Fiction: Just a Few Miles Down the Road [Gen, 1/9]
Title: Just a Few Miles Down the Road
Rating: PG 13
Warning: Angst, abuse of timelines, mention of canon deaths
Word Count: 2,330/ 33,600 approx
Genre: Drama/Angst
Summary: Abby was happy here, settling back in as though nothing had happened. As though Danny wasn't still MIA, as though Sarah hadn't died trying to save them.
Abby had forgotten them.
Connor would never forget.
Set sometime early in Season Four.
Author's Note: This fic broke my brain. Originally it was just going to be this section. The lovely prehistoriccat, my beta, said I couldn't possibly leave it there. Many, many thanks both to her and to tli for beta'ing this thing. Title and theme lyrics from Man in Motion. Crossposted; sorry for spamming.
Burning up, don't know just how far that I can go.
Soon be home, only just a few miles down the road.
I can make it, I know I can,
You've broke the boy in me,
But you won't break the man.
Take me where my future's lying.
Connor couldn't believe it had taken him so long to think of it.
Five weeks back from the Cretaceous, and they'd been busy. Lester had gotten them around the 'military only' rule, but Matt wanted Connor and Abby to have a certain amount of training, enough to keep them alive if necessary. Both had been working, bare-handed and with weapons, to meet his admittedly lax standards. Jess had walked Connor through the changes to his system and he'd promptly suggested three more upgrades and countless other ideas. Lester had gotten their paperwork back in order - even without being declared dead, vanishing for a year had made a mess of their private lives. Abby had reunited with Jack, so happy to see him that it took a good twenty minutes before he started irritating her.
But it still felt wrong. It still wasn't home.
Connor was working late one evening, implementing one of the upgrades he'd discussed with Jess. He was all but alone; one soldier on guard at the door, one passing through on rounds every few minutes. Lester was gone. Abby and Jess had gone. Matt - actually, Connor had no idea where Matt was. They hadn't talked, apart from the necessary, though he seemed pleasant enough.
Connor's grip slipped and he brushed a wire. Gasping at the mild shock, he threw himself backwards without thinking.
"Alright, Connor?" the guard called, starting towards him.
"Yep! Fine. No problem." He scrambled to his feet, shaking out his hand. "I need coffee. Don't let anyone touch that, alright?"
There was a wall just inside the door of the rec room. Everyone passed it every day. And somehow, it had become a shrine to the people who weren't there anymore. No one knew who'd started it - or, they weren't talking, whichever - but Lester had made no comment, and Burton never came in here, so it had stayed.
Connor, as he always did, brushed his fingers over certain pictures as he passed. Stephen, in Cutter's office, laughing at something off-screen. Cutter, fiddling with the Anomaly Matrix. Ryan; they'd used his official ID photo, since they didn't have another. Danny, talking to Becker. Sarah, smiling and chatting with -
Connor's breath caught in his throat and he whipped around, pulling the photo from the wall. Sarah was leaning on her worktable, talking with Jenny.
Jenny.
Connor took just long enough to tidy away his tools and make sure that the ADD was still working. "Turning in?" the guard asked as he left.
"Yeah, I'm tired. Can't see straight. I'll sort it in the morning. Night."
"Night."
Abby was asleep. Connor touched her arm lightly; it would wake her, he knew. Neither of them were sleeping very well since the Cretaceous.
"Mphm...Connor?" She pushed up onto her elbows, staring at him. "What is it?"
Connor held out the photo, settling beside her. Abby took it, fingers brushing gently over Sarah's face.
"What about it?" she asked after a minute. "I've seen it."
"Jenny."
"Jenny," Abby repeated. "Connor? I need you to explain exactly what you're thinking, ok? And use small words, it's twenty past two in the morning."
Connor took the photo back, staring at it. "Cutter said that Jenny was Claudia. That the world changed, just a little, when he went to the Permian. They changed something and it made Claudia turn into Jenny."
"I remember," Abby agreed, still not following.
He looked up, meeting her gaze. "We were in the Cretaceous for a year, Abby. Eating fish, and little dinos, building our home, moving things. What's the knock-on effect of that?"
