Primeval fic: All in Good Time 4/4
Title: All in Good Time
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: No ownership, no money.
Rating: PG-13, may yet get upgraded.
Summary: The first time Connor met Stephen wasn't the first time Stephen met Connor. Or something like that.
AN: And drumroll please . . . finished! I hope everyone gets at least a bit of what they wanted in the ending.
********************
It wasn't until after sunset and hours of listening to Cutter and Abby berate him over losing Stephen that Connor began to get truly afraid for Stephen. After all, he'd said no further than France, but what if he'd miscalculated to the west rather than the east? Stephen could have been dumped into the Atlantic and drowned from exhaustion trying to swim back. Or Connor could have just got hte time wrong and Stephen wasn't going to be back for years yet. Or worse, he'd completely miscalculated, sending Stephen spinning off to be lost in time and space.
He knew the machine worked, because he'd made contact with Luke almost immediately. Luke had never left Ireland and never stopped being a hippie. He lived in some weird commune they'd put together a few miles out from some tiny town at the northermost bit of the island. Connor had gone out there once, have worked and save like a dog to take a gap year and visit everyone.
Not everyone had turned out so well. There had been victims of illness and war, he'd hoped Yolanda from early 90s LA would have been fine and one of the ones closer to his own age still, but she'd died in an earthquake not days after getting home. He'd found Hettie's grandkids, who'd been puzzled as anything by the safety deposit box she'd left them to give to anyone from a list of names who came looking for it. It had been filled with letters from others, left over hundreds of years. It seemed while Connor's back had been turned, the others had created a chain, oldest to youngest, so to speak, passing letters forward to each other.
He'd made photocopies of everything, passing them on to anyone still living and about. Hopefully when Stephen got back, they could have a talk about what they should do with them. Maybe store them in the Home Office until such time as the anomalies went public. It would be a nice set of museum pieces.
Elsie from Perth in Australia and David, who'd been from South Africa, both of them from about the same time, had scandalised everyone by finding each other after the war, falling in love and getting married. They'd wound up in New Zealand. Connor had travelled out there, the three of them having a happy reunion and amusing themselves at the expense of Elsie and David's kids, who were all in their forties and thirties and didn't know what to make of this teenager who they'd never heard of being so friendly with their parents.
David had laughed himself sick when Elsie had laid a rather dramatic kiss on Connor when he'd finally left, as all their kids had been horrified at their mother's behaviour, kissing a teenaged boy like that, and in front of their father. Connor rather suspected it was the tongue that did it, since Elsie was as feisty then as was when they'd been captives together. He'd noted the locations of everyone who had yet to go through the anomalies that were living, marking dates on calendars so he could call them or find them when it finally happened.
Wesley, it turned out, had made out incredibly well, becoming a very wealthy merchant during the end of Elizabeth the first's reign, and had left an amusingly perplexing diary to posterity, housed in the British Museum, filled with anachronistic references to everything from rap music, Doctor Who, Canadian politics of the 1970s, some obscure New Zealand children's television show from the 1980s and a variety of other minutiae that they were trying to parse through in terms of period knowledge. It had taken some doing, money borrowed from everyone and a discreet bit of hacking to get access to it. He'd gone through the old book carefully, page by page, painstakingly scanning everything to add to his collection. Wesley had been the one of them all from the farthest back, and he'd noted the details of his plan to create a chain of letters going forward.
There were a lot of snide comments about Connor's 'research' into the text. When Connor had politely asked if they thought it might be a hoax, he was given a lengthy lecture on the dating of artefacts, and a whispered admission from a Dr. Sarah Page that rather thought it had to be a hoax, because the results of one of the World Cups from the 1950s had been put in there far too clearly to be mistaken for anything else, not to mention the perfect drawings of various prehistoric animals done with the loving eye of an artist.
An evening at the Home Office listening to Cutter be furious over Stephen going missing and blaming Connor for it, he came dragging back to the flat he was supposed to be temporarily sharing with Abby to a stack of emails and phone messages a mile long, everyone asking after Stephen. He was forced to tell them, again and again, "I don't know. I didn't have preprogrammed coordinates."
He told Abby it was a computer gaming thing.
