I'd've Baked a Cake 11/14
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: Oh, look. An update. Hopefully the next one won't take as long.
*****************************
Stephen tended to find himself a little conflicted about working with James Lester and his government squad of military meatheads. On the one hand, he hated that the science was taking a back seat to the rounding up of things and shoving them back through, he hated that he was having to report every last damn detail of each encounter, not for scientifically important things but for damage repayment bills and cover-ups and a whole load of things that were of absolutely no interest to him.
On the other hand, it was very nice that, when an anomaly was detected, he and Cutter could, once things had settled down, take samples of whatever had traipsed through, could sometimes even take a few minutes on the other side collecting specimens and could rely on the military personnel to watch their backs, which certainly made it easier on him, since he did get rather tired of playing bodyguard to Cutter as well as assistant. Moreover, his skills with sharpshooting had garnered him respect from those men, which was something he had not got much of in the academic community, which tended to take a very dim view of those with skills at firearms.
One of the things that made it all so irritating was Connor. Not that Connor was trouble, per se, but he resented being tossed out of a project that wouldn't exist but for his efforts, he resented being shut out after two years of Cutter and Stephen including him in all the research (Cutter resented the loss as well, in no small part because he enjoyed that Connor would give Cutter the sort of rip roaring arguments he favoured as part of the academic process -- teenaged obstinacy and a brilliant mind colliding sharply with Cutter's native stubborness and unorthodox theories) but most of all, he resented being stuck in school with no outlets for his intellectual frustrations.
Because while Connor was at a school for gifted students, all about GCSEs for the lower years and university preparatory work in Sixth form (with a proper disdain for any of the lower orders of humanity who'd be found at colleges, or worse, without higher education at all), the teachers were, for the most part, not formerly gifted children, and their students were consistently smarter than they were. Connor's teenaged rebellion finally found its place, and he was suspended for disrupting class.
Not for shooting spitballs at teachers, roughhousing or class clowning, but for arguing. Connor took a nearly malicious pleasure in proving his teachers wrong one way or another, running them ragged by arguing. In fact, there were very few teachers who expressed differing opinions, effectively his English literature teacher and the maths teachers. The former because Connor was not gifted in that area, and tended to be quiet as he had nothing to either contribute or contradict any more than the other students. His maths teachers, it turned out, had turned Connor loose on younger years as a tutor and class assistant, which had the double advantage of giving them things he could do in class, as well as taking the work of helping the students off their shoulders.
Everyone else, chemistry, physics, biology, history, sociology, any area that was fact or statistic-based in some way, found themselves treated to the argumentative nature Cutter had fostered in Connor, and Stephen found himself in and out of the headmaster's office so often, he grumbled in passing to the school secretary that he ought to consider enrolling in school all over again, he was spending so much time there.
The last straw came when he got home one evening to find Connor deeply involved in research into Cromwell, carefully referring to his history textbook. After one minute of observation, Stephen came to a revelation and his temper to a boil. "Have you been spending all your spare time solely on proving your teachers wrong?"
Connor sat up, grinning. "Yeah. It's fun. Then they turn all red and-"
"And you get suspended again, and I get dragged down to your headmaster's office for another discussion about the way you're disrupting the school, and do you know that I've had three calls in the last month alone from the child protective services, because Rachel Green is still watching me?" Stephen demanded.
His ward got a mulish look on his face. "I don't see why I can't have a little fun," he muttered resentfully. "Cutter-"
"Cutter was wooed by a dozen universities and is a minor celebrity in his area of concentration," Stephen snapped. "He was given leeway that you absolutely will not be unless and until you have your own doctorate. Which is not something you'll get if you alienate everyone, because you'll never find anyone to get you through your thesis and viva." He glared. "I've been letting this go because your grades weren't falling but for the participation portions. But you're about to pass a critical point in number of days present in the classroom, and it might actually put your graduation in jeopardy."
Eyes wide, Connor sat bolt upright. "What?"
"I didn't know what I was going to do about this, and now I do. Connor, since you seem to have enough free time to waste on pointless research, you'll be acting as the assistant in the computer lab at school-"
"But Stephen-"
"And still helping your maths teachers in the capacity you are now-"
"Stephen!"
"As well as the biology and physics teachers-"
"They hate me!"
"And you're joining the school football team, I've already spoken to the coach, since it seems their goalkeeper's got a broken ankle and won't be playing for the rest of the year," he finished mercilessly. Between all the extracurriculars, Connor wouldn't have the time to waste on digging up things just to harass his teachers with, not if he wanted to do anything else with his time.
