a babysitter.”
The doctor looks hesitant. “Well, we could allow you to stay at home by yourself… as long as somebody checked in on you at least twice a day.” He looked around at Abby and Jess. “A co-worker, perhaps?”
Even though she is determinately not looking at Abby, Jess feels the other woman’s eyes on her. “Sorry, Becker,” Abby says, sounding truly apologetic. “But with the wedding and moving into our new apartment and everything, Connor and I are swamped.”
Curse her. Or bless her, Jess isn’t sure which. Because now Jess will look like an A+ asshole if she doesn’t offer. “I could do it,” she suggests tentatively. “Your place is on the way to work anyway, I could always stop by on my way there and on my way home.”
Becker grunts, which Jess roughly interprets as oh, if you must. She knows it’s the closest thing to approval which she is going to get and takes it with a beaming smile.
The doctor nods his own agreement. “Great, that’s all sorted,” he scribbles once more on his clipboard. “We’ll be discharging him in a couple of days, Miss Parker. Now, can you follow my finger, please Captain…”
Week 1
Her alarm blares at her ridiculously early in the morning and for a second Jess thinks she must have forgotten to set it to the proper time, or something. But then she remembers; today is the first day of many where she will be ‘forced’ to stop by and check on an injured Captain Becker.
She wishes the only thought going through her mind wasn’t heehee.
She dresses unreasonably quickly and finds herself in the unique predicament of having accidently put on a mismatching skirt and blouse. Once that has been rectified, she scrambles herself some eggs at lightning-fast pace and chokes them down just as quickly.
Jess checks her watch just as she is poised to leave the house, and exhales. She is due at the ARC at 9am… it is only 06:45. Becker will think her absolutely crazy if she turns up at his apartment now.
Instead, she sits down on her couch, turns on the TV to watch the morning news and… waits. At 06:55, she decides to go for a run. At 07:02, she decides against it when she is knee deep in the back of her closet and still can’t find her running shoes.
At 07:06, she sits down at her computer and logs in to the online ARC server and begins to leisurely make her way through the medical staff’s firewalls. It’s not a particularly tasking job, and she munches on a second piece of toast while she types. After twenty minutes, she’s in and looking at the medical records for two days ago.
BECKER, Hilary. That’s one of three files that were amended on Tuesday, November 26th. She clicks into it with interest and scrolls all the way down to the medical section. Of course, she understands barely a word of what she’s reading, because it is all in medical code. Programming code she can crack just fine. Doctor abbreviations - not a damned chance.
Finally, she loses the battle with herself at half-past seven. She’s been standing by the door in her heels and coat for at least five minutes and no longer sees the point in waiting. Even if he thinks she’s a punctual weirdo, it’s better than just standing there and torturing herself.
Jess has never driven a car so fraught with tension, and been all alone before.
In an attempt to break it, she switches on the radio. Jingle bell rock. Not helpful in the slightest. Silence is golden.
She does fine (parallel parks coolly in front of Becker’s building, doesn’t catch her skirt in the door or trip as she gets out of the car) right up until she’s standing outside of Becker’s door. Then she hesitates.
Jingle bell rock playing on loop in her head isn’t doing much to help either.
Finally summoning all of the guts that got her through University, a year ahead of everybody else, she pressed the doorbell and heard it trill loudly on the inside of the apartment. She waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Nearly a minute. She was about to ring again when there was a grunt, the sound of a key in the lock, and then finally the door opened for her.
Jess wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting.
She’d been way too worried about herself and all the ways in which she might screw up when faced with Becker and his manly bachelor pad. But she hadn’t even thought of how a frustrated Becker would look on mandatory medical leave.
She remembered the one and only time she had seen him in civilian clothes before. In jeans and shrugging on a plaid shirt. This was similar, but Jess had already felt the gush of hot air from his flat and knew he must have the heating up high. That was one of the few explanations for his answering the door in a tank top and shorts and little else.
“Jess?” He asked in a confused sort of way, looking at her up and down. She wished it was much less analytical and much more sexual, but Christmas wishes are generally for children and usually are granted in December, not on November 28th.
“I’m checking in on you,” she explains brightly, gaze falling lower down his body to his abdomen, where she knew there to be two twin deep cuts. “How come you’re standing?”
Becker grunted in a pained sort of way and moved aside to let her enter his flat. “I wasn’t actually expecting you to turn up,” he admits ruefully as he moves over to the kettle, wincing.