He was all at sixes and sevens the next day, forgot to take his dose and found himself twitchy and irritable, suffering from the withdrawal pangs. That was another problem. For all his intellectual gifts, microbiology and chemistry weren't among them, and Connor had been unable to adapt the dosages properly for the changes in his hormones and all when he'd finished puberty. With everything that happened, he was addicted now, rather than merely taking a medication, but he hadn't known enough to fix it, and it did unfortunate things to him. But it was this or madness, and shockingly, he'd take the addiction and being a sort of normal human being to being off it, and a murderous freak.
By the end of the day, he was suffering small tremors and Abby and Cutter were so angry with him they didn't care, labelling it faffing around rather than flu, which was his preferred excuse.
A week passed, and Connor was now sure that he'd killed Stephen by accident. He'd emailed Elsie and the others with his fears and had got a call at around three in the morning from her. "Connor Temple you listen to me. You have not killed Stephen and you knew you were hit and miss up to a year. Don't you sit there whining when you know that perfectly well."
"Else-"
"I'm not too old to put you over my knee, young man," she told him.
He heard the undertone and laughed despite his fears. "I don't think David'd appreciate you throwing him over for me."
The familiar accents of the black man who'd braved the police and everything in between to get out of a still-divided South Africa to Australia, travelling over land, from the bottom of the continent, up and across Asia, down through Indonesia and finally across the last gaps to meet Elsie, came on the line. "Somehow, Connor, you never struck me as that sort of person."
"Connor!" Abby shouted from her bedroom. "You'd better not be talking to some gaming buddy or I'll throw you out right now! It's the middle of the night!"
"Who's that?" Elsie asked.
Connor blushed. "I had some trouble at my flat and Abby was nice enough to let me stay on her couch until I straightened things out."
"You couldn't stay at Tom and . . ." David stopped. "Sorry."
Connor shook his head. "No, it's fine. I just . . . I was trying to impress Tom and Duncan and get them off me at the same time. If they thought that I had a girlfriend, it'd explain why I was missing Gillian Anderson marathon night."
"Well, now that I've yelled at you," Elsie said, "I'll hang up, since your friend's right, it's the middle of the night where you are."
"Thanks Else."
"Any time, Conn."
A week passed, Connor clinging to any semblance of calm he had, because he had thought it might be a year he was out, even then. But a year was a long time to wait when you were suddenly past the date you'd expected.
He was waiting for his run at the obstacle course, feeling even more off centre than usual while the SFs made disparaging remarks they pretended he couldn't hear, and Connor half wished he was off his treatments so he could shut them all up, when his mobile rang. He pulled it out and felt his heart stop as the number on the display caught his eye properly.
"Stephen?"
"You definitely missed the mark. I came out about five feet in the air, dead centre in the Liffey."
****************************
A gasp of laughter rang down the line. "I'm really sorry about that. Elsie's been on me for days now, reminding me that I'd said you might not come out where you'd started."
"Elsie's alright?" Stephen asked, curious, despite the fact that he was dripping wet in the middle of Dublin, having had to swim for shore, lying through his teeth about someone shoving him over the side of a nearby bridge when the police oh-so-politely inquired as to why he was swimming in his clothes in the river.
"Married to David and living in New Zealand," Connor told him. "And you will not believe Wesley's journal. I had to do a lot to get my hands on that, but it's in the British Museum if you can believe it. Chock full of Doctor Who references and some daft show little Katie told him about and the Canadian Prime MInister from the 70s, Pierre Trudeau. It's sort of really weird."
There was a shout from the other end of the line, a scuffle, and then Cutter was on the line. "Stephen? Are you alright? What happened? I can't believe Connor wasn't at least there enough to tell us what happened-"
"You haven't been harassing him, have you Nick?" Stephen asked. "Because he's been through enough for the moment, I should think."
Another muffled noise and a shout from Cutter. "Stephen?" it was Abby. "How are you?" she sounded breathy and girlish and Stephen found himself briefly staring at the wall in front of him in perplexity.
"I'm fine," he told her. "Look, give Connor back his mobile, then can you send someone to get me?"
There was some more muffled goings-on, and then Connor's voice, clearly far from the phone saying, "Thanks for my phone," before he clearly got it back in position. "So, other than a wetting, you're fine?"
"I'm fine," he assured Connor. "Though I've got a lot of questions."
