Primeval fic: A Twist in a Relative Timeline 3/3

[scwlc_fic]

Title: A Twist in a Relative Timeline
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own anything anyone recognises and I'm not making any money from it.
Rating: R
Summary: When time travel's involved, you never know when you'll meet up with old friends.
Notes: Nearly there. If anyone has any importunate demands for gaps to be filled in, now's the time. I expect there'll only be about one more part.

*****************************


With the sort of bustle in the hospital, the nurses in and out, curious doctors who wanted to stare at the medical wonder that was recovering from bullet wounds in a matter of days that should have taken weeks, no one really wanted to risk being overheard asking Connor and Stephen about things.

Cutter, and incidentally Stephen, had been right, and all the nurses thought Stephen and Connor were a gay couple. Connor had nearly burst a few stitches he laughed so hard when Stephen wasn't able to flirt his way past the nurses because, "Now you just stop that. Your boyfriend's a lovely young man and there's not a single reason for you to be doing this behind his back."

"Oh, let him," said a much younger one. "After all, he just wants to stay together. It's sweet and romantic and they're not making a bit of trouble, unlike Ms Campbell down in 46."

Stephen sighed and took the advantages offered by the misapprehension, but looked quite dour as he walked into Connor's room and worse as he saw the amused looks on Cutter and Abby's faces. "Connor's been giving you the blow-by-blow description?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," Abby said.

Nick just smirked.

When Connor opened his mouth, Stephen declared, "You know you're about to get out tomorrow, and if you say a word I will stage a breakup and leave you to the mercy of the nurses."

"They'd probably just pet him and spoil him and call you a berk behind your back, you know," Abby told him. Then, with a fascinated look on her face, she slipped a massaging hand under Connor's shoulders, making his eyes shut briefly in contentment and a purr rattle in his chest.

Then he turned and shot her a look. "Are you going to keep doing that?" he asked. "It's sort of distracting."

"It just makes me wonder what sort of physiological changes happened," Cutter said from the other side of the bed. "The mechanism that would allow purring and growling, in that way isn't something contained in human anatomy."

Before Abby could get at that spot, Connor moved away from her. "Abby!"

"You like it," she said. "Now I know you're just taking advantage when you ask for massages."

"Hmmph," Connor grumbled. "Anyhow," he turned back to Cutter. "I've got a lot more of their database saved. Once I'm out of here I'll go to the safety deposit box I keep the information in and get it to the ARC's techs. There's some really weird stuff there in terms of data about various environments and species."

Cutter's eyes narrowed over Connor's having held back potentially important information, and certainly interesting information. "I assume you have a reason for not having produced this?"

"The same reason I had for not telling you all I'm a mutant freak," Connor replied pointedly. Then he started purring. "Abby, cut it out!"

"I notice," Cutter having had his ire appeased, was able to relax a tad and say, "That you're not nearly as tetchy as when you first got in."

Connor nodded. "I know that I don't have to sit here pretending that I'm not entirely normal, physiologically and all that, so it makes it easier."

"And he's healing, so he doesn't feel so vulnerable," Stephen added, shrugging over Connor's glare. "It's true, you know. You're much more able to put up with things when you know that you're not coming from a position of weakness."

Thinking, Abby said, "So, he's been a bit like an angry badger caught in a trap."

"Badger," Connor grumbled. "I never get to be anything cool."

"He's a Hufflepuff on all of the Harry Potter personality quizzes," Abby informed them with a grin.

"You're just plain mean," Connor told her.

The next afternoon was much less lighthearted. Despite Connor being home, on a much more even keel mentally speaking thanks to some far better balanced injections of hormones and other chemicals and snuggling a cheeping Rex, the atmosphere was heavy with the fact that he and Stephen both had to finish the story of what happened to them.

Stephen, clutching the beer bottle far tighter than he needed chose to start. "I remember when I saw Connor standing there, growling and just looking . . . gone, I was terrified. I was sure he was going to rip me apart."

