Fic: Primeval: Be Careful What You Wish For (1/3)

[bigtitch]

Title: Be Careful What You Wish For
Author: bigtitch
Characters: Stephen/Ryan, Cutter, Lyle, Blade, Finn, Kermit, Abby, Connor, Lester, Ditzy, Jenny
Rating: PG, implied slash
Warnings: angst, angst and more angst but this is a fixit, honest
Spoilers: mentions the unmentionable from S1.6
Word count: 2500
Disclaimer: Not mine, no names, no packdrill.
A/N: Thanks to lukadreaming for being a wonderful beta.




Ryan was dead.

However happy Stephen might be upon waking, the thought landed on him like a black cloud as soon as he opened his eyes. This cloud would coalesce and settle inside him, like a lump of lead in his chest. It was a weight he had to carry around with him through the day.

Stephen stared at the ceiling and felt the familiar weight settle on him. At least this wasn't one of the bad mornings, the ones where he woke up convinced that Ryan was beside him where he belonged and all he had to do was reach out his hand and touch him. And then to find out that all that was beside him was a cold bed and an empty pillow. Because Ryan lay elsewhere so far back in time that even his bones didn't exist now. He was dust.

He got out of bed and went into the bathroom. His body needed washing so he showered. His teeth needed brushing so he cleaned them. His face needed shaving so he did that too. As routine and as meaningless as when Cutter had come back through the anomaly from the Permian and gave him the news in words that sucked all meaning out of the world forever: Captain Ryan didn't make it.

He walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on, dug a spoonful of coffee out of the jar and stared down at the worktop. Two mugs. One for him and one for a dead man. He put the extra mug back in the cupboard, resisting the urge to beat his head against the door as he did so.

He couldn't help it. Ryan wasn't there but seemed so real to him. He walked down streets beside Stephen, stood looking in shop windows when Stephen did. If Stephen saw something interesting Ryan was there when Stephen turned to tell him. And then he would be gone, leaving Stephen alone and heartbroken again.

And Ryan haunted the ARC. There were too many black-clad figures around so Stephen saw him a dozen times a week. He'd walk past in the corridor, turn into the kitchen or the gym, only to become Finn or Kermit or Lyle when Stephen looked closer.

Ryan even haunted the local supermarket, turning corners or standing in the queue at the deli, only to disappear when Stephen looked closer. It seemed everywhere Stephen went Ryan was there, mocking him with his absence.


++++

Stephen dumped his bag on his desk and went to get a coffee. The jug in the machine was empty, of course. He sighed and set a new batch going. He considered standing there cup in hand to stake his place in the coffee queue, but decided he didn't want to look that desperate.

Out in the corridor Cutter and Connor were talking. Or rather Connor was talking and Cutter was listening. He had the look of someone drowning in Connor's data stream so Stephen went over to offer a lifeline.

'Hi guys,' he said.

Cutter gave him a brief nod of acknowledgement and Connor grinned broadly at him.

'I was just explaining to the professor how double-pulsing the waveform receptor will increase the ADD sensitivity by six per cent.'

'That sounds impressive,' Stephen said most sincerely. Connor always swept you up in his enthusiasm no matter how little you understood him.

Stephen looked over to Cutter and they shared a quick grin.

Stephen offered his lifeline. 'If you can spare five minutes, Cutter, I could do with you looking at some of the snail shells in the last batch of euoplocephalus dung I've been analysing. I think one of them might push the dating for Elona quimperium back a few millennia.'

Cutter glanced at him. 'Sure, I'll come along in a bit.' He clapped Connor on the shoulder. 'Once young Einstein here can explain this double-pulsing process.'

Connor obediently followed Cutter towards the atrium and the ADD machine, leaving Stephen alone in the corridor. It was a situation he was getting used to being in.

When Helen had gone missing Stephen had always tried to be there for Cutter. He'd gone round, chivvied him into eating and forced him to keep on with the job. He'd bullied him into getting research papers submitted on time (surreptitiously quality checking them as well.) He'd done that for over a year and the closeness of that had made it into their friendship.

But now Stephen only saw Cutter at work. Some of it was from Stephen's relationship with Ryan. It's hard not be exclusionary when you're madly in love with another person, but Stephen had always tried to make an effort to keep up his friendship with Cutter. And yet it had lessened. Stephen got the feeling that Cutter didn't know how to handle Stephen's relationship with Ryan. Stephen had never hidden his bisexuality but it looked like Cutter had managed to ignore it until Stephen had a settled lover.

