Primeval fic: Finding Their Way Home
Title: Finding Their Way Home
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: If you recognise it, I don't own it.
Summary: Sometimes the pathway to where you belong isn't exactly straight, something Sarah and Stephen discover.
Rating: NC-17
A/N: So, this is both a bit of Saving Stephen, and a fair amount of romantic schmaltz in a Stephen/Sarah 'ship. On the topic of Sarah's long bow, I see no reason why she shouldn't have spent some time playing with mediaeval weapon recontruction, and I think that she's plenty fearless enough to have been on archeological expeditions to all kinds of crazy places, it's just that she's never learned to fire a gun, which puts her into an odd position in the field as the one person who can't shoot (since by the time she gets there someone took the time to teach Connor). Feel free to tell me you think I got her characterisation wrong. Also, I believe it's more or less canon she left a dead body behind, but pretend she didn't for the sake of the fic.
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She'd been screaming for Becker, but between the predators and the injuries and everything else, she wasn't even really aware that the person that had her wasn't Becker until a day later when she woke up, injured, bloody, dehydrated but alive, and curled up in the arms of a man about as bloody and injured as she was, and equally as handsome as Becker under the blood, bruises and dirt, if in a completely different way.
"I'm Stephen," he said, as she fixed her eyes on his face. "I'm afraid I haven't much to offer by way of hospitality, but I do have clean water."
Shrugging, she told him, "Given that I was about to die, I think I can afford to be grateful for the water." She stiffly sat up, pulling away from him, only to realised that half the reason he'd been holding her so closely was that they were in some sort of treehouse, and her eyes were very wide as she realised there were dinosaurs below. Given that they'd already been through the one anomaly, she supposed it wasn't so strange that this man should have taken her through another. Quite possibly he'd felt the place was safer than the predators, and she couldn't exactly blame him. "I'm Sarah, by the way."
A squawk behind her, and she found herself facing a ptera-something-or-other, Connor would have known what, and she started scrambling back. The sharp command, "Duck!" made her instinctively flatten herself to the floor of the platform, and a zinging sound above her was followed by a loud "Thunk!" and suddenly there was a dead ptera-thingy on the floor beside her, an arrow . . . she sat up and looked at Stephen . . . crossbow bolt, then, through its head. "Dinner," he said dryly.
Just barely suppressing hysteria, Sarah said, "Well, good to know we won't starve." She nonetheless eyed it askance, even though she'd had weirder on her expeditions to Africa. "I assume it tastes like chicken?"
"Actually, more like bat," he said. He was eyeing her sideways, and suddenly Sarah realised he was doing something she'd often done after coming back from a dig. He was waiting for her to be weird and frightened of the notion.
She smiled. "It's been ages since I had bat, actually," she told him instead. "I mean, the dangers of rabies really make it more of a risk than it's worth, but it was really quite tasty."
The smile he gave her was quite dazzling.
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For two very long years, Stephen had been alone out in the wilds of the far side of the anomalies. In spite of how much he missed beer, worried about Nick and Connor and Abby, wanted to know how Everton was doing in the standings and would have killed for a decent shower and change of clothes, there was something about being out in the unspoiled wilderness that just suited him.
Still, he knew he didn't belong in the time he was, and the last thing he wanted was to wind up like Helen, mad and working with someone like Leek. He also knew that Nick deserved better and if they hadn't seen that an anomaly had opened right in the room with him they'd all think he was dead, and if they had . . . they deserved better than Helen had done by both him and Nick. So he'd see an anomaly, poke a head through to be sure it wasn't leading somewhere ridiculous, like a desert, or somewhere with toxic fumes, and he'd go through to check it out.
Sarah he'd rescued by chance, but now, several anomalies and a few million years later, he couldn't exactly regret the risk he'd taken with her. She was fun and witty, and although not so much an outdoorsman as himself, she'd been on some wild digs as an archaeologist, with a few hair-raising stories to match his own. She was also surprisingly adept at survival, admitting with a pleased blush at his compliments, that she'd quite enjoyed the practical work of determining how ancient peoples did certain things by testing out and learning how to make various tools.
Right now, though, he was running from a pack of terror birds, and Sarah, who had gone off on her own for a bit, asking for some privacy, was nowhere to be found. He'd already shot two of the birds with the crossbow he'd managed to trade for on a side trip to the middle ages, (and that had taken all his skills of pantomime and the loss of a very good knife of knapped obsidian), but running at full tilt and loading up a crossbow were just not compatible activities. Suddenly, something zinged by his head, and first one, then two of the birds fell away to the side.
He chanced a glance up, and there was Sarah, with what appeared to be a full English longbow in hand. "I said I'd never fired a gun, I didn't say I was a terrible shot," she shouted with a grin, then fired another arrow. This one missed killing its target, but still landed solidly, garnering a squawk of dismay, and sending a passel of the flock tripping all over each other. They ran for their latest tree habitat, scrambling up and away from the snapping beaks.
"So, that's what you've been working on," he said, grinning. "I'm impressed."
She grinned back at him. "I used to really love Robin Hood growing up," she told him. "My parents signed me up for archery classes after I whinged at them for three months straight." He held out a hand with an inquiring eyebrow and she obligingly handed the bow over for him to look at. "One of my instructors was a reconstructionist. I wound up begging him to teach me how to make one like Robin Hood's."
It was very nice. A solid weight, and when he twanged the string, he could feel that it was a good solid hundred-pound pull, maybe more. He didn't really know them that well, being more of a rifle man himself, but he knew enough to tell this was quality work. "You're going to have to start helping with the hunting now, you know," he told her with a grin. He already knew she wasn't particularly squeamish generally. In fact, even though it had only been a few months as far as either could tell, he was already just a little in love with her. She was tough as nails and as hardheaded as he was, hugely intelligent and just plain fun. It didn't hurt she'd been able to fill him in where Everton had been in the standings before she'd gone through the anomaly. "You can't hide behind me anymore."
