I'd've Baked a Cake 10/14
Title: I'd've Baked a Cake
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: If I owned Stephen I'd keep him dressed in nothing but a loincloth for my personal amusement. Sadly, I don't. Nor do I own anything else you might recognise.
Rating: PG, this may change in time.
Summary: Stephen and Connor meet for the first time under unusual circumstances and it forges a very important friendship. AU
Notes: There was going to be a cliffhanger, but then it didn't happen. Then there was going to be Claudia. That didn't happen either. Then Abby, who refused point blank, and I was left with this, which actually wasn't at all what I had planned. This is why I don't bother planning.
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They all stood around the clearing, staring at the dinosaur head on the ground. "What the hell just happened?" Stephen heard himself ask blankly.
"We nearly got trampled by a triceratops and then eaten by a t-rex," said the slight blonde girl helpfully.
"It was a styracosaur," Connor corrected rather absently as he stared at the head, "And I think this might just be an allosaur. I don't think the head's shaped right for a t-rex. And it's too small."
"Same thing," the girl said dismissively.
Connor turned to her, his colour starting to come back and said, "It's not the same thing any more than a lesser iguana's the same thing as green iguana."
She shot him a speculative look, then nodded. "Fair enough."
"The next time we go looking for tabloid monsters, you're raiding Stephen's gun collection," Becker declared.
"Alright," Connor said amiably. Stephen thought the kids were probably still in shock, because he wasn't sure he'd be up to anything comprehensible to say for the next while.
"What?"
Yeah, he wouldn't be up to any normal conversation.
Cutter had already moved forward and started to look over the head while Stephen been ruminating on the possibility he was locked up somewhere howling his guts out while concerned psychiatrists made concerned tisking noises. "This is incredible," Cutter was muttering. "Look at the colouration on the scales."
"We should get an infrared light down here," Connor said walking over to stand next to Cutter. "I mean, birds have all sorts of colours outside the visible spectrum."
The girl joined them, starting to poke at the head herself. "Look at the shape of the scales," she said. "If Connor's right about the whole bird thing, that shape there looks like a sort of feather precursor. There's nothing like this in the reptiles around today."
"You want to start collecting bacterial swabs from the mouth, Stephen?" Cutter asked.
"What the hell are you lot doing!?" the man in military fatigues demanded.
Cutter stood and shot an irritable glare at him. "We're examining a specimen of a species that's been extinct for millions of years," he said. "The things it could tell us about animals in that period of time are invaluable."
"We need to call someone about this," insisted the man.
"Who?" Cutter demanded. "The government? They'll just close this off and probably declare it some sort of secret, and we'll never get to study any of this."
Connor suddenly had an arrested look on his face. "Professor? Remember last week when you were talking about the variations in speciation in the fossil record, appearances of animals in anachronistic settings?"
"Yes," Cutter said sounding even more irritable. "This is more import . . ." he trailed off and turned to stare where the time portal thing was. "The anomalies in the record. They're not strange appearances, they're things that went through one of these --"
"Holes in the space-time continuum?" Connor offered, sounding a little wry. If Stephen wasn't mistaken, he'd borrowed the term from Star Trek.
The military man glared around impartially. "This is not something for a bunch of scientists to be moonlighting over."
"Come on," Cutter gestured imperiously, ignoring him. "We've got the hilux here, we can strap it to the roof."
Connor scampered over to the kit. "The styracosaur was eating. I'll get some swabs off the bushes, and some samples. There might be something there out of the saliva."
The blonde was already following after. "Wait up! We should see if it scraped itself when it rammed the tree. There might be tissue samples!"
"Wait a moment," Stephen said hastily. "Connor, who's your friend?"
"I'm Abby Maitland," she said. "I want to be a herpetologist. I like lizards."
"She's smart," Connor said, turning pleading eyes to Cutter and Stephen. "I'll bet she could help. I mean, right now we just need to collect samples, right? There's not time to get people down here."
Becker was over in a corner, muttering with the military man, but Stephen was now on autopilot as Cutter shoved the sampling kit at him and Connor was looking over the trees with the Maitland girl, both of them scraping off the bark, then digging through the kit. There was another hurried consultation, then Connor shouted, "Professor! We're almost out of sterile containers, so Abby and I are heading over to the mall down the way. She thinks she's got an idea for a few stopgaps."
"That's good," Cutter said absently as he rapidly took samples off the creature of things that might vanish if allowed to dry out. "Let me know what the cost is and I'll pay you back if it's any good."
