Nobody is suddenly an author.

The Art Of Chivalry, G

2010-03-20T22:43:21Z

Title: The Art Of Chivalry
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: Lewis may have a seriously epic crush on Beth, but it’s never going to happen.
A/N: For primeval100 prompt 150, Bedtime Stories. Yet more ARClets! Lewis Ryan McAllister is Fifi’s creation from A Life Never Lived, Ryan and Hugh’s adopted son, and Beth Cooper is Luka’s creation, Cara and Kermit’s daughter. If you want a visual reference, Lewis is this guy and Beth is this girl.

Lewis bumped into her in the hall, and blushed reflexively. “Sorry, Beth.”

“It’s fine,” Beth smiled, shifting the folders of notes in her arms. “I wasn’t looking.”

Lewis shrugged, and nodded at her notes. “Work?”

Beth grimaced. “Tons. I hate A-Levels.”

“I’m bad enough at GCSEs...”

She smiled warmly at him. “You’ll be fine. I’d better go to bed, though, I’m shattered.”

“Um. Okay. Night,” Lewis said, and watched her go.

In fairytales, knights got to fall in love with princesses; but while Beth was definitely a princess, he’d suck at being a knight.

Also, Uncle Kermit would kill him.

Under The Thumb, G, and Tall Tales, G

2010-03-19T22:59:10Z

Title: Under The Thumb
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: Some people have Blade wrapped round their little finger.
A/N: For primeval100 challenge 150, Bedtime Stories. I saw Fifi’s drabble The Exciting Adventures of Uncle Ryan and remembered I was neglecting the ARClets! Carys is Lorraine and Blade’s impossible daughter. *g*

There was a sound of a door unlocking and a clatter as Lorraine crashed into the hallway, carrying a rucksack full of laptop and briefings. Blade put his book down and went into the hall to join her; she was breathless from bicycling home, her skin cold.

“Is Carys in bed?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he answered, kissing her. “She made me read for bloody hours before she’d go to sleep, though. I never want to see another storybook again.”

Lorraine chuckled and leant against him. “She has you wrapped around her little finger, you realise?”

“She takes after her mother...”

Title: Tall Tales
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: Kit’s not convinced by books, but he likes stories.
A/N: Another ARClet, but this one belongs only to Luka’s Whole New Vision ‘verse. Kit is Ryan and Stephen’s foster son, and a Luka-approved creation. *g* Gorgonopsid purposely misspelt; he’s eight and can’t get everything right. Also, I feel Kit’s pain here, as when I was eight teachers who thought the limit of my reading abilities was Animal Ark were the bane of my life.

Library Day, Ryan thought to himself as he walked into the school. Stupid thing to make kids do on a Saturday.

Despite the confusing layout, he quickly found the library and Kit, who was dubiously examining a thin book with a tiger on, but when Ryan called his name he looked up, smiled and came over to join him.

“Hey, Kit,” Ryan said. “Good day?”

Kit looked uncertain.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeeees. Ryan...”

“Yes?”

“Are books good? This one’s boring.”

“The right books are good.”

“Oh... Will you tell me about the gorgonospid later?”

Ryan squeezed Kit’s hand. “’Course.”

Hanging On The Telephone, PG

2010-03-18T22:57:52Z

Title: Hanging On The Telephone
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: At her sister’s for Christmas, Lorraine calls her boyfriend.
A/N: For primeval100 challenge 150, Bedtime Stories. I’m not sure this works. It’s been through about six versions, and I still can’t get across what I want to.

Lorraine climbed into bed in her sister’s spare room, and picked up her phone. “Niall?”

“Here.”

“You sound stressed. Bad day?”

Blade made a noise that indicated that any day was liable to be bad for someone stuck in the ARC and girlfriend-less just before Christmas. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be with you tomorrow... I’m sorry I couldn’t drive down with you.”

“It’s fine.” She shuddered. “Jac needs to turn up the heating, though.”

“You cold?”

“Very. Duvet’s nice and warm, though.”

“You’re in bed?”

“Yes.”

“Like a bedtime story?”

She grinned at the suggestive tone in his voice. “Nothing better.”

Castles In The Air, G

2010-03-17T22:59:25Z

Title: Castles In The Air

Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: Helen should have said it then.

A/N: For primeval100 challenge 150, Bedtime Stories.

She only admitted she was sick when Nick carried her back to halls and wrapped her in blankets, frowning worriedly; it didn’t matter so much that she was succumbing to weakness when Nick was holding her, stroking her hair, building castles in the air in the softest voice.

“You should come up to Scotland with me... Family’s got a little cottage-thing out in the middle of nowhere. I’d sit out with you, show you the stars... clearer than anywhere else...”

Come on, Nick, it would never work, Helen thinks.

She’s too weak to say it aloud.

She should have done.

Sunday Morning, PG-13

2010-03-01T22:55:11Z

Title: Sunday Morning
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13? Might be a soft R
Summary: Sunday morning rain is falling/Steal some covers share some skin/Clouds are shrouding us in moments unforgettable/You twist to fit the mold that I am in. Lorraine and Blade like Sunday mornings.

A/N: I should never write semi-smut, or rather, would-be-smut-if-black-wasn’t-faded-to-PDQ. It’s embarrassing. Call it fluff and watch me feel better!

It’s Sunday morning and they have nothing pressing to do and the grey summer clouds pouring wet summer rain outside make everything strangely seem strangely out of time, as if seconds and minutes and hours don’t pass as they lie together. He gets up, smoothing the duvet over her as she murmurs in her sleep, and goes to make tea; he is leaning against the kitchen counter, watching the kettle come to the boil, when she pads out into the kitchen after him, rubbing her face with sleepy hands. Her pyjama bottoms, loose, thin cotton in a pale blue check that would seem incongruous to someone who only knew alert, efficient Lorraine, are hanging off her hips; her camisole clings to her body, and her hair is all over the place, her eyes sleepy, and when she sees him she smiles at him in a lazy, sleepy way that she almost never does when she’s properly awake. He thinks she’s the sexiest thing he’s ever seen, and holds his arms out to her; she comes to him, and presses against him, tucking her head under his chin, arms sliding around his waist so her thumbs can hook into the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms.

“You got up,” she remarks, and there’s muddled, sleepy reproach and puzzlement in her voice. “It’s half-past seven on a Sunday and you got up.”

He laughs, and gently prises her head away from his chest so he can kiss her softly, lingeringly. “Only to make tea. You can drink it and go back to sleep.”

One hand disengages from his waistband, and slides up his back, fingers warm on his skin. “Or...”

“Or,” he agrees, and the kettle boils.

He turns away, pretending to ignore the sleepy, offended noise that gets him even though it makes the corners of his lips curl up, and pours tea into the two mugs he had waiting, then turns back. “Or,” he repeats. “I’m not sure what this or is, Miss Wickes. I can’t fulfil an objective if I don’t understand it.”

She narrows her eyes at him and reaches up, her fingers sliding on his face and trailing across the skin of his neck, making him shiver and rest his hands on her hips, and then leans her head against his chest and murmurs against his skin, lips warm, and his heart beats faster. “It’s too early to play games. Come back to bed.”

“Your tea will stew,” he points out, hands sliding under her camisole, loving the heat that sparks in her eyes and her sharp little intake of breath.

There’s a definite edge of irritation to her expression; irritation and suppressed amusement, because she knows he’s teasing her, and then she grabs his head in both hands and pulls him down for a serious kiss, satisfying and hot and intoxicating. “Never mind the tea,” she whispers against his lips when they both have to gasp for breath, and backs away. Her smile and her eyes laugh at him.

He follows her, and catches her just as she’s reaching the bed and tackles her down into the rumpled duvet, and she laughs out loud and he kisses her lips, her jaw, her neck, her collarbone-

The tea does stew.

Paradox

2010-02-28T22:55:48Z

Title: Paradox
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13?
Summary: Things they are and things they aren’t; perfect and lethal and love and the disturbing lack of difference between all three. Lorraine/Blade

A/N: I don’t even know.

He’s tough. Everyone knows that. He’s made of something harder than skin, than flesh and bone and muscle- like all the soldiers, really, you put him through a mangle of guns and blood and things with too many teeth and he comes out with a gimlet stare, armed and ready, cut about and bruised and still willing and able to do it all again. Except his toughness extends to his mind, his thought processes are cold and calm until they’re not and he blows up in your face because some things still have the power to break open the carapace that grief and pain and practice built over his emotions.

He doesn’t jump at the sound of gunfire, he can lock pain into his teeth and jaw and pretend agony doesn’t matter, he can kill and make it beautiful in an atavistic sort of way, silver steel knives and blood and skill. He can walk for miles in the burning sun and never tire, he can put himself through hell to achieve his objectives and hide the fresh layers that every new sadness puts on him, like shining flakes of mother-of-pearl or droplets of mercury.

Beautiful, but fragile.

Wonderful, but dangerous.

And at the same time he’s not because this man, she knows, and she could probably break him and she doesn’t mean just physically (she’d have to be faster than him and she’s not: but with the right gun in her hands it is quite quickly becoming apparent that there’s not a lot she can’t actually do) but mentally, too. She could tell him she doesn’t love him; she could end what they have, cut it off and tear it from her flesh, tear every tiny thread-like root out from under her skin, and she could do it and it would break him but it would leave her flayed and bleeding and even more broken than him. And besides, it would be a lie.

This man needs her, as much as she needs him. This man needs her to love him, needs her to promise him it will be all right and lie half-curled and heavy with sleep in his arms at night, needs her to be there, still and quiet and the rock in the river that doesn’t move, ever. He smiles at her. He doesn’t lie to her. He protects her, even when she doesn’t need it, and he gives her a window onto who he is, the shell behind the mother-of-pearl, the water the mercury sinks through. The silence and cleanness in his own mind, the self-enforced emptiness (because you love people and they leave you and it hurts because you can’t save them because you can’t keep them because they don’t want you because that’s your fault because you’re just not worth the wanting), the sharp edges of his logical thought processes and the way he can reduce a catastrophe to a set of orders for himself, do this, then do that, and this. He lets her see, too, what happens when someone hits the wrong buttons, when someone behaves towards her in a way he doesn’t like, when somebody pushes too hard at the wrong subject despite all the warnings, when someone gets between him and those he’s reluctantly decided to keep close. Lets her see the fire that flares up from somewhere he doesn’t understand, because he brought himself up in between the exhortations to eat his vegetables and the hours left alone and the tears because his eyes are just like his mother’s, and he never really learnt to mix fire and ice and moderate himself, so sometimes rationality escapes him. He even lets her see what she does to him, lets her see the slow burn of love that won’t go out, that won’t go away; that lets her sink into his consciousness like a depth charge, that makes him call her beautiful and hold her close, anxious not to crush her and wanting her as close as she can get, pressed against his skin and her arms round his back like she wants to melt into him, like she wants to be part of him and part of him to be her, untouchable, invincible, always there. Because he wants that, and so does she.

They shouldn’t work, because they’re so totally different, and even Matt-who-knows-everything says this until he says it to the strange woman with black and pink hair who has eyes like Lorraine’s and introduces herself as Jacinth Wickes, and she laughs herself sick at him. They aren’t, they really aren’t; they have the same capacity for silence and stillness and insane cleverness and keeping their thoughts inside their respective heads, and an instinctive line to each other’s understanding. They operate on the same wavelength, and they love each other, and they’re easy for you to break and you can’t lay a finger on them, and they’re two-peas-in-a-pod the same and are-you-even-the-same-species different. They’re biro stains and blood stains, black and white, guns and knives, and together they are perfect and lethal.

What disturbs people is that they can’t tell which is which.

Takeaways And Too Much Information, PG

2010-02-27T22:19:28Z

Title: Takeaways And Too Much Information
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG (some language, not much)
Summary: Lester spends the one-year-anniversary of his divorce with his best friend, and Emily Sayers fails at subtlety in everything.

A/N: So Juliet’s mother has been growing clearer as a character in my mind for a while – Fifi even helped me cast her: Jodie Foster - and then this fic popped into my head, as fic has been doing all day, preventing me from my collaborative duties on other fic, and I had to write it.

It was one of those nights. Work had been a catastrophe, and it showed on his face; when he came home Liz had hugged him and retreated quickly to her room to do homework and waste time on Facebook.

There was a knock on the door, and he got up to answer it. Dr. Emily Sayers bounded through, kissed him on both cheeks and hugged him, and exclaimed in her usual carrying voice: “James, darling! You have that look on your face.”

Lester sighed. Emily Sayers was perhaps his closest non-related friend. She was the only single parent among all the parents of Liz’s year, and although Lester was only recently divorced for all the interaction Liz allowed her mother in her life he might as well have been a single father, not to mention the fact that she refused to be intimidated by him and always had done: she’d been a great comfort during the worst stages of the divorce, turning up on his doorstep for hugs and alcohol and square meals and terrible, terrible movies. She had also instituted a regular day of the week when she turned up at the flat with a decent bottle of wine and ordered takeaway for them.

Really, how could he have forgotten it was Friday?

He dragged his brain back to relevancies. “What look, Emily?”

“The look that says you have been acting in a manner not commensurate with the fair and above-board functioning of a democracy, and it pisses you the hell off.”

Lester took a moment to process this. “Close enough,” he admitted at last.

“I knew it!” Emily said, and hugged him again. “Poor baby. Chinese or Indian?”

“You choose,” Lester sighed. “I’m not in a fit state to make decisions.”

“Are you in a fit state to drink alcohol and take orders?” Emily demanded practically.

Lester raised an eyebrow at her. “Not at the same time.”

“You’ll do! Here.” She thrust a bottle of wine into his hands. “I have unilaterally decided that we are having Chinese. Go and uncork this and put some in glasses. Was it a really honestly terrible day?”

Lester sighed again, uncorking the wine. “South African white goes with Chinese?”

“It does,” Emily declared, bouncing up onto the island in the middle of the kitchen. “I say so, therefore it does. Also we have not ordered yet and you don’t know what we’re having, so. Go and get a menu when you’re done there. Behind the clock.”

“There are no menus behind my clock!”

“Yes there are. I put them there.”

“My cleaning lady will have moved them.”

“No she won’t. She thinks I’m right and you need feeding up!” Emily poked Lester in the stomach for emphasis.

He glared. “Kindly refrain from doing that when I’m trying to pour the wine.”

Emily stuck her tongue out at him.

“That is childish.”

“So is not answering my question,” Emily retorted, trapping him neatly. “Terrible day?”

“Yes,” Lester said reluctantly. “And it’s all classified, except for the bit where Kathy rang me up in my lunch hour to complain about Liz making sure she didn’t get her school reports- Kathy getting Liz’s reports, that is –or invites to parents’ evenings.”

“Oh burn,” Emily said sympathetically. “Liz really doesn’t like her mum, does she.”

“No. They’re going through a very bad patch,” Lester admitted.

“Why?”

“Two weeks ago Kathy called CCF a blatant recruiting tool for an instrument of slaughter and castigated me for allowing Liz to join. She wanted to know if I wanted my daughter to become a part of said instrument of slaughter and die young and violently.”

“Christ on a piece of toast! James, I know you used to be in love with her, bu-“

“I know, I know,” Lester interrupted, and sighed yet again. Emily pushed his wineglass towards him; he nodded thankfully at her, picked it up, and took a sip. “When she called me this morning, she... became rather personal... and made some unfounded accusations...”

“Mm,” Emily said, and her eyes were full of sympathy. She reached out and gripped his shoulder gently. “I told you about the part where Juliet’s father called me a stupid whore for getting pregnant?” Lester’s head shot up and he stared at her. “No, I see I did not. Or the time where I took her to see him, because, you know, she does have a right to know who her father is? Do you know what she did?”

“Did he really say that to you?” Lester demanded, furious on her behalf.

“Really really.”

“What’s his name?”

“Uh-uh.” She waved a finger at him. “No revenge. I already broke his nose and outstripped him professionally, and Juliet called him a bastard who hurt her mummy and bit him.”

In spite of himself, he laughed. “How old was she at the time?”

“Seven,” Emily winced. “I think my language leaves something to be desired. I’m a bad mother.”

This time, he laughed properly, and she laughed with him, and then got down to grab the menus – which were, in fact, behind the clock. They ordered, and sat talking for a while, waiting for their orders to arrive.

“How are you doing on the significant other front?” Emily demanded, swirling her second glass of wine in the glass.

Lester raised an eyebrow at her, but she just stared insistently back, and he gave in. “There’s no-one.”

Emily shrugged. “It’s hardly like there’s pressure. I mean, you only got divorced- last year, isn’t it? Ooh, almost to the day.”

“It...” Lester had a very funny feeling inside. “It is the day, actually.”

Emily’s eyes went wide. “Oh my God. James, I am so sorry for reminding you.”

“No- no, it’s fine,” he dismissed, and found, to his surprise, that it was- more or less. When Kathy wasn’t being vitriolic or freezing him out, and as long as the boys kept in contact with him (although Nicky’s simmering anger was a constant ache), he managed well enough. He found a smile for Emily, who smiled back in relief.

“I sometimes think you need to get laid, that’s all,” she explained disarmingly, crossing her legs at the knee. “You’re too strait-laced, and I suspect you could use a chance to let go.”

He arched an eyebrow at her. “Did you just proposition me, Emily Anne Sayers?”

Emily grimaced. “What have I told you about using my full name? Where did you get hold of it, anyway?”

Lester just smiled serenely, withheld the information that since Emily was employed by the government on classified research, it was relatively easy for James Peregrine Lester, government hatchet man, to get hold of the relevant details, and waited for her to answer. He knew she would. She rarely flinched from even the most personal questions.