"Now if I could have got the others at the ARC to do that," she muttered.
He froze. Funny how, in all the days and weeks they'd known each other, they hadn't actually talked properly about how they both came to be where they were. "Did you say the ARC?"
Her head snapped up and she froze. Then she seemed to come to a decision and said, "You know, I think it'd be a little late for Lester to yell at me for revealing the truth about the anomalies." Then her grin came back. "As Connor said when I met him, 'No, not that ark'."
Stephen couldn't help himself. "So, Connor and Abby, they're okay? And Cutter?"
Sarah's jaw dropped open, making her look utterly gormless for a moment before she recovered. "Wait . . ." she said slowly. "Stephen. As in Stephen Hart? Slept with that crazy woman Helen Cutter, Stephen Hart? The paragon of virtue that sacrificed his life for Nick Cutter Stephen Hart?"
That was a new one on him. "Paragon?" he asked.
She ignored his question, and told him, "You're prettier than I expected, and a lot less saintly."
He couldn't stop the slightly hysterical bark of laughter. "Saintly! Nick was about ready to murder me for sleeping with his wife. Not that I didn't deserve it." He had to ask, "Paragon?"
"Abby and Connor did nothing but sing your praises. I'll tell you, I think it annoyed the hell out of Becker. Danny too, a little."
"Who are Becker and Danny?" Stephen asked, fascinated. They must have joined the ARC at some point, along with Sarah. "How did you wind up in the ARC? I thought you said you were in archaeology."
"I am," she replied, amused. "Well, it all started for me the evening I stayed late to get a final chance to try to decode the heiroglyphics on the Sun Cage." At his look, she explained, "It's an Egyptian artefact that no one had been quite certain of what it was for or depicted, only that it was a large magnetite sculpture of four gods enclosing an area with their arms." She went on to explain about her discovery of random people with guns in the museum, the death of her supervisor, "That bitch," she muttered, and seeing a primitive crocodile crawl out of the anomaly that appeared in the middle of the artefact.
"So, Connor's taking me on a tour of the ARC, when I offhandedly remarked that I'd just seen a living legend. Cutter went mad about how he wanted me on the project to help him research the appearances of anomalies throughout history."
"And then you found yourself working for him, whether you wanted to or not, and you weren't quite sure which it was," Stephen said, amused. "The same thing happened to me. I was perfectly happy out in the field, but I tossed out one offhanded comment about coprolites and comparing the appearance of those with modern animal dung, and suddenly I'm in a lab-"
"And no idea how you got there," she finished, eyes sparkling. "Cutter always was a force of nature."
Something in the way she said it made him ask. "Was?"
Suddenly the humour vanished and she seemed to pull in a little. "Was. Helen killed him. It was barely a few months after I joined. Cutter had just figured out something about the pattern of the anomalies, had made an accurate prediction where one would be, when Helen invaded the ARC."
"What?" he gasped.
"She took over, she had a virtual little army of clones. Even a clone of Cutter." Sarah took in a shuddering breath. "She shot him. He died in Connor's arms. Connor . . . took it very badly. He looked up to Cutter so much, you know."
"Nick's dead," he mumured. It didn't feel real. He'd sacrificed himself to keep Nick alive, and it all felt like it was for nothing.
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For a few weeks, Nick's death and everything at the ARC that they had in common cast a pall on their relationship, and it was one Sarah didn't know how to lift. She tried everything, from telling him funny stories about the ARC, to trying to get back that easy camaraderie that had so characterised the first few months they'd travelled together. But time passed and Stephen gradually pulled himself out of mourning for his friend and began to reciprocate with stories she hadn't heard from Connor or Abby, asking questions about who was at the ARC now, and being stunned at how Lester had come to be so very well-loved by the people at the ARC.
They continued to travel together, going through anomaly after anomaly, sometimes finding themselves briefly in various periods of human history, taking the time to get new clothes, a bit of a bath, a meal that involved foodstuffs both could actually recognise, becoming closer with every passing day. It was after a narrow escape from a pack of mad, huge prehistoric wolves that everything changed. They'd both barely escaped with their lives, perched up a tree, as they so often were, when Sarah turned around, only to find Stephen's lips on hers, his arms nearly crushing her as he held her close.
"God, I thought I'd lost you a moment there," he murmured, dragging her around to pin her against the trunk of the enormous tree. The branches were so large and wide, it was practically a tree-house platform on its own. Not that she was thinking of that as he pressed a thigh between her legs, and his sizeable erection into her hip.
It had been a very long time, far longer than merely the stretch she'd been lost in time with Stephen, longer even that that better part of a year she'd been with the ARC. In fact, the last time had been with that guide back in Egypt. So, when Stephen's clever fingers found their way into the tunic she wore, cupping a breast and rollng a nipple between his fingers, it was like lightning jolted through her and she bucked desperately against him, kissing back feverishly. "Stephen," she whimpered. "Please."
A low groan was her answer, as he began to roll his hips, pressing that tempting bulge against her, and encouraging her to ride the rock-hard thigh between her legs. He kissed her harder, all tongue and demand, and that sensual mouth was just as skilled as she'd idly wondered in the middle of the night when they slept close together to conserve body heat.
But it wasn't enough, and Sarah pulled away from that mouth, tugging at his shirt to get her hands on some skin, feeling the delightful cut of his torso under her fingers and catching his nipples, making him curse and tug at the breeches she now wore, that they had liberated from a sixteenth century clothesline. Moments later his fingers slipped down to where she was already copiously wet and one slid inside while the heel of his hand pressed on the nub of her clit. It was fantastic, and Sarah lost track of anything she was doing to him to buck and writhe helplessly. Her orgasm rushed up almost too quickly, but then she was coming, clinging to Stephen and gasping out his name.
