Sleeping Patterns (4/6)
Title: Sleeping Patterns (Part 4 of 6)
Author: echo_fangirl
Characters: Connor/Lester (angsty pre-slash)
Rating: PG
Words: 2,811
Spoilers: Season 3, starting at 3.05
A/N & Thanks: Thank you to fredbassett, who very generously beta'd and cleaned this up for me!
Disclaimer: Not mine, as nice as it would be
Previous parts:
( Part 1 )
( Part 2 )
( Part 3 )
---
Part 4:
Lester woke first, as usual. He briefly considered slipping away before Connor woke up and allowing the younger man to get a little more sleep, but decided against it. Whatever message Connor might get from waking up alone after the night before, he was pretty sure it would be the wrong one.
Instead, Lester cleared his throat loudly enough to cause Connor to scrunch his face up and squeeze one eye open. After a few seconds, the second eye joined the first and Lester felt himself being regarded nervously.
"I'm getting up now, Connor," Lester said plainly, well aware of how difficult Connor found mornings in general. "You're very welcome to go back to sleep, as it's only 6.30. But if you would like to get up, you can join me for coffee. I'm going to make some now."
"Coffee?" Connor asked. "From your coffee machine?"
"Yes," replied Lester. "Obviously from my coffee machine. Where else would I be getting it from?"
Connor quirked his lip up just a little. "I don't know. It's just... you never let me have coffee from your coffee machine."
"Perhaps if you got up at a reasonable hour I might offer it more frequently," Lester retorted.
Connor pursed his lips. "Is it really only 6.30?"
"6.35 now."
"And you really get up this early every day?"
"Yes."
Connor pushed himself up on one elbow so that he could see the clock on the far bedside table. "Huh," he said, thereby confirming the early hour. "Wow." He flopped back down onto the pillow and took a deep, decisive breath. "Okay, I'll get up. But only because there's coffee."
Lester nodded, rolling away and climbing out of bed. His slippers were in the wrong room, which was quite inconvenient. He went to get them before heading down to the kitchen, giving Connor some room and time to compose himself.
Connor padded into the kitchen in his slippers about a minute after Lester. He set himself down on a kitchen stool and watched Lester with the kind of sleepy fascination borne of the early hour and the shiny and complex nature of the machine in question. Lester worked the coffee machine with a practiced ease, and soon had it running its normal cycle, slightly modified to fill two cups rather than one.
Connor jumped when Lester placed the packet of corn flakes and a bowl in front of him. Lester had always kept breakfast cereals in the house, but they were for the benefit of his children rather than himself. His preference was, naturally, for toast.
"Thanks," answered Connor, a slight hint of colour appearing in his face.
Lester assumed, rightly, that Connor was not used to being waited on at breakfast time. Connor started to get up to retrieve the milk and sugar, but Lester waved him back. A moment later, both were set down on the table.
Connor self-consciously poured a bowl of cereal, accidentally over-tipping and spilling a few flakes over the edge of the bowl. The sound of Lester clearing his throat spurred Connor to quickly scoop the rogue flakes back into the bowl and pull his hands into his lap like an errant school child. Lester once again rolled his eyes, and turned to drop some bread into the toaster.
Connor finally managed to speak. "Ah, so... About last night..."
"Yes?" replied Lester, now retrieving jam and thus partially obscured by the pantry door.
"Well I just... You know..." he stammered awkwardly. Once again, Connor had apparently failed to plan his complete sentence in advance, choosing instead to break the silence with only a vague idea of where he was going to end up.
Oddly enough, Lester was beginning to find that trait less irksome and more endearing.
Having found at least a few words to string together, Connor stammered on. "I guess, thanks for bring in tea. Or hot water. That was... Thoughtful." He smiled hopefully, picking up the milk bottle and unscrewing the lid.
"You're very welcome," replied Lester. "Although I think tonight it might be better if we sleep in my bed. It's queen sized. Much less crowded."
