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In Confidence

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:56:49 GMT

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

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:22:40 GMT

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!

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:38:53 GMT

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

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:10:47 GMT

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

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:34:49 GMT

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.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:42:48 GMT

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

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:53:31 GMT

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

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:49:55 GMT

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.”

Nightmares

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:56:17 GMT

Title: Nightmares
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13
Summary: How Blade finds out that Lorraine has nightmares. Lorraine/Blade

A/N: Fifi insisted I should post this. Happy birthday, Fi! &hearts;

By some sixth sense, he woke before she started thrashing. Maybe it was the panicked breathing that alerted him, or the occasional stifled mew of fear, but something impinged on his sleeping brain and made him realise that something was wrong.

Blade propped himself up on his elbow, blinking while his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room. Lorraine had twisted out of his hold in her sleep, and migrated to the other side of the bed, where she was now having a fairly spectacular nightmare. He reached out and pulled her closer, and noticed the twitching of her hands, as if she was curling them around a handgun that wasn’t there. Her eyes were flashing from side to side under the thin skin of her eyelids, and she seemed completely unconscious of his presence, shaking and terrified.

Blade shook her shoulders and called her name, and she woke with a gasp. Her eyes found his, and he saw first terror, then unspeakable relief in them before she hid her face in his shoulder, pressing close against him, still shaking, breathing quick and panicked. He tightened his arms around her and stroked her back, wondering what could possibly have brought the nightmare on. Lorraine never seemed afraid or worried; he’d only seen her frightened once before, and that had been after the future predator attack on the ARC- but then, they’d all been clinging to sanity with fraying fingernails that day.

He took a guess. “Sh, Lorraine... It’s all right, they’ve gone. Relax.”

Lorraine’s fingers tightened involuntarily on his arm, nails biting into his skin, but loosened quickly when she realised. She craned her neck back to look into his face. “How... You guessed?”

He nodded. “The predators?”

“Yes.” She sounded more frightened just talking about it. He kissed her forehead, trying to soothe her.

“How long have you been having nightmares about them?”

“Since- since the attack.”

Blade cursed in the privacy of his own head. More than six months she’d been living with this, coping with a hell in her own mind- alone and unaided, if he knew her at all. They hadn’t been together long, and they’d been sleeping together for even less time, but he’d never seen her have a nightmare, so perhaps they weren’t too frequent? He asked.

“They don’t usually happen when you’re here,” Lorraine told him. She was returning to some semblance of calm, breathing more easily. “They’ve been getting... less frequent.”

“How often?”

He could feel her hesitate. “Twice a week,” she admitted reluctantly. “Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

“What are they about?”

A longer pause, and then she told him. About the predator chasing her down into the unused, dusty corridors of the ARC, following her, now here, now there, kept back by a spray of bullets, and about how she relived every second of the mindless fear and hysteria, the flicker of lights and predator, with one crucial difference- the dream-Lorraine wasn’t fast enough or deadly enough or lucky enough, and the predator ran her down and killed her.

“I wake up screaming,” she finished, matter-of-fact.

“Screaming and alone. Fuck it, Lorraine,” he hissed, “why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“Because,” Lorraine whispered, and hesitated again. “Because... it didn’t seem to matter. They’re... just nightmares, and- people need me, they need me working, not making a fuss about little things.”

“Little things!”

Lorraine choked a laugh. “Little things,” she repeated. “You’re crushing me, Niall.”

He loosened his hold. “Sorry. But- Jesus, Lorraine!”

She was silent.

“Anyone else would have got help,” he muttered, half-cross, half-alarmed. “Anyone.”

Lorraine pulled his head down far enough that she could kiss him, a brief brush of lips. “I help myself. I wish you hadn’t seen that- it’s not as if you don’t have better things to do than worry-”

He shut her up with a kiss, and felt the last of the tension fall away from her. What did she do when he wasn’t here? Lie awake and watch the ceiling? Did she dare go back to sleep?

“You should have told me,” he whispered. “Told someone.” He let her go and turned onto his side, curling himself protectively around her with one arm over her chest. “Go to sleep. I’ll be here if the nightmares come back.”

Lorraine settled down, taking hold of the hand close to her. “I know.” She was already slipping into sleep, but a few moments later she added softly “Thank you.” He closed the grip on her fingers briefly in reply.

Although she went limp against him, and her breathing evened out and slowed, it took Blade longer to sleep.

Alone. She’d tried to do this alone, tried to live through the nightmares by herself, and she’d paid for it with sleepless nights and an ever-present fear. It explained so much. The constant target practice wasn’t just something she enjoyed, it made her feel safe, it reassured her that next time, she’d be ready. She stayed late at work to stop herself having to sleep, came in so early because she’d been woken at three in the morning by a nightmare and couldn’t bring herself to try and fall asleep again. And she hadn’t asked for help, because she preferred to save others the trouble by helping herself.