It wasn't until after she came back down that she was aware of the slow rocking of his hips and the need behind the smug smile on his face. Turnabout being fair play, she smiled at him and undid his trousers, sliding a hand around the erection he was sporting and squeezing. He groaned, and she turned them so that his back was to the trunk now, before settling in to give him a hand job.
The temptation to push him down and get that gorgeous cock inside her was intense and pernicious, but until they were somewhere reasonable and safe, she wasn't going to take any risk of getting pregnant. No matter how good the pulsing hardened flesh in her hands would probably feel. "Sarah," he panted, his hips jerking hard in her grasp. "God, so good."
Ye gods but it was arousing to turn this man into putty. He was so gorgeous. A few minutes longer and he was coming, a few more spastic thrusts of his hips and he seemed to puddle at the join between the trunk and the branch they were on. Immediately she crawled into his arms, the both of them relaxed in the afterglow. "Don't scare me like that again," he muttered in her ear. "I don't think I could stand to lose you."
"The same goes for you," Sarah told him a little tartly. "Don't you go making giant carnivores chase you on foot."
They sat together, resting and just enjoying each other's company for the moment. Sarah found herself drifting off, feeling safe, despite their location, both physical and temporal. Nearly asleep, she could have sworn she heard him tell her. "I really think I love you, you know."
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It had been a year since he'd met Sarah Page, and Stephen knew one thing. If he'd wanted to create a woman for himself from scratch, he couldn't have done better. She was as adventurous as he was, although she admitted to never having learned to use a gun, she didn't back down and was a mean shot with an English longbow. She'd travelled to a great many mad places just as he had, and she missed the wildness. She understood the work of a paleontologist, because so many of the skills in the field for achaeology and paleontology were the same, and she was smart, brilliant even, and fun and witty and clever. To top all that off, the woman was stunningly beautiful, but in an unaffected way that meant she didn't concern herself with it, it just was.
Not that there was much in the way of cosmetics available in the pre-human eras of the planet, but he never caught her primping, even when they found themselves briefly in other times. She was solid and practical and everything he'd thought Helen was, but without the overweening selfishness. For the first time, he was thinking things about a woman he'd never thought he would, things about commitment and love.
They'd landed up in the Middle Ages one more time, and he didn't know if it was the beer he'd had to drink (it wasn't bad, though he'd've killed for a proper Guiness) but he said to her suddenly, "Marry me."
She turned, eyes wide, "What?"
Once Stephen set himself on a course, he never backed down and never turned from it without a tremendous outside intervention of some kind. "Marry me, Sarah. I . . . I don't think I've ever felt this way about anyone and I don't think anyone's ever known me as well as you do, except maybe Nick."
Her dark eyes were wide as she stared, her jaw dropping open. Then slowly her mouth closed as she seemed to seriously think about what he was saying. He just waited. Unsure of what she would say, how she'd respond, half-expecting a 'no', and half-expecting that she'd ask him to let her think about it. She said the one thing he didn't expect. "Yes."
"Really?" he couldn't keep himself from asking. That kind of nonconfidence went against everything he ever tried to maintain with a woman, girlfriend or otherwise, but this was Sarah. He had to know, to be sure she wasn't just . . . yanking his chain.
"Really. Yes," she said.
He'd never been religious and she was lower C of E, but they chose to stay longer than might have been adviseable and had the local priest marry them in a Catholic ceremony that she had to prompt him through because the only Latin he had was scientific names for things and the translations of the parts of ancient animal names.
Two anomalies later they were in the Permian, the period that, for him at least, started it all, when all of a sudden, the anomaly they'd been slowly approaching bulged, and a whole train came through. They exchanged looks and ran for it, amazed the thing had somehow managed to stay on its wheels, even as it screeched to a halt, millions of years in the past.
The year they'd spent together had brought them so much in synch, it was almost like working with Nick again. Barely a glance and she she'd simply set herself to helping him evacuate the people on the train back through the anomaly. "Alright, let's go," he said, hauling some idiot sputtering businessman to his feet. "As you can see there's been something of a derailment, best to head back away from the train. I'm sure that some help will be there shortly."
Sarah showed up, holding one of the passenger tickets left behind, to show him the date. "I don't think we'll get closer to home than this," she told him, then redoubled her efforts to get people moving. "Come on! You don't want to stay on a derailed train, do you? Better to get moving so this can all get cleared up and you can get to where you were going."
Moments later, pushing his way through the crowds on the train, a brunet man with a very odd-looking weapon in hand got to them, trailed by a dark-haired woman, who seemed to be reassuring and trying to speed people along. "Sir, Ma'am, I'll have to ask you both to move along with the rest of the passengers-"
The woman seemed to take in their appearances, rolled her eyes at the man, whose accent indicated Irish origins, and interrupted him. "If you'd rather continue travelling through the gates, of course, we won't stop you, but I can assure you that the time Matt and myself both now live in is a vast improvement over itinerant eternal travel through various periods of time. Not to mention the troubles to be had with finding the precise originating period of time you're from."
The man, Matt apparently, shot her a confused look. "What?" he said.
"Really, Matt, can't you tell just by looking at them that they've been travelling as I was with Ethan and Charlotte?"
Sarah laughed. "Why doesn't it surprise me that there are time nomads as well." A familiar look of curiosity crossed her face. "I wonder if they might eventually create an entire culture and society of temporal wanderers?"
"Maybe you can speculate about myths of vanished imaginary civilisations once we're back in the twenty-first century and you can have access to proper research papers again," Stephen suggested with a grin. "Maybe after I've had a shower and shagged you six ways from Sunday too."
She grinned. "You sweet-talker, you," she said. "You must be with the ARC, then. How's Lester, and Jenny? Did they get Connor, Abby and Danny back?"
"Connor and Abby, yes," Matt replied, still looking a tad flummoxed.