"I'm sorry I didn't warn you," Connor blurted out. "I just . . . I didn't want to mess up the timeline and all."
"It's okay," Stephen soothed. "I was thinking more about the treatments and all."
A sigh. "It's not good," Connor admitted. "If I go off them I go into withdrawal, but . . ." he trailed off.
"Right." Stephen was about to continue when another round of muffled noise broke out at Connor's end.
Connor heaved a sigh. "We'll have to talk about it all later, Stephen," he said. "It seems that some of the SFs have taken the word withdrawal to mean I'm a heroin addict." He paused. "Lester said he's sending someone, and you should get to where the ferry to Liverpool lands up."
Later that afternoon, in his own clean clothing, showered and fortified with a beer, Stephen was settled in the conference room, faced with Cutter looking deeply anxious at him, Lester sneering as usual, and Claudia with one of those poker faces that only tells you something is really horribly wrong, because it wouldn't be that blank otherwise. Abby was making those doe eyes he'd been trying very strenuously to ignore, while Connor wasn't looking him in the eye at all. "So," Nick started with a sideways glare at Connor. "What happened that Connor missed?"
"He didn't miss it," Stephen said. "He was letting things take the course they had to."
"What?" came a chorus of voices back.
"You're not upset?" Connor asked him. "I mean, that I didn't warn you?"
Stephen recalled that bereft look Connor had shot him before he'd left him alone in the Permian. "No. Not at all. If I'd known I'd have insisted on waiting for backup to arrive. The anomaly would probably have closed and Elliott wouldn't have got home, or anyone else."
"What didn't Connor warn you about?" Abby demanded next.
So, Stephen told them. Told them about how Elliott had found him, led him through the anomaly into the Permian and over to the clones trying to kill Connor. His story about the shock of a teenaged Connor, explaining why Connor had been so weird all that time and his feral rages. He described the compound and the children trapped inside and the experiments done on them and how they'd freed the children and sent them home.
He told them all about Connor's troubles and saw a look of relief cross Connor's face, and realised that Connor had been truly worried that they wouldn't believe him if he'd tried to tell them.
"Connor?" Nick said, sounding deeply sceptical. "Connor's the victim of an experiment turning him into some sort of mad, half-animal?"
Stephen stood and came up behind Connor. "Connor? Do you mind if I . . ." he trailed off, very gently leaving a finger on the spot that he learnt made Connor purr reflexively.
"If my public humiliation'll do it, then get on with it," Connor grumbled, slumping forward. Stephen shook his head, amused, and dug his fingers into Connor's spine, the deep and rumbling purr erupting at once from Connor's throat and startling everyone to their feet.
"What the . . ." Cutter gasped, seemingly looking about for a firearm of some kind. Claudia looked frightened and Lester's face was deeply intense, if unreadable.
Abby however looked intrigued. "He's purring. Are you purring?" she asked Connor. "That's . . . I knew you made that sound when you were in the shower that time."
Connor pulled away from Stephen's fingers with a half-hearted glare. "Okay, enough. And Abby, I wasn't wanking."
She'd already dashed around and got her fingers on that spot, the suddenness making Connor's eyes roll back, a dreamy smile cross his face and the purr erupt again. This time, prepared, the others responded by retaking their seats while Abby got into a minor slap fight with Connor, who clearly was trying to get her to stop.
"Both of you, enough," Lester demanded sharply. He stared intensely at Connor. "You returned the children to their homes, you said?"
"Yes," Connor replied. "I mean, I returned them to basically the same minute they were taken."
There was a look of sudden vulnerability on Lester's face as he asked, "Was . . . do you recall a girl named Diane? She was a twin, her sister was-"
Stephen looked at Connor and saw a stricken look on his face. "Victoria. I'm sorry."
"Victoria had nightmares for years," Lester said softly. "She'd wake, screaming about clones taking Diane away and some terrible woman doing experiments. My wife said that a man who'd only given the name Stephen was the one who'd returned her. We never knew what she'd seen, only that she would tell us only that Diane was taken by someone."
"Peter never made it out of the arena," Connor said slowly. "He died, and H- . . ." he glanced at Cutter and continued. "They didn't have any use anymore for the children once the teenager they were being kept with had died."