“Let me,” Jess argues with him, switching it on herself. She can tell that Becker is normally a very neat and tidy person (another difference between the two of them), but even he has succumbed to the mess in a way. She can tell that he has set up a sort of nest around the sofa, where food, drink and entertainment are all immediately available.
So she puts the kettle on and makes them some tea, which they drink as they sit peacefully at his kitchen table.
“So you’re sure that you’re fine?” She double-checks as he helps her into her coat.
“Yes, Jessica,” and despite his staunch tone, she can tell that he is exasperated through the use of her full first name. So she leaves him in peace, stubbornly resolving to come back that afternoon and twice a day every day after that… right up until Christmas.
Knowing that he is in no immediate danger and yet that she is still somehow allowed to see him twice a day outside of work thrills her to no end.
Week 2
By the second week, he has gotten used to her coming and going. She can tell this because he always leaves out two coffee mugs and one morning even buys pastries for the two of them to share.
They have also progressed to actually speaking over their respective hot drinks. She finds out that he was trained at Sandhurst while he now knows that she was something of a child genius when she was younger and skipped ahead a year, something she is usually far too humble to admit to.
She also learns little things about him that make her stomach squirm. Like how sometimes when she uses his bathroom she sees what kind of shampoo he uses and even whether he keeps any spare toothbrushes for guests (he doesn’t - and also does not have a guest bedroom).
So one day when she comes over and he’s not in the house, she panics a little. Becker is far too considerate a man to leave her hanging.
Something must have happened, she worries.
The door lock is 100% ordinary, unlike the ones at the ARC, so there is no chance of her accessing the system and breaking it open with her mind rather than her fingers. She runs through a thousand possibilities, mostly stolen from James Bond films, and then decides that actually, there is a much easier way to get things done.
She calls the building manager and asks him to let her in, which he is all too happy to do once she shows him her ID. Everybody and their mother knows what the ARC is now. It’s what led to Becker getting hurt - trying to protect a civilian from a raptor.
He is not there, which Jess thinks is better than him being there but lying unconscious on the floor, so she sits tight on the sofa. She has already tried his mobile, twice, to no avail. As she sits there, the worry mounts up until she has no choice but to get up and start pacing his living room.
Then she hears a key click in the lock and Becker makes his way through the door, tugging along three large shopping bags. He catches sight of her just as he sets the bags down and his eyes widen perceptibly. “Jess!” He exclaims, running a hand through his hair. “I thought…”
“You thought I would have just left when I realised you weren’t in!” Jess exclaimed, striding over to where he was standing over the shopping bags and jabbing him in the torso, careful to poke as far away as possible from any injured areas of his body. “Well, I’m sorry Captain, but my job is to check in on you and make sure you’re not in any danger so yeah, when you didn’t answer the door I was bloody worried!” She ended her lecture yelling, not sure when she had gotten so loud and pushy.
“Jess,” he said her name like a caress and smiled down at her. “I’m fine.”
Week 3
She is so confused.
Admittedly not a particularly unusual trait for her. Give her a computer, GPS, anything with a circuit board, and she’s fine. People, not so great. She can banter with Lester, play the (slightly overenthusiastic) hostess to Abby and Connor, but in most social situations it is rare that she truly knows what to do or say.
If Jess needs advice about a guy, she usually goes to a girlfriend, but they’ve mostly fallen out of touch as Jess firstly became very secretive and then secondly very famous. So now the only girls who she really has to talk to are Abby or Emily.
Emily she likes, but it is Abby who she really feels comfortable with and who she knows will give her at least semi-sensible advice.
“Hey,” she greets quietly, finding her ex-roommate exactly where she thought that she would… in the menagerie. “I need some…” she hesitates, fast approaching the point of no return. “Advice.”
“About Becker?” Abby enquires, straightening up from where she was encouraging Sid (or Nancy, Jess can never tell the two apart) to eat some sort of leaf.
She flushes all the way from her cheeks down her chest. “Yeah,” she mumbles, uncharacteristically shy. Becker is by no means the first guy she’s ever been silly over, but he’s probably the most embarrassing.
“How are your medically compulsory visits going?” Abby cocks an eyebrow before leaning back down to Diictodon-level and resuming leaf-feeding.
Jess sits down on a nearby plastic-y chair. “They’re… going.”
“Yikes,” Abby mumbles, more to Sid/Nancy than Jess. “That doesn’t sound good.”
It’s then that Jess realises how much Abby is just humouring her and crosses her arms. “Has he spoke to you about this?” She demands of her friend, emulating the smart, competent field-coordinator which she always is on the job.
