Primeval fanfic: Making Shifts 1/2
Title: Making Shifts 1/2
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Really owning nothing anyone recognises, especially the direct quotes and characters. I super-don't own those.
Summary: When Connor takes Stephen's place in the Menagerie, a lot of things change. AU
Series: Well, obviously the end of S2 and moving into S3.
Rating: PG-13 right now, subject to change because I'm really making this up on the fly.
Pairing: Stephen/Connor eventually.
A/N: Again, feel free to brit-pick in the comments, it's three in the morning here, so goodness knows I may have used some things that I ought to know better about. This is not going to be a total series rewrite, just . . . working my way up to the 'shippiness. Thing is, this is long enough and it's late enough that I'm just splitting the thing into however many pieces I wind up getting when I'm done. I don't know. I just know I've seen very few of these (let's keep Stephen from dying there in the first place), and while it's slightly inspired by, "Game Changing: Saving Stephen" this is something different. Also, how is Connor there and knowing what's going on? It's way too late (or early) for me to think of it. Maybe later.
Now corrected for a few minor pieces of Brit-pickery noted by lukadreaming.
********************************************
It all starts when he reaches out and clocks Nick to take his place inside Leek's Menagerie of Doom so the animals don't get out and kill everyone. Because the delay of doing so allows Connor to blow right past him and into the room, slamming the door behind himself.
Connor's just locked himself in with a gorgonopsid, a venomous millipede, a pair of raptors, a sabre toothed tiger, one of those predators from the future they didn't have a name for yet and one of the things that had kidnapped Abby. There was probably something else in there, but by then Stephen's brain was stuttering as he realised there was no way Connor was going to survive. He and Nick pounded on the door, desperately trying to convince the kid to get out, not to throw his life away, Nick trying everything from flattery to guilting Connor into coming out. "Who's going to handle fixing the damage to the ADD if you're dead, Connor!"
"Hey, I'm not the important one," he says with unconcealed terror as the whites of his eyes belie the casual words. "Besides, no one at the ARC even likes me that much, so it's not like you'll miss me and Abby'll be happy to get her flat back."
Stephen rather doubts Abby will want it back with the knowledge that it came from Connor committing suicide, but he just bangs on the door again, shouting, "Dammit Connor, get out of there!"
He ignores them both now and feints at the gorgonopsid. Stephen vaguely wonders if this is a plan, or if Connor's just trying to speed up the inevitable. He can't blame him for wanting to make it go faster, rather than seeing his death approach slowly. Somehow, though, it tempts the creature into lunging, and Connor, with one of his bursts of sudden physical talent that only seem to be brought on by near-death situations, dives out of the way, and the snarling lizard crashes into the smilodon.
Chaos seems to spread outward from that moment, and somehow Connor slips and slides and dashes and makes it to a sparking panel on the wall without dying. his hands, steady and skilled rip into the wires, disconnecting and reconnecting, twisting and tugging, working to some plan all his own.
He doesn't see the predator leap from the wall on top of him, his scream tearing through Stephen and Nick like a hot knife through butter, only far more destructive. Maybe a buzzsaw through flesh.
Neither can tear themselves away, and watch as the scent of Connor's blood seems to incense the other creatures. They lunge, and one of the raptors pulls the predator off Connor, prompting another scream as the move rips open further the vicious wounds left by the mutant bat that had been taking its time in killing him.
Somehow, though, Connor pulls himself back up, and shaking, he begins at the panel again as the predators in the room tear at each other, caught up in battles between themselves. They all want the prey animal against the wall by the sparking panel, but they have to take out the others first. Connor's losing a lot of blood, but the waistcoat and then his shirt both go, one after the other, used to temporarily blind attacking animals, covering them in the copiously spilling blood and making them into distractions for the others.
He's holding his own as he works the wiring.
Stephen watches and thinks he'd never have managed, but recognises Abby in the way Connor's managing to predict behaviours. Nick had said the kid was brilliant, but it's like he's pulling together every piece of animal information he's ever seen or come across to keep himself in one piece.
Suddenly his legs give out and he slides to the floor, the blood that's all over now preventing him from getting any sort of purchase. Nick mutters something about Claudia and pteradons, but Stephen can't think of Cutter's vanished possibly imaginary girlfriend right now. He pounds at the door again. "Connor!" Not now. Not when he's so close to surviving them all. Just a little longer and help might come. "Connor! Get up!"
Connor's eyes look dull and empty as his gaze slowly moves to the door where Stephen is banging desperately and shouting at him to not give up. The smilodon is dead, beaten by the gorgonopsid. It had been no match for the raptors, taking one out, but losing when the predator had briefly tag-teamed with the remaining one. The walrus thing had been bitten by the millipede, but it's death throes had distracted the other predator and had allowed the millipede to get the jump on it.
There were only two left, and maybe, just maybe, Connor could hold out. If Lester and the soldiers got there in time . . . if Connor didn't give up . . . if the last two animals chose to fight each other first . . .
"Connor! Don't you dare die now!"
Something sparked in Connor, Stephen didn't know, didn't even care if it had been him or just the desire to survive. What mattered was that Connor struggled and slowly got himself to his feet. Reached into the panel and did something. Just as the last to creatures lunged toward him, apparently planning to kill him before they finished each other off, a small explosion seemed to detonate from the panel, and Connor was flung back a few feet, hitting the concrete floor hard and leaving a streak of blood behind as he skidded.
And an electric fence came online, separating Connor safely behind it from the two monsters, who turned on each other in frustration over their prey being denied to them.
"Yes! Brilliant!" Stephen found himself laughing as the electricity now kept Connor safe, kept him from being hurt more. He and Nick exchanged joyful grins that the nerdy tech had pulled a miracle out of his silly fedora.
But Connor isn't moving and there's so much blood.
Lester's soldiers show up, and Stephen can barely bring himself to back away from his vigil at the tiny window in the door. He'd planned to go in there. He'd been expecting to die, to save Nick and everyone else, to expiate his sins for believing Helen when he should have trusted Nick . . . Cutter. He didn't even have the right to call the man by his first name anymore, did he?
He would have died, he liked to think he'd have died well, but Connor's technical genius had got the boy . . . no, man, Connor was no boy for what he had managed that day. Connor's brilliance may have saved him, but there was no way of knowing now. Precious minutes were being lost, trickling away like the blood coming from the gaping injuries all over Connor's mauled body while they tried to get into the room. Then as they had to fight the monsters to a standstill before it was safe to even think about getting Connor out of the cage that had saved him and was now keeping him from the medical attention he needed.
The medics were right there, vibrating, calibrating instruments and prepping for whatever Connor might need if he was still alive. Abby was crouched by the humming electrical fence, cursing Connor out and telling him that if he didn't come through this okay she was going to do terrible things to his Xbox and burn his collection of Doctor Who merchandise. Her eyes were fixed on him, and Stephen knelt beside her, unable to find anything to say to the young man who he'd shown so much contempt for so many times.
Both of them stared unwaveringly at the only thing keeping them sane. The nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. The movement was so slight, sometimes Stephen wondered if they were both imagining it, pretending that the already dead fourth member of their team was still alive, already in the first denial of the loss of a friend and teammate.
It took an eternity for the electricity to go down, and with a visible shudder, he and Abby both saw Connor take one shuddering breath, relax, and stop moving entirely. "No!"
The barrier went down, but they couldn't run to his side. The medics pushed them away, more electicity now being brought to bear as they desperately shocked his stopped heart.
Nick, who had often tended to bury himself in talking and working and doing during crises like this had been practically flinging himself up and down the room and the corridors, making a nuisance of himself and trying to find solutions. He now finally joined them, saying in a shaky voice, "You'd have been proud of him, Abby. I think what got him through was what he learned from you."
"Don't talk like he's dead," Abby snapped.
"Clear!" shouted the medic again, and Connor's body arched on the trolley.
"I didn't mean . . ." Cutter trailed off helplessly as the paddles shocked his former student again and again.
Suddenly a voice shouted, "I've got a rhythm! Let's get him to the hospital!"
Stephen felt the strength leave his legs suddenly and he knew without looking that Cutter was staggering to the wall next to him, while Abby had just sunk to the floor, clutching Rex and sobbing with relief. On some level he knew Connor might not be out of the woods yet, but for now it was enough to let the joy buoy them through the moment.
*****************************
Lester had arranged something with the hospital to allow them in to see Connor at all hours of the day and night. When they had all exhausted themselves repeatedly, staying up all hours by Connor's comatose side, Jenny had finally stepped in, organising them into shifts, and putting herself on one as well, just to keep the length down and so that someone would be there from the team when Connor woke up.