It was too late to discuss that now, of course. Not when there was an even bigger issue not to discuss – Stephen's relationship with Helen. That revelation couldn't have come at a worse time. Cutter wouldn't discuss it – even on the couple of occasions when Stephen had felt up to talking about it, Cutter just refused.

Stephen decided that looking desperate by the coffee machine was preferable to looking like Billy-no-Mates in the corridor. He just got to the door when the ADD alarm went off. He cast a longing eye at the half-filled coffee jug before dumping his mug on the counter and heading off to the armoury.

Lyle and a scattering of black-clad troops were already there selecting their guns and whatever other causes of mayhem they deemed necessary for the occasion.

'No rest for the wicked, eh?' Lyle said as Stephen edged past him.

'Not even time for a cup of coffee!' Stephen agreed.

'It's not a coffee you want to miss on a morning, though,' Finn said. 'It's tea! That's what sets you up for the day, not having a nice cuppa!'

'And don't we know it!' Lyle rolled his eyes at Stephen. 'He's hopeless before he has his Earl Grey and slice of lemon!' He ducked as an empty ammo carton went past his head. 'That's assaulting a senior officer, that it is!'

Stephen grinned and relaxed as their usual banter flowed around him, occasionally chiming in or fending off a comment aimed at him.

When the civilians had failed him, it had been the special forces guys who had provided a lifeline.

He had been surprised at how easily his relationship with Ryan had been accepted by his men. With Ryan there was no real mystery - there had been no disguising the respect the captain had inspired in his men. Maybe some of that respect had rubbed off on him. Or maybe his tracking and shooting skills generated a little respect of his own. Whatever the reason, as soon as his relationship with Ryan had gone public, Stephen had found himself included without fuss or fanfare in the Special Forces team, certainly socially and (as far as the limits of the ARC project went) professionally as well.

He was, he mused, half team member and half wife-and-girlfriend. But instead of that half and half status excluding him from either side fully, when Ryan was killed both sides had been there for him. He had been embraced by a machine that dealt with death and disaster on a regular basis.

In the first hideous days the existing wives and girlfriends had engaged with practical matters, making sure there was food in his fridge and clean clothes in his wardrobe. He suspected that Claire, Ditzy's girlfriend, mentally weighted him each time they met and would issue an invite for Sunday lunch if she felt he was getting thin.

It had been the men who had quietly and without fuss given him the emotional support he needed. They had made sure there was always someone around when he needed company and would chivvy him into being more social when he had spent too long alone.

They had all helped, but it had been Blade, a hard man who offered him no sympathy, who had done most to keep him alive and sane. He'd taken him fishing.

Stephen hadn't been enthusiastic at first. But faced with a choice of being miserable in a grey flat with nothing interesting on the TV and being miserable on a riverbank, he thought he may as well be miserable somewhere new. With anyone else Stephen would have worried that this would be an opportunity to talk. But this was Blade, who rarely got above monosyllabic.

And it had turned out to be as promised. Blade loaned him the equipment, briefly explained its use, walked 100 metres down the riverbank and set himself up and left Stephen to it.

Stephen had sat down, stared at the sunlight on the water and discovered something wonderful. A place where Ryan wasn't.

Ryan had never shown any interest in anything resembling fishing. His idea of fun was mountain-biking or a hike, certainly not sitting for hours by a river or canal side. And because Ryan had never been there, Stephen found he missed him less. Ryan's absence didn't hurt him so much because he never expected to see him.

That had been the first time and Stephen had gladly taken Blade up on the next offer. The two men would sit a good distance apart, with a cool-box of beer equidistant between them. Sometimes Stephen would catch something. Sometimes he just sat the whole afternoon, staring at the water. Sometimes when he got up to fetch a beer, he found his face was wet with tears. Recently he found himself studying the habits of some herons who were fishing to far better effect than him up and down the river bank. He had started taking binoculars with him. Spring was coming and he wanted to see if there were a mating pair and whether he could find their nest.

Whatever instinct for preservation he had left in him recognised this for an unlikely lifeline and he grabbed it.

++++

The anomaly was at the Forest of Dean site. It had reopened. The permanent guard there hadn't reported anything but a skeleton crew were being sent up anyway, that crew being Lyle, Blade and Kermit, Abby and himself.

