Primeval Fic - If...
Title: If...
Author: Bella
Rating: G
Pairings: Gen
Summary: Is there any such thing as fate?
A/N: A belated (I prefer not to think about how belated) happy birthday to lukadreaming. This was supposed to be timey-wimey fic, but it somehow got away from me.
What if the weather was different?
August 1945.
It’s summer and the sky is sagging, smothering the houses with humid air. The school holidays are two-thirds gone and most of what there is to be done in small-town Wiltshire has already been thoroughly tired of.
John Maitland is ten years old and captain of the school football team. Sarah Roberts is the girl next door.
The proximity of their houses has ensured that, while their orbits may never cross at school, every summer holiday they once again collide.
The forecast for August had been rainy and has thus far proved to be stunningly inaccurate even by the general meteorological standards. John has worn nothing but shorts all summer and Sarah’s hair is bleached shockingly blonde.
For the two children, there seems little to be done on a hot Thursday afternoon but sit under the old apple tree in Sarah’s garden, blanketed by shade and the smell of rotting fruit, and dream.
‘Somewhere interesting,’ Sarah says, ‘somewhere exotic, like the Galapagos Islands.’
‘No,’ John shakes his head vigorously. ‘Too hot - somewhere cold. Somewhere with snow.’
‘Iceland,’ Sarah says, dreamily. ‘That’s almost as interesting as the Galapagos.’
‘Yes,’ says John. ‘Iceland, with hot springs and volcanoes and glaciers.’
Sarah nods. ‘When we’re older then, that’s the first place we’ll go.’
They clink glasses of warm lemonade together, on the promise of the future.
*-*-*-*-*
What if you didn’t miss?
May 2000.
God, he’s tense. The pressure weighs down on Stephen, forcing its way down his throat until it leeches into his very bones and causes his trigger finger to stiffen, white and brittle like fine china.
He can handle pressure. He can. It’s meant to be one of his goddamn strengths, but this - this matters, dammit - this is his dream and it rests entirely on one shot.
Ever since he was a little boy, watching his father polishing that rifle, dismantling and then snapping it back together - all clean lines and precision and power - he’s wanted to shoot.
And he’s good. He’s more than good, actually, and he knows it. But this could be the fucking Olympics - and all he needs is one shot. Just one good shot and he’s qualified and then he can only go up.
But he can’t do it.
With a groan, he steps back and lowers the rifle. A murmur runs through the spectators and Stephen feels a flush of anger.
‘Is he choking?’
That might not be what the crowd is saying, but that’s what it sounds like to him.
‘What the hell are you doing, Hart?’
He can hear his coach’s voice, loud and clear in his mind.
‘Feel it, Stephen. Feel the shot. Trust yourself, and you can’t miss.’
Stephen closes his eyes, as a voice he never hears anymore rings through his mind. His father, long dead now, but somehow still there, still with him.
Calm steals over him and he opens his eyes.
Steps forwards, raises the rifle.
And fires.
He normally lets the crowd tell him whether the shot has gone home, but now, in that split second of silence before the roar rises and breaks over him, he knows.
He’s going to the Olympics.
Thanks, Dad.
*-*-*-*
What if you were born different?
January 1984.
Maya Temple is exhausted and sweaty and disgusting and happier than she’s ever been in her life.
The bundle in her arms is the most beautiful thing in the world, red-faced and wrinkled as her daughter is.
Her husband is sat beside her, hair standing on end and looking vaguely numb with shock.
‘I’m a father,’ he keeps repeating, ‘I’m a father.’
Secretly, Maya is relieved at his reaction. He’d talked all through the pregnancy about how excited he was to have a son - had been so sure that the new life developing inside of her was a boy - the baby girl had been a bit of a surprise, yet one look and he’d fallen head over heels.
‘What are we going to call her?’ she asks him.
Connor had been their previous plan, after Bob’s father.
There’s a pause while Bob thinks, brow wrinkled, before finally, he breaks out into a grin - a grin with a wicked little glint in it.
‘Constance,’ he says. ‘Connie, for short.’
Maya splutters. ‘She’s a girl, Bob! We can’t still name her after your father!’
The wicked glint grows. ‘Can’t we?’ he asks. ‘I, personally, think Dad will be thrilled.’
Maya tries to protest, tries to insist that this is a ridiculous idea but all she can do is look at her crazily-grinning husband and laugh.
God, how she loves this man and now they’re a proper family.
She looks down at the bundle in her arms.
‘Hey, Connie,’ she says. ‘Welcome to the world.’
*-*-*-*
What if there was never enough money?
September 1992.
‘There’s limited space on this course for a reason, Helena. We just don’t have the funds.’
Closeted in the administrational havoc of the CMU Admissions Office, Helena is down to the last stages of the selection process and she’s rapidly losing patience with the entire thing.
The joint masters in Evolutionary Zoology and Palaeontology is what’s known as a ‘university specialty’. It’s not offered at any other university in the country. Unfortunately, this sends the number of admissions through the roof, and they only have limited places - very limited places. 26 to be precise.