“No,” Abby replies and Jess honestly can’t tell if she’s being honest or not. The woman stands up and turns to face her, surprising her by clasping her hands in Abby’s own. “But everybody else has, Jess… there’s even an office pool, and I didn’t think those even happened outside of TV shows.”
Jess looks at her incredulously. “A pool?”
Abby smiles a little guiltily. “We were thinking of organising a surprise Christmas party for Becker, just before he has to go back to work.”
She’s often confused, yes, but now the mind which got her into University a year early is whizzing at top speed.
Week 4
Christmas is fast approaching and Jess faces yet another problem.
Presents are never an easy or a pleasant task. Often she gets into a habit. For instance, for her sister’s sixteenth birthday she had bought her a charm bracelet and every birthday and Christmas she gets another charm. That makes her easy, and her parents are usually contented with a nice bottle of wine.
Connor’s present she finds in a comic book store down a dubious-looking street. Abby’s she buys after a lengthy browsing session on Amazon. Lester and Matt both pose their problems, but she eventually gives in and just buys some impersonal toiletries, knowing they’ll probably be stuffed in a bathroom cabinet never to be seen again.
Finally, in the week before Christmas, she just has Emily and Becker left to find things for. She’s unsure which concerns her more - the man she has a scarily large crush on or the woman who does not understand how anything in this century works.
The night of the party is set for Christmas Eve. And it comes up fast, much faster than Jess was expecting. In fact, she sits in Starbucks at eleven am, still without a Christmas present for Becker or Emily.
The shops are crazy, not that Jess was expecting anything less, and if she wasn’t so panicky about not finding presents she’d probably give up and go home.
But she persists and she finds the presents.
Then… there is the party.
She arrives with a bottle of wine at seven on the dot, wearing her most floral dress and sporting three-inch heels.
Becker answers the door and looks her up and down suspiciously. “Did I forget about something?” He asks, frowning at her state of dress and Jess’s heart sinks right down into her stomach.
“Didn’t-“ she shakes her head. “Abby tricked -“
“Excuse me!” Abby pops up behind Becker, holding a glass of her own and beaming at Jess. “I did no such thing.” She swats Becker on the arm.
“I’m just joking with you Jess,” her Captain grins and gives her a one-arm hug. Jess feels her heart flutter a little in her chest.
She hands him the bottle of wine and enters his flat like she is so accustomed to doing now. Lester, Matt and Emily turn up shortly after, somebody calls the pizza takeaway place and soon the seven of them are eating happily away on Becker’s sofa.
Jess looks over at Becker and catches his eye. Perhaps she is not brave enough to confront him about it and perhaps he is too awkward or noble to talk to her properly. But Jess has a funny little premonition that next Christmas, when the night ends, she won’t have to go home with everybody else.
She smiles. So does he.
Word Count: 5021
Rating: K
Characters/Pairing: Jess/Becker, various other ARC characters
Warnings: None.
Spoilers: Post series 5.
Authors Notes: This is a secret santa for Pinkcat! Sorry it's so late in the day! Also, unbetaed, so all mistakes are my own.
When it happens, it happens fast.
Jess is still determinedly making her way into the building’s security cameras when there is high-pitched screaming coming through her comm, followed by several yells of ‘Becker’ and the sound of panic.
She feels quite intimately familiar with the sound of panic.
“Becker!” She demands, her feminine voice pitched even higher than usual. “What’s going on?” She asks again, uselessly, staring only at lines of code on her screen.
“He’s hurt, Jess,” Abby pants loudly in her ear. “We need emergency medical assistance.”
Her hands are shaking as she patches through to the medical bay and twists her chair around to face the other monitor, so that she can pick up their location. This is why they hired you, she tells herself firmly. Because you’re good in a crisis. Don’t let yourself down now.
“Urgent medical assistance required in the field,” Jess speaks again, probably startling all of the poor medical personnel. Normally she would announce herself or something, but the only two words she can think are ‘Becker’ and ‘hurt’. “I’ve programmed their location into your GPS.”
“Thanks, Miss Parker,” the chief of the medical wing spoke back to her after an instant. “We’re on our way.”
She wants to sit back in relief, like she would with any other teammate, because she has done all that she can do. Becker, with the help of the rest of the team, will have to hold out until the medical team get there. She learnt very early on that worrying needlessly was a waste of everybody’s time.
