I'd've Baked a Cake 8/14
Title: I'd've Baked a Cake
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: If I owned Stephen I'd keep him dressed in nothing but a loincloth for my personal amusement. Sadly, I don't. Nor do I own anything else you might recognise.
Rating: PG, this may change in time.
Summary: Stephen and Connor meet for the first time under unusual circumstances and it forges a very important friendship. AU
Notes: Yes, I made up the book titles. I'm sure there must have been something like that extant at the time. I promise, there will be anomalies at some point. Eventually. When I get there.
******************************
He wasn't quite sure how he'd wound up like this, but Stephen found, as he gasped and flung his head back, that it was very hard to care.
"A-hem," said a youthful voice pointedly. Stephen looked up, past Helen, to see Connor, bright red and glaring, standing in the doorway. "I'm not going anywhere this time," he said pointedly to Stephen. He then plopped down on the bed, elbowing the two adults apart and started reading, pointedly in the space he'd created between them.
The look on Helen's face was amusing, and Stephen muffled his laughter desperately, because it wasn't the time, no one would thank him, and he was probably drunk from the liqueurs Helen had been plying him with.
She slid off the bed with a feline grace that swept any notion of laughter from his thoughts and glancing hastily at Connor, did a quick adjustment of just where things were inside his trousers. The look Connor turned on him just went to prove that he hadn't been nearly subtle enough. Helen smirked and sashayed off. Connor watched her leave as though she were a cobra that had wandered into the flat. "You have twenty-four hours," Connor told him, "And if you haven't stopped, I'm telling Professor Cutter."
"Connor," Stephen started, then stopped, searching for the right thing to say.
His sort-of-adopted little brother kept right on glaring. "She's horrible, Stephen. She was horrible to you and about you right up until she saw you, you know. I met her first at the airport and she said all kinds of horrible things. Then she saw you and got all creepy."
"What do you mean?" Stephen asked, frowning. Helen had been nothing but charming and deeply apologetic for her treatment of him, admitting that she'd misjudged him before.
"I mean, she was all, 'I can't believe we're bringing that useless lump of a student along, not to mention his bratty cousin . . .'" Connor trailed off, a parodic imitation of someone seeing something startling on his face. "'Oh my, look at the young stud-'"
"She did not say that," Stephen interrupted, scandalised.
"She didn't have to. She looked like that girl in my class, Ismene Harrison, you know, the one who always tries to lean over in front of you when you stop by to take me out of school," Connor said pointedly. Stephen winced, because the girl's crush was embarassing for all concerned, and she was about as subtle as a pink elephant in Harrods. "You watch her," Connor said. "Look at Helen, not just at her breasts when she starts waving them at you like she's been doing whenever the professor's back is turned."
They were all out the next day, him, Cutter, Connor and Helen, and Stephen tried watching Helen instead of reacting, and damned if Connor wasn't right. But worse, was that Cutter truly loved his wife, thought she hung the moon. So, he told Helen no, that he was very flattered, but that as long as she was married, he simply was not going there. Not even if she had him pressed against a wall and a hand on the front of his trousers that was so clever and strong and oh God . . .
She shrieked, backing away, batting at her top. Cutter and Connor rounded the corner a moment later to see Helen yank her top off and a couple frogs come climbing out of her brassiere. The smirk on Connor's face said it all. "Connor!"
"You little cretin!" shrieked Helen, lunging at Connor, who took to his heels with alacrity. The moment the pair were out of sight, Cutter burst into laughter.
"I shouldn't laugh," he said, chuckling. "Helen will kill me if she finds out."
Much later that evening Stephen told Connor that, as a consequence of his prank he was banned from the next couple outings, and then asked how he'd done it. "Trade secret," Connor said. "And if I see her at it again, they're going in her pants."
The whole incident took the bloom off that romance, more so when Connor turned out to have written Stephen's mother about it too, and she called long distance to take him down a few pegs. When they went home for Christmas, accompanied by Becker, who had wanted to have a proper Christmas with his grandparents, rather than with his overworked parents in the Gambia, they were greeted at the airport by his mother saying, "You're not still letting that woman lead you around by your bits, are you?"
"No, mother," Stephen said, sighing. "She stays away ever since Connor managed to get frogs into her underwear while she was wearing it."
"You must be James," his mother said to the sombre twelve-year-old. "Connor's said a lot about you."
Becker seemed to perk up, grinning happily at being addressed the way he wanted to be. "Nice to meet you, Mrs. Hart," he said. "Thanks for letting me stay over until my grandparents pick me up."
"It's no trouble at all," his mother assured the boy.
The long trip back to the house was filled with the eager chatter of the two boys, Stephen blushing much of the time, because Becker's idolisation of him was sometimes a little uncomfortable, and the looks his parents were levelling at him made it fairly clear they were going to take the mick something fierce over that. Connor and Becker practically bolted up the stairs to the room they'd be sharing for Becker's overnight stay, and Stephen found himself faced with his mother.
"So, is she still leading you around by your bits?"
"Mum!"
"Don't scandalise him too much, Pauline," his father said. "Otherwise he'll be like a nun at an orgy and you won't get a word out of him of any use."
"Thanks so much, dad," he said.