This year there have been over 400 applicants but during four rounds of initial selection, further selection, examinations and interviews, Helena and her colleagues have whittled it down to 27 students.
It’s still one too many and now they’re stuck.
Nicholas Cutter and Helen Ambrose - both with excellent grades, excellent references, obvious passion and enthusiasm and high marks in both the interviews and the exams.
If it was up to Helena, she would have said ‘screw the funding’ and offered them both a place. But as Marcus, her colleague of fifteen years is pointing out, that is against university policy and probably wouldn’t sit well with the Dean.
‘In an ideal world,’ he’s currently saying, ‘we’d offer all the talented students a place. But it isn’t practical.’
‘Okay,’ she says, eventually. ‘Let’s make a decision.’
Two weeks later, Nick Cutter gets a letter.
We are delighted to offer you a place at the Central Metropolitan University…
*-*-*-*
What if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time?
February 1986.
When Tom Ryan was a boy, all he wanted to do was join the army. His Dad was a soldier and to Tom, there was nothing on earth more worthy of admiration than that.
His father came home between tours, tall and broad-shouldered and he was good and kind and he taught Tom how to wrestle. His mother always laughed more, the lines at the corners of her eyes fainter, whenever his Dad was home.
A roadside bomb changed all of that.
Now his father was home all the time, but he seemed shorter, colder and instead of wrestling there was whisky. He wasn’t whole any more, and it wasn’t just because his leg was missing.
The lines around his mother’s eyes didn’t get lighter now, they got darker.
It made Tom angry, made him so angry that sometimes he felt like he wanted to hit his father. But he never did because his Dad had had enough pain, and secretly Tom hoped that somewhere beyond the dark, there was still the man he used to be.
Then Tom turned eight, and the lines around his mother’s eyes started to be anointed with bruises.
That changed things.
Now, Tom was lost. He had no idea what to do.
He was nine when they left. In the middle of night, his mother packed a bag and they ran, hand in hand through the dark streets.
Tom never saw his Dad again, but he saw how it had broken his mother.
Sometimes, even now, years later, he still felt a bit lost. But there was one thing he knew for certain.
He was never going to be a soldier in someone else’s war.
*-*-*-*
What if you’d never met him?
September 1998.
It’s the first day of the school year and for the new Year 13, it’s the last time they’ll ever be doing this. All Jenny Lewis can think is ‘thank god’.
Jenny is popular at school. This isn’t big-headed, it’s just fact. She’s mean with the mean girls, nice with the nice girls and just enough of a challenge that the boys keep looking.
Her grades are good, she plays a decent game of netball and she’s head of the debating team. She knows what to say to make the teachers like her.
She’ll go on to university, to study something like ‘business management’ and then she’ll get a highly paid job somewhere characterless and earn an amount of money that’s nothing to spit at.
She can see it all laid out so clearly in front of her.
It’s quite incredibly boring.
It’s this - this, and the monotony of yet another year of school stretching out in front of her - that she blames for the decision she makes on the first day back.
Either way, when she and a friend are wandering around the activities fair in the school hall, dutifully scribbling their names down for debating (Jenny) and orchestra (Caroline) and netball (both of them), they somehow end up next to a stand labelled CCF.
Jenny has no real inkling what those letters stand for, but the broad-shouldered boy in army uniform hardly makes it difficult to guess. Jenny allows her eyes to linger for a moment, appreciating the stretch of material across his shoulder blades, when he turns around and catches her looking. The front view is nothing to scoff at either.
Caroline nudges Jenny in the side with her elbow, gently enough for it not to hurt, but hard enough for it to be obvious. The soldier boy catches this and the corner of his mouth quirks briefly, almost scornfully, before he turns away.
Now that, that, irks Jenny. This is an activities recruitment fair and she may not exactly know what CCF stands for, or have ever felt a single spark of interest in the armed forces, but that does not mean that some stupid Sixth Form boy dressed up like a soldier gets to dismiss her like she’s an amusing child. Like she could never do what he does.
She straightens up, stiffening her spine and beside her, she feels the warmth of Caroline’s anticipation.
She stalks straight up to the soldier boy and writes her name on his sign-up sheet in firm block capitals, just so there can be no mistake. She throws the pen down like a challenge and walks away again without a single word.
Later - much later - she will remember this moment.
She will remember it during the first training session at CCF - Combined Cadet Force, that’s what it stands for - when they demand her do press-ups and what follows is possibly the most humiliating experience of her life.
She will remember it the first time she tries to take apart a rifle and it just won’t fit, neither in her hands, nor in her mind.
She’ll curse it the time she forgets her uniform for training and fails to talk her way out of it, pretty words and a nice smile for the first time failing her utterly.
She’ll gloat at it, when finally, after hours of grim determination and reprimands, she can strip a rifle in half a minute flat, lift herself through endless press-ups with quiet strength and stomp through hours of drill, perfectly in step with dozens of others far more suited to being there than she.