But she cannot recline in her comfy chair and continue tapping out code until she finds her way into the building’s security tape. Instead, she finds herself clutching her penguin-shaped stress ball far too hard to be healthy.
Snap out of it. She’s the best field coordinator in the UK, goddamnit. She won’t lose her cool because some co-worker she has a mild crush on has been injured in the field.
Who is she kidding? The world and his wife knows that her feelings for Becker are much stronger than just a mild crush.
“Jess?” A voice enquires from behind her, and she jumps what feels like a foot in the air. It shows how jumpy she is; Lester doesn’t usually have the power to surprise her so badly.
She inhales, fixes an appropriately sombre half-smile on her face and swivels around in her chair. “What can I do for you?” She asks sweetly.
His eyebrows crinkle in that way he has of showing his confusion. Damn. That had been far too polite. “Lester,” She prompts after a second, too quick to allow him to reply.
“What’s going on?” His eyes dart from one of her screens, where the video feed from the security tapes is now finally showing to the middle, where her GPS map is still up, to the end which is constantly running the algorithm Connor had written three years ago to detect anomalies.
“Becker’s injured,” she tries her best to say it as brusquely as possible, but all of the blunt deliveries in the world can’t stop her voice from breaking or hide how choked up she is.
She feels a rare, almost-comforting hand on her shoulder. James Lester has not got to where he is today (wherever that place may politically be) through ignorance of other people’s expressions. She allows herself to sniffle miserably for a second, and then straightens her spine and concentrates all her energy on field coordination.
“Abby?” She asks, checking the other woman is still communicable by comm. Her voice is disgustingly nasal and she thankfully takes the tissue which Lester offers her and blows noisily. “I have a visual on the creature… It’s on the second floor, fifth corridor…”
The first sign that Jess gets that the medics are back is when they crash through the doors and keep going, through into the next corridor.
It is not the most subtle of entrances, only enhanced by the stretcher which they are towing along with them. Two of Becker’s men are running behind the medics, followed by Lester who is striding uncomfortably quickly in his Italian leather shoes and neatly pressed shirt. She hurriedly gestures at one of the tech supports, who is always just wandering around, to take over and jogs after the procession herself.
Inevitably she and Lester fall behind. Middle-aged men wearing ties and young girls balancing on two-inch heels move at around the same pace, so they speed walk along the corridors and up the stairs together.
“Did you see him?” She demands of her boss as she shoves open another ‘Authorised Personnel Only’ door.
“Only a glimpse,” Lester replies and refuses to elaborate, causing the snakes writhing in Jess’s stomach to multiply.
Then finally they are at the medical bay and she pushes the door open urgently, only for it to bang against the opposite wall and rebound towards her, forcing her to break into a half-run to avoid its oncoming path. But that doesn’t matter, and nor does the fact that these shoes really weren’t designed for speed walking or how the sterile smell of the medical bay makes her want to throw up in the nearest rubbish bin.
All that matters is Hilary Becker. And she can’t even bring herself to chuckle at his first name like she always does, even half-heartedly.
He’s conscious, which she wasn’t really expecting. Conscious and batting weakly at the emergency staff’s hands as they begin to work on his injuries, which appear to be two deep cuts to his sort of stomach area. She hears lots of medical terms in that minute in which she is allowed to stand there gormlessly, watching five scrubbed-in doctors in action, like ‘lacerations’ and ‘high risk of sepsis’. But Becker gestures weakly at her and Lester, who is still standing beside her, and somebody manages to interpret that as a request to remove them from the vicinity.
“We need to minimise the potential exposure to bacteria,” the nurse explains sympathetically as she marches them towards the door. “Sorry!” She shrugs, not sounding at all apologetic as the door slams and locks automatically. The light beeps orange. Jess knows what that means, having studied every facet of the technology of the building. It means ‘Restricted Access’; but it is much more efficient than any obnoxious sign.
It means that she and Lester, if they were stupid enough to try and swipe their access cards, would be denied. But of course, all medical personnel are on the access list. Right down to the soldier trained in slightly more intensive first aid than everybody else in the field. But she is not. Nor is Lester. Or Abby. Or Connor. Or Becker himself, in fact.
And if he was on the outside, desperate to see any other injured teammate like they are now, that would actually matter.
Lester seems relieved. “It’s just a scratch,” he breathes out, tension visibly leaving his body while Jess knows it must still radiate from hers. “He’ll be fine.” Jess isn’t sure who he is speaking too, because his words seem to be having a much more cathartic effect on himself than they seem to be having on her.
