Title: Endgame Part 18
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13
Summary: We’re all dying, say the more pessimistic philosophers: if that’s so, Jamie Burke-Lester is doing it a lot faster than most. Primeval Big Bang.

This is really, truly, and positively the last chapter of Endgame. At approximately 42,000 words, it was about 32,000 words longer than ever I planned, much, much angstier than ever I planned, and chewed up my life for longer than ever I planned. It is also the first proper long fic I have ever finished.

Many, many thanks are due to many people. First up has to be Lucas, who shrieked at me when she found out, months ago, that I was killing off Jamie, so loudly that I wrote her Liz/Juliet in mitigation; secondly everyone in the ARC chat who encouraged me, prodded me, and on several occasions formed torch- and pitchfork-wielding angry mobs on account of my quite literal character-assassination. I have not forgotten the evening you spent threatening me with losing custody of my beloved OCs, but I bear no grudge, and I would never have got to this point without you- any of you.   Third, Luka, who beta’d about 14,000 words of this- the whole last section –a feat beyond description. She massacred my colons in the name of grammar and corrected my punctuation-type misapprehensions, and trust me, I cannot thank her enough. Unless she wants me to write a ficlet. In which case I will take a request, and gladly.

It’s been fun, guys. I have handed out kilos of metaphorical tissues, received comments describing how I made you sob at work – I am sorry, I did not realise it was this weepy! – and asked many a person who would rather have been discussing something else why everyone was so attached to a character you had met only once before.

All that remains is to say thank you. Enjoy the last chapter.

~May

Liz and Juliet’s re-entry into the kitchen reminded everyone - except Nicky, who had already been thinking hopeful thoughts about eggs and bacon – that none of them had yet had any breakfast, and Alison muttered something colourful and strode over to the fridge to examine the supplies; having eight guests in the house had put a certain amount of strain on the larder. The house exploded almost sheepishly into activity, as if everyone was embarrassed by the high drama of the morning and thought moving would exorcise it, and the sore spot that was the closed door to the room Jamie had slept in and the absence of Jamie’s face and voice ached in all their hearts. Nicky, Ralph and Lyle were all packed off, complaining, to the nearest supermarket to buy eggs, bacon, orange juice, bread and milk in industrial quantities, Theo, Kathy and Lester went to make arrangements that were carefully not specified around Liz related to Jamie, and Liz, Juliet and Alison remained behind, sipping coffee and discussing ballet and CCF and anything - anything – that had nothing to do with Jamie.

It was hard for Liz, sitting there and talking, with Jamie always in the back of her mind, and she knew it was going to be hard for a long time. Still, she was now sure of something that she hadn’t been at all convinced of before; it might take a while, and the funeral was going to be a total ordeal, but she’d be okay. Reading the last of the book to Jamie had... helped, somehow. Even the weird shadow thing she’d seen that, to be honest, probably meant no more than that it had been stupid to look up at the sun- that had helped. She felt a lot calmer now.

She could see concern that she was going to fall apart writ large in Alison’s greenish eyes, and offered the older woman a small smile; she didn’t feel up to a proper one yet. Her stomach rumbled, and Juliet stopped discussing the finer points of ballet and giggled.

“You wouldn’t be hungry, by any chance?”

“Me? Never,” Liz said.

Alison smiled slightly. “The boys will be back from the supermarket soon- oh. Talk of the devil...”

There was the sound of a car parking itself in the drive, and people climbing out of the car and slamming the doors. The three in the kitchen got up and went outside.

“How was the trip?” Alison enquired, folding her arms and watching Lyle load Nicky down with bread and orange juice before sending him to take it all into the kitchen.

“Lousy!” Ralph said succinctly. “Traffic had to be seen to be believed. Bunch of old biddies and families with squalling kids trolling around the supermarket, too, always just where we were trying to get something, and there was a bloody flasher in the supermarket!”

“Oh dear,” Alison said. “What did you do?”

“You mean what did Nicky do. He asked the man if he wasn’t cold, wandering around dressed like that, and then he went and told the security guards.”

“Good lad!” Alison smiled. “No harm done, I think.”