Connor subsided into resentful muttering and stomped off to his room, where he could be heard wasting Stephen's money on a long-distance phone call to Becker, complaining bitterly about the sudden upsurge of responsibilities. He was forced to throw the sixteen-year-old off the phone two hours later.
Perhaps the most amusing part of the whole debacle was the fact that Becker and Abby somehow managed to make it to more than half of Connor's games, the pair having come to some sort of truce in order to heckle their sixth form friend.
When summer started, Connor took up a new hobby of harassing James Lester. He emailed the man a hundred times a day, trying to get himself onto the team studying the temporal anomalies and being rebuffed at every turn. They soon developed a tacit agreement that if Connor found anything, either Stephen or Cutter could 'discover' the news of an incursion in Connor's open email, open tabloid papers or thinly coded messages which only the truly stupid could have not seen through.
Dear Professor Cutter,
Thanks for the suggestion about my graphic novel idea. The Terminator's secret pig weapons is a great idea for a funny villain. Especially if I have it attacking people in Croydon. The sewage works off the B272 would be a great visual gag, yeah?
Connor
Cutter sighed heavily as they loaded up the ketamine. "The Terminator's secret pig weapons? He's getting worse."
"I think he likes the ridiculousness, myself," Stephen said, shaking his head. Connor wasn't always right, but he really did seem to have a better bead on tracking the anomalies than the Home Office.
And then they went quiet, maintaining the fiction they'd come up with the reports themselves, and heading off to stop a Terminator Pig from ravaging a Croydon sewage plant.
****************************************
Connor was damned if he'd let himself get sidelined from the coolest thing ever to happen to anyone ever. He was helping by letting Stephen and Cutter know where things were, sure, but he wanted to be there, doing the science, seeing the animals. He also missed Stephen. He hardly ever saw Stephen anymore, save at his bloody football matches, which Stephen had insisted he continue over the summer as a warning that he'd best not slip up again.
It wasn't that he begrudged Stephen the job, he just . . . Stephen was his best friend and he'd been there in the Gambia, he'd got to go to Brazil once, even if he had spent far more time than he liked trying to pretend that Allison and Stephen were having a roaring and argumentative chess game in her tent.
Now, he didn't get to go along, he didn't get to hear about it and he didn't get to help. He knew it wasn't Stephen and Cutter's fault, knew that it was irrational of him, but he was a bit resentful and angry and did his best not to let anyone know, especially after Becker had told him he sounded like a girl who'd just been dumped by her boyfriend.
He did complain to Abby though. Because Abby understood. She told him all about the trip to the Galapagos when she was a kid and how she knew it was stupid to be angry with her parents for dying and never taking her back, that she'd rather never go again in exchange for them back, but it didn't stop her from being angry about it. She also understood his anger at being kept away from the science, because she knew what it was like to like that sort of thing.
His birthday passed and Connor could finally drive, taking Stephen's car (the one he personally owned, not the Hilux Stephen and Cutter shared for work) out to Brighton to visit Becker and Abby and to listen to them both say nasty things to each other, pretending they weren't friends. It was during one of these stretches, the three of them sprawled out on the beach, Connor grousing that there had to be a better way to track anomalies than waiting until someone got themselves attacked, that Becker said, "Isn't there some way to track massive magnetic phenomena?"
"How?" Connor grumbled again. "What'm I supposed to do? Stick magnets and radios all over Britain?"
Abby, however, sat bolt upright. "You said you're a computer hacker, right?" Abby asked.
"Yeah," Connor half sat up to look at her. "Why?"
"Well, I was doing a school project about the BA, you know, the Science Association," she said, "And it came up along the way that the Geological Society tracks the Earth's magnetic field. They've got sensors all over. Maybe there's somewhere you can hack to pick up on that."
"You are brilliant," Connor told her sincerely. "You too, Becker."
"I appreciate your understanding of my utter brilliance, as is my due," Becker dryly. "Now, can we possibly enjoy the beach?"
The rest of his vacation, Connor secluded himself in his room, hacking the Geological Society's servers, finding where they uploaded their data and figuring out the numbers and things needed to track the anomalies. When school started, he begged and pleaded and got himself released from his tutoring jobs, which was a relief, because between the football that Stephen still wouldn't let him quit, school and being stuck for hours going over university application materials with Stephen (which was even less fun than it sounded), he couldn't get nearly as much done as he wanted on his detector.