"Cool," Connor said, leaving with his new girlfriend. Becker arrived back and said, "If you're going to take that thing, you'd better get packing. Lieutenant Ryan's already trying to find someone to talk to in the government."
Cutter was muttering to himself, "Stephen, if you could find some tracks and make a few quick casts, that would be good."
They did need to do the work, no matter what happened with the government. "Becker, can you give me a hand with the plaster?"
"Where's Connor?"
"Getting a few things to use as sterile containers," Stephen said, shrugging. "He left with . . . what's her name-"
"Abby?" Becker made a face. "Damn. Now she'll never go away."
Stephen looked at his ward's friend. "Go away?"
"She's always following me," Becker complained. "And I think she's trying to make me ask her out and it's weird."
Cutter was looking amused as Becker held the container of plaster and whinged about the girl. "I didn't think having a pretty blonde girl following you around would be a travail."
"She just yells at me about lizards," Becker said. "It's like Connor, only without her being willing to talk about anything else."
Connor and Abby returned with a bag full of sealed jars, which Cutter muttered over, but admitted they were probably the best they were going to get on short notice. They also produced massive amounts of very cheap plastic kitchen wrap, which they proceeded to start covering the head with. They worked in near silence, all of them in a hurry, lest someone take Lieutenant Ryan seriously and send people, and with Connor and Becker used to how Stephen and Cutter worked in the field, and Abby being quite clever, they were done in no time, with Abby bagging samples of the plants the styracosaur had eaten, pointing out, "It probably ate things it sort of thought it recognised, so these'll be useful for reference, if nothing else."
Then with the help of the three teens, they all loaded the head, now wrapped in a tarp, onto the hilux, and headed off, Abby eagerly and Becker grumpily agreeing to email along their observations of the styracosaur's behaviour.
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There had never in the world been anything cooler than this.
Connor practically skipped home from school every day, because he'd get to go and help Cutter and Stephen take measurements and samples and things of the allosaur head, running it through a CT scanner and an MRI in the dead of night, because Cutter didn't want it taken away, wanted to be the one doing all the tests. It was completely brilliant. Becker called it guerilla science and Connor decided that that just made it cooler.
On a hunch, he set up a programme on his computer to track monster sightings and lucked out a month later, just as Cutter and Stephen were debating whether to dissect the only specimen they had or leave it intact. "Professor Cutter?" Connor asked, having cut school during his lunch break, because when he'd checked his email in the lab right before leaving to eat, his programme had sent him a message that there was a likely candidate for a temporal anomaly.
"Why aren't you at school, Connor?" Stephen asked him.
The disapproving look on Stephen's face was a little hard to take, because Stephen was still sometimes harassed by the child protection people, who thought Stephen wasn't a good choice of guardian. If he did things like this, they'd get in trouble, Stephen might get in trouble, and where would Connor be? But this was prehistoric animals. "I think there's an edaphasaur in Beaconsfield."
Cutter whipped around. "Are you sure?"
"Not entirely," Connor admitted. "But this one, the person interviewed said they found the 'monster'," he held up his fingers in air quotes, "Because he'd been doing something in a park and his compass went all wonky."
Nodding sharply, Cutter said, "It sounds reasonable. Still, that could mean there would be dimetrodons about, or other predators. Stephen? You'll get the tranqs ready?"
Stephen gave Connor a dark look. "Next time, you call us from school on your mobile and you stay there," he said sternly. "This is dangerous, Connor, and you're not good with these, not even the tranq rifles."
"Stephen," Connor felt sort of awful. Partly because he wasn't a child, and how could Stephen think he'd be able to just sit there in class and not go look for archosaurs? Partly because he knew his grades were slipping. Not in terms of doing his homework, at least not in the sciences, but he was starting to slip in literature and Latin, and the Latin he wanted for practical purposes and he was supposed to be keeping his grades up.
Stephen just shook his head, but he didn't stop Connor from sliding into the back seat, plying a camera at the creature, taking notes, carrying samples or anything else.
That evening, after an afternoon of oddly bovine complacency from the sailbacked lizard, Connor plonked down next to Stephen. "I'm sorry," he said, feeling a bit miserable. "I just . . . it's dinosaurs and things," he finished lamely.
Looking at him seriously, Stephen said, "Do you remember the conditions I had for bringing you along when we went to Gambia?"
"Keep my grades up and don't do anything that would get you in trouble," Connor recited.