She blinked. "You think something changed?"
"Lester - our Lester, the Lester we left behind - he would never have made the ARC military-only. He didn't even like Ryan, to start with. It was always civilians, always. Becker wouldn't have gone along with it. Matt - maybe he'd have come to us, or maybe he’d have gone climb more mountains, I don’t know. But Abby, this place, it isn't right. It isn't our home."
Abby sat upright, pulling her legs in to sit cross-legged. "Connor..."
"We can do something about it. We need to get back, and then...I dunno, we'll figure something out, but...we can't stay here, Abby. This isn't home. It's not."
"It's not home," she agreed softly. "But it's what we have. Connor, we can't just go messing around with the Anomalies. That's what Helen Cutter did, and she went insane and tried to wipe out humanity. Remember?"
"I'm not gonna wipe anyone out," Connor protested.
"You don't know that. If Cutter had gone back, and changed things back, Jenny would have been gone. Our friend, Jenny, gone."
"It isn't...it's not the same, Abs."
Abby glanced at the clock again. "I can't talk about this now, Connor, I can't even keep my eyes open. Come and lie down with me and we'll worry about it tomorrow, yeah?"
"You don't believe me."
"I agree it's possible. That's all you're getting tonight. Come and lie down. Please?"
He gave in, lying down and wrapping his arms around her, listening as her breathing evened out into sleep.
She didn't believe him. Didn’t think it possible. Abby was happy here, settling back in as though nothing had happened. As though Danny wasn't still MIA, as though Sarah hadn't died trying to save them.
Abby had forgotten them.
Connor would never forget.
He didn't let on, of course. Connor was smarter than that. The next morning, while Jess was getting ready, he quietly went through the plan again with Abby and allowed her to talk him out of it. It wasn't hard; she kept harking on how he didn't know anything, he couldn't know how to change things to get the results he wanted.
He didn't know. That much was true. But Connor had never met a subject he couldn't learn about, and he wasn't going to start now.
It took a long time. Weeks. Connor let Abby think he'd forgotten it - tiredness-induced rambling - and pretended not to notice how she murmured with the rest of the team, and the curious looks he was getting. Someone was always around, now, when he stayed to work late, and for some reason they never had anything better to do than sit somewhere near him - but not too close, because he spread his tools widely around him - and chat about absolutely useless stuff.
He kept the act up. He talked movies and music with Jess, discussed plants with Matt, pretended Becker's attempts at small talk weren't so laughable. He was nice enough, Becker, but they didn't really have anything in common, so they usually ended up reminiscing or giving out about Matt. Lester never tried to chat, of course, just watched from his office before ordering him home. Those nights were the best, because Lester never came close enough to see what he was actually doing.
Connor wasn't stupid, of course. He kept his research to do during the day, usually just after an alert. The others were busy with their own reports, then, and they rarely bothered him. Plenty of time for his own work.
It wasn't until he started going through Sarah's old reports that he made his break-through. She'd never finished translating Helen Cutter's notebook, but she had scanned it onto her hard drive as a back up. No one had touched her files since, and that had been only a few weeks before her death; as far as Connor could tell, no one knew the digital copy was there.
He transferred it to his own computer, locked it under twelve different levels of security, and erased it from Sarah's. Now no one would ever know about it.
It still wasn't easy, of course. Helen was a lot of things, including both intelligent and paranoid. The notebook was written in a dozen different ciphers, switching randomly from one to the next, and there were notes scribbled all over the main entries. Still, Connor had time, and he worked patiently at it.
It was getting harder to keep up appearances with the team. He heard them talking, sometimes, about Burton and the sudden influence he seemed to have. It was news to Connor, who hadn't even realised Burton was wooing him, but it was useful. Burton would never admit that Connor wasn't working for him, so 'staying to work on a project Philip asked me to do' became his new excuse. No one expected anything he did for Burton to be comprehensible, so once he'd copied Helen's work into his own handwriting he could work on it right out in the open without fear of being caught.
When he finally cracked it he left it for a week before coming back to check his work. He didn't want to risk making a mistake at this point. He was only going to get one shot at this.