“Anyway.” She frowned, pursing her lips, and then looked at him frankly, her eyes running up and down his body. “Not really. I mean, I might. We could work quite well as fuck-buddies, I suppose, but we both need something deeper than that in a relationship, and it would just be mutually unsatisfying no matter how good the sex was. And you’re not bad-looking, James, but you know I like my men less tied to a desk.” She smirked. “Although I have been known to wonder what you’d look like out of a suit.”

He choked on his wine and turned pink about the ears, and she went off into a peal of laughter. “Too much information? You asked for it, James!”

He glared at her, and she only laughed harder, and then the takeaway arrived. They took delivery of it, setting out the foil-covered boxes on the counter and peeling away the foil, putting the food on plates, and giving Liz her share when she turned up to ask for it and returned to her room. They were eating, sitting comfortably on the sofa, Emily having kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the coffee table, which made Lester raise his eyebrows but which he knew better to object to, when he suddenly put an arm around her and hugged her close.

“I’m glad you’re my friend,” he said into her hair. “And I’m glad you’re here tonight.”

She didn’t say anything; she didn’t need to. She just put her free arm around him and hugged him back. “You’re okay, James,” she said softly. “You know that? And you know that just because I’m not interested in a relationship with you doesn’t mean that there isn’t someone else out there who fancies the pants off you? I know you feel wrung-out and exhausted now, but you will be happy again.”

Sometimes, times like this, he really wished he could tell her about the ARC. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but instead he just said: “I know.”

Emily sort of chuckled and elbowed him in the ribs and teased: “In your own time, James,” and he sighed impatiently and requested her to desist enacting actual bodily harm on his person, and she laughed at him, and they were back to normal.

Fifty-Six Lives And A Pair Of Tweezers, PG-13

2010-02-27T17:21:49Z

Title: Fifty-Six Lives And A Pair Of Tweezers
Fandom: Star Trek (Reboot)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Damn it, Nyota hates it when Gaila nicks her stuff, but this time she can’t be angry.

A/N: I’m not sure where this came from . O_o It may just be a fit of May-madness.

The first time Nyota sees Gaila again after the massacre involving the Narada and about seven Starfleet ships, Gaila is standing by the huge window in the hospital common-room. She is not wearing uniform, but a soft primrose-yellow shift dress that gets about halfway down her thighs and stops and lace-patterned black leggings that fail to reach her knees. Her glorious red hair has been cut short, at first because it had to be and then because Gaila wasn’t willing to go out in public with the ugly but necessary quick cut by a medical intern to remove singed and blackened patches. There are pale scars on her bare arms and legs, the stripes and sparks of electrical burns that would have killed her if she was human.

Nyota spares a moment to thank any god out there that her roommate, while vastly irritating and prone to stealing her black nailpolish, is not human and is therefore still alive.

She’s standing there at the window, looking at something in her hand which Nyota can’t see, turning it over and over in delicate fingers; she’s perceptibly thinner and weaker, but she will be strong again, Nyota promises herself, promises Gaila who sleeps with anyone she feels like and smiles all the time and never, ever talks about her past. Quietly, Nyota hopes that the horror of the Farragut’s demise didn’t break Gaila’s mind, didn’t wound her where years of slavery couldn’t. Some people say that Orion slave women enjoy themselves, but looking at Gaila’s eyes, looking at the constant awareness of everyone’s position relative to her, Nyota is pretty damn sure that Gaila wasn’t among them, that she didn’t like being used. Casual sex is fine; being a toy is not. This is a rule by which Gaila lives her life, or Nyota thinks it is.

Possibly this is why Spock told her she displayed exceptional aural sensitivity; if you want to guess even the tiniest bit about Gaila Vro, you have to listen when she isn’t talking and hear what she doesn’t say. Nyota picks on that random god again, but not for thanks this time; for a prayer that Gaila will not have stopped talking without uttering a word, that she will not become a cool ceramic blankness that even Nyota cannot listen to and translate.

All this passes through Nyota’s head as she crosses the common-room, ignoring the chatter of residents. Dealing with Kirk as her captain (oh dear god her captain) has taught her to think very fast and remove the button that says DO NOT PUSH from his grasp before he even knows it’s there.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Her head is becoming cluttered, which is a stress reaction to not knowing if Gaila’s all right in the head, or maybe it’s fear that she isn’t. With an effort, Nyota clears it just as Gaila turns to her, blue eyes full of sadness – and cruelly that makes Nyota happy because they aren’t blank and that means that Gaila is still in there – and holds out to Nyota on her flat palm the thing she was toying with earlier.

It’s a pair of tweezers. Stainless steel, with pink rubber grips which are a bit melted, the steel a bit battered.

Nyota’s mind goes totally blank and her jaw drops and this is why Nyota hates Gaila sometimes, because she hadn’t even noticed they were missing. Gaila’s personal code of conduct apparently does not include ‘thou shalt not steal your roommate’s nailpolish, moisturiser, eyeliner, or anything else, and thou shalt especially not steal her clean panties just because thou forgot to do thine own damn washing, Gaila, I’m serious!’ and ever since they’ve roomed together at the Academy, little things of Nyota’s have vanished. Of course, they come back, usually in mint condition and sometimes before. The panties were clean when Nyota got them back, forty minutes after she’d noticed they were missing.

But they were still Nyota’s goddamn panties and these are Nyota’s goddamn tweezers and, fuck it, sometimes Gaila is a real pain in the ass.

“Your tweezers saved my life,” Gaila says, in all seriousness. “They saved fifty-six people.”

Nyota forgets to be pissed and just gapes at her. “Gaila, what-?”

Gaila shuts her eyes and her jaw twitches as she tries not to clench it and speaks and doesn’t quite explain, but this is okay, as Nyota’s Gaila-interpretation skills have not gotten too rusty in the week or so they’ve been apart. Nyota hears what Gaila says and doesn’t say and her imagination matches it up with the fragments of ship, the tiny matchstick figure that might have been a human body, the metal ripped like paper and floating in space that she saw from the bridge of the Enterprise.

nobody here knows what’s going on because does it look like we’re on the bridge this is engineering and we’re dying dying dying as weapons we don’t understand tear open the hull and pour fire down our walkways and into our engines and gaila’s another pair of hands boosting the cooling systems and filling holes with sealant, a flash of red hair and green skin and a ripped stained burned uniform but she ignores the pain because she can, breathes as best she can and tries to cope with the shifting pressure inside the ship, stumbles and falls and picks herself up again as the Farragut lurches, and baby baby no the chief engineer whispers with tears on his face because half his engineers are dead and his beautiful ship is dying. He hits the commands to seal off and shield the section of the ship with its own life support systems (gaila thinks automatically medical bay mess auxiliary power source) and gaila cries to him, what, what are you doing, and he turns to her and he screams saving lives, saving lives, go and take the others with you and save what you fucking well can cadet because that’s all you can do in this life: or that’s what he meant to scream but there’s no time and all that makes it out of his mouth is run before metal shrapnel pierces his eyes and peppers his brain and there’s blood in his mouth and he’s dead.

smoke, fire, sparks. gaila runs, calls to the others, dives and rolls under the closing steel door with seconds to spare and discovers that nobody followed her. well they can call her a coward if they like but screens are telling her that not all the doors closed because the automatic circuits are broken and screams are telling her that medical bay has more patients than doctors and she should finish her commanding officer’s last actions for him it’s all the tribute she can give him and it will save lives. Gaila doesn’t hesitate she takes her electronic screwdriver out of her belt and rips open the panels with it and her bare hands, fumbles trying to route power to the override circuits but her fingers are too clumsy and she fears to break the wires, she pats down her pockets and toolbelt panickily and there it is there is her salvation there are the tweezers she meant to give back to nyota and nyota’s going to be pissed but there’s no time to think about that, no time, no time.

“Smoke,” Gaila says slowly, remembering. “Smoke, fire, sparks...”

Nyota’s eyes are stricken, and she is full of guilt that Kirk’s weird combination of certifiable crazy and utter brilliance meant that she was spared while Gaila suffered. She doesn’t even care about the tweezers any more.

Gaila blinks again and there’s a new alertness in her eyes. She clears her throat and pushes the tweezers gently towards Nyota. “So. I’m sorry I took your tweezers. Do you want them back? They’re kind of burnt. Should I buy you new ones?”

“No,” Nyota says, “no,” and she’s shaking her head and crying as she folds Gaila’s hands over the tweezers and puts her arms around the other woman, feeling Gaila stiffen with surprise and rubbing her hand over the other woman’s shoulderblades and rocking her. “No, no. I’m not mad, Gaila, I’m not. I swear I’m not. Come back to Starfleet and bring the tweezers and save more lives. Oh God Gaila, oh God, I’m so sorry-“

Gaila’s arms fold around her too, with the tweezers clutched in one fist. “It’s okay, Nyota, it’s all right. I’m fine, I promise. I’m fine.”

Maybe it’s inappropriate that it occurs to the both of them that this is the first time Gaila has nicked something and Nyota has not been mad, or maybe it’s just Nyota and Gaila and that’s the way they are, tweezers and all.

Cupboard Love, PG-13

2010-02-10T22:56:12Z

Title: Cupboard Love
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Anders and Carter just aren’t so hot on appropriate locations sometimes...

Lorraine stared at the cupboard, wondering what on earth to do next, and thanking God she hadn’t opened the door yet. She’d worked in the ARC for years now, but she still had some standards, and when she heard the mysterious noises from one of the empty cupboards waiting to be filled with files it took her a few seconds to work out what they were, by which time she had already had her hand on the handle.

There was a loud moan.

Fired with embarrassment, she twisted the handle, locking the cupboard, but that didn’t produce even a momentary interruption.

“Oh fffff- Jason-” someone groaned, and Lorraine fled.

Half an hour later, Captain Jacobs turned up in her office, frowning. “Miss Wickes, do you know where Anders and Carter might be?”

“I’m afraid not, Captain,” Lorraine said mildly, pushing her glasses further up her nose and frowning at Lieutenant Lyle’s unique spelling.

She gave it another fifteen minutes before walking downstairs again, unlocking the cupboard, and delivering a short speech on inadvisable places to have sex.

Holding Out For A Hero, PG

2010-02-10T22:54:34Z

Title: Holding Out For A Hero
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: It’s the symbolism that counts! Abby/Stringer.

A/N: This was meant to be a drabble. It didn’t happen. Also, for those fortunate ones not related to a football encyclopaedia, Man U=Manchester United football team. *g*

Also? Like many things, this made more sense in my head.

“No, really, I couldn’t be less interested if you tied me up and threatened to feed me to a rubber duck-“

“Is that an invitation? Because I think it is.”

“Is this conversation going to end with me slapping you? Because I think it is.”

The raised voices at the other end of the bar attracted Mary Mitchell’s attention, and she turned to see a student in shorts and ripped fishnet tights with short blonde hair glaring at a teenager in a football shirt who thought he was a lot smoother than he actually was. She also saw Captain Stringer gliding in their general direction like a shark which has scented blood, and decided to wait and see what happened before interfering.

“Is there a problem, miss?” Captain Stringer enquired genially.

The student smiled gratefully. “Nothing I wouldn’t be able to handle with a hockey stick.”

“Nothing the general absence of hockey sticks, I’ll assume there is,” Captain Stringer said pleasantly, and turned to the Man U supporter, who was staring balefully at him. “Were you bothering the lady?”

The teenager muttered something. Captain Stringer raised a censorious eyebrow, which got a sulky apology, the teenager evidently having registered that the soldier could quite easily tie him in a knot.

The student smiled.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Stringer asked, still polite.

She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m driving and I need to get to Bristol. Only stopped for coffee.”

“Ah, well. Good luck,” Stringer said, shook hands, and returned to the bar for his own drink.

“Abby isn’t much for being a damsel in distress,” Mary observed, pouring it. “But you’d like to be her hero anyway, wouldn’t you?”

Dinosaur pictures...

2010-02-06T14:33:29Z

So I may have been drawing dinosaurs in my lessons... Well, it wasn't as if my teachers minded. One of them congratulated me on knowing it was an apatosaurus, not a brontosaurus, and another asked me how I'd got into dinosaurs.

Okay By Me

2010-02-01T22:40:22Z

Title: Okay By Me
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: 15. Warning for some language!
Summary: In 2009, Liz Lester went through an anomaly and almost never came out again; in 2009, Liz Lester broke up with her girlfriend; in 2009, Nick Cutter went through an anomaly and never came back. This is what happened in 2024. Liz/Juliet.

A/N: Riffs off Luka’s Whole New Vision. Curses!, All Kitted Out, and In Confidence belong to the same ficverse. Also birthday fic for Luka! *hugs* Happy birthday! I hope this is okay by you, too. ;)

Thanks go to Fifi for a truly Speedy Gonzales beta. :)

When the first journalist called her, Liz was a bit surprised. Since the furore around 2013, when the unfortunate fact of anomalies became public knowledge (Liz still winced at the memory of the tabloid pieces, and the totally unauthorised book written about the ARC’s main players, cringingly titled Anomalous), Liz had avoided journalists on principle, even the journalism students when she was at university. Even though Jamie had rung her to spread the glad tidings about the anomalies reopening, she had not expected that a journalist would run her to ground to try and get a scoop.

“No,” she said flatly.

“Captain Lester, your perspective on the anomalies is unique-“

“So is every other member of my family’s. Why are you calling me?”

Silence.

Liz sighed, turned off the hob, pasta bubbling slowly to a halt, and leant against the counter in preparation for a serious explanation. “I have not got a unique perspective, all right? At least, nothing that’d interest you. I-”

“But you have! You’ve been through an anomaly actually with Helen Cutter-“

“It was a long time ago. I was seventeen, which is roughly the age you sound.”

Grumpy silence, this time.

Liz sighed again. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

“But-“

“Nothing,” Liz repeated sharply, and ended the call. As an afterthought, she pressed the small orange button beside the blacked-out screen which meant that all calls would be routed to answerphone.

She finished cooking the pasta, and mechanically ate it standing up, staring out at the garden.

The anomalies were really back, then. The journalist calling her was proof, in an obscure sort of way, more proof than Jamie’s excited chatter during a hurried call before his plane took off.

Liz shut her eyes and remembered. Closer to the surface of her mind were recollections of obscure bits of Africa and Asia and South America, blood and guns and explosives and scars, but hidden beneath these lay a thick seam of memories unfaded by time, of her forced trip through time at the age of just-about seventeen. Her hands curled into fists as she remembered the woman responsible.

Helen was supposed to be dead. She had been shot, twice, before she disappeared through an anomaly, and mere hours later all the anomalies were shut down. It was almost inconceivable that she had survived, but what if she had? Connor Temple, apparently, had posited a theory that these anomalies had been functioning on another frequency which for some reason was less efficient at creating anomalies while the other, stronger frequency, 87.6 FM, still worked. With 87.6 FM locked down, these anomalies were able to strengthen, to multiply, feeding off the increased activity on that frequency.

So: assume there were still anomalies when we believed them gone, Liz told herself, and assume that Helen is still alive, or has skipped forward in time to now...

“Not good,” she said aloud, “not at all good,” and then added pensively, “This is going to go to hell so quickly.”

Thoughtfully, she reached into her pocket, feeling for the penknife she kept there, and was relieved to find it still there. Then she went for a hunt on her kitchen table, rifling through the two months’ worth of junk mail, bank statements, catalogues and personal correspondence that she had dumped there that morning, intending to sort it all out after lunch. Two months in obscure corners of Africa training idiots who couldn’t find their backside with both hands and a metal detector had been neither rewarding nor instructive, and it had created an impressive backlog of answerphone calls and post.

At the very bottom, underneath an unexplained copy of Vogue - Liz had tried emailing, calling and even writing old-fashioned letters, but whichever computer gremlin at Vogue had sent a twelve-month subscription to 62 Hemingway Street, Herefordshire as opposed to 62 Hemingway Street, Hertfordshire, they weren’t accepting her corrections – she found her phone. It was a tiny thing, which explained why she’d managed to forget about it to the extent of leaving it under her post.

She moved to the same computer set in the wall that served her as a home phone, and pressed a couple of buttons and navigated the touchscreen until she was flicking through her book of contacts. She had never transferred the number she wanted to her own mobile; the chances that she would call it were low.

The number she was looking for occupied almost the entirety of the J section.

Juliet London.

Juliet mobile.

Juliet Moscow.

Juliet Mumbai.

Juliet New York.

Juliet Paris.

Juliet Rome.

Liz hesitated, and chose Juliet mobile, then pressed ‘yes’ when the message came up Call Juliet mobile?. As the phone rang, she felt her heart start to thud, quick and hard in her chest.

“Please pick up,” she whispered, and then stopped dead, shocked. She had thought that Juliet was simply no longer a part of her life any more, even if the other woman did always keep her updated on her contact details, and even if Liz always checked the culture section of newspapers, looking for reviews of the Royal Ballet and watching for Juliet Sayers’ name. There had been an interview, a few years back, and a review of Soldier Girl, the first ballet Juliet had starred in. She had cut them out of the newspapers and kept them, tucked away in a photo album that only her brother Jamie knew about, and he never mentioned them.

Ms Sayers shows remarkable promise, and is a talented dancer... her portrayal of Cleo, the titular ‘soldier girl’, showed both a freshness true to the character and a remarkable realism, conflict and strength, which helped to ground a ballet that could easily have been a catastrophe of cloying idealism... Levy deserves all the praise he has received for this extraordinary production.