"Exactly," Stephen told him. "I know it's exciting, but Connor, you need to finish school. You need to get the degree and the qualifications. I know you wanted to go into paleotology, but it's less and less the Wild West these days, and when this gets found out by the public, and you know it will, they're not going to let you do any of these things unless you have credentials."
"I just . . ." he was looking for the words, but all he could say was, "I just want to help."
They were back in Brighton again, a month after that, this time trying to drive a misplaced basilosaurus back into the anomaly, and the irritable and weird-looking skinny whale was having none of it. Worse, Connor was sitting there, terrified, because Cutter and Stephen were in the bloody water with it, bloody scuba-diving. While Connor's teachers had one of those professional development days for maintaining their credentials, Becker had simply skipped school to be there and was aiming a tranquiliser gun at the water, watching for the whale. It had already nearly capsised their boat and Becker was less than sympathetic to its plight.
As it surfaced, a rattle of automatic gunfire rent the air. They whipped around to see a speedboat hurtling along, Lieutenant Ryan in the front with a machine gun, "So, cool," moaned Becker, sounding a little like Stephen did when Allison dropped by from Brazil. Amongst a rather large number of military types, there was a man, about Cutter's age, dressed rather nattily and looking both irritated and discombobulated.
"Alright there, Becker!" shouted the lieutenant.
"Not bad!" he called back. "It's a freaky skinny whale from a few million years ago, and Cutter and Stephen are in the water with it, unless it's eaten them!"
"You're the least reassuring best friend ever," Connor said to Becker. "I don't know why I hang out with you."
"Because I'm the only person you know, other than Stephen, who can keep your arse from being eaten?" offered Becker. "And me more than Stephen, since he's clearly just plain suicidal."
The nattily dressed man managed to get off his boat and onto the one Cutter and Stephen had hired for the afternoon, and to do so without so much as a hair out of place. "Lieutenant Ryan, I do appreciate your assistance. Where are Misters Hart and Cutter?" he turned and demanded of Connor and Becker.
"Somewhere in the water," Connor said with a shrug. He turned back to the water to see Cutter and Stephen surfacing.
"What the hell is going on up here!" Cutter demanded as he pulled himself back onto the boat. "What idiot shot at it?"
"That one," Connor replied, pointing at Ryan. Becker elbowed him hard. "Ow."
"Don't call him an idiot," Becker snapped.
The Natty Man looked Cutter up and down, and for the first time, Connor saw someone who might actually have a strong enough personality to face off with Cutter. Well, aside from Mrs. Cutter, but she was a weird freak of nature, and seemed to have run off through an anomaly if the monster sightings down at the Forest of Dean from when she'd vanished were any clue. "My name is James Lester, and I'm with the Home Office. Your research into these . . . anomalies is now a government operation and subject to the Official Secrets Act."
"What?" Cutter snapped, looking appalled. "I'm not going to sign any bloody forms right before I present my findings on the allosaurus to --"
"You have no choice," said Natty James Lester with a sneer. "If you don't, I'll have you arrested for a breach of national security."
"You can't be serious," Stephen said, gaping.
A small, cold smile crossed the man's face. "I absolutely can. I am, of course, subject to the whims of my superiors, being far too junior an official to have any influence per se, but I am now the liason between the anomaly research division and the government. You, sirs, have been drafted to the programme." Then he flipped through some notes. "Oh, and as for these young men, Mr. Becker, wasn't it? I have spoken to your parents, and they have given Lieutenant Ryan leave to stand in loco parentis as regards these matters. That is, any violations of the agreement, and he will suffer the consequences as there are limited means with which we may censure minors." He looked almost as though he wished they could still have public floggings of the two teens. "And Mr. Hart will suffer the consequences on your behalf, Mr. Temple."
"Oh, if only it were my real parents," Connor muttered.
The man looked at him, and it was as though he changed from being a cyborg of pure government evil and into a human for a moment. "I rather think just punishment would obviate any threats I'd offered," he said rather dryly. "Although, if you wish to have them prosecuted, I understand Ms Green continues to leave the file open in the hopes of convincing you of such."
"How do you know that?" Stephen demanded, putting himself between Connor and this incredibly weird, yet frightening man.
"I have access to some rather excellent researchers," replied Natty Lester smugly. "Now, if that . . . whatever it is, has been dealt with, I do believe there are some rather important matters to be attended to on the shore."
And with that, three months after the most amazing discovery and events of his life, Connor found himself thoroughly excluded from the abruptly formed Anomaly Research Initiative.
Part 9
Part 11
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