Primeval: Nothing Else (Becker/Matt)
Title: Nothing Else
Rating: T
Author: ssw_loved
Characters: Becker/Matt, Jess Parker
Warnings: none
Spoilers: series 4 episode 2
Summary: They'd fought that morning.
They’d fought that morning, an inch from flying fists, long past Becker shoving Matt against the wall and telling him he’d lost all respect. Telling him that nothing else he said would matter. That if he ever had to deal with him in a way that wasn’t completely professional, he wouldn’t survive it.
And Matt knows it’s over. Knows it before Becker storms out of the room after throwing the EMD on the ground. Knows it even when he’s standing there later in the day, laughing and joking and pretending around Jess that everything is fine, that something beautiful hasn’t been shattered irreparably. Knows it when Jess is telling him to get chocolate for her and Becker doesn’t say goodbye before he leaves, because Becker always says goodbye.
(It’s a thing with Becker, he assumes. Saying goodbye. Like a fear, a phobia. That this might be the last time. Always say goodbye, no matter how short the trip. No matter how simple. Becker always says goodbye.)
Not this time.
It hurts more than he expected it to.
Becker doesn’t care where Matt is going. Doesn’t care if he’s going to buy a boat or if he’s going to jump off of one. It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s not Matt’s keeper. Never was. And he doesn’t want to be.
She’s looked into his personal file. She’s looked into all their personal files. Becker finds it in himself not to be jealous. He’s seen Matt’s file. Nothing special. Because Becker isn’t so sure what’s truth and what’s lies, and the last thing he wants to consider on this morning from hell is whether or not Matt Anderson climbed Everest.
Which means she’s looked into his file. She’s being absolutely beyond obvious, but she’s young. It’s not her fault she doesn’t know she has the wrong guy. On any other day, he’d be nicer. On any other day, he would have said something other than staring at her and raising an eyebrow. But this isn’t any other day. He doesn’t have the patience.
And when she says, “Anyway, about Matt…” it hits too close to home, and he’s snapping at her without thinking. He draws out her name in a way that means nothing less than this conversation is over.
“He knows what he’s doing.”
A double sided meaning, a sword with two edges. Matt knew what he was doing that morning when he refused to back down. Matt knew what he was doing when he’d started the argument. And he knew what he was doing when he let Becker walk away.
The second time Jess speaks there’s worry in her voice he doesn’t want to face. Because there’s no reason for him to feel the worry in response if he doesn’t care. And he doesn’t. Doesn’t care any more than he did when he first saw the man standing in Lester’s office, a man who was going to replace people he’d cared about, people he still cared about. Abby, Connor, Danny. People he woke up thinking about every day.
His biggest failure.
So he tells himself that it’s his job he has to do. That he has to go protect Matt if he’s being chased by a creature, and that’s why he tells Jess to tell Matt he’s on his way. That’s why he’s moving a little faster than normal to get his team together, and no other reason. That it’s a fear of failure and nothing else that makes him not want to lose another leader.
He refuses to look into it any deeper.
Won’t.
Or maybe he can’t.
And the creature is knocking Matt back and he knows that the “over” him and Becker had this morning is a different kind of “over” than he’s about to experience. The first kind can be fixed. (Oh, how he’d fix it, too. He’d grip Becker’s shoulders and beg him to understand, plead with him until he saw that the stupid argument they had was nothing.)
But he wasn’t going to get the chance.
And then there’s a squeal. A flash of light he knows to be the EMDs he designed. And the creature falls.
He expects to see Abby. Connor, by some miraculous stroke of luck.
“Sorry, mate. Caught every red light.”
And Matt smiles.
Because Becker had been right that morning. Nothing else mattered.
Matt smiles. And Becker can’t help but smile, too. Things are forgiven in an instant. The panic he’d felt dies down in his heart, until it’s a steady background noise.
He’d been right.
Nothing else matters.