It was November by the time he was ready to test it out properly. He'd got a good degree of success with predicting where anomalies would open up by comparing those readings to confirmed anomalies, but he had yet to test it. Connor's school was closed for teacher professional development stuff, luckily, when his alarm went off and he saw his detector reading that something was open in Eastbourne. He called Abby and Becker, just to let them know, and Abby declared she'd meet him there, saying that nothing was happening in school that day that was worth her hanging about. Becker told Connor, "If I don't hear back from you by this afternoon, I'm calling everyone, Stephen and Cutter and Lieutenant Ryan, and if I find out you're both snogging in some bushes, tough luck."
When Connor got to the location, it was just in time to see the tail end of something scaly go back through, then the anomaly shut. Abby came down from the tree she'd been in. "Took you long enough. Was traffic that bad?"
"It really was -- Abby! What happened?" Connor demanded. The right side of her face was swollen and bruised. "Did it get you?"
She shook her head, backing away hastily. "No. It was just . . . I'm fine."
Something in the way she said it, made Connor ask, "Who did that, Abby? Was it your aunt?"
Her jaw set. "What would you know about it?"
"Nothing," Connor said, just as sharply. "Except that the reason I live with Stephen is because my Dad took exception to my wanting something other than a dead end job in a factory. I was in the hospital for a week."
Abby started to shake. "That's well enough for you, you had somewhere to go. I don't," her breath hitched. "I have to stay, and Jack . . . my brother . . . even if there was somewhere to go, I have to . . ."
Connor just stepped up to her, wrapping an arm around her. He was about to say something, although he didn't know what, exactly, when she suddenly turned and started sobbing into his shoulder. "It's okay," he said, feeling rather stupid saying it. Because it wasn't okay, but what else could he say? "It'll be okay." He walked her to a bench and let her cry all over him, patting her back and hoping she'd stop soon, because he didn't know what to do if he had to do something other than make soothing noises and rub her back.
When she finally seemed to have got the crying out of her system, he set his jaw and said. "The first thing we're going to do, is you're going to get Jack, and I'm taking you both back to my place, and we'll figure something out from there."
"But Stephen-" she started.
"Stephen took me in when I showed up at three in the morning and before we'd done more than exchange letters for a few years," Connor said, interrupting. "He'll help. I promise."
They were settled in at the flat, when Stephen came slamming through the door. "Connor!" he exclaimed. "Where have you been? Becker called and said something about you and an anomaly in Eastbourne."
"You forgot to call," Abby said reproachfully from where she was lying the wrong way around on the couch, her legs over the back, head dangling to the floor off the seat and watching the telly upside-down.
Connor hissed. "Damn. I completely forgot. I'll go apologise-"
"First you'll tell me what you were doing running around near an anomaly with no one but Abby there," Stephen said sharply. "It looks like Abby came off the worse for it."
Taking a deep breath and steeling himself, Connor stood and said. "Abby didn't come off the worse for running into the desmatosuchus," he said.
Stephen made a sound remarkably like a whimper as he dropped his head into his hands a moment. "What happened?" he asked.
"Abby's aunt's not exactly the nicest person," Connor explained. "She got a bit angry and took it out on Abby."
Whipping around, Stephen was next to Abby, gently turning her head back and forth as he looked at her. "I'm sorry," he said. Then he sighed. "Connor, not that I don't want to help, but I'm not running a home for abused teenagers here."
"Just until she finds somewhere to go," Connor pleaded. "Please, Stephen. I can't . . . I don't want Abby to get hurt the way I did-"
Eyes rolling, Stephen said, "I knew it. I knew he'd hurt you more than the one time. Why did you lie?"
"It's not important," Connor insisted. "Please, Stephen."
"Fine," Stephen said, sighing. Then he turned on his heel, saying, "You get to call everyone, Cutter, Becker, everyone, and tell them you're alright."
"Okay," Connor reached for the phone.
"Then I'm calling Mum," Stephen said as he headed for his bedroom.
"Oh, hell," Connor muttered, imagining Pauline's reaction.
A twelve-year-old boy poked his head out of Connor's room, sporting a curious look to go with a black eye. "Is this Stephen?"
Stephen turned back to Connor, the question obvious. "That's Jack. Abby's brother."
"I'll just be deciding what to tell Mum," Stephen informed Connor as he shut the door behind him sharply.