Eight in the morning to two, Abby was there, two to eight in the evening was Jenny's shift, Cutter took up the eight at night to two in the morning, and Stephen got the last shift. It was wreaking merry hell with his internal clock, but Jenny was right that it meant they all got some sleep, always had someone up to handle an anomaly and always had someone there with Connor.
Abby had insisted that they talk to him, citing some silly study that no one really believed in that coma patients could hear everything that was going on around them. So, Abby always arrived with one of Connor's ridiculous comic books or movie tie-in novels, sometimes with Connor's laptop, reading him updates on conspiracy and sci-fi blogs that he loved.
Cutter, with a rather disturbed look on his face in the face of Abby's insistence, had taken to reading to Connor from paleontological journals and critiquing all of Connor's old papers. Lecturing the young man on what he was going to insist on for Connor's viva. Apparently Cutter had decided that Connor needed a bludgeon to make people respect him. After all, Stephen was Cutter's official assistant with a long CV of experience, Abby could declare herself a professional in the field of animal behavioural study and Cutter was a professor. Connor had nothing of that sort. He was a drop-out from a PhD program and had nothing to show that he was as brilliant and skilled in his way as the others. It would mean Connor could turn back a sneer by insisting people respect his title, at the very least.
Jenny's tack had been gossip. When she'd run out of gossip from the ARC, she'd moved on to celebrity gossip, and when that ran out she read him newspapers of every kind, even the silly supermarket ones about alien love children of Elvis.
Stephen hadn't completely let Abby bully him, usually picking up some random book, and making sure to read some of it aloud about when she was supposed to show up of a morning. But mostly he just sat there silently, wondering how he could have missed so much about who Connor really was.
It had been easy to dismiss him at first. Coltish and silly, blundering about and trying to pretend he knew more about what was going on than he clearly did. Stephen had been, quite frankly, relieved when Connor had been suckered in by his friends' prank and then booted off the team.
Waking up to discover that the idiot had somehow won his way back in while Stephen had been unconscious had taken him rather aback. Connor's constant state of being flustered by nearly everything had always made Stephen shake his head in disbelief. He'd taken a rather malicious pleasure in making Connor uncomfortable, and privately was rather amused at the way the kid could always be trusted to get chased by something, fall over or make an idiot of himself in some way.
Watching Connor survive a gauntlet he knew he never could have made it through sent uncomfortable tendrils of memory through Stephen.
"The creature we found was some kind of scutosaurus, late Permian era. That footprint? Definitely not the same animal. If we are talking late Permian, then this little charmer is the prime suspect. It’s a gorgonopsid. It’s a compact killing machine, and it’s got incredible power."
He'd known exactly where to look and what it was. No, he wasn't a physical sort of person, but knowing how tall something was, seeing the summary of what it ought to be capable of and Connor's guesses from comparative anatomy and a variety of studies gave Stephen an edge in knowing where to look and how in tracking. More, Cutter had told him in admiring tones that if it hadn't been for Connor's quite-thorough database of prehistory, they might never have found the arthropleura.
Still, perhaps Connor should have been what he'd called himself, logistics, and been on call from the safety of an office at first at the Home Office and then the ARC. Somewhere he could ply his computers in safety to the benefit of those in the field.
And what had Connor done when the mosasaur's anomaly had opened, the one that had brought Helen thoroughly back into his and Cutter's lives?
"The reservoir’s land locked, right? Well, I made this mark at water level earlier. The water level’s fallen 40 centimetres since then. This isn’t a reservoir any more, it’s a tidal lake. The water’s literally pouring out of it."
While everyone else wibbled about, taking water samples and staring at the reservoir as though it would somehow magically reveal what was going on, Connor had thought simply and pragmatically and got them proof the anomaly was still there and open. Abby had been all kinds of impressed at Connor driving off the marine reptile with nothing more than a paddle.
And he, Stephen had focussed on the fact that Connor hadn't been heroically diving with himself and Cutter, had focussed on the second half of Abby's story where Connor had taken the moment to grope her, and had let himself be amused at Connor's posturing over Allison. Posturing he now admitted deep in the privacy of his own mind, that may have been Connor protecting Abby's interests and chiding Stephen for leading the girl on. Which he may have deserved, if only for having pretended he didn't remember asking her out when he'd hallucinated she was Helen. Not to mention that Allison was just a friend he sometimes slept with when they were both wanting a quick shag, and the lie had been to save himself trouble, not to protect Abby or anything else.
He'd concentrated on Connor's idiocy in getting his friends involved and had put from his mind a young man who held such faith in his friends that he stepped in front of the guns and laser sights of half a dozen people to talk his friend down so that the sick young man could die with some dignity and not in a hail of bullets. And he'd done it too, with sensitivity and strength that Stephen had uncomfortably ignored because it conflicted too much with the picture he'd built up in his head of Connor, and ignoring the camaraderie that had been growing between them in spite of everything.
"Fluke."
"Jealous."
Connor's revenge as Stephen was left holding the creepy, sneaky, horrible thing with its flicking tongue and weird footless locomotion.
"I'm not touching it."
Which turned out to be complete fakery as Connor had finally rolled his eyes and snickered, handling the slithery thing with ease, informing Stephen he'd once had a pet constrictor, albeit one much smaller, when he was younger, and getting an appreciative smile out of Abby when he happily let it crawl all over him. He'd waltzed out of there, letting it poke its head out from time to time, while Stephen tried not to look like he was completely weirded out by snakes. Ryan had been particularly amused that the Mighty Hunter (how had they learned Connor's nickname for him?) couldn't handle the baby snake, but the geek could.
In fact, despite the fact that he was the most vulnerable of them, the one who had the least skills and the one who was most likely to be eaten some day, Connor just walked fearlessly in after them, again and again, and Stephen couldn't even make the excuse he was ignorant or overconfident. If anything, Connor had no self-confidence and knew better sometimes than Stephen even did what these things could do to him.
"You couldn't have just been some piss-poor excuse for a doctorate student?" he asked Connor softly. "Or just the impractical research assistant or . . . anything than someone so brilliant he can survive something even I don't think I could."
"Think a lot of yourself, don't you?" came the soft, half-strangled sounding reply from the bed.
His heart nearly stopped, and Stephen looked down to see Connor's dark eyes, looking black in the shadows of a room with the lights off for sleep, as though it had made a difference until now. His face was a pale slash, but for where there was a claw mark through one of his eyebrows. It had healed enough to be left alone, and Stephen wondered at the luck that had let Connor keep the eye. His dark hair and general pallor meant that Connor looked like a ghost, some sort of horrible spirit sent to get revenge on the living for something.
Stephen shook off the morbid fantasy and hit the button to page the nurse. "Well, you keep calling me Mighty Hunter, and you've got Lester's little army calling me that, too."
Connor smiled weakly and asked, "Is everyone okay? Abby? Rex?"
"Yes, Abby's illegal flatmate is fine," Stephen said, amused that Connor thought of Rex as part of 'everyone'. He took a deep breath, wanting to say to Connor that he was sorry, that he wouldn't treat him like a halfwit country bumpkin anymore, that he respected the other man and that he'd promise to stop calling Connor a kid, even in his own head.
"Lester must be really grateful for the NHS right now," Connor said. "Imagine if this was America. He'd be paying through the nose for all this."
It was such a departure from anything Stephen could have expected, he burst into laughter. It was a tad hysterical, but he was just so relieved that none of the doctor's dread predictions of Connor losing all cognitive ability had been right and he seemed to be functioning fine mentally. "I'm sure," he said.
"It's not that funny," Connor had said with a small smile.
Stephen had settled by then and replied, "Well, it's a little unlike you to comment on that."
"Tom was in political science and his focus was on international politics," Connor said. "We may have decided we were better off friends, but you don't date a bloke that long without picking up a few things."
As the nurses came in, shoving Stephen aside to do their jobs, the lab assistant and tracker found himself undergoing another paradigm shift regarding Connor Temple.
****************************
Any revelations about Connor and Tom and who he had or had not dated had to be put aside, though, because it turned out the doctor's fears about Connor were real. There was something wrong with him. It became clear to Stephen, because while Connor seemed to pass all the doctor's tests with flying colours, he wasn't being Connor about it.
The jokes and pop culture references that had tended to pepper any conversation he had were missing. And it wasn't like Connor was just trying not to go off-topic or something of the like. No, it was as though he wasn't even thinking of them. Stephen tossed a few one-liners Connor's way, things about Doctor Who and Star Wars that would normally have got him a lecture of amazing complexity for some third-rate excuse for drama that shouldn't be able to have that many facts and figures attached to it. Instead Connor took them at face value with nary a wince.
