by AR Moler
asked Danny.
"No, I don't think so, surprisingly. Despite the fact it bled like hell, the lower edge of your eye socket seems to have caught more of the impact. I'll X-ray it just to be sure, though. You're going to have a major black eye, at least 'til I get it fixed." It would take some healing to tame down the swelling and bruising.
"Maybe you should let Sebastiano know she didn't kill me. I think she was kind of upset," said Danny.
"Where is she?"
"I thought she was over by the door."
"Nope," replied Peter.
"Well crap. Where'd she go? Maybe I should go look for her." Danny tried to sit up, but Peter put a hand on his chest and prevented him.
"You're not going anywhere for the next half hour, while I work on your face. Lie down and don't squirm around. I'll sit on you if I have to," Peter threatened.
Danny rolled his eyes.
***
Suitcases open on the floor, Jennifer stopped her packing and flung herself on the bed. Tears were streaming down her face and her head was pounding hard enough to make her feel sick. The program was reputed to take an average of ten weeks. She'd been here five. Whatever made her think she could do this? She sobbed into the pillow. Division P may have done the recruiting, but she'd said yes. What the hell had she been thinking? An artist could turn into a "secret agent"? Better to leave now and avoid the humiliation of being told to leave. Christine, the woman who had run the focus session, had been very displeased with Jennifer's performance this morning, even going so far as to express doubts as to why Jennifer had been offered training at all. Nothing this week had really gone right.
And now she'd injured the guy who was supposed to be conducting the combat parts of her instruction.
The headache was turning into a full-fledged migraine, and she buried her face deeper against the pillow, trying to block out the light. The nausea was creeping higher too. She barely even heard the knock at the door. Whoever the hell it was could just go the fuck away. She'd be out of their hair as soon as she stopped being curled up in pain.
***
There was no answer when Danny knocked on the door to Sebastiano's quarters. He stood there for a moment, thinking. There wasn't any indication she'd gone elsewhere. He put his hand flat on her door, wondering if she was inside. It was an unconscious gesture, not really necessary, just a little physical trigger for his mental quest. She was inside, he could tell, and very, very upset.
He had an internal little argument. Psi were a particularly odd group of people as a whole. Most tended toward incredibly strong emotions and unpredictable reactions, but that very sensitivity was a component of what made them capable of what they did.
Did she need someone to check on her? Should it be him? Or was that going to compound the problem? He opened his shielding further. She was in pain, physical pain. He made a snap decision and pulled his pass key from his pocket to unlock the door.
The inside of her quarters was silent and she wasn't in view in the main den/kitchen area. He walked through into the bedroom. She was curled on the bed, dim late afternoon light filtering through the curtains.
"Sebastiano?" he said softly. She gave no response.
"Jennifer?" He walked around to the other side of the bed and knelt down. One arm was up in front of her face and her hands were fisted. He knelt down beside the bed and gently touched her shoulder. Pain was roaring through her and he grimaced at the intensity. Headaches and migraines were a fact of life for many psi.
"Go 'way," she mumbled.
"I wanted to make sure you were okay." He glanced at the open suitcases and guessed that she was planning on bailing. However, right now, she wasn't going anywhere, except maybe off to see Peter. "You're not.
Do you want to go to the clinic or have Peter come to you?"
"Le' me alone. Please," she said.
He brushed one finger against the back of her hand.
Guilt, despair and agony were not a good combination.
They made people make stupid choices.
"Nope." He picked up the phone at the bedside and dialed the infirmary. Sandra, one of the nurses, answered. "Is Peter still there?" Danny asked.
"No. I think he went to the cafeteria."
Danny was unsurprised. After doing work on Danny's face, the healer was probably hungry. "See if you can find him. I'm bringing Jennifer Sebastiano back to the infirmary. She has a migraine. A bad one."
"Okay, got it."
"Come on. Let's go." He gently pulled her up into a seated position. She didn't resist too much. Danny helped her stand and with one arm under her elbow and one arm around her body, he guided her out the door.
"You can close your eyes if you want, I won't let you walk into anything."
"Deserve it," she muttered.
"No you don't. You gave me a bloody nose and a black eye. Big deal. It's not like you did any permanent damage."
***
If someone had informed her that there was a machete protruding from the side of her head, Jennifer would have instantly agreed and said that it went in through her right eye socket and came out at the base of her skull. She could barely open her eyes. This was nothing particularly new. The migraines came without much warning, sometimes several in one week; other times there were weeks or months in between. She had long known that they were tied in some way to the psychic thing. If Danny Valentine hadn't been guiding her along the unfamiliar hallway, she probably would have been inching along, one hand on the wall and the other over her eyes. She couldn't comprehend why he was being nice to her or why he didn't seem to be utterly furious. Not that she was thinking too straight at the moment.
"Almost there. Maybe I should have just picked you up and carried you," he said.
"Bring her in here," said the voice of the medical guy.