Liz had gone to the first night, and Juliet had sent her a programme with the words ‘I danced Cleo for you, but I think you know that’ written inside. That had been their last meaningful contact, except for the contact details that Juliet periodically sent her, and it had been nine years ago. They had left each other behind.

But Juliet, too, had known about the anomalies, and Juliet, too, had been dragged into the vortex when the anomalies were made public. Not at first, but later, when the book Anomalous was published, because the author, an investigative journalist, had devoted an entire chapter to talking about Lester and his home life with an alarming voyeurism, going into Lester’s relationship with Lyle and his daughter’s with Juliet in appalling detail. They’d sued the hell out of the journalist who’d written it, they’d got their money, the book had stopped being sold, but Liz would more happily have taken her price out in blood for the scared and unhappy look on Juliet’s face. They had drifted apart not long after Liz returned from her six months behind the anomalies, unable to tell Juliet what had happened to her, but the instinct to protect Juliet remained strong.

The phone rang for the umpteenth time, and then, suddenly, it beeped and a voice issued from the speakers. “Liz? Liz? Oh my God. Is it you?”

Liz licked her lips and tried to speak. “Yeah.” It came out as a croak. She cleared her throat. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh, my God,” Juliet repeated. “Wait.” There was another beep, and an image fizzled onto the screen.

Juliet was older, but the kittenish face-shape, almond-shaped blue eyes and long blonde hair hadn’t changed, and nor had the beaming smile on her face. Liz was awkwardly aware that Juliet would be seeing someone very different to the girl she’d known; a woman with hair in a short, utilitarian cut, hard eyes and an almost hawk-like look to her face. Liz was thirty, and although it would be hard to say she looked older than her age, she certainly looked as if the years had contained a fair amount of violence, some of which she’d been dealing out.

The split in her eyebrow she’d acquired in her two months away training idiots wouldn’t help, really. Liz consoled herself with the fact that Juliet couldn’t see the broken finger, cocooned in white plaster. Or the stretchy bandage around her knee.

Juliet choked a laugh. “It’s you. God. I can’t believe it. It’s you.”

Liz shrugged awkwardly. “It’s... been a while.”

“Eight years, four months and three weeks!”

Liz stared at her. “You were counting?” You missed me?

Juliet glared. “I was counting, okay? I got into the habit of it. It happened. I missed you.”

Okay, you missed me. “Er...” Liz looked down, eyeing her bare feet. “I... don’t know what to say to that.”

She wasn’t going to tell Juliet about the blondes who’d come onto her, the few who had kissed her, and the fact that she’d never taken any of them home or even started dating them because she looked at them and thought Juliet and that wasn’t fair. She wasn’t going to tell Juliet about the two or three guys she’d dated just to try it, and realised it was a mistake. She wasn’t going to tell Juliet about Tez, who had left her only six months ago after telling her that ‘Liz, babe- you never got over your first girlfriend, you stupid monogamous bitch’. No, she definitely wasn’t going to tell Juliet about Tez.

Juliet stopped smiling, and Liz felt a sharp stab of regret.

“I missed you more,” she blurted, and watched a cautious, intrigued glint shine in Juliet’s blue eyes, her head tilt carefully sideways.

“I thought you left me.”

“It wasn’t working, and we both knew it,” Liz said, more harshly than she meant to. “I couldn’t tell you why I’d changed so much. It wasn’t fair on you. And then, when it all... you know... we were both too shocked by that-“ she bowdlerised hastily- “by everything. Too shocked to do anything, I mean.”

“Like get back together?”

Liz nodded, haplessly.

Juliet chewed her lip, and the familiarity of the gesture pulled at Liz’s heart. “I... Hmm. Maybe.” She paused a moment. “I don’t think you called to tell me that, though.”

“No,” Liz whispered. She took a deep breath. “Juliet, the anomalies are back.”

Juliet went white. “What?”

Liz nodded. “Yes. I- look, I don’t know how much I can tell you over the phone. Where are you?”

“Birmingham,” Juliet said. “On tour. You?”

“Hereford. Off tour,” Liz joked, and saw Juliet smile again with unspeakable relief. “How about I come up and see y- Ju. Juliet, you look like you’re about to faint.”

“Oh, Christ, yes,” Juliet said, and disappeared from the screen.

“Juliet? Juliet?”

“Still here. I’m sitting on the floor in case you say anything like that again.”

“Oh?... Uh. Okay.”

“When?”

“When w- oh. This afternoon?”

“That’s soon,” Juliet commented.

“It’s kind of urgent. Jamie told me only hours after I got back- he hauled me out of bed, literally, I was sleeping off the op –that was just yesterday, and I had a journalist ring me up about an hour ago wanting to talk anomalies.”

“Aargh,” Juliet said succinctly.

“Aargh,” Liz agreed. “Are you free this afternoon?”

“Yes,” Juliet said.

“I’ll be with you as soon as I can, then.”

“Yes.” A pause. “I... God, I missed you so much.”

“Yeah,” Liz said softly, “me too.”

She ended the call, and bit her tongue on the ‘I love you’ that threatened to roll off it.

The journey to Birmingham was a mere matter of hours, and Liz tapped her fingers nervously on the wheel all the way. Her thumbs were not prickling, as someone very senior had once asked her if they did, severely startling Liz, then a green second lieutenant, and alarming the company when he explained that any stepdaughter of Jon Lyle’s had probably picked up more than just his cheeky grin; after that, everyone had looked at her like a suspected IED. Still, the lack of prickly thumbs meant nothing.

Once she’d got to Birmingham it was easy to find the theatre Juliet was performing in and park the car, hopping out and wincing when she jarred her knee. She made a concession to her injury by walking sedately up the steps, rather than taking them two at a time, and pushed the door open.

Seeing Juliet again in person was a sucker-punch to the stomach, driving the breath from her. The comfortable grey tracksuit bottoms, the loose jumper over a tight cotton vest- she even dressed the same, damn it! –the blonde hair caught up into a loose knot at the back of her head and the straight carriage, it was all painfully familiar.

It took a moment for even the basics of the uncomfortable conversation Juliet was having with what looked like an usher to filter through, and then Liz found herself glaring viciously at the usher, a perfectly inoffensive bottle-blonde with clumpy mascara and her eyes on Liz’s Juliet as if she wanted her hands to be there instead.

“Uh, Serena, that’s really sweet of you, but-“

“Any time,” Serena assured her, and tucked a slip of paper into her hand. “Here’s my number, if you’d ever like to... meet up...”

Liz crossed the lobby in three strides, seized Juliet by the waist and pulled her into a long and deeply satisfying kiss, feeling the shock of contact as Juliet’s slim, wiry figure pressed against her own and Juliet’s hands laced themselves into her short hair, and reeling with the knowledge that at one time she had actually given this up, this warmth against her body and in her heart.

Also, that Juliet was going to give her hell for this when she wasn’t immediately occupied with kissing back.

“Darling!” Juliet exclaimed enthusiastically when they finally gave in to the need to breathe, and flung her arms around Liz’s neck. “Oh, my God! I thought you were still in Afghanistan!”

Liz derived a certain amount of satisfaction from how miffed Serena looked. “I came back,” she said nonchalantly. “Thought I’d surprise you.”

Juliet laughed. “Well, you managed that one! You were obviously paying attention when they taught you stealth at Sandhurst.”

Liz slid her arm around Juliet’s waist and squeezed. “I always pay attention. Let’s go.”

They walked out of the building, and towards the parking space Liz had found.

“You’re an actress and I never knew it,” Juliet murmured, leaning closer against Liz. Liz tensed, uncertain of what to do, and Juliet immediately picked up on it and moved away again. “We can probably stop now. She’s not going to follow us, silly girl. I...” She paused. “Thank you for getting me out of a hole. She’s been a little... obsessive. But- if you’re not comfortable-”

“I’m comfortable if you’re comfortable,” Liz told her quietly. Juliet stopped.

Liz stopped, a pace away from her, and turned, looking at her. The dancer was smiling at her, a soft, contemplative smile. “What?” Liz demanded uncomfortably after a moment, throwing her hands up in the air. “What are you looking at?”

Juliet grinned and shook her head. “I’m looking at you, Liz Lester. I’m looking at you, and thinking, really you don’t change a bit.”

She stepped forward, and took Liz’s hand. “Let’s go and talk glittery things and toothsome what-nots, soldier girl.”

They found the car, and Liz unlocked it so they could both get in. For a moment, they just sat there.

“Bugger this for a game of soldiers,” Liz said suddenly, violently, switched on the ignition and all but tore the car out of the parking space. Juliet buckled her seatbelt hurriedly.

“I can tell you’ve been driving in a war zone,” she observed. “No consideration for your fellow passengers.”

“Whatever, Twinkletoes,” Liz said, and shot Juliet a sideways grin. “You liking what you’re doing lately?”

“Yeah,” Juliet said, watching with interest as Liz casually overtook a cursing man in an SUV, giving him the finger as she passed. “I’m dancing Lise. La Fille Mal Gardée?”

“The what?”

“Pig. It’s a ballet. La Fille Mal Gardée, The Badly Guarded Girl. Lise is the main character.” She leaned comfortably back into the seat. “I quite like it- I’ve always been very attached to classical ballet –but I prefer the short we’re doing, the new one. Our choreographer got enthusiastic and choreographed about five minutes of all-new, hyper-modern energy and jetés.”

“Like Soldier Girl?” Liz asked.

“Oh, God,” Juliet laughed, “Soldier Girl. Yep. That was the maddest idea in the book, nobody thought it was going to work...”

Liz stopped at a traffic light.

“...I took that part for you.”

“You did what?” Liz yelped.

“Took that part for you,” Juliet repeated. “Because nobody else was dancing it right. Too heroic or too nasty. Caricatured, you know?”

“I know,” Liz said quietly.

“Not real. As far as I was concerned, Cleo was real.” She huffed a laugh. “And now they want me to do a ten-year-anniversary show of it, because it was that successful. I said hell no, get a new dancer, get a good dancer, but get a new dancer- somebody no-one knows about. Like me. Just out of interest, Liz, where are you taking me?”

“Out of the city,” Liz said. “Had enough of cities.”

“Have you been spending much time in them?”

Liz wrinkled her nose. “No. But I like to get out- you know me.”

“I did,” Juliet answered. “Once.”

Liz drove furiously for a few minutes, on the very edge of the speed limit, with her jaw set tight and her eyes glued to the road. After a while, she muttered: “That was uncalled-for.”

“But really, really true. Liz, what do you want?”

“A lot of things,” Liz snapped. “None of which I’m likely to get.”

“I don’t know about that,” Juliet murmured. Liz gaped for a moment, then noticed an impending traffic light and stamped on the brake.

“Warn me before you say stuff like that,” she requested.

“Yes ma’am,” Juliet said cheekily.

Liz rolled her eyes.

Eventually, Liz extricated them from Birmingham, and got herself thoroughly lost in a suitable bit of countryside, before parking tidily in a pub car park. “Out.”

“Are we going for a walk?” Juliet demanded suspiciously. “It’s muddy out there.”

“There are wellies in the back of the car,” Liz informed her.

“Hip, hip, hooray,” Juliet said. “My feet are two sizes smaller than yours.”

“There are hiking socks, too,” Liz said sweetly. “Ah, no, shit- don’t wear those; Chalky had them last and I haven’t washed them since.”

“That explains the smell.”

Liz grinned. “I see trainers on your feet. Scared to get them a little dirty, are we? You can always stick them in the washing machine.”

“Horror,” Juliet said.

“Wuss,” Liz returned. Sixteen years earlier, she would have simply set out and known that Juliet would follow her; now, she waited.

Juliet muttered something grumpy, and folded her arms. “I’m cold.”

“Walking will warm you up.”

Juliet pouted.

“I’m not going to talk unless we get properly out of sight and sound.”

“Can you even do that in this day and age?”

“Hello, Grandma.”

“Bitch,” Juliet sulked, and thumped Liz’s arm. “Fine, then.”

They walked out onto the road, crossed it, climbed a stile and followed the right-of-way along the side of the field by the hedge. It wasn’t as bad as Juliet had predicted, and the day was relatively warm; but when they got to the next field, having crossed another stile in the hedge just over the crest of the hill, she frowned, and leaned down to massage her knee. It was aching quite badly. Belatedly, she remembered the medic’s orders, which had involved no strenuous exercise, and although this wasn’t strenuous exercise in Liz’s book, she had been aware ever since Ditzy first cursed her out for doing something that didn’t meet his standards of common sense that medics applied different rules to life.

Juliet stopped with her. “Are you okay?”

Liz shrugged. “My knee hurts a bit.”

“What have you done to it?” Juliet sighed.

Liz shrugged again, defensively. “I just wrenched it a bit.”

“Stupid woman!” Juliet looked around. “Look. Is this out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere enough for you?”

“It’ll do,” Liz conceded.

“Then sit down,” Juliet shoved her down with a hand in the middle of her chest and Liz laughed at her, falling down on a drier patch of grass, “and tell me about the anomalies.”

“There’s not much to tell,” Liz said, picking at the laces on her trainers. “Dad’s working in Washington at the moment; Jon’s with him, of course, and Jamie’s been out there with them on holiday, as it were. Actually, he’s staying with them while he charms the pants off the New York art scene.”

Juliet giggled. “Nice!”

“Anyway,” Liz resumed, “Connor Temple- do you remember Temple? Total geek. Fingerless gloves. Dresses like a Noughties Camden Town indie kid, or used to, before he sort of... grew up and got professorial. He just wears very odd ties and shirts now.”

“I think so,” Juliet said uncertainly.

“Well, he called Dad in the middle of the night to say that Nick Cutter had pitched up in his office at CMU. You definitely won’t remember Cutter. Grumpy Scottish guy. Early forties. Thing is, he went through an anomaly in 2009, a few months after I did, only he never came back...”

Juliet whistled.

“...Yeah. And apparently there’d been reports of something that looked like anomaly activity. The current theory is that there have been anomalies operating on other frequencies all the time- it’s just that they were weaker, because there were more on the original anomaly frequency, 87.6FM, which drowned them out. When 87.6 FM was locked down, the other frequency was free to run, and as more anomalies appeared on that frequency they... sort of snowballed. The more anomaly activity on a frequency, the more anomalies on that frequency appear. We didn’t know what we had when it was just 87.6!”

There was a contemplative silence.

“Personally,” Juliet said thoughtfully, “I would have thought sabotage was a more obvious solution.”

Liz grinned. “That’s what I said. But no, this thing is watched day and night. It’s still a possibility, but it’s a very vague possibility.” She rubbed the muscle behind her knee, trying to stop the ache. “And then this morning I got rung up by a journalist, and you know, me and journalists-“

“You don’t like journalists,” Juliet completed. “They’re not all bad, you know.”

Liz pressed her lips together. “He wanted to talk anomalies. I told him where he got off.”

Juliet smiled. “You would.” She sighed, and tucked her knees up to her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs. “Thanks for the warning, Liz.”

They didn’t move for a long time, both staring out over the countryside, wrapped in their own thoughts. Juliet buried her nose in the collar of her jumper, chilled by the breeze. Liz ignored it, focussing unwillingly on the events of the past few hours, on kissing Juliet and getting to hold her for the first time in- what, fifteen years?

Shit, it never seemed that long ago- but of course it had been, quite literally the worst times of her life packed into her teenage years: the illness they had all thought would kill Jamie, the strain and fear of uncounted weeks spent behind anomalies, the break-up with Juliet, the shock of the declassification of the anomalies and its unexpected consequences in terms of public attention on the main players. No wonder Abby and Stringer had emigrated to Australia, where fewer people knew who they were; no wonder Connor had chosen to go to ground at CMU, rather than picking any of the more exalted universities that would have had him like a shot. No wonder Liz, faced with the possibility of telling Juliet everything that had happened to her now it was no longer such restricted information and rebuilding the best relationship she’d ever had, had cracked and held back.

“We were right to break up,” Juliet said abruptly, hauling Liz out of her reverie.

“What?” Liz said. “Didn’t catch that. Thinking.”

“We were right to break up,” Juliet repeated patiently.

“We weren’t doing so well,” Liz agreed, fiddling with the cast on her broken finger.

Juliet grinned. “We were sinking by the day, and you know it.” She reached out for Liz’s hand; Liz looked at Juliet’s outstretched fingers, and into Juliet’s face, and then let Juliet take her hand. “You were all kinds of broken, sweetheart.”

“Still am,” Liz informed her. “I caught someone referring to me as a hardass the other day.”

Juliet laughed. “What did you do to him?”

“Sent him on a six-mile punishment run so he could be just like me.”

Juliet grinned. “Be that as it may, and, okay, it’s pretty funny... Liz, hardass is not the same as broken.”

“Broken is what leads to hardass, unfortunately.”

Juliet elbowed her hard in the ribs. “I don’t care!”

“Oi! All right, all right, you don’t care. Why are you talking about this, Juliet? What do you want?” Her voice rose, hard-edged with almost-anger.

“You,” Juliet said softly. “I always have.”

Liz was silent. She let her hand slide out of Juliet’s and looked away from the other woman, mind reeling.

“I thought you wanted me back,” Juliet continued, still quiet, “I thought that was why you called me. I hoped. Even when you said it was the anomalies, I hoped to hell that you called me, that you drove out to meet me, because you wanted me, and when you kissed me I was nearly sure because you were jealous. You didn’t want me to take Serena’s number. You didn’t want me to go out with her. You wanted me.”

Juliet clambered round to kneel in front of Liz and take her face in both hands, turning it gently, forcing Liz to look at her. Liz stared into her eyes.

“Yes or no, Liz?”

Liz was frozen.

