As they drove to Ivo Technologies they didn't say a word, and although Gemma had a lot of questions she was too nervous to ask them.

So sitting in complete silence felt like the best option.  No matter how awkward and uncomfortable it felt. Sure they might have gone to the same high school but the truth was that they were complete strangers.

"I'm sorry about the whole..." Jaime began breaking the silence but he didn't seem to know how to exactly finish his sentence.

"Kidnapping thing?" Gemma questioned feeling like there was no other way to put it.

He looked over at her for a second and laughed awkwardly, and Gemma was glad that she was the only one that felt a little uncomfortable. "It wasn't... well I guess it technically was kidnapping."

Again they were silent until they finally parked in front of the Ivo Tech building, and Gemma couldn't help but feel relieved. It felt suffocating being in a car alone with him and she could see that he felt the same.

They came to a stop when they saw that Brenda Del Vecchio sitting at the front desk. Gemma looked to Jaime and was confused by the shocked look on his face, like if he hadn't expected her there.

"Brenda?" Jaime said the moment he saw her, but he was tense and clearly nervous. Which was weird considering that Brenda was one of his best friends, or at least she had been.

"Jaime?" Brenda replied seeming just as shocked to see him but she stood up anyway walking to him and pulling him into a hug. The hug seemed awkward, like the type of hug you give someone after not seeing them for a long period of time. But the hug only lasted a moment before Brenda pulled away and looked to Gemma. "Ms. Ivo what are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here?" Gemma questioned instead surprised that anyone other than security was still at the building.

"I was just working on some paperwork that we're behind on." Brenda said slowly as she looked between Gemma and Jaime. There was no way to know what she was exactly thinking but Brenda clearly understood that they didn't want her there. "Should I go?"

Gemma smiled trying her best to make the situation seem as normal as possible. Which was kind of difficult considering the large cut on her arm and the fact that she really did look like she had been through a lot in the last couple of hours.

"Yes, don't worry about the paperwork. Enjoy the rest of your night." Gemma replied seeing as Jaime didn't seeing to want her to know what he was going through.

Brenda nodded slowly before walking behind the desk and picking up her bag. Everything about this situation continued to get more complicated and weird and Gemma just wanted to get up to the labs and find answers. The answers that would end all of this so that she could just go back to Metropolis and try to live a normal life.

They watched as Brenda left the building and from the awkward goodbye Gemma wondered if Brenda and Jaime were no longer friends. It was normal to lose touch with people from high school, Gemma no longer was in contact with anyone that she had at one point considered a friend.

Or maybe Gemma was over thinking it and Jaime simply didn't want Brenda involved in any of this. There was no point to put her in danger.

Jaime and Gemma continued their silence as they stepped onto the elevator taking the fifth floor to the medical labs.

Gemma immediately ran to the other side of the room grabbing a suture kit from one of the cabinets. Now she couldn't help but feel incredibly grateful that Brenda had given her that extensive tour of the building a couple of days ago.

Sitting down on one of the stool she unwrapped her arm, the bandage the Jaime's grandmother had placed already soaked in blood. The cut wasn't terrible, but it still needed to get taken care of before any kind of infection happened so she immediately began cleaning the wound.

Jaime looked around the lab like he expected someone else to be around to help. "You're not going to take anything for the pain?

"No I'll be okay." She relied as she started the stitches. Admittedly she would have wanted something for the pain, but she didn't want anything slowing her down.

She had never done stitches on herself before and it definitely wasn't easy. But it wasn't like she had any other choice, they didn't have time to wait hours in the emergency room to do some simple stitches that she could do in a couple of minutes.

"I really am sorry." He repeated as he watched her work, and it made her nervous tried to control the way her hand was shaking.

"Don't worry about it. You didn't have any control over that." Gemma assured him as she finished the last stitch. She could only hope that she could figure this out quickly and everything could go back to normal. "Okay sit down."

Jaime did as he was told sitting down in one of the medical beds as Gemma put on her lab coat and began gathering the supplies she planned to use on a tray.

