Primeval Fic: Something Like Claudia Brown 1/5
Title: Something Like Claudia Brown
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, except a third-rate fantasy novella that will probably never be finished.
Rating: PG-13 at the outset, I may change it later.
Summary: Abby's going to get married. Then she goes through an anomaly, comes back out, and finds out just how upsetting the Claudia Brown phenomenon can be.
A/N: So, as I take a bold step into my first Conby 'ship fic, I've been kicking this idea around.
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In the end, Abby and Connor had had to be the ones to go through of the team, everyone else was occupied. They had to retrieve the strings of tinsel and some very long-lasting shiny stuff, taken by the hopeful oviraptor male, who had managed quite a . . . decorative effect with his bower. As they stripped it away, Connor idly remarked, "I feel quite sorry for him, actually. I mean, he'd gone to all this trouble to decorate the place, probably might as well have put on Barry White albums and everything, and he's going to bring his girl back to find a mess."
Despite agreeing with his sentiments in a way, Abby just rolled her eyes at her fiance and soon-to-be-husband. "As much as I agree, Connor, let's just hurry up and get this done and get home. I need to take the time to yell at Danny in advance so that when he brings you home from your stag night I've already got it out of my system." At the affronted look on his face, she rolled her eyes. "I'm expecting to be too drunk myself to do it then, you know. I heard Jenny going on about male strippers."
Connor raised an eyebrow at her. "Is that why you're not laying down the law about not getting me too pissed to stand up and all that? You won't have a leg to stand on?"
"Pretty much," Abby told him blithely. "Anyhow, it's also that I trust you and I don't even think it's a possibility that you'd actually do anything wrong behind my back. So, if you, Danny, Becker and Matt decide to spend all night getting drunk and leering at mostly naked women, I can deal with it."
"Also, you still can't say anything if Jenny's living room will be populated by people like, Casper the Copper and Frankie the Fireman."
Abby stared at him. "I may have been curious about what Jenny was planning," he admitted.
"You hacked her email and used keyword searches, didn't you?"
"Yup." She couldn't keep herself from laughing. "Hey," he said, an amused twinkle in his eye, "Did you know she's being courted for being the publicity relations person for the Association for Regulation of Scottish Economics?"
Abby stared blankly a moment, then sighed. "Silly arses," she muttered. "No pun intended," she snapped even as Connor opened his mouth.
It closed again, and then he nodded. "She sent them a pretty scathing email back."
"I don't blame her," Abby told him. They'd gotten the last bundles together and walked back to the anomaly. Connor plucked a flower from a nearby bush with his free hand, presenting it to her.
"For the loveliest lady in all the British Isles," he said sketching a bow.
She took it, smelled it, put it into her hair, which didn't quite work because it wasn't staying put properly, and smiled back. "I know you're leaving room for Tricia Helfer," she told him, taking his hand anyhow, because it was sweet the way he romanced her. It was awkward and endearing and if you ignored the things he accidentally said because he didn't mean to say them and just completely missed them, he was really romantic.
He took her hand and they walked back through the anomaly.
The first thing she noticed on the other side was that Matt, Emily and Becker weren't there. Stephen, Cutter and Captain Ryan were. A sick feeling filled her a moment, as she wondered if she was dead or dreaming or . . . something. But a quick pinch of her leg told her that she was probably not dreaming, and if she were dead, shouldn't she either remember something about to kill her, or at least not be feeling the pain of being pinched or . . . she'd assume she was alive until someone pointed out the Pearly Gates to her.
The second thing was that she had a free hand to pinch herself, and Connor's hand that had been in hers was missing. He wasn't there. She didn't even have time to start looking for him when Stephen strode forward, saying, "God, I was worried! What possessed you to go through?" Then he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
Shocked, Abby just stood there a moment while Stephen kissed her, trying to cope with what was going on. That was when she realised that Stephen Hart was kissing her, and pushed away from him, staggering back into the wall, staring blankly. "What?" she asked dumbly. How could this be happening?
"Claudia! Where's Claudia Brown?"
She felt sick at the memory and asked the question she was now certain she wouldn't like the answer to. "Where's Connor?"
"Who?" Stephen asked, still standing too close.
"For goodness sake, Stephen," said Jenny as she emerged from behind Ryan and Cutter. "I realise you're still dealing with the breakup, but I don't think trying to kiss your way back in will work."
Abby shook her head to clear it, wondering if this was how Cutter had felt as he came out of the anomaly, looking for a woman who'd never existed. "Connor Temple," she repeated. "I . . . he was right behind me, Cutter." She shook her head, "It's like he just . . . evaporated as we crossed back."
Suddenly, Jenny got a sour look on her face. "She's talking about the Temple boy, Nick. The one who's been causing all the trouble with showing up at the anomalies like some sort of thrill-seeker." Disgruntled, she continued. "I still cannot believe he convinced my own sister to join his merry little band of . . . of vigilantes. What Jenny was thinking I do not know."
The idea was dizzying, and Abby found herself saying, "Claudia?" in disbelief.
"Yes?"
"Oh my God." Abby felt her knees shaking as she leaned against the wall. It was all wrong. "So . . . I don't . . . No wonder you looked so disorientated," she said to Cutter. A hysterical laugh escaped her. "You were right, she does look just like Jenny. How Connor managed to even understand it all is just beyond me, but he's always been that way."
"Abby," Stephen said, cautiously, "Are you alright?"
"No," she said. "No I am not alright on an epic scale." Another hysterical laugh as she felt the walls of the alley starting to rotate around her. "God, Connor, you have me quoting one of your damn shows and you're not even here to appreciate corrupting me."
Cutter seemed to make a decision to take a stab at getting sense out of her. "Abby, we can't help if you don't explain."
Taking in a trembling breath, Abby said, "It's just like Claudia Brown."
"What?" said the woman who looked like Jenny but was actually Claudia.
"Long story," Abby said, deciding that explaining about Cutter staggering out of the anomaly in the Forest of Dean wouldn't do any good and would just confuse the issue. "The point is, when I went through the anomaly, you were dead," she told the three men. "Ryan died in the anomaly in the Permian when Helen tricked us into sending the future predator's kits through. It was his body they found when he and Cutter went through that anomaly the first time." She turned to Stephen. "You died in Leek's menagerie, but you won't know who Leek is, because you have Claudia, which we didn't, because she disappeared from history when Cutter came out of the Permian anomaly without Ryan."
"What?" came a ragged chorus of reply.
She ignored them. "And Helen had one of her clones shoot you," she added to Cutter. "It left Connor gutted when you died. He was there and . . . I've never seen him like that since." She shook her head. "It was so surreal. We'd spent the day at the hospital, coralling the diictodons, and then all of a sudden, the ARC's been invaded by Helen and . . . so we were left with Becker and Sarah, and Lester hired Danny on the spot to stop Christine Johnson from poking her nose into the ARC, not that that helped."
"Abby, you're not making any sense," Stephen said gently.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just . . . this morning you were all dead." The look the others exchanged spoke volumes. "I'm not mad. Something happened in the past. Something Connor and I did changed things, or maybe it was the oviraptor taking the tinsel," she held out her handful of shiny stuff, "But everything's changed here."
It was as though a light went on in Cutter's head. "You're saying that you think you must have done something in the past which somehow sent ripples through time to affect the present?"