He was still trying to decide whether that was incredibly brave, incredibly stupid or both when he dozed off, and when he woke up in the morning Lorraine still had his hand clasped in hers.

Always The Quiet Ones

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:50:10 GMT

Title: Always The Quiet Ones
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Oliver Leek, returned to the ARC through an anomaly, tries to repair his non-existent relationship with Jenny. It’s not a good idea.

A/N: Lorraine/Jenny. Double-and-a-half-drabble? Thanks to Fifi for checking it for craziness.

“Jenny.” His smile is both too confidential and too nervous to evoke friendliness or sympathy, and from Jenny he gets only revulsion. “I feel we... got off on the wrong foot, before-“

The metal circle on the back of his neck silences him. He knows it belongs to a gun.

“I have a few things to say, Oliver,” a voice says coolly. “Please turn around.”

Obediently, Leek turns, and finds himself facing Lorraine Wickes (Lorraine! Useless, efficient but mouse-like, uncomplaining, nothing more than a workhorse, a drudge!) and a loaded gun, aimed squarely between his eyes.

“Just because you’re not in a cell doesn’t mean that we aren’t watching you,” Lorraine tells him. “Just because you say Helen took you away and took your memories of what you did away doesn’t mean we believe you. And just because you think you’re safe doesn’t mean I will hesitate to kill you. Please return to the desk Lester assigned you.”

Stunned, Leek bows his head and leaves, too quickly to see the women shift closer together and Jenny reach out to touch Lorraine’s sleeve and speak. “That was... harsh?”

“Seventeen people died because of him,” Lorraine answers, tucking the gun carefully into a shoulder holster. “I don’t forget.” A pause. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.”

“Good.” Lorraine’s fingers entwine with Jenny’s. “Let’s go and get a coffee.”

They pass the desk Leek sits at. Lorraine brushes Jenny’s cheek with a kiss, and makes sure that Leek sees.

Leek never approaches Jenny again.

I Spy

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:47:05 GMT

Title: I Spy
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: Caroline and the secret she cannot discover.

A/N: For primeval100’s New Pairings challenge. Caroline/Lorraine. Thanks to Fifi for checking it for craziness for me!

Caroline’s good at getting hold of secrets. Deceiving, wheedling, seducing- she sometimes thinks that she should have been a female James Bond. She joins the ARC because she must; signs the papers and gives them to Lorraine, feels the cool of Lorraine’s skin.

Lorraine has an air of secrets about her. Caroline wants to know, so she works her magic of smiles and flirtatious words. When neither of them can sleep for nightmares, she finds herself trusting Lorraine with some of her secrets.

Caroline tells her about the spy idea, and Lorraine’s eyes are guarded.

Caroline never finds out why.

Overheard In Battersea

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:56:44 GMT

Title: Overheard In Battersea
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: Because not even Jon can break a terracotta flowerpot quietly, and Liz and Juliet aren’t that deep sleepers.

A/N: Companion to Luka’s Midnight Caller. *g* For primeval100’s Things That Go Bump In The Night.

Crash. Swearword.

In the bedroom down the corridor, Juliet drifted awake. “Whassat?” she mumbled, knowing that Liz would be more alert.

“Jon,” Liz murmured, curling tighter around her girlfriend. “Comes up here every weekend. Breaks flowerpots...”

“Whatabout... falling?”

Liz yawned and shrugged. “DLF’s a bigger problem.”

“Wha?”

“Dowager Lady Fanshawe. Lives in the flat below. Nice lady. Pearls and gin?”

“Oh... What, she might proposition him?“

“Ew! No! She might set him up with her oldest granddaughter.”

“Fate worse’n death,” Juliet muttered.

“Go back to sleep,” Liz advised, burying her face in Juliet’s hair. “Before Dad and Jon get noisy.”

Slightly Legless

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:54:33 GMT

Title: Slightly Legless
Fandom: Primeval, Sanctuary!verse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: There’s more than just fairies at the bottom of the Sanctuary garden. The Interns get more than they bargained for searching the bushes on Hallowe’en.

A/N: A tasteless riff-off from Fifi’s distressing Phantoms In The Night- KINDLY BEAR THIS IN MIND BEFORE READING, AS IT MEANS MENTION OF PERMANENT MAIMING IS INVOLVED. Credit/rotten tomatoes due to Fred, who mentioned the possibility of bits of person turning up in Sanctuary.