When the doctor started talking about Connor's condition, descending into medical jargon, Stephen truly knew things were wrong, because of the four of them, Connor had always been the only one who could follow it all without a wince. Normally a doctor could get as esoteric as he or she wished with Connor, because Connor understood.
But he didn't. Not now.
Stephen felt a lump in his throat as Connor turned panicked eyes to him, now aware that something was wrong. "What's wrong with me?" he demanded abruptly. "I can't . . . why can't I understand?"
The doctor didn't look phased, and Stephen briefly considered punching the man. "I apologise," he said. "I sometimes forget myself, in layman's terms-"
Stephen cut him off. "What Connor means is that he's never had to have anything put in layman's terms for him before. He's smarter than everyone in this hospital combined, which is why he's working for the Home Office with the kind of security clearance you can only dream about." Stephen snapped it out, hoping he could at least reassure Connor that he understood the fear that was making Connor pale and his eyes blank. "You said before there might have been damage to his brain from the blood loss. Is there an MRI or something you can do to check?"
The doctor looked doubtful and began wittering on about averages. "I don't care about average capabilities, doctor," Stephen sneered at the man. "I care about the fact that Connor's normal cognitive abilities are so impressive, that average for him is like brain-damaged halfwit to the rest of us. And if you can't get tests done on him to see what's gone wrong and if anything can fix it, you'd damn well better find someone who can."
Connor looked close to tears and shakily said, "Maybe we should just listen to the doctor, Stephen. I didn't get that bit about statistics of recovery-"
Something smug in the doctor's face made Connor stop. His eyes narrowed in clear concentration, then suddenly widened. "Call Lester," he demanded. "I want a competent neuro - brain specialist."
Stephen was on the phone a moment later, leaving messages with the team and Lester and asking Jenny to come down quickly. More because he wanted her ability to cut someone down to nothing with a few choice words than anything else. He still felt sick. Connor not knowing the right word for something in a scientific area? He glared at the doctor who was still trying to convince them that merely average was completely fine and that Connor wasn't as brilliant as they thought he was.
On the verge of losing his temper, Stephen did something he hadn't done since he was in a bar in the US when he was twenty and stupid. He blatantly pulled out the pistol he now carried on him all the time in case of anomaly and ostentatiously started to check it over.
The doctor paled and fled the room. Stephen immediately put it away and sat down next to Connor. "Don't worry. Lester will find someone and we'll have you prancing mental circles around the rest of us in no time."
There was a watery smile on Connor's face as he said, "It took me a minute, but I remembered that look on the doctor's face. It was just like Professor Morrison that time when he'd arranged to drop my grade because I'd shown up him in class."
Humbert Morrison was an arse, in Stephen's opinion, and the notion that an undergraduate Connor had got the better of him was just one more amusing addition to the character that was Connor. Actually, now that he thought about it . . .
"He was in fine fettle a few years back about some titchy honours student who'd 'tried' to debunk his theory of mammalian evolutionary superiority," Stephen said. "That wouldn't happen to have been you?"
Connor snorted. "The man's practically a creationist the way he subscribes to Lamarckian theories of evolution. The concepts he'd been spouting off were entirely rebuttable." He launched into the story, but as it unfolded, Connor became more and more distressed. His logic was plain and irrefutable, the reasoning brilliant, the explanations cogent and his conclusions were perfection. It took Stephen a minute to understand why Connor was so upset. Normally all the logic Connor was following was so obvious to the younger man that he bypassed it entirely in his explanations because he honestly couldn't see how anyone didn't see it. He must have felt like his mind had been abruptly stunted by this slowdown.
"You should have forgotten all about the aliens and just handed that in to Cutter for your thesis. He would have supported you the whole way just to put one over on Morrison," Stephen told him.
"It's not as . . . it's not any good," Connor muttered. "It's like my brain's wrapped up in something and I can't think." He was on the verge of tears. "Normally I'm at the part where he went purple by now."
In spite of himself, Stephen snickered. "Sorry," he said when Connor gave him a hurt look. "Morrison, purple," he said by way of explanation. He got another smile, but it quickly crumpled. "Oh, Connor," he murmured, and settled onto the bed next to Connor, wrapping an arm around the trembling super-genius.
By the time Cutter, Abby and Jenny showed up, Connor had gone back to sleep, clinging to Stephen like a child to a favourite stuffed toy. Stephen managed to edge away, but only by leaving his jacket behind. Connor immediately curled into a ball around it.
Out in the hall, Stephen explained what was going on, and vented a bit of his anger at the condescending doctor in Jenny's direction. "Mostly I was just hoping you could get them to take a look at the damage," Stephen said. Then he sighed and sagged against the wall. "Not that they'll believe there's damage if they talk to Connor."
Cutter frowned. "What do you mean, Stephen?"
"I mean, Connor's . . . you know how normally he's just that much smarter than everyone else and the only reason he looks idiotic has to do with practicality rather than sheer intellect?" Stephen asked.
Abby nodded immediately. "It's the way he can build the ADD and still not work the security chain on the door in the flat."
"He can't?" asked Jenny gaping.
"Nope," Abby told her. "I've never explained it to him either. It's too funny watching him poke at it." She grinned. "When he couldn't, he turned the microwave into an alarm on the door instead."
Stephen shook his head. That was Connor all over. "Anyhow, if you were introduced to him now, he'd seem like a normal person and tremendously smart. But Connor's feeling the difference. He said it was like his brain was wrapped up in something."
"Oh, Connor," Abby said softly, and stared through the door at him.
Jenny nodded. "I'll get on it. If there's that much of a change, there must be something showing the damage." She turned smartly, her heels clacking purposefully down the hall. Abby was already curled up in the chair next to Connor, so Stephen took the moment to pull Cutter aside. "You know the thesis you want Connor to do?"
"Yes?" Cutter asked, his eyes wandering back to the young man's room. "What about it?"
"Forget whatever you want him to do and ask him to tell you about the time he pissed off Morrison. It's just a bit brilliant."
Cutter perked up, because he hated Humbert Morrison about the same as he hated Leek and Celtic. Stephen usually wore green on match days because it made Nick sputter. He vaguely wondered if Connor had a team, and if so, who it was. Or if it was cricket or rugby or even something American or esoteric. Or if Connor had never watched sports at all. There was a lot about Connor Stephen hadn't bothered to find out, and he suddenly wanted to know, didn't want to be left wondering what he hadn't known.
"What's it about?"
"You know that thesis about mammalian evolutionary superiority that he made his career off of?" Stephen asked.
Cutter nodded, making a face. It was an unassailable bastion of wrongness that no one had been able to properly take apart.
"Connor destroyed it in class one day. The words 'Morrison turned purple' apparently come up in the story," Stephen said with a grin.
Cutter grinned and almost skipped with glee into the room to wait with Abby. The ability to destroy Morrison alone would make Connor into Cutter's favourite person for the next little while. Now that Connor wasn't in a coma anymore, Stephen just wanted to go home for a while to think in peace and quiet about things. Abby, Cutter and Jenny would watch out for Connor and make sure the doctors didn't take advantage of Connor's new average state, so Stephen slipped away to the silence of his flat.
Once he was there he found himself wandering aimlessly through, looking at the plain walls he normally didn't bother with because he was never home and the bed with the serviceable coverlet that he'd never bothered to change because everything else he owned was so white it didn't clash.
And here and there were the small reminders of Helen. A lump of bandages in the bin, a bit of fossilised dung from before she'd vanished, her preferred brand of beer in his fridge, the fucking pillowcase and bed that still smelled like her.
Connor had nearly died because of her fucking games with Leek and Cutter and him and . . . what the hell had he been thinking?
He started scooping up the reminders, dropping them with distaste into the metal rubbish bin, then lighting and tossing in one more, a lighter she'd given him as a gift before that expedition to Australia. The smoke filled the room in no time, setting off the smoke alarm and he couldn't bring himself to care, just reached up and yanked the thing open and the battery out.
But the bed still stank of Helen, and he couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand what his stupidity had nearly caused, had caused, because Connor's mind wasn't the only thing damaged, there were broken bones that needed healing, gashes and cuts and contusions and burns on Connor's hands from where he'd ignored the sparks and fire to get the barrier up.
Somehow he got everything, from the mattress to the blankets and sheets and pillows and quilt. Fled until he was somewhere that masqueraded as isolated and stared at what was tantamount to all the bedding he owned. He'd already got rid of the lighter, but he'd set fires with less, and there was still petrol in the car tank. He siphoned some out, just to speed things up, and a few minutes later had the whole of it ablaze in the middle of a concrete warehouse.