Gemma tied her hair back in a ponytail before adjusting the ear piece on herself and placing the chest piece on Jaime's chest.

"Take a deep breath." She instructed as she carefully listened to the sound of his heart and lungs. Gemma couldn't deny that she felt a little nervous being this close to him, and she hated herself for that. "Your heart is beating a little faster than normal but it could nothing. I'm going to run some blood tests."

She told him as she wrote down a couple of notes for things she wanted to look for when the test result came in.

"Follow the light." She continued as she moved the flashlight from side to side watching as his did what she said. He was completely silent letting her do her work, but she could see how nervous he was.

How could he not be? He wanted that thing out of him and he had no idea if Gemma could do it.

"Take off your shirt for me." Gemma said as she pulled two gloves out of the box.

"Wow. At least take me out to dinner first." He replied causing her to drop the gloves on the floor. Gemma was at a loss of words as she looked at him in shock.

"I'm sorry you don't have to. I just wanted wanted to take a closer look at the Scarab." Gemma began to ramble feeling foolish. "But there are other test I can run and...."

"I'm just joking."

"Oh." She said softly as she laughed nervously feeling embarrassed for having taken him so seriously. They looked at each other for a moment an awkward silence settling between the two. Gemma was waiting for him to do what she had asked, and began to wonder if he was still trying to tease her. "Are you going to make me ask you again or..."

"Right." Jaime said as he shook his jacket off before pulling his shirt over his head. "Not like you haven't seen me naked already."

Gemma didn't really know what to say to that. She had seen him naked, and the memory she had no doubt was currently making her blush.

Seeing him shouldn't have affected her the way it did. She was a doctor after all, she was used to seeing the human body. So really she was just being unprofessional.

Walking around the bed her eyes widened at seeing the Scarab again. It was like she had forgotten how bad it really looked. The Scarab took over most of his spine and it even glowed blue from under his skin. The part of the Scarab that was exposed glowed in a way that made it look alive reminding Gemma that this was alien tech that they were dealing with.

Slowly Gemma placed her fingers along where the Jaime's skin met with the Scarab, but she immediately pulled her hand away when he tensed at her touch. "Sorry... are my hands cold?"

"A little." He admitted.

"I should be wearing gloves anyway... hold on." She told him as she reached for the box of gloves.

What was wrong with her? She was missing steps and making mistakes, that wasn't like her.

Once she had her gloves on she took a closer look at the Scarab again. It was both fascinating and terrifying. "Interesting."

Jaime became tense again as he turned his head to look at her. "What?"

"It's not embedded from the outside." Gemma observed looked at just how much of Jaime's spine the Scarab had attached itself too. It was almost the entirety of his spine and that was only what was visible to her without an scans. "I looks like it's coming from inside of you. How did it get inside of you?"

"It uhh...." Jaime began but seemed unable to continue. "It went in through... my mouth. Yeah, it was crazy."

"Well it's definitely latched onto your spine. I'll run the blood tests first and then get you in for a CT scan."

They both became silent again as Gemma prepared everything to get the blood samples, but the silence wasn't as painfully awkward as before. Now that they were trying to work towards an answer it seemed that the both of them had relaxed.

"Do you still keep in touch with anyone from high school?" He questioned suddenly clearly trying to fill the silence as she slowly pushed the needle into his arm beginning to draw the blood.

Gemma looked up to meet his eyes for a moment before shaking her head. "No."

"You had a lot of friends."

"I realized that they weren't really my friends. Everyone always wants something from me." Gemma mentally scolded herself for talking too much. He was just trying to make small talk and here she was speaking personal problems. "How about you? It seemed a little awkward between you and Brenda."

"After I went off to college I started talking to Brenda and Paco less everyday. Then they started dating and... well we stopped talking all together." Jaime said and although he was trying to seem as indifferent about the situation as she had been, it was easy to see that losing his friends had hurt him. "And now they broke up so there's like no chance of us being as close as before."

"It happens." Gemma told him as she pulled the needle out of his arm. "But who knows, maybe not all hope is lost."

She placed a bandage on his arm where she had drawn his blood and Gemma had to admit that she was a little afraid of what she would find.