Connor spilled the milk in surprise.
Lester made no comment, calmly collecting a tea towel from the hook on the wall and passing it over.
"Sorry!" Connor apologized, rapidly swabbing up the small puddle. "It's just... Well I didn't really expect..." He forced himself to take a deep breath, pressing his lips together for a second before continuing, "You want to sleep together again tonight?"
"That was what I was implying, yes," replied Lester.
"Oh," said Connor, nodding slowly to himself. "Okay. Only... Why?"
Lester collected his freshly-popped toast and sat next to Connor at the bench. "Because last night I offered you an opportunity to tell me what it is that is concerning you, and you did not take advantage of it. I intend to offer that same opportunity again tonight. Your cereal is losing cohesion, you really should eat it before it becomes completely unpalatable."
"Oh," said Connor once again, starting at the cereal, but clearly thinking instead about Lester's offer. "I didn't... You really want to know? You really want me to tell you?"
Lester nodded. "I do, yes."
The coffee machine chose that moment to squeal obnoxiously. Connor jumped again, then watched it with a distant fascination as it started to drool out its delightful, if poorly timed, liquid caffeine.
"Okay, but don't tell anyone..." he began quietly, staring at the tiny curl of steam above the cups.
Lester nodded lightly, spreading margarine on his toast.
"Sometimes I dream that they're mad at me," Connor confessed. "Sometimes just Cutter, or Tom, sometimes they're all together." Connor stirred absentmindedly at the bowl of milky mush in front of him. Lester watched in silence, pleasantly surprised when Connor dared a moment of eye contact. "I wake up when I have those dreams, but I can normally go back to sleep."
Lester refraining from speaking, half-expecting Connor to continue, but nodded his understanding.
There was silence for several seconds.
"I think the coffee is done," Connor eventually said.
Lester looked at the machine. It had been done before Connor had finally started to talk, but he had hoped for a slightly longer burst of honesty from the young man, and had thus left the coffee to cool. He rose to collect the two cups, his eyes barely leaving Connor, who, in turn, was staring firmly once again at his breakfast bowl. The spoon was slowly sinking into his cornflake quicksand, something Connor was apparently enthralled by.
Lester mixed in the requisite milk and sugar, then placed one cup in front of Connor before reclaiming his own seat, cup in hand.
"Careful," Lester warned. "It's still very hot."
Connor nodded, bringing the cup close but refraining from drinking.
"Do you know what survivor's guilt is?" Lester asked carefully. Connor nodded slowly, granting Lester leave to continue. "You've lost a lot of people over the past few years. And you've been with a lot of those people when they died... Under those circumstances, it would be entirely understandable if you experienced survivor's guilt. Even though you know you're not to blame."
Connor took a small, halting breath at that. He grabbed the tip of his spoon, playing briefly with his bowl of mush before letting it sit again. "That's nice of you to say."
Lester wasn't quite sure what he had been expecting from Connor, but that wasn't it.
Connor glanced up though, clarifying. "Problem is, I am to blame, at least partly. Tom died because I told him something I shouldn't. Stephen died because I was too much of a wuss to tell Cutter and Stephen to sort themselves out when it could have made a difference. Cutter died because I didn't find him in time..." The eye-contact disappeared again, the cereal earning itself another half-hearted stir. "Or maybe I did find him in time, but instead of getting him out of there while I still had the chance, I just sat there and waited for him to die."
For the first time in a very, very long time, Lester had no idea what to say.
---
Lester stood, hands on hips, looking put out.
This was, of course, not an uncommon occurrence. Lorraine had just waved Connor through with a long-suffering look and a tired head shake when he had arrived at the office.
Connor didn't understand why it was that, despite having an entire team of technicians, electricians, mechanical engineers and general science staff on hand at the ARC, Lester always insisted on calling him whenever his laptop had network connection problems. That's not to say that Connor wasn't technically capable of fixing Lester's network issues, because that was pretty much a given. Compared to building a system which pinpointed magnetic disturbances around the country using nothing but radio distortion patterns, configuring Windows 7 network drivers was pretty mundane. It just seemed, though, that with everything else that was going on in his life right at the moment, there might have been someone else available to rescue Lester's incommunicado laptop.