“Yes or no?” Juliet repeated.

Liz shut her eyes. “Yes. Fuck, yes.” She heard Juliet let a breath of relief out, and her eyes snapped open and she grabbed Juliet, pulling her forward with a hand on the back of her neck and an arm around her back, and kissed her hard, lips crashing together messily, hard enough to bruise, opening a split in Liz’s chapped lips. One of Juliet’s hands laced tightly into Liz’s short hair, the other curling into a fist on her shirt; Liz could feel Juliet’s breath on the skin of her neck when the other woman pulled away and rested her head against Liz’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” Liz said, gasping for breath. “That was- a bit... precipitate.” She ran a hand along the line of Juliet’s back. “You still weigh the square root of nothing.”

“You still kiss like you’re fighting a war,” Juliet informed her, muffled against her skin. “Let’s not get carried away, shall we? Or we’ll get arrested for public indecency.”

“It’s not public if there’s no-one to see,” Liz said, but took the point.

Juliet’s stomach rumbled, and they both laughed. “When did you last eat?” Liz demanded, poking her.

“Breakfast,” Juliet said sheepishly. “Admittedly, it was an enormous fry-up...”

Liz shook her head, and pushed Juliet off her, getting to her feet and holding out her hands for Juliet. “Come on, let’s get you some lunch. That pub down the hill looked all right; there was a board talking about lunch specials.”

“Sounds good,” Juliet agreed, taking Liz’s hands and letting herself be hauled upright. “You know what else sounds good?”

“What?” Liz asked, raising her eyebrows.

Juliet looked down at Liz’s hands, which she was still holding, and squeezed them gently, a little sideways smile on her face. “Dating you again. Getting hauled out of bed at six a.m. to go for a run, taking you out for lunch, laughing at you, worrying about you, being worried about, seeing that glint in your eyes when you look at me, being pointed and laughed at by our respective families when we tell ’em we got back together again...” She suddenly seemed to realise what she’d said, and blushed. “Er. If that’s okay by you?”

Liz smiled at her, and kissed her cheek. “That’s okay by me.”

Sharp Enough To Cut Themselves

2010-01-10T22:41:08Z

Title: Sharp Enough To Cut Themselves
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: 16, or R.
Summary: Lorraine and Blade are sharp enough to cut themselves.

A/N: Inspired by a little phrase in Sunset’s mammoth all-one-sentence New Year’s fic! Therefore set in her ficverse, I guess? Blade is fredbassett’s. Thanks to Luka for taking a quick peek at it and correcting my grammar!

It’s a stupid party, it really is. The bright colours make Lorraine’s eyes hurt, and the carols are making her head ache and she is tired, so tired so she walks down to the armoury, in search of a little peace and quiet in a room other people aren’t having sex in. Places like this are in short supply at the moment.

She knows that someone follows her and does not care. Punching in the code for the armoury, she pushes open the heavy door and steps into the empty room, right up to the counter, and does not turn.

Somebody shuts the door behind her, and she closes her eyes.

“Miss Wickes.” The tone is carefully neutral, and she knows the voice.

She laughs, a little broken chuckle. “Please. At this stupid, frenzied party, where everyone is drunk and fucking each other on every available surface, I think even you can find it in you to call me Lorraine.”

Blade steps closer. “I’d like to call you Lorraine.”

“Do it, then,” she whispers, and that, well, that can be taken in so many ways.

He moves closer again, close enough that she can feel the heat of his body, the knives in their flat sheathes next to his skin. He puts one hand on her hip, light, testing. He runs his lips up her neck. “Niall,” he says quietly. “Call me Niall.”

“I know. Niall Richards, son of Bronwen and Rhys Richards. Born in Cardiff, raised in Yorkshire by David and Mary Richards from the age of two, when Bronwen and Rhys died in a car crash; attended a primary called Oaktree, and St. Mark’s High, then Feynman College, studying electrical engineering. Joined the army: Royal Engineers, then the SAS.” Lorraine opens her eyes and shuts them again, tongue flicking out onto her dry lips. “I know.”

He is very still. “You know a lot. Lorraine.” He turns her, gently, and she moves with him, eyes locking onto his. He curls a hand around the back of her neck, tastes the alcohol in her mouth. “Vodka,” he says at last.

She nods. “One shot.”

“Also orange juice. Cake?”

“I didn’t want to get drunk.”

“Mistake.”

“Maybe.”

His hands are still on Lorraine, on the small of her back, the base of her skull; she is looking at him, clear-eyed, unafraid, sad. She wonders what he thinks of her; why he touches her, why he looks at her with half-wild, intense eyes- she isn’t pretty enough to interest him, and she is too shy, too broken.

He’s not drunk, or if he is she can’t smell the alcohol on his breath, and he seems in complete control of himself. Yet he followed her, all the way down to the armoury. She asks herself why, what he looks for when his eyes search hers like that, and she has no answer.

She also asks herself why she trusts him, when she is so fragile and unarmed, and he is much stronger and doubtless loaded with knives. She is literally in his hands, and she is not safe, she tells herself, but... she is.

Looking into his eyes she knows why she left the party, why she had to get away; because she had suddenly understood the wildness, the abandon in the air. Faced with mortal danger, the instinct is to procreate, and while procreation may not be on the collective ARC mind, the act that leads to it certainly is. That had repulsed her, a little; but it had made her sad, too. People should not be driven to this.

Looking into his eyes, she knows that on some level, he understands this as well as she does.

Lorraine’s eyes close, and tears roll from them, slow, pitiful. She doesn’t care why he followed her any more: it’s a problem she can consider later, and sorrow does not wait for intellectual puzzles- the scenes upstairs are pathetic more than they are maddened, at least to her eyes, and it breaks her heart to see her colleagues so, and to remember the death that they are trying to forget. For a moment she might as well be alone, and then she feels the lightest touch on her skin as he brushes her cheekbones, her eyelashes with his lips, tongue catching the salt water. He turns her again, runs fingers down her chest, holds her close with an arm around her abdomen. “Who are you?” he whispers into her ear, scrapes the lobe with his teeth, drawing a shiver from her; draws a knife with his free hand, holds the flat against the hollow of her throat.

He will not hurt her. She knows that, even as her breathing quickens and she has to fight to stay relaxed; his touch is still gentle, and there is no threat in his voice, just a question.

“Lorraine Wickes,” she tells him; lets the knife slide, travel, around the curve of her breast, along the soft, thin skin of her inner wrist. “Daughter of Marie and Edward Wickes, sister of Jacinth, George and Eric Wickes, sister-in-law of Ben Morton, aunt of Adele Morton. Born in London; attended Newton Prep, then St. Paul’s Girls- sch-“ she hesitates as the knife slides up her throat, tilts her head back until it is past the danger point and tracing her cheekbones, nose, jawline. “Scholarship girl. Cambridge. Studying Economics. Joined the civil service; Home Office, MI5... the ARC.”

The knife has come to rest, flat side against her lips. Decision time.

Lorraine lets her tongue flicker out, and quite deliberately catches it on the sharp edge of the knife. Copper explodes in her mouth, and Blade lets the knife fall, his hands firm on her hips as she turns to kiss him, her lips parting willingly, his tongue in her mouth, his arms holding her up against the counter; and she’s lifted onto it so that they’re on a level, and she lets her skirt be pushed up, her tights and underwear pushed down- and he waits to be sure that she wants this, and she tells him that he does not need to with a kiss and her hands fisted in his shirt and the webbing that holds his knives on, pulling him closer.

The world shatters for both of them and they are the only fixed points in pleasure too close to pain and madness too close to sanity, and if Lorraine cries for the dead and the innocent, she is not alone.

Genius, Remember?

2010-01-10T10:23:14Z

Title: Genius, Remember?
Fandom: Star Trek (Reboot)
Rating: 16/R, warning for swearing!
Summary: Pavel Chekov, growing up abruptly, Hikaru Sulu, nothing if not patient, and Jim Kirk, precipitating matters.

A/N: My first Star Trek fic, and I’ve only seen the 2009 film and know next to nothing else about the series, so this could be a really, really horrible mistake. *nervous grin*

He only sleeps with Jim Kirk once.

It’s totally understandable. It makes perfect sense. The logic is flawless, as Commander Spock would say. After that day from hell, the fear and barely controlled panic, the fight on the drill, the stress of nearly dying, Olson actually dying, Kirk jumping into thin air to save him, the sting of Kirk’s horrified look when he says he’s a trained fencer appeased by the respect on Kirk’s face when he kills the Romulans, the pain of lost colleagues, the need to soothe the conflicted, broken look on Chekov’s too-young face and the bitter knowledge that he cannot... well, after all that, Hikaru Sulu, pilot, unruffled by anything but the embarrassment of having Spock tell him how to do his job, finds himself leaning against a white cold wall and shaking, too weak to stand, his head spinning.

Sulu closes his eyes to steady himself, and then he opens them again, and there is Jim Kirk, standing just outside his personal space. Kirk is cut about, grimy, and bruised; his full lips are set in a neutral line, his dirty gold hair messy, his assassin-black shirt and trousers blood-spattered.

And when he comes just a little closer and cups Sulu’s jaw in his hand and offers to give him a few hours’ comfort, Sulu accepts and is grateful. In a strange way, it means nothing, his captain’s hands on him, his lips and fingers taking Sulu beyond knowing anything, into a little piece of perfection; the whispered words, the not your fault and easy, Hikaru, easy and it’s gonna be okay, promise; the way Jim holds him afterwards while he cries, the sticky, sweaty sheets kicked away from them, and then kisses his forehead and leaves him to sleep. It means nothing because both of them can deny that there’s anything between them with a clear conscience, because this is just comfort, just a little time when Hikaru gets to be looked after for a change. It means nothing because he sees Jim do the same for so many, seeking out the lonely and the broken, a hug for Nurse Chapel, a bone-melting kiss for McCoy in a dark corner and a teasing, provocative comment to bring out the grumpy bastard the whole ship knows and loves, a cunningly arranged break for Spock and Uhura to share, a slow makeout session with Gaila, half an hour spent kneeling on the floor, cuddling a sobbing xenobiologist Hikaru doesn’t know to his chest. Even Chekov spends the night with him, and Sulu pretends he doesn’t know.

At the same time as it means nothing, this means everything, because it means that Sulu is working for a captain he is proud to serve under, one who considers his crew above himself and who is genuinely compassionate. Still, the captain has no-one to do this for him, and so Sulu extracts a bottle of villainous hooch from Scotty and takes it to Jim Kirk’s quarters. Three glasses in, Jim tells him everything, and he lets Jim rest his heavy head in his lap and close his eyes while he talks, and Sulu’s hand runs through that thick hair, strokes the forehead that already has worry lines on it, wipes the tears away with his thumb.

It nearly turns into sex again. Sulu stops that; that’s going too far. Instead, he puts the captain to bed, goes in search of McCoy, and tells him everything. This is known as passing the buck.

ii.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, apparently. Three months on, poor bloody Chekov’s schoolkid crush on Jim is getting too obvious for either Hikaru or Jim to ignore. In another month’s time the Enterprise will be ready to leave, and this will just make things unbearably awkward. It could break Chekov’s career in Starfleet.

For God’s sake, Pavel. Hikaru has always thought he wasn’t ready for Starfleet, he was too young. He was brilliant, Hikaru couldn’t deny it, incredibly, ridiculously clever and he excelled at everything he really put his mind to, but he was much too naive, and he could get positively starry-eyed around Jim.

He didn’t understand that what Jim had offered him had been a one-time thing, an episode of comfort he was meant to take at face value, a time without fear. Nothing deeper; that would be unethical, and Hikaru got the impression that whatever rules Jim Kirk was willing to break, among them were not fraternisation regulations. Technically, he’d already smashed them to pieces, but that had been just comfort. It belonged only to those stunned, bereaved days between Nero’s defeat and their return to Earth, where they’d been treated like heroes. (His parents had been so proud.)

Only Pavel had to take it seriously, the way he did everything. Pavel had to get serious.

Fuck it, Pavel. Only you.

iii.

Hikaru thinks that maybe he’s a bit jealous that Pavel doesn’t want him. After all, Pavel is Hikaru’s to look after, explain things to, and rescue from the security officers who think making fun of the clever comms officer and the fact that he barely knows which way is up when it comes to more adult social interaction is funny.

Pavel, bloody Pavel, with his huge intelligent innocent blue eyes and the short, light brown, immaculate curls, and his accent, which gives him so much trouble with the voice recognition software and which Hikaru has teased him for so many times but secretly thinks is... Not sweet. Not sweet. Hikaru refuses to believe that he thinks anything about any fellow officer is sweet.

Endearing, then- yes, endearing, that’s the word. Pavel and his accent are endearing. And he’s Hikaru’s. It’s just that that seems to have passed Pavel by, and all right, Hikaru can see that he’s more than just a bit jealous, but, still...

Oh, Pavel, you stupid, stupid, stupid kid.

iv.

A week later, Hikaru’s had enough. He goes straight to Jim, because this is his fault, even though he never meant it to happen.

Jim puts on his Captain Kirk hat and has an uncomfortable discussion with Pavel in a room where Scotty has briefly disabled the security cameras. Pavel comes out looking crushed, and walks straight into Hikaru’s hand clapping on his shoulder in wordless comfort and steering him back to Hikaru’s room for a glass of applejack with a serious kick to it (Scott’s other contribution to this, ah, enterprise, and where he got the apples Hikaru doesn’t want to know.) Pavel does not cry. He just sits on Hikaru’s couch, feet drawn up onto the cushions and resting his chin on his knees, and says quietly that he understands now, that Keptin Kirk has been wery kind in explaining to him.

The accent is out in full force; Hikaru hasn’t heard it this bad for months, when Pavel was feeling very, very homesick, and knows that it’s not a good sign. Also, there is an unhappy twist to Pavel’s mouth that he just wants to kiss away, but he knows that that would be a bad move, that he has to wait if he wants this to work, and oh God he does. He doesn’t just want to be half of a rebound relationship.

He’s a patient man. He’ll wait.

Hikaru knows that the crush on Jim is over when Jim, dazed, swollen and covered in purple blotches from his thirty-second allergen - the one they discovered about thirty seconds ago when he started eating the Orion canapés which looked and tasted like cheese puffs but plainly weren’t - throws up all over Pavel.

Pavel gives him an appalled look, and says: “Thenks a lot, Keptin!”

Jim grins, mumbles something about “all part of the service, Chekov”, and spews a little more. McCoy growls and jabs a hypospray into Jim’s neck, and the captain's eyes roll up in his head, he trills “Ooh, the pretty colours,” and then falls forward. Pavel skips neatly backwards. Hikaru catches Jim, and hoists him over his shoulders, which is not easy; the captain weighs a ton.

“Sickbay,” McCoy says grimly, and sets off.

Hikaru staggers after him.

vi.

It takes another year for Hikaru to decide that the time to satisfy the unresolved sexual tension between him and Pavel is now, and one night after they’ve finished their game of chess (Pavel has won, inevitably, but it took him about forty-five minutes longer than it used to) Hikaru leans over and brushes Pavel’s lips gently with his own.

Pavel just sits there and looks at him for a second, and Hikaru would be worried except that he knows Pavel liked it, knows he felt Pavel’s lips parting under his.

Well. He is worried. But he stops being worried when Pavel gives him this huge, glorious smile and gets up, steps round to his side of the table and reaches out his hands and pulls Hikaru up until they’re standing flush against each other, and- Pavel’s not a bad kisser for a naive genius. In fact, he’s really, really good, and Hikaru is loving this, Pavel in his arms with his tongue in Hikaru’s mouth and enjoying himself very much, showing the same kind of enthusiasm for something he understands that he does to every chess game and that he did when he ran down the corridors of the Enterprise yelling “I can do zat! I can do zat!”, shoved the transport chief out of his seat, and rescued Hikaru and Jim without blinking an eyelid.

“This is worth it,” he breathes when he can, and Pavel looks at him, puzzled.

“Worth waiting for years,” he elaborates, “worth watching you crush on Kirk, worth beating up security officers for you, worth worrying about you all the time and never saying it out loud.”

“All zat time?” Pavel asks, and Hikaru nods, and there’s a spark in Pavel’s eyes that says he understands.

Of course he does. Genius, remember?

All Kitted Out

2010-01-04T21:48:58Z

Title: All Kitted Out
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: Richardses are crazy right through, even the little ones, but Stephen and Ryan forgot to tell Kit that. He isn’t surprised. He’s only a foster kid.

A/N: Riffs off Luka’s Whole New Vision and my Curses! No Rest For The Wicked and In Confidence belong to the same ficverse. Kit is just because the idea of Ryan and Stephen trying to deal with a shy foster kid amused me. He has Luka’s approval. *g*

It’s cold in the Forest of Dean, a lot colder than it was in London, and Kit... Kit is freezing. At least it’s not raining, he tells himself. It was raining in Bristol.

The girl he’s walking with doesn’t seem to be affected. He can remember her name (Carys, Ceh-riss, just close enough to Chris that it makes him glad everyone calls him Kit not Chris or Christopher) but he can’t remember why Stephen and Ryan know her, or why she cares enough about him that she’s let him come on this walk.

To be honest, Kit is just bored and confused, but he knows it won’t pay to ask questions. It never has done, not at any of the places he’s been fostered at, and even though Stephen and Ryan are nicer than the other foster-parents have been – Auntie Pam and Uncle Mike, if he ever meets less tolerant people he’ll eat his beanie, and that pair who wanted him to call them Mum and Dad, that’s just not happening – he still knows not to ask questions. He knows not to ask why they’ve come down to this place in the middle of nearly-Welsh nowhere, to this hotel where the people who run it seem to know Stephen and Ryan so well, and who all these people are, and why they look so serious, and also who the grumpy jerk in the smart suit is.

