Title:  Requiem

Author: Eva Parker

Rating: PG

Disclaimer:  They’re not mine.  You know who they belong to.  Here’s hoping I did it right, anyway.


                                                                 ---

  She rested her hand on the door handle.  It was cool against her palm, and the light within the building glowed warm, something to nestle up to.  A man in a smock worked busily inside, making a cup of java that, at the moment, looked like a little slice of heaven.
  With its own, personal guardian angel and more freaking baggage than an airport luggage claim. Why had she come? she asked herself for the hundredth time.  Anyone with sense would’ve turned tail and run.  Actually, anyone with sense would never have risked her hard-won directorship for a quarry she’d stopped hunting many years ago.
   And, she was certain, anyone with half a brain would not be feeling the tempest of emotions that threatened to drown her now.  Her breath caught in her throat.  She leaned against the chill glass door and let the autumn wind whip her brown hair, now streaked with gray, across her face.  She closed her eyes and breathed, trying to return her attention to the outside world rather than her inner self.  And failing miserably, as usual.  She felt like she was thirty-six again.  Hell’s bells, she felt like she was nine.
   She recalled the chain of events that had brought her to this meeting.  Or, rather, the event. 
   The letter.
  She sat in her office, on a brand new, luxurious black leather chair which did nothing for the damned arthritis—you’d think a doctor would have come up with a cure for that by now—but conveyed the kind of power which glowed around the rest of the corporation.  The office had changed a lot in the last fourteen years; the desk was glass and polished steel, in the style of the times, and the console was nothing but a small and wireless module that looked like a dish turned over.  It was a few years ahead of the times; soon every CEO and director in the world would have one.
   There were a few personal touches:  a family photograph sat on the far edge of the desk, where a younger Mr. Parker held a smiling blonde woman around the waist—his second wife—his other hand on the shoulder of his fair-haired and powerful son, his dark-eyed and serious young daughter drawn away, her arms crossed over her chest, the beautiful, ominous Centre façade rising above them.  But she, the daughter, was smiling.  It had been a good day.  A rare moment of love between the Parkers, a rarer moment of intimacy.
   So many years ago.  So many in that photograph dead or dying.  The thought didn’t upset her.  It had been a long time, a half-dozen years, longer, since she’d last looked at that photograph and cried, and even then, those tears had been of catharsis and release.  She’d grown plenty of scars in the right places.
  The second photo on the desk was an even older one.  A beautiful woman clutched her child to her chest, her smile one of pure joy, her sparkling eyes all for her infant daughter.  She looked so much like the serious and clipped daughter in the first picture that it was hard to believe that they were different people—and, she guessed, not so difficult, now that her daughter had made it to fifth decade.  Catherine Parker hadn’t lived that long.  There were smudges on the glass where she’d touched her mother’s face.  A corner was wrinkled and the colors warped, where she’d spilled gun oil on the last day of her search for Jarod, but the picture was salvageable.
   Salvageable.  As she had been, surprisingly, after that day.
   The third and last picture sat on a small table where she kept the gin.  She’d found it convenient to have hard liquor available in this job, and though she’d only dipped into the crystal decanter a few times, they had been times when she really needed it.  Besides, if worse came to worst, she decided, she could always use it to sterilize a gunshot wound.  She rarely looked at the third photograph at all.  It was black-and-white.  It was a photograph of a thirteen-year-old boy in blue Centre scrubs, and it was almost as old as the picture of her mother.
   Oh, and there were the school pictures of Nathan in her top desk drawer.  Her nephew.  The only good thing Lyle had ever created before she shot him with her own gun.  Even then, he hadn’t known about Nate, not until he died.  Parker thought little Nathan had been damned lucky never to meet his father.  She’d known for years, courtesy of the brown-eyed little lab monkey that was the boy in her photo.  One of her first acts in her newfound position was to ship Nate and his mother to Cincinnati, where they would never get involved and her contacts could watch over them discreetly.  Nate would not grow up with this life.
  Though, she guessed, this life wasn’t that sorry of an excuse for one.
   And, of course, there was the polished and rather old-fashioned nametag on her desk.  She’d forgone Director, for the position underneath her name.  All that had been necessary was Tsarina, a small joke that still gave her a thrill.  She also kept a reserve weapon in her bottom desk drawer, with the oil, and the extra clips, and the first aid kit.  A 9mm nickel-plated monstrosity.  She much preferred the Smith and Wesson holstered at the small of her back, but in a crisis, Parker believed, a gun is a gun.
  She thought about none of that now.  Her office was home, and she took it entirely for granted.  What occupied her full attention was the unopened letter in her hand.  Hardly anyone sent letters anymore, which was a shame—the dying postal service had become one of the most secure ways to communicate, because no one paid attention to it anymore. Even the sweeper who’d slipped it across her desk, a round-faced kid called William…or was it Warren?…had stared at it in befuddlement.