They were, all four of them, at the tail of the group of irritatingly slow-moving passengers. "Maybe we could move a little faster!" Stephen grumbled. Around the outside of the train, soldiers in black were hastily moving to attach chains and ropes and pulleys to the vehicle, clearly to try to prevent someone from one day discovering a Permian-era railway train. They were most of the way to the tail end where the anomaly waited, when Stephen saw him. He almost didn't recognise him, the confident bearing, normal clothing and lack of fedora all serving to throw him off. But the man's head turned and Stephen hadn't realised until just then how much he'd missed them all, even, "Connor?"
"Stephen?" The other's eyes were wide and stunned. Not surprising since from what Sarah had said, they thought he'd died. "How-" but he suddenly started violently coughing, doubled over his comfortingly ubiquitous laptop.
"Dammit Connor, I told you to stay on the other side," Matt snapped.
And then Abby was there. "You told him, I told him, Jess and Lester told him, but he's determined to kill himself." Her jaw dropped. "Stephen?"
"Nice to see you, Abby." He looked over at Connor, who'd taken the handkerchief the dark-haired woman he still didn't know the name of, handed to him, and took it away from his mouth, bloodstained. "What the hell happened to you?" he asked the younger man.
Suddenly they all stiffened, and Emily and Connor both put a hand to their ears, where Stephen suddenly saw they all had some sort of communication device, clearly listening to someone on the other end. Matt sighed in irritation. "Point taken. Abby, Emily, keep these people moving, and that includes you two," he said to Sarah and Stephen. "Connor, as soon as you're done, you're off the field teams until the medics clear you."
"I'm not leaving him without someone to watch his back," Abby said stubbornly. "I only just got engaged, I'm not going to let him get eaten. And before you play the, 'I won't let anything happen, Abby,' card," she cut him off, "You need to get back out to the other side, because someone has to be the official face of things, and you know you don't want Becker doing that."
"Really not," agreed Sarah. "He'll just be sarcastic."
"Sarah?" chorused Connor and Abby.
She gave them both a sardonic look. "I feel so loved."
Connor looked like he was about to hug her when he had another attack. When he straightened up, his face was serious, and he said, "I have to stay, because I have to make sure this gets back through properly onto the tracks. I'm the only one who's got the ability to liase with Jess right now." He took the weird gun he carried, and flicked a switch, clearly making the whatever-it-was power up. "Stephen can watch my back while the rest of you keep people moving. Okay?" He tossed it to Stephen. Then he looked at Sarah. "We're trusting you that he's not another of Helen's clones, you know."
"He's too good a conversationalist for that," Sarah assured Connor. "You just make sure you don't die." She went with Abby, the woman whose name was apparently Emily, and Matt, herding the idiots down the train who seemed to be unable to understand that something was bloody wrong. Just before she vanished through the door at the far end leading to the last car, he heard Sarah shout triumphantly, "Yes! I won the When Connor and Abby Shag pool!"
Connor grumbled. "I'd've won if Cutter hadn't died. I put in an entry under his name."
"Awfully confident, weren't you?" Stephen asked with a grin. The pout and the tapping at the keyboard were so familiar, he could almost pretend nothing had changed.
His young colleague shrugged. "Actually, I just took one of the last dates left. Anyhow, Sarah didn't win the whole pool, I'm pretty sure she just won the engagement pool."
"When did you ask Abby to marry you?" Stephen asked curiously. Things had changed so much, he didn't want things to be even more awkward when they all got back to the ARC.
Connor's grin went goofy. "She asked me earlier today. We were in the future and I was pretty much about to let myself die from toxic fumes." The grin faded. "I nearly destroyed the world today."
"This I can't wait to hear," Stephen said. "Really? Did you become a comic-book supervillain after I . . . er . . . died?"
So in between coughs, handling a liason through the anomaly, Stephen really wasn't sure how Connor invented things like a cross-anomaly radio on the fly, directing the passel of soldiers and with Stephen shooting away prehistoric giant lizards (oh, how he'd missed guns, even weird ones like the EMD he now held), Connor told him the story of New Dawn.
Finally the train was dragged out, landed back on the tracks and the anomaly was locked up behind them. They arrived back at the new ARC, to be greeted by Lester, looking a great deal worse for wear, and a frighteningly cheerful teenager. "Oh, this is incredible!" she exclaimed. "I'm Jess, I've read both your files, and I'm so pleased to meet you both. You're practically a legend, you know," she informed them.
Connor muttered softly to Stephen. "It's almost like she knows you," he muttered. "I'm so happy Abby and I've moved out from her place. One more week as 'roomies' and I might've gone a little mad."
Sarah had a peculiar and slightly disturbed look on her face. "Isn't that hypocritical of you?" Stephen asked him. "I know you hacked everyone's files."
"I did, but I didn't assume that meant I knew them," Connor replied, then had another coughing fit.
"So," Lester said dryly. "Can I safely assume that you are over your utter mistrust of me?"
He had to be, didn't he? "Yes," he said.
"Fantastic," Lester declared. "Jess, get started on inputting Mr. Hart and Miss . . . Dr. Page-"
"Actually," Sarah said, laughter in her voice from what Stephen knew was glee at the bomb she was about to drop. "I believe I'd just as soon skip over the administrivia and be Dr. Hart to begin with, even before we renew our vows with everyone there."
"You got married?" asked the soldier in black apparently known only as Becker.
"You'll renew your vows?" inquired Jess eagerly.
"Good God, is this some sort of matchmaking centre now?" Lester demanded of the universe in rather a great deal of pique.
"You married Stephen?" Connor and Abby chorused.
There was a brief pause as Stephen and Sarah both waited on Emily and Matt to say something. "Congratulations," offered Emily. "I really don't know either of you at all to say anything."
"Likewise," Matt agreed.
"What's wrong with me?" Stephen asked Abby and Connor curiously.
Becker, Abby, Connor and Jess descended on Sarah and him, gleefully sharing stories and asking about double weddings, and he knew as he laced his fingers through Sarah's, that they were finally both where they belonged.