She settles by the wall, fully intending on leaning there for a while until some kind nurse takes pity on her and lets her back in the medical bay. But her knees give out and she slides down the smooth painted wall. Lester only looks down at her.
Connor, she thinks, would have definitely sat down next to her. Abby, too. Matt… perhaps. But Lester, no, never. He wouldn’t dirty himself by sitting on the floor. He is a man of government, of dignity, a man of striped shirts and tie clips. He will not sit on the floor beside her (however clean the staff keep it) and wait.
She’s never proclaimed to be any sort of judge of character, good or bad, so she hopes to be surprised by her boss. But she isn’t, and he gives her a look instead. “There’s a kettle in the break room,” he says, but it is more of an order than a suggestion. “Some tea might settle your nerves.”
Jess notices that he does not offer to make the tea himself, or even accompany her there. It doesn’t matter - she isn’t going to be moving from this spot for a long time regardless.
There is a silence and she just stares at the patch of the floor to the left of his foot. She is a friendly, amicable person. He probably expects her to politely accept or decline. But she merely sits on the floor and does not say a word.
“Suit yourself,” he walks off.
Then she remembers that he is used to dealing with stubborn employees.
Time passes. Slowly, but it passes. Jess gets up, walks around to keep her circulation going. Connor drops by after an hour, shares a smile and a few words with Jess, peers through the glass (but Jess knows that he can’t see anything) and then leaves. He must have told Abby about the futility of visitation but she comes anyway, around lunchtime.
“Here,” she holds out what looks like a Panini or ciabatta (something in that family anyway) and Jess bites into it hungrily, tasting cheese and the distinct sweetness of caramelised onion. She hadn’t had time for breakfast that morning and was going to grab a coffee and pastry from the break room. But then the sequence of events which had led up to Becker being hurt had begun and she had gone without food.
Abby slides down the wall next to her, the first to do so, and out of politeness Jess offers her a bite of her lunch. “Thanks,” she says, shaking her head and producing her own. “Lester called me into his office,” she relates after a moment through a mouthful of bread. “He made awkward conversation for about thirty seconds before oh-so-subtly mentioning that you were down here and too stubborn to move.”
Jess swallows and suddenly her throat feels a lot drier than it did before.
“We’re all worried about him,” Abby says softly and pats Jess’s hand where it lies on her thigh. “I can take over the stake out.” Jess smiles, the two words abruptly bringing back memories of Chinese takeaway and spontaneous bomb disposal. “I’ll tell you the second there’s any news,” Abby reassures her. Jess bites her lip. If she refuses to leave, it’ll look suspicious. And Jess realises, from the suspect look in Abby’s eyes, that she is expecting Jess to be stubborn and stay, confirming Abby’s little guess about how she feels about Becker.
It is a lot of speculation and panic in five seconds, so Jess surpasses her own expectations when she gets to her feet. “Thanks for the Panini,” she smiles at Abby. Then the smile falls from her face as she looks through the clear glass of the window of the Medical bay door. “The second you hear anything?” Jess confirms, wheeling around to pin Abby with her stare.
“Right,” Abby nods, taking a slurp of takeaway coffee and wriggling into the ground like a dog. Her eyes shut and Jess remembers that the team have been out in the field all morning and must be exhausted. Abby is probably planning to catch a nap.
Every bone in Jess’s body is telling her to stay but she walks away, just about to push through the doors at the end of the corridors, when there is a voice. “Miss Parker?” It says inquisitively. Jess wheels around. The nurse that kicked she and Lester out earlier has poked her head out of the door and is looking with confusion at where Abby is sitting sleepily on the floor.
“Over here,” Jess calls attention to herself, hurrying back over to the medical bay doors.
“He’s out of danger,” she tells them both and Jess breathes a huge sigh of relief. She’s been actively trying to keep the lid on her overactive imagination, but somehow the possibilities had all formed silently in the back of her mind anyway. Knowing that he’ll be fine sends a huge, giddy rush throughout her body and Jess has to resist the urge to sit down on the spot.
“Would you like to see him?” The nurse enquires, and Jess looks at Abby, only to find the other girl looking right back at her expectantly.
Jess’s voice is thick as she replies. “Yes.” Yes. As if there was ever any doubt.
The cliché about people looking small in hospital beds is just evidently untrue, Jess muses as she and Abby pull up chairs next to Becker’s bedside. He still looks as bulky and manly as ever, just uncomfortable as hell with only a sheet to protect his modesty and his abdomen all bandaged up. Jess is somewhat grateful that he is unconscious, though the nurses tell her the sedation will only last so long before he wakes up and is in pain once more.