She’d known who it was from the moment her eyes alighted on the neat capital letters on the envelope.  Formal, formal, she’d chirruped in her head.  Miss Parker, Director, The Centre, Post Office Box #1672, Blue Cove, Delaware, the envelope read.
   It had been almost fourteen years…
  Fourteen years since the day that had changed her life.  The day she finally had him in her clutches, back to his place in the Centre—and fourteen years since she’d let him go.  Fourteen years since he’d contacted anyone at the Centre, even Sydney.  So long, since anyone had seen him at all.
   Fourteen years during which she’d built a whole life for herself, one that didn’t factor in an experiment running away from the corporation from Hell.
   And then, he sends her a letter.  He knows her title.
   Pretender, experiment, lab rat, fugitive.  Jarod.  Call him what you will, the little bastard always caught up with you eventually.  But even as she thought the words, she couldn’t say them in her head without a touch of playfulness.  That, at least, hadn’t faded.  She’d chased him with a ferocity that stemmed from her life as a Parker and her early, early career as a cleaner.  She’d released him from her life, not to mention the prison of the chase—for both of them—when she was thirty-six. 
She had forgotten him easily enough, in the flurry of work and politics and maneuvering, seeing him only in those rare moments when everything was done and the night was clear, and the windows were open, breathing warm, Blue Cove summer air into her office, and she closed her eyes, and was at peace.  Then, she didn’t feel wounds, didn’t feel the ache or the deep, fluctuating, passionate emotions that had threatened to drown her when she was a young woman.  She just felt content.
She could remember Jarod then.  The sound of his laughter.  The feeling of his small, light hand on her arm, when they were both children.
  How his brown eyes glistened with despair when she’d looked down the barrel of her gun at him for the last time.
  Hell, maybe she’d loved him.  Once.  Maybe she’d even loved him then, when she sighted slow and prepared to shoot him, if it came to that.  Now… she was familiar enough with his mind to call her, in some twisted and bizarre way, a friend.  No, they had never had a moment of companionship after they’d both grown.  Jarod played mind games and she hunted him down, and neither effort had more than a touch of fun in it. They were comrades-at-arms, two strangers who were too tired from the battle to hate each other, to familiar with each other’s psyches to make words much of an issue.
  And that had been more than a dozen years ago.  She wasn’t that woman anymore.  Lyle, Raines, her mother, the ghosts of her past, dead memories, only one of which she remembered with fondness, and none of whom she had nightmares about anymore.  Angelo—sent to a nice, cozy, hometown Centre satellite, if there was such a thing, in Oregon, where the worst sin committed was loosing the paperwork on the way in.  Sydney, noble doctor, trusted friend, living out his last years in his cabin, with Melissa.  She visited them for a week every summer.  Broots’s daughter had gone to medical school, and was now working at one of the world’s top ten research hospitals, right in Dover.  Parker had insisted on paying for it, though Broots certainly made enough money as head of the tech department.
  Her father.  That still hurt; she felt it now in her chest and stomach.  He was dying of Alzheimer’s.   She’d refused the world-class facilities at the Centre for him.  Though Parker had made many changes—beginning with returning all the children, and setting up a renowned adoption center, and ending with cutting the ties with the Triumvirate, a project she was still working on—there was still treachery here.  He was at Debbie’s hospital, guarded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by a security team assigned to the purpose.  She’d cried for hours, every week, at his bedside; now there was only waiting, and the thick-headed feeling of grief anticipation.
  Jarod, a ghost himself, just who happened to be living.  Another face she no longer saw in her dreams.
  She didn’t even feel guilty to think it:  her father’s death, a relief as his mind slipped away, was the last threshold.  And then all her memories would be dead.  Her life would be her own.  She would grieve, and then she would be happy.  She would remember fondly, and that was contentment.  To think that once she’d believed, with all her heart and soul, that the only path to happiness was a life without the Centre.  Now, she couldn’t imagine leaving.  She’d finally turned this place into something that was just as much her mother’s as her father’s.  She loved what she’d created, and she was married to this job just as surely as she would have been if it was a living person.
  No more trickery.  No more secrets and lies.  She was vindicated, and freedom was sweet.
  She should just throw the goddamn letter in the trash can and get on with it.
  Parker placed it on her desk.  She stared at the lettering.  She picked it up again, twirled it in her fingers.
  Looked at the trash can.
  Glanced at the stainless steel letter opener that flashed in her pen cup.  A gift for her ten-year anniversary, inscribed with the Centre logo and her name.  A terrible gift, especially in a business world forged on the instantaneous electronic transmission, but then, she’d gotten a matching pen and a mug, too.
  Screw this, she thought.
  She grabbed the letter opener, wrapped her fingers around it, inserted it into the paper, and pulled it gently open.  The sound seemed to echo through her office.  She dropped the opener on her blotter with a clink.  Then, she reached in, pinched the paper with her fingertips, and drew it from its envelope.
  There was the security issue, she thought, but she guessed, too, that she just plain old liked paper letters.  They were a lot more real.  A lot more convincingly human.  Maybe Jarod had remembered that; there were certainly a dozen ways he could have left her a message on Centrenet, the corporation’s internal network, though it was already sprayed with enough electronic graffiti that it would take Broots years—well, at least six months—to clean it all out.
  She was delaying.  Because there was only one reason Jarod would contact her.  And if she read it, she guessed she would have to go.  One more night that she couldn’t visit with her dying father.
Parker lifted the edges of Jarod’s letter.  It was handwritten, too, on a piece of copy paper with a faint corporation watermark.  Part of her wanted to call analysis and have the watermark traced, put the Jarod-team, the no-longer-existent Jarod sweeper team, on alert.  Old habits die hard.
  She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath in order to gain control of all the emotions that had risen up in her.  Nostalgia, her old wistful companion in still moments.  Yeah, a bit of annoyance, too; the cold bitchiness, she thought with a smile, that had wrought her this job had been dulled, not killed, with her newfound peace.  Must be a natural part of my personality, after all.   
  Maybe even a little anticipation.