The rest of the conversation passed Liz by, as she went to help take things out of the boot. Lyle glanced at her, and asked quietly: “You okay?”

“For a given value of ‘okay’,” Liz admitted, accepting a pot of strawberry jam and two packets of bacon. “Look, there’s something important. Before-” she hesitated- “well... Jamie told me to check his sketchbook.”

“Check his sketchbook? What?”

“That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t in a mood to, you know, say anything. He probably had a reason.”

Lyle nodded. “After breakfast, maybe.”

Liz nodded as well. “Yeah. When Dad and Mum are back.”

She turned and went back into the house, and Lyle looked at Juliet. “She’s doing well.”

“Yeah.” Juliet shrugged. “When she went out this morning it was to read aloud the last of that book. She didn’t read the epilogue before Jamie... died, so she just took it outside and found a place to read and read. I think it... I think it helped.”

 “Hmm.” They both looked back at the open door of the house.

“Closure,” Juliet commented matter-of-factly, took a box of eggs, and vanished into the kitchen.

***

Over breakfast Liz acquainted the rest of the family with Jamie’s cryptic remark about sketchbooks, and it was decided that they should follow it up. So, after breakfast had been finished and the washing-up concluded, someone thoughtlessly asked Liz to fetch the sketchbook, forgetting that it would be in the room where Jamie had died. She flicked an involuntary glance at the door - firmly closed - and blanched.

“I’ll go,” Nicky volunteered quickly, and slipped into the bedroom and out again in double quick time, returning as white as his sister, but with the black sketchbook clutched in one hand.

“I’m sorry,” the someone said, but was totally ignored in the switch of focus to the object in Nicky’s hand. The boy slid into a seat at the kitchen table, and everyone began to coalesce around the sketchbook, dragging chairs from where they’d been doing duty as ladders to the higher cupboards or holding files of lesson plans, without even having to call anyone in to stop what they were doing and come and see.

Nicky pushed the sketchbook out into the centre of the table, towards Liz, and Liz, still very pale, recoiled involuntarily. “No.”

Juliet’s hand on her shoulder tightened. She had seen Liz abseil, cave, scuba dive, handle a rifle and face a, a, well, a something- Miss Lewis had been very clear that it wasn’t a dinosaur, Ed Mackenzie had been just as clear that it was, and Juliet was not disposed to take a position on the matter – without flinching, and now she couldn’t touch a sketchbook; because it had belonged to her adored brother, and he was dead.

Lester glanced around the table. No-one seemed inclined to touch the sketchbook, and in an ordinary case he himself would quite happily have packed it away and never looked at it again. But Jamie had told Liz to check it, and he must have had a reason. Still, he understood Liz, pressed against the back of the kitchen chair, only slowly relaxing. It was like touching a flame with a burnt hand, when you knew it might burn down a house if nobody put it out; you knew it had to be done, but you knew it was going to hurt, too.

He reached out, pulled the sketchbook roughly towards him and flipped it open. Everyone craned to see.

The sketchbook was two months old and half finished; Jamie had had the strength to draw until the last few days of his life, and the latest drawings dated from four days previously. Quick sketches of friends and family, of objects, one painstaking silhouette of the London skyline, illustrations from the chapters Liz had been reading to him. Kathy blinked, and blinked again, a new shine in her eyes; her lips compressed and the hand resting on the table clenched, nails biting deep into soft palm.

And then Lester flicked over a page and came at last to blankness; and that was infinitely worse, more utterly final, than anything drawn by Jamie’s hand. They stared at it for a long moment.

“I don’t understand,” Nicky said at last. The grand gesture had fallen flat; Jamie had gathered them together from beyond the grave, to see- what? A final testimony? None of them knew - but something that meant something, that had a purpose. But there was nothing there. It was funny, in a dark and ultimately despairing kind of way.

Liz shook her head. “Me neither,” she admitted, and picked up the sketchbook herself. There was nothing new in it, so it was no longer something to be afraid of.

She held it and started to go back through it again, and several white, flat, rectangular objects fell out into her lap from where they’d been tucked into the back pages, making her start, drop the sketchbook and use several very bad words learnt from the ARC’s contingent of Special Forces.