Doubly so today, considering the awkwardness that he and Lester had been caught up in that morning. He hadn't really meant to share the way he did, not with his boss of all people. He had to stop giving people reasons to fire him, or to send him off for psychological assessment, or whatever it was top secret military organizations did with people who were going mad.
In hindsight, Lester had played his cards pretty well, luring Connor out of bed with the promise of caffeine, only to trick him into sleep-deprived confessions he hadn't even been entirely ready to admit to himself. He supposed it would make sense for Lester to be trained in interrogation techniques, but he hadn't expected to be on the receiving end of them.
Right now, Lester was just looking impatient, peering over Connor's shoulder at the screen. It had the default ARC logo on the desktop, looking stark and impersonal. Connor opened up the network settings window, immediately noticing the little red x on top of the network icon.
"It was working this morning," commented Lester. "Have you been doing something to the computers that would have caused it to break?"
"No, I don't think so," Connor replied wearily. "If everyone's computer had lost the network, then I'd say probably one of the IT guys had done something, but it looks like it's just your computer." The whole situation was awkward really, Connor mused, while practiced fingers worked at the computer's settings. That morning, once Connor had realized just how deep a hole he had dug himself, he’d immediately gone into evasion mode. He had started up irrelevant conversations, asked Lester questions about unrelated things, and when Lester persisted in his line of questioning Connor had given short, nondescript answers. Finally, in the car on the way in, Lester had huffed his irritation over the misdirection and the two of them had remained in silence until they’d parted ways in the ARC's underground car park. Lester had never been a particularly easy person to read, but Connor couldn't help feeling that maybe he had overstepped the boundaries of their relationship this time.
Of course that was a pretty ridiculous idea, given that only the night before Lester had very purposefully crawled into bed with him. How anyone was supposed to figure out appropriate personal boundaries after something like that, Connor did not know.
He checked the back of Lester's laptop, and jiggled the cable a couple of times. It had no effect. "Have you tried turning it off then turning it on again?"
Lester managed to look even less impressed than he had a few moments earlier. "Of course I did, but clearly it didn't do any good." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "You'd think with a team the size of his, Gates would at least be able to produce a computer that didn't break quite so often. Even the anomaly detector only needs to be rebooted every few weeks, and that was built by a team of one university drop-out and very little else."
Connor chose to take that as a compliment, despite its very backhanded nature. "Actually, Bill Gates dropped out of university early on, to work on Microsoft."
"Well that explains quite a few things," Lester grumbled.
Connor pushed back from the desk, the wheelie chair sliding along the smooth floor almost silently. Back in his student days, he'd participated in any number of wheelie chair races. Competing with Lester's chair would have been like driving a Ferrari in a race full of VW Beetles. Of course, as a student he almost certainly couldn't have afforded a chair like Lester's. He wasn't entirely sure he would be able to afford one now.
Connor got down onto his hands and knees. He spotted the problem almost instantly. The network cable was dangling loose, clearly unplugged from its wall socket. At almost exactly the same moment, Connor heard the sound of Lester's door closing.
He crawled back a few centimeters, peering up over the edge of the desk to where Lester was standing in front of the closed door. "Network cable was unplugged," he said, waving the end of the cable around in all its self-evident glory.
"Yes," replied Lester. "I know."
Connor stumbled over that thought for a moment, before answering, "Well... I... think that's why your network isn't working."
Lester nodded. "I rather suspected as much, since the problem happened immediately after I unplugged it. Sit." He gestured to the chair which Connor had only just vacated.
Connor didn't move.
"Don't you want me to plug it in again?" he asked instead, waving the cable end in the air.
"It can wait," replied Lester, gesturing once again to the chair. "I said sit."