And when, accepted into Sandhurst after 18 months of things being wrenchingly difficult and humiliating and anything, anything but boring, she’ll remember it as the best decision she ever made.
*-*-*-*
What if you never took the job?
January, 2000.
The days she gets the acceptance letter to the Central Metropolitan University is possibly the best of Abby Maitland’s life. She’s done her degree - geology and palaeontology - at Nottingham and loved every moment, but CMU, or rather, one of its professors, is the best and if she was going to do a doctorate, it was always going to be there.
Professor Nick Cutter, barely thirty and already a renowned name in his field. Scruffy appearance, eyes sharp enough to cut yourself on and buzzing with energy and a passion for life that Abby can’t imagine ever being dampened by anything or anyone.
He’s her thesis supervisor.
‘Why this field?’ is the first thing he asks her.
Abby considers how to reply to this honestly and eventually settles for, ‘I used to go on holiday to Iceland with my parents every year. The geology and history of that landscape are…’ she pauses, searching for the right word to describe the fixation she developed and failing. ‘There are parts of the country entirely unique from anywhere else on earth and other parts where you can almost step directly back in time.’ She shrugs. ‘It got me.’
Professor Cutter contemplates her for a moment. ‘A geologic anomaly,’ he summarises, which is pretty much what Abby was trying to say, but couldn’t.
She just nods and his smile is as sudden as it is vibrant. ‘Tell me about your thesis,’ he says and Abby somehow feels as though she has received his approval.
Three years later, when her thesis is written and her doctorate is in the bag, he settles his weight onto the edge of her desk and tells her he needs a lab technician.
It’s several miles short of what Abby has already been offered by other sources, but this is Cutter. He’s mad and brilliant and she considers him her best friend.
‘This is only temporary,’ she warns him and he grins at her, that ridiculous smile that holds absolutely nothing back.
‘Weeks,’ she reiterates at him, ‘months at most.’
He nods sagely and later, Abby will reflect that he probably already knew that there wasn’t much of a stretch between ‘months’ and ‘years’.
*-*-*-*
What if you’d just said ‘no’?
August, 2004.
It’s a ludicrously hot summer’s day when Connie Temple walks into Cutter’s office and asks them to go chasing a mysterious beast in the Forest of Dean.
Connie - Constance, if Abby remembers correctly - is theoretically a student of theirs. Abby has never actually seen the girl in any lectures but her essays and assignments are written with a sharp style, and a flair only crimped by their ridiculous content.
It’s only been a few moments, but Abby can already tell that Cutter is going to acquiesce to the monster-hunting request. Partly it’s because she suspects that Cutter secretly enjoys Connie’s mad theories, but mostly it’s because Connie said ‘Forest of Dean’ and ‘mysterious’ in the same sentence.
The Forest of Dean is where Helen Ambrose disappeared.
Helen Ambrose is the only scientist in the field who has ever rivalled Cutter in reputation and talent. Or at least, she had rivalled him until a few years ago, when, after spending months theorising wildly, she wandered into the Forest of Dean and never returned.
Despite having only ever encountered the woman at conferences and on the university circuit, Cutter had been hooked by her disappearance. Hooked enough to actually drag Abby out to the forest one slow afternoon and have a look at the scene himself.
He’d been strangely contemplative for a few weeks after and Abby had had to work to get him to snap out of the mood. All she could remember thinking at the time was how grateful she was that Cutter hadn’t known the woman better. God knows what that would have done to him.
As it is, anything mysterious in the Forest of Dean can still earn itself hours of his time. Abby wonders if she should tell Connie Temple this - let the girl know that the reason for Cutter’s interest is nothing to do with her monster - and everything to do with a brilliant scientist that never came home.
The girl is so eager, however, that Abby can’t bring herself to. Instead she says, ‘If we leave now, we can be there by lunch.’
She knows the routine now. They’ll go, they’ll search, they won’t find anything. Cutter will obsess for a few days, maybe re-read a few more of Helen Ambrose’s wilder theories and then things will return to normal.
Abby has no way of knowing that this time will be different beyond her wildest dreams.
*-*-*-*
What if you met a stranger in a bar?
August 2004.
The hotel bar is exactly the same as a thousand others. Pretty dire, in matter of fact. The whisky, on the other hand, is not bad.
Everybody has an Achilles heel. Nick Cutter - never one to claim saintliness - is prepared to admit that he has two; fine malt scotch, and Helen Ambrose. She was, to him, technically little more than a stranger, just another face from the academic circle, but she fascinates him.
Hence why he’s sitting at a hotel bar, in the middle of nowhere, chasing monsters that are likely little more than shadows.
The bar is relatively empty of other patrons, just a couple seated towards the back. Nick takes a minute away from his thoughts to watch them. The woman is a bottle blonde, with a cleavage you could get lost in and, by the looks of it, far too much to say for herself. The man is dark-haired, blue-eyed and looks as though he shares Nick’s opinion about his verbose companion.