Part 10
Part 12
Back to archive page
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: Oh, look. An update. Hopefully the next one won't take as long.
*****************************
Stephen tended to find himself a little conflicted about working with James Lester and his government squad of military meatheads. On the one hand, he hated that the science was taking a back seat to the rounding up of things and shoving them back through, he hated that he was having to report every last damn detail of each encounter, not for scientifically important things but for damage repayment bills and cover-ups and a whole load of things that were of absolutely no interest to him.
On the other hand, it was very nice that, when an anomaly was detected, he and Cutter could, once things had settled down, take samples of whatever had traipsed through, could sometimes even take a few minutes on the other side collecting specimens and could rely on the military personnel to watch their backs, which certainly made it easier on him, since he did get rather tired of playing bodyguard to Cutter as well as assistant. Moreover, his skills with sharpshooting had garnered him respect from those men, which was something he had not got much of in the academic community, which tended to take a very dim view of those with skills at firearms.
One of the things that made it all so irritating was Connor. Not that Connor was trouble, per se, but he resented being tossed out of a project that wouldn't exist but for his efforts, he resented being shut out after two years of Cutter and Stephen including him in all the research (Cutter resented the loss as well, in no small part because he enjoyed that Connor would give Cutter the sort of rip roaring arguments he favoured as part of the academic process -- teenaged obstinacy and a brilliant mind colliding sharply with Cutter's native stubborness and unorthodox theories) but most of all, he resented being stuck in school with no outlets for his intellectual frustrations.
Because while Connor was at a school for gifted students, all about GCSEs for the lower years and university preparatory work in Sixth form (with a proper disdain for any of the lower orders of humanity who'd be found at colleges, or worse, without higher education at all), the teachers were, for the most part, not formerly gifted children, and their students were consistently smarter than they were. Connor's teenaged rebellion finally found its place, and he was suspended for disrupting class.
Not for shooting spitballs at teachers, roughhousing or class clowning, but for arguing. Connor took a nearly malicious pleasure in proving his teachers wrong one way or another, running them ragged by arguing. In fact, there were very few teachers who expressed differing opinions, effectively his English literature teacher and the maths teachers. The former because Connor was not gifted in that area, and tended to be quiet as he had nothing to either contribute or contradict any more than the other students. His maths teachers, it turned out, had turned Connor loose on younger years as a tutor and class assistant, which had the double advantage of giving them things he could do in class, as well as taking the work of helping the students off their shoulders.
Everyone else, chemistry, physics, biology, history, sociology, any area that was fact or statistic-based in some way, found themselves treated to the argumentative nature Cutter had fostered in Connor, and Stephen found himself in and out of the headmaster's office so often, he grumbled in passing to the school secretary that he ought to consider enrolling in school all over again, he was spending so much time there.
The last straw came when he got home one evening to find Connor deeply involved in research into Cromwell, carefully referring to his history textbook. After one minute of observation, Stephen came to a revelation and his temper to a boil. "Have you been spending all your spare time solely on proving your teachers wrong?"
Connor sat up, grinning. "Yeah. It's fun. Then they turn all red and-"
"And you get suspended again, and I get dragged down to your headmaster's office for another discussion about the way you're disrupting the school, and do you know that I've had three calls in the last month alone from the child protective services, because Rachel Green is still watching me?" Stephen demanded.
His ward got a mulish look on his face. "I don't see why I can't have a little fun," he muttered resentfully. "Cutter-"
"Cutter was wooed by a dozen universities and is a minor celebrity in his area of concentration," Stephen snapped. "He was given leeway that you absolutely will not be unless and until you have your own doctorate. Which is not something you'll get if you alienate everyone, because you'll never find anyone to get you through your thesis and viva." He glared. "I've been letting this go because your grades weren't falling but for the participation portions. But you're about to pass a critical point in number of days present in the classroom, and it might actually put your graduation in jeopardy."
Eyes wide, Connor sat bolt upright. "What?"
"I didn't know what I was going to do about this, and now I do. Connor, since you seem to have enough free time to waste on pointless research, you'll be acting as the assistant in the computer lab at school-"
"But Stephen-"
"And still helping your maths teachers in the capacity you are now-"
"Stephen!"
"As well as the biology and physics teachers-"
"They hate me!"
"And you're joining the school football team, I've already spoken to the coach, since it seems their goalkeeper's got a broken ankle and won't be playing for the rest of the year," he finished mercilessly. Between all the extracurriculars, Connor wouldn't have the time to waste on digging up things just to harass his teachers with, not if he wanted to do anything else with his time.