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Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: If you recognise it, I don't own it.
Summary: Sometimes the pathway to where you belong isn't exactly straight, something Sarah and Stephen discover.
Rating: NC-17
A/N: So, this is both a bit of Saving Stephen, and a fair amount of romantic schmaltz in a Stephen/Sarah 'ship. On the topic of Sarah's long bow, I see no reason why she shouldn't have spent some time playing with mediaeval weapon recontruction, and I think that she's plenty fearless enough to have been on archeological expeditions to all kinds of crazy places, it's just that she's never learned to fire a gun, which puts her into an odd position in the field as the one person who can't shoot (since by the time she gets there someone took the time to teach Connor). Feel free to tell me you think I got her characterisation wrong. Also, I believe it's more or less canon she left a dead body behind, but pretend she didn't for the sake of the fic.
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She'd been screaming for Becker, but between the predators and the injuries and everything else, she wasn't even really aware that the person that had her wasn't Becker until a day later when she woke up, injured, bloody, dehydrated but alive, and curled up in the arms of a man about as bloody and injured as she was, and equally as handsome as Becker under the blood, bruises and dirt, if in a completely different way.
"I'm Stephen," he said, as she fixed her eyes on his face. "I'm afraid I haven't much to offer by way of hospitality, but I do have clean water."
Shrugging, she told him, "Given that I was about to die, I think I can afford to be grateful for the water." She stiffly sat up, pulling away from him, only to realised that half the reason he'd been holding her so closely was that they were in some sort of treehouse, and her eyes were very wide as she realised there were dinosaurs below. Given that they'd already been through the one anomaly, she supposed it wasn't so strange that this man should have taken her through another. Quite possibly he'd felt the place was safer than the predators, and she couldn't exactly blame him. "I'm Sarah, by the way."
A squawk behind her, and she found herself facing a ptera-something-or-other, Connor would have known what, and she started scrambling back. The sharp command, "Duck!" made her instinctively flatten herself to the floor of the platform, and a zinging sound above her was followed by a loud "Thunk!" and suddenly there was a dead ptera-thingy on the floor beside her, an arrow . . . she sat up and looked at Stephen . . . crossbow bolt, then, through its head. "Dinner," he said dryly.
Just barely suppressing hysteria, Sarah said, "Well, good to know we won't starve." She nonetheless eyed it askance, even though she'd had weirder on her expeditions to Africa. "I assume it tastes like chicken?"
"Actually, more like bat," he said. He was eyeing her sideways, and suddenly Sarah realised he was doing something she'd often done after coming back from a dig. He was waiting for her to be weird and frightened of the notion.
She smiled. "It's been ages since I had bat, actually," she told him instead. "I mean, the dangers of rabies really make it more of a risk than it's worth, but it was really quite tasty."
The smile he gave her was quite dazzling.
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For two very long years, Stephen had been alone out in the wilds of the far side of the anomalies. In spite of how much he missed beer, worried about Nick and Connor and Abby, wanted to know how Everton was doing in the standings and would have killed for a decent shower and change of clothes, there was something about being out in the unspoiled wilderness that just suited him.
Still, he knew he didn't belong in the time he was, and the last thing he wanted was to wind up like Helen, mad and working with someone like Leek. He also knew that Nick deserved better and if they hadn't seen that an anomaly had opened right in the room with him they'd all think he was dead, and if they had . . . they deserved better than Helen had done by both him and Nick. So he'd see an anomaly, poke a head through to be sure it wasn't leading somewhere ridiculous, like a desert, or somewhere with toxic fumes, and he'd go through to check it out.
Sarah he'd rescued by chance, but now, several anomalies and a few million years later, he couldn't exactly regret the risk he'd taken with her. She was fun and witty, and although not so much an outdoorsman as himself, she'd been on some wild digs as an archaeologist, with a few hair-raising stories to match his own. She was also surprisingly adept at survival, admitting with a pleased blush at his compliments, that she'd quite enjoyed the practical work of determining how ancient peoples did certain things by testing out and learning how to make various tools.
Right now, though, he was running from a pack of terror birds, and Sarah, who had gone off on her own for a bit, asking for some privacy, was nowhere to be found. He'd already shot two of the birds with the crossbow he'd managed to trade for on a side trip to the middle ages, (and that had taken all his skills of pantomime and the loss of a very good knife of knapped obsidian), but running at full tilt and loading up a crossbow were just not compatible activities. Suddenly, something zinged by his head, and first one, then two of the birds fell away to the side.
He chanced a glance up, and there was Sarah, with what appeared to be a full English longbow in hand. "I said I'd never fired a gun, I didn't say I was a terrible shot," she shouted with a grin, then fired another arrow. This one missed killing its target, but still landed solidly, garnering a squawk of dismay, and sending a passel of the flock tripping all over each other. They ran for their latest tree habitat, scrambling up and away from the snapping beaks.
"So, that's what you've been working on," he said, grinning. "I'm impressed."
She grinned back at him. "I used to really love Robin Hood growing up," she told him. "My parents signed me up for archery classes after I whinged at them for three months straight." He held out a hand with an inquiring eyebrow and she obligingly handed the bow over for him to look at. "One of my instructors was a reconstructionist. I wound up begging him to teach me how to make one like Robin Hood's."
It was very nice. A solid weight, and when he twanged the string, he could feel that it was a good solid hundred-pound pull, maybe more. He didn't really know them that well, being more of a rifle man himself, but he knew enough to tell this was quality work. "You're going to have to start helping with the hunting now, you know," he told her with a grin. He already knew she wasn't particularly squeamish generally. In fact, even though it had only been a few months as far as either could tell, he was already just a little in love with her. She was tough as nails and as hardheaded as he was, hugely intelligent and just plain fun. It didn't hurt she'd been able to fill him in where Everton had been in the standings before she'd gone through the anomaly. "You can't hide behind me anymore."