With little to keep his attention there, Nick finds his thoughts drifting irretrievably back to Connie Temple and her monster hunt. If it had been anywhere, anywhere, but the Forest of Dean, he would have laughed the girl out of his office. But something had happened to Helen Ambrose here - and he knew Abby thought he was obsessed - but something had happened that couldn’t be explained. Helen had been an extraordinary scientist - crackpot crazy, perhaps - but quite extraordinary, and somehow it seemed important that it be known what had happened to her.
“Excuse me?” A voice jolts Nick out of his thoughts, and he has a brief moment to register dark hair and a crisp white shirt, before finding himself enveloped in strong arms and the scent of a really nice aftershave. He sits frozen, arms stiffly by his sides, until the stranger lets go and steps back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, blue eyes dancing with mirth, “I just told that woman over there that you were my companion. One more come-on and I was going to have to kill her.”
“Right,” Nick says, brain stumbling out of ‘befuddled’ and into ‘slightly amused’, “well, glad I was here to help.”
The man smiles and extends a hand. “Stephen Hart.”
*-*-*-*
What if you were in the right place at the right time?
August, 2004.
There is something bloody weird going on.
Ryan is standing in a wood, clutching a flying-lizard-that-is-not-a-proper-flying-lizard in his arms, and staring at what he can only describe as a dinosaur.
An hour or so ago, he narrowly avoided being eaten. Life has taken an unexpected turn.
Now, in general, Ryan likes lizards - likes most animals in fact. He likes them because they are honest and straight-forward. An animal very rarely has an ulterior motive, something which comes from having a nice uncomplicated brain. There is a peace to be found in working with them.
This - this is not simple. This is anything but simple, and huddled under a tree watching something enormous with a stupid number of teeth thunder past was not particularly peaceful either.
The dinosaur swallows a mouthful of tree. Ryan has absolutely no idea what to do next; he feels completely adrift and unable to do anything but watch. It is a feeling he despises.
So when flashlights loom out of the dark, blinding him slightly, he feels gratitude rather than fear.
‘Who are you?’ asks a very Scottish voice.
Ryan introduces himself and the flashlights are lowered a bit.
Between the spots dancing across his eyelids, Ryan can make out two men and two women. The first man is short but he has presence, and a tiny blonde woman is anchored to his side. The second man is taller, dark-haired, and looks, for some reason, vaguely familiar. The second woman is dark haired and wearing a ridiculous hat which is probably supposed to be a fashion statement, but is more like a mistake.
Call it fate, call it cowardice, call it curiosity, whatever you will, but when the blond man, eyes blazing like fire, runs off through the wood after the spooked dinosaur, it doesn’t occur to Ryan to do anything else but follow.
*-*-*-*
What if some things never change?
August, 2005.
It’s been a year since they started hunting monsters. Abby barely remembers what it feels like to have a normal job anymore. She isn’t sure she cares.
They have a team; a rag-tag collection of people, none of whom are really the government ideal, but who, for some reason, are right for the job.
There’s Cutter, of course. Still mad, still brilliant, but slightly less care-free about his enthusiasms now than he had once been. People have died and he’s not the sort of scientist to ignore that. But he leads the team and Abby stays by his side and if the only thing that hasn’t changed is his strange fascination with Helen Ambrose, well, Abby isn’t going to mention it.
Connie Temple is young, too intelligent for her own good and has terrible fashion sense. There’s a vulnerability about her, a craving for praise that she hides behind an ill-fitting confidence and it occasionally makes Abby cringe. But she has a thirst for knowledge to match Cutter’s and Abby has complete faith that she’ll go far.
Tom Ryan is their resident animal expert. He’s tall and handsome and there’s a quiet air to him that Abby suspects ought not to ever be broken through. There is Captain Jennifer Lewis, the most unlikely back-up Abby could imagine, yet there’s no one she’d rather have controlling the firepower. Jenny is strictly professional, but Abby has seen her at work once or twice and her smile is as deadly as her aim.
Finally, there’s Stephen Hart. Ex-Olympian, turned TV sports presenter, turned journalist - a consequence of finding he enjoyed everything about working in the news, except for having to present it. He’s Lester’s godsend; he spins stories for the press and everyone smiles and no one finds out about the dinosaurs. It’s the three gold medals, in Abby’s opinion; they lend Stephen an air of reliability - a man who delivers - and this translates into believability. The eyelashes probably help.
And together, on a regular basis and in a variety of bizarre, unconventional and slightly illegal ways, they save the world. Or at least, as much of it as they can at any given moment.
Sometimes, Abby wonders ‘what if’. There must be an infinite number of ‘ifs’ in a lifetime, an infinite number of decisions, and an infinite number of ways.
She wonders what little twists of chance brought these people together, to do this job. She wonders whether in a different world, any of this would have happened at all. It seems unlikely.
Yet, there are moments - moments like chasing dodos around an industrial kitchen, like watching a pteranadon soaring free over a 21st century golf course, like walking in the past - when Abby looks at the team and feels certain that some things will always happen. Maybe the details might have been different in an alternate timeline, but essentially, some things are immutable.
It’s a good feeling, amidst all the uncertainty of the anomalies.