Connor subsided into resentful muttering and stomped off to his room, where he could be heard wasting Stephen's money on a long-distance phone call to Becker, complaining bitterly about the sudden upsurge of responsibilities. He was forced to throw the sixteen-year-old off the phone two hours later.
Perhaps the most amusing part of the whole debacle was the fact that Becker and Abby somehow managed to make it to more than half of Connor's games, the pair having come to some sort of truce in order to heckle their sixth form friend.
When summer started, Connor took up a new hobby of harassing James Lester. He emailed the man a hundred times a day, trying to get himself onto the team studying the temporal anomalies and being rebuffed at every turn. They soon developed a tacit agreement that if Connor found anything, either Stephen or Cutter could 'discover' the news of an incursion in Connor's open email, open tabloid papers or thinly coded messages which only the truly stupid could have not seen through.
Dear Professor Cutter,
Thanks for the suggestion about my graphic novel idea. The Terminator's secret pig weapons is a great idea for a funny villain. Especially if I have it attacking people in Croydon. The sewage works off the B272 would be a great visual gag, yeah?
Connor
Cutter sighed heavily as they loaded up the ketamine. "The Terminator's secret pig weapons? He's getting worse."
"I think he likes the ridiculousness, myself," Stephen said, shaking his head. Connor wasn't always right, but he really did seem to have a better bead on tracking the anomalies than the Home Office.
And then they went quiet, maintaining the fiction they'd come up with the reports themselves, and heading off to stop a Terminator Pig from ravaging a Croydon sewage plant.
****************************************
Connor was damned if he'd let himself get sidelined from the coolest thing ever to happen to anyone ever. He was helping by letting Stephen and Cutter know where things were, sure, but he wanted to be there, doing the science, seeing the animals. He also missed Stephen. He hardly ever saw Stephen anymore, save at his bloody football matches, which Stephen had insisted he continue over the summer as a warning that he'd best not slip up again.
It wasn't that he begrudged Stephen the job, he just . . . Stephen was his best friend and he'd been there in the Gambia, he'd got to go to Brazil once, even if he had spent far more time than he liked trying to pretend that Allison and Stephen were having a roaring and argumentative chess game in her tent.
Now, he didn't get to go along, he didn't get to hear about it and he didn't get to help. He knew it wasn't Stephen and Cutter's fault, knew that it was irrational of him, but he was a bit resentful and angry and did his best not to let anyone know, especially after Becker had told him he sounded like a girl who'd just been dumped by her boyfriend.
He did complain to Abby though. Because Abby understood. She told him all about the trip to the Galapagos when she was a kid and how she knew it was stupid to be angry with her parents for dying and never taking her back, that she'd rather never go again in exchange for them back, but it didn't stop her from being angry about it. She also understood his anger at being kept away from the science, because she knew what it was like to like that sort of thing.
His birthday passed and Connor could finally drive, taking Stephen's car (the one he personally owned, not the Hilux Stephen and Cutter shared for work) out to Brighton to visit Becker and Abby and to listen to them both say nasty things to each other, pretending they weren't friends. It was during one of these stretches, the three of them sprawled out on the beach, Connor grousing that there had to be a better way to track anomalies than waiting until someone got themselves attacked, that Becker said, "Isn't there some way to track massive magnetic phenomena?"
"How?" Connor grumbled again. "What'm I supposed to do? Stick magnets and radios all over Britain?"
Abby, however, sat bolt upright. "You said you're a computer hacker, right?" Abby asked.
"Yeah," Connor half sat up to look at her. "Why?"
"Well, I was doing a school project about the BA, you know, the Science Association," she said, "And it came up along the way that the Geological Society tracks the Earth's magnetic field. They've got sensors all over. Maybe there's somewhere you can hack to pick up on that."
"You are brilliant," Connor told her sincerely. "You too, Becker."
"I appreciate your understanding of my utter brilliance, as is my due," Becker dryly. "Now, can we possibly enjoy the beach?"
The rest of his vacation, Connor secluded himself in his room, hacking the Geological Society's servers, finding where they uploaded their data and figuring out the numbers and things needed to track the anomalies. When school started, he begged and pleaded and got himself released from his tutoring jobs, which was a relief, because between the football that Stephen still wouldn't let him quit, school and being stuck for hours going over university application materials with Stephen (which was even less fun than it sounded), he couldn't get nearly as much done as he wanted on his detector.