He turned his back on it and walked away, just like he'd walked away from the scorpion and from Lester's office back when this all had begun and Lester had been so insistent it was a one-time thing. This time, he felt good, somehow. Lighter.
At least until he got home and realised he had nowhere to sleep now.
A small voice in his head suggested that since Connor had clearly been interested in men in the past and Stephen was quite attractive if bunches of people did say so themselves, maybe Connor would be willing to share his hospital bed.
He shook the mad little thought away and went to sleep on the couch. Clearly he was getting a little punch drunk.
***********************
Stephen woke up to a splash of cold water to his face and a sharp voice telling him, "You are an idiot!"
He was off the couch and in a defensive crouch on the floor, reaching for anything he could use as a weapon before he was fully awake. Then he realised that Jenny was standing in his flat, glaring at him, beyond furious, while Cutter stood behind her, some combination of angry and amused himself. "What the hell were you thinking?" she demanded.
"What?" Stephen shook his head, sending a spray of droplets everywhere as he tried to fully wake up and understand what was going on. "How did you get in-"
"You gave me a spare key, remember?" Cutter inquired from behind her. "Although I think she was about willing to borrow a few of the SAS to knock your door down after she found out." His amusement turned into complete disapproval as he added, "I don't really blame her, either. That was incredibly stupid."
Stephen thought back to all the fires he set the day before and winced. "Okay, so maybe the fire in the warehouse was a bad idea-"
"Fire in the warehouse!" Jenny shrieked. "What the hell were you doing setting fire to warehouses? In fact, what happened in here? It's bad enough you were threatening the doctor with a gun-"
"Oh." Stephen said as he realised what they were talking about. "I didn't threaten anyone," he argued hastily.
She had stopped listening and was on her mobile. "James, I think we may need to do more than just deal with the issue of the hospital and dangerous weapon charges. Stephen just said something about setting fire to a warehouse yesterday." She eyed him. "I'm not totally certain he didn't try to burn down his flat either. There's a lot of smoke damage in here."
"I didn't set fire to a warehouse," Stephen said. "I just . . . burned some things in one."
Cutter was sifting through the things in the rubbish bin, coming up with the fossil dung. "This wasn't going to burn," he commented idly. "Rocks don't tend to do that well." He continued to sift through the ashes and remnants with the same concentrated focus he'd brought to every dig Stephen had seen him on. "I guess Helen's been picking your locks a lot, lately." He held up a cracked beer bottle, broken from the heat.
One of the soldiers, Stephen couldn't bring his name to mind at the moment, came wandering out of the bedroom then. "You know, beds are a lot more comfortable with a mattress."
He buried his head in his hands. This was a little too humiliating.
"So, that's what happened to that," Cutter was saying as he glared disapprovingly at the copy of Robert Bakker's first book Stephen had tossed in as well. "That was my favourite work of fiction. I wondered where it had gone. Helen gave it to you?"
It had survived the fire after the beer bottles had broken, soaking everything in there with beer. "Fiction?" he asked inanely. Bakker was a paleontologist and the book was just one of many on the topic of dinosaurian evolution.
"Well, the science in these has never been remotely solid," Cutter pointed out.
Jenny was finished and back on a roll. "So, what precisely were you thinking, pulling a gun, in a hospital no less. right next to Connor?"
He felt as if he was being scolded by his old primary teacher, Miss Pratt the Bat they'd all called her. "I was thinking that that . . ." well, now he couldn't call anyone a prat, that might just make him have hysterics, "Tosser needed to get out before he upset Connor any more than he was."
"Stephen, Lester arranged for you to be able to carry that at all times because of the anomalies, not so that you could use it to threaten people."
"I didn't threaten him," he muttered mutinously. She was turning more Bat-like every second. "I just took it out and checked the clip."
Her sigh spoke volumes on the idiocy that was him, how exhausted she was going to be cleaning up after his mess, how annoyed she was that he'd made her life more difficult with a soupcon of resignation to having to put up with it. "You are quite lucky that he's generally disliked around the hospital, and that when security looked in they decided to leave the 'nice gay couple' alone."
Stephen blinked.
It wasn't that he'd never experimented, but it was Connor. Connor the-
He cut off the usual derision in his thoughts. It was a bad habit he had to break himself of, especially after what Connor had just been through.
. . . maybe Connor would be willing to share his hospital bed.
He shook his head to clear it. "Not funny," he said, playing for time. Nick shot him a sharp look, and Stephen chose to ignore him. Better not to give the man any more ammunition.
"Oh, I'm not joking," she said, clearly enjoying the process of making him horribly uncomfortable. "In any event, Lester's sent people down to wave clearances about, and now they all think Connor's some sort of secret government scientist and you're his bodyguard."
The SFs were going to be taking the piss about this for the rest of eternity.
Jenny was meanwhile laying down the law, effectively telling him that he'd better behave himself, and more than that, he was off of any anomaly work, barring an emergency, until Connor was out of the hospital to maintain his cover of being a bodyguard. Then she ordered him to shower, since he smelled like his flat, and that smelled like beer and soot and ashes and some things best not considered.
Discovering that Helen had managed to leave sanitary towels in his bathroom nearly made him scream, since he hadn't known about those at all, and after his shower he grabbed a bag with crosswords and books and magazines and some other entertaining odds and ends, and threw the towels into the bin as he passed, and nearly added a lit match to it. But he knew he was already on thin ice, and if he went too far he might get himself banned from Connor's room. All it took was remembering the terrified look on Connor's face as the doctor tried to bully him to stiffen Stephen's resolve not to let his anger at himself interfere with getting Connor back to normal.
He avoided Cutter like the devil and made it to the hospital in time to be met by Abby. "You pulled a gun on a doctor? What were you thinking?"
"I didn't pull a gun on that idiot. I took it out of the holster, checked the clip, and then he ran away," he protested.
Connor looked rather perky as he said, "It was cool, Abbs. Like an episode of Supernatural."
Abby just shook her head. "I didn't think much of your tv before, Connor, but now that you're taking advantage of a head injury to watch Corrie, I just . . . I'm just going to go before you drag me down."
Connor made a face at her retreating back, then turned to Stephen. "It was kind of stupid of you to do that."
"Jenny's already gone after me about it," Stephen said. "Anything from anyone else will just be weak." He sat in the chair by the bed. "Did she tell you-"
"That you're my bodyguard because I'm so important that some terrorists tried to torture me into revealing state secrets," Connor finished, yeah. "I was joking when I suggested it."
Stephen shook his head in disbelief. "Well, I suppose as long as you don't start singing, I'll cope."
"Huh?" Connor frowned, clearly looking for the reference.
"The Bodyguard? Whitney Houston?" Stephen prompted.
Connor looked revolted. "Oh, that was awful. That song didn't go away until secondary. Fran Thompkins chased the boys she liked all around the schoolyard singing that. God that was horrible."
Stephen asked curiously, "She chase you any?"
Connor's laugh was a little bitter. "No. I was the weird kid who liked dinosaurs long after they stopped being cool. The one on school trips to the museum who'd correct the tour guide's pronounciation."
"Still, must be nice to have known all along what you wanted," Stephen said. "I didn't figure anything out until I was in the summer after my second year at university. I had to make up a science credit and there was a paleontological expedition involved in the course. Getting to be outside and away from classrooms for it decided me as far as taking the course went." He smiled a little, remembering. "Watching Cutter point out where the bones were and how it was all put together got me interested. I changed my area of focus and did whatever I could to be qualified to go into the field."
"How'd you get from university to being the Mighty Hunter?" Connor asked, a bit of mischief in his voice.
"Being pretty stupid. I spent a gap year in America learning to hunt somewhere there was still wilderness. It's where I learned how to use a machine gun."
Connor's mouth opened for a moment, then closed. He looked defeated again all of a sudden. "I should have something to say to that," he said sadly. "But . . . it's not there." He swallowed, his eyes losing their focus a moment. "I'm happy I'm not dead, really I am. But I can't . . . I feel so stupid!"
"Don't say that," Stephen snapped. Connor's turn to despair had him frightened. There was just something in the way Connor looked, so bereft, that made something in his chest clench. "You are not stupid. You've merely been downgraded from genius to extremely smart."
"It's not good enough," Connor told him. "It's not enough. I can't work on anything for Cutter or that ARC like this, and I don't just mean my hands." He gestured with the heavily bandaged appendages. "If I tried to build the ADD now it would take me months. We don't have that kind of time. I need to finish those calculations for Cutter, and I can't even follow my own maths." He gestured at the laptop on the table next to him.
Stephen didn't even pause to think as he pulled Connor into his arms, holding the younger man as he broke down.