"Now if I could have got the others at the ARC to do that," she muttered.
He froze. Funny how, in all the days and weeks they'd known each other, they hadn't actually talked properly about how they both came to be where they were. "Did you say the ARC?"
Her head snapped up and she froze. Then she seemed to come to a decision and said, "You know, I think it'd be a little late for Lester to yell at me for revealing the truth about the anomalies." Then her grin came back. "As Connor said when I met him, 'No, not that ark'."
Stephen couldn't help himself. "So, Connor and Abby, they're okay? And Cutter?"
Sarah's jaw dropped open, making her look utterly gormless for a moment before she recovered. "Wait . . ." she said slowly. "Stephen. As in Stephen Hart? Slept with that crazy woman Helen Cutter, Stephen Hart? The paragon of virtue that sacrificed his life for Nick Cutter Stephen Hart?"
That was a new one on him. "Paragon?" he asked.
She ignored his question, and told him, "You're prettier than I expected, and a lot less saintly."
He couldn't stop the slightly hysterical bark of laughter. "Saintly! Nick was about ready to murder me for sleeping with his wife. Not that I didn't deserve it." He had to ask, "Paragon?"
"Abby and Connor did nothing but sing your praises. I'll tell you, I think it annoyed the hell out of Becker. Danny too, a little."
"Who are Becker and Danny?" Stephen asked, fascinated. They must have joined the ARC at some point, along with Sarah. "How did you wind up in the ARC? I thought you said you were in archaeology."
"I am," she replied, amused. "Well, it all started for me the evening I stayed late to get a final chance to try to decode the heiroglyphics on the Sun Cage." At his look, she explained, "It's an Egyptian artefact that no one had been quite certain of what it was for or depicted, only that it was a large magnetite sculpture of four gods enclosing an area with their arms." She went on to explain about her discovery of random people with guns in the museum, the death of her supervisor, "That bitch," she muttered, and seeing a primitive crocodile crawl out of the anomaly that appeared in the middle of the artefact.
"So, Connor's taking me on a tour of the ARC, when I offhandedly remarked that I'd just seen a living legend. Cutter went mad about how he wanted me on the project to help him research the appearances of anomalies throughout history."
"And then you found yourself working for him, whether you wanted to or not, and you weren't quite sure which it was," Stephen said, amused. "The same thing happened to me. I was perfectly happy out in the field, but I tossed out one offhanded comment about coprolites and comparing the appearance of those with modern animal dung, and suddenly I'm in a lab-"
"And no idea how you got there," she finished, eyes sparkling. "Cutter always was a force of nature."
Something in the way she said it made him ask. "Was?"
Suddenly the humour vanished and she seemed to pull in a little. "Was. Helen killed him. It was barely a few months after I joined. Cutter had just figured out something about the pattern of the anomalies, had made an accurate prediction where one would be, when Helen invaded the ARC."
"What?" he gasped.
"She took over, she had a virtual little army of clones. Even a clone of Cutter." Sarah took in a shuddering breath. "She shot him. He died in Connor's arms. Connor . . . took it very badly. He looked up to Cutter so much, you know."
"Nick's dead," he mumured. It didn't feel real. He'd sacrificed himself to keep Nick alive, and it all felt like it was for nothing.
*********************************
For a few weeks, Nick's death and everything at the ARC that they had in common cast a pall on their relationship, and it was one Sarah didn't know how to lift. She tried everything, from telling him funny stories about the ARC, to trying to get back that easy camaraderie that had so characterised the first few months they'd travelled together. But time passed and Stephen gradually pulled himself out of mourning for his friend and began to reciprocate with stories she hadn't heard from Connor or Abby, asking questions about who was at the ARC now, and being stunned at how Lester had come to be so very well-loved by the people at the ARC.
They continued to travel together, going through anomaly after anomaly, sometimes finding themselves briefly in various periods of human history, taking the time to get new clothes, a bit of a bath, a meal that involved foodstuffs both could actually recognise, becoming closer with every passing day. It was after a narrow escape from a pack of mad, huge prehistoric wolves that everything changed. They'd both barely escaped with their lives, perched up a tree, as they so often were, when Sarah turned around, only to find Stephen's lips on hers, his arms nearly crushing her as he held her close.
"God, I thought I'd lost you a moment there," he murmured, dragging her around to pin her against the trunk of the enormous tree. The branches were so large and wide, it was practically a tree-house platform on its own. Not that she was thinking of that as he pressed a thigh between her legs, and his sizeable erection into her hip.
It had been a very long time, far longer than merely the stretch she'd been lost in time with Stephen, longer even that that better part of a year she'd been with the ARC. In fact, the last time had been with that guide back in Egypt. So, when Stephen's clever fingers found their way into the tunic she wore, cupping a breast and rollng a nipple between his fingers, it was like lightning jolted through her and she bucked desperately against him, kissing back feverishly. "Stephen," she whimpered. "Please."
A low groan was her answer, as he began to roll his hips, pressing that tempting bulge against her, and encouraging her to ride the rock-hard thigh between her legs. He kissed her harder, all tongue and demand, and that sensual mouth was just as skilled as she'd idly wondered in the middle of the night when they slept close together to conserve body heat.
But it wasn't enough, and Sarah pulled away from that mouth, tugging at his shirt to get her hands on some skin, feeling the delightful cut of his torso under her fingers and catching his nipples, making him curse and tug at the breeches she now wore, that they had liberated from a sixteenth century clothesline. Moments later his fingers slipped down to where she was already copiously wet and one slid inside while the heel of his hand pressed on the nub of her clit. It was fantastic, and Sarah lost track of anything she was doing to him to buck and writhe helplessly. Her orgasm rushed up almost too quickly, but then she was coming, clinging to Stephen and gasping out his name.