It was November by the time he was ready to test it out properly. He'd got a good degree of success with predicting where anomalies would open up by comparing those readings to confirmed anomalies, but he had yet to test it. Connor's school was closed for teacher professional development stuff, luckily, when his alarm went off and he saw his detector reading that something was open in Eastbourne. He called Abby and Becker, just to let them know, and Abby declared she'd meet him there, saying that nothing was happening in school that day that was worth her hanging about. Becker told Connor, "If I don't hear back from you by this afternoon, I'm calling everyone, Stephen and Cutter and Lieutenant Ryan, and if I find out you're both snogging in some bushes, tough luck."
When Connor got to the location, it was just in time to see the tail end of something scaly go back through, then the anomaly shut. Abby came down from the tree she'd been in. "Took you long enough. Was traffic that bad?"
"It really was -- Abby! What happened?" Connor demanded. The right side of her face was swollen and bruised. "Did it get you?"
She shook her head, backing away hastily. "No. It was just . . . I'm fine."
Something in the way she said it, made Connor ask, "Who did that, Abby? Was it your aunt?"
Her jaw set. "What would you know about it?"
"Nothing," Connor said, just as sharply. "Except that the reason I live with Stephen is because my Dad took exception to my wanting something other than a dead end job in a factory. I was in the hospital for a week."
Abby started to shake. "That's well enough for you, you had somewhere to go. I don't," her breath hitched. "I have to stay, and Jack . . . my brother . . . even if there was somewhere to go, I have to . . ."
Connor just stepped up to her, wrapping an arm around her. He was about to say something, although he didn't know what, exactly, when she suddenly turned and started sobbing into his shoulder. "It's okay," he said, feeling rather stupid saying it. Because it wasn't okay, but what else could he say? "It'll be okay." He walked her to a bench and let her cry all over him, patting her back and hoping she'd stop soon, because he didn't know what to do if he had to do something other than make soothing noises and rub her back.
When she finally seemed to have got the crying out of her system, he set his jaw and said. "The first thing we're going to do, is you're going to get Jack, and I'm taking you both back to my place, and we'll figure something out from there."
"But Stephen-" she started.
"Stephen took me in when I showed up at three in the morning and before we'd done more than exchange letters for a few years," Connor said, interrupting. "He'll help. I promise."
They were settled in at the flat, when Stephen came slamming through the door. "Connor!" he exclaimed. "Where have you been? Becker called and said something about you and an anomaly in Eastbourne."
"You forgot to call," Abby said reproachfully from where she was lying the wrong way around on the couch, her legs over the back, head dangling to the floor off the seat and watching the telly upside-down.
Connor hissed. "Damn. I completely forgot. I'll go apologise-"
"First you'll tell me what you were doing running around near an anomaly with no one but Abby there," Stephen said sharply. "It looks like Abby came off the worse for it."
Taking a deep breath and steeling himself, Connor stood and said. "Abby didn't come off the worse for running into the desmatosuchus," he said.
Stephen made a sound remarkably like a whimper as he dropped his head into his hands a moment. "What happened?" he asked.
"Abby's aunt's not exactly the nicest person," Connor explained. "She got a bit angry and took it out on Abby."
Whipping around, Stephen was next to Abby, gently turning her head back and forth as he looked at her. "I'm sorry," he said. Then he sighed. "Connor, not that I don't want to help, but I'm not running a home for abused teenagers here."
"Just until she finds somewhere to go," Connor pleaded. "Please, Stephen. I can't . . . I don't want Abby to get hurt the way I did-"
Eyes rolling, Stephen said, "I knew it. I knew he'd hurt you more than the one time. Why did you lie?"
"It's not important," Connor insisted. "Please, Stephen."
"Fine," Stephen said, sighing. Then he turned on his heel, saying, "You get to call everyone, Cutter, Becker, everyone, and tell them you're alright."
"Okay," Connor reached for the phone.
"Then I'm calling Mum," Stephen said as he headed for his bedroom.
"Oh, hell," Connor muttered, imagining Pauline's reaction.
A twelve-year-old boy poked his head out of Connor's room, sporting a curious look to go with a black eye. "Is this Stephen?"
Stephen turned back to Connor, the question obvious. "That's Jack. Abby's brother."
"I'll just be deciding what to tell Mum," Stephen informed Connor as he shut the door behind him sharply.
Part 10
Part 12
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