Damn, why couldn't she remember his name? Except for seeing him very briefly earlier in the day, she thought she'd met him just the once before. The room she was led into was blissfully dim. "There's a bed right beside you. You can sit down on it. My name's Peter. Seems to me you told me something about being really bad with names when Miko introduced us."
Jennifer gingerly sat down and Valentine's hands let go. She almost reached for him. Between the guilt of having hurt him and confusion at his kindness, his arms supporting and guiding her had been strangely welcome.
Peter's hands touched her face and the nausea and pain slid away with such speed, she thought she was going to pass out. Four hands grabbed her, eased her back to lie flat on the bed. The world was gray and spinning, but the pain had seemingly been sucked away.
"Just relax. I'm blocking out your pain perception. It's not actually gone. You're just not noticing it. It's going to take me a little while to fix it," said Peter.
"Anything you want me to do?" asked Valentine.
"No, I'm good. Just pull the door shut on the way out.
Oh, and go change your shirt. You look like you murdered somebody."
"Yeah, yeah. I got sidetracked. I'll probably check back and see how she's doing in a couple hours."
Fingers pressed lightly at various points on her head and face. It was soothing in an odd way. She kept expecting the usual neuro stuff -- somebody peering in her eyeballs with an agonizingly bright light and being asked to touch her nose. All those difficult and irritating things they did to you in the ER. They didn't happen.
She was tired, exhausted tired.
"Do you want to take a nap? I could nudge things in that direction," offered Peter.
"You're the psychic healer."
"Yeah, that's me. We're pretty few and far between. I guess you could say I'm top dog on that front around here."
"I'm such a fuck-up I don't even know why I'm here,"
Jennifer whispered.
"No you're not. You're having an amazingly shitty day. That happens to all of us. I really do think you could do with some sleep. It's going to take me another hour or so to sort out the migraine thing.
<
br /> "Are you going to give me drugs?"
"Nope. I might if I was slam busy and needed to deal with someone else who was badly injured, but except for Danny's face, I'm having a pretty slow day." Peter chuckled just a little.
"I'm sorry I hurt him. I was… mad." The exhaustion was stealing over her, and the room's dim lighting was easy on her eyes. Peter's fingers softly traced a circle on her temple.
***
"Is Sebastiano asleep?" Danny poked his head into the infirmary. Peter looked up from his book. "No, not anymore.
She slept for about an hour, then I sent her off to the cafeteria. Come here and let me see how your eye and nose are doing." Although he had done some initial healing on the damage, it was nowhere near back to normal.
Danny straddled a straight back chair that had been turned and sat down in front of Peter. Peter gently ran his fingertips along Danny's still slightly swollen and bruised nose and eye socket. Danny flinched a little as Peter's touch came to the lower edge of the orbit.
"Yeah, that's the spot that took most of the force of the blow." Peter sent a warm tendril of energy into the area, and focused on easing away some more of the bruising, as well as the pain. Danny let out a small sigh.
"Better?"
"Mmm… yes."
"Good, the visible bruising is down to a just a little left near the corner of your eye. By tomorrow it should be barely noticeable." Peter trailed a finger lightly down across Danny's mouth and chin. "No more letting cute chicks haul off and hit you."
Danny gave him a grin. "She is kind of cute isn't she?
Especially when she's pissed."
***
Jennifer's hands were wrapped around a cup as she sat at a table in the cafeteria. Danny watched her for a moment before he went toward her. "You look more with it than you did earlier," he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down beside her.
"Um… yeah." She stared into the cup like she was hoping it would yield the meaning of the universe.
"Talk to me. That wasn't a lucky punch. Whatever you did never made it to conscious thought. It was a reflex. You laid me out." Danny tried to make his tone as gentle as possible. She was still too close to spooked.
"Eight unwilling years of Aikido. My father thought it would improve my self-discipline and help me control my temper. All it did was give me the ability to make my temper… well, close to lethal. After a couple of years of fumbling my way through class like the complete klutz I am, I stopped trying to think about it. I used to just tune out. God, that makes me sound like I was dropping acid or something. I don't know how I’d do it. I'd just fall into sync with whatever the instructor's body was doing. If the teacher could do it perfectly, so could I. They say muscle memory is deeper than thought. My body knows every move I was ever taught, even if I'd prefer it didn't. When I went to college I stayed away from everything I thought was dangerous. I took up art. It's difficult to hurt somebody with a paint brush. Only I'm not really very good. I can only draw what I see. I can draw the abuser, the rapist, the attacker.
I can draw the nightmares that the victims can barely live with." Her fingers were tight around the cup.
He reached out and laid a hand on her wrist. "What we do is hard. What we are is even harder. Making peace with your strengths and limitations is one of the things the training is supposed to help you with." She was still torturing herself; he could feel the angst.
"Why aren't you mad as all hell at me?" she asked.
"Why should I be? I told you I was going to grab you and I wanted to judge your response. You cleaned my clock. It's not the first bloody nose I've had. I've gotten hurt worse sparring with some of my Marine Corps buddies."
She heaved a tiny sigh. Danny felt so sorry for her.
Division P training wasn't easy. She seemed to be having a worse time than most, but then she came from one of the least structured career backgrounds.
"Is your headache gone?" he asked.
"Yeah, Peter's… amazing."
"That he is. You up for a drive?" Danny asked.
"To where?"
"The beach. It takes half an hour or so from here in Suffolk. I think you could do with a little getting away from here."
"It's almost midnight," said Jennifer.
"So? It's not like you have a curfew."
"I guess."
***
Virginia Beach's oceanfront was pretty quiet at half past midnight on a Wednesday. Jennifer had to admit, being away from the Division P complex was good. That place had its own sort of isolationist feel despite easy access to all forms of media. Danny and Jennifer walked along the surf edge for a while in silence, just listening to the white noise of the ocean.
If Jennifer had had any reservations about walking alone on the beach of an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night, Danny's tall muscular form would have dispelled them. When he had gone from being an annoyance to feeling like a friend? She must have been broadcasting again, because he reached out and took her hand. If anyone saw them walking on the beach, they would assume he was her boyfriend. The idea amused her a little. Ten years from now, when someone asked her how she met him, she could say that first he gave her shooting lessons and then a couple weeks later she decked him. Yeah, there was going to be a ten years from now, she had a feeling.
"You're in a better mood," he said.
"Sort of." At least she didn't feel wound quite so tight. He tugged on her hand and drew her up away from the surf line to sit on the sand. She hugged her arms loosely around her knees.
"Are you cold?" he asked.
"Only a little." She wasn't sure why she was slightly surprised when he scooted back a few inches and swung his leg on the other side of her hips, pulling her back into the "v" of his legs. His arms draped around her body and his chin rested on her shoulder. She caught the image of him kissing her from his thoughts, followed by visions of them having sex in a bed.
"It's a suggestion. We don't have to do either," he said softly. "But I can tell you're at least a little curious." She twisted her body and met his mouth. It was a gentle aggression that started out with lips and deepened as her mouth opened to his. His hand cupped against the back of her head and he turned her so that she faced him more directly. Danny laid her back on the sand and braced an elbow so the weight of his body wasn't completely on top of her as his hips snuggled between her legs. The kiss went on and on and she was enraptured by the taste of his mouth and feel of his lips. Her body was responding to his and she could feel her pulse in intimate places.
He finally lifted his head, breathing hard. "Much as I'd like to do this right out here on the beach. One, we might get arrested if the beach patrol cruises by and two, sand in certain parts of the anatomy is not real fun. I speak from personal experience on that front."
"Personal experience on this beach?" she asked.
Pulling her thoughts together took some doing.
"No, actually Iraq. Sand in between your butt cheeks is not a magnificent experience when you only get to shower once a week."
She giggled.
***
Back at the complex, Danny closed the door of his quarters. His fingers were woven between Jennifer's. He leaned back against the door sensing a certain amount of uncertainty from her. The car drive back to Division P had cooled their arousal. He cupped his hands around her face and looked down into her eyes.
"We don't have to do this. I don't want you to feel like this is some sort of penance for what happened earlier today," he said.
"I… Technically speaking I work for you I think. Is this going to make… is this going to be way too weird?"
she whispered.
"No, you don't work for me. More like with me.
Yeah, I do some of the training and I organize and debrief and stuff like that, but I'm not really the one in charge. If you hang around here long enough, you'll also find we're a pretty inbred bunch. Psi tends to gravitate to psi given a choice." Danny wanted her badly, but not at the price of gu
ilt. He'd settle for jerking off alone rather than dump more emotional hurt on her. Of course there was always the possibility he could go crawl in bed with Peter… Oh fuck… Jennifer must have lifted the image of making out with Peter from his head, because she made an odd face. He'd better come clean. That kind of secret would come back to bite you in the ass.
"Jen, I… Peter and I are well… friends with benefits.
I told you we're a pretty inbred bunch. I go both ways.
So does Peter. If that creeps you out I'm sorry." That was as simple he could put it. Peter was his best friend and sometimes they got physical about it.
Danny wondered if he should hold his breath and wait for a blast of anger or worse from her. But there was no sense of revulsion, or distaste, more like a sort of confusion for her.
"Won't he… get mad? Be hurt?" she asked.
"No. There's no strings. If he and I hook up, it's good.
If we sleep with someone else that's okay too. Safe sex and all that." That confusion continued. He kissed her softly on the forehead. "You're tired. It's almost two a.m.
Maybe we'd better forego this. Are you okay to walk back to your quarters? Or do you want some company?"
"I'm fine. It's only one floor down," she said. In another moment she had slipped out the door and he still hadn't quite figured out what her take on his relationship with Peter was.
***
Draw it. Get it out of your head, she told herself. Jennifer pulled a sketch pad out of the still partially packed suitcases, and some pencils. Danny and… the healer, Peter. It wasn't like she didn't know a number of gay couples. She worked in the art community. But Danny hadn't said gay. He'd said "both ways" and she had felt some definite chemistry between Danny and herself, too.