"Yes!" Abby exclaimed. "It's happened before. With you and Claudia Brown. You came out of the anomaly, asking where she was, but none of us had ever heard of her, because she didn't exist. But now she does and . . . everything's different," Abby finished lamely, unable to explain better. After all, there was no way to explain this, and she was no Connor with his instinctive understanding of such concepts.
Cutter frowned, but Abby had the somewhat comforting feeling that he wasn't dismissing her out of hand, just trying to determine what to do about things. "We'd best head back to the Home Office," he told her. "We'll figure something out."
She followed him back to his car, a sense of some relief coming over her. Losing Cutter had done some very bad things to the team, had taken away the mandate of scientific exploration that had so characterised those early years, leaving them with Danny and Matt and Becker to take up the slack, pushing it all into a military mindset of controlling the anomalies and not studying them and the animals that came through.
But as they pulled up at the home office, heading past the mishmash of offices that Abby remembered as being completely inadequate to the work at the ARC, she realised how different things were. This wasn't the ARC, this was the small adjunct satellite to the Home Office that had been set up on a shoestring to handle the incursions. Where was the tech? Where were the scientists and soldiers and administrators? Leek had been pretty much an evil, skeevy, creepy, Helen-minion, but he'd organised and delegated and got them their building.
Now that she thought about it, it had been down to him and Connor. Connor, who had claimed the computer system was inadequate for a proper handling of his database and the information that needed to be processed and cross-referenced, Connor, who had pointed out they needed to separate the science into departments, if only to keep the samples from cross-contaminating, and Connor who'd liased between Leek and Cutter, keeping them from each other's throats by playing go-between so that the set-up would get done without having to call Lester in to make disparaging comments.
Connor wasn't here.
She felt like crying.
By the time they trooped into Lester's office she had herself under control, but the sight of Lester, looking exactly the same as when they'd left the ARC that morning nearly undid her. He'd agreed to walk her down the aisle, taking the place of her absentee father. She nearly moved to hug him in relief, when he seemed to retreat from her. He neither backed down nor flinched, but something in the way he held himself was standoffish. This wasn't the Lester that had greeted her and Connor with a joke after a year away in the Cretaceous, this was the government hatchet man Cutter had so disliked.
One more thing out of place. It was good to see Ryan again, Cutter and Stephen well and friendly, but she missed Becker's stolidity, so different in nature from Ryan's phlegmatic temperament. She missed Matt's weird stiffness and she missed Jess' cheer and Emily's warmth.
Then from around the corner, Sarah appeared. "Sarah!" She wasn't a replacement for the ones Abby was missing, no one was, but then, no one was a replacement for anyone else. She didn't care that the other woman looked baffled, anything was better than the picture in her mind drawn by Becker's defeated words of Sarah lying dead in a car, killed by predators in a now-hopefully-changed future.
Sarah hesitantly hugged her back, saying, "Erm . . . there, there? Abby? Are you alright?"
"You're not dead anymore!" Abby gushed. "You don't know how horrible it was when . . ." She pulled away. "Sorry. It's complicated."
Cutter stared at her, "What happened?" he asked, eyes wide, "Was there some sort of apocalypse in this . . . alternate reality you're from? It's as though everyone you meet here is someone who was dead there."
Abby knew she should be serious, but a little devil of mischief made her say, "Oh, we stopped the apocalypse. Really, I still don't know how Matt made it back out of that monster anomaly Helen got Burton to trick Connor into making."
They all stared. "Sorry. It's just . . . everything here's so . . . different."
"If one of you might consider explaining this . . . possibly delusional behaviour?" Lester asked pointedly.
Abby was thankful that Cutter leapt in to explain, rather than forcing her to do it, because Connor was really the only one who'd understood when Cutter had tried to explain in the original timeline. Or was it the second one, since the one with Claudia Brown and Connor had come first?
At least everyone was now so used to the weirdness that was the anomalies, that they seemed to accept fiarly quickly that Abby was a different Abby than the one they knew, while still being Abby. When Cutter's explanation of the theory of how a different present could be created by Abby having been in the past, he said, "And she's been bringing up that Temple boy."
It hadn't quite registered with her until that moment. "So, Connor exists here? Not like Claudia Brown and Jenny, where Jenny just sort of . . . replaced Claudia?"
"Jenny 'replaced' me?" Claudia asked, sounding stunned. "How . . ."
Abby shrugged. "I don't know. Connor was the only one who ever really understood. I mean . . ."
"Well," Stephen interrupted her. "I don't know about someone replacing anyone, but I have the feeling that the Connor that you're used to is significantly different from the one here."
"What do you mean?" Abby asked slowly.
Looks of disgust circled the room. "When we went out to investigate the report in the Forest of Dean, he just kept doing the silliest things," Cutter explained. "I finally just sent him back to the university after he sat in front of the anomaly sending his bloody housekey through, like a three-year-old with a new toy."
Stephen nodded. "It's just as well. That poor kid you got the coelurosauravus from was killed."
"The gorgonopsid killed Ben?" Abby asked, aghast.
Nodding soberly, Stephen told her, "I found a footprint, but I just wasn't prepared for what it was." He shook his head. "Temple would have just-"
"Told you it was a gorgonopsid so you knew and knew to move fast and keep Ben from being killed," Abby snapped.
"Abby," Cutter said gently. "I think you need to realise that this isn't the reality you're from. Temple and his little gang have been getting in our way, risking themselves, and doing some very foolish things. He's not the person you remember."
She nodded silently, but wondered if Cutter were truly right. They'd all thought Connor quite daft when the project had started, but after years of working with him, everyone had to agree that there was a method behind the daft, sometimes childlike man Connor was. What she had to do was bide her time, find out more, then find Connor to see for herself.
As the meeting broke up, she hastily latched onto the one person she recognised that might be able to answer some of her questions, and used Sarah as an excuse to avoid Stephen. Soon they were ensconced in Sarah's lab, one thing that looked not much different from the one she'd had at the old ARC building. "I need to know a few things," Abby said to her. "And I think the first one is, were Stephen and I dating?"
Sarah looked extremely uncomfortable as she said, "You were, but a week ago you broke up with him. You gave him the 'let's just be friends,' speech. He didn't really take it well."
"Well, that's something, at least," Abby muttered. "I mean, not that Stephen's not happy, but I was going to get married in just a few days. I couldn't have gone from that to Stephen's girlfriend, even if I were still interested. Which I'm not anymore."
"Anymore?" Sarah inquired.
So, Abby told her about those early days when she'd held out hope that Stephen would notice her. "But in the end, it wouldn't have worked anyhow. And I'm happy with Conn . . ." her voice cracked as she realised that, even if there was a Connor here, he wouldn't be her Connor. He wouldn't have spent a year lost 65 million years in the past, wouldn't have lived with her and Rex and Sid and Nancy. Wouldn't have dangled over a cliff's edge, screaming for anyone to hear that he loved her as he clung to her hand, preferring to die than abandon her.