On to Part 2
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Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Really owning nothing anyone recognises, especially the direct quotes and characters. I super-don't own those.
Summary: When Connor takes Stephen's place in the Menagerie, a lot of things change. AU
Series: Well, obviously the end of S2 and moving into S3.
Rating: PG-13 right now, subject to change because I'm really making this up on the fly.
Pairing: Stephen/Connor eventually.
A/N: Again, feel free to brit-pick in the comments, it's three in the morning here, so goodness knows I may have used some things that I ought to know better about. This is not going to be a total series rewrite, just . . . working my way up to the 'shippiness. Thing is, this is long enough and it's late enough that I'm just splitting the thing into however many pieces I wind up getting when I'm done. I don't know. I just know I've seen very few of these (let's keep Stephen from dying there in the first place), and while it's slightly inspired by, "Game Changing: Saving Stephen" this is something different. Also, how is Connor there and knowing what's going on? It's way too late (or early) for me to think of it. Maybe later.
Now corrected for a few minor pieces of Brit-pickery noted by lukadreaming.
********************************************
It all starts when he reaches out and clocks Nick to take his place inside Leek's Menagerie of Doom so the animals don't get out and kill everyone. Because the delay of doing so allows Connor to blow right past him and into the room, slamming the door behind himself.
Connor's just locked himself in with a gorgonopsid, a venomous millipede, a pair of raptors, a sabre toothed tiger, one of those predators from the future they didn't have a name for yet and one of the things that had kidnapped Abby. There was probably something else in there, but by then Stephen's brain was stuttering as he realised there was no way Connor was going to survive. He and Nick pounded on the door, desperately trying to convince the kid to get out, not to throw his life away, Nick trying everything from flattery to guilting Connor into coming out. "Who's going to handle fixing the damage to the ADD if you're dead, Connor!"
"Hey, I'm not the important one," he says with unconcealed terror as the whites of his eyes belie the casual words. "Besides, no one at the ARC even likes me that much, so it's not like you'll miss me and Abby'll be happy to get her flat back."
Stephen rather doubts Abby will want it back with the knowledge that it came from Connor committing suicide, but he just bangs on the door again, shouting, "Dammit Connor, get out of there!"
He ignores them both now and feints at the gorgonopsid. Stephen vaguely wonders if this is a plan, or if Connor's just trying to speed up the inevitable. He can't blame him for wanting to make it go faster, rather than seeing his death approach slowly. Somehow, though, it tempts the creature into lunging, and Connor, with one of his bursts of sudden physical talent that only seem to be brought on by near-death situations, dives out of the way, and the snarling lizard crashes into the smilodon.
Chaos seems to spread outward from that moment, and somehow Connor slips and slides and dashes and makes it to a sparking panel on the wall without dying. his hands, steady and skilled rip into the wires, disconnecting and reconnecting, twisting and tugging, working to some plan all his own.
He doesn't see the predator leap from the wall on top of him, his scream tearing through Stephen and Nick like a hot knife through butter, only far more destructive. Maybe a buzzsaw through flesh.
Neither can tear themselves away, and watch as the scent of Connor's blood seems to incense the other creatures. They lunge, and one of the raptors pulls the predator off Connor, prompting another scream as the move rips open further the vicious wounds left by the mutant bat that had been taking its time in killing him.
Somehow, though, Connor pulls himself back up, and shaking, he begins at the panel again as the predators in the room tear at each other, caught up in battles between themselves. They all want the prey animal against the wall by the sparking panel, but they have to take out the others first. Connor's losing a lot of blood, but the waistcoat and then his shirt both go, one after the other, used to temporarily blind attacking animals, covering them in the copiously spilling blood and making them into distractions for the others.
He's holding his own as he works the wiring.
Stephen watches and thinks he'd never have managed, but recognises Abby in the way Connor's managing to predict behaviours. Nick had said the kid was brilliant, but it's like he's pulling together every piece of animal information he's ever seen or come across to keep himself in one piece.
Suddenly his legs give out and he slides to the floor, the blood that's all over now preventing him from getting any sort of purchase. Nick mutters something about Claudia and pteradons, but Stephen can't think of Cutter's vanished possibly imaginary girlfriend right now. He pounds at the door again. "Connor!" Not now. Not when he's so close to surviving them all. Just a little longer and help might come. "Connor! Get up!"
Connor's eyes look dull and empty as his gaze slowly moves to the door where Stephen is banging desperately and shouting at him to not give up. The smilodon is dead, beaten by the gorgonopsid. It had been no match for the raptors, taking one out, but losing when the predator had briefly tag-teamed with the remaining one. The walrus thing had been bitten by the millipede, but it's death throes had distracted the other predator and had allowed the millipede to get the jump on it.
There were only two left, and maybe, just maybe, Connor could hold out. If Lester and the soldiers got there in time . . . if Connor didn't give up . . . if the last two animals chose to fight each other first . . .
"Connor! Don't you dare die now!"
Something sparked in Connor, Stephen didn't know, didn't even care if it had been him or just the desire to survive. What mattered was that Connor struggled and slowly got himself to his feet. Reached into the panel and did something. Just as the last to creatures lunged toward him, apparently planning to kill him before they finished each other off, a small explosion seemed to detonate from the panel, and Connor was flung back a few feet, hitting the concrete floor hard and leaving a streak of blood behind as he skidded.
And an electric fence came online, separating Connor safely behind it from the two monsters, who turned on each other in frustration over their prey being denied to them.
"Yes! Brilliant!" Stephen found himself laughing as the electricity now kept Connor safe, kept him from being hurt more. He and Nick exchanged joyful grins that the nerdy tech had pulled a miracle out of his silly fedora.
But Connor isn't moving and there's so much blood.
Lester's soldiers show up, and Stephen can barely bring himself to back away from his vigil at the tiny window in the door. He'd planned to go in there. He'd been expecting to die, to save Nick and everyone else, to expiate his sins for believing Helen when he should have trusted Nick . . . Cutter. He didn't even have the right to call the man by his first name anymore, did he?
He would have died, he liked to think he'd have died well, but Connor's technical genius had got the boy . . . no, man, Connor was no boy for what he had managed that day. Connor's brilliance may have saved him, but there was no way of knowing now. Precious minutes were being lost, trickling away like the blood coming from the gaping injuries all over Connor's mauled body while they tried to get into the room. Then as they had to fight the monsters to a standstill before it was safe to even think about getting Connor out of the cage that had saved him and was now keeping him from the medical attention he needed.
The medics were right there, vibrating, calibrating instruments and prepping for whatever Connor might need if he was still alive. Abby was crouched by the humming electrical fence, cursing Connor out and telling him that if he didn't come through this okay she was going to do terrible things to his Xbox and burn his collection of Doctor Who merchandise. Her eyes were fixed on him, and Stephen knelt beside her, unable to find anything to say to the young man who he'd shown so much contempt for so many times.
Both of them stared unwaveringly at the only thing keeping them sane. The nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. The movement was so slight, sometimes Stephen wondered if they were both imagining it, pretending that the already dead fourth member of their team was still alive, already in the first denial of the loss of a friend and teammate.
It took an eternity for the electricity to go down, and with a visible shudder, he and Abby both saw Connor take one shuddering breath, relax, and stop moving entirely. "No!"
The barrier went down, but they couldn't run to his side. The medics pushed them away, more electicity now being brought to bear as they desperately shocked his stopped heart.
Nick, who had often tended to bury himself in talking and working and doing during crises like this had been practically flinging himself up and down the room and the corridors, making a nuisance of himself and trying to find solutions. He now finally joined them, saying in a shaky voice, "You'd have been proud of him, Abby. I think what got him through was what he learned from you."
"Don't talk like he's dead," Abby snapped.
"Clear!" shouted the medic again, and Connor's body arched on the trolley.
"I didn't mean . . ." Cutter trailed off helplessly as the paddles shocked his former student again and again.
Suddenly a voice shouted, "I've got a rhythm! Let's get him to the hospital!"
Stephen felt the strength leave his legs suddenly and he knew without looking that Cutter was staggering to the wall next to him, while Abby had just sunk to the floor, clutching Rex and sobbing with relief. On some level he knew Connor might not be out of the woods yet, but for now it was enough to let the joy buoy them through the moment.
*****************************
Lester had arranged something with the hospital to allow them in to see Connor at all hours of the day and night. When they had all exhausted themselves repeatedly, staying up all hours by Connor's comatose side, Jenny had finally stepped in, organising them into shifts, and putting herself on one as well, just to keep the length down and so that someone would be there from the team when Connor woke up.