Connor very slowly worked his way out from under the desk and back into the chair. He had a very uneasy feeling of being trapped. Lester pulled over one of the visitor’s chairs, and sat facing him across the desk. Connor tried to smile, but strongly suspected it was coming across as more of a grimace.
"There are some things I need to discuss with you, Connor, and I didn't think they could wait until this evening. You have been avoiding me, being deliberately evasive since..." he paused, then exhaled in a way that almost sounded like a chuckle. "Good lord, Connor, you look like you're expecting to be assigned an after-school detention."
"Oh," replied Connor, rapidly unclasping his hands from his lap before realizing that he had nowhere else to put them. They flailed around for a moment before settling on the desk in front of him. "Sorry, I didn't mean to... look like that."
"And yet you persist," Lester commented. He offered a smile which was almost certainly meant to be calming, and his eyes softened very slightly. Connor didn't really feel overly reassured, but he tried to relax anyway as Lester continued. "This morning you did as I asked and shared your concerns with me. However, since that time you have avoided me as much as possible, and when that was not practical you avoided the topic almost as effectively."
Connor clasped his hands together again. An after-school detention was suddenly sounding a lot less frightening than the conversation he was actually having.
Lester waited until Connor was watching him again before he continued. "I've been doing some research, and it has only confirmed my initial thoughts. Your friend, Tom, died because of a parasitic infection. Do you disagree?"
Connor returned the very slightest shake of his head.
"Good. Then we are on the same page at least. Stephen died from a creature attack, there's little to no doubt there. Nick Cutter died from a bullet wound inflicted by his chronically disturbed ex-wife." Lester leaned forward a short way in his seat before continuing. "There are dozens more soldiers and civilians who have been injured or killed in the course of the anomaly project. I could show you every one of those records, but you would not find a single one which attributes their death to you." Lester reached over his desk and placed a warm palm over Connor's own, fidgeting hands. "You are innocent, Connor. Your guilt is misplaced. Do you understand?"
The anomaly detector chose that moment to start blaring.
Author: echo_fangirl
Characters: Connor/Lester (angsty pre-slash)
Rating: PG
Words: 2,811
Spoilers: Season 3, starting at 3.05
A/N & Thanks: Thank you to fredbassett, who very generously beta'd and cleaned this up for me!
Disclaimer: Not mine, as nice as it would be
Previous parts:
( Part 1 )
( Part 2 )
( Part 3 )
---
Part 4:
Lester woke first, as usual. He briefly considered slipping away before Connor woke up and allowing the younger man to get a little more sleep, but decided against it. Whatever message Connor might get from waking up alone after the night before, he was pretty sure it would be the wrong one.
Instead, Lester cleared his throat loudly enough to cause Connor to scrunch his face up and squeeze one eye open. After a few seconds, the second eye joined the first and Lester felt himself being regarded nervously.
"I'm getting up now, Connor," Lester said plainly, well aware of how difficult Connor found mornings in general. "You're very welcome to go back to sleep, as it's only 6.30. But if you would like to get up, you can join me for coffee. I'm going to make some now."
"Coffee?" Connor asked. "From your coffee machine?"
"Yes," replied Lester. "Obviously from my coffee machine. Where else would I be getting it from?"
Connor quirked his lip up just a little. "I don't know. It's just... you never let me have coffee from your coffee machine."
"Perhaps if you got up at a reasonable hour I might offer it more frequently," Lester retorted.
Connor pursed his lips. "Is it really only 6.30?"
"6.35 now."
"And you really get up this early every day?"
"Yes."
Connor pushed himself up on one elbow so that he could see the clock on the far bedside table. "Huh," he said, thereby confirming the early hour. "Wow." He flopped back down onto the pillow and took a deep, decisive breath. "Okay, I'll get up. But only because there's coffee."
Lester nodded, rolling away and climbing out of bed. His slippers were in the wrong room, which was quite inconvenient. He went to get them before heading down to the kitchen, giving Connor some room and time to compose himself.