"Oh, Abby," Sarah murmured as she wrapped her arms around her friend. It wasn't her Sarah, wasn't the one who'd lied to Connor about a curse on the Sun Cage and cheerfully messed with Connor's sense of superiority about his programming and locking device, but it was still Sarah. Who smelled like curry and dust and had a hundred references in her office to try tracking anomalies by historical appearance. Sarah, who Abby had thought she'd never see again and had died trying to give Connor and Abby a rescue when she should never have been in the field.
"I missed you," she admitted into her friend's shoulder. "When we got back from the Cretaceous, Connor and I, and we found out you'd died on a mission to rescue us, I felt so awful. Becker wasn't the same either. I think he blamed himself."
"Who's Becker?" Sarah asked curiously.
"How . . . of course," Abby shook her head. "He wouldn't be here. He was hired after Ryan died, and if Ryan never died, there'd be no reason to get Becker."
Quick on the uptake as always, Sarah said, "So, he was a soldier?"
"SAS," Abby said grinning. "Extremely good-looking."
"Who's good-looking?" interrupted a voice from the door. It was the not-Jenny, Claudia.
"Just someone I knew once," Abby said, shaking her head. "It's weird how much you look like Jenny."
Claudia just looked irritated. "I'll tell you this. My sister is the bane of my existence. The notion that I might have had another life where she never existed is a dream I had all the time growing up."
"What?" Abby said, baffled.
Sighing, Claudia said, "I suppose I'd better warn you before you trip over her and get confused. I have a half sister. Our mothers were twins, and my father, our father, had an affair with my aunt. It's a quirk of genetics, but my half sister, Jenny looks exactly like me. We were even born on the same day. She just goes by her mother's name, Lewis. Since my mum was actually married to our father at the time, I have their name, Brown."
Abby buried her head in her hands a moment, stifling snickers. "What is it?" Sarah asked.
Trying not to have hysterics, Abby told them, "It's just . . . it always seemed like some sort of weird mystical thing that Claudia was magically replaced by some other woman that looked just like her but was totally different. This just . . . makes it all a lot less mysterious."
"I suppose it does at that," Sarah said nodding. Abby still caught her and Claudia shrugging at each other out of the corner of her eye.
Stephen suddenly rounded the corner. "We've got a lead on an anomaly, let's move," he said shortly.
Abby found herself in the back seat of the old Hilux, loading up the tranqs they'd ceased to use with the advent of the EMD. Her head snapped up as she heard Cutter grumble, "I just hope we can beat them to it. I wish I knew how Temple's crew beats us to the anomalies the way they do."
"Beats us to the anomalies?" Abby asked.
Stephen turned to face her. "Somehow, Temple's managing to beat us to the anomalies. It's turned into a stupid race," he said. "Sometimes they beat us and sometimes they don't, and no one's been able to figure out how they beat us or not. It seems to be luck," he explained.
When they got there, it seemed that Connor's 'crew' had indeed beaten them there. How could Cutter and Stephen tell? The anomaly had been blocked off from allowing anything to escape, by the expedient of surrounding it on all sides with the heavy barrels in the warehouse, which had also been hastily bolted together. From inside the enclosure Abby could hear an irritated roar, but it would be cut off as the animal on the other side would clearly go right back through when faced with nowhere to go. It was clever and effective, given that apparently this Connor had no locking device.
Cutter and Stephen, meanwhile, were making irritated noises about Connor's 'interference', which only stiffened Abby's resolve to find Connor and see if she could put together what was going on.
*******************
Abby aimlessly wandered the offices, renewing her acquaintance with the layout of everything, wondering if every few years she'd be doing this again. This time, unlike the last two times, however, there was no Connor. With the move to the first ARC, he'd eagerly pointed out everything that had been his idea, showing her, Cutter and Stephen where their offices were and the quarantine spaces for studying things that might be dangerous and places where they could hold things like Columbian mammoths until such time as there was somewhere to send them. He'd been intimately involved in setting up, having argued Lester and Leek to a standstill as he pointed out that if it was a scientific endeavour, they should have one of the working scientists consulting on layout. He'd even snagged one of Ryan's men, insisting that they should have a say on their section of things.
Cutter had been too busy with the anomalies themselves to pay attention, she and Stephen had been too busy with the animals, and none of them had even noticed how bored Connor was at playing lab tech for them to realise until he'd whipped out a complete architectural bluprint one day, having taught himself the entire first year curriculum for an architecture student in his free time.
The second time, they'd gone through and Connor had made dry remarks about living like morlocks underground and the security upgrades all over. Despite the sense of displacement, he and Becker had had her in stitches as Connor had put on airs and tried to outdo Becker for bone-dry sarcasm. His glee following each comment had ruined the effect, but it had made her love him all the more as he forced the tour into making the new ARC their own again.
Now she was wandering about and there was no Connor to tisk about the overflowing in-trays and make faces about the aged computers.
"Impressive, isn't it?" Sarah said from behind her.
Abby nearly leapt three feet in the air. "It's . . . something," she said, comparing it to the old ARC, with it's high ceilings and airy openness. A thought occurred to her, "How do you detect anomalies here, anyhow?" she asked.
"Well," Sarah said, leading her down the hall. "Cutter's got some techs working around the clock to locate anomalies based on something to do with radio waves," she explained. "He noticed a few years back that the anomalies disrupt a particular frequency, but it's been sort of on the back burner. At the moment," Sarah stopped at the door to a large room with a bank of computers, a bank of televisions, a stack of what were radios and a dozen people or so, clearly monitoring everything coming out of the massive media collection in the room, "we just track any and all reports of strange sightings, odd animal sightings and whatnot."
"You . . ." Abby trailed off.
Sarah nodded. "It's a pretty stunning undertaking, isn't it?" she said proudly.
"Stunning," Abby echoed. Well, it was no wonder Connor was beating them to anomalies. He probably had an ADD up and running, while they were still using the old internet keyword search 'bot system from the early days. Even if Connor didn't have an ADD, she bet he'd've put one together that was better than whatever they had.
Soon enough she was given a proper tour by Cutter and Claudia, both of whom were immensely cute together as a couple, and mistakenly proud of their set-up. When Cutter showed her the fancy newfangled anomaly tracking devices his team had come up with, the ones that would let them narrow down an anomaly location once they were within a few hundred metres of the things, she nearly laughed. And her Cutter had been disappointed with the 'large' size of Connor's first prototypes? These things were the size of a notebook computer, and while they had some extra app-like functions on them, they didn't even have the elegance of Connor's early work, which had tended to include bits of toasters. Usually toasters taken from their flat.
She felt like she was in another technological era altogether. Cutter's work on the anomalies was far more advanced along, his giant model with many more blanks filled in than it had when he'd died in the old timeline. Stephen had got himself a whole room for comparative microbiology and seemed happier than she'd even seen him before, but for the sad, hangdog expressions he aimed her way. Sarah, too, had her own little department of researchers, doing the legwork of digging up potential historical references to anomalies for her, saving her time of endlessly poring over things written in languages someone else could translate.
But the technological heart of the ARC had been Connor, and without him puttering around, it all felt wrong. Abby found her way back to her office and began to read through old reports.
Without Burton, they'd had to find other ways to handle the animals left behind and trapped in the present. It seemed that Abby handled oversight of that, and Lester had somehow got them an old private zoo to keep them in. Looking at the pictures, Abby smiled. It was a million times better than Burton's grim concrete enclave and all the large herbivores had turned out docile enough to roam in the open together freely.