"It's hard for me to remember clearly sometimes," Connor admitted. "When I'm like that my perceptions, my thought processes are . . . they're much less conscious and much harder for me to translate into a sort of human paradigm." He shrugged. "I knew we weren't safe and that Stevie . . . Stephen was . . ." he frowned, reaching for the words. "Not like he was my . . ." he shot an apologetic glance at Stephen. "Keep in mind, Stephen was five then, yeah?"

Cutter's eyebrows raised. "You're saying you felt like five-year-old Stephen was your son?" he asked. This whole conversation was not sitting well with the Scotsman.

"Not my son," Connor told him. "More like . . . like a cub is communal property. Belongs to the whole pack. The pack being Stephen and me and the others there." He smiled wryly. "It's sort of weird, because I kept thinking of Stevie as the five-year-old I knew then, and part of me is trying to work through the fact that he's not that."

Nodding, Stephen added, "It's the same in reverse for me, of course. Because I was five, and when you're five a teenager seems like an adult by comparison." He shook his head. "It's strange, because I'm just so used to thinking of . . . of two Connors, I suppose. The one that rescued me then, and the one here and now. The fact that they're the same person, it's confusing."

"That does sound a little weird," Abby agreed. "But you were saying, you were thinking of Stephen, and I guess the rest of the children as . . . sort of the pack's cubs?"

Connor shrugged. "It's hard to put into words, and I'm using that sort of terminology, because I need to keep it clear for everyone else when I'm, sort of, thinking like that. And Stevie - Stephen, was sort of more mine that the others."

"Not that I was aware of that in any way, at first," Stephen clarified. "He was . . . well, you both saw him in Leek's compound."

Connor snarled and advanced on Stevie, who cracked and began to cry, even though he was a big boy and was supposed to be brave. But it was scary, and being torn apart like the others would hurt so much. He stumbled back, then tried to take off running. But Connor was on top of him, one hand on his shoulder, eyes blank as he leaned in. Stevie's hand came into contact with a rock, and he grabbed it, frantically bashing it against Connor's head, making the older boy rear back in shock and pain, giving Stevie the chance to run. He'd forgot about the pistol he'd taken from the soldier, all he could think was that he had to get away.

Which was when he ran into a batrachotomus. The carnivorous archosaur growled, its head lowering to stare at the unusual creature in its territory. Stevie crab-walked backwards, now even more terrified. He'd gone from the frying pan to the fire to some other horrible and certainly lethal place. As the creature lunged, a roar came from behind him, and Connor was there, slamming feet-first into the animal, sending it tumbling with the force of the blow.

It was on its feet in moments, but Connor was now between it and its prey, dodging and weaving, blocking the thing from getting anywhere near to Stevie. He managed one final leap to its back, and with one perfectly placed concussive blow, slammed a fist into its neck and felled the thing. Then he climbed easily off and stalked up to Stevie, cuffed him sharply on the ear, then picked him up, carrying him away again.

"Discipline for running away?" Abby asked, shrewdly.

"Yep," Connor popped the 'p'. "I mean, he wasn't wrong, because when he started running I was pretty much likely to kill him, but I wasn't in my right mind, and by that point I'd recalled he was my cub and I got a little angry he'd run away from me."

"Bloody hurt," Stephen muttered, rubbing at the side of his head in memory.

"You saw a batrachotomus?" Cutter asked, curious.

Connor nodded. "I'm not totally sure, but I came back later, after I'd got Stephen into a tree somewhere sort of safe and came back and butchered it, sort of. The characteristics in the bones look about right, but I wouldn't stake my life on it, really. Definitely an archosaur, though."

"Butchered it?" Abby asked hesitantly.

"I'd killed it," Connor replied with a shrug. "Broke its spine with that hit, and I knew I had to feed Stevie."

"By the way, Cutter," Stephen told his long time friend. "You wondered where I learnt to eat anything, it was in the Triassic." He winced. "That cured me of picky eating."