He'd been requesting bits of tech from Jess on and off for a while. More requests had gone to Burton, and he'd sourced the rest of what he needed himself. No one here would be able to figure out what he was doing.
When he was ready, he waited patiently for an alert. It was an easy one, luckily, no incursion and the Anomaly closed up within an hour. He helped the others pack up and then asked Abby if she’d mind driving back with Matt. “I want to run some scans,” he explained. “I want to add another field to the database, but I need to check it out first.”
“I’ll wait with you,” Becker offered.
“You’ll be bored,” Connor warned him. “It’s not going to take long, and I’ll keep me box on. I won’t be far behind you.” He grinned at Abby. “Pick a movie. I’ll be home to watch it.”
“You’re sure?” Becker asked, already edging towards the truck.
“Go on. I’ll be an hour, tops.”
“Alright,” Matt agreed. “Check in when you’re done, yeah?”
“Promise. Go on.” He bent over his laptop, typing until they drove away.
Then he dropped his black box, ripped the GPS out of the car, and headed for the stadium.
The Anomaly here continued to open sporadically. The ARC had a team on site with a locking mechanism at all times, and nothing had come through since the dodo that had killed Tom. That was fine with Connor; he didn’t want anything to come through.
He greeted the team, grinning easily. “Just came to check your locking mechanism,” he told them. “We’re doing some upgrades, I wanna make sure it’s ready.”
“Go ahead,” he was told, and easy as that, he was ignored again. He’d been counting on that, of course; the soldiers never paid much attention to the techies.
He kept one eye on his watch, installed a one-use-only timer and then he poked uselessly at the mechanism. He was coming up on the hour he’d asked for, and he knew his new team leader well enough to know he’d call at exactly sixty five minutes.
Then the Anomaly opened, and Connor dropped his tools, hit the delay he’d just installed and lunged for it. The locking mechanism locked it behind him, and he crowed in triumph. No one was coming through there until the next time it opened, which wouldn’t be for almost a week. He’d be long gone by then.
He was very careful about his route. Helen had mapped hundreds of Anomalies, but he knew exactly where and when he needed to be and he stuck to it. He was almost surprised when he stepped through the last one and found himself on a cliff, watching Hesperonis squawk.
Nick was walking back into the sea; Helen was standing on the beach, watching him go. Connor gave himself exactly three seconds to stare at Nick before scrambling down towards her.
Helen whirled at the sound, drawing a knife from somewhere. Connor raised his hands, pulling off his backpack and slinging it to one side, out of his reach.
Helen relaxed fractionally, watching him. “You’re Nick’s boy. What are you doing here?”
“I’m not Nick’s anything. Nick’s dead.”
“Is he?” She didn’t seem too surprised. “Where did you come from, then?”
“Four years ahead of him.” He jerked his head towards the beach.
“Why?”
“I need - something changed. Something went wrong. I need you to tell me how to fix it.”
“What makes you think I’ll do that?”
Connor glanced at his watch. “In a few minutes, soldiers are gonna come, sent by Lester to capture you. Nick didn’t know, but - “ He shrugged. “Isn’t the last time. I can help you.”
“You’ll mess up the timeline.”
“The timeline is wrong. I can’t fix it on my own. I need you.” He glanced out at the sea; bubbles were starting to rise. Turning, he scooped up his backpack and started back up the cliff. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
“I could turn you in,” she called from behind him.
“No, I don’t think you could.”
He was out of sight before the soldiers surfaced, but he could hear them. Helen fought like a madwoman, but she didn’t give him up, and no one thought to look around. Who else would be here, after all?
He was dozing in the sun the next afternoon when someone stepped into his light. Without opening his eyes, he asked, “Convinced?”
“Did I kill Nick?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t speak for a moment; when he opened his eyes she was nodding, gaze far away. “I thought so. He destroys the world, you know.”
“He doesn’t. I’ve been to the future, after he died. If it had been him it would have changed.”
She sat down, watching him. “You’re still his boy. You can’t do what’s necessary.”
“I spent a year in the Cretaceous killing for my life,” he said evenly. “I betrayed the ARC to find you. I’ll do anything to get my home back.”