Suddenly, she saw something in the background of one of the photographs. Peering closely, finally getting out a magnifying glass, she saw what, or rather who, it was. Tom. Connor's friend Tom was in the background, talking to the manager at the menagerie there. A thought made her open up a dozen files and expense reports, and begin to dig through them. Her sudden hunch seemed accurate.
The Home Office Anomaly Research Adjunct weren't the only people using the menagerie. Connor's so-called crew had been using it too. In secret, with her supposed subordinates keeping it from her. Either her previous self had missed the clues, or had caught them but let it go because the animals needed proper care. Either way, Connor would have been making sure that any animals he captured wound up there, which meant that if Abby went out to check, and mid-week it wasn't on her normal Friday afternoon schedule, she might find someone who could point her to where Connor was now.
She trotted to the door, telling Claudia that, "Since I'm effectively brand new and all, I'd like to see the zoo we've got," and got waved off to do whatever needed doing. After all, there was no need to hide where she was going, it was part of her job she'd have to deal with anyhow.
It was amusing when she got there to see a sudden panic as a bunch of keepers tried to drag Princess the dracorex out of sight. It wasn't so much working, and Abby ignored the frantic manager as she noticed the dinosaur's fixation on someone's lunch, poked through it to discover they'd brought a container of strawberries and cheerfully stole them to feed to the herbivore. "Hey there, you," she said, giving the dinosaur a good scratching while the creature happily ate someone's lunch treat.
"So," she told the now-sweating man. "I don't suppose one of you can tell me how to get into contact with Connor Temple's people, can you?"
From behind her, she heard someone say, "I'd be interested in knowing what you plan to do if someone tells you how."
When she turned, she got another shock. "Tom?"
He looked disturbed. "Er . . . yeah. Since when do you know my name?"
It was another difference. "Can we talk somewhere, in private?" she asked. It was all well and good to tell some people, but she didn't want everyone in the greater London area to know her new background. A few minutes later they were installed in her office at the prehistoric zoo, and Tom was looking at her suspiciously. It wasn't the same Tom that had tried to kill her under the influence of the dodo's parasite, this Tom was . . . sharp. There was a set to his shoulders that was different, not aggressive, but prepared. "I need to talk to Connor," she started.
"Why?" he asked. "Why now? None of you people give a damn about anything we try to tell you. You don't want to work with us because we aren't in the know to begin with. I've seen how you all treat Connor," he snapped. "You act like he's some sort of idiot, just because . . . I don't even know why," he finished in aggravation.
"I know," Abby said. "But I'm not who you think I am. Not anymore, anyhow."
Tom stared at her blankly. "What?"
"You know all that stuff about . . . about alternate timelines," Abby said carefully. "I'm from one. I went into an anomaly yesterday morning, and when I came out, people who were dead weren't anymore, my whole team was gone, it's like the world up and reset itself to something different."
Eyes wide, Tom said, "Duncan always speculated that we could be changing the present every time we went into the past, but it wasn't enough for the person who came back to notice, or maybe that they changed when they came through to align with the present."
"Oh, they don't realign with the present," Abby said without thinking. "Otherwise we wouldn't have thought Cutter was mad when he came out shouting about Claudia Brown and not knowing who Leek was."
"You're really serious," Tom said wonderingly. "You've seen it happen?"
She was making progress. Maybe there was something to hiring sci-fi nerds for these positions. They were used to thinking like this. "Well, I saw Cutter come out and ask after someone who didn't exist, and then have no idea what the ARC was. And now . . . now there's no ARC, and everything's completely . . ." she trailed off, shaking her head.
"ARC?" Tom asked.
"The Anomaly Research Centre," Abby explained. "I think Connor picked the name because he wanted to tell people, 'No, not that ark,' every chance he got."
The redhead fixed her with a stare, then slowly nodded. "I think I believe you, but whatever happens will be up to Connor in the end."
Abby stood. "So, what now? Will you meet at my flat, do you want me to meet with Connor and . . . whoever, at someplace else?"
"I'll talk to Connor, see what he says," Tom told her. "He'll want to see for himself that you're . . . if you're telling the truth."
"Think he'll be sceptical that I knew him in another timeline and all?" Abby asked. It would make sense, certainly.
Her new contact nodded. "He will. I don't suppose you have more proof than a cockamamie story, do you?"
Abby thought a moment, then grinned. "Tell him that he once compared a cabin with no electricity that hadn't been occupied since the 30s to his gran's at Christmas, and that I know from personal experience that he's been circumcised."
Tom flushed as red as his hair, but he nodded. He gestured with his head, and they went into the zoo, Tom showing her all the animals Connor's group had arranged to keep in the menagerie. It was pleasant, and Abby, who'd never had any chance at all to know Tom, found herself amused and charmed by him. He was more confident than Connor in some ways, with a more sardonic outlook on life, but he was smart and a decent conversationalist. At the end of her tour, which had saved her the trouble of having to ask people to give her a tour of a facility she was supposed to have known, she walked him to his car, a beaten up and rusted hulk from the late 80s. As he turned the key, she said to him, "By the way, Tom?"
"Yeah," he said as he shifted it to drive.
"It's good to see you alive."
She walked away before he could do more than squawk. If what she'd said thus far didn't get Connor's attention, she didn't know what would.
After all that, she just drove home, happy to have her old flat back. The new flat she and Connor had shared was nice enough, but this one had all her things, her equipment and Rex. It didn't really feel like home, of course. It was missing Connor and his boxer shorts strewn every which way, it was missing his XBox and the pictures of Tom and Duncan. The bits and bobs of things he'd been in the middle of making that he kept as out of the way as he could and the sudden discovery that he'd ignored her and warmed his bloody pants in the microwave again, the kettle he always kept full and the tea and coffee he'd make for them both at the drop of a hat, it wasn't there. Connor wasn't there, and since he wasn't there it wasn't home.
But in a twisted sort of way, given that she'd never been further from where they belonged than this, it was more home than their new apartment, which she'd never see again.
It all finally sank in. Her old life, the new ARC, Becker, Jess, Matt and Emily, the Lester who was now more of a father to her than her own, the ADD and EMDs, shared memories of a past, Connor . . . it was all gone. Even if they were all here, the people, they wouldn't be hers. The Cutter there wasn't the one that had stumbled shellshocked to find his whole world upside-down. That Stephen had never been turned away from the team for following along with Helen's scheme. This Sarah had never joked and picked on Connor. That Lester hadn't dealt with Christine Johnson or spent a year waiting for three of his people to come back from prehistory. The people were the same, but they weren't her people.
With a sob, Abby collapsed to the sofa, arms wrapped around a cushion and began to cry. She was alone now. No one would remember, only her.
Rex landed beside her, crawling onto her and snuggling down. He was like a cat that way. Sometimes he'd just been able to tell when she needed to cuddle something and had filled in the need. "I'm glad I'm here, Rex," she murmured. "I just wish everyone else was."
He cheeped, making her giggle wetly, and then pull herself together. Cutter had rebuilt for himself after landing in his new timeline, Emily and Matt had made homes for themselves out of their own times, and she and Connor had figured out how to live in the 21st century all over again after a year of roots, bulbs and running away from Bob the Spinosaurus. She'd cope now.