Connor was munching away on his raw scary lizard meat, but Stevie was more cautious. Wasn't meat supposed to be cooked? His mum had always got all weird when his dad left pinkish bits in the middle. On the other hand, Connor wasn't at all normal right now, so this might be all that Stevie got, and at least meat wouldn't turn out poisonous. They'd had that lady come in to school and tell them all about why they shouldn't eat any old plants, because they might be poisonous, but she'd never said that about meat.

Eventually, though, Connor noticed he wasn't eating and separated out a strip, shoving it at him. Stevie pursed his lips and took it, finding himself faced with an anxious-looking Connor, who was sniffing at him, which was so silly he couldn't help but giggle, then pinched his nose like he was eating sprouts, like his granddad had suggested that time, and bit off some and ate it. Connor sat back, satisfied, but still watching him carefully, and Stevie sighed and ate more.

It was still better than the weird food in the scary compound place.

Cutter nodded as if some long-held theory of importance had just been confirmed. "So that explains why you'll eat anything from anywhere."

"Sushi, Nick, is hardly what I'd call inedible strangeness," Stephen said, shaking his head.

"It's raw fish," Nick protested. "When things are meant to be eaten raw, they don't require preparation to do it safely."

"You're just sickeningly conventional," Stephen informed him in the steps to this familiar dance between them. "At least save it for the next time I'm having crickets, would you?"

"As interesting as Stephen's inability to eat like a normal person may be," Abby said, "I'm interested in knowing how they made it home."

The mood darkened again and Abby looked both chastened and defiant at that. She still joined Connor on the couch, carding her fingers through his hair, making him sigh, put his head in her lap and purr.

"It took a lot longer for Connor to come back to normal there than it did here," Stephen said. "Probably partly because it was the first time he had to do it, but also, everything was so dangerous that he was constantly on alert."

Connor nodded into Abby's thigh. "I spent a lot of time reacting to things, protecting Stevie - sorry, Stephen, and just making sure we didn't die."

"That was when I first started to figure out something was different with me, as well," Stephen said. "When Connor got tetchy or did something I thought was weird, it was as though something knew instinctively what was really going on. Eventually, though, he started talking again."

"Steve . . . Stevie? I . . . oh my God. Are you alright? What did I . . . did I hurt you?"

"Connor?" he asked, hesitant. Then for the first time in what felt like forever, Connor was looking at him like he did before. "Connor!" he flung himself at the older boy hugging him, just happy to have him back to normal. "I was scared. You got weird and I thought you might . . . might hurt me like Quinn did and-"

Connor hugged him back hard, saying, "I'm so sorry. I didn't . . . I didn't want to, you know?"

"You didn't," Stevie said firmly. Connor shouldn't feel bad for being a superhero like the Hulk. It wasn't his fault. From below them, they heard rumbling noises and something that looked sort of like a crocodile and sort of like a frog poked its head out of the lake they could see from the tree.

For some weird reason, Connor looked happy. "That . . . that's a mastodontosaurus," he said. "If that's . . . then we're in the Triassic. How . . . that's mad," he said. "But sort of incredible."

"I thought mastodons were like big, furry elephants," Stevie said, frowning.

Connor laughed. "That's because this isn't a mastodon, it's a mastodontosaurus. The Saurus part means lizard. Although it's really more of an amphibian, like a frog or a newt."

Stevie looked up at Connor, awed. Did his adult friend know everything? "So, what does Tri . . . erm . . ."

"Triassic?"

"Yeah," Stevie nodded. That was what Connor had said.

"Triassic means we're somewhere about 200 million years ago," Connor explained. "Dinosaurs were only just starting to appear."

"But I thought dinosaurs were 65 million years ago," Stevie frowned. Everyone always talked about dinosaurs and 65 million. And wasn't 65 million more than enough? It was such a big number already.

Grinning at him, Connor said, "That's not bad." Then he explained all about different names for different times in prehistory, and how there were three with dinosaurs, and that the Triassic was the earliest. "It still doesn't explain how we went back in time, though," he said. "And I think we have to, because there's no grass, and there isn't anywhere on Earth in the present that doesn't have grass, pretty much."