“I see.” She nodded sharply. “Well then. Let’s get started.”
Rating: PG 13
Warning: Angst, abuse of timelines, mention of canon deaths
Word Count: 2,330/ 33,600 approx
Genre: Drama/Angst
Summary: Abby was happy here, settling back in as though nothing had happened. As though Danny wasn't still MIA, as though Sarah hadn't died trying to save them.
Abby had forgotten them.
Connor would never forget.
Set sometime early in Season Four.
Author's Note: This fic broke my brain. Originally it was just going to be this section. The lovely prehistoriccat, my beta, said I couldn't possibly leave it there. Many, many thanks both to her and to tli for beta'ing this thing. Title and theme lyrics from Man in Motion. Crossposted; sorry for spamming.
Burning up, don't know just how far that I can go.
Soon be home, only just a few miles down the road.
I can make it, I know I can,
You've broke the boy in me,
But you won't break the man.
Take me where my future's lying.
Connor couldn't believe it had taken him so long to think of it.
Five weeks back from the Cretaceous, and they'd been busy. Lester had gotten them around the 'military only' rule, but Matt wanted Connor and Abby to have a certain amount of training, enough to keep them alive if necessary. Both had been working, bare-handed and with weapons, to meet his admittedly lax standards. Jess had walked Connor through the changes to his system and he'd promptly suggested three more upgrades and countless other ideas. Lester had gotten their paperwork back in order - even without being declared dead, vanishing for a year had made a mess of their private lives. Abby had reunited with Jack, so happy to see him that it took a good twenty minutes before he started irritating her.
But it still felt wrong. It still wasn't home.
Connor was working late one evening, implementing one of the upgrades he'd discussed with Jess. He was all but alone; one soldier on guard at the door, one passing through on rounds every few minutes. Lester was gone. Abby and Jess had gone. Matt - actually, Connor had no idea where Matt was. They hadn't talked, apart from the necessary, though he seemed pleasant enough.
Connor's grip slipped and he brushed a wire. Gasping at the mild shock, he threw himself backwards without thinking.
"Alright, Connor?" the guard called, starting towards him.
"Yep! Fine. No problem." He scrambled to his feet, shaking out his hand. "I need coffee. Don't let anyone touch that, alright?"
There was a wall just inside the door of the rec room. Everyone passed it every day. And somehow, it had become a shrine to the people who weren't there anymore. No one knew who'd started it - or, they weren't talking, whichever - but Lester had made no comment, and Burton never came in here, so it had stayed.
Connor, as he always did, brushed his fingers over certain pictures as he passed. Stephen, in Cutter's office, laughing at something off-screen. Cutter, fiddling with the Anomaly Matrix. Ryan; they'd used his official ID photo, since they didn't have another. Danny, talking to Becker. Sarah, smiling and chatting with -
Connor's breath caught in his throat and he whipped around, pulling the photo from the wall. Sarah was leaning on her worktable, talking with Jenny.
Jenny.
Connor took just long enough to tidy away his tools and make sure that the ADD was still working. "Turning in?" the guard asked as he left.
"Yeah, I'm tired. Can't see straight. I'll sort it in the morning. Night."
"Night."
Abby was asleep. Connor touched her arm lightly; it would wake her, he knew. Neither of them were sleeping very well since the Cretaceous.
"Mphm...Connor?" She pushed up onto her elbows, staring at him. "What is it?"
Connor held out the photo, settling beside her. Abby took it, fingers brushing gently over Sarah's face.
"What about it?" she asked after a minute. "I've seen it."
"Jenny."
"Jenny," Abby repeated. "Connor? I need you to explain exactly what you're thinking, ok? And use small words, it's twenty past two in the morning."
Connor took the photo back, staring at it. "Cutter said that Jenny was Claudia. That the world changed, just a little, when he went to the Permian. They changed something and it made Claudia turn into Jenny."
"I remember," Abby agreed, still not following.
He looked up, meeting her gaze. "We were in the Cretaceous for a year, Abby. Eating fish, and little dinos, building our home, moving things. What's the knock-on effect of that?"
She blinked. "You think something changed?"