There are kids, too. Quite a lot of them, because someone somewhere is pretending this is just a family get-together rather than some kind of emergency conference. Sam and Flick, brother and sister with brownish-blonde hair, Sam a year older than Kit, Flick two years younger. Robbie, a boy his age with brown hair and a well-meaning smile, but Robbie’s too bloody tactless and has already tried to interrogate Kit about his family, and Kit doesn’t much like that. Apparently there’s a family coming all the way from Australia, and they have twin girls, Holly and Lucy. Then there’s Carys, who is pretty and mixed-race and quiet and very, very, very good at escaping from adults.

Which is how they got away with skipping out on the emergency conference thingawhatsit, because Carys went out a window, and Kit followed Carys.

“Aren’t we going to get in kind of a lot of trouble when we get back?” Kit asks.

Carys shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Are you ’llowed to go wandering round like this?”

“No.”

“Are we going to get lost?”

“No, ’cause I know where we are.”

“Do you come here a lot, then?”

“Daddy goes caving here sometimes. He brings me.”

“What’s caving?”

“’S where you go down a very muddy hole with lots of ropes and stuff. Your daddy doesn’t like it.”

“He’s not my dad,” Kit corrects her uncomfortably. “Not Stephen or Ryan.”

“No?” Carys stops and scrutinises him through greenish-brown eyes. “You look a bit like Stephen.”

“Um. Okay.”

“Are you adopted, then?” Carys enquires, and they keep walking. They haven’t actually gone that far, but still... Kit is getting anxious, because after all, they’re only eight- well, he’s eight, but then she’s taller than him so maybe she’s older. And maybe the Forest of Dean is for Carys like London was for him: he used to wander around a lot there when he was little and he didn’t get scared even though it was dangerous and his mum used to get angry.

He scuffs the leaves with a trainer. “No. I’m a foster kid. Which is sort of like being adopted for a very little while.”

Carys digests this. “Oh. Cool.”

“Not really,” Kit says simply.

A long pause.

“Why are you a foster kid?”

“I don’t want to say.” Too right he doesn’t, now that he’s old enough to understand a bit about the drugs his mum was taking and dealing, and the life he had when he was little. It’s freaky, everyone says so. As he overheard Ryan saying to someone called Ditzy down the phone, an eight-year-old should not be able to name more than ten kinds of illegal drugs, their side-effects, the kind of highs they give you and the current street price.

Unlike Robbie, Carys just shrugs and nods. Kit decides that he likes her, which is a big thing because she’s a girl, but ew, he doesn’t like her like that. He just likes that she shuts up every now and then.

They turn a corner, onto a rather overgrown path, and have to walk in single file. Carys goes first.

“Where are we going?” he asks her puffa-jacketed back.

“Back to the hotel,” Carys tells him. “We’re going inna circle.”

“Oh.”

And then they turn another corner and Carys stops so suddenly that Kit piles into her back. He stumbles backwards, and peers around her, because she is now standing stock still and this is not helpful.

There is a giant sparkly thing in the middle of the air. It looks a bit like the time he broke a glass at Auntie Pam and Uncle Mike’s house, except that he somehow doubts that whoever broke this glass is reciting the catechism as penance. Watching Star Wars, maybe. It looks sort of Star Wars-y.

“Um. What’s that?” he asks Carys.

“Bad,” Carys says, backing slowly away, and now he backs away. “Very, very bad.” And then after a pause: “We are in so much trouble.”

Kit thinks that’s maybe the most sensible thing she’s said for a while.

Motive

2010-01-04T10:06:04Z

Title: Motive
Fandom: Original; Miss Baillie-verse
Rating: PG-13

Summary: This day will make Lydia Hennessy change the world and win a war.

A/N: This is set within a steampunk universe I’ve been playing with, only about 17 years on from the story I want to set in it, Miss Baillie and the Sands of Time; the titular Miss Baillie is Lydia’s Aunt Corinna, sister of Lydia’s mother. Sands of Time is set in the very late Victorian era, more or less 1898/99, and the events of this story take place mid-1915. Lydia is roughly 17. Written in response to joereaves’ prompt, ‘The primroses are over’.

The primroses are over, thought Lydia Hennessy, and she looked down at the little bunch of violets in her hands and called it unfit for purpose. She should have found mourning flowers; but all she could do was pick a few violets and a bit of fool’s parsley and tie the resulting posy with an old hair-ribbon. It would have to do.

She felt silly, standing before a grave that contained no body in her schoolgirl’s uniform and wearing a child’s safety medallion, on a beautiful spring day that did not hint at the devastating war, only (if she thought about it) a few hundred miles away, and if she stood at this grave, much, much closer.

Of course, the war was increasingly close every day. Lydia had been approached by one of her friends to hand out white feathers to cowards, and her Aunt Clementine had joined a force of doctors and nurses fighting for the soldiers’ lives on the Continent with ether and disinfectant and pitiful resources. This made Lydia’s Uncle Henry highly nervous, especially when one of Aunt Clementine’s letters arrived, hair-raising in the extreme and full of gory medical details. Father was in the War Cabinet, naturally, and Mother was knitting warm socks industriously for the Men at the Front- although the Hennessy Home Sock Production Centre had seen a regrettable slump lately, through no fault of anyone’s; Mother had retired to her room and was drowning herself in books of Latin and Greek literature, and had been heard to refer to herself as Andromache and Hecuba, which upset Father and made Lydia want to cry. Even Lydia's Aunt Corinna had had her beloved dirigible craft requisitioned, much to her irritation.

Lydia herself often wondered if she should do something, too. She had lost friends and family to the Kaiser’s men and his murderous automatons, chopping up entire battalions into so much mincemeat; she was not supposed to know about those, but Father could not stop her reading the newspapers however hard he tried, and removing the radio from a young woman who would simply build another one and better at the earliest opportunity was a pointless enterprise. She had built her first radio at boarding school, specifically to listen to the war news; it had been clunky, did not always pick up the signal very well, and had an unreliable volume control, but her entire dorm had clustered around it, listening to the well-modulated tones of the radio announcer enunciating the unfamiliar names of faraway places. Ypres, Arras, Antwerp, Coronel, the words resounding in the bare, cold room, schoolgirls with their hair in plaits crouched round Hennessy’s radio, listening in perfect silence and complete darkness to words that they only barely understood meant destruction and death.

Of course, within three months they had been caught, and the radio was confiscated and Lydia was in disgrace. That did not matter. She simply built a new one, which was much better and did not need quite so much vigorous winding to get it to work, and ensured that the young ladies of Dorm Six remained uncannily well-informed about the progress of the war.

So Lydia, knowing what was happening around her, being so familiar with death which cut down her dearest ones and put her into mourning, wondered if she perhaps should do some kind of war work. She was not cut out for nursing, she felt sure, or munitions work, but there must be something.

She had voiced these thoughts to Uncle Theodore, her Aunt Corinna’s husband, who had once been a soldier, like Uncle Henry, but was not nearly so nervous as Uncle Henry, as his wife was safely in England. Uncle Theodore had told her in his gentle way that she should get an education; that higher education was the really important thing for someone with brains like hers, and that if she wished to serve her country with her mechanical talents, she had best hone them first.

He had suggested Oxford.

She had said her father would never countenance it.

He had said that Aunt Corinna would make him countenance it, not to mention Grandmamma.

She had conceded that in that case she might have a fighting chance, and that she would think about it.

Now, standing motionless before a grave as a bitter spring wind cut through her, she thought. Memories filled her logical mind, of girls in white nightdresses, wrapped in blankets and listening to the death-knells of sweethearts and cousins, of oil and cogs and wires and solder under her fingers- of the marching bands, bright and gay, and of her friend Arabella’s oldest brother, haunted and shaking and coughing out his lungs, corrupted by the Huns’ devil-gas.

Lydia made a decision.

She knelt and laid the flowers before the tombstone, a marker for a body that lay somewhere in the mud of France, and she spoke softly to the grainy, sepia-coloured holographic likeness above it, protected from the light cold drizzle beginning to fall by a glass bell. “I will go to university, and I will get the best degree that anyone has ever got; and then I shall design and build weapons that will win the war, and on each and every single one of them I shall have your name printed, Will. That way, every blow that is struck with them, every shot fired, will be a blow and a shot for you.”

Lydia reached out and touched the glass flecked with rain and swallowed hard. “It- I know it is only a woman’s revenge, Will. But I think you will not despise it.”

She bowed her head for a moment, as the rain intensified, then stood, dark circles on her uniform where the raindrops soaked into the thick material. And as she walked away, the grey clouds spread over all the sky and lay immovable while darts of water wounded Lydia’s flowers and traced the tombstone’s inscription:

Lt. William John Hennessy

12^th May 1896 – 3^rd May 1915

Beloved son of William and Parthena Hennessy

Beloved brother of Lydia Hennessy

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

John 15:13.

***

“... it is commonly agreed that the deadliest and most destructive weaponry of the war was built by scientist Lydia Hennessy, a gifted inventor driven by the loss of her elder brother William in 1915. To her credit are the automated sneak-bomb, used by troops to destroy German posts in the trenches, and the shrapnel grenade; she was also responsible for great improvements in firearms, revolvers and rifles alike. Hennessy always said, until the end of her life in the late 1980s, that however many men and women they killed she never regretted these creations and improvements, and that she made them in the service of her country and for her brother’s sake. It is certainly worth noting, as her cousin Parthena Swift points out in her biography of Hennessy Damn The Torpedoes: The Life of Lydia Hennessy, that every invention she designed for use in war (which also included safety medallions which gave early warning of gas attacks, and more portable anaesthetic masks) bore the stamp WILL...”

-extract from Chapter Six of The Great War by Joseph Hodder, Reprieve Publishing, 2014.

And One Wise Woman

2009-12-31T22:19:38Z

Title: And One Wise Woman
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: Carys has problems with the Nativity play. Blade fails to be the kind of parent who makes constructive suggestions for solutions.

A/N: Christmas present for Fifi. *g* Posted as the New Year firework display goes batcrap-crazy outside. Happy New Year, everyone!



            Lorraine nudged open the kitchen door with her hip and discovered Kirsten, the unflappable Swedish au pair who helped take care of Carys, looking distinctly hassled. Lorraine put down her laptop bag on a chair, reflecting that whatever it was must be bad if Kirsten was bothered, as the discovery that one of her employers was bound over by the Offical Secrets Act, and the other had an extensive collection of knives, hadn’t even caused a ripple of expression to pass over her mild face.

            “Hi, Kirsten!”

            Glancing around, she spotted her daughter and immediately realised that it was bad. Carys, who was six, had neither greeted her mother nor lifted her head when she entered the room, and she was poking her baked beans, baked potato and sausages crossly. They were almost untouched, which was odd, because Carys would eat gallons of baked beans if she was allowed, and she loved sausages.

            “Carys?” Lorraine asked. “Are you going to say hello to your mother?”

            “Hello Mummy,” Carys mumbled.

            Lorraine gave Kirsten a puzzled look. Kirsten shrugged and returned to scraping baked bean residue off the hob, so Lorraine went and sat next to her daughter and put a hand out to tuck a strand of Carys’s wildly curly hair behind her ear. “Sweetie, is something the matter?”

            Carys muttered something.

            “Darling, I didn’t catch that...”

            “They made me a wise man,” Carys said unhappily, slightly louder.

            Lorraine sat back, nonplussed. “Oh.”

            Carys gave her a look which said, as plain as plain, ‘This is a huge, world-ending disaster, and you are not helping’, and allowed herself to fall forward into her baked beans.

Lorraine stared.

            Carys remained face down and silent in the baked beans.

            Kirsten sighed wearily, and squeezed her cloth out into the sink and rinsed it, the better to apply it to Carys’s face.


            Once Kirsten and Lorraine had finally succeeded in removing the last traces of orange from Carys’s face, and Lorraine had run Carys through the bath (an enterprise which left them both soaking wet and giggling), Blade had returned home and Lorraine had thought of a solution.

            The three of them collected in Blade and Lorraine’s bedroom, sitting on the double bed with Carys firmly clutching her James Bond teddy bear, a present in extremely bad taste from her godfather, thumb stuffed into her mouth, and squashed between her parents.

            “Why don’t you tell us exactly what happened?” Lorraine prompted.

            Carys said something around her thumb. Blade removed it from her mouth, examined the length of her nails, and wordlessly produced a knife from somewhere and started to trim. Lorraine closed her eyes in resignation, but Carys watched, fascinated, and started to talk.

            “It’s the n’tivity play. Miss Harrison says I have t’be a wise man.”

            “Why do you have to be a wise man?” Lorraine enquired.

            “’Cause nobody else can say frankincense.”

            Neither could Carys, Lorraine observed. She had pronounced it ‘fankincense’.

            “Do you have lines, then?” Blade asked, changing hands.

            Carys nodded. “I have to say ‘I bring frankincense.”

            “Nice,” her father observed, and Carys made a bid to yank her hand out of his custody, nearly losing three fingers in the process, but Blade had a very sturdy grip on her small wrist.

            “It’s not nice! I’m not a boy!”

            “I hadn’t noticed,” Blade said, concentrating on his daughter’s nails. “I wasn’t in the room when you were born, and the nurse didn’t hand you to me and tell me I had a daughter. No. I was down the pub with Uncle Ross and Uncle Matt and I thought you were a boy until after I slept off the hangover and realised Mummy had given you a girl’s name.”

            Lorraine was fairly certain that Carys didn’t quite grasp most of that, but the child smiled reluctantly anyway.

            Lorraine laid a hand on her daughter’s back. “Look, you know what I think?”

            Carys twisted to look at her, greenish eyes as sceptical as a child’s can be.

            “I think that there was a Wise Woman,” Lorraine confided. “Otherwise they’d never have got to Bethlehem in time, because men won’t ask directions. Somebody had to go and ask the way to Bethlehem when they got lost.”

            “Daddy never gets lost,” Carys pointed out.

            “That’s because the army spent a lot of time teaching your daddy how to read a map,” Lorraine said dryly.

            “Why doesn’t it say there was a Wise Woman in the Bible, then?”

            “What does Auntie Claudia always say about the Bible?”

            “The Bible is a book written by lots of stupid old men who hate women,” Carys said obediently.

            Blade choked, and Carys cast him a suspicious look.

            Lorraine tried not to laugh. “I’m sure she didn’t say exactly that, sweetie.”

            “Yes she did,” Carys said with alarming promptitude. “And then Uncle Ian took her glass of juice ’way and hid it.”

            “What kind of juice?”

            “Sort of red....”

            “Oh,” Lorraine said, struggling valiantly with laughter. “Grown-up juice. Okay.”

            Carys nodded entirely seriously. Blade turned away and chucked the nail clippings into the bin, face a perfect blank.

            “You know what I think you should do?” he asked, turning back and hauling Carys onto his lap. “I think you should tell Miss Harrison you’re a Wise Woman. If you do it nicely, she won’t mind.”

            Carys nodded, sucking her thumb and considering this. Lorraine reached over and took the thumb out; Carys was supposed to stop that after she turned six, but was proving very stubborn.

            “What do I do ’bout Drew?”

            “Drew?” Lorraine questioned.

            “Red hair,” Blade prompted, being marginally more familiar with Carys’ classmates. “Brown eyes. Pigtails. What’d she do?”

            “She said Miss Harrison made me a Wise Man because I gots a boy’s name,” Carys said, grammar worsening along with her mood.

            “That is absolutely not true,” Lorraine said firmly. “Carys is a girl’s name, it’s just that Drew is too stupid to know the difference between Carys and Chris or something like that. There are no boys called Carys.”

            “But I dunno what to do with her,” Carys muttered, thumb creeping mouthwards. Lorraine took hold of that hand.

            “Hit her,” Blade suggested.

            “Don’t!” Lorraine ordered hastily, glaring at her husband. Carys actually looked like she was considering it. “I’ll tell Miss Harrison what Drew said when I come to pick you up tomorrow, because I’m working from home, remember, and Miss Harrison will stop her.”

            “Can I hit her too?” Carys asked hopefully.

            “No,” Lorraine said.


            The next day, when Lorraine came and picked Carys up from school, Carys was a lot happier.

“I’ve got new lines,” she announced. “Miss Harrison gave them to me. And she said you were right that there must’ve been a Wise Woman and she didn’t know why she didn’t think of it before.”

“What are they?” Lorraine asked.

“’Don’t be silly, Balthazar, we’ve been past this oasis three times. I wonder if that innkeeper knows where we are.’”

In Confidence

2009-12-23T22:56:49Z

Title: In Confidence
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: Blade and Lorraine might be plunging back into the same nightmare that nearly killed them both on several occasions, but at least the Powers That Be managed to schedule it for a half-term.

A/N: Riffs off Luka’s Whole New Vision. Curses! and No Rest For The Wicked belong to the same ficverse. Carys Richards is, as ever, my fault. References Fifi’s Mending series.

Well, it's hardly Christmassy fic, but just in case I don't otherwise get the chance- Merry Christmas, everyone! Thank you for reading my fic for almost exactly a year, and being so kind and helpful. :)

It was the Friday before half term; therefore, the school was rowdy with gleeful kids and relieved teachers. Blade waded through the morass until he found his daughter, sitting impatiently in her classroom, waiting to be collected; he smiled when he saw her, and she bounced out of her chair and leapt into his arms. “Daddy!”