"That was when I knew we had to break back in," Connor said. "Not only to rescue everyone else that we could, but also because that was the only place we'd find out answers about how to get home."

"And you were so eager to talk about dinosaurs," Stephen said, shaking his head. "I never knew."

"You weren't exactly asking hard questions," Connor pointed out. "I mean, the difference between common species of the Jurassic, Triassic and Cretaceous? What were the names of things? Sure there was some stuff we saw not from the fossil record, but it's not like you were asking comparative anatomical differences between closely related sauropods or something."

"I feel like I should be insulted," Stephen told him.

Connor shrugged. "You were five. They were good questions for a five-year-old." Then he turned back to Cutter. "Anyhow, I felt awful about it, but I had to leave Stephen alone when I went scouting out the compound, just to see what was happening." He closed his eyes, grief on his face a moment. "I remember seeing the others that had been . . . had been totally changed. They were in cages. Like animals. No," he took in a shuddering breath. "They were animals. I got close enough, once, to try to reach them. They were just . . ." he swallowed sharply. "Gone."

"You never told me," Stephen said.

"I couldn't," Connor told him. "I just . . . I tried and tried. I couldn't reach them, it was like there was nothing left. I . . . Jim, Wendy and I, we had to kill them. It was . . . awful."

Abby was crying again and reached out to twine her fingers with Connor's. His eye were closed as he reached for some sort of self-control. "I'm so sorry," she murmured into his hair. "I'm sorry you had to go through that."

When Connor seemed disinclined to continue, Stephen picked up the thread of the narrative. "Connor bodged together a whistle out of a tree branch for me, and he'd leave me the pistol-"

"Which was probably a better teddy bear for him than I ever was," Connor interrupted. "It took me a bit to make sure the safety was on, and things like that. I'd never so much as seen a gun for real before that, so I was just experimenting to be sure I knew I wouldn't come back to him missing something because he'd shot it off. But if I was leaving him alone there, I didn't want him not to have anything, you know?"

Stephen shrugged. "He didn't do badly, considering, as Connor said, he'd never even seen a real gun before."

"He killed a pterosaur," Connor put in. "I heard the shot while I was double-checking the timing on the guard shifts and the like, and came back to see him looking completely freaked out but really proud."

"I think the recoil sprained my wrist," Stephen recalled. "I slept with that thing every night. When I got home, I used some of my Christmas gift money to buy a toy gun, and I slept with that until I was seven. Scared the hell out of my parents."

"I can imagine," Cutter said, picturing the scene all too easily. Stephen had risked arrest more than once, carrying pistols on him into places he never should have done. He could far too easily picture Stephen as a child, carting around a gun in fear of a teratosaur or coelophysis coming to kill him.

"Eventually," Connor said, "I decided we had to risk it. We couldn't stay there forever and the only way to get home was going to be in the compound. I also thought we owed it to the others to get them out."

It was an all-or-nothing strategy. Connor had asked what felt like a hundred times if he was sure he didn't want to stay behind. But Connor's plan needed two people, and Stevie was the second. Connor was going to go in and do this, and Stevie had to help. If anything happened to Connor, after all, Stevie wouldn't last long anyways in the terrifying jungle out there.

The stolid clones never deviated from their patrols, never really noticed much and were stupid as anything. Stevie was perched on the wall, standing watch with his whistle and pistol, and Connor slipped down the rest of the way, killing the guard and creating the hole to get them in quietly. There was almost no security, because there was no need to worry about break-ins or anything else. The scientists were all horrible enough that they didn't care so long as they got to do their experiments.

Once inside, Stephen remember the way back to the cells and waited for the signal. The noisily dying guards, the alarms raised and pounding feet told him Connor had started his diversion. Now it was his turn. He ran to the cells, frozen a moment at how many were empty except for the sight of old blood and the scent of rotting viscerae. Then he pulled himself together. None of the guards were there, and he had to hurry.