“Elizabeth!” her mother almost shouted.

“Oh, Liz,” her aunt sighed.

“Not bad,” Ralph conceded judiciously. “Jon, did you tea-“

“Not guilty,” Lyle said, restraining himself from crossing his fingers to negate the blatant lie.

“They’re addressed,” Lester observed, voice as calm as he could make it, as he helped Liz fish the items off the floor. “I think they’re letters.”

The brief chaos of the moment deflated.

“I gave him that notepaper to write thank-you letters on,” Kathy said, strangely detached with her voice wavering, picking one up. “Nicky, this is yours.”

Nicky accepted it gingerly. The white envelope had the kind of blue and red border usually used on airmail, and was addressed in Jamie’s immaculate joined-up writing to ‘Nicky (Nicholas) Theodore Burke’. There could be no possible doubt as to who it was for. There were others too, addressed with the same almost nit-picking accuracy, one for everyone at the table. Nicky ripped his open, got a papercut, swore, was hissed at by his mother and started to read regardless. Theo fished out his Swiss Army knife and opened his, his wife’s and Ralph’s without being asked, and Lyle had already done the same for his own and Lester’s with a rather more lethal-looking knife casually produced from somewhere. Kathy reached for the kitchen scissors, and found Juliet had got there first.

Liz’s lay unopened in front of her, the teenager’s arms folded across her chest as she slouched back in her chair. Juliet nudged her gently, and raised her eyebrows at her, but Liz did nothing. Left alone, she sat rock-still and unmoving while the letters played out their dramas on the faces of those reading them, while tears bloomed in the corners of eyes and sadness filled expressions.

“Liz-“ Lester began questioningly, surprised by her attitude, and got a poisonous glare for his trouble.

“I don’t think I want to even touch it,” Liz said. Her face was not stony, but the faint tilt of the head away from the letter, the troubled eyes fixed on the letter and uncertain line of her mouth all screamed her aversion to the letter before her.

There was a long silence produced by a lot of people deciding that maybe now was not a good time to ask why.

“If you don’t,” Juliet said, the first line of her own letter running through her head (‘first things first: try to get Liz to read her letter, seriously!’), “you’ll just wonder what it says, and that will hurt more.”

“Won’t. I don’t want to know, okay?”

“Liar,” Juliet murmured, eyes firmly fixed on her own letter.

It felt as if the temperature in the room had plunged.

“I’m not lying,” Liz said finally, softly, but there was a steel in it very few people could safely ignore.

“Prove it,” Juliet said evenly.

“How?” Liz demanded. “I shouldn’t need to! You know I wouldn’t lie to you!”

“Yeah, but there are people in here you would lie to without even thinking about it. You could just have talked to them. There’s nothing to say you weren’t just talking to them.”

“Fuck you!” Liz snarled, cheeks burning with fury.

Juliet didn’t raise her eyes from the note in her hands, but if Liz had been watching closely enough she would have been her knuckles whiten, her shoulders tense, even as the flippant rejoinder poured off her tongue. “Not till you hit sixteen, sweetie, and does it look like August to you?...”

Liz’s chair hit the floor, and the back door hit the wall, as Liz stamped barefoot out into the garden. Juliet picked the chair up off the floor and sat down on it, paying no attention to the eyes on her.

Lester sat back in his chair, his own letter lying open on the table before him. None of them were very long, some only a few sentences, but Lester’s was among the longest - always presuming that the few addressed to Burke relatives, untouched in their envelopes, weren’t longer. “I’m not sure if that was inspired or incredibly stupid, Juliet.”

“Inspired. I hope.” Juliet sighed. “Look... this way, Liz sits out in the garden for half an hour, and probably gets, you know, kind of wet... ’cause it’s raining now. Maybe hits something. Not a person, more likely a wall. Anyway, she’ll cool off, and I’ll say sorry, and then she’ll read the letter.” Juliet stretched out her legs, and eyed her toes. There was blue glittery nail varnish on them. “She’ll be cross for days,” she admitted. “There’s sod-all I can do about that.”