It was dark, cold, wet, and Hallowe’en. The Interns had a thousand things they’d rather be doing that night, but the Chief Medical Officer had caught them trying to tap into a CCTV feed in Sanctuary, and Management had decided that this – whatever this was – was an adequate punishment. The Interns were somewhat apprehensive; they had heard Irish-toned mutterings about legs not being able to aim themselves, and seen the Manager in a dinosaur t-shirt giggling excitedly, and had thought seriously about turning the job down- but a Manager had handed them torches, patted them comfortingly on a shoulder each, leaving behind a muddy handprint, and pushed them gently out into the darkness.

They were looking for something that had been intended to arrive at Management Office, but had missed, and landed in the bushes at the bottom of the Sanctuary garden. Any assignment there required avoiding the fairies and plotbunnies that infested it (Management intended a Serious Clearout, but hadn’t the time just now) and irritated whoever was stuck with it immensely. The Interns were no exception, but just at the moment they were more freaked out than ticked off.

“It’s spooky out here,” muttered one, flashing her torch suspiciously at a funny-shaped tree.

“Ha. You just try living with ghosts,” the other said scornfully, and brandished her torch (narrowly missing the other’s head.) “We can hit anything if it comes too close!”

“Yeah, and what does it say about this that they gave us blunt instruments beforeha- eek!”

“What now?”

“B. B-b-b-“

“Blood?”

“Y-yes.”

“...Ew, it actually is, too- WHAT ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH IS THAT. Management!”

“Having fun out there, girls?”

“No! Not in the slightest!” the first Intern snapped, acquiring some backbone. “W-why are there limbs in the garden?”

”Oh, those are Connor’s. Bring them up, would you? Shouldn’t be too heavy.”

The Interns glanced at each other, faces ghastly in the unforgiving torchlight, and took a decision as one. “What do you think?” the second Intern demanded of the disembodied voice, and the two teenagers streaked up the garden towards well-lit Sanctuary, Management’s laughter echoing in their ears.

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:13:08 GMT

Title: Everything But The Kitchen Sink
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: Liz has a run-in with the Temples’ plumbing, Nicola learns a few swearwords, and Thomas is a Puritan in the making. Kid!fic

A/N: I found this while I was rootling around my hard-drive last week. It seems to have been inspired by Fifi’s Children In Need ficlet, Doing It For The Kids, and is set maybe a few weeks beforehand; naturally I used Fifi’s names for the kids. I fired it off to the original author and acquired the seal of approval; Fi, I hope you don’t mind me posting this, but if you do let me know and I’ll take it down pronto, or at least as pronto as today’s long-haul flight back to school allows for.

“Ouch! Bloody, bloody, sodding-!”

“Buddy,” Miss Nicola Temple repeated experimentally, and her older brother gave Liz a startled and shocked look.

“Ouch... Dam’ pipes... Don’t look at me like that, Thomas,” Liz Lester said, extricating herself from the tender grip of half of Connor and Abby’s kitchen plumbing and clapping a hand to her bruised head. “I’m part of the crude and licentious soldiery. Swearwords come with the package. Blame your father for asking me to help babysit.”

“Is something wrong?” Jenny enquired, wandering through from the living-room and a phone call to Nick and picking up Nicola, who promptly plugged her mouth with her thumb and laid her head –faintly sticky tangle of dark hair and all- on her honorary auntie’s shoulder. “Nick says there’s no news, but everything seems to be going according to plan. Abby is demanding painkillers and Connor is chewing his nails.”

“Oh, good. And no, nothing’s wrong,” Liz sighed, sitting upright and eyeing the pipes under the sink. “The sink is blocked and I was just trying to sort it out before Abby has sproglets numbers three and four and needs it. And Thomas is turning into a Puritan.”

“Auntie Jenny, Auntie Liz said a bad word,” Thomas said reproachfully, sliding off his chair and tugging on his godmother’s shirt to get her attention.

“Did she? Bad Liz.”

“You’re all b-“

“Liz!”

“-dratted well ganging up on me. Sorry, Jenny. No, Nancy, that is a screwdriver, it is not diictodon dinner!” Liz wrenched the screwdriver out of the now rather elderly diictodon’s grasp and wiped it on a tea-towel, before attacking the sink again. Thomas wandered over and plonked down beside her, hauling Nancy half onto his lap to occupy her and keep her from chewing the tools Liz had unearthed from the depths of the laundry room.

“Auntie Jenny, am I going to have another sister?” he said after a moment, placidly watching Liz wrestle with a pipe and a screwdriver.

“Maybe,” Jenny said cautiously, evicting Sid from the Unexpected Rocking Chair in the corner of the kitchen (so christened because visitors would keep sitting down on it all unawares and hurtling backwards as the chair did what it was designed to do and rocked.) While the ultrasound had informed Connor and Abby not only that twins were on the way but the sex of the babies, Connor and Abby had not seen fit to tell anyone else. “Why?”