"C'mon!" he hissed at the first two as he unlocked the cell door. He turned to Jim. "You've gotta help Connor! He's trying to get the guards. It's down that way, left, then the next left, and straight shoudl get you out."

Jim's face lit up savagely. "Right. Bernie, stick with Steve here, and I'll come back, I promise."

Stevie hadn't been close to someone his own age in forever and he grinned. "Come on, I've got the keys, let's get everyone out."

Bernie followed, saying, "I'd thought they'd got you both. We all did. I'm glad you're okay."

"I'm sorry we didn't come back sooner, but Connor wanted to be sure," Stevie said as he fumbled with the next door, letting Wendy and Hester out, "That he knew where the guards were and stuff."

Wendy was off a moment later, chasing after Jim and Connor. Soon the kids were all free, and Stevie said, "Connor said we're supposed to find someplace to bar . . . barricade," he said proudly as the harder word came out okay, "Ourselves in."

"Will said he saw a canteen one time," offered Nate, who was the oldest of the younger kids at seven. "We should go there. I bet there's better food there."

"Anything's better than a batrachotomus," Stevie muttered. "I never want to eat any more dinosaur again."

They found the canteen, thankfully deserted, and did what they could to block the doors, then plundered the fridge. When the teens came back, there was food all over the tables and the kids, who had been glutting themselves in delight at the tasty things. Wendy and Ursula had taken them in hand, then drafted Donnell to help, grimly turning themselves to giving the children showers in the facilities over the protests of the boys in particular, who had been enjoying living without having to be dragged to the bath.

"I remember hearing that," Connor snickered. "I could hear you lot all the way in the operations hub."

"I have a vague recollection," Stephen told him, "Of someone being dragged away from the computer banks by two very determined teenaged girls who stripped you to your boxers and scrubbed you down because you wouldn't stop working long enough to have a shower."

"He still does that," Abby informed them.

"You're a cruel, cruel roommate," Connor told her. "And that was once."

"No," Abby told him. "I just drop food down the back of your shirt now before it gets that far."

"That's deliberate?" Connor squawked.

Cutter sighed. "As entertaining as the Temple-Maitland mating rituals are, I'm somewhat curious as to the rest of the story."

Flushing, Abby shut up, and Connor continued, trying to pretend he wasn't lobster red himself. "There's not much more to tell," he said. "We killed the guards, because there wasn't anything else we could do with them, and once I'd figured out the programming for the anomaly generator, the first thing we did was strip the scientists naked and shove them through into some stretch of time after humans had evolved."

"Then Connor programmed it to send us all home, within hours to days of when we were first taken," Stephen said. "It turned out that the changes that had happened to most of the teens were . . . if not reversible, not particularly worse than what happened to me, so he sent them home with some cautions about foods to eat that should counteract the worst of the brain chemistry troubles."

"I programmed the computer to send them all home and collected as much of the biological data as I could on what had been done to me," Connor finished. "I set it up so that after I went through the anomaly to home, the thing would effectively suck the whole compound back in time to the stretch when the earth was first forming, pre-preCambrian, if you will. So it should have been effectively destroyed by lava flows and the like."

"And I screamed the house down and my parents decided I'd gone mad," Stephen told them, feeling somewhat less bitter now that he was believed.

"Did you ever look up anyone else from there?" Abby asked curiously.

"A few," Connor said shrugging. "But some of them haven't been born yet, or haven't been and come back yet, and some were too young to really give me much to go on in looking, like Stephen, and some died before I ever got home, in effect. About only Jim's still around that I was able to track down. I did contact him a few years after I got back, but he's in his fifties and it's a little weird." He sighed. "But it would have been nice to have someone around who knew."

"It would have," Stephen admitted.