Somehow.
Go to Part Two
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Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own anything, except a third-rate fantasy novella that will probably never be finished.
Rating: PG-13 at the outset, I may change it later.
Summary: Abby's going to get married. Then she goes through an anomaly, comes back out, and finds out just how upsetting the Claudia Brown phenomenon can be.
A/N: So, as I take a bold step into my first Conby 'ship fic, I've been kicking this idea around.
*********************************
In the end, Abby and Connor had had to be the ones to go through of the team, everyone else was occupied. They had to retrieve the strings of tinsel and some very long-lasting shiny stuff, taken by the hopeful oviraptor male, who had managed quite a . . . decorative effect with his bower. As they stripped it away, Connor idly remarked, "I feel quite sorry for him, actually. I mean, he'd gone to all this trouble to decorate the place, probably might as well have put on Barry White albums and everything, and he's going to bring his girl back to find a mess."
Despite agreeing with his sentiments in a way, Abby just rolled her eyes at her fiance and soon-to-be-husband. "As much as I agree, Connor, let's just hurry up and get this done and get home. I need to take the time to yell at Danny in advance so that when he brings you home from your stag night I've already got it out of my system." At the affronted look on his face, she rolled her eyes. "I'm expecting to be too drunk myself to do it then, you know. I heard Jenny going on about male strippers."
Connor raised an eyebrow at her. "Is that why you're not laying down the law about not getting me too pissed to stand up and all that? You won't have a leg to stand on?"
"Pretty much," Abby told him blithely. "Anyhow, it's also that I trust you and I don't even think it's a possibility that you'd actually do anything wrong behind my back. So, if you, Danny, Becker and Matt decide to spend all night getting drunk and leering at mostly naked women, I can deal with it."
"Also, you still can't say anything if Jenny's living room will be populated by people like, Casper the Copper and Frankie the Fireman."
Abby stared at him. "I may have been curious about what Jenny was planning," he admitted.
"You hacked her email and used keyword searches, didn't you?"
"Yup." She couldn't keep herself from laughing. "Hey," he said, an amused twinkle in his eye, "Did you know she's being courted for being the publicity relations person for the Association for Regulation of Scottish Economics?"
Abby stared blankly a moment, then sighed. "Silly arses," she muttered. "No pun intended," she snapped even as Connor opened his mouth.
It closed again, and then he nodded. "She sent them a pretty scathing email back."
"I don't blame her," Abby told him. They'd gotten the last bundles together and walked back to the anomaly. Connor plucked a flower from a nearby bush with his free hand, presenting it to her.
"For the loveliest lady in all the British Isles," he said sketching a bow.
She took it, smelled it, put it into her hair, which didn't quite work because it wasn't staying put properly, and smiled back. "I know you're leaving room for Tricia Helfer," she told him, taking his hand anyhow, because it was sweet the way he romanced her. It was awkward and endearing and if you ignored the things he accidentally said because he didn't mean to say them and just completely missed them, he was really romantic.
He took her hand and they walked back through the anomaly.
The first thing she noticed on the other side was that Matt, Emily and Becker weren't there. Stephen, Cutter and Captain Ryan were. A sick feeling filled her a moment, as she wondered if she was dead or dreaming or . . . something. But a quick pinch of her leg told her that she was probably not dreaming, and if she were dead, shouldn't she either remember something about to kill her, or at least not be feeling the pain of being pinched or . . . she'd assume she was alive until someone pointed out the Pearly Gates to her.
The second thing was that she had a free hand to pinch herself, and Connor's hand that had been in hers was missing. He wasn't there. She didn't even have time to start looking for him when Stephen strode forward, saying, "God, I was worried! What possessed you to go through?" Then he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
Shocked, Abby just stood there a moment while Stephen kissed her, trying to cope with what was going on. That was when she realised that Stephen Hart was kissing her, and pushed away from him, staggering back into the wall, staring blankly. "What?" she asked dumbly. How could this be happening?
"Claudia! Where's Claudia Brown?"
She felt sick at the memory and asked the question she was now certain she wouldn't like the answer to. "Where's Connor?"
"Who?" Stephen asked, still standing too close.
"For goodness sake, Stephen," said Jenny as she emerged from behind Ryan and Cutter. "I realise you're still dealing with the breakup, but I don't think trying to kiss your way back in will work."
Abby shook her head to clear it, wondering if this was how Cutter had felt as he came out of the anomaly, looking for a woman who'd never existed. "Connor Temple," she repeated. "I . . . he was right behind me, Cutter." She shook her head, "It's like he just . . . evaporated as we crossed back."
Suddenly, Jenny got a sour look on her face. "She's talking about the Temple boy, Nick. The one who's been causing all the trouble with showing up at the anomalies like some sort of thrill-seeker." Disgruntled, she continued. "I still cannot believe he convinced my own sister to join his merry little band of . . . of vigilantes. What Jenny was thinking I do not know."
The idea was dizzying, and Abby found herself saying, "Claudia?" in disbelief.
"Yes?"
"Oh my God." Abby felt her knees shaking as she leaned against the wall. It was all wrong. "So . . . I don't . . . No wonder you looked so disorientated," she said to Cutter. A hysterical laugh escaped her. "You were right, she does look just like Jenny. How Connor managed to even understand it all is just beyond me, but he's always been that way."
"Abby," Stephen said, cautiously, "Are you alright?"
"No," she said. "No I am not alright on an epic scale." Another hysterical laugh as she felt the walls of the alley starting to rotate around her. "God, Connor, you have me quoting one of your damn shows and you're not even here to appreciate corrupting me."
Cutter seemed to make a decision to take a stab at getting sense out of her. "Abby, we can't help if you don't explain."
Taking in a trembling breath, Abby said, "It's just like Claudia Brown."
"What?" said the woman who looked like Jenny but was actually Claudia.
"Long story," Abby said, deciding that explaining about Cutter staggering out of the anomaly in the Forest of Dean wouldn't do any good and would just confuse the issue. "The point is, when I went through the anomaly, you were dead," she told the three men. "Ryan died in the anomaly in the Permian when Helen tricked us into sending the future predator's kits through. It was his body they found when he and Cutter went through that anomaly the first time." She turned to Stephen. "You died in Leek's menagerie, but you won't know who Leek is, because you have Claudia, which we didn't, because she disappeared from history when Cutter came out of the Permian anomaly without Ryan."
"What?" came a ragged chorus of reply.
She ignored them. "And Helen had one of her clones shoot you," she added to Cutter. "It left Connor gutted when you died. He was there and . . . I've never seen him like that since." She shook her head. "It was so surreal. We'd spent the day at the hospital, coralling the diictodons, and then all of a sudden, the ARC's been invaded by Helen and . . . so we were left with Becker and Sarah, and Lester hired Danny on the spot to stop Christine Johnson from poking her nose into the ARC, not that that helped."
"Abby, you're not making any sense," Stephen said gently.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just . . . this morning you were all dead." The look the others exchanged spoke volumes. "I'm not mad. Something happened in the past. Something Connor and I did changed things, or maybe it was the oviraptor taking the tinsel," she held out her handful of shiny stuff, "But everything's changed here."
It was as though a light went on in Cutter's head. "You're saying that you think you must have done something in the past which somehow sent ripples through time to affect the present?"