It wasn't until after she came back down that she was aware of the slow rocking of his hips and the need behind the smug smile on his face. Turnabout being fair play, she smiled at him and undid his trousers, sliding a hand around the erection he was sporting and squeezing. He groaned, and she turned them so that his back was to the trunk now, before settling in to give him a hand job.
The temptation to push him down and get that gorgeous cock inside her was intense and pernicious, but until they were somewhere reasonable and safe, she wasn't going to take any risk of getting pregnant. No matter how good the pulsing hardened flesh in her hands would probably feel. "Sarah," he panted, his hips jerking hard in her grasp. "God, so good."
Ye gods but it was arousing to turn this man into putty. He was so gorgeous. A few minutes longer and he was coming, a few more spastic thrusts of his hips and he seemed to puddle at the join between the trunk and the branch they were on. Immediately she crawled into his arms, the both of them relaxed in the afterglow. "Don't scare me like that again," he muttered in her ear. "I don't think I could stand to lose you."
"The same goes for you," Sarah told him a little tartly. "Don't you go making giant carnivores chase you on foot."
They sat together, resting and just enjoying each other's company for the moment. Sarah found herself drifting off, feeling safe, despite their location, both physical and temporal. Nearly asleep, she could have sworn she heard him tell her. "I really think I love you, you know."
***********************************
It had been a year since he'd met Sarah Page, and Stephen knew one thing. If he'd wanted to create a woman for himself from scratch, he couldn't have done better. She was as adventurous as he was, although she admitted to never having learned to use a gun, she didn't back down and was a mean shot with an English longbow. She'd travelled to a great many mad places just as he had, and she missed the wildness. She understood the work of a paleontologist, because so many of the skills in the field for achaeology and paleontology were the same, and she was smart, brilliant even, and fun and witty and clever. To top all that off, the woman was stunningly beautiful, but in an unaffected way that meant she didn't concern herself with it, it just was.
Not that there was much in the way of cosmetics available in the pre-human eras of the planet, but he never caught her primping, even when they found themselves briefly in other times. She was solid and practical and everything he'd thought Helen was, but without the overweening selfishness. For the first time, he was thinking things about a woman he'd never thought he would, things about commitment and love.
They'd landed up in the Middle Ages one more time, and he didn't know if it was the beer he'd had to drink (it wasn't bad, though he'd've killed for a proper Guiness) but he said to her suddenly, "Marry me."
She turned, eyes wide, "What?"
Once Stephen set himself on a course, he never backed down and never turned from it without a tremendous outside intervention of some kind. "Marry me, Sarah. I . . . I don't think I've ever felt this way about anyone and I don't think anyone's ever known me as well as you do, except maybe Nick."
Her dark eyes were wide as she stared, her jaw dropping open. Then slowly her mouth closed as she seemed to seriously think about what he was saying. He just waited. Unsure of what she would say, how she'd respond, half-expecting a 'no', and half-expecting that she'd ask him to let her think about it. She said the one thing he didn't expect. "Yes."
"Really?" he couldn't keep himself from asking. That kind of nonconfidence went against everything he ever tried to maintain with a woman, girlfriend or otherwise, but this was Sarah. He had to know, to be sure she wasn't just . . . yanking his chain.
"Really. Yes," she said.
He'd never been religious and she was lower C of E, but they chose to stay longer than might have been adviseable and had the local priest marry them in a Catholic ceremony that she had to prompt him through because the only Latin he had was scientific names for things and the translations of the parts of ancient animal names.
Two anomalies later they were in the Permian, the period that, for him at least, started it all, when all of a sudden, the anomaly they'd been slowly approaching bulged, and a whole train came through. They exchanged looks and ran for it, amazed the thing had somehow managed to stay on its wheels, even as it screeched to a halt, millions of years in the past.
The year they'd spent together had brought them so much in synch, it was almost like working with Nick again. Barely a glance and she she'd simply set herself to helping him evacuate the people on the train back through the anomaly. "Alright, let's go," he said, hauling some idiot sputtering businessman to his feet. "As you can see there's been something of a derailment, best to head back away from the train. I'm sure that some help will be there shortly."
Sarah showed up, holding one of the passenger tickets left behind, to show him the date. "I don't think we'll get closer to home than this," she told him, then redoubled her efforts to get people moving. "Come on! You don't want to stay on a derailed train, do you? Better to get moving so this can all get cleared up and you can get to where you were going."
Moments later, pushing his way through the crowds on the train, a brunet man with a very odd-looking weapon in hand got to them, trailed by a dark-haired woman, who seemed to be reassuring and trying to speed people along. "Sir, Ma'am, I'll have to ask you both to move along with the rest of the passengers-"
The woman seemed to take in their appearances, rolled her eyes at the man, whose accent indicated Irish origins, and interrupted him. "If you'd rather continue travelling through the gates, of course, we won't stop you, but I can assure you that the time Matt and myself both now live in is a vast improvement over itinerant eternal travel through various periods of time. Not to mention the troubles to be had with finding the precise originating period of time you're from."
The man, Matt apparently, shot her a confused look. "What?" he said.
"Really, Matt, can't you tell just by looking at them that they've been travelling as I was with Ethan and Charlotte?"
Sarah laughed. "Why doesn't it surprise me that there are time nomads as well." A familiar look of curiosity crossed her face. "I wonder if they might eventually create an entire culture and society of temporal wanderers?"
"Maybe you can speculate about myths of vanished imaginary civilisations once we're back in the twenty-first century and you can have access to proper research papers again," Stephen suggested with a grin. "Maybe after I've had a shower and shagged you six ways from Sunday too."
She grinned. "You sweet-talker, you," she said. "You must be with the ARC, then. How's Lester, and Jenny? Did they get Connor, Abby and Danny back?"
"Connor and Abby, yes," Matt replied, still looking a tad flummoxed.