This is where they’re meant to be.
Author: Bella
Rating: G
Pairings: Gen
Summary: Is there any such thing as fate?
A/N: A belated (I prefer not to think about how belated) happy birthday to lukadreaming. This was supposed to be timey-wimey fic, but it somehow got away from me.
What if the weather was different?
August 1945.
It’s summer and the sky is sagging, smothering the houses with humid air. The school holidays are two-thirds gone and most of what there is to be done in small-town Wiltshire has already been thoroughly tired of.
John Maitland is ten years old and captain of the school football team. Sarah Roberts is the girl next door.
The proximity of their houses has ensured that, while their orbits may never cross at school, every summer holiday they once again collide.
The forecast for August had been rainy and has thus far proved to be stunningly inaccurate even by the general meteorological standards. John has worn nothing but shorts all summer and Sarah’s hair is bleached shockingly blonde.
For the two children, there seems little to be done on a hot Thursday afternoon but sit under the old apple tree in Sarah’s garden, blanketed by shade and the smell of rotting fruit, and dream.
‘Somewhere interesting,’ Sarah says, ‘somewhere exotic, like the Galapagos Islands.’
‘No,’ John shakes his head vigorously. ‘Too hot - somewhere cold. Somewhere with snow.’
‘Iceland,’ Sarah says, dreamily. ‘That’s almost as interesting as the Galapagos.’
‘Yes,’ says John. ‘Iceland, with hot springs and volcanoes and glaciers.’
Sarah nods. ‘When we’re older then, that’s the first place we’ll go.’
They clink glasses of warm lemonade together, on the promise of the future.
*-*-*-*-*
What if you didn’t miss?
May 2000.
God, he’s tense. The pressure weighs down on Stephen, forcing its way down his throat until it leeches into his very bones and causes his trigger finger to stiffen, white and brittle like fine china.
He can handle pressure. He can. It’s meant to be one of his goddamn strengths, but this - this matters, dammit - this is his dream and it rests entirely on one shot.
Ever since he was a little boy, watching his father polishing that rifle, dismantling and then snapping it back together - all clean lines and precision and power - he’s wanted to shoot.
And he’s good. He’s more than good, actually, and he knows it. But this could be the fucking Olympics - and all he needs is one shot. Just one good shot and he’s qualified and then he can only go up.
But he can’t do it.
With a groan, he steps back and lowers the rifle. A murmur runs through the spectators and Stephen feels a flush of anger.
‘Is he choking?’
That might not be what the crowd is saying, but that’s what it sounds like to him.
‘What the hell are you doing, Hart?’
He can hear his coach’s voice, loud and clear in his mind.
‘Feel it, Stephen. Feel the shot. Trust yourself, and you can’t miss.’
Stephen closes his eyes, as a voice he never hears anymore rings through his mind. His father, long dead now, but somehow still there, still with him.
Calm steals over him and he opens his eyes.
Steps forwards, raises the rifle.
And fires.
He normally lets the crowd tell him whether the shot has gone home, but now, in that split second of silence before the roar rises and breaks over him, he knows.
He’s going to the Olympics.
Thanks, Dad.
*-*-*-*
What if you were born different?
January 1984.
Maya Temple is exhausted and sweaty and disgusting and happier than she’s ever been in her life.
The bundle in her arms is the most beautiful thing in the world, red-faced and wrinkled as her daughter is.
Her husband is sat beside her, hair standing on end and looking vaguely numb with shock.
‘I’m a father,’ he keeps repeating, ‘I’m a father.’
Secretly, Maya is relieved at his reaction. He’d talked all through the pregnancy about how excited he was to have a son - had been so sure that the new life developing inside of her was a boy - the baby girl had been a bit of a surprise, yet one look and he’d fallen head over heels.
‘What are we going to call her?’ she asks him.
Connor had been their previous plan, after Bob’s father.
There’s a pause while Bob thinks, brow wrinkled, before finally, he breaks out into a grin - a grin with a wicked little glint in it.
‘Constance,’ he says. ‘Connie, for short.’
Maya splutters. ‘She’s a girl, Bob! We can’t still name her after your father!’
The wicked glint grows. ‘Can’t we?’ he asks. ‘I, personally, think Dad will be thrilled.’
Maya tries to protest, tries to insist that this is a ridiculous idea but all she can do is look at her crazily-grinning husband and laugh.
God, how she loves this man and now they’re a proper family.
She looks down at the bundle in her arms.
‘Hey, Connie,’ she says. ‘Welcome to the world.’
*-*-*-*
What if there was never enough money?
September 1992.
‘There’s limited space on this course for a reason, Helena. We just don’t have the funds.’
Closeted in the administrational havoc of the CMU Admissions Office, Helena is down to the last stages of the selection process and she’s rapidly losing patience with the entire thing.
The joint masters in Evolutionary Zoology and Palaeontology is what’s known as a ‘university specialty’. It’s not offered at any other university in the country. Unfortunately, this sends the number of admissions through the roof, and they only have limited places - very limited places. 26 to be precise.