"Yes!" Abby exclaimed. "It's happened before. With you and Claudia Brown. You came out of the anomaly, asking where she was, but none of us had ever heard of her, because she didn't exist. But now she does and . . . everything's different," Abby finished lamely, unable to explain better. After all, there was no way to explain this, and she was no Connor with his instinctive understanding of such concepts.
Cutter frowned, but Abby had the somewhat comforting feeling that he wasn't dismissing her out of hand, just trying to determine what to do about things. "We'd best head back to the Home Office," he told her. "We'll figure something out."
She followed him back to his car, a sense of some relief coming over her. Losing Cutter had done some very bad things to the team, had taken away the mandate of scientific exploration that had so characterised those early years, leaving them with Danny and Matt and Becker to take up the slack, pushing it all into a military mindset of controlling the anomalies and not studying them and the animals that came through.
But as they pulled up at the home office, heading past the mishmash of offices that Abby remembered as being completely inadequate to the work at the ARC, she realised how different things were. This wasn't the ARC, this was the small adjunct satellite to the Home Office that had been set up on a shoestring to handle the incursions. Where was the tech? Where were the scientists and soldiers and administrators? Leek had been pretty much an evil, skeevy, creepy, Helen-minion, but he'd organised and delegated and got them their building.
Now that she thought about it, it had been down to him and Connor. Connor, who had claimed the computer system was inadequate for a proper handling of his database and the information that needed to be processed and cross-referenced, Connor, who had pointed out they needed to separate the science into departments, if only to keep the samples from cross-contaminating, and Connor who'd liased between Leek and Cutter, keeping them from each other's throats by playing go-between so that the set-up would get done without having to call Lester in to make disparaging comments.
Connor wasn't here.
She felt like crying.
By the time they trooped into Lester's office she had herself under control, but the sight of Lester, looking exactly the same as when they'd left the ARC that morning nearly undid her. He'd agreed to walk her down the aisle, taking the place of her absentee father. She nearly moved to hug him in relief, when he seemed to retreat from her. He neither backed down nor flinched, but something in the way he held himself was standoffish. This wasn't the Lester that had greeted her and Connor with a joke after a year away in the Cretaceous, this was the government hatchet man Cutter had so disliked.
One more thing out of place. It was good to see Ryan again, Cutter and Stephen well and friendly, but she missed Becker's stolidity, so different in nature from Ryan's phlegmatic temperament. She missed Matt's weird stiffness and she missed Jess' cheer and Emily's warmth.
Then from around the corner, Sarah appeared. "Sarah!" She wasn't a replacement for the ones Abby was missing, no one was, but then, no one was a replacement for anyone else. She didn't care that the other woman looked baffled, anything was better than the picture in her mind drawn by Becker's defeated words of Sarah lying dead in a car, killed by predators in a now-hopefully-changed future.
Sarah hesitantly hugged her back, saying, "Erm . . . there, there? Abby? Are you alright?"
"You're not dead anymore!" Abby gushed. "You don't know how horrible it was when . . ." She pulled away. "Sorry. It's complicated."
Cutter stared at her, "What happened?" he asked, eyes wide, "Was there some sort of apocalypse in this . . . alternate reality you're from? It's as though everyone you meet here is someone who was dead there."
Abby knew she should be serious, but a little devil of mischief made her say, "Oh, we stopped the apocalypse. Really, I still don't know how Matt made it back out of that monster anomaly Helen got Burton to trick Connor into making."
They all stared. "Sorry. It's just . . . everything here's so . . . different."
"If one of you might consider explaining this . . . possibly delusional behaviour?" Lester asked pointedly.
Abby was thankful that Cutter leapt in to explain, rather than forcing her to do it, because Connor was really the only one who'd understood when Cutter had tried to explain in the original timeline. Or was it the second one, since the one with Claudia Brown and Connor had come first?
At least everyone was now so used to the weirdness that was the anomalies, that they seemed to accept fiarly quickly that Abby was a different Abby than the one they knew, while still being Abby. When Cutter's explanation of the theory of how a different present could be created by Abby having been in the past, he said, "And she's been bringing up that Temple boy."
It hadn't quite registered with her until that moment. "So, Connor exists here? Not like Claudia Brown and Jenny, where Jenny just sort of . . . replaced Claudia?"
"Jenny 'replaced' me?" Claudia asked, sounding stunned. "How . . ."
Abby shrugged. "I don't know. Connor was the only one who ever really understood. I mean . . ."
"Well," Stephen interrupted her. "I don't know about someone replacing anyone, but I have the feeling that the Connor that you're used to is significantly different from the one here."
"What do you mean?" Abby asked slowly.
Looks of disgust circled the room. "When we went out to investigate the report in the Forest of Dean, he just kept doing the silliest things," Cutter explained. "I finally just sent him back to the university after he sat in front of the anomaly sending his bloody housekey through, like a three-year-old with a new toy."
Stephen nodded. "It's just as well. That poor kid you got the coelurosauravus from was killed."
"The gorgonopsid killed Ben?" Abby asked, aghast.
Nodding soberly, Stephen told her, "I found a footprint, but I just wasn't prepared for what it was." He shook his head. "Temple would have just-"
"Told you it was a gorgonopsid so you knew and knew to move fast and keep Ben from being killed," Abby snapped.
"Abby," Cutter said gently. "I think you need to realise that this isn't the reality you're from. Temple and his little gang have been getting in our way, risking themselves, and doing some very foolish things. He's not the person you remember."
She nodded silently, but wondered if Cutter were truly right. They'd all thought Connor quite daft when the project had started, but after years of working with him, everyone had to agree that there was a method behind the daft, sometimes childlike man Connor was. What she had to do was bide her time, find out more, then find Connor to see for herself.
As the meeting broke up, she hastily latched onto the one person she recognised that might be able to answer some of her questions, and used Sarah as an excuse to avoid Stephen. Soon they were ensconced in Sarah's lab, one thing that looked not much different from the one she'd had at the old ARC building. "I need to know a few things," Abby said to her. "And I think the first one is, were Stephen and I dating?"
Sarah looked extremely uncomfortable as she said, "You were, but a week ago you broke up with him. You gave him the 'let's just be friends,' speech. He didn't really take it well."
"Well, that's something, at least," Abby muttered. "I mean, not that Stephen's not happy, but I was going to get married in just a few days. I couldn't have gone from that to Stephen's girlfriend, even if I were still interested. Which I'm not anymore."
"Anymore?" Sarah inquired.
So, Abby told her about those early days when she'd held out hope that Stephen would notice her. "But in the end, it wouldn't have worked anyhow. And I'm happy with Conn . . ." her voice cracked as she realised that, even if there was a Connor here, he wouldn't be her Connor. He wouldn't have spent a year lost 65 million years in the past, wouldn't have lived with her and Rex and Sid and Nancy. Wouldn't have dangled over a cliff's edge, screaming for anyone to hear that he loved her as he clung to her hand, preferring to die than abandon her.
"Oh, Abby," Sarah murmured as she wrapped her arms around her friend. It wasn't her Sarah, wasn't the one who'd lied to Connor about a curse on the Sun Cage and cheerfully messed with Connor's sense of superiority about his programming and locking device, but it was still Sarah. Who smelled like curry and dust and had a hundred references in her office to try tracking anomalies by historical appearance. Sarah, who Abby had thought she'd never see again and had died trying to give Connor and Abby a rescue when she should never have been in the field.