She doesn’t know what she wants to do. So, ignoring Abby beside her, she slowly reaches over to brush a lock of hair off of his face. His hair is lovely. She has always said so. And of course, the moment her fingers make contact with his skin, his eyes snap open.
She honest-to-God shrieks.
And of course, makes a fool of herself. She can’t help it around Becker. Her usual joviality seems to constantly backfire in his presence and she tumbles backward and falls right off her chair.
Bloody typical. Is it too much to hope for that one day she will be able to conduct herself with dignity and elegance in this particular man’s presence?
“What happened?” Becker asks as she sort-of crawls back on to the chair, face bright red. She follows his line of sight and he is asking Abby anyway, despite her being further away than Jess. Of course he would demand a recounting from reliable, calm, not-at-all foolish Abby.
A doctor bustles in, holding a chart, and answers Becker’s question for her. “Two deep lacerations from a raptor’s claw,” he replies, eyes darting up to the clock as he scrawls down a time. “As well as some haematoma around the torso from where you were knocked back. They’re going to take a good three weeks to heal, and even then we can’t even consider putting you back on active duty for at least four.”
“Dammit,” Becker lets out some rare frustration and hits the bed with a closed fist. “That’s right about Christmas.”
“Mm,” the doctor says, and Jess notices that he is neither interested nor listening particularly closely. “You’ll need someone to monitor you for the first three weeks once we discharge you.”
“I live alone,” Becker replies staunchly. “And I don’t require a babysitter.”
The doctor looks hesitant. “Well, we could allow you to stay at home by yourself… as long as somebody checked in on you at least twice a day.” He looked around at Abby and Jess. “A co-worker, perhaps?”
Even though she is determinately not looking at Abby, Jess feels the other woman’s eyes on her. “Sorry, Becker,” Abby says, sounding truly apologetic. “But with the wedding and moving into our new apartment and everything, Connor and I are swamped.”
Curse her. Or bless her, Jess isn’t sure which. Because now Jess will look like an A+ asshole if she doesn’t offer. “I could do it,” she suggests tentatively. “Your place is on the way to work anyway, I could always stop by on my way there and on my way home.”
Becker grunts, which Jess roughly interprets as oh, if you must. She knows it’s the closest thing to approval which she is going to get and takes it with a beaming smile.
The doctor nods his own agreement. “Great, that’s all sorted,” he scribbles once more on his clipboard. “We’ll be discharging him in a couple of days, Miss Parker. Now, can you follow my finger, please Captain…”
Week 1
Her alarm blares at her ridiculously early in the morning and for a second Jess thinks she must have forgotten to set it to the proper time, or something. But then she remembers; today is the first day of many where she will be ‘forced’ to stop by and check on an injured Captain Becker.
She wishes the only thought going through her mind wasn’t heehee.
She dresses unreasonably quickly and finds herself in the unique predicament of having accidently put on a mismatching skirt and blouse. Once that has been rectified, she scrambles herself some eggs at lightning-fast pace and chokes them down just as quickly.
Jess checks her watch just as she is poised to leave the house, and exhales. She is due at the ARC at 9am… it is only 06:45. Becker will think her absolutely crazy if she turns up at his apartment now.
Instead, she sits down on her couch, turns on the TV to watch the morning news and… waits. At 06:55, she decides to go for a run. At 07:02, she decides against it when she is knee deep in the back of her closet and still can’t find her running shoes.
At 07:06, she sits down at her computer and logs in to the online ARC server and begins to leisurely make her way through the medical staff’s firewalls. It’s not a particularly tasking job, and she munches on a second piece of toast while she types. After twenty minutes, she’s in and looking at the medical records for two days ago.
BECKER, Hilary. That’s one of three files that were amended on Tuesday, November 26th. She clicks into it with interest and scrolls all the way down to the medical section. Of course, she understands barely a word of what she’s reading, because it is all in medical code. Programming code she can crack just fine. Doctor abbreviations - not a damned chance.
Finally, she loses the battle with herself at half-past seven. She’s been standing by the door in her heels and coat for at least five minutes and no longer sees the point in waiting. Even if he thinks she’s a punctual weirdo, it’s better than just standing there and torturing herself.
Jess has never driven a car so fraught with tension, and been all alone before.
In an attempt to break it, she switches on the radio. Jingle bell rock. Not helpful in the slightest. Silence is golden.