“You could not have said it in the first place,” Kathy pointed out sharply.

Juliet met her eyes. “And then she wouldn’t have read the letter. She’d have put it away somewhere and never touched it again except maybe to hide it, and she’d be hiding it but she’d really be hiding from it because she’s scared.”

“Yes,” Lester said, and took up his own letter, turning it over in his hands. His jaw set. “It hurts, and she’s afraid of it hurting.”

“Liz, afraid of pain?” Kathy said, a certain amount of scorn in her voice. “James, are we even talking about the same girl?”

“Emotional pain,” Lester said frostily. “Not physical. To be honest, I know exactly how she feels. If you’ll excuse me.”

He got up and went out. Lyle followed him. Nicky muttered something and fled, his letter crushed in his hand. Slowly, the kitchen emptied; it was now as uncomfortable to be in the same room with the others as it had been reassuring to be together.

Juliet remained.

***

            “Most people,” Lyle commented, flopping down onto the bed and watching James Lester standing by the window and holding his letter, smoothing the paper automatically, eyes fixed on his son’s handwriting, “would try not to pick a fight with their girlfriend, boyfriend, partner or whatever.”

            “Juliet is different... Juliet and Liz are different... although I do think she may have... overreached herself a little here. And she has a point. Jamie would have known that, too.” Lester sighed, and put the letter down. “He had amazing handwriting,” he said quite randomly, but it was obvious that he was talking about Jamie. “The best in the class - always. Much better than Liz’s. God knows why.”

            “He was pretty amazing,” Lyle said. “Even I can see that.”

            “Yes. He was.”

            Lester went over, and sat next to him on the bed. “If I could have switched places with him...” His hands were folded again, one hand wrapped over a fist, elbows resting on his knees.

            “I know,” Lyle told him. The idea made him sink his teeth into the inside of his cheek to stop himself saying something stupid; his mind revolted from the idea of Lester dwindling away to nothing as Jamie had. It wasn’t hearts-and-flowers sentimentality; nothing about them ever was. It was just that when he faced the idea, he thought No, never, and there was an end to it. It wasn’t allowed to happen. He wouldn’t let it.

“Yes.” Lester leant against him, his hands uncurling, shoulders relaxing. “Oh, God. What would I do without you?”

“Explode?” Lyle suggested, and grinned mischievously at him. Lester rolled his eyes.

“No, that’s what happens when you’re around.”

“Oh, come on, sweetie, you know you love it.”

Lester snorted, but half-heartedly, as if on automatic.

They didn’t speak for a while as they settled on the bed, Jon half-lying, half-leaning against the bedstead with Lester in his arms. Then Lester said matter-of-factly, his face invisible to Lyle: “I’m going to miss him for a long time. Forever, even. There will be bad days, and worse days. It will be... painful.”

“I know,” Lyle repeated, and ran a hand through his boyfriend’s short hair, wishing he could see the expression on his face. “I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere.”

Lester leant up with some difficulty and kissed him, and they lay together for a long while without speaking. After a few minutes Lester found himself blinking away tears, and felt Jon’s arms close tight round him.

“Still here,” Jon said, and Lester nodded, for once lost for words, and was comforted.

***

The kitchen door swung open. Juliet looked up at the dripping wet figure, hands shoved stubbornly into her pockets, dark hair turned almost to black by the water and plastered to her forehead, but brown eyes still burning sullenly. She might have been crying. It was raining too hard outside for anyone to tell.

At last, Liz spoke. “I wasn’t lying.”

Silence.

“Admit it.”

More silence, and then Juliet sighed and got up, but did not move towards Liz, still standing in the doorway, motionless but for the dripping of water from her hair and clothes. There remained a tension in the room, bitter and harsh, and it had to be dispelled - and soon.

“You weren’t lying,” Juliet said. “I was. I’m sorry.”

Liz looked hard at her for a few moments more, but the tension was leaking away, from face, shoulders, atmosphere. She really hated being called a liar. “All right,” she said gruffly, and the last of the tension melted into mist.