"I missed you," she admitted into her friend's shoulder. "When we got back from the Cretaceous, Connor and I, and we found out you'd died on a mission to rescue us, I felt so awful. Becker wasn't the same either. I think he blamed himself."
"Who's Becker?" Sarah asked curiously.
"How . . . of course," Abby shook her head. "He wouldn't be here. He was hired after Ryan died, and if Ryan never died, there'd be no reason to get Becker."
Quick on the uptake as always, Sarah said, "So, he was a soldier?"
"SAS," Abby said grinning. "Extremely good-looking."
"Who's good-looking?" interrupted a voice from the door. It was the not-Jenny, Claudia.
"Just someone I knew once," Abby said, shaking her head. "It's weird how much you look like Jenny."
Claudia just looked irritated. "I'll tell you this. My sister is the bane of my existence. The notion that I might have had another life where she never existed is a dream I had all the time growing up."
"What?" Abby said, baffled.
Sighing, Claudia said, "I suppose I'd better warn you before you trip over her and get confused. I have a half sister. Our mothers were twins, and my father, our father, had an affair with my aunt. It's a quirk of genetics, but my half sister, Jenny looks exactly like me. We were even born on the same day. She just goes by her mother's name, Lewis. Since my mum was actually married to our father at the time, I have their name, Brown."
Abby buried her head in her hands a moment, stifling snickers. "What is it?" Sarah asked.
Trying not to have hysterics, Abby told them, "It's just . . . it always seemed like some sort of weird mystical thing that Claudia was magically replaced by some other woman that looked just like her but was totally different. This just . . . makes it all a lot less mysterious."
"I suppose it does at that," Sarah said nodding. Abby still caught her and Claudia shrugging at each other out of the corner of her eye.
Stephen suddenly rounded the corner. "We've got a lead on an anomaly, let's move," he said shortly.
Abby found herself in the back seat of the old Hilux, loading up the tranqs they'd ceased to use with the advent of the EMD. Her head snapped up as she heard Cutter grumble, "I just hope we can beat them to it. I wish I knew how Temple's crew beats us to the anomalies the way they do."
"Beats us to the anomalies?" Abby asked.
Stephen turned to face her. "Somehow, Temple's managing to beat us to the anomalies. It's turned into a stupid race," he said. "Sometimes they beat us and sometimes they don't, and no one's been able to figure out how they beat us or not. It seems to be luck," he explained.
When they got there, it seemed that Connor's 'crew' had indeed beaten them there. How could Cutter and Stephen tell? The anomaly had been blocked off from allowing anything to escape, by the expedient of surrounding it on all sides with the heavy barrels in the warehouse, which had also been hastily bolted together. From inside the enclosure Abby could hear an irritated roar, but it would be cut off as the animal on the other side would clearly go right back through when faced with nowhere to go. It was clever and effective, given that apparently this Connor had no locking device.
Cutter and Stephen, meanwhile, were making irritated noises about Connor's 'interference', which only stiffened Abby's resolve to find Connor and see if she could put together what was going on.
*******************
Abby aimlessly wandered the offices, renewing her acquaintance with the layout of everything, wondering if every few years she'd be doing this again. This time, unlike the last two times, however, there was no Connor. With the move to the first ARC, he'd eagerly pointed out everything that had been his idea, showing her, Cutter and Stephen where their offices were and the quarantine spaces for studying things that might be dangerous and places where they could hold things like Columbian mammoths until such time as there was somewhere to send them. He'd been intimately involved in setting up, having argued Lester and Leek to a standstill as he pointed out that if it was a scientific endeavour, they should have one of the working scientists consulting on layout. He'd even snagged one of Ryan's men, insisting that they should have a say on their section of things.
Cutter had been too busy with the anomalies themselves to pay attention, she and Stephen had been too busy with the animals, and none of them had even noticed how bored Connor was at playing lab tech for them to realise until he'd whipped out a complete architectural bluprint one day, having taught himself the entire first year curriculum for an architecture student in his free time.
The second time, they'd gone through and Connor had made dry remarks about living like morlocks underground and the security upgrades all over. Despite the sense of displacement, he and Becker had had her in stitches as Connor had put on airs and tried to outdo Becker for bone-dry sarcasm. His glee following each comment had ruined the effect, but it had made her love him all the more as he forced the tour into making the new ARC their own again.
Now she was wandering about and there was no Connor to tisk about the overflowing in-trays and make faces about the aged computers.
"Impressive, isn't it?" Sarah said from behind her.
Abby nearly leapt three feet in the air. "It's . . . something," she said, comparing it to the old ARC, with it's high ceilings and airy openness. A thought occurred to her, "How do you detect anomalies here, anyhow?" she asked.
"Well," Sarah said, leading her down the hall. "Cutter's got some techs working around the clock to locate anomalies based on something to do with radio waves," she explained. "He noticed a few years back that the anomalies disrupt a particular frequency, but it's been sort of on the back burner. At the moment," Sarah stopped at the door to a large room with a bank of computers, a bank of televisions, a stack of what were radios and a dozen people or so, clearly monitoring everything coming out of the massive media collection in the room, "we just track any and all reports of strange sightings, odd animal sightings and whatnot."
"You . . ." Abby trailed off.
Sarah nodded. "It's a pretty stunning undertaking, isn't it?" she said proudly.
"Stunning," Abby echoed. Well, it was no wonder Connor was beating them to anomalies. He probably had an ADD up and running, while they were still using the old internet keyword search 'bot system from the early days. Even if Connor didn't have an ADD, she bet he'd've put one together that was better than whatever they had.
Soon enough she was given a proper tour by Cutter and Claudia, both of whom were immensely cute together as a couple, and mistakenly proud of their set-up. When Cutter showed her the fancy newfangled anomaly tracking devices his team had come up with, the ones that would let them narrow down an anomaly location once they were within a few hundred metres of the things, she nearly laughed. And her Cutter had been disappointed with the 'large' size of Connor's first prototypes? These things were the size of a notebook computer, and while they had some extra app-like functions on them, they didn't even have the elegance of Connor's early work, which had tended to include bits of toasters. Usually toasters taken from their flat.
She felt like she was in another technological era altogether. Cutter's work on the anomalies was far more advanced along, his giant model with many more blanks filled in than it had when he'd died in the old timeline. Stephen had got himself a whole room for comparative microbiology and seemed happier than she'd even seen him before, but for the sad, hangdog expressions he aimed her way. Sarah, too, had her own little department of researchers, doing the legwork of digging up potential historical references to anomalies for her, saving her time of endlessly poring over things written in languages someone else could translate.
But the technological heart of the ARC had been Connor, and without him puttering around, it all felt wrong. Abby found her way back to her office and began to read through old reports.
Without Burton, they'd had to find other ways to handle the animals left behind and trapped in the present. It seemed that Abby handled oversight of that, and Lester had somehow got them an old private zoo to keep them in. Looking at the pictures, Abby smiled. It was a million times better than Burton's grim concrete enclave and all the large herbivores had turned out docile enough to roam in the open together freely.