After a moment, when she was sure her mind was boss again, she glanced down at his handwriting.  Not different at all, was her first reaction.  And, of course, the words invited her to a meeting.  A small coffee shop she knew in New York City.  Five in the morning…she rolled her eyes.  Don’t tell me he anticipated that I’d be up half the night trying to decide whether to read it.
  In those rare moments in her life when she’d thought about meeting Jarod again, though back then, she’d been sure she never would, she had sworn she had changed completely.  It bothered her, that he could still predict her moods.  For Chrissake, he hadn’t seen her in fourteen years.      She felt like laughing, though it wasn’t that funny.
  She wasn’t going, she decided.  Too much anguish.  To many buried things to dig up.  But the words were empty; she’d made the decision before she opened the letter.  She flipped on her headset, spoke the code that would bring her in touch with the pilot on duty, and tried not to notice that her hands trembled, ever so slightly.  Her mind was on a one-track phrase.  Fourteen years…Fourteen years…Fourteen years.  She felt like a little kid again.
  Now don’t get yourself into anything stupid, Angel.  That’s what Daddy would have said, if he was lucid.  Don’t go running off with your emotions.  You’re a Parker.  Remember what that means.
  She knew she wouldn’t, with the same surety that meant she was going.  But she felt a little dark something sink inside her at the thought.  Maybe regret.  Some things just don’t turn out the way you thought, she told herself.  She wouldn’t feel this way for long.  She never did.  The Parker girl might have gotten caught up in the moment, hot-headed and foolish as she had been, but the Director certainly did not.
  Already drowning, she spoke the code into her headset which would waken the helicopter pilot.

And so she was here, she thought, blinking her eyes as if rising from a dream.  Standing out in the cold, while it threatens to rain, while my past uses his photographic memory to recall that I like my cappuccino with a shot of French vanilla, whipped cream, and chocolate sprinkles. Or had she drunk it black, like the hard-core bitchcake commando she’d fancied herself to be in those early years?  She thought Jarod would probably figure it out, anyway.
  How long are you going to stand out here, Miss Parker, Madame Director?  Afraid of the lab rat, are you?  Afraid of how you might feel? For a long time, she’d used that word scornfully.  Feelings sucked, was her general opinion.
  But the answer was yes.  She was fourteen years beyond lying to herself and calling it courage.  She wiped a stray tear from her cheek, wondering why she was crying at all, ran her fingers through her hair—it was not so difficult to restrain as it had once been—and pulled open the door.    Buck up, bucko.  Remember who you are.
  A blast of heat breathed into her face before the door closed, cutting her off from the strange-tasting air of New York. 
  She searched the empty seats for him, and this time, she spotted him first, eyes hooded, staring at the golden oak floorboards, hand wrapped around a tall latte mug.  Whipped cream, she noticed.  Colored sprinkles.  She stared at his hand a long time before realizing what she was looking for.  Something more than the wear of fourteen years.  What had his life brought him?
  Who was Jarod now?  Not the man she had let go, the man who wore the face of an innocent and abused child.  And someone familiar, all the same.
  And then he was staring at her, his deep brown eyes bright.  An impish smile spread across his face.
  He winked.  “Hello, Miss Parker,” he murmured, a playful lilt in his voice.  “Listen—how do you drink your coffee these days?”
  She felt something stick in her throat for a moment, but she smiled back, though her eyes welled up with tears.  It was a long moment before she spoke  “Jarod,” she choked, trying to put that snappish tone in the name.  “You brought me all the way to New York City to ask me how I wanted my coffee?”
  With the hand that had been resting in his lap, he beckoned her toward the table for two.  She sat down, forgetting the pain in her knees and ass, and leaned close.
  “We can talk about that later,” he informed her.  “You don’t look bad, you know.”
  Neither do you. “Thanks a lot,” she sighed sarcastically.
  His hand came up and rested on hers.  It was warm.  There was no electricity, but she had never put much stock in that kind of BS, anyway.  “Miss Parker…”  He was grinning, eyes full of mischief.
  “What is it, Jarod?”
  “I wanted to ask you…well, I wanted you to go with me to…”
  She turned her head and pursed her lips, an expression that felt so familiar, as she listened to Jarod explain his idea, and something unknotted in her soul.  Outside, raindrops fell fat and heavy onto the street and hissed into drainage vents, a cold and bittersweet accompaniment.