Lester looked human finally as he crumpled. "Tell me," he demanded.
Connor looked mulish. "I . . . I won't tell you what they did to her, because you don't need to know. It was horrible and I know that no one needs to remember someone that way. I will say this. At least it wasn't because Peter was one of the ones gone so mad he killed her. She didn't die thinking he'd turned on her."
"Victoria," Stephen said frowning. "I remember. She was so reserved, I didn't know it was because of that. I saw her off to her Mum, but the woman hadn't seen the anomaly and Victoria insisted she'd be fine."
"I wasn't able to track where the children were, in a lot of cases," Connor admitted. "I tried, but without addresses and last names it was a bit hard. I was worried about the ones who didn't have someone to talk to, but better for them to be home, than lost in time."
"My God," Claudia said, staring at Lester. The image of the man as a doting father was strange, but the look on his face was a terrible combination of relief and grief. Probably relief at finally knowing what had happened.
"Perhaps you might come by," Lester said slowly. "I . . . it would be good for Victoria to be able to talk to someone."
Connor nodded. "If she wants to talk to one of the other children, not the teens, I know that Geoff's living in Brighton. He's fourteen now, and the closest one to her age."
"I'll ask," Lester said hoarsely. Then he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and seemed to shelve anything human again. But there was a sharpness to his eyes that went beyond his usual degree of biting intelligence. "Do you know anything of who is behind this?"
Stephen exchanged looks with Connor, Connor raising an eyebrow at him and tilting his head, clearly indicating it was his show. Which, since he knew the sort of denial Nick was going to react with, it sort of was. "Helen," he told them, seeing Nick shake his head in denial. "It was Helen."
"No," Nick said. "It can't . . . she wouldn't."
Connor's voice was cold as he finally gave voice to what had no doubt been strangling him ever since he'd seen her coming out of that woman's house. "Yes, she would."
Stephen broke in. "Nick, you'll have to face it. The Helen we both thought we knew doesn't exist anymore, maybe never did." As Nick looked liable to argue, Stephen told him, "Not now. It's been a hard few months for me and I'm not going to have this argument with you here and now." Then he turned to Lester. "I'm going to need to get a real biochemical expert to look at Connor. While the treatment I bodged together back there's holding, it's making him sick."
"Not sick," Connor said with a sigh. "Addicted. I get body pains and the shakes when I try to take a spell off. I can't quit because it's the thing that keeps me in one piece mentally, but I'm having to up the doses again and again. I don't have the chemistry to fix this."
Lester agreed to that and the meeting broke up. There would be time to figure it all out in the coming weeks and months. Abby had pulled Connor aside and was in some sort of consultation that ended in her pulling him onto a sofa next to her and setting off the purr again. Claudia was talking to Nick urgently and Lester was on the phone, Stephen catching the name, 'Victoria' as he spoke.
He went to crouch next to Connor. "I'm sorry about-"
"Don't," Connor told him. "I really should have known better than to assume you'd know me when you saw me. In retrospect, it was clear that you'd got to know me before going through the anomaly."
"By the way," Stephen asked. "What were you going to say? Right before I left, I mean."
Connor smiled a little. "I was really scared that I wasn't going to get it right, that I wouldn't make it home. That I'd mess it up and wind up dying in lava with the lab. I was going to ask that you tell my parents something about what happened to me if I didn't make it. But I didn't want you to change your mind about going then."
"You're right," Stephen told him. "I wouldn't have left then." He glanced up at Nick, who Claudia was failing to restrain. "I'm going to head home and get some rest in my own bed before Cutter gets loose and tries to corner me."
"We should head back to my flat too," Abby said, pulling Connor to his feet. "You'll tell me everything you ever saw the ceolosauravuses doing in that forest," she informed him.
Connor's grin was blinding and happy as he obediently did what Abby told him. But as they split up, heading for their respective cars, a look Stephen had come to recognise crossed Connor's face. He suddenly reached out, pulling Connor into a gentle headlock and rubbed his knuckles into Connor's head, the same way his own older brother had done. "There you are," he grinned as Connor squawked and wriggled away. "I've finally got myself a younger brother to torment."
"Bloody stupid . . ." Connor was grinning back, even while he grumbled. "All those sisters and this is what I get now?"