Connor padded into the kitchen in his slippers about a minute after Lester. He set himself down on a kitchen stool and watched Lester with the kind of sleepy fascination borne of the early hour and the shiny and complex nature of the machine in question. Lester worked the coffee machine with a practiced ease, and soon had it running its normal cycle, slightly modified to fill two cups rather than one.
Connor jumped when Lester placed the packet of corn flakes and a bowl in front of him. Lester had always kept breakfast cereals in the house, but they were for the benefit of his children rather than himself. His preference was, naturally, for toast.
"Thanks," answered Connor, a slight hint of colour appearing in his face.
Lester assumed, rightly, that Connor was not used to being waited on at breakfast time. Connor started to get up to retrieve the milk and sugar, but Lester waved him back. A moment later, both were set down on the table.
Connor self-consciously poured a bowl of cereal, accidentally over-tipping and spilling a few flakes over the edge of the bowl. The sound of Lester clearing his throat spurred Connor to quickly scoop the rogue flakes back into the bowl and pull his hands into his lap like an errant school child. Lester once again rolled his eyes, and turned to drop some bread into the toaster.
Connor finally managed to speak. "Ah, so... About last night..."
"Yes?" replied Lester, now retrieving jam and thus partially obscured by the pantry door.
"Well I just... You know..." he stammered awkwardly. Once again, Connor had apparently failed to plan his complete sentence in advance, choosing instead to break the silence with only a vague idea of where he was going to end up.
Oddly enough, Lester was beginning to find that trait less irksome and more endearing.
Having found at least a few words to string together, Connor stammered on. "I guess, thanks for bring in tea. Or hot water. That was... Thoughtful." He smiled hopefully, picking up the milk bottle and unscrewing the lid.
"You're very welcome," replied Lester. "Although I think tonight it might be better if we sleep in my bed. It's queen sized. Much less crowded."
Connor spilled the milk in surprise.
Lester made no comment, calmly collecting a tea towel from the hook on the wall and passing it over.
"Sorry!" Connor apologized, rapidly swabbing up the small puddle. "It's just... Well I didn't really expect..." He forced himself to take a deep breath, pressing his lips together for a second before continuing, "You want to sleep together again tonight?"
"That was what I was implying, yes," replied Lester.
"Oh," said Connor, nodding slowly to himself. "Okay. Only... Why?"
Lester collected his freshly-popped toast and sat next to Connor at the bench. "Because last night I offered you an opportunity to tell me what it is that is concerning you, and you did not take advantage of it. I intend to offer that same opportunity again tonight. Your cereal is losing cohesion, you really should eat it before it becomes completely unpalatable."
"Oh," said Connor once again, starting at the cereal, but clearly thinking instead about Lester's offer. "I didn't... You really want to know? You really want me to tell you?"
Lester nodded. "I do, yes."
The coffee machine chose that moment to squeal obnoxiously. Connor jumped again, then watched it with a distant fascination as it started to drool out its delightful, if poorly timed, liquid caffeine.
"Okay, but don't tell anyone..." he began quietly, staring at the tiny curl of steam above the cups.
Lester nodded lightly, spreading margarine on his toast.
"Sometimes I dream that they're mad at me," Connor confessed. "Sometimes just Cutter, or Tom, sometimes they're all together." Connor stirred absentmindedly at the bowl of milky mush in front of him. Lester watched in silence, pleasantly surprised when Connor dared a moment of eye contact. "I wake up when I have those dreams, but I can normally go back to sleep."
Lester refraining from speaking, half-expecting Connor to continue, but nodded his understanding.
There was silence for several seconds.
"I think the coffee is done," Connor eventually said.
Lester looked at the machine. It had been done before Connor had finally started to talk, but he had hoped for a slightly longer burst of honesty from the young man, and had thus left the coffee to cool. He rose to collect the two cups, his eyes barely leaving Connor, who, in turn, was staring firmly once again at his breakfast bowl. The spoon was slowly sinking into his cornflake quicksand, something Connor was apparently enthralled by.