This year there have been over 400 applicants but during four rounds of initial selection, further selection, examinations and interviews, Helena and her colleagues have whittled it down to 27 students.
It’s still one too many and now they’re stuck.
Nicholas Cutter and Helen Ambrose - both with excellent grades, excellent references, obvious passion and enthusiasm and high marks in both the interviews and the exams.
If it was up to Helena, she would have said ‘screw the funding’ and offered them both a place. But as Marcus, her colleague of fifteen years is pointing out, that is against university policy and probably wouldn’t sit well with the Dean.
‘In an ideal world,’ he’s currently saying, ‘we’d offer all the talented students a place. But it isn’t practical.’
‘Okay,’ she says, eventually. ‘Let’s make a decision.’
Two weeks later, Nick Cutter gets a letter.
We are delighted to offer you a place at the Central Metropolitan University…
*-*-*-*
What if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time?
February 1986.
When Tom Ryan was a boy, all he wanted to do was join the army. His Dad was a soldier and to Tom, there was nothing on earth more worthy of admiration than that.
His father came home between tours, tall and broad-shouldered and he was good and kind and he taught Tom how to wrestle. His mother always laughed more, the lines at the corners of her eyes fainter, whenever his Dad was home.
A roadside bomb changed all of that.
Now his father was home all the time, but he seemed shorter, colder and instead of wrestling there was whisky. He wasn’t whole any more, and it wasn’t just because his leg was missing.
The lines around his mother’s eyes didn’t get lighter now, they got darker.
It made Tom angry, made him so angry that sometimes he felt like he wanted to hit his father. But he never did because his Dad had had enough pain, and secretly Tom hoped that somewhere beyond the dark, there was still the man he used to be.
Then Tom turned eight, and the lines around his mother’s eyes started to be anointed with bruises.
That changed things.
Now, Tom was lost. He had no idea what to do.
He was nine when they left. In the middle of night, his mother packed a bag and they ran, hand in hand through the dark streets.
Tom never saw his Dad again, but he saw how it had broken his mother.
Sometimes, even now, years later, he still felt a bit lost. But there was one thing he knew for certain.
He was never going to be a soldier in someone else’s war.
*-*-*-*
What if you’d never met him?
September 1998.
It’s the first day of the school year and for the new Year 13, it’s the last time they’ll ever be doing this. All Jenny Lewis can think is ‘thank god’.
Jenny is popular at school. This isn’t big-headed, it’s just fact. She’s mean with the mean girls, nice with the nice girls and just enough of a challenge that the boys keep looking.
Her grades are good, she plays a decent game of netball and she’s head of the debating team. She knows what to say to make the teachers like her.
She’ll go on to university, to study something like ‘business management’ and then she’ll get a highly paid job somewhere characterless and earn an amount of money that’s nothing to spit at.
She can see it all laid out so clearly in front of her.
It’s quite incredibly boring.
It’s this - this, and the monotony of yet another year of school stretching out in front of her - that she blames for the decision she makes on the first day back.
Either way, when she and a friend are wandering around the activities fair in the school hall, dutifully scribbling their names down for debating (Jenny) and orchestra (Caroline) and netball (both of them), they somehow end up next to a stand labelled CCF.
Jenny has no real inkling what those letters stand for, but the broad-shouldered boy in army uniform hardly makes it difficult to guess. Jenny allows her eyes to linger for a moment, appreciating the stretch of material across his shoulder blades, when he turns around and catches her looking. The front view is nothing to scoff at either.
Caroline nudges Jenny in the side with her elbow, gently enough for it not to hurt, but hard enough for it to be obvious. The soldier boy catches this and the corner of his mouth quirks briefly, almost scornfully, before he turns away.
Now that, that, irks Jenny. This is an activities recruitment fair and she may not exactly know what CCF stands for, or have ever felt a single spark of interest in the armed forces, but that does not mean that some stupid Sixth Form boy dressed up like a soldier gets to dismiss her like she’s an amusing child. Like she could never do what he does.
She straightens up, stiffening her spine and beside her, she feels the warmth of Caroline’s anticipation.
She stalks straight up to the soldier boy and writes her name on his sign-up sheet in firm block capitals, just so there can be no mistake. She throws the pen down like a challenge and walks away again without a single word.
Later - much later - she will remember this moment.
She will remember it during the first training session at CCF - Combined Cadet Force, that’s what it stands for - when they demand her do press-ups and what follows is possibly the most humiliating experience of her life.
She will remember it the first time she tries to take apart a rifle and it just won’t fit, neither in her hands, nor in her mind.
She’ll curse it the time she forgets her uniform for training and fails to talk her way out of it, pretty words and a nice smile for the first time failing her utterly.
She’ll gloat at it, when finally, after hours of grim determination and reprimands, she can strip a rifle in half a minute flat, lift herself through endless press-ups with quiet strength and stomp through hours of drill, perfectly in step with dozens of others far more suited to being there than she.
And when, accepted into Sandhurst after 18 months of things being wrenchingly difficult and humiliating and anything, anything but boring, she’ll remember it as the best decision she ever made.