Everything was finally put right.
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Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: No ownership, no money.
Rating: PG-13, may yet get upgraded.
Summary: The first time Connor met Stephen wasn't the first time Stephen met Connor. Or something like that.
AN: And drumroll please . . . finished! I hope everyone gets at least a bit of what they wanted in the ending.
********************
It wasn't until after sunset and hours of listening to Cutter and Abby berate him over losing Stephen that Connor began to get truly afraid for Stephen. After all, he'd said no further than France, but what if he'd miscalculated to the west rather than the east? Stephen could have been dumped into the Atlantic and drowned from exhaustion trying to swim back. Or Connor could have just got hte time wrong and Stephen wasn't going to be back for years yet. Or worse, he'd completely miscalculated, sending Stephen spinning off to be lost in time and space.
He knew the machine worked, because he'd made contact with Luke almost immediately. Luke had never left Ireland and never stopped being a hippie. He lived in some weird commune they'd put together a few miles out from some tiny town at the northermost bit of the island. Connor had gone out there once, have worked and save like a dog to take a gap year and visit everyone.
Not everyone had turned out so well. There had been victims of illness and war, he'd hoped Yolanda from early 90s LA would have been fine and one of the ones closer to his own age still, but she'd died in an earthquake not days after getting home. He'd found Hettie's grandkids, who'd been puzzled as anything by the safety deposit box she'd left them to give to anyone from a list of names who came looking for it. It had been filled with letters from others, left over hundreds of years. It seemed while Connor's back had been turned, the others had created a chain, oldest to youngest, so to speak, passing letters forward to each other.
He'd made photocopies of everything, passing them on to anyone still living and about. Hopefully when Stephen got back, they could have a talk about what they should do with them. Maybe store them in the Home Office until such time as the anomalies went public. It would be a nice set of museum pieces.
Elsie from Perth in Australia and David, who'd been from South Africa, both of them from about the same time, had scandalised everyone by finding each other after the war, falling in love and getting married. They'd wound up in New Zealand. Connor had travelled out there, the three of them having a happy reunion and amusing themselves at the expense of Elsie and David's kids, who were all in their forties and thirties and didn't know what to make of this teenager who they'd never heard of being so friendly with their parents.
David had laughed himself sick when Elsie had laid a rather dramatic kiss on Connor when he'd finally left, as all their kids had been horrified at their mother's behaviour, kissing a teenaged boy like that, and in front of their father. Connor rather suspected it was the tongue that did it, since Elsie was as feisty then as was when they'd been captives together. He'd noted the locations of everyone who had yet to go through the anomalies that were living, marking dates on calendars so he could call them or find them when it finally happened.
Wesley, it turned out, had made out incredibly well, becoming a very wealthy merchant during the end of Elizabeth the first's reign, and had left an amusingly perplexing diary to posterity, housed in the British Museum, filled with anachronistic references to everything from rap music, Doctor Who, Canadian politics of the 1970s, some obscure New Zealand children's television show from the 1980s and a variety of other minutiae that they were trying to parse through in terms of period knowledge. It had taken some doing, money borrowed from everyone and a discreet bit of hacking to get access to it. He'd gone through the old book carefully, page by page, painstakingly scanning everything to add to his collection. Wesley had been the one of them all from the farthest back, and he'd noted the details of his plan to create a chain of letters going forward.
There were a lot of snide comments about Connor's 'research' into the text. When Connor had politely asked if they thought it might be a hoax, he was given a lengthy lecture on the dating of artefacts, and a whispered admission from a Dr. Sarah Page that rather thought it had to be a hoax, because the results of one of the World Cups from the 1950s had been put in there far too clearly to be mistaken for anything else, not to mention the perfect drawings of various prehistoric animals done with the loving eye of an artist.
An evening at the Home Office listening to Cutter be furious over Stephen going missing and blaming Connor for it, he came dragging back to the flat he was supposed to be temporarily sharing with Abby to a stack of emails and phone messages a mile long, everyone asking after Stephen. He was forced to tell them, again and again, "I don't know. I didn't have preprogrammed coordinates."
He told Abby it was a computer gaming thing.