Juliet stepped forward and kissed her, and Liz put her arms around the smaller teenager, feeling the relief in every line of her girlfriend’s body, and felt a sudden burst of pleasure that Juliet had actually been worried that she wouldn’t forgive her, that that had actually mattered to her.

“Get dry,” Juliet told her, blue eyes serious. “Change. I’ll stick your stuff in the tumble-dryer. And then, Liz, please... read that letter.”

Liz hesitated, and then, finally, she agreed.

***

There was a perfunctory knock on the bedroom door. Lester didn’t even bother to open his eyes, but Lyle knew that if they had been open, they would have rolled heavenwards. “Come in, Liz,” Lester called.

The door swung open, and Liz uncharacteristically hovered on the threshold. “S’raining again,” she observed.

“Yeah,” Lyle said, reflecting that Liz was unlikely to be disturbed by the sight of him holding her father in his arms. “You get wet?”

            Liz shrugged. “Kind of.”

            She came into the room and perched on the end of the bed, one leg crossed under her. She had been crying recently, Lyle thought, and there was a dull-edged sadness on her face, but it was low tide to the heartbreaking flood that had been there just after Jamie had died.

            “Where’s Juliet?” he asked.

            “Downstairs,” Liz said. “Doing ballet-type stretches.”

            “Oh,” Lyle said. Lester shifted in his arms and settled again; he wondered if Liz had had any reason for coming in here, or if she’d just done it randomly.

            Lyle watched Liz lick her lips nervously, then open and close her mouth once or twice as if she was working up to saying something.

            “Spit it out,” he ordered. She gave him the middle finger, but obediently spoke.

            “I read it.”

            Lyle could practically feel Lester snap to alertness, blue eyes flying open. “Well done.”

            Liz flushed. “Thank Juliet.”

            “I will,” Lester assured her. “What did it say?”

            “Lots of stuff,” Liz said vaguely. Lyle could see in her face that some of that ‘stuff’ would never be repeated by Liz, no matter who asked. “Some of it was important. Some was personal. Some wasn’t... He said it was for Nicky and me to decide who got his Swiss Army knife. You know, the one with his initials on.”

            “Yeah,” Lyle said. “And?”

            “Nicky won’t have it. He says it’s mine by right, whatever that means. So I’m keeping it.”

            “All right,” Lester said.

            “The sketchbooks are for you, Dad,” Liz continued as if he’d said nothing. “Except for some stuff he did specially for Mum. He said you already knew but he wanted to make sure.”

            “Yes,” her father agreed. It had gone to his heart to read that. He had taught Jamie to draw as much as anyone had taught the boy to do something that came to him easy as breathing, taken him to art galleries, bought him sketchbooks and pencils, encouraged him constantly. ‘Yes’ was a suitably neutral monosyllable; it hid more than ten years of his son’s life catalogued in the boy’s own art.

            Liz paused, staring at the middle distance, her eyes fixed on the wall. “He says I have to live and love it. Do everything I want to and not too much I don’t. He says I have to not let being sad kill my own dreams. He says I have to grow up and not worry about what he would have been like.”

            Lyle drew a startled breath, and felt his professional blank face automatically slide down over the natural expression of total astonishment like steel shutters. That was definitely not all the ‘stuff’, but it was certainly a lot more of it than he’d ever thought any of them would hear.

            “Sounds like good advice to me,” he said eventually, and Liz nodded and hauled herself up the bed to hug her father and Lyle.

            “He said to remember that there was a future,” she said, voice slightly muffled. “That this was the end of one game... but the tournament wasn’t over.”

            It had stopped raining outside, the last of the rainfall over. Tomorrow would dawn half-cloudy, half-sunny. There would be Liz and Juliet’s GCSEs on the horizon, the summer holiday, Liz’s sixteenth birthday, Nicky’s move to a secondary school, and of course, more dinosaurs than a sci-fi TV channel, Helen bloody Cutter, the Special Forces’ romantic entanglements and the day-to-day running of the ARC, and all this they would have to cope with. Jamie would be there in their minds, the ghost in the corner with a bright smile and brighter eyes, making it harder for them, but they would still manage, however haphazardly.

            Because – as he had reminded them - there was a future. And it was theirs.