She does fine (parallel parks coolly in front of Becker’s building, doesn’t catch her skirt in the door or trip as she gets out of the car) right up until she’s standing outside of Becker’s door. Then she hesitates.
Jingle bell rock playing on loop in her head isn’t doing much to help either.
Finally summoning all of the guts that got her through University, a year ahead of everybody else, she pressed the doorbell and heard it trill loudly on the inside of the apartment. She waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Nearly a minute. She was about to ring again when there was a grunt, the sound of a key in the lock, and then finally the door opened for her.
Jess wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting.
She’d been way too worried about herself and all the ways in which she might screw up when faced with Becker and his manly bachelor pad. But she hadn’t even thought of how a frustrated Becker would look on mandatory medical leave.
She remembered the one and only time she had seen him in civilian clothes before. In jeans and shrugging on a plaid shirt. This was similar, but Jess had already felt the gush of hot air from his flat and knew he must have the heating up high. That was one of the few explanations for his answering the door in a tank top and shorts and little else.
“Jess?” He asked in a confused sort of way, looking at her up and down. She wished it was much less analytical and much more sexual, but Christmas wishes are generally for children and usually are granted in December, not on November 28th.
“I’m checking in on you,” she explains brightly, gaze falling lower down his body to his abdomen, where she knew there to be two twin deep cuts. “How come you’re standing?”
Becker grunted in a pained sort of way and moved aside to let her enter his flat. “I wasn’t actually expecting you to turn up,” he admits ruefully as he moves over to the kettle, wincing.
“Let me,” Jess argues with him, switching it on herself. She can tell that Becker is normally a very neat and tidy person (another difference between the two of them), but even he has succumbed to the mess in a way. She can tell that he has set up a sort of nest around the sofa, where food, drink and entertainment are all immediately available.
So she puts the kettle on and makes them some tea, which they drink as they sit peacefully at his kitchen table.
“So you’re sure that you’re fine?” She double-checks as he helps her into her coat.
“Yes, Jessica,” and despite his staunch tone, she can tell that he is exasperated through the use of her full first name. So she leaves him in peace, stubbornly resolving to come back that afternoon and twice a day every day after that… right up until Christmas.
Knowing that he is in no immediate danger and yet that she is still somehow allowed to see him twice a day outside of work thrills her to no end.
Week 2
By the second week, he has gotten used to her coming and going. She can tell this because he always leaves out two coffee mugs and one morning even buys pastries for the two of them to share.
They have also progressed to actually speaking over their respective hot drinks. She finds out that he was trained at Sandhurst while he now knows that she was something of a child genius when she was younger and skipped ahead a year, something she is usually far too humble to admit to.
She also learns little things about him that make her stomach squirm. Like how sometimes when she uses his bathroom she sees what kind of shampoo he uses and even whether he keeps any spare toothbrushes for guests (he doesn’t - and also does not have a guest bedroom).
So one day when she comes over and he’s not in the house, she panics a little. Becker is far too considerate a man to leave her hanging.
Something must have happened, she worries.
The door lock is 100% ordinary, unlike the ones at the ARC, so there is no chance of her accessing the system and breaking it open with her mind rather than her fingers. She runs through a thousand possibilities, mostly stolen from James Bond films, and then decides that actually, there is a much easier way to get things done.
She calls the building manager and asks him to let her in, which he is all too happy to do once she shows him her ID. Everybody and their mother knows what the ARC is now. It’s what led to Becker getting hurt - trying to protect a civilian from a raptor.
He is not there, which Jess thinks is better than him being there but lying unconscious on the floor, so she sits tight on the sofa. She has already tried his mobile, twice, to no avail. As she sits there, the worry mounts up until she has no choice but to get up and start pacing his living room.
Then she hears a key click in the lock and Becker makes his way through the door, tugging along three large shopping bags. He catches sight of her just as he sets the bags down and his eyes widen perceptibly. “Jess!” He exclaims, running a hand through his hair. “I thought…”
“You thought I would have just left when I realised you weren’t in!” Jess exclaimed, striding over to where he was standing over the shopping bags and jabbing him in the torso, careful to poke as far away as possible from any injured areas of his body. “Well, I’m sorry Captain, but my job is to check in on you and make sure you’re not in any danger so yeah, when you didn’t answer the door I was bloody worried!” She ended her lecture yelling, not sure when she had gotten so loud and pushy.
“Jess,” he said her name like a caress and smiled down at her. “I’m fine.”