****************************

Back at the ARC finally, everyone had to get used to this new Connor and Stephen. While some aspects of the group remained unchanged, the techs in the ARC had to become used to the way Connor sometimes didn't bother using stairs, preferring to simply hop over a banister and drop ten feet to the floor. Everyone had to become used to the fact that getting out of Connor's earshot was virtually impossible without putting real thought into it and Abby had to get used to a much more tactile Connor Temple.

There was enough of a difference that Stephen asked one day when they were loitering about in Abby and Connor's flat, "How did you cope when you got home?"

"Hmm?" Connor said, lifting his head from where he was oddly pretzeled in front of the television. "How did I cope?"

Stephen gestured at the way Connor was sitting. "You're hardly in a position normal for anyone but a contortionist, and the way you've been roughousing with Abby really isn't anything like the way you were before."

"Ah," Connor said and straightened out. "Well, when I got back, I programmed it for a couple days later. See, I'd been on a boy scouts camping trip when I got taken, so I made sure that people thought I'd got separated from the rest of the boys and got lost." He gave a grim sort of smile. "It was sort of a combined camping trip, a bunch of younger ones and older ones to keep track of things along with the adults. I knew there was supposed to be bad weather over those couple days, so I figured I'd just make myself missing, then stagger up to them all shocky. It'd give me a few days leeway to figure out what I was going to do."

It made sense. "What happened?" he asked. "Because I can't imagine that went over well."

"It didn't," Connor admitted. "Mum went mad while I was gone, and when I kept waking up, growling, she got scared." Connor sighed. "I bodged up something to handle things right quick, especially when all the traffic noises started driving me mad. I sort of pretended I was too traumatised by the whole thing to go back out, and a few of my rounds of treatments did some ugly things to my lungs and things."

"You'd mentioned asthma when we were tracking the gorgonopsid," Stephen recalled. "And allergies."

Connor shrugged. "It made a good excuse. And they did wreak havoc on my sense of balance. And smell. I felt like I had a muffler 'round my head all the time." Then he shot Stephen a look. "What about you? You mentioned the psychologists. What happened?"

"I'm not lying!"

"No one said you were, sweetheart. We're . . . concerned."

"You think I'm making it up. Why would I make it up? That would be stupid for me to make it up."

Stevie was getting very annoyed with his mum and dad. Not only were they not listening, they kept taking him to talk to these people who kept on making him look at stupid pictures of stupid ponies and things and asking him to make up stories about the stupid ponies. Then there were the ones who wanted to play stupid word games. "What's the first thing you think of when I say dark?"

He'd got so annoyed with it that he wrote down a bunch of stupid answers to stupid games like that in advance and deliberately answered them wrong, just because it was annoying and stupid.

"Up."

"Rhamphorhynchus."

"Black."

Mastodontosaurus."

"House."

"Tree."

"Father."

"Wanker." It slipped out before he could stop it and he saw the light go on in the stupid therapist's eyes. The pen went scribbling all over the page, but she kept on going.

"Pet."

He hadn't got one for this. He paused too long and she was about to say something. He blurted out the first word that came to mind as he recalled all those times he'd patted Connor on the head, keeping him calm, making him not panic or get all growly again. "Connor."

The pen stopped scribbling and she stared. Then she blurted out, "I thought Connor was the boy who rescued you?"

"Why should I tell you anything? You just think I'm mad. I'm not mad and I'm not making Connor up and you're just trying to trick me!"

Stephen sighed. "It was just so bloody irritating. But eventually, with no evidence, no proof that anyone existed, and no fifteen-year-old Connor Temples to be found anywhere in the UK I had to give in. Agree that it was all a figment of my imagination."

"You said my name when she came up with 'pet'?" Connor asked, sounding amused. "I like that. Did they ask if your goldfish was named Connor?"

Laughing, he said, "Actually, they asked my parents if they knew any Connors. Turns out I have a second cousin named Connor. They dragged me out to see him, trying to find out if I'd somehow learnt about him and worked him into the delusion."

"I can picture it now," Connor said, his lips twitching. "What did you do to the poor bloke?"