He was all at sixes and sevens the next day, forgot to take his dose and found himself twitchy and irritable, suffering from the withdrawal pangs. That was another problem. For all his intellectual gifts, microbiology and chemistry weren't among them, and Connor had been unable to adapt the dosages properly for the changes in his hormones and all when he'd finished puberty. With everything that happened, he was addicted now, rather than merely taking a medication, but he hadn't known enough to fix it, and it did unfortunate things to him. But it was this or madness, and shockingly, he'd take the addiction and being a sort of normal human being to being off it, and a murderous freak.
By the end of the day, he was suffering small tremors and Abby and Cutter were so angry with him they didn't care, labelling it faffing around rather than flu, which was his preferred excuse.
A week passed, and Connor was now sure that he'd killed Stephen by accident. He'd emailed Elsie and the others with his fears and had got a call at around three in the morning from her. "Connor Temple you listen to me. You have not killed Stephen and you knew you were hit and miss up to a year. Don't you sit there whining when you know that perfectly well."
"Else-"
"I'm not too old to put you over my knee, young man," she told him.
He heard the undertone and laughed despite his fears. "I don't think David'd appreciate you throwing him over for me."
The familiar accents of the black man who'd braved the police and everything in between to get out of a still-divided South Africa to Australia, travelling over land, from the bottom of the continent, up and across Asia, down through Indonesia and finally across the last gaps to meet Elsie, came on the line. "Somehow, Connor, you never struck me as that sort of person."
"Connor!" Abby shouted from her bedroom. "You'd better not be talking to some gaming buddy or I'll throw you out right now! It's the middle of the night!"
"Who's that?" Elsie asked.
Connor blushed. "I had some trouble at my flat and Abby was nice enough to let me stay on her couch until I straightened things out."
"You couldn't stay at Tom and . . ." David stopped. "Sorry."
Connor shook his head. "No, it's fine. I just . . . I was trying to impress Tom and Duncan and get them off me at the same time. If they thought that I had a girlfriend, it'd explain why I was missing Gillian Anderson marathon night."
"Well, now that I've yelled at you," Elsie said, "I'll hang up, since your friend's right, it's the middle of the night where you are."
"Thanks Else."
"Any time, Conn."
A week passed, Connor clinging to any semblance of calm he had, because he had thought it might be a year he was out, even then. But a year was a long time to wait when you were suddenly past the date you'd expected.
He was waiting for his run at the obstacle course, feeling even more off centre than usual while the SFs made disparaging remarks they pretended he couldn't hear, and Connor half wished he was off his treatments so he could shut them all up, when his mobile rang. He pulled it out and felt his heart stop as the number on the display caught his eye properly.
"Stephen?"
"You definitely missed the mark. I came out about five feet in the air, dead centre in the Liffey."
****************************
A gasp of laughter rang down the line. "I'm really sorry about that. Elsie's been on me for days now, reminding me that I'd said you might not come out where you'd started."
"Elsie's alright?" Stephen asked, curious, despite the fact that he was dripping wet in the middle of Dublin, having had to swim for shore, lying through his teeth about someone shoving him over the side of a nearby bridge when the police oh-so-politely inquired as to why he was swimming in his clothes in the river.
"Married to David and living in New Zealand," Connor told him. "And you will not believe Wesley's journal. I had to do a lot to get my hands on that, but it's in the British Museum if you can believe it. Chock full of Doctor Who references and some daft show little Katie told him about and the Canadian Prime MInister from the 70s, Pierre Trudeau. It's sort of really weird."
There was a shout from the other end of the line, a scuffle, and then Cutter was on the line. "Stephen? Are you alright? What happened? I can't believe Connor wasn't at least there enough to tell us what happened-"
"You haven't been harassing him, have you Nick?" Stephen asked. "Because he's been through enough for the moment, I should think."
Another muffled noise and a shout from Cutter. "Stephen?" it was Abby. "How are you?" she sounded breathy and girlish and Stephen found himself briefly staring at the wall in front of him in perplexity.
"I'm fine," he told her. "Look, give Connor back his mobile, then can you send someone to get me?"
There was some more muffled goings-on, and then Connor's voice, clearly far from the phone saying, "Thanks for my phone," before he clearly got it back in position. "So, other than a wetting, you're fine?"
"I'm fine," he assured Connor. "Though I've got a lot of questions."