They were, all four of them, at the tail of the group of irritatingly slow-moving passengers. "Maybe we could move a little faster!" Stephen grumbled. Around the outside of the train, soldiers in black were hastily moving to attach chains and ropes and pulleys to the vehicle, clearly to try to prevent someone from one day discovering a Permian-era railway train. They were most of the way to the tail end where the anomaly waited, when Stephen saw him. He almost didn't recognise him, the confident bearing, normal clothing and lack of fedora all serving to throw him off. But the man's head turned and Stephen hadn't realised until just then how much he'd missed them all, even, "Connor?"
"Stephen?" The other's eyes were wide and stunned. Not surprising since from what Sarah had said, they thought he'd died. "How-" but he suddenly started violently coughing, doubled over his comfortingly ubiquitous laptop.
"Dammit Connor, I told you to stay on the other side," Matt snapped.
And then Abby was there. "You told him, I told him, Jess and Lester told him, but he's determined to kill himself." Her jaw dropped. "Stephen?"
"Nice to see you, Abby." He looked over at Connor, who'd taken the handkerchief the dark-haired woman he still didn't know the name of, handed to him, and took it away from his mouth, bloodstained. "What the hell happened to you?" he asked the younger man.
Suddenly they all stiffened, and Emily and Connor both put a hand to their ears, where Stephen suddenly saw they all had some sort of communication device, clearly listening to someone on the other end. Matt sighed in irritation. "Point taken. Abby, Emily, keep these people moving, and that includes you two," he said to Sarah and Stephen. "Connor, as soon as you're done, you're off the field teams until the medics clear you."
"I'm not leaving him without someone to watch his back," Abby said stubbornly. "I only just got engaged, I'm not going to let him get eaten. And before you play the, 'I won't let anything happen, Abby,' card," she cut him off, "You need to get back out to the other side, because someone has to be the official face of things, and you know you don't want Becker doing that."
"Really not," agreed Sarah. "He'll just be sarcastic."
"Sarah?" chorused Connor and Abby.
She gave them both a sardonic look. "I feel so loved."
Connor looked like he was about to hug her when he had another attack. When he straightened up, his face was serious, and he said, "I have to stay, because I have to make sure this gets back through properly onto the tracks. I'm the only one who's got the ability to liase with Jess right now." He took the weird gun he carried, and flicked a switch, clearly making the whatever-it-was power up. "Stephen can watch my back while the rest of you keep people moving. Okay?" He tossed it to Stephen. Then he looked at Sarah. "We're trusting you that he's not another of Helen's clones, you know."
"He's too good a conversationalist for that," Sarah assured Connor. "You just make sure you don't die." She went with Abby, the woman whose name was apparently Emily, and Matt, herding the idiots down the train who seemed to be unable to understand that something was bloody wrong. Just before she vanished through the door at the far end leading to the last car, he heard Sarah shout triumphantly, "Yes! I won the When Connor and Abby Shag pool!"
Connor grumbled. "I'd've won if Cutter hadn't died. I put in an entry under his name."
"Awfully confident, weren't you?" Stephen asked with a grin. The pout and the tapping at the keyboard were so familiar, he could almost pretend nothing had changed.
His young colleague shrugged. "Actually, I just took one of the last dates left. Anyhow, Sarah didn't win the whole pool, I'm pretty sure she just won the engagement pool."
"When did you ask Abby to marry you?" Stephen asked curiously. Things had changed so much, he didn't want things to be even more awkward when they all got back to the ARC.
Connor's grin went goofy. "She asked me earlier today. We were in the future and I was pretty much about to let myself die from toxic fumes." The grin faded. "I nearly destroyed the world today."
"This I can't wait to hear," Stephen said. "Really? Did you become a comic-book supervillain after I . . . er . . . died?"
So in between coughs, handling a liason through the anomaly, Stephen really wasn't sure how Connor invented things like a cross-anomaly radio on the fly, directing the passel of soldiers and with Stephen shooting away prehistoric giant lizards (oh, how he'd missed guns, even weird ones like the EMD he now held), Connor told him the story of New Dawn.
Finally the train was dragged out, landed back on the tracks and the anomaly was locked up behind them. They arrived back at the new ARC, to be greeted by Lester, looking a great deal worse for wear, and a frighteningly cheerful teenager. "Oh, this is incredible!" she exclaimed. "I'm Jess, I've read both your files, and I'm so pleased to meet you both. You're practically a legend, you know," she informed them.
Connor muttered softly to Stephen. "It's almost like she knows you," he muttered. "I'm so happy Abby and I've moved out from her place. One more week as 'roomies' and I might've gone a little mad."
Sarah had a peculiar and slightly disturbed look on her face. "Isn't that hypocritical of you?" Stephen asked him. "I know you hacked everyone's files."
"I did, but I didn't assume that meant I knew them," Connor replied, then had another coughing fit.
"So," Lester said dryly. "Can I safely assume that you are over your utter mistrust of me?"
He had to be, didn't he? "Yes," he said.
"Fantastic," Lester declared. "Jess, get started on inputting Mr. Hart and Miss . . . Dr. Page-"
"Actually," Sarah said, laughter in her voice from what Stephen knew was glee at the bomb she was about to drop. "I believe I'd just as soon skip over the administrivia and be Dr. Hart to begin with, even before we renew our vows with everyone there."
"You got married?" asked the soldier in black apparently known only as Becker.
"You'll renew your vows?" inquired Jess eagerly.
"Good God, is this some sort of matchmaking centre now?" Lester demanded of the universe in rather a great deal of pique.
"You married Stephen?" Connor and Abby chorused.
There was a brief pause as Stephen and Sarah both waited on Emily and Matt to say something. "Congratulations," offered Emily. "I really don't know either of you at all to say anything."
"Likewise," Matt agreed.
"What's wrong with me?" Stephen asked Abby and Connor curiously.
Becker, Abby, Connor and Jess descended on Sarah and him, gleefully sharing stories and asking about double weddings, and he knew as he laced his fingers through Sarah's, that they were finally both where they belonged.
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