Lester mixed in the requisite milk and sugar, then placed one cup in front of Connor before reclaiming his own seat, cup in hand.
"Careful," Lester warned. "It's still very hot."
Connor nodded, bringing the cup close but refraining from drinking.
"Do you know what survivor's guilt is?" Lester asked carefully. Connor nodded slowly, granting Lester leave to continue. "You've lost a lot of people over the past few years. And you've been with a lot of those people when they died... Under those circumstances, it would be entirely understandable if you experienced survivor's guilt. Even though you know you're not to blame."
Connor took a small, halting breath at that. He grabbed the tip of his spoon, playing briefly with his bowl of mush before letting it sit again. "That's nice of you to say."
Lester wasn't quite sure what he had been expecting from Connor, but that wasn't it.
Connor glanced up though, clarifying. "Problem is, I am to blame, at least partly. Tom died because I told him something I shouldn't. Stephen died because I was too much of a wuss to tell Cutter and Stephen to sort themselves out when it could have made a difference. Cutter died because I didn't find him in time..." The eye-contact disappeared again, the cereal earning itself another half-hearted stir. "Or maybe I did find him in time, but instead of getting him out of there while I still had the chance, I just sat there and waited for him to die."
For the first time in a very, very long time, Lester had no idea what to say.
---
Lester stood, hands on hips, looking put out.
This was, of course, not an uncommon occurrence. Lorraine had just waved Connor through with a long-suffering look and a tired head shake when he had arrived at the office.
Connor didn't understand why it was that, despite having an entire team of technicians, electricians, mechanical engineers and general science staff on hand at the ARC, Lester always insisted on calling him whenever his laptop had network connection problems. That's not to say that Connor wasn't technically capable of fixing Lester's network issues, because that was pretty much a given. Compared to building a system which pinpointed magnetic disturbances around the country using nothing but radio distortion patterns, configuring Windows 7 network drivers was pretty mundane. It just seemed, though, that with everything else that was going on in his life right at the moment, there might have been someone else available to rescue Lester's incommunicado laptop.
Doubly so today, considering the awkwardness that he and Lester had been caught up in that morning. He hadn't really meant to share the way he did, not with his boss of all people. He had to stop giving people reasons to fire him, or to send him off for psychological assessment, or whatever it was top secret military organizations did with people who were going mad.
In hindsight, Lester had played his cards pretty well, luring Connor out of bed with the promise of caffeine, only to trick him into sleep-deprived confessions he hadn't even been entirely ready to admit to himself. He supposed it would make sense for Lester to be trained in interrogation techniques, but he hadn't expected to be on the receiving end of them.
Right now, Lester was just looking impatient, peering over Connor's shoulder at the screen. It had the default ARC logo on the desktop, looking stark and impersonal. Connor opened up the network settings window, immediately noticing the little red x on top of the network icon.
"It was working this morning," commented Lester. "Have you been doing something to the computers that would have caused it to break?"
"No, I don't think so," Connor replied wearily. "If everyone's computer had lost the network, then I'd say probably one of the IT guys had done something, but it looks like it's just your computer." The whole situation was awkward really, Connor mused, while practiced fingers worked at the computer's settings. That morning, once Connor had realized just how deep a hole he had dug himself, he’d immediately gone into evasion mode. He had started up irrelevant conversations, asked Lester questions about unrelated things, and when Lester persisted in his line of questioning Connor had given short, nondescript answers. Finally, in the car on the way in, Lester had huffed his irritation over the misdirection and the two of them had remained in silence until they’d parted ways in the ARC's underground car park. Lester had never been a particularly easy person to read, but Connor couldn't help feeling that maybe he had overstepped the boundaries of their relationship this time.
Of course that was a pretty ridiculous idea, given that only the night before Lester had very purposefully crawled into bed with him. How anyone was supposed to figure out appropriate personal boundaries after something like that, Connor did not know.