"I'm sorry I didn't warn you," Connor blurted out. "I just . . . I didn't want to mess up the timeline and all."
"It's okay," Stephen soothed. "I was thinking more about the treatments and all."
A sigh. "It's not good," Connor admitted. "If I go off them I go into withdrawal, but . . ." he trailed off.
"Right." Stephen was about to continue when another round of muffled noise broke out at Connor's end.
Connor heaved a sigh. "We'll have to talk about it all later, Stephen," he said. "It seems that some of the SFs have taken the word withdrawal to mean I'm a heroin addict." He paused. "Lester said he's sending someone, and you should get to where the ferry to Liverpool lands up."
Later that afternoon, in his own clean clothing, showered and fortified with a beer, Stephen was settled in the conference room, faced with Cutter looking deeply anxious at him, Lester sneering as usual, and Claudia with one of those poker faces that only tells you something is really horribly wrong, because it wouldn't be that blank otherwise. Abby was making those doe eyes he'd been trying very strenuously to ignore, while Connor wasn't looking him in the eye at all. "So," Nick started with a sideways glare at Connor. "What happened that Connor missed?"
"He didn't miss it," Stephen said. "He was letting things take the course they had to."
"What?" came a chorus of voices back.
"You're not upset?" Connor asked him. "I mean, that I didn't warn you?"
Stephen recalled that bereft look Connor had shot him before he'd left him alone in the Permian. "No. Not at all. If I'd known I'd have insisted on waiting for backup to arrive. The anomaly would probably have closed and Elliott wouldn't have got home, or anyone else."
"What didn't Connor warn you about?" Abby demanded next.
So, Stephen told them. Told them about how Elliott had found him, led him through the anomaly into the Permian and over to the clones trying to kill Connor. His story about the shock of a teenaged Connor, explaining why Connor had been so weird all that time and his feral rages. He described the compound and the children trapped inside and the experiments done on them and how they'd freed the children and sent them home.
He told them all about Connor's troubles and saw a look of relief cross Connor's face, and realised that Connor had been truly worried that they wouldn't believe him if he'd tried to tell them.
"Connor?" Nick said, sounding deeply sceptical. "Connor's the victim of an experiment turning him into some sort of mad, half-animal?"
Stephen stood and came up behind Connor. "Connor? Do you mind if I . . ." he trailed off, very gently leaving a finger on the spot that he learnt made Connor purr reflexively.
"If my public humiliation'll do it, then get on with it," Connor grumbled, slumping forward. Stephen shook his head, amused, and dug his fingers into Connor's spine, the deep and rumbling purr erupting at once from Connor's throat and startling everyone to their feet.
"What the . . ." Cutter gasped, seemingly looking about for a firearm of some kind. Claudia looked frightened and Lester's face was deeply intense, if unreadable.
Abby however looked intrigued. "He's purring. Are you purring?" she asked Connor. "That's . . . I knew you made that sound when you were in the shower that time."
Connor pulled away from Stephen's fingers with a half-hearted glare. "Okay, enough. And Abby, I wasn't wanking."
She'd already dashed around and got her fingers on that spot, the suddenness making Connor's eyes roll back, a dreamy smile cross his face and the purr erupt again. This time, prepared, the others responded by retaking their seats while Abby got into a minor slap fight with Connor, who clearly was trying to get her to stop.
"Both of you, enough," Lester demanded sharply. He stared intensely at Connor. "You returned the children to their homes, you said?"
"Yes," Connor replied. "I mean, I returned them to basically the same minute they were taken."
There was a look of sudden vulnerability on Lester's face as he asked, "Was . . . do you recall a girl named Diane? She was a twin, her sister was-"
Stephen looked at Connor and saw a stricken look on his face. "Victoria. I'm sorry."
"Victoria had nightmares for years," Lester said softly. "She'd wake, screaming about clones taking Diane away and some terrible woman doing experiments. My wife said that a man who'd only given the name Stephen was the one who'd returned her. We never knew what she'd seen, only that she would tell us only that Diane was taken by someone."
"Peter never made it out of the arena," Connor said slowly. "He died, and H- . . ." he glanced at Cutter and continued. "They didn't have any use anymore for the children once the teenager they were being kept with had died."