"Lester - our Lester, the Lester we left behind - he would never have made the ARC military-only. He didn't even like Ryan, to start with. It was always civilians, always. Becker wouldn't have gone along with it. Matt - maybe he'd have come to us, or maybe he’d have gone climb more mountains, I don’t know. But Abby, this place, it isn't right. It isn't our home."
Abby sat upright, pulling her legs in to sit cross-legged. "Connor..."
"We can do something about it. We need to get back, and then...I dunno, we'll figure something out, but...we can't stay here, Abby. This isn't home. It's not."
"It's not home," she agreed softly. "But it's what we have. Connor, we can't just go messing around with the Anomalies. That's what Helen Cutter did, and she went insane and tried to wipe out humanity. Remember?"
"I'm not gonna wipe anyone out," Connor protested.
"You don't know that. If Cutter had gone back, and changed things back, Jenny would have been gone. Our friend, Jenny, gone."
"It isn't...it's not the same, Abs."
Abby glanced at the clock again. "I can't talk about this now, Connor, I can't even keep my eyes open. Come and lie down with me and we'll worry about it tomorrow, yeah?"
"You don't believe me."
"I agree it's possible. That's all you're getting tonight. Come and lie down. Please?"
He gave in, lying down and wrapping his arms around her, listening as her breathing evened out into sleep.
She didn't believe him. Didn’t think it possible. Abby was happy here, settling back in as though nothing had happened. As though Danny wasn't still MIA, as though Sarah hadn't died trying to save them.
Abby had forgotten them.
Connor would never forget.
He didn't let on, of course. Connor was smarter than that. The next morning, while Jess was getting ready, he quietly went through the plan again with Abby and allowed her to talk him out of it. It wasn't hard; she kept harking on how he didn't know anything, he couldn't know how to change things to get the results he wanted.
He didn't know. That much was true. But Connor had never met a subject he couldn't learn about, and he wasn't going to start now.
It took a long time. Weeks. Connor let Abby think he'd forgotten it - tiredness-induced rambling - and pretended not to notice how she murmured with the rest of the team, and the curious looks he was getting. Someone was always around, now, when he stayed to work late, and for some reason they never had anything better to do than sit somewhere near him - but not too close, because he spread his tools widely around him - and chat about absolutely useless stuff.
He kept the act up. He talked movies and music with Jess, discussed plants with Matt, pretended Becker's attempts at small talk weren't so laughable. He was nice enough, Becker, but they didn't really have anything in common, so they usually ended up reminiscing or giving out about Matt. Lester never tried to chat, of course, just watched from his office before ordering him home. Those nights were the best, because Lester never came close enough to see what he was actually doing.
Connor wasn't stupid, of course. He kept his research to do during the day, usually just after an alert. The others were busy with their own reports, then, and they rarely bothered him. Plenty of time for his own work.
It wasn't until he started going through Sarah's old reports that he made his break-through. She'd never finished translating Helen Cutter's notebook, but she had scanned it onto her hard drive as a back up. No one had touched her files since, and that had been only a few weeks before her death; as far as Connor could tell, no one knew the digital copy was there.
He transferred it to his own computer, locked it under twelve different levels of security, and erased it from Sarah's. Now no one would ever know about it.
It still wasn't easy, of course. Helen was a lot of things, including both intelligent and paranoid. The notebook was written in a dozen different ciphers, switching randomly from one to the next, and there were notes scribbled all over the main entries. Still, Connor had time, and he worked patiently at it.
It was getting harder to keep up appearances with the team. He heard them talking, sometimes, about Burton and the sudden influence he seemed to have. It was news to Connor, who hadn't even realised Burton was wooing him, but it was useful. Burton would never admit that Connor wasn't working for him, so 'staying to work on a project Philip asked me to do' became his new excuse. No one expected anything he did for Burton to be comprehensible, so once he'd copied Helen's work into his own handwriting he could work on it right out in the open without fear of being caught.
When he finally cracked it he left it for a week before coming back to check his work. He didn't want to risk making a mistake at this point. He was only going to get one shot at this.