“I don’t want another sister.” A thoughtful pause. “Can I send it back if it’s a sister?”

There came a snort from under the sink.

“You are not helping,” Jenny told Liz, and tried to think of something comforting to say. She gave up. “I’m afraid not, Thomas.”

“I could help wrap it up and everything,” Thomas suggested.

There was a high-pitched sound from under the sink, somewhere between a wheeze and a giggle.

“Stop it, Liz,” Jenny hissed. “I’m sure you could wrap it very nicely, Thomas, but you can’t send babies back. It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work?” Thomas demanded.

Liz, unhelpfully, started to laugh, and then shrieked and spluttered as dirty water poured down from a pipe directly onto her. Evidently, she’d successfully removed the blockage.

Thomas peered solicitously at her. “Are you all right, Auntie Liz?”

“Oh, fine,” Liz said, sliding out from beneath the deluge and putting a bucket where her head had been, with a poisonous glare for Jenny who was smiling beatifically.

“Karma,” Jenny said happily, stroking Nicola’s hair. “Don’t give up the day job, Liz. Thomas, take Auntie Liz away and tidy her up, will you? Good boy.”

Visiting Rights

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:49:00 GMT

Title: Visiting Rights
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: Alex (Hilary) Becker is at home, right where he is. His mother understands.

A/N: This drabble features Alick Fraser, the redshirt I killed off and was promptly shanghaied into slashing with Becker by Fakey. I named Becker’s mother Rosemary, though the name isn’t used in this drabble, and gave Becker the middle name of Alexander, which he uses in preference to Hilary. For primeval100 challenge ‘Where The Heart Is’; forms part of a loose series with, in order, Before The Fall, The Importance of Labels, Far From The Tree, and Worthless.

“Are you coming home soon, Hilary?” his mother asked, and Alex Becker knew that his father was within hearing range because she hadn’t called him by the name he preferred.

“No. It’s not home for me any more, Mother. I’m at home now.”

“Where are you?”

“Skye,” Alex said, and smiled at Alick, leaning faux-casually against a wall. “You should come here. You’d love it.”

“I’d like to visit you.”

“Don’t bring Father.”

He knew his mother was finally thinking about leaving the overbearing, controlling man who she’d inexplicably loved so much when she said: “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Too Many Reminders

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:43:58 GMT

Title: Too Many Reminders
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: There’s always something of him, wherever she looks.

It’s in her youngest son’s blue eyes and gift for music, in the lessons he takes and the specialist music school he attends.

It’s in her fragile older boy’s clever hands and art, the quick sketches and full-colour pieces, saturated with life.

It’s in her awkward daughter’s sharp tone, her sarcasm, even her... relationship with that girl, because she can see a familiar unstinting love in her daughter’s eyes.

Their father is there in all of them, always. Sometimes that upsets Kathy, because it means that - after all this time and pain and loss – James Lester is still with her.

Smile

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:42:19 GMT

Title: Smile
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: G
Summary: Cara and Darren start with a smile and a matchmaking barmaid. Kermit/Cara.

A/N: With apologies to Luka and Fred for wandering off with Cara and Kermit when they weren’t looking!

“Cute guy’s looking at you,” the barmaid commented.

Cara flushed. “Bella!”

“What? S’true.” Bella, a friend from uni, leaned forward. “And you’ve been looking at him. You’re in here all the time and somehow I don’t think it’s because you adore my company.”

“Shut up!”

“Look. His name’s Darren Cooper, he lives down my road, and he’s adorable. Aaand he’s looking at you. Smile.”

“No!” Cara hissed, but sneaked a glance at the lad with the brown eyes anyway.

He was looking at her, and when he saw her looking he smiled shyly.

Cara couldn’t help it; she smiled back.

Nothing Unusual

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:25:06 GMT

Title: Nothing Unusual
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: Lorraine considers the everyday doings of the Anomaly Research Centre. Written for primeval100 challenge Sex, Dinosaurs and Rock & Roll.

James Lester eyed the stack of paperwork Lorraine was holding out to him. “That’s... rather extensive, Miss Wickes. Have there been any disasters I wasn’t aware of?”

Lorraine thought.

Reminder from CCTV operators that there were cameras on the underground car-park, which made having sex in there a Very Bad Idea.

Note from Professor Cutter requesting permission to name the latest hitherto-unknown dinosaur- a vicious raptor -after Lester.

Complaint from Dr. Butterworth about noise from the office Ciarán O’Murphy, Abby and Connor shared, which was a problem only if you disliked the All American Rejects.

“Nothing unusual, sir,” she said.

Icons

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:46:27 GMT

Abby/Lