Title:  Requiem Author: Eva Parker Email:  eva_parker@yahoo.com Rating: PG Disclaimer:  They’re not mine.  You know who they belong to.  Here’s hoping I did it right, anyway. Author’s Notes:  I swore I’d never do it, but here it is, a Jarod/Miss Parker romance.  I’m not a shipper, I swear, not even a closet one.  It just fit the story, I guess.  Maybe I shouldn’t bother to deny it; I know you’re all staring at the screen smirking, anyway.  Enjoy. P.S.  “Woods” and “A Critical Break” should be along soon. P.P.S.  My species, Fanfictionous authorus, cannot go for more than three weeks without its natural food source, feedback.  Please, write me anything!                                                                  ---   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.