He'd been requesting bits of tech from Jess on and off for a while. More requests had gone to Burton, and he'd sourced the rest of what he needed himself. No one here would be able to figure out what he was doing.
When he was ready, he waited patiently for an alert. It was an easy one, luckily, no incursion and the Anomaly closed up within an hour. He helped the others pack up and then asked Abby if she’d mind driving back with Matt. “I want to run some scans,” he explained. “I want to add another field to the database, but I need to check it out first.”
“I’ll wait with you,” Becker offered.
“You’ll be bored,” Connor warned him. “It’s not going to take long, and I’ll keep me box on. I won’t be far behind you.” He grinned at Abby. “Pick a movie. I’ll be home to watch it.”
“You’re sure?” Becker asked, already edging towards the truck.
“Go on. I’ll be an hour, tops.”
“Alright,” Matt agreed. “Check in when you’re done, yeah?”
“Promise. Go on.” He bent over his laptop, typing until they drove away.
Then he dropped his black box, ripped the GPS out of the car, and headed for the stadium.
The Anomaly here continued to open sporadically. The ARC had a team on site with a locking mechanism at all times, and nothing had come through since the dodo that had killed Tom. That was fine with Connor; he didn’t want anything to come through.
He greeted the team, grinning easily. “Just came to check your locking mechanism,” he told them. “We’re doing some upgrades, I wanna make sure it’s ready.”
“Go ahead,” he was told, and easy as that, he was ignored again. He’d been counting on that, of course; the soldiers never paid much attention to the techies.
He kept one eye on his watch, installed a one-use-only timer and then he poked uselessly at the mechanism. He was coming up on the hour he’d asked for, and he knew his new team leader well enough to know he’d call at exactly sixty five minutes.
Then the Anomaly opened, and Connor dropped his tools, hit the delay he’d just installed and lunged for it. The locking mechanism locked it behind him, and he crowed in triumph. No one was coming through there until the next time it opened, which wouldn’t be for almost a week. He’d be long gone by then.
He was very careful about his route. Helen had mapped hundreds of Anomalies, but he knew exactly where and when he needed to be and he stuck to it. He was almost surprised when he stepped through the last one and found himself on a cliff, watching Hesperonis squawk.
Nick was walking back into the sea; Helen was standing on the beach, watching him go. Connor gave himself exactly three seconds to stare at Nick before scrambling down towards her.
Helen whirled at the sound, drawing a knife from somewhere. Connor raised his hands, pulling off his backpack and slinging it to one side, out of his reach.
Helen relaxed fractionally, watching him. “You’re Nick’s boy. What are you doing here?”
“I’m not Nick’s anything. Nick’s dead.”
“Is he?” She didn’t seem too surprised. “Where did you come from, then?”
“Four years ahead of him.” He jerked his head towards the beach.
“Why?”
“I need - something changed. Something went wrong. I need you to tell me how to fix it.”
“What makes you think I’ll do that?”
Connor glanced at his watch. “In a few minutes, soldiers are gonna come, sent by Lester to capture you. Nick didn’t know, but - “ He shrugged. “Isn’t the last time. I can help you.”
“You’ll mess up the timeline.”
“The timeline is wrong. I can’t fix it on my own. I need you.” He glanced out at the sea; bubbles were starting to rise. Turning, he scooped up his backpack and started back up the cliff. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
“I could turn you in,” she called from behind him.
“No, I don’t think you could.”
He was out of sight before the soldiers surfaced, but he could hear them. Helen fought like a madwoman, but she didn’t give him up, and no one thought to look around. Who else would be here, after all?
He was dozing in the sun the next afternoon when someone stepped into his light. Without opening his eyes, he asked, “Convinced?”
“Did I kill Nick?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t speak for a moment; when he opened his eyes she was nodding, gaze far away. “I thought so. He destroys the world, you know.”
“He doesn’t. I’ve been to the future, after he died. If it had been him it would have changed.”
She sat down, watching him. “You’re still his boy. You can’t do what’s necessary.”
“I spent a year in the Cretaceous killing for my life,” he said evenly. “I betrayed the ARC to find you. I’ll do anything to get my home back.”
“I see.” She nodded sharply. “Well then. Let’s get started.”