He laughed, and hugged her tightly, then let her slide to the floor and reached over to shake hands with her teacher, and was then towed out of the school by Carys Joy Richards, eight years old and determined to get as far away as possible from anything resembling a classroom right now.

They caught the Tube back to the family home, Carys hanging on his hand and the rail and swaying happily with the movement of the train, explaining what she’d done in the half-day she’d spent at school, yelling to be heard above the noise. It wasn’t a long journey, even allowing for delays, and passed quickly; so did the walk from the Tube station to the house. It was a gorgeous sunny autumn day with a bite of cold in the air, and Carys was off school and he was off work and Lorraine had promised to finish her work and be home by five, and there had been a steel in her voice which suggested that this would actually happen. He was happy.

Mrs. Neill from the other end of the street called to them, and Blade made slightly stilted polite conversation for a couple of minutes while Carys turned shy and silent beside him – faced with relative strangers, she was not an outgoing child – and the memory of his last discussion with Lorraine on the subject of Mrs. Neill ran through his head, making it extremely difficult to keep a straight face.

(“She fancies you,” Lorraine had said, giggling helplessly. “I can see it! First it was the blocked gutter, now it’s a dodgy boiler, and oh god the makeup and the dress and you could just tell she didn’t expect you to bring me-“

“You did it too,” Blade pointed out a little crossly. “The socket, the sink, that stuck drawer-“

“Yes, but not on purpose,” Lorraine said, kissing him soothingly and spoiling it by collapsing with laughter halfway through. “Or only once, anyway. And you weren’t married then... Oh God... her face... Do you think she’s getting a kick out of trying to seduce a man she knows is taken? A sort of safe high, because she knows it’ll never happen?”

He had laughed too, because it was funny. Sort of.)

Then they were outside the front door, and Blade found his keys and unlocked it, and was very surprised to find his wife sitting in the kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee and talking on her Blackberry. She darted a glance and a smile at him. “-Hello, love. Not you, sir, my lawful wedded husband. Hi, sweetie,” she added, kissing the top of her daughter’s head as Carys hugged her round the waist and ran to kick off her shoes and drop her schoolbag. “No, sir, my husband has just arrived from bringing our daughter back from school. It’s half-term. I know Liz, Jamie and Nicky have been out of school long enough for you to have forgotten how the holiday system works, but... No, I will not call you James. Habit, sir.”

Puzzled, Blade fished for a piece of scrap paper and a pen and wrote Lester? on it before showing it to Lorraine. She nodded, took the pen and added explain later to the piece of paper.

There were thuds from upstairs. Blade grinned.

Lorraine rolled her eyes. “That, sir, is the sound of my daughter jumping up the stairs- before you draw any invidious comparisons, I would remind you that Liz used to blow up dinosaurs... So, is that all settled? The Mitchells have been contacted? By the Minister? Then I’d better call as well. Now, is this list correct for the people coming-“ She paused, and read off a long list on the table before her. “-Yes? Excellent. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow, sir.” She ended the call, and put the phone down with a sigh. He came and stood behind her, laying his hands on her shoulders, and she leant her head back against him, closing her eyes.

“Were we doing anything important this weekend? Or this half-term, as a matter of fact?”

He racked his brains. “Visiting your family tomorrow. And we’re going to Cornwall, just you and me, Carys’s going to stay with Ditzy and Claire, but that’s next Friday and Saturday. I was going caving with Finn and Ditzy midweek. Apart from that... No. Why?”

“Because if we were,” Lorraine murmured, “we aren’t now.” She stood up and stepped into his arms. “I am so glad I kept that P228. And that my job licenses me to have the damn thing.”

Lester- the Mitchells, who ran the hotel the team had used as a base- the handgun Lorraine kept, but rarely referred to. Pieces began to fall together in Blade’s mind. “The anomalies. Open again?”

“Yes. No. Maybe. Professor Cutter came through one.”

Blade swore quietly.

“Yes. Connor’s machine was only down for about a minute, but it was enough, and Lester thinks that where there can be one blip, there can be more, and he contacted the Minister, who says that Caroline- you remember Caroline Steel? –who monitors this kind of thing now, well, she’s just slapped a report on his desk saying that she thinks anomalies are back. Perhaps operating on a different frequency. On a smaller scale, but... she’s seeing hints. No Helen, but hints.”

“Helen’s dead. I saw her body,” he said, remembering the broken figure in the long-ago, almost pathetic in the anti-climax of her death.

“She travelled in time... is it such a great step to think she might have come into this future? Well, this present, but-”

“No,” he said, thinking, itching for a knife in his hand, “no, it isn’t.” He swore some more, and her arms tightened around him.

“So. Lester’s arranging an emergency conference, hosted by the ever-reliable Mitchells at that Forest of Dean hotel. You’ll probably still get to go caving...”

He grinned. “Probably. Does Lester want you running this thing?”

“In your words, probably.” They relaxed, and Lorraine headed for the kettle. “Tea? I sort of miss the ARC, you know. The camaraderie.”

“Not the nightmares,” Blade said, a statement, not a question.

“Not the nightmares,” Lorraine admitted. “I sometimes think we didn’t have a fighting chance, really. With today’s technology- half of it built by you-” she turned and smiled at him- “well, it might have been better.”

There was a clatter, and Carys appeared abruptly in the kitchen, dressed in jeans and an orange long-sleeved t-shirt. Blade sighed, and swung his daughter off her feet, making her giggle. “What do you think about the Forest of Dean, Carys?”

Carys gave her father a stare which (much to Claire and Lizzie’s amusement when Cara pointed it out) closely resembled Lorraine’s patented ‘I’m not sure I totally understand what you mean, and that may be a good thing’ look. Lorraine rephrased. “Daddy means, do you want to come with me and Daddy to the Forest of Dean this half-term. There’ll be other kids there- Flick and Sam and Robbie at least- and lots of your uncles and aunts. There’ll probably be quite a bit of grown-ups’ talky stuff, but you don’t have to listen or even hang around while it’s happening.”

Carys thought, then nodded, and reached out for her mother. Lorraine smiled, and moved closer, putting her arms around her daughter and her husband and letting her daughter wrap her arms around her chest. She leaned forward and whispered in Blade’s ear. “And I won’t even complain if you bring the knives.”

Blade smiled, recognising the joke, and Carys jabbed Lorraine in the ribs. “What, Mummy?”

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Lorraine said. “Confidential.”

No Rest For The Wicked

2009-12-21T22:22:40Z

Title: No Rest For The Wicked
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13
Summary: James Lester was looking forward to a smooth posting and honourable retirement. This didn’t feature in his plans.
A/N: Riffs off Luka’s Whole New Vision. Curses! belongs to the same ficverse.

                 James Lester climbed out of his car, thanked the driver, nodded to the security guards, and unlocked his front door, stepping inside the elegant house. It was not quite so elegant inside, but that was because his son and his partner were staying with him, and Jamie’s tolerance for minimalism was higher than Jon’s- just not much. Lester had seen Jamie’s flat. It had white walls when it was bought, which lasted about as long as it took Jamie to buy a lot of paint and huge paintbrushes; it was now a work of art, but Lester somehow felt that the British government would disapprove if this house were to suffer the same fate. On the other hand, the sketches Jamie blu-tacked to the walls instead of painting the walls were definitely an improvement on Jon’s caving ropes- and why Jon had brought caving kit to Washington, D.C., Lester didn’t know and didn’t care to ask.

              He wandered through to the library, where he found Jamie and Jon playing darts, and swallowed back an acidic comment recommending the preservation of the library’s beautiful wood panelling, replacing it with an urbane greeting. Jon wandered over and kissed him, the same easy, familiar gesture that they’d shared for years, and headed for the drinks cabinet.

            “Your sense of priority has not escaped you, Captain,” Lester drawled, just because he could, and Lyle looked at him and grinned. He’d made Captain only a year before he left the Army, and it sounded odd to hear his partner say captain and not lieutenant.

              “Is this a prelude to one of your mildly twisted BDSM sex games?” Jamie asked, sending a dart whizzing into the second circle of the board. “Because if so, I’d like to be elsewhere.”

              Jon laughed and poured three brandies, handing one over to Jamie and one over to Lester, who observed by way of revenge that it never got any less odd to see your son halfway down a glass of alcohol and know it was perfectly legal.

               “I’m twenty-nine,” Jamie protested, brandishing a second dart and sipping his drink.

              Lester removed his jacket and sat down in an armchair, leaning back and smiling as if he knew something Jamie didn’t, prompting a snigger from Jon and a stuck-out tongue from Jamie.

            The phone rang, and Jon picked it up. Lester looked at him quizzically, one eyebrow raised; it wasn’t usual for someone to call the house this late at night. (His Blackberry, yes, frequently, and frequently Jon beat him to the phone and informed whoever it was that it was half-past one in the morning and Sir James Lester wasn’t available for comment. But the house phone?)

            “Hello?... Connor?”

             Lester closed his eyes wearily. Oh God, please not Connor Temple, not after this evening’s excruciatingly dull political dinner, it was more than he could handle... He’d had years of dealing with that overgrown mechanically-minded toddler and his habit of getting into every kind of mischief the security team could think of and several others that would only ever have occurred to an imaginative chimpanzee on amphetamines. Surely, in his old age, he was due a little respite?

             He said the last bit out loud. Jamie snickered.

             Lester opened his eyes again, and looked at Lyle, who had gone mysteriously silent. His eyes were wide with shock, and his jaw hanging open just a little bit.

              “...Connor, I’m going to put you on speaker. I’ve got James and mini-James-“

               Jamie stuck one finger in the air rather emphatically, and Jon just grinned absently-

              “-in the room, and they both know about the anomalies already. Also, the room isn’t bugged.” Jon pressed a button. “Now tell the nice people what you already told me...”

              And Connor Temple’s voice, excited and laughing and sounding twenty years younger than it ought to and not nearly alarmed as it should, crackled over the Atlantic and into the library. “So, I was sitting in my office at CMU and suddenly you’ll never guess who came in and basically said what the hell are you doing in my office- Cutter! It was Cutter!”

              Jamie spat out a mouthful of brandy and made a high-pitched hitching noise of combined shock and alcohol-up-the-nose. On another occasion, Jon would have pointed and laughed, but not now.

             “-I mean, I mean, he’s back! And not even a bit older! Apparently he came through the Forest of Dean one. There was a blip on the anomaly machine this afternoon, just for like a minute but enough, and he came through!”

               There was a deadly pause. Lester broke it, choosing his words carefully. “Connor.”


               “Yes?”


              “Have you been dabbling in illegal substances, possibly furnished to you by mischievous students?”


              “No!” Connor snapped. “Look, I’ll prove it- Nick! Nick! For God’s sake, it’s just a toaster, I know it looks all space-age but it’s a toaster and if you’re not careful-“

“Ow!” came a distant shout.

“-yeah, if you’re not careful that happens. Look, Lester wants to talk to you.”

“I do not want to talk to-“ Lester began to protest.

“Tough,” Connor said, with a kind of upbeat callousness that Lester last heard when Abby was shanghaiing him into giving the equivalent of a father’s speech at her wedding. It was a pity that some of Abby’s common sense hadn’t rubbed off on Connor as well. “Here’s Nick.”

The sound of a phone changing hands, and then Nick’s Scottish half-growl: “Lester, you bastard, are you suggesting that Connor’s hallucinating me?”

The glass slid through Lester’s fingers, and shattered on the floor, and there was a very, very long silence.

“Jamie?” Lester said eventually.

“Yes?”

“Start packing.”

Curses!

2009-12-16T22:38:53Z

Title: Curses!
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13 (caution for swearing!)
Summary: In Melbourne and enjoying a peaceful family life, Nick’s reappearance comes as something of a shock to the Maitland/Stringer clan.

A/N: Riffs off Luka’s Whole New Vision, and alludes to Fred’s The Devil’s Crowll. Holly and Lucy are entirely my own fault, but it was Luka who said Abby and Joel had twins... *grin*

           The phone rang. Joel groaned, and reached out for it, but only succeeded in knocking the lamp onto the floor. His wife, only slightly less awake, mumbled “Men!” scathingly, and squirmed over him to reach the offending telephone, keeping up a running commentary of stupid bloody ex-special forces idiots what was all that sodding training for as she went. In the darkness, Joel smirked; they were a long way away from England, the Forest of Dean and the Devil’s Crowll, but Abby was still unimpressed by machismo. Or stupidity fit to knock lamps off bedside tables, if you put it Abby’s way.

           He put an experimental hand on her thigh, and she smacked it lightly, pressing the call button on the phone. “Hello? Hello. Connor! Do you know what bloody time it is here?... I was just getting some sleep. For God’s sake, between you, Joel, the twins and that sodding snow leopard at the zoo- what. Connor, could you repeat that please, this line is awful and I’m not sure- What! I don’t bloody believe it!”

               Joel resurrected the bedside lamp and switched it on in order to look into his wife’s face. Her jaw was hanging open with shock.

               “Daddy?” came a feathery whisper from the door, and Joel glanced up to see the twins. Taking acknowledgement as invitation, they pattered forward and clambered onto the bed.

              “Holly, Lucy, you should be in bed,” Abby said sternly, but halfway off the bed and lying over her husband’s legs was not a position of authority, and Holly and Lucy completely ignored her.

               Joel ruffled Holly’s short sandy hair, and tugged one of her sister’s plaits. “Holls, Luce, you’ve had your marching orders. Off, now.”

               “Ngh,” Lucy mumbled, snuggling against her father’s side and sticking her thumb into her mouth, with the apparent intention of falling asleep. Joel groaned, and removed the thumb.

               “Lucy, you know what Dr. Sharma said about sucking your thumb. Now go. Both of you... Abby, are you all right?”

              “No!” Abby spluttered, fuming. “I don’t know! Clumsy, idiot husbands, stupid friends, children climbing everywhere- help me up, I’m falling off!”

               Joel and the twins obligingly hauled. Lucy and Holly retreated to the end of the bed, the better to go unnoticed.

               “What’s happened, anyway?” Joel demanded, as Abby smouldered dangerously in a slightly less precarious position.

              Abby sighed. “Connor’s... Ah. There’s been a blip on that gadget of his that shuts down anomalies, and Nick’s come back.”

               “Nick? Cutter?”

              Abby nodded resignedly, and, almost automatically, a litany of truly awful and remarkably inventive swearwords poured forth from Joel.

               There was a stunned silence, and then Connor, on the other end of the phone line, began to laugh helplessly. “Connor, shut up, it’s not funny,” Abby hissed, glaring daggers at Joel. “Girls, you aren’t to repeat any of those ever, do you understand me?”

              “Yes, Mummy,” Lucy said obediently, but Abby could hear Holly trying out ‘squirrel-swiving’ under her breath, and the glare only got worse.

              “Joel Stringer,” she muttered, “you are in so much trouble. Connor! We will discuss this later! At some time that is not three in the morning! Goodnight! Girls, bed. It’s not morning yet. Come and give me a kiss, then shoo, all right?”

              Holly and Lucy gave her a kiss each, and then slid off the bed and bounced away. Joel prepared himself for a serious interrogation.

             He didn’t get one; what he did get was one small foot, heaving him out of bed, or at least seriously indicating that he didn’t belong in the bed. “Sofa,” Abby said shortly, and cocooned herself in the duvet. “If I sleep with you now, I’ll find myself eating you before the night’s over. Like a praying mantis. And I think I have a name for that warthog now... Joel the warthog. It has a nice ring... What are you doing still there?”

              “Going,” Joel said meekly, and headed for the sofa, hearing his girls giggling quietly and trying out a few of the words he’d just inadvertently taught them. He had a feeling that a night on the sofa wouldn’t be the last he’d hear of this.

***

In England, Connor still hadn’t stopped laughing, and Nick was at something of a loss to know why. “What? Connor, what?” he protested, eyeing Connor in some perplexity.

“Nothing,” Connor gasped, “nothing,” and wept with laughter and joy and a sense of mischief he hadn’t felt for, oh God, years.

He only hoped Lester’s reaction would be half as much fun.

Undue Influence of Mistletoe and Wine

2009-12-16T21:10:47Z

Title: Undue Influence of Mistletoe and Wine
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The office Christmas party produces a lot of one night stands; these things happen, perfectly normal, nothing to worry about, hardly a lasting relationship in the making. Jenny’s grown up enough to understand that, but she still wishes he’d stay. Jenny/Blade.

A/N: This fic was supposed to be a drabble, and there are two reasons for its existence.

1) I wanted to not write Blade as the good guy, for a change.

2) I wanted to write something quick, just to prove I could still write. It’s been a trifle frustrating here.

                     When Jenny wakes, the first thing that pops into her head (after that was actually quite a good Christmas party, really) is that Blade is trying to leave without waking her. There’s no other explanation for what she’s seeing. It’s dark and still outside, and Blade is dressing very quietly, probably thinking she’s still asleep.

               It’s not an unreasonable assumption, and his shirt is still half over his head after all, but Jenny will wake at the sound of an ant waltzing these days, let alone the sound of someone putting clothes on. She sits up, the sheet sliding to her waist.

                “If you want to go, go,” she says.

               He freezes, and she sighs. “Do you usually get away with it?”

               “Get away with what, Miss Lewis?”

               “I told you, Jenny. Get away with leaving before your latest conquest wakes up.”

               She’s caught him red-handed and he doesn’t even sound embarrassed. “Yes.”

              “Look, if you wanted to leave you could have just gone, rather than sneaking out like a criminal. We’re both adults; these things happen. We can blame it on undue influence of mistletoe and wine.”