*-*-*-*
What if you never took the job?
January, 2000.
The days she gets the acceptance letter to the Central Metropolitan University is possibly the best of Abby Maitland’s life. She’s done her degree - geology and palaeontology - at Nottingham and loved every moment, but CMU, or rather, one of its professors, is the best and if she was going to do a doctorate, it was always going to be there.
Professor Nick Cutter, barely thirty and already a renowned name in his field. Scruffy appearance, eyes sharp enough to cut yourself on and buzzing with energy and a passion for life that Abby can’t imagine ever being dampened by anything or anyone.
He’s her thesis supervisor.
‘Why this field?’ is the first thing he asks her.
Abby considers how to reply to this honestly and eventually settles for, ‘I used to go on holiday to Iceland with my parents every year. The geology and history of that landscape are…’ she pauses, searching for the right word to describe the fixation she developed and failing. ‘There are parts of the country entirely unique from anywhere else on earth and other parts where you can almost step directly back in time.’ She shrugs. ‘It got me.’
Professor Cutter contemplates her for a moment. ‘A geologic anomaly,’ he summarises, which is pretty much what Abby was trying to say, but couldn’t.
She just nods and his smile is as sudden as it is vibrant. ‘Tell me about your thesis,’ he says and Abby somehow feels as though she has received his approval.
Three years later, when her thesis is written and her doctorate is in the bag, he settles his weight onto the edge of her desk and tells her he needs a lab technician.
It’s several miles short of what Abby has already been offered by other sources, but this is Cutter. He’s mad and brilliant and she considers him her best friend.
‘This is only temporary,’ she warns him and he grins at her, that ridiculous smile that holds absolutely nothing back.
‘Weeks,’ she reiterates at him, ‘months at most.’
He nods sagely and later, Abby will reflect that he probably already knew that there wasn’t much of a stretch between ‘months’ and ‘years’.
*-*-*-*
What if you’d just said ‘no’?
August, 2004.
It’s a ludicrously hot summer’s day when Connie Temple walks into Cutter’s office and asks them to go chasing a mysterious beast in the Forest of Dean.
Connie - Constance, if Abby remembers correctly - is theoretically a student of theirs. Abby has never actually seen the girl in any lectures but her essays and assignments are written with a sharp style, and a flair only crimped by their ridiculous content.
It’s only been a few moments, but Abby can already tell that Cutter is going to acquiesce to the monster-hunting request. Partly it’s because she suspects that Cutter secretly enjoys Connie’s mad theories, but mostly it’s because Connie said ‘Forest of Dean’ and ‘mysterious’ in the same sentence.
The Forest of Dean is where Helen Ambrose disappeared.
Helen Ambrose is the only scientist in the field who has ever rivalled Cutter in reputation and talent. Or at least, she had rivalled him until a few years ago, when, after spending months theorising wildly, she wandered into the Forest of Dean and never returned.
Despite having only ever encountered the woman at conferences and on the university circuit, Cutter had been hooked by her disappearance. Hooked enough to actually drag Abby out to the forest one slow afternoon and have a look at the scene himself.
He’d been strangely contemplative for a few weeks after and Abby had had to work to get him to snap out of the mood. All she could remember thinking at the time was how grateful she was that Cutter hadn’t known the woman better. God knows what that would have done to him.
As it is, anything mysterious in the Forest of Dean can still earn itself hours of his time. Abby wonders if she should tell Connie Temple this - let the girl know that the reason for Cutter’s interest is nothing to do with her monster - and everything to do with a brilliant scientist that never came home.
The girl is so eager, however, that Abby can’t bring herself to. Instead she says, ‘If we leave now, we can be there by lunch.’
She knows the routine now. They’ll go, they’ll search, they won’t find anything. Cutter will obsess for a few days, maybe re-read a few more of Helen Ambrose’s wilder theories and then things will return to normal.
Abby has no way of knowing that this time will be different beyond her wildest dreams.
*-*-*-*
What if you met a stranger in a bar?
August 2004.
The hotel bar is exactly the same as a thousand others. Pretty dire, in matter of fact. The whisky, on the other hand, is not bad.
Everybody has an Achilles heel. Nick Cutter - never one to claim saintliness - is prepared to admit that he has two; fine malt scotch, and Helen Ambrose. She was, to him, technically little more than a stranger, just another face from the academic circle, but she fascinates him.
Hence why he’s sitting at a hotel bar, in the middle of nowhere, chasing monsters that are likely little more than shadows.
The bar is relatively empty of other patrons, just a couple seated towards the back. Nick takes a minute away from his thoughts to watch them. The woman is a bottle blonde, with a cleavage you could get lost in and, by the looks of it, far too much to say for herself. The man is dark-haired, blue-eyed and looks as though he shares Nick’s opinion about his verbose companion.