He checked the back of Lester's laptop, and jiggled the cable a couple of times. It had no effect. "Have you tried turning it off then turning it on again?"
Lester managed to look even less impressed than he had a few moments earlier. "Of course I did, but clearly it didn't do any good." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "You'd think with a team the size of his, Gates would at least be able to produce a computer that didn't break quite so often. Even the anomaly detector only needs to be rebooted every few weeks, and that was built by a team of one university drop-out and very little else."
Connor chose to take that as a compliment, despite its very backhanded nature. "Actually, Bill Gates dropped out of university early on, to work on Microsoft."
"Well that explains quite a few things," Lester grumbled.
Connor pushed back from the desk, the wheelie chair sliding along the smooth floor almost silently. Back in his student days, he'd participated in any number of wheelie chair races. Competing with Lester's chair would have been like driving a Ferrari in a race full of VW Beetles. Of course, as a student he almost certainly couldn't have afforded a chair like Lester's. He wasn't entirely sure he would be able to afford one now.
Connor got down onto his hands and knees. He spotted the problem almost instantly. The network cable was dangling loose, clearly unplugged from its wall socket. At almost exactly the same moment, Connor heard the sound of Lester's door closing.
He crawled back a few centimeters, peering up over the edge of the desk to where Lester was standing in front of the closed door. "Network cable was unplugged," he said, waving the end of the cable around in all its self-evident glory.
"Yes," replied Lester. "I know."
Connor stumbled over that thought for a moment, before answering, "Well... I... think that's why your network isn't working."
Lester nodded. "I rather suspected as much, since the problem happened immediately after I unplugged it. Sit." He gestured to the chair which Connor had only just vacated.
Connor didn't move.
"Don't you want me to plug it in again?" he asked instead, waving the cable end in the air.
"It can wait," replied Lester, gesturing once again to the chair. "I said sit."
Connor very slowly worked his way out from under the desk and back into the chair. He had a very uneasy feeling of being trapped. Lester pulled over one of the visitor’s chairs, and sat facing him across the desk. Connor tried to smile, but strongly suspected it was coming across as more of a grimace.
"There are some things I need to discuss with you, Connor, and I didn't think they could wait until this evening. You have been avoiding me, being deliberately evasive since..." he paused, then exhaled in a way that almost sounded like a chuckle. "Good lord, Connor, you look like you're expecting to be assigned an after-school detention."
"Oh," replied Connor, rapidly unclasping his hands from his lap before realizing that he had nowhere else to put them. They flailed around for a moment before settling on the desk in front of him. "Sorry, I didn't mean to... look like that."
"And yet you persist," Lester commented. He offered a smile which was almost certainly meant to be calming, and his eyes softened very slightly. Connor didn't really feel overly reassured, but he tried to relax anyway as Lester continued. "This morning you did as I asked and shared your concerns with me. However, since that time you have avoided me as much as possible, and when that was not practical you avoided the topic almost as effectively."
Connor clasped his hands together again. An after-school detention was suddenly sounding a lot less frightening than the conversation he was actually having.
Lester waited until Connor was watching him again before he continued. "I've been doing some research, and it has only confirmed my initial thoughts. Your friend, Tom, died because of a parasitic infection. Do you disagree?"
Connor returned the very slightest shake of his head.
"Good. Then we are on the same page at least. Stephen died from a creature attack, there's little to no doubt there. Nick Cutter died from a bullet wound inflicted by his chronically disturbed ex-wife." Lester leaned forward a short way in his seat before continuing. "There are dozens more soldiers and civilians who have been injured or killed in the course of the anomaly project. I could show you every one of those records, but you would not find a single one which attributes their death to you." Lester reached over his desk and placed a warm palm over Connor's own, fidgeting hands. "You are innocent, Connor. Your guilt is misplaced. Do you understand?"
The anomaly detector chose that moment to start blaring.