               It’s a nice, neat PR phrase, and he manages to shatter it in just a few moments. He comes and stands next to the bed, and he’s smiling down at her, almost ruefully (but she’s fairly sure that Niall Richards never regretted a single thing he did, and that includes any and all drunken one-night-stands.) “Or mutual attraction, Miss Lewis? It’d be more truthful.”

               And Blade leans down and slides his hand into her loose hair and kisses her softly, slowly, like a goodbye, and then he’s gone.

              Jenny calls him every bad name she knows, because now she cares that he left.

Bull's-eye

2009-12-02T21:34:49Z

Title: Bull’s-eye
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: 15 for swearing, dark themes, character death
Summary: The story of a friendship forced by circumstances.

A/N: Sam belongs to the splendiferous sunsetdawn20. Many thanks for the lend! J

one

There are two new employees at the ARC. One is Lorraine Wickes, quiet and shy and an admin whiz. The other is Sam West, noisy and sexy and really, really good at getting into trouble.

Lorraine rather disapproves of Sam, to be honest, with her smoking setting off the fire alarm and her habit of wandering around with a handgun tucked into the back of her jeans like it’s supposed to be there (which it’s not.) Most of all, she disapproves of the way that Sam never seems to take any of this seriously, and by ‘this’ she doesn’t just mean the anomalies- she means the death, destruction and pain they bring. Sam’s always there with a filthy laugh and a filthier joke, and, ready as she is to see Sam’s usefulness to the team, she wishes that Sam would understand the danger of what they do.

Sam thinks Lorraine is boring, when she notices her at all. Just another civil servant, more soft-spoken than Lester, but just as quick on the uptake, and apparently possessed of a phenomenal memory- and a way of being silent that screams disapproval. Also either lock-picking skills or the wit to bribe a lock-picker, because Sam’s cigarettes have vanished from her locker four times in a row, and Sam’s starting to get cross. Lorraine is boring and prissy and dull, dull, dull.

Sam enjoys trying to wind Lorraine up, and every now and then succeeding.

Lorraine enjoys using the master key to get into Sam’s locker and remove Sam’s cigarettes.

two

Lester orders shooting lessons for certain civilians, and Lorraine is among them. She protests, and Lester ignores her, and with something of a bad grace she accepts lessons from Captain Ryan, who knows what she is- what she used to be. It means he treats her with a little more respect than most of the soldiers do.

Sig Sauer P228 is the make of handgun he teaches her to use, and he is surprised to see that she has the beginnings of an aptitude. If only she’d practise- and she does, dutifully, once a week, but Stephen confirms that if she just put in a little more time she could be really good rather than just mediocre. She refuses, and her eyes have gone strangely opaque, so Ryan and Stephen and even Lester drop the subject.

Sam takes advanced lessons from Ryan, often straight after Lorraine’s. She waits just outside, sitting on a table and swinging her legs and watching Lorraine’s scores get higher and higher, but Sam is still miles better. When Lorraine comes out, puts her ear defenders away, puts the handgun away, puts the spare cartridges away, Sam immediately starts chattering to Ryan, with her sly full smile.

three

“You put these in my locker!” Sam accuses, striding into Lorraine’s office and throwing a packet of nicotine patches onto her desk. Lorraine blinks, removes her reading glasses and eyes the patches dispassionately.

“No, but I’d like to thank whoever did.”

“Are you one of those sanctimonious bastards who bang on about smoking being wrong?”

“No,” Lorraine says calmly, handing the packet back to her. “I think it is wrong, but I’m not going to go on about it. Your lungs are your problem, not mine.”

Caught hopping – she’d been so convinced that she was absolutely right about Lorraine, that she was bland and condescending and something hateable – Sam scowls furiously, and tries a new tack. “You’ve been breaking into my locker!”

“No,” Lorraine repeats, putting her glasses back on and typing a few letters. “I haven’t. But do quit smoking. You smell like an ashtray all the time and you set the fire alarm off at least once a week, which I for one find tiresome.”

Sam gapes, swears volubly, and storms out, still holding the nicotine patches. Jenny chuckles. “Do you think she knows about the master key?”

Lorraine finally smiles. “I know she doesn’t. But I still didn’t put the nicotine patches there.”

“Ditzy?”

“Probably.”

four

Then it happens, in a clean, industrial room with a lot of electronic cages.

Sam’s world snaps and shatters and crumbles.

Ryan’s is annihilated.

The funeral is terrible. They bury scraps of bone and flesh, and – unless Sam is wrong – both Nick Cutter and Tom Ryan’s hearts. And a bit of hers, too. In a way.

She can’t stay with Ryan. She doesn’t want to see him cry.

Lorraine offers her the use of a spare room, and Sam doesn’t even ask how she knew. Sam accepts the offer, and gets roaring drunk the first night she stays there- actually, they both do, because as it turns out Lorraine is a total lightweight. Neither of them ever quite remembers what each told the other, which is probably a good thing, and in the morning they go back to work in a half-destroyed, demoralised building.

Given the state of things now, nobody notices that Lorraine Wickes and Sam West have both got stinking hangovers, and nobody asks why they arrived and left in the same car. Obscurely, they miss the thriving, cheerful gossip grapevine, burnt and shredded by seventeen deaths and one maiming.

five

Ryan tells Sam what he knows about Lorraine mostly by accident and under the influence of alcohol, of which there has been a bit too much lately. “-she’s a fucking spy! Didn’t you know? Lester headhunted her from MI5-“

No, Sam didn’t know. She confronts Lorraine with this while Lorraine is cooking dinner (one of those vicious curries she seems to make on automatic.) In hindsight, this is a mistake, as Lorraine almost cuts off the top of her finger in shock. “Captain Ryan told you?”

“Yeah. Does it matter? Why don’t you tell anyone, Lorraine? It’s cool! You worked for MI5!”

Lorraine’s lips thin and she moves quietly to run her finger under the tap and find a plaster. Absently, Sam fishes for the box in one of the kitchen drawers, and discovers a set of Angelina Ballerina ones. She waves them questioningly at Lorraine, who nods her head at the family portrait, a professional photograph on a plain background: there is a small girl in the picture, presumably Lorraine’s niece. Well, that explains the plasters.

“I saw men and women sent to their deaths, Sam,” Lorraine tells her, softly, and her face is distant, as if she sees something Sam does not. “I handed out briefings and took dictation and photocopied and printed and made phone calls - and you know how bad I am at forgetting. There was nothing cool about it. Nothing.”

“Okay, right, whatever,” Sam says, subject closed, and puts the plasters away and fishes in Lorraine’s cupboards for the six-pack of beer she put there and the elderflower cordial Lorraine is addicted to.

That evening, Sam takes extra care to smoke out of the window, so that the spare room (quickly becoming Sam’s room) won’t reek of it.

six

These nightmares Lorraine has, they worry Sam; but then, she has her own to worry about.

They develop a sort of teasing rivalry that privately astonishes almost everyone at the ARC, Lorraine fighting to improve her score on the shooting range, trying to beat Sam- and getting there, too, slowly but surely, Sam swearing loudly and raising her game every time Lorraine comes close. Practice does it; constant practice. It’s probably not healthy but it helps them both, to be able to joke and jibe, each constantly trying to beat the other.

Jenny notices that outside of these times, Lorraine and Sam lapse too easily into a blank silence, shock coalesced and hardened, baked hard by denial in every hour and every day. She also notices the deep shadows under Lorraine and Sam’s eyes, that they’re not getting enough sleep.

But then, who is these days?

seven

Months after the attack on the ARC and Stephen’s death, Sam wakes up to the sound of Lorraine screaming, again, and half-falls out of bed to stumble hurriedly to her side. Lorraine has kicked her duvet off and there are darker sweat patches on her pyjamas, and her screaming has sunk to a fearful torn sobbing.

Sam shakes her awake. Lorraine is sick.

Sam is so shocked that she cleans Lorraine up and sends her to sleep on the sofa while she sorts out the bed. This is not how it works. Lorraine is the one who looks after her, not the other way round. Something is wrong, very wrong, more wrong than Sam ever realised before.

A week later, Lorraine has finally had enough of Sam’s badgering her to get counselling, and suggests snappishly that she move back to live with Ryan. Sam shouts that she will, and she does, although the boxes of nicotine patches (because Sam is trying, and she is smoking less these days- well, a bit less) stick around. So do the camouflage plasters Sam bought to replace the Angelina Ballerina ones. And a stray earring. And a pair of socks and a bra which happened to be in the wash. Also a thriller of the kind Lorraine refers to as ‘war porn’. Not to mention six or seven paper shooting targets, kept as mementoes of particularly good scores. Sam finds all these things in her locker within the next week.

It’s remarkably easy to break off the friendship. They don’t have to come into contact at all if they don’t want to, and they don’t.

eight

When Lorraine and Blade start dating, Sam is not quite as surprised as everyone else (after all, she knows that Lorraine likes the bad ones really, or so she tells Ryan and Davis and a bunch of others with her signature dirty grin, which raises a laugh.) But when she, ah, accidently overhears Blade telling Ditzy that Lorraine has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, she barges in, because she has to warn him. The whole story of how she came to leave Lorraine’s flat pours out.

“If you don’t want to lose her, don’t badger her to get counselling,” she finishes, both Blade and Ditzy staring at her. The only thing that makes her think that Lorraine might have a chance, might not just blow her brains out one grey day, is that Blade looks genuinely upset and afraid- insofar as it’s possible to tell, this being Blade.

Bull’s-eye

Sam’s a little scared of Blade, really, but he’s Lorraine’s boyfriend and that puts her under a positive obligation to use him to drive her up the wall, so she starts to flirt- cautiously at first, since a knife between the ribs is never welcome, but then more boldly. A brush of the hips, a suggestive comment, standing just a little too close... this is Sam’s favourite game, and Blade’s a pretty counter to play it with. Blade doesn’t react much, but Sam knows that Lorraine knows what she’s up to, and she is just waiting to see what Lorraine will do next. So is everybody else. In fact, by this point, there is a betting pool.

Nobody thinks it’s a coincidence when Lorraine manages to drop in at the rec room just as Sam finishes thrashing the latest foolhardy bunch of soldiers at strip poker, although everyone is surprised when Lorraine offers to play.

“Poker?” Sam says, grinning cheekily.

Lorraine smiles forgivingly. “No; I don’t know how to play. Cheat?”

Sam shrugs. “Sure.”

Unfortunately, Lorraine turns out to have a really excellent game face and a gift for trapping Sam into saying ‘cheat’ at the wrong moment. By the time that Lorraine has lost her jacket and both her earrings, Sam is in her underwear, and the suppressed laughter around the room is not so suppressed.

Lorraine eyes her, and then smiles blandly. “You can keep the rest,” she offers generously, and lays her cards on the table face down. The laughter turns into a full-throated roar of amusement, and Lorraine turns to go.

Sam stops flirting with Blade. She knows when she’s beaten.

The next day, Lorraine finds cigarettes in her locker. She laughs, and stops taking them out of Sam’s. She knows when she’s beaten.

lonely_candle @ 2009-12-01T22:42:00

2009-12-01T22:42:48Z

Title: The Only Thing That Matters
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: 15
Summary: Carys Richards discovers the downside to inheriting your Dad’s looks. Lewis looks after her. Carys/Lewis.

A/N: Written for Fifi, and posted after it got to the point where the poking was becoming unbearable. :p This is set within Fifi’s and my ARClets kid!fic verse; Carys Richards is Lorraine and Blade’s daughter, Lewis is from Fifi’s A Life Never Lived.

“Lewis!”

The Chemistry textbook slid out of Lewis’s hands, bounced off his forehead, and fell to the floor. He knelt, picked it up, and tried to stand up. Unfortunately, the open locker door was in the way, and his skull caught the metal edge, thick messy light hair proving no cushion at all. He swore.

“Lewis,” Ms Rothspey said reprovingly.

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, retreating a few paces and straightening properly before stuffing the textbook into his untidy locker. “Were you looking for me?”

“Yes,” Ms Rothspey said. “Carys has gone.”

“Gone? What! Gone where? Why?”

The Physics teacher, and coincidentally Carys’s form tutor, sighed. “Gone, yes. Since early lunchtime. Considering that this is Carys, and Houdini has nothing on her aptitude for wriggling out of windows, probably over a wall or out a side door or down a drainpipe, but where then, Lewis, I was hoping you could tell me. Robbie Finn and Thomas Temple tell me it was the Sixth form boys bothering her again. They showed me a website...”

Lewis swore again, much more loudly. Ms Rothspey gave him an admonishing look, but said nothing. “Max Hayes and Jack Bacon and that lot? If they’ve been harassing her, I’ll-“

“Do nothing that isn’t absolutely above board and reasonable,” Ms Rothspey said for the benefit of a passing teacher, and ran a hand through short, sticky-up hair. “Look, Lewis, I know. I can’t make them shut up and I can’t make her speak to me about them. I need to talk to the Head, if these boys are upsetting her to the extent of making her run away. God knows I’ve tried, but he just suggests the school counsellor and conflict resolution, and we all know just how well that would wo-“

“She won’t run away from home,” Lewis assured her, thinking. He hadn’t got any more lessons that day, and he’d been planning to do some Biology coursework, but finding Carys was more important. “I think I know where she is. Don’t let them call her in truant. But seriously, Ms Rothspey. Get the Head to suspend those boys, or expel them- they’re making Carys miserable and furious and she will seriously hurt one of them if they don’t knock it off. If she doesn’t, I will. I’m sick of seeing them prey on her.”

“I can believe that,” Ms Rothspey said. “I’ll go to the Head as soon as I’ve got Carys sitting in my office.”

“Show him the webpages about her. Maybe reading a thousand repetitions of Caris Richard is sexy will get him to believe they’re a problem.”

“I wish I had your optimism,” Ms Rothspey muttered, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

Lewis grinned at her. “I’ll find her, Ms Rothspey. She won’t have gone far.”

***

He walked out of the school gates and took a sharp left down the street, calculating in his head. If Carys had been gone since early lunchtime, she had forty-five minutes’ head start. She would have been dressed in incriminating school uniform. She would have had to ditch that first... Games kit? Lewis knew she kept some in her locker on a permanent basis. She must have changed into it before she left school- all of it was sufficiently anonymous to suggest she was just a girl out for a run rather than a skiving teenager. She probably hadn’t had any lunch before she left, so she might have gone for a run and then stopped into a café to buy a drink and a sandwich, but he knew for certain where she would have ended up by now.

Fifteen minutes’ brisk walk took him to the planetarium. He paused outside the double doors, and then went inside, walking across to the bored teenager on the front desk. The foyer was much as it had always been; dark blue walls painted with patterns of stars, vending machines.

“Hi,” Lewis said. “Has a girl come in here in about the past hour? She was probably wearing a grey tracksuit and a blue t-shirt. About sixteen years old, maybe five foot six or seven tall.”

The teenager yawned, and cast his mind back with an effort. “Uh...”

“Brown straight hair,” Lewis added. “Brown skin. Greenish brown eyes?”

“Oh, the hottie!” the teenager exclaimed, brightening up instantly, and shrivelled under Lewis’s furious glare. “All right, your hottie, I get it. She came in about half an hour ago, went into observatory three.”

“Thank you,” Lewis said dangerously, and bought a ticket for observatory three using the touch-screen the teenager offered and his debit card. The ticket printed out with an electronic splutter, and Lewis pocketed it.

He knew this place off by heart, so finding observatory three. Carys had dragged him and Robbie and Thomas here so many times, to look at the stars and listen to the explanatory films. She’d always been fascinated by space. Lewis pressed the ticket against the small, glowing reader beside the observatory’s heavy door, and waited for it to beep in confirmation before pushing the door open.

The room was quite dark, except for the film playing overhead, scanning gently round the Milky Way while a soothing voice explained the Big Bang Theory. Carys could probably recite the audio in her sleep, but that didn’t stop her coming here when she was angry or frightened.

Lewis fumbled his way around the observatory in the dark until he found the row of reclinable seats right in the middle, and edged along it until he found the one occupied seat in the whole auditorium- right in the centre. He pulled his keys from his pocket and switched on the tiny keyring torch.

For a moment, it lit up a figure that looked older than sixteen in a thin grey tracksuit and a blue sleeveless shirt, long straight brown hair, skin the colour of a really good mocha, full lips and greenish brown eyes. Carys Richards scowled and put up an arm to cover her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you.” Lewis sat down in the seat beside her, switching off the torch, and reclined his own seat till he was lying flat beside Carys. “I hear Max Hayes is making a pain of himself again.”

“Him and a bunch of other jerks,” Carys agreed.

“What did they do this time?”

Hesitation.

Lewis turned onto his side, watching her in the dim light of the film. “You can tell me.”

“They... came and found me. At my locker. They stood around me, and they... talked.”

“Talked?”

“About dirty things. What they’d do with me if-” She paused. Lewis got the picture. His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists.

“Go on.”

“I told them I wouldn’t sleep with them if they were the last men on earth, that I wouldn’t blow them if I was dying of thirst, that I’d as soon kill them as look at them.”

“Attagirl.” He reached out and touched her hair soothingly. “You tell ’em.”

“Then Max said I must be getting it from somewhere else if I didn’t want them.” Carys swallowed. “He- Thomas and Robbie.”

Lewis indulged in a burst of pure Anglo-Saxon. Carys chuckled, startled, and he saw the glint of light on her teeth as she smiled, but the quicksilver grin was gone almost as soon as it arrived. “I can’t believe-!”

“I can.” She sounded sad. “Why can’t they shut up and leave me alone?”

Lewis sighed. “Because you pretty much got your dad’s looks. Genetics didn’t let you down there. And also because you’re unavailable, and you confuse them.”