Eight in the morning to two, Abby was there, two to eight in the evening was Jenny's shift, Cutter took up the eight at night to two in the morning, and Stephen got the last shift. It was wreaking merry hell with his internal clock, but Jenny was right that it meant they all got some sleep, always had someone up to handle an anomaly and always had someone there with Connor.
Abby had insisted that they talk to him, citing some silly study that no one really believed in that coma patients could hear everything that was going on around them. So, Abby always arrived with one of Connor's ridiculous comic books or movie tie-in novels, sometimes with Connor's laptop, reading him updates on conspiracy and sci-fi blogs that he loved.
Cutter, with a rather disturbed look on his face in the face of Abby's insistence, had taken to reading to Connor from paleontological journals and critiquing all of Connor's old papers. Lecturing the young man on what he was going to insist on for Connor's viva. Apparently Cutter had decided that Connor needed a bludgeon to make people respect him. After all, Stephen was Cutter's official assistant with a long CV of experience, Abby could declare herself a professional in the field of animal behavioural study and Cutter was a professor. Connor had nothing of that sort. He was a drop-out from a PhD program and had nothing to show that he was as brilliant and skilled in his way as the others. It would mean Connor could turn back a sneer by insisting people respect his title, at the very least.
Jenny's tack had been gossip. When she'd run out of gossip from the ARC, she'd moved on to celebrity gossip, and when that ran out she read him newspapers of every kind, even the silly supermarket ones about alien love children of Elvis.
Stephen hadn't completely let Abby bully him, usually picking up some random book, and making sure to read some of it aloud about when she was supposed to show up of a morning. But mostly he just sat there silently, wondering how he could have missed so much about who Connor really was.
It had been easy to dismiss him at first. Coltish and silly, blundering about and trying to pretend he knew more about what was going on than he clearly did. Stephen had been, quite frankly, relieved when Connor had been suckered in by his friends' prank and then booted off the team.
Waking up to discover that the idiot had somehow won his way back in while Stephen had been unconscious had taken him rather aback. Connor's constant state of being flustered by nearly everything had always made Stephen shake his head in disbelief. He'd taken a rather malicious pleasure in making Connor uncomfortable, and privately was rather amused at the way the kid could always be trusted to get chased by something, fall over or make an idiot of himself in some way.
Watching Connor survive a gauntlet he knew he never could have made it through sent uncomfortable tendrils of memory through Stephen.
"The creature we found was some kind of scutosaurus, late Permian era. That footprint? Definitely not the same animal. If we are talking late Permian, then this little charmer is the prime suspect. It’s a gorgonopsid. It’s a compact killing machine, and it’s got incredible power."
He'd known exactly where to look and what it was. No, he wasn't a physical sort of person, but knowing how tall something was, seeing the summary of what it ought to be capable of and Connor's guesses from comparative anatomy and a variety of studies gave Stephen an edge in knowing where to look and how in tracking. More, Cutter had told him in admiring tones that if it hadn't been for Connor's quite-thorough database of prehistory, they might never have found the arthropleura.
Still, perhaps Connor should have been what he'd called himself, logistics, and been on call from the safety of an office at first at the Home Office and then the ARC. Somewhere he could ply his computers in safety to the benefit of those in the field.
And what had Connor done when the mosasaur's anomaly had opened, the one that had brought Helen thoroughly back into his and Cutter's lives?
"The reservoir’s land locked, right? Well, I made this mark at water level earlier. The water level’s fallen 40 centimetres since then. This isn’t a reservoir any more, it’s a tidal lake. The water’s literally pouring out of it."
While everyone else wibbled about, taking water samples and staring at the reservoir as though it would somehow magically reveal what was going on, Connor had thought simply and pragmatically and got them proof the anomaly was still there and open. Abby had been all kinds of impressed at Connor driving off the marine reptile with nothing more than a paddle.
And he, Stephen had focussed on the fact that Connor hadn't been heroically diving with himself and Cutter, had focussed on the second half of Abby's story where Connor had taken the moment to grope her, and had let himself be amused at Connor's posturing over Allison. Posturing he now admitted deep in the privacy of his own mind, that may have been Connor protecting Abby's interests and chiding Stephen for leading the girl on. Which he may have deserved, if only for having pretended he didn't remember asking her out when he'd hallucinated she was Helen. Not to mention that Allison was just a friend he sometimes slept with when they were both wanting a quick shag, and the lie had been to save himself trouble, not to protect Abby or anything else.
He'd concentrated on Connor's idiocy in getting his friends involved and had put from his mind a young man who held such faith in his friends that he stepped in front of the guns and laser sights of half a dozen people to talk his friend down so that the sick young man could die with some dignity and not in a hail of bullets. And he'd done it too, with sensitivity and strength that Stephen had uncomfortably ignored because it conflicted too much with the picture he'd built up in his head of Connor, and ignoring the camaraderie that had been growing between them in spite of everything.
"Fluke."
"Jealous."
Connor's revenge as Stephen was left holding the creepy, sneaky, horrible thing with its flicking tongue and weird footless locomotion.
"I'm not touching it."
Which turned out to be complete fakery as Connor had finally rolled his eyes and snickered, handling the slithery thing with ease, informing Stephen he'd once had a pet constrictor, albeit one much smaller, when he was younger, and getting an appreciative smile out of Abby when he happily let it crawl all over him. He'd waltzed out of there, letting it poke its head out from time to time, while Stephen tried not to look like he was completely weirded out by snakes. Ryan had been particularly amused that the Mighty Hunter (how had they learned Connor's nickname for him?) couldn't handle the baby snake, but the geek could.
In fact, despite the fact that he was the most vulnerable of them, the one who had the least skills and the one who was most likely to be eaten some day, Connor just walked fearlessly in after them, again and again, and Stephen couldn't even make the excuse he was ignorant or overconfident. If anything, Connor had no self-confidence and knew better sometimes than Stephen even did what these things could do to him.
"You couldn't have just been some piss-poor excuse for a doctorate student?" he asked Connor softly. "Or just the impractical research assistant or . . . anything than someone so brilliant he can survive something even I don't think I could."
"Think a lot of yourself, don't you?" came the soft, half-strangled sounding reply from the bed.
His heart nearly stopped, and Stephen looked down to see Connor's dark eyes, looking black in the shadows of a room with the lights off for sleep, as though it had made a difference until now. His face was a pale slash, but for where there was a claw mark through one of his eyebrows. It had healed enough to be left alone, and Stephen wondered at the luck that had let Connor keep the eye. His dark hair and general pallor meant that Connor looked like a ghost, some sort of horrible spirit sent to get revenge on the living for something.
Stephen shook off the morbid fantasy and hit the button to page the nurse. "Well, you keep calling me Mighty Hunter, and you've got Lester's little army calling me that, too."
Connor smiled weakly and asked, "Is everyone okay? Abby? Rex?"
"Yes, Abby's illegal flatmate is fine," Stephen said, amused that Connor thought of Rex as part of 'everyone'. He took a deep breath, wanting to say to Connor that he was sorry, that he wouldn't treat him like a halfwit country bumpkin anymore, that he respected the other man and that he'd promise to stop calling Connor a kid, even in his own head.
"Lester must be really grateful for the NHS right now," Connor said. "Imagine if this was America. He'd be paying through the nose for all this."
It was such a departure from anything Stephen could have expected, he burst into laughter. It was a tad hysterical, but he was just so relieved that none of the doctor's dread predictions of Connor losing all cognitive ability had been right and he seemed to be functioning fine mentally. "I'm sure," he said.
"It's not that funny," Connor had said with a small smile.
Stephen had settled by then and replied, "Well, it's a little unlike you to comment on that."
"Tom was in political science and his focus was on international politics," Connor said. "We may have decided we were better off friends, but you don't date a bloke that long without picking up a few things."
As the nurses came in, shoving Stephen aside to do their jobs, the lab assistant and tracker found himself undergoing another paradigm shift regarding Connor Temple.
****************************
Any revelations about Connor and Tom and who he had or had not dated had to be put aside, though, because it turned out the doctor's fears about Connor were real. There was something wrong with him. It became clear to Stephen, because while Connor seemed to pass all the doctor's tests with flying colours, he wasn't being Connor about it.
The jokes and pop culture references that had tended to pepper any conversation he had were missing. And it wasn't like Connor was just trying not to go off-topic or something of the like. No, it was as though he wasn't even thinking of them. Stephen tossed a few one-liners Connor's way, things about Doctor Who and Star Wars that would normally have got him a lecture of amazing complexity for some third-rate excuse for drama that shouldn't be able to have that many facts and figures attached to it. Instead Connor took them at face value with nary a wince.