Week 3
She is so confused.
Admittedly not a particularly unusual trait for her. Give her a computer, GPS, anything with a circuit board, and she’s fine. People, not so great. She can banter with Lester, play the (slightly overenthusiastic) hostess to Abby and Connor, but in most social situations it is rare that she truly knows what to do or say.
If Jess needs advice about a guy, she usually goes to a girlfriend, but they’ve mostly fallen out of touch as Jess firstly became very secretive and then secondly very famous. So now the only girls who she really has to talk to are Abby or Emily.
Emily she likes, but it is Abby who she really feels comfortable with and who she knows will give her at least semi-sensible advice.
“Hey,” she greets quietly, finding her ex-roommate exactly where she thought that she would… in the menagerie. “I need some…” she hesitates, fast approaching the point of no return. “Advice.”
“About Becker?” Abby enquires, straightening up from where she was encouraging Sid (or Nancy, Jess can never tell the two apart) to eat some sort of leaf.
She flushes all the way from her cheeks down her chest. “Yeah,” she mumbles, uncharacteristically shy. Becker is by no means the first guy she’s ever been silly over, but he’s probably the most embarrassing.
“How are your medically compulsory visits going?” Abby cocks an eyebrow before leaning back down to Diictodon-level and resuming leaf-feeding.
Jess sits down on a nearby plastic-y chair. “They’re… going.”
“Yikes,” Abby mumbles, more to Sid/Nancy than Jess. “That doesn’t sound good.”
It’s then that Jess realises how much Abby is just humouring her and crosses her arms. “Has he spoke to you about this?” She demands of her friend, emulating the smart, competent field-coordinator which she always is on the job.
“No,” Abby replies and Jess honestly can’t tell if she’s being honest or not. The woman stands up and turns to face her, surprising her by clasping her hands in Abby’s own. “But everybody else has, Jess… there’s even an office pool, and I didn’t think those even happened outside of TV shows.”
Jess looks at her incredulously. “A pool?”
Abby smiles a little guiltily. “We were thinking of organising a surprise Christmas party for Becker, just before he has to go back to work.”
She’s often confused, yes, but now the mind which got her into University a year early is whizzing at top speed.
Week 4
Christmas is fast approaching and Jess faces yet another problem.
Presents are never an easy or a pleasant task. Often she gets into a habit. For instance, for her sister’s sixteenth birthday she had bought her a charm bracelet and every birthday and Christmas she gets another charm. That makes her easy, and her parents are usually contented with a nice bottle of wine.
Connor’s present she finds in a comic book store down a dubious-looking street. Abby’s she buys after a lengthy browsing session on Amazon. Lester and Matt both pose their problems, but she eventually gives in and just buys some impersonal toiletries, knowing they’ll probably be stuffed in a bathroom cabinet never to be seen again.
Finally, in the week before Christmas, she just has Emily and Becker left to find things for. She’s unsure which concerns her more - the man she has a scarily large crush on or the woman who does not understand how anything in this century works.
The night of the party is set for Christmas Eve. And it comes up fast, much faster than Jess was expecting. In fact, she sits in Starbucks at eleven am, still without a Christmas present for Becker or Emily.
The shops are crazy, not that Jess was expecting anything less, and if she wasn’t so panicky about not finding presents she’d probably give up and go home.
But she persists and she finds the presents.
Then… there is the party.
She arrives with a bottle of wine at seven on the dot, wearing her most floral dress and sporting three-inch heels.
Becker answers the door and looks her up and down suspiciously. “Did I forget about something?” He asks, frowning at her state of dress and Jess’s heart sinks right down into her stomach.
“Didn’t-“ she shakes her head. “Abby tricked -“
“Excuse me!” Abby pops up behind Becker, holding a glass of her own and beaming at Jess. “I did no such thing.” She swats Becker on the arm.
“I’m just joking with you Jess,” her Captain grins and gives her a one-arm hug. Jess feels her heart flutter a little in her chest.
She hands him the bottle of wine and enters his flat like she is so accustomed to doing now. Lester, Matt and Emily turn up shortly after, somebody calls the pizza takeaway place and soon the seven of them are eating happily away on Becker’s sofa.
Jess looks over at Becker and catches his eye. Perhaps she is not brave enough to confront him about it and perhaps he is too awkward or noble to talk to her properly. But Jess has a funny little premonition that next Christmas, when the night ends, she won’t have to go home with everybody else.
She smiles. So does he.