“Yeah, and I managed to inherit Mum’s conscience as well. If I was more like Dad I could just knife them.”

“There are laws against that,” Lewis reminded her.

Carys snorted. “I know. I don’t mean it.” She paused. “Much.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Lewis reached for her hand and squeezed it comfortingly, only slightly alarmed. “Do your parents know about Max and his minions?”

Carys shook her head. “I made Thomas and Robbie swear not to tell them.”

“Do you want to tell them, or shall I?” Lewis asked. “I think Ms Rothspey’s worked her way up to going on the warpath by now. She’ll probably drag in the Head and your parents –so they’ll have to find out- and the school counsellor and all sorts of people, and Robbie and Thomas showed her the websites. Max Hayes is screwed.”

“Good,” Carys said with considerable satisfaction. “And... I’ll tell them.” She fell silent. “They’re not going to be happy.”

He stood up, and she followed his lead. He smiled down at her. “Maybe not. I definitely wouldn’t want to be Max Hayes when they find out. But they won’t be angry with you, I promise.”

Suddenly, Carys stepped closer and hugged him. Lewis smiled, and put his arms around her, resting his chin on the top of her head. He could feel her heart beating, and then something soaked through his t-shirt. “Hey!” he said, startled, and pulled back a little. “You’re crying.”

Carys nodded and sniffled some more.

“Don’t cry,” he said gently, and wiped the tears off her cheeks with the cuff of his school shirt.

“They upset me,” Carys explained, and almost sobbed, “why can’t they leave me alone?”

“Because they’re jerks,” Lewis said matter-of-factly, and hugged Carys tightly, trying to squash a sudden urge to break every bone in Max Hayes’s body. “And I’ll see them expelled if it’s the last thing I do.”

Carys buried her face in his shoulder for a moment, then pulled away, standing on her own two feet and almost smiling at Lewis. “Thanks, Lewis. I owe you.”

“Rubbish,” Lewis said awkwardly.

***

The halls was quite empty. Lewis, having confirmed with an automated receptionist that he was expected, found himself wandering down a corridor, looking for a name on of the identical doors. He heard voices from inside some of the rooms, but none of them were familiar, and he didn’t see the person he was looking for- so presumably she was in her room. He was a bit early, though...

He spotted the name he was looking for and knocked on the door. Carys opened it, and smiled broadly. Lewis, unused to the sheer impact of a Richards smile at close range after a few months of not seeing the family much, reeled mentally. “Lewis! I wasn’t expecting you for ages. Come in!”

She stepped aside and let him into her room. It was scrupulously tidy, and Lewis winced to think of the contrast between it and his own room, which was (quite bluntly) a tip. The desk light was on, and focussed on a sheet of paper with half-done calculations on it. “I’m sorry, I interrupted you.”

“No, honestly. The work’s not due for a good while.” She closed the door behind him. “You look cold.”

“It’s freezing out there,” he admitted.

“Your hands are icy,” she said disapprovingly, and rubbed them briskly between hers to warm them up. “Did you forget your gloves or something?”

“Gloves are for sissies,” he grinned, and earned himself a roll of the eyes and an affectionate cuff round the ear.

“Hot chocolate?” Carys asked, waving a tin of instant hot chocolate. “Kitchen’s a wreck, but you can usually fight your way to the kettle.”

“That’d be great, thanks.” He followed her out of the room and down the corridor to a large open kitchen area, littered with saucepans, half-empty bacon packets, dirty mugs and other features of a student kitchen. Carys filled the kettle and set it to boiling, then retrieved two mugs from a cupboard and ladled instant hot chocolate into it.

“So, how’ve you been?” Lewis asked, watching her. She looked comfortable and happy, and much less defensive and sullen than she had been at secondary school. University definitely suited her.

“I’m fine,” Carys said, pouring boiling water into the mugs and stirring, before producing a bag of small marshmallows labelled with her initials and tipping some into the mugs. She handed one over to Lewis, fingers brushing his. “Careful. Mug’s boiling.”

“Thanks,” he said gratefully, sipping it as quickly as he could without burning his tongue. “God, it’s good to see you again!”

Carys laughed, a pleased smile on her face. “Did you miss me?”

“Everyone does,” he assured her, and wondered if he was imagining that flash of disappointment in her eyes. “You know I go down to London a lot- because I’m not mad enough to go to uni in Scotland- well, nothing’s the same without you and Thomas and Robbie around. It’s much quieter. Your mum and dad say hi, by the way.”

“Are they coping?”

Lewis shrugged. “Think so, but they miss you. You know it’s hard to tell.”

Carys shrugged herself as they headed out of the kitchen. “People say it’s hard to tell with me.”

“They don’t know you,” Lewis assured her. “You’re hardly an open book and you do clam up around people you aren’t sure of-“

“I thought Robbie was the budding psychiatrist! Spare me!”

“-but that’s just because people have let you down before. Over dyslexia and that. It’s not your fault. Speaking of ‘that’, have you had any trouble?”

Carys raised her eyebrows and opened the door to her room. “If you mean trouble of the Max Hayes variety, then no. Some at the beginning of term, but it sort of... stopped.”

“Knife or pistol?”

Carys flipped him the bird. “Neither! I only hit one person a little bit. One of Dad’s old friends does teach Engineering here, though. And there’s another of Dad’s mates in the caving club here, and some of Auntie Liz’s. Is it just me, or is our extended family ridiculous? I think they might have put the word around that you leave Carys Richards the hell alone-“

“-or you can expect a broken nose?” Lewis grinned at her.

“I did that once. Once!”

“It was kind of spectacular.”

“I think the best bit was Uncle Ditzy telling him he was lucky to still have his nose, full stop,” Carys confided.

“I think the best bit was where Auntie Abby awarded you seven and a half for technique. You looked gutted.”

“She was a bloody harsh teacher! Good, though.”

“And it solved the Hayes problem,” Lewis pointed out, remembering the kickboxing lessons and the care Carys had taken to practise beating seven kinds out of a punchbag in the school gym where she could be seen.

“It did, too.” Carys sipped her hot chocolate meditatively, and said suddenly: “Did I ever thank you for coming to find me in the planetarium?”

He thought. “Probably. I don’t remember.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.” She smiled crookedly at him. They were sitting companionably next to each other on the bed, sides of their legs touching and backs pressed against the wall, and he turned his head and frowned.

“It doesn’t still bother you?”

“No. But I don’t forget. Like Dad I don’t forgive and like Mum I don’t forget.” The twisted smile twisted further. “And if I ever see Max Hayes again I’ll deck him. He had no right to talk to me like that.”

“Nobody does,” Lewis said firmly. “The only thing that matters is that you came out of it OK.”

“Yeah, well. I owe that to you, don’t I?”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” Carys kissed him quickly on the cheek, and he smiled.

“Funny way of saying thank you,” he observed.

“It’s not thank you. It’s- nothing.”

Lewis frowned again, struck by a sense that she’d been going to say something else, and then he put together that flash of disappointment earlier with her smile when she saw him and so many other little things and a shocking possibility occurred to him and his jaw dropped, and he stared at Carys. She couldn’t- she wouldn’t- not her, surely. She probably had a boyfriend and was just waiting for him to turn up so she could introduce them.

A sullen, brick-red flush flamed on Carys’s cheeks. She had always hated being stared at. “What?” she demanded.

“Do you-“ he swallowed, and gave up on words, putting his half-empty mug down on her desk and taking her mug out of her hands to do the same with it, then reaching out to slide his hand round the back of her neck and lean in –carefully, slowly, giving her time to push him away without actually having to hurt him, as he was under no illusions that she would and he didn’t want to lose her trust- to kiss her.

She sighed, mouth opening under his, and moved into the kiss, pressing closer till she was practically sitting in his lap, and he put his other arm around her.

The door creaked open, and someone squeaked. “Go away, Christina,” Carys said calmly, pulling away and looking over at the door and a very startled fellow student. Christina did.

“Your ears have gone red,” Carys remarked, flicking one of them, and smiling at him.

“Ow!”

“Maybe I should bolt the door,” she pursued, and got up and pressed her index finger into the pad beside the door. It flashed red, and there was an audible click of the door locking. “And that was a very odd way of asking if I fancied you.”

“That was a very odd way of saying yes,” Lewis retorted, and held out his arms to her. She came over to the bed and let him pull her into his lap.

“We both got the message. That’s what’s important. Although... I’m surprised.”

“By what?” he enquired with some difficulty, given that Carys kept finding better things to do with his mouth.

She sighed. “That you didn’t realise before. Pictures, McAllister. Look at ’em.”

She moved out of his line of sight, and his eyes flicked to the digital photo frame beside her bed, which slid between a slideshow of three pictures- one of Carys’s parents together, one of Robbie and Thomas pulling horrible faces at the camera, and the last and the only one that featured Carys, one of her and himself taken last summer when the entire extended family had organised itself for a huge get-together in a hotel outside Hereford and the two of them had sat next to each other at dinner. He had his arm around her, and her head was resting against his shoulder. They were both grinning broadly.

“I’m blind,” he observed, thumping his forehead with the heel of his hand.

“You’re blind,” Carys agreed. “But you got there in the end, yes?”

“Yeah.” He pressed the pause button on the photo frame, so it froze on the picture of them. “I like that photo.”

“Funny thing, so do I- but I think the other participant has better things to do than talk.”

“Definitely,” Lewis said solemnly, and pounced.

Arclets Wallpapers

2009-11-29T22:53:31Z

As some of you may know, fififolle and I are playing with some kid!fic ideas at the moment. Having cast most of them, with the exception of Robbie Finn (thank you Fakey!) and in need of stress relief, I started toying with graphics... and, well, here we are.

OC - Author - Actor
Robbie Finn - Fakey - Michael Angarano
Thomas Temple - Fifi - Thomas Dekker
Nicola Temple - Fifi - Rachel Bilson
Beth Cooper - Luka - Anne Hathaway
Carys Richards - May - Katerina Graham
Lewis Ryan McAllister - Fifi - Zach Roerig

Unintentional

2009-11-26T22:49:55Z

Title: Unintentional
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: “What are your intentions towards my aunt?” Blade suffers the trauma of a family Christmas. Blade/Lorraine.

A/N: I have been on something of a Blade/Lorraine kick lately, I admit. *g* I’m under a certain amount of pressure, and I find writing about them comfortingly easy. This also dedicated to Fifi, for her patience in receiving and appreciatively reading absurd amounts of B/L fluff..

It was halfway through Christmas afternoon, that peaceful time after presents and dinner when half the family falls fast asleep and the other half gets out the board-games. Although Blade was fairly convinced he would have preferred to fall asleep with Lorraine, he had found himself conscripted into the latter group, and being thrashed at Scrabble by a seven-year-old who had just put down ZEST on a triple word score.

Lorraine, sitting by his shoulder and being absolutely no help whatsoever, laughed and reached around him, thoughtfully rearranging the little letter tiles on the small green rack, which didn’t change the fact that of the seven tiles, five were vowels. There came a sudden whoop and a spurt of giggles from the kitchen, and Lorraine shook her head tolerantly.

She leaned against his shoulder for a moment, sleepy and relaxed, then kissed his neck and stood up. “I’m going to see what Eric and George are mixing up in the kitchen.”

“The demon drink,” Adele said absently, flipping through the shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Her aunt and her aunt’s boyfriend stared at her in utter confusion.

“We’ve been learning about Victorians and temp’rance in school,” she explained, looking up at them innocently. “Did you know that teetotallers are called teetotallers because the sort of leader guy couldn’t talk prop’ly and they asked him if-“

“Yes,” Lorraine said, making a hasty escape to the kitchen. Blade felt inexplicably abandoned.

It had been a nice Christmas. Lorraine had been quite clear that he didn’t have to come if he didn’t want to, but she usually went down a few days before Christmas Eve and left the evening of Boxing Day, and they all piled into her older sister Jacinth’s house because it was largest, and if Blade wanted to join her then... well, she’d like that. She’d like that a lot. And Jac had specifically said he was welcome. Lorraine had almost babbled, as much as someone like Lorraine Wickes was capable of it, right up until he’d put his arms around her and hugged her almost crushingly tight, whereupon she had muttered “that’s a yes, then,” and relaxed.

He hadn’t been... sure, so to speak. He’d never been exposed to the noisy, boisterous entirety of the Wickes family, just one or two members of it at a time, and even just ‘family’ the way Lorraine thought of the concept was completely alien to him. He’d lost his parents when he was small, he’d never had a brother or a sister or even cousins, and while his grandparents had done their best, their best hadn’t helped him that much. He was only two. He didn’t understand why they cried.

Watching Lorraine talk to her parents, seeing how much they loved her, he thought he was beginning to get the point.

And they’d accepted him. Let him fix things, let him in on their inside jokes, welcomed him, and that didn’t mean treating him politely like a guest, but actually welcoming him, sending him out with Lorraine’s brothers to ritually dismember the fusebox or asking him to help bring the Christmas tree in. Or, as it happened, play Scrabble.

Blade blinked and glared at his letters. A E O L U I V. What the hell was he supposed to do with that lot? No wonder Adele was thrashing him quite so impressively.

From the kitchen, he heard a joyful cry of “Lori! Come and have a cocktail. How about a Sexy Green Eyes?”

“Eric, take your twin, give him coffee, and put him under a cold shower,” Lorraine ordered more quietly, although Blade could practically hear her embarrassment and grinned to himself. “He’s already drunk. Besides, that’s not a real cocktail.”

“’Tis now. We made it up.”

“That’s nice. Now go away and sober up,” Lorraine sighed, and the sound of the twins – not without protest – retreating upstairs reached Blade’s ears.

There was a small cough from the implacable child on the other side of the Scrabble board, and Blade met uncomfortably sharp black eyes. (He was almost certain seven-year-olds weren’t meant to behave like this, even seven-year-olds that were Nearly Eight, Actually, as Adele kept reminding people.) In the dim lighting, Adele looked faintly angelic; the lamp shone on her black curls and light brown skin. The impression was completely ruined by the fact that SATANIC had just been added to his latest pitiful effort (PAID.)

Then Adele said something that really alarmed him. “What are your intentions towards my aunt?”

Blade goggled at her. “What...”

“I read it in a novel,” she said with considerable self-satisfaction. “Mummy said it wasn’t a proper book but I read it anyway. It was about a girl from when they had to wear stupid corsets and she fell in love and-“

“But what-“

“What are your intentions towards my aunt?” Adele repeated, obviously pleased with the phrase.

“I don’t know,” Blade said, frustrated.

Adele’s stare seemed to suggest that this was not an answer. After a moment, she took pity and rephrased. “D’you love her?”

“I...”

“D’you always want to spend time with her?”

“Yeah, more or less. I mean, she is my gi-“

“D’you miss her when she’s not there?”

“Well, yes.”

“What would you do if she got hurt?”

“Depends who hurt her,” Blade said cautiously, thinking that the truth (‘I’d kill anyone who hurt her’) was maybe not suitable for a child’s ears. “Probably something very... very, very... bad. To the person who hurt her.”

“And you still don’t know if you love her?” Adele sounded incredulous.

“Grown-ups find it hard to tell,” he said, exasperated, just as the living-room door swung open, and Lorraine reappeared.

“Grown-ups find it hard to tell what?” she asked, going back to sit beside him and resting her chin on his shoulder. He put an arm around her waist.

Adele grinned impishly at Blade. “Nothing,” she replied, and Lorraine’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Niall, has my horrible niece been bullying you?”

Adele shook her head earnestly. Blade smiled. “No.”

“Good,” Lorraine said. “Oh...”

“What?” he asked, and then watched as she picked out four of the letters on the little tile-rack and put them on the board, joining them to TREAD.

L. O. V. E.

LOVED.

“Are you a grown-up?” Adele asked in apparent mild interest, eyeing the board.

“Not right now,” Blade told her, and put his other arm around Lorraine as well, pulling her close and leaning his cheek against her hair.

“So it is yes?” Adele persisted, bouncing impatiently.

“Yes,” Blade said.

“What are you two-“ Lorraine started, but Adele had whooped and leapt to her feet, flying out of the room with a diminishing cry of ‘Mummy will say I told you soooooooo’ echoing behind her.

Blade groaned and flopped onto the floor. Lorraine sat up, with a small frown and a bemused smile on her face. “I didn’t understand half of that. What have you two cooked up between you?”

“Your niece is awful,” Blade told her, eyes closed. “I’m pretty sure she arranged that game of Scrabble and your brothers playing with the cocktail shaker just to make me admit I was in love with you.”

Lorraine chuckled. “I could have told you that. The Scrabble thing, I mean, not...” She blushed, and waved a hand vaguely. “Although- obviously- I- glad... um... It’s Adele’s favourite way of pinning people down to ask questions.” She picked up one of Blade’s hands, and toyed with it, flexing the fingers and stroking the lines on the palm. “She did it to me yesterday.”

“What did she want to know?”

“I think Adele’s been at the fairy-tales. She wanted to know if I was in love with you.”

“What’d you say?”

Lorraine lifted his hand to her lips and held it there for a moment before putting it gently down on his stomach and answering: “I said I was.” She glanced at him cautiously.

He smiled broadly, bright and real and lighting his whole face, and sat up, curling his hand behind her head and kissing her. “I’m not Prince Charming or whatever, but I count, yeah?”

“In every story I read, Prince Charming was a boring bimbo on horseback,” Lorraine murmured, moving closer to him. “And you’d have him on the floor spitting out apologies and teeth before he could even get halfway up the stairs to my flat.”

“That mean yes?”

“Definitely.”