His father shot him a disapproving look. "I don't think you've got much you can say in your own defense right now, Stephen. Not when you're making that kind of choice."
"It won't help in the slightest if I say she was convincing, will it?" Stephen asked rhetorically. "I know it was stupid, I knew it then. She just . . ." he shook his head, sighing. "One minute we're talking-"
A high-pitched voice, the teenaged boy imitation of the female voice issued from the stairs. "Oh, Stephen, you're so brilliant and handsome. Let me shove my chest at you!"
Becker was standing next to Connor, looking a tad gutted. "He was . . . with Creepy Mrs. Cutter?" He looked like he'd just been told that Christmas was cancelled because Santa Claus had been murdered by his own elves for running a sweat shop.
"You'll understand when it happens to you," he warned Connor.
Connor snorted. "It won't happen to me, Stephen, because I'm not Hollywood pretty like you. I'm sorry, it's just a cross you'll have to bear alone."
"I wish you would let that go," Stephen said, sighing.
Poor Becker still looked lost. "She's creepy," he said again.
"This is a sad, sad day," his mum said.
"How can I trust you?" Becker asked.
Stephen was about to reassure him, when he saw the hint of smirk on the twelve-year-old's face. "Cute, Becker."
"C'mon," Connor tugged on Becker's arm, "It's Christmas. We can always be horrible after the holidays're over. I've got Wolfenstein on the computer here."
"Cool," Becker agreed.
"You mean, you're going to set my parents on me even worse, then run before you get sucked into the chaos," Stephen said irritably.
"Or that," Connor agreed as the boys scampered upstairs again.
"I should let him get eaten by a crocodile," Stephen said with a sigh as he turned back to his parents' heckling.
******************************
Connor and Becker exchanged presents that evening, despite it being before Christmas, because Connor wanted to be sure the present he'd asked Stephen's mum to pick up for Becker on his behalf went over well.
Becker peeled away the wrapping paper and laughed. "The Idiot's Guide to Basic Training? Thank you, Connor. Oo! The Encylopedia of Firearms? Wicked!" He began paging through it, muttering about which ones he liked.
Meanwhile, Connor dug into the box to find a biography of Jack Horner and, "Raptor Red? What the . . . Oh, my God. He just straight up wrote a novel. I can't wait to show this to Cutter." Connor scanned the summary of the book, written from the perspective of a utahraptor and giggled.
Then next afternoon, Becker left and Connor plopped down next to Stephen, where his guardian was brooding. "I'm sorry I set your mum on you," he said. "I just . . . she's not . . . I don't like her."
"It's alright, you were right," Stephen said, "And you're not my mother, please don't do that again."
"If you're just after someone sexy, I know that there's a secretary at the consulate that's forever doing her makeup if she thinks you're stopping by," Connor offered. The look Stephen shot him was dire, and he bolted, trying to get away before. "Ack! No! Not your armpit!" He struggled, but Stephen was smarter than the bullies back in Miller's Field, and knew how to dodge around all the ways he used to use to get away from headlocks. The painfully affectionate knuckling of the crown of his head made him smile and wince at the same time. Not that he stopped struggling. "Okay! Okay! I'll stop!"
"Your brother was clearly a terrible influence," Pauline said as she walked by Stephen's room, not interfering with their horseplay. "Try not to do that in front of his children."
The next couple weeks, Connor was included in the first family Christmas where no one was horrible to him. People got drunk and even Reg had an argument with one of his brothers about who was at fault for the destruction of some family heirloom they'd been smacked by their parents over, but while there were some chilling silences, no one got into a fistfight, nobody started to cry, and he was allowed to act just like the children and scatter wrapping paper all over the floor as he tore into a variety of computer games, dinosaur books and gift certificates from people who clearly had no idea what to get him. Frankly, he preferred that to someone getting him a poorly fitting jumper.
Dutifully, he spent some money and sent his parents a card. He wasn't quite sure why it hurt that much when he got it back in the mail, having been unopened. Stephen found him in the room that was to be his whenever they were at Stephen's parents' place. "What's wrong?"
"I just . . . I know they don't want me because I'm not . . . what they wanted," he said, lamely. "But it just sort of . . . why wasn't I good enough?" he asked. Stephen frowned as he saw the envelope and realised what happened.
He sat next to Connor, wrapping a brotherly arm around his shoulders and said, "I don't know, Connor. I wish I knew. I wish they had the sense to see how brilliant you are. It's the only thing I regret about this situation," he said. Connor just sighed and leaned against him. "When you're ready, come down. William's gone to that boutique store that sells nothing but gourmet cupcakes. You'll want to get one before there's no choices left."
A final comforting tightening of the arm around him, and then Stephen headed out the door. Connor looked at the letter, the one that as much as said he didn't have a family anymore. Then he thought of Stephen's older brother and how he and Stephen harassed him together, teaching little Grant, who was finally starting to talk properly, how to say dinosaur names, Pauline and Reg scolding him for his table manners in the same breath as they did to Stephen and William and even Professor Cutter, joking with him about bad science.
He swung by the fireplace as he walked to where everyone was arguing about who got which cupcake and threw the card in. So his family didn't want him. This was better anyhow.
Part 7
Part 9
Back to archive page