With little to keep his attention there, Nick finds his thoughts drifting irretrievably back to Connie Temple and her monster hunt. If it had been anywhere, anywhere, but the Forest of Dean, he would have laughed the girl out of his office. But something had happened to Helen Ambrose here - and he knew Abby thought he was obsessed - but something had happened that couldn’t be explained. Helen had been an extraordinary scientist - crackpot crazy, perhaps - but quite extraordinary, and somehow it seemed important that it be known what had happened to her.
“Excuse me?” A voice jolts Nick out of his thoughts, and he has a brief moment to register dark hair and a crisp white shirt, before finding himself enveloped in strong arms and the scent of a really nice aftershave. He sits frozen, arms stiffly by his sides, until the stranger lets go and steps back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, blue eyes dancing with mirth, “I just told that woman over there that you were my companion. One more come-on and I was going to have to kill her.”
“Right,” Nick says, brain stumbling out of ‘befuddled’ and into ‘slightly amused’, “well, glad I was here to help.”
The man smiles and extends a hand. “Stephen Hart.”
*-*-*-*
What if you were in the right place at the right time?
August, 2004.
There is something bloody weird going on.
Ryan is standing in a wood, clutching a flying-lizard-that-is-not-a-proper-flying-lizard in his arms, and staring at what he can only describe as a dinosaur.
An hour or so ago, he narrowly avoided being eaten. Life has taken an unexpected turn.
Now, in general, Ryan likes lizards - likes most animals in fact. He likes them because they are honest and straight-forward. An animal very rarely has an ulterior motive, something which comes from having a nice uncomplicated brain. There is a peace to be found in working with them.
This - this is not simple. This is anything but simple, and huddled under a tree watching something enormous with a stupid number of teeth thunder past was not particularly peaceful either.
The dinosaur swallows a mouthful of tree. Ryan has absolutely no idea what to do next; he feels completely adrift and unable to do anything but watch. It is a feeling he despises.
So when flashlights loom out of the dark, blinding him slightly, he feels gratitude rather than fear.
‘Who are you?’ asks a very Scottish voice.
Ryan introduces himself and the flashlights are lowered a bit.
Between the spots dancing across his eyelids, Ryan can make out two men and two women. The first man is short but he has presence, and a tiny blonde woman is anchored to his side. The second man is taller, dark-haired, and looks, for some reason, vaguely familiar. The second woman is dark haired and wearing a ridiculous hat which is probably supposed to be a fashion statement, but is more like a mistake.
Call it fate, call it cowardice, call it curiosity, whatever you will, but when the blond man, eyes blazing like fire, runs off through the wood after the spooked dinosaur, it doesn’t occur to Ryan to do anything else but follow.
*-*-*-*
What if some things never change?
August, 2005.
It’s been a year since they started hunting monsters. Abby barely remembers what it feels like to have a normal job anymore. She isn’t sure she cares.
They have a team; a rag-tag collection of people, none of whom are really the government ideal, but who, for some reason, are right for the job.
There’s Cutter, of course. Still mad, still brilliant, but slightly less care-free about his enthusiasms now than he had once been. People have died and he’s not the sort of scientist to ignore that. But he leads the team and Abby stays by his side and if the only thing that hasn’t changed is his strange fascination with Helen Ambrose, well, Abby isn’t going to mention it.
Connie Temple is young, too intelligent for her own good and has terrible fashion sense. There’s a vulnerability about her, a craving for praise that she hides behind an ill-fitting confidence and it occasionally makes Abby cringe. But she has a thirst for knowledge to match Cutter’s and Abby has complete faith that she’ll go far.
Tom Ryan is their resident animal expert. He’s tall and handsome and there’s a quiet air to him that Abby suspects ought not to ever be broken through. There is Captain Jennifer Lewis, the most unlikely back-up Abby could imagine, yet there’s no one she’d rather have controlling the firepower. Jenny is strictly professional, but Abby has seen her at work once or twice and her smile is as deadly as her aim.
Finally, there’s Stephen Hart. Ex-Olympian, turned TV sports presenter, turned journalist - a consequence of finding he enjoyed everything about working in the news, except for having to present it. He’s Lester’s godsend; he spins stories for the press and everyone smiles and no one finds out about the dinosaurs. It’s the three gold medals, in Abby’s opinion; they lend Stephen an air of reliability - a man who delivers - and this translates into believability. The eyelashes probably help.
And together, on a regular basis and in a variety of bizarre, unconventional and slightly illegal ways, they save the world. Or at least, as much of it as they can at any given moment.
Sometimes, Abby wonders ‘what if’. There must be an infinite number of ‘ifs’ in a lifetime, an infinite number of decisions, and an infinite number of ways.
She wonders what little twists of chance brought these people together, to do this job. She wonders whether in a different world, any of this would have happened at all. It seems unlikely.
Yet, there are moments - moments like chasing dodos around an industrial kitchen, like watching a pteranadon soaring free over a 21st century golf course, like walking in the past - when Abby looks at the team and feels certain that some things will always happen. Maybe the details might have been different in an alternate timeline, but essentially, some things are immutable.
It’s a good feeling, amidst all the uncertainty of the anomalies.
This is where they’re meant to be.