When the doctor started talking about Connor's condition, descending into medical jargon, Stephen truly knew things were wrong, because of the four of them, Connor had always been the only one who could follow it all without a wince. Normally a doctor could get as esoteric as he or she wished with Connor, because Connor understood.
But he didn't. Not now.
Stephen felt a lump in his throat as Connor turned panicked eyes to him, now aware that something was wrong. "What's wrong with me?" he demanded abruptly. "I can't . . . why can't I understand?"
The doctor didn't look phased, and Stephen briefly considered punching the man. "I apologise," he said. "I sometimes forget myself, in layman's terms-"
Stephen cut him off. "What Connor means is that he's never had to have anything put in layman's terms for him before. He's smarter than everyone in this hospital combined, which is why he's working for the Home Office with the kind of security clearance you can only dream about." Stephen snapped it out, hoping he could at least reassure Connor that he understood the fear that was making Connor pale and his eyes blank. "You said before there might have been damage to his brain from the blood loss. Is there an MRI or something you can do to check?"
The doctor looked doubtful and began wittering on about averages. "I don't care about average capabilities, doctor," Stephen sneered at the man. "I care about the fact that Connor's normal cognitive abilities are so impressive, that average for him is like brain-damaged halfwit to the rest of us. And if you can't get tests done on him to see what's gone wrong and if anything can fix it, you'd damn well better find someone who can."
Connor looked close to tears and shakily said, "Maybe we should just listen to the doctor, Stephen. I didn't get that bit about statistics of recovery-"
Something smug in the doctor's face made Connor stop. His eyes narrowed in clear concentration, then suddenly widened. "Call Lester," he demanded. "I want a competent neuro - brain specialist."
Stephen was on the phone a moment later, leaving messages with the team and Lester and asking Jenny to come down quickly. More because he wanted her ability to cut someone down to nothing with a few choice words than anything else. He still felt sick. Connor not knowing the right word for something in a scientific area? He glared at the doctor who was still trying to convince them that merely average was completely fine and that Connor wasn't as brilliant as they thought he was.
On the verge of losing his temper, Stephen did something he hadn't done since he was in a bar in the US when he was twenty and stupid. He blatantly pulled out the pistol he now carried on him all the time in case of anomaly and ostentatiously started to check it over.
The doctor paled and fled the room. Stephen immediately put it away and sat down next to Connor. "Don't worry. Lester will find someone and we'll have you prancing mental circles around the rest of us in no time."
There was a watery smile on Connor's face as he said, "It took me a minute, but I remembered that look on the doctor's face. It was just like Professor Morrison that time when he'd arranged to drop my grade because I'd shown up him in class."
Humbert Morrison was an arse, in Stephen's opinion, and the notion that an undergraduate Connor had got the better of him was just one more amusing addition to the character that was Connor. Actually, now that he thought about it . . .
"He was in fine fettle a few years back about some titchy honours student who'd 'tried' to debunk his theory of mammalian evolutionary superiority," Stephen said. "That wouldn't happen to have been you?"
Connor snorted. "The man's practically a creationist the way he subscribes to Lamarckian theories of evolution. The concepts he'd been spouting off were entirely rebuttable." He launched into the story, but as it unfolded, Connor became more and more distressed. His logic was plain and irrefutable, the reasoning brilliant, the explanations cogent and his conclusions were perfection. It took Stephen a minute to understand why Connor was so upset. Normally all the logic Connor was following was so obvious to the younger man that he bypassed it entirely in his explanations because he honestly couldn't see how anyone didn't see it. He must have felt like his mind had been abruptly stunted by this slowdown.
"You should have forgotten all about the aliens and just handed that in to Cutter for your thesis. He would have supported you the whole way just to put one over on Morrison," Stephen told him.
"It's not as . . . it's not any good," Connor muttered. "It's like my brain's wrapped up in something and I can't think." He was on the verge of tears. "Normally I'm at the part where he went purple by now."
In spite of himself, Stephen snickered. "Sorry," he said when Connor gave him a hurt look. "Morrison, purple," he said by way of explanation. He got another smile, but it quickly crumpled. "Oh, Connor," he murmured, and settled onto the bed next to Connor, wrapping an arm around the trembling super-genius.
By the time Cutter, Abby and Jenny showed up, Connor had gone back to sleep, clinging to Stephen like a child to a favourite stuffed toy. Stephen managed to edge away, but only by leaving his jacket behind. Connor immediately curled into a ball around it.
Out in the hall, Stephen explained what was going on, and vented a bit of his anger at the condescending doctor in Jenny's direction. "Mostly I was just hoping you could get them to take a look at the damage," Stephen said. Then he sighed and sagged against the wall. "Not that they'll believe there's damage if they talk to Connor."
Cutter frowned. "What do you mean, Stephen?"
"I mean, Connor's . . . you know how normally he's just that much smarter than everyone else and the only reason he looks idiotic has to do with practicality rather than sheer intellect?" Stephen asked.
Abby nodded immediately. "It's the way he can build the ADD and still not work the security chain on the door in the flat."
"He can't?" asked Jenny gaping.
"Nope," Abby told her. "I've never explained it to him either. It's too funny watching him poke at it." She grinned. "When he couldn't, he turned the microwave into an alarm on the door instead."
Stephen shook his head. That was Connor all over. "Anyhow, if you were introduced to him now, he'd seem like a normal person and tremendously smart. But Connor's feeling the difference. He said it was like his brain was wrapped up in something."
"Oh, Connor," Abby said softly, and stared through the door at him.
Jenny nodded. "I'll get on it. If there's that much of a change, there must be something showing the damage." She turned smartly, her heels clacking purposefully down the hall. Abby was already curled up in the chair next to Connor, so Stephen took the moment to pull Cutter aside. "You know the thesis you want Connor to do?"
"Yes?" Cutter asked, his eyes wandering back to the young man's room. "What about it?"
"Forget whatever you want him to do and ask him to tell you about the time he pissed off Morrison. It's just a bit brilliant."
Cutter perked up, because he hated Humbert Morrison about the same as he hated Leek and Celtic. Stephen usually wore green on match days because it made Nick sputter. He vaguely wondered if Connor had a team, and if so, who it was. Or if it was cricket or rugby or even something American or esoteric. Or if Connor had never watched sports at all. There was a lot about Connor Stephen hadn't bothered to find out, and he suddenly wanted to know, didn't want to be left wondering what he hadn't known.
"What's it about?"
"You know that thesis about mammalian evolutionary superiority that he made his career off of?" Stephen asked.
Cutter nodded, making a face. It was an unassailable bastion of wrongness that no one had been able to properly take apart.
"Connor destroyed it in class one day. The words 'Morrison turned purple' apparently come up in the story," Stephen said with a grin.
Cutter grinned and almost skipped with glee into the room to wait with Abby. The ability to destroy Morrison alone would make Connor into Cutter's favourite person for the next little while. Now that Connor wasn't in a coma anymore, Stephen just wanted to go home for a while to think in peace and quiet about things. Abby, Cutter and Jenny would watch out for Connor and make sure the doctors didn't take advantage of Connor's new average state, so Stephen slipped away to the silence of his flat.
Once he was there he found himself wandering aimlessly through, looking at the plain walls he normally didn't bother with because he was never home and the bed with the serviceable coverlet that he'd never bothered to change because everything else he owned was so white it didn't clash.
And here and there were the small reminders of Helen. A lump of bandages in the bin, a bit of fossilised dung from before she'd vanished, her preferred brand of beer in his fridge, the fucking pillowcase and bed that still smelled like her.
Connor had nearly died because of her fucking games with Leek and Cutter and him and . . . what the hell had he been thinking?
He started scooping up the reminders, dropping them with distaste into the metal rubbish bin, then lighting and tossing in one more, a lighter she'd given him as a gift before that expedition to Australia. The smoke filled the room in no time, setting off the smoke alarm and he couldn't bring himself to care, just reached up and yanked the thing open and the battery out.
But the bed still stank of Helen, and he couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand what his stupidity had nearly caused, had caused, because Connor's mind wasn't the only thing damaged, there were broken bones that needed healing, gashes and cuts and contusions and burns on Connor's hands from where he'd ignored the sparks and fire to get the barrier up.
Somehow he got everything, from the mattress to the blankets and sheets and pillows and quilt. Fled until he was somewhere that masqueraded as isolated and stared at what was tantamount to all the bedding he owned. He'd already got rid of the lighter, but he'd set fires with less, and there was still petrol in the car tank. He siphoned some out, just to speed things up, and a few minutes later had the whole of it ablaze in the middle of a concrete warehouse.