"I knew you were smart... I just didn't know how smart I guess." Jaime said as he watched her prepare his blood sample for testing.

Gemma really didn't know what to say. Her whole life consisted people commenting on how smart she was, and although that was true she also wished that there was more to her than just that.

"But the whole doing your own stitches thing was pretty badass." He continued and Gemma found that she didn't want the attention to be on her. She wasn't very good about talking to herself and she wasn't sure just how much she wanted Jaime to know.

If he had the whole picture of who she was would he be like everyone else who saw her like a disaster waiting to happen?

It was probably for the best that he knew the least about her as possible.

"I'm going to need you to change into these." Gemma told him as she handed him a folded hospital gown. They weren't going to have a full picture of what was going on inside of him until she had the scans.

"Wow. I'm going to start thinking that you do want to see me naked again." Jaime said with a slight smile as he unfolded the hospital gown. He had a dimple on his left cheek, it was something that Gemma hadn't noticed before. But it was only something that could be noticed up close, and she had never been this close to him before.

"Funny."  Gemma replied a small smile touching her lips that she quickly tried to suppress. "I'll be waiting outside."

It was past 3am when she had finally finished the CT scan and had all the results in front of her. The screens all around them displayed his blood samples and the holograms all reflected different angles of the full body scans.

It took her almost an hour to get through it all because she had to go through it multiple times trying to find a solution. But the reality was that there wasn't one. At least not a clear on considering how little she knew about the Scarab and it's origins.

"The way it's latched onto your spine and spreading its way onto you brain stem... even the way it's slowly fusing with your blood cells... Jaime this is really bad." Gemma stated not even sure how she could tell him that the past couple of hours in the lab had been essentially pointless. "It's trying to form a symbiotic relationship with you. Trying to take control."

She looked to him only to find him staring at her with a blank expression on his face. Clearly he either hadn't been listening or didn't understand a word she had said.

"Jaime?"

"I'm going to be completely honest with you I didn't hear a single word you said." He replied as he turned his attention back to all of the scans and images that surrounded them around the room.

"We need to find a way to get this thing out of you before it can fully form that bond with you."

Jaime still looked confused or maybe he simply couldn't believe what he was hearing. He looked around the room at everything around him one last time before meeting her eyes. "There so much tech around us you're telling me that nothing here can take this thing out of me?"

The Scarab was so advanced and the way that it was wrapped around his spine and taking over his cells was something that she had never seen before. And she had worked on some medical cases that seemed unreal before, but this was something else entirely. A surgery to try to remove it would be too risky, and the medical technology to separate the Scarab from his cells hadn't been perfected yet.

And there was to knowing the way the Scarab would react to any attempts of getting it removed by force. Everything was too risky.

Normally when it came to taking risks and pushing boundaries Gemma enjoyed being innovative and taking that risk. But this was a risk that she wasn't willing to take.

"The medical technology to do that hasn't been perfected yet. And there's no way of knowing what defenses the Scarab has."

Jaime froze, as he tried to process what she had just told him. There was no sugar coating this, they probably only had a couple of hours to figure this out before the Scarab found a way to fully connect itself with Jaime. "You're saying I'm stuck with this thing?"

"We need Jenny." Gemma told him knowing that her dad's research had to have included a way to remove it. Ted Kord had dedicated his life to researching the Scarab, that was their last option.

Jaime shook his head in disbelief, clearly he was beginning to panic. And he had every right to be. "She's the one that gave me this thing."

"She's also the person that knows the most about it."

He knew that she was right. That they had to go to Jenny Kord, the problem was that Gemma didn't know if Jenny had successfully hidden herself away from her aunt. She was supposed to meet with Jenny before Jaime taken her from the middle of the street.

Unfortunately she had lost her phone somewhere in the city when Jaime had involuntarily flown her to his house. Luckily for them Jenny had given Jaime her number and they had a glimmer of hope that things could go their way.

A/N: This chapter took a little longer to write, but I just wanted to make sure that it was as perfect as possible because it's such an important chapter. Hope you all enjoy!