Lester looked human finally as he crumpled. "Tell me," he demanded.
Connor looked mulish. "I . . . I won't tell you what they did to her, because you don't need to know. It was horrible and I know that no one needs to remember someone that way. I will say this. At least it wasn't because Peter was one of the ones gone so mad he killed her. She didn't die thinking he'd turned on her."
"Victoria," Stephen said frowning. "I remember. She was so reserved, I didn't know it was because of that. I saw her off to her Mum, but the woman hadn't seen the anomaly and Victoria insisted she'd be fine."
"I wasn't able to track where the children were, in a lot of cases," Connor admitted. "I tried, but without addresses and last names it was a bit hard. I was worried about the ones who didn't have someone to talk to, but better for them to be home, than lost in time."
"My God," Claudia said, staring at Lester. The image of the man as a doting father was strange, but the look on his face was a terrible combination of relief and grief. Probably relief at finally knowing what had happened.
"Perhaps you might come by," Lester said slowly. "I . . . it would be good for Victoria to be able to talk to someone."
Connor nodded. "If she wants to talk to one of the other children, not the teens, I know that Geoff's living in Brighton. He's fourteen now, and the closest one to her age."
"I'll ask," Lester said hoarsely. Then he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and seemed to shelve anything human again. But there was a sharpness to his eyes that went beyond his usual degree of biting intelligence. "Do you know anything of who is behind this?"
Stephen exchanged looks with Connor, Connor raising an eyebrow at him and tilting his head, clearly indicating it was his show. Which, since he knew the sort of denial Nick was going to react with, it sort of was. "Helen," he told them, seeing Nick shake his head in denial. "It was Helen."
"No," Nick said. "It can't . . . she wouldn't."
Connor's voice was cold as he finally gave voice to what had no doubt been strangling him ever since he'd seen her coming out of that woman's house. "Yes, she would."
Stephen broke in. "Nick, you'll have to face it. The Helen we both thought we knew doesn't exist anymore, maybe never did." As Nick looked liable to argue, Stephen told him, "Not now. It's been a hard few months for me and I'm not going to have this argument with you here and now." Then he turned to Lester. "I'm going to need to get a real biochemical expert to look at Connor. While the treatment I bodged together back there's holding, it's making him sick."
"Not sick," Connor said with a sigh. "Addicted. I get body pains and the shakes when I try to take a spell off. I can't quit because it's the thing that keeps me in one piece mentally, but I'm having to up the doses again and again. I don't have the chemistry to fix this."
Lester agreed to that and the meeting broke up. There would be time to figure it all out in the coming weeks and months. Abby had pulled Connor aside and was in some sort of consultation that ended in her pulling him onto a sofa next to her and setting off the purr again. Claudia was talking to Nick urgently and Lester was on the phone, Stephen catching the name, 'Victoria' as he spoke.
He went to crouch next to Connor. "I'm sorry about-"
"Don't," Connor told him. "I really should have known better than to assume you'd know me when you saw me. In retrospect, it was clear that you'd got to know me before going through the anomaly."
"By the way," Stephen asked. "What were you going to say? Right before I left, I mean."
Connor smiled a little. "I was really scared that I wasn't going to get it right, that I wouldn't make it home. That I'd mess it up and wind up dying in lava with the lab. I was going to ask that you tell my parents something about what happened to me if I didn't make it. But I didn't want you to change your mind about going then."
"You're right," Stephen told him. "I wouldn't have left then." He glanced up at Nick, who Claudia was failing to restrain. "I'm going to head home and get some rest in my own bed before Cutter gets loose and tries to corner me."
"We should head back to my flat too," Abby said, pulling Connor to his feet. "You'll tell me everything you ever saw the ceolosauravuses doing in that forest," she informed him.
Connor's grin was blinding and happy as he obediently did what Abby told him. But as they split up, heading for their respective cars, a look Stephen had come to recognise crossed Connor's face. He suddenly reached out, pulling Connor into a gentle headlock and rubbed his knuckles into Connor's head, the same way his own older brother had done. "There you are," he grinned as Connor squawked and wriggled away. "I've finally got myself a younger brother to torment."
"Bloody stupid . . ." Connor was grinning back, even while he grumbled. "All those sisters and this is what I get now?"
Everything was finally put right.
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