Stephen affected a childish, high-pitched voice. "He's not Connor. I bet he couldn't even beat a saltopus to death with a rock. Hester could do that."

"You didn't. Hello Abby."

"I did. I was horrible." Stephen waved at her as she dropped to the sofa.

She shook her head. "Should I ask?"

"Connor wanted to know what happened to me when I came home at five, insisting I'd been kidnapped and nearly eaten by dinosaurs and experimented on by a madwoman," Stephen said. "I was just telling him about the time my parents thought maybe I'd heard something about my second cousin Connor, and that was where I'd got Connor from in my head."

"Ah," she said. "Connor, I think you'd better be in the hub tomorrow morning."

He fully unpretzeled and sat up. "How come?"

"Lester's bringing in his replacement for Ryan," she explained. "And I'm thinking it'd probably be better for him to get used to you and all this sooner rather than later." As she talked, Connor joined her on the sofa, eyes narrowing briefly as he gave a quick sniff.

"Is Yertle feeling better?" Connor asked. "You've been hanging around him this afternoon."

Abby smiled, as she always did when Connor expressed his genuine interest in the welfare of the animals under her care, and dug her fingers into what she'd dubbed 'the purring spot' on Connor's back. He immediately melted. "He is, and thank you for asking."

"What do you want?" Connor asked suspiciously as he wriggled away from her fingers. Stephen mentally added a few tallies and notes to put into the relationship pools about Connor and Abby.

Grinning, Abby told him, "I'll trade an evening working your back over for you seeing if you can scare the living daylights out of the new captain," she explained. "I figure, if he stays sanguine when you're at your weirdest, he'll do fine and we'll know."

Connor thought about it, then agreed. "Fine. It's done." As Abby settled in, Stephen got to his feet. "Are you going?" Connor asked.

"I know it doesn't matter to you," Stephen partly lied, "But it probably will to Abby and you know it, and anyhow, I want to tell Cutter so he'll be there to watch tomorrow."

He was laughingly waved out the door. "You really are horrible, Stephen," Connor said.

The next morning Stephen, Cutter and Abby were faux-casually waiting in the hub and watched as a young man in black with an impeccable military bearing walked into the open space, making a dry joke about dinosaur wrangling on his CV. "So far so good," Stephen said.

They looked at him. It was nice to, like Connor, no longer have to normalise what he perceived. "He just said that he thought he'd got the job because of his extensive dinosaur wrangling experience."

"It's a good sign," Abby said.

Connor dropped from the roof, landing directly between Lester and the man. Lester merely looked irritated after the initial surprise, and everyone waited to see what the new CO would do. Connor deliberately ignored the byplay, leaning in to sniff the man. "No aftershave or other perfumey nonsense," he said, starting to circle the man, who still had a hand on his pistol. "Not overly startled, so he'll deal well when the things try for biting his head off."

"Connor, do stop harassing Captain Becker," Lester said. "I realised Miss Maitland will have put you up to this, but I would rather not have to go through the rigmarole of hiring someone new right after I finished the process for this one."

Ignoring their boss for a moment longer, Connor took one more long sniff, imprinting the scent into his mind, just in case. Then straightened and reverted to normal human social interaction. "Captain Becker is it? Nice to meet you. I'm Connor Temple, the resident semi-feral geek."

Captain Becker managed to look polite, sceptical, appalled and amused at once. "Do that to me again, Temple, and I'll shoot you."

"Fair enough," Connor told him cheerfully. "But you'll have to get in line after Abby. She still owes me for the time I shot her." He waved them over. "I think he's good!" Connor told them. "He's amused under all the sitff-upper-lipping."

Cutter, who couldn't take anyone's word for anything until he'd judged himself came over at once to be abrasive, and Stephen came over to mediate and play midway point between scientist and military. The small part of him that had been so neglected and confused for so long about who he was and what was truth or lies purred in satisfaction along with Connor.

Back to last part

Go to All in Good Time

Return to Primeval Fic Page