Suddenly, she saw something in the background of one of the photographs. Peering closely, finally getting out a magnifying glass, she saw what, or rather who, it was. Tom. Connor's friend Tom was in the background, talking to the manager at the menagerie there. A thought made her open up a dozen files and expense reports, and begin to dig through them. Her sudden hunch seemed accurate.
The Home Office Anomaly Research Adjunct weren't the only people using the menagerie. Connor's so-called crew had been using it too. In secret, with her supposed subordinates keeping it from her. Either her previous self had missed the clues, or had caught them but let it go because the animals needed proper care. Either way, Connor would have been making sure that any animals he captured wound up there, which meant that if Abby went out to check, and mid-week it wasn't on her normal Friday afternoon schedule, she might find someone who could point her to where Connor was now.
She trotted to the door, telling Claudia that, "Since I'm effectively brand new and all, I'd like to see the zoo we've got," and got waved off to do whatever needed doing. After all, there was no need to hide where she was going, it was part of her job she'd have to deal with anyhow.
It was amusing when she got there to see a sudden panic as a bunch of keepers tried to drag Princess the dracorex out of sight. It wasn't so much working, and Abby ignored the frantic manager as she noticed the dinosaur's fixation on someone's lunch, poked through it to discover they'd brought a container of strawberries and cheerfully stole them to feed to the herbivore. "Hey there, you," she said, giving the dinosaur a good scratching while the creature happily ate someone's lunch treat.
"So," she told the now-sweating man. "I don't suppose one of you can tell me how to get into contact with Connor Temple's people, can you?"
From behind her, she heard someone say, "I'd be interested in knowing what you plan to do if someone tells you how."
When she turned, she got another shock. "Tom?"
He looked disturbed. "Er . . . yeah. Since when do you know my name?"
It was another difference. "Can we talk somewhere, in private?" she asked. It was all well and good to tell some people, but she didn't want everyone in the greater London area to know her new background. A few minutes later they were installed in her office at the prehistoric zoo, and Tom was looking at her suspiciously. It wasn't the same Tom that had tried to kill her under the influence of the dodo's parasite, this Tom was . . . sharp. There was a set to his shoulders that was different, not aggressive, but prepared. "I need to talk to Connor," she started.
"Why?" he asked. "Why now? None of you people give a damn about anything we try to tell you. You don't want to work with us because we aren't in the know to begin with. I've seen how you all treat Connor," he snapped. "You act like he's some sort of idiot, just because . . . I don't even know why," he finished in aggravation.
"I know," Abby said. "But I'm not who you think I am. Not anymore, anyhow."
Tom stared at her blankly. "What?"
"You know all that stuff about . . . about alternate timelines," Abby said carefully. "I'm from one. I went into an anomaly yesterday morning, and when I came out, people who were dead weren't anymore, my whole team was gone, it's like the world up and reset itself to something different."
Eyes wide, Tom said, "Duncan always speculated that we could be changing the present every time we went into the past, but it wasn't enough for the person who came back to notice, or maybe that they changed when they came through to align with the present."
"Oh, they don't realign with the present," Abby said without thinking. "Otherwise we wouldn't have thought Cutter was mad when he came out shouting about Claudia Brown and not knowing who Leek was."
"You're really serious," Tom said wonderingly. "You've seen it happen?"
She was making progress. Maybe there was something to hiring sci-fi nerds for these positions. They were used to thinking like this. "Well, I saw Cutter come out and ask after someone who didn't exist, and then have no idea what the ARC was. And now . . . now there's no ARC, and everything's completely . . ." she trailed off, shaking her head.
"ARC?" Tom asked.
"The Anomaly Research Centre," Abby explained. "I think Connor picked the name because he wanted to tell people, 'No, not that ark,' every chance he got."
The redhead fixed her with a stare, then slowly nodded. "I think I believe you, but whatever happens will be up to Connor in the end."
Abby stood. "So, what now? Will you meet at my flat, do you want me to meet with Connor and . . . whoever, at someplace else?"
"I'll talk to Connor, see what he says," Tom told her. "He'll want to see for himself that you're . . . if you're telling the truth."
"Think he'll be sceptical that I knew him in another timeline and all?" Abby asked. It would make sense, certainly.
Her new contact nodded. "He will. I don't suppose you have more proof than a cockamamie story, do you?"
Abby thought a moment, then grinned. "Tell him that he once compared a cabin with no electricity that hadn't been occupied since the 30s to his gran's at Christmas, and that I know from personal experience that he's been circumcised."
Tom flushed as red as his hair, but he nodded. He gestured with his head, and they went into the zoo, Tom showing her all the animals Connor's group had arranged to keep in the menagerie. It was pleasant, and Abby, who'd never had any chance at all to know Tom, found herself amused and charmed by him. He was more confident than Connor in some ways, with a more sardonic outlook on life, but he was smart and a decent conversationalist. At the end of her tour, which had saved her the trouble of having to ask people to give her a tour of a facility she was supposed to have known, she walked him to his car, a beaten up and rusted hulk from the late 80s. As he turned the key, she said to him, "By the way, Tom?"
"Yeah," he said as he shifted it to drive.
"It's good to see you alive."
She walked away before he could do more than squawk. If what she'd said thus far didn't get Connor's attention, she didn't know what would.
After all that, she just drove home, happy to have her old flat back. The new flat she and Connor had shared was nice enough, but this one had all her things, her equipment and Rex. It didn't really feel like home, of course. It was missing Connor and his boxer shorts strewn every which way, it was missing his XBox and the pictures of Tom and Duncan. The bits and bobs of things he'd been in the middle of making that he kept as out of the way as he could and the sudden discovery that he'd ignored her and warmed his bloody pants in the microwave again, the kettle he always kept full and the tea and coffee he'd make for them both at the drop of a hat, it wasn't there. Connor wasn't there, and since he wasn't there it wasn't home.
But in a twisted sort of way, given that she'd never been further from where they belonged than this, it was more home than their new apartment, which she'd never see again.
It all finally sank in. Her old life, the new ARC, Becker, Jess, Matt and Emily, the Lester who was now more of a father to her than her own, the ADD and EMDs, shared memories of a past, Connor . . . it was all gone. Even if they were all here, the people, they wouldn't be hers. The Cutter there wasn't the one that had stumbled shellshocked to find his whole world upside-down. That Stephen had never been turned away from the team for following along with Helen's scheme. This Sarah had never joked and picked on Connor. That Lester hadn't dealt with Christine Johnson or spent a year waiting for three of his people to come back from prehistory. The people were the same, but they weren't her people.
With a sob, Abby collapsed to the sofa, arms wrapped around a cushion and began to cry. She was alone now. No one would remember, only her.
Rex landed beside her, crawling onto her and snuggling down. He was like a cat that way. Sometimes he'd just been able to tell when she needed to cuddle something and had filled in the need. "I'm glad I'm here, Rex," she murmured. "I just wish everyone else was."
He cheeped, making her giggle wetly, and then pull herself together. Cutter had rebuilt for himself after landing in his new timeline, Emily and Matt had made homes for themselves out of their own times, and she and Connor had figured out how to live in the 21st century all over again after a year of roots, bulbs and running away from Bob the Spinosaurus. She'd cope now.
Somehow.
Go to Part Two
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