He turned his back on it and walked away, just like he'd walked away from the scorpion and from Lester's office back when this all had begun and Lester had been so insistent it was a one-time thing. This time, he felt good, somehow. Lighter.
At least until he got home and realised he had nowhere to sleep now.
A small voice in his head suggested that since Connor had clearly been interested in men in the past and Stephen was quite attractive if bunches of people did say so themselves, maybe Connor would be willing to share his hospital bed.
He shook the mad little thought away and went to sleep on the couch. Clearly he was getting a little punch drunk.
***********************
Stephen woke up to a splash of cold water to his face and a sharp voice telling him, "You are an idiot!"
He was off the couch and in a defensive crouch on the floor, reaching for anything he could use as a weapon before he was fully awake. Then he realised that Jenny was standing in his flat, glaring at him, beyond furious, while Cutter stood behind her, some combination of angry and amused himself. "What the hell were you thinking?" she demanded.
"What?" Stephen shook his head, sending a spray of droplets everywhere as he tried to fully wake up and understand what was going on. "How did you get in-"
"You gave me a spare key, remember?" Cutter inquired from behind her. "Although I think she was about willing to borrow a few of the SAS to knock your door down after she found out." His amusement turned into complete disapproval as he added, "I don't really blame her, either. That was incredibly stupid."
Stephen thought back to all the fires he set the day before and winced. "Okay, so maybe the fire in the warehouse was a bad idea-"
"Fire in the warehouse!" Jenny shrieked. "What the hell were you doing setting fire to warehouses? In fact, what happened in here? It's bad enough you were threatening the doctor with a gun-"
"Oh." Stephen said as he realised what they were talking about. "I didn't threaten anyone," he argued hastily.
She had stopped listening and was on her mobile. "James, I think we may need to do more than just deal with the issue of the hospital and dangerous weapon charges. Stephen just said something about setting fire to a warehouse yesterday." She eyed him. "I'm not totally certain he didn't try to burn down his flat either. There's a lot of smoke damage in here."
"I didn't set fire to a warehouse," Stephen said. "I just . . . burned some things in one."
Cutter was sifting through the things in the rubbish bin, coming up with the fossil dung. "This wasn't going to burn," he commented idly. "Rocks don't tend to do that well." He continued to sift through the ashes and remnants with the same concentrated focus he'd brought to every dig Stephen had seen him on. "I guess Helen's been picking your locks a lot, lately." He held up a cracked beer bottle, broken from the heat.
One of the soldiers, Stephen couldn't bring his name to mind at the moment, came wandering out of the bedroom then. "You know, beds are a lot more comfortable with a mattress."
He buried his head in his hands. This was a little too humiliating.
"So, that's what happened to that," Cutter was saying as he glared disapprovingly at the copy of Robert Bakker's first book Stephen had tossed in as well. "That was my favourite work of fiction. I wondered where it had gone. Helen gave it to you?"
It had survived the fire after the beer bottles had broken, soaking everything in there with beer. "Fiction?" he asked inanely. Bakker was a paleontologist and the book was just one of many on the topic of dinosaurian evolution.
"Well, the science in these has never been remotely solid," Cutter pointed out.
Jenny was finished and back on a roll. "So, what precisely were you thinking, pulling a gun, in a hospital no less. right next to Connor?"
He felt as if he was being scolded by his old primary teacher, Miss Pratt the Bat they'd all called her. "I was thinking that that . . ." well, now he couldn't call anyone a prat, that might just make him have hysterics, "Tosser needed to get out before he upset Connor any more than he was."
"Stephen, Lester arranged for you to be able to carry that at all times because of the anomalies, not so that you could use it to threaten people."
"I didn't threaten him," he muttered mutinously. She was turning more Bat-like every second. "I just took it out and checked the clip."
Her sigh spoke volumes on the idiocy that was him, how exhausted she was going to be cleaning up after his mess, how annoyed she was that he'd made her life more difficult with a soupcon of resignation to having to put up with it. "You are quite lucky that he's generally disliked around the hospital, and that when security looked in they decided to leave the 'nice gay couple' alone."
Stephen blinked.
It wasn't that he'd never experimented, but it was Connor. Connor the-
He cut off the usual derision in his thoughts. It was a bad habit he had to break himself of, especially after what Connor had just been through.
. . . maybe Connor would be willing to share his hospital bed.
He shook his head to clear it. "Not funny," he said, playing for time. Nick shot him a sharp look, and Stephen chose to ignore him. Better not to give the man any more ammunition.
"Oh, I'm not joking," she said, clearly enjoying the process of making him horribly uncomfortable. "In any event, Lester's sent people down to wave clearances about, and now they all think Connor's some sort of secret government scientist and you're his bodyguard."
The SFs were going to be taking the piss about this for the rest of eternity.
Jenny was meanwhile laying down the law, effectively telling him that he'd better behave himself, and more than that, he was off of any anomaly work, barring an emergency, until Connor was out of the hospital to maintain his cover of being a bodyguard. Then she ordered him to shower, since he smelled like his flat, and that smelled like beer and soot and ashes and some things best not considered.
Discovering that Helen had managed to leave sanitary towels in his bathroom nearly made him scream, since he hadn't known about those at all, and after his shower he grabbed a bag with crosswords and books and magazines and some other entertaining odds and ends, and threw the towels into the bin as he passed, and nearly added a lit match to it. But he knew he was already on thin ice, and if he went too far he might get himself banned from Connor's room. All it took was remembering the terrified look on Connor's face as the doctor tried to bully him to stiffen Stephen's resolve not to let his anger at himself interfere with getting Connor back to normal.
He avoided Cutter like the devil and made it to the hospital in time to be met by Abby. "You pulled a gun on a doctor? What were you thinking?"
"I didn't pull a gun on that idiot. I took it out of the holster, checked the clip, and then he ran away," he protested.
Connor looked rather perky as he said, "It was cool, Abbs. Like an episode of Supernatural."
Abby just shook her head. "I didn't think much of your tv before, Connor, but now that you're taking advantage of a head injury to watch Corrie, I just . . . I'm just going to go before you drag me down."
Connor made a face at her retreating back, then turned to Stephen. "It was kind of stupid of you to do that."
"Jenny's already gone after me about it," Stephen said. "Anything from anyone else will just be weak." He sat in the chair by the bed. "Did she tell you-"
"That you're my bodyguard because I'm so important that some terrorists tried to torture me into revealing state secrets," Connor finished, yeah. "I was joking when I suggested it."
Stephen shook his head in disbelief. "Well, I suppose as long as you don't start singing, I'll cope."
"Huh?" Connor frowned, clearly looking for the reference.
"The Bodyguard? Whitney Houston?" Stephen prompted.
Connor looked revolted. "Oh, that was awful. That song didn't go away until secondary. Fran Thompkins chased the boys she liked all around the schoolyard singing that. God that was horrible."
Stephen asked curiously, "She chase you any?"
Connor's laugh was a little bitter. "No. I was the weird kid who liked dinosaurs long after they stopped being cool. The one on school trips to the museum who'd correct the tour guide's pronounciation."
"Still, must be nice to have known all along what you wanted," Stephen said. "I didn't figure anything out until I was in the summer after my second year at university. I had to make up a science credit and there was a paleontological expedition involved in the course. Getting to be outside and away from classrooms for it decided me as far as taking the course went." He smiled a little, remembering. "Watching Cutter point out where the bones were and how it was all put together got me interested. I changed my area of focus and did whatever I could to be qualified to go into the field."
"How'd you get from university to being the Mighty Hunter?" Connor asked, a bit of mischief in his voice.
"Being pretty stupid. I spent a gap year in America learning to hunt somewhere there was still wilderness. It's where I learned how to use a machine gun."
Connor's mouth opened for a moment, then closed. He looked defeated again all of a sudden. "I should have something to say to that," he said sadly. "But . . . it's not there." He swallowed, his eyes losing their focus a moment. "I'm happy I'm not dead, really I am. But I can't . . . I feel so stupid!"
"Don't say that," Stephen snapped. Connor's turn to despair had him frightened. There was just something in the way Connor looked, so bereft, that made something in his chest clench. "You are not stupid. You've merely been downgraded from genius to extremely smart."
"It's not good enough," Connor told him. "It's not enough. I can't work on anything for Cutter or that ARC like this, and I don't just mean my hands." He gestured with the heavily bandaged appendages. "If I tried to build the ADD now it would take me months. We don't have that kind of time. I need to finish those calculations for Cutter, and I can't even follow my own maths." He gestured at the laptop on the table next to him.
Stephen didn't even pause to think as he pulled Connor into his arms, holding the younger man as he broke down.
On to Part 2
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