Abby and Stephen were in one of the SUVs and they drove in silence. It was Stephen's fault – he tried to respond to her conversation starters but just couldn't manage it. He tried to make the excuse of concentrating on driving, but that wasn't it. Truth be told, he wasn't concentrating on traffic but on the tight whirling in his stomach as he thought of going back to the Forest of Dean.

The drive seemed endless, but somehow they were there before he was ready for it. They pulled up at the site and Stephen could see the glitter of the anomaly through the trees.

His stomach churned and he threw himself out of the car to take in big gulps of air to try to stop himself from throwing up.

'You OK, mate?' It was Blade with a steadying hand on the middle of his back.

A couple more breaths and Stephen could talk.

'I'm OK. It's just... that!' he pointed towards the anomaly.

'I'm not fond of it myself, ' Lyle said coming to stand beside them. 'Why don't you and Blade do a quick sweep around, see if it anything's got through the perimeter. As soon as you give us the all-clear we can get back to the ARC.'

Stephen breathed deeply again, grabbing on to the job as if it were a lifeline. He could do this.

He and Blade set off to check the ground for any unusual tracks while Abby and the others went to monitor the anomaly. As usual, Blade kept himself between Stephen and the anomaly. Somehow Stephen managed to find a smile at that.

It was a routine that had started after the first anomaly he had attended after Ryan's death. He had completed a tracking sweep with Finn (his usual partner on patrol) and had come back to the anomaly. While Finn had hunted down a cup of tea he had stood watching the play of light of the anomaly fragments. He was heartsick and weary of the pain that Ryan's absence was causing him. Through that glittering oval was a world clean and empty of memories and regrets. It would kill him but it would be an easier death than the one he was living now.

'Don't even think about it,' Blade had said in his ear.

'What are you going to do?' Stephen asked. 'Shoot me?'

'Yes,' Blade told him briskly. 'Not anywhere vital, but I'll do what it takes to stop you.'

Stephen hadn't found any words to answer that promise but had stared at Blade with hot, teary eyes.

'We've lost Ryan,' Blade said plainly. 'We're not going to lose you as well. Besides, The Boss wouldn't like it.'

After that he and Abby had swapped special forces partners. She got Finn and he got Blade. Apparently the decision had been made that he was more in need of the personal protection specialist than she was.

++++

Stephen and Blade made a wide circle of the anomaly site looking for traces of a creature incursion. They didn't find anything but Stephen didn't relax. He hated being here. It felt like the Forest of Dean was intimately and malevolently involved in his life. From Helen's disappearance to her return, from Stephen meeting Ryan to Ryan's death – it all stemmed from here. It almost mocked him, giving him stuff and then taking them away.

They had nearly made a full circuit when the tone of Blade's one-sided conversation changed.

'What's up, mate?' the soldier spoke into his mic. 'Lyle? Lyle? Are you receiving me?' They stopped as Blade concentrated on what was coming through his ear-piece. 'Lyle!' Blade's posture relaxed. 'I thought something had happened.' His eyes flickered towards Stephen. 'Sure, I'll bring him back.'

'What's up?'

'Lyle didn't say. Just said I had to being you back to the site at the double.'

'I've got a bad feeling about this.'

'You and me both.'

The two men made their way back with their weapons at the ready, considerably more wary than when they left.

It didn't take long before the trees thinned out and the undergrowth lessened as they came to the edge of the anomaly clearing.

Stephen glanced towards the group by the anomaly and froze. A figure stood beside Lyle. Tall, blond, longer haired and bearded but impossibly familiar.

'Blade,' Stephen said. 'Do you see him? Is that...?'

The figure turned, a tilt of the head and Stephen didn't have to wait for Blade's awed, 'Bloody hell!' to know that this was no ghost, no hallucination, but reality.

He ran forward, uncoordinated and desperate, heedless of nothing but his need to be there. He didn't know if he was screaming it aloud and he didn't care. All he had going through his head was 'Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom.'

Because it was him. Tom Ryan. Back from the dead. A dream made real.

Stephen burst through the loose ring of people and launched himself at Ryan.

And he was held away. Stupidly, uncomprehending he struggled forward and looked down to find Ryan's strong hands holding him at bay.

'Tom?'

Ryan's tanned and bearded face looked concerned and puzzled. 'I'm sorry, mate. Do I know you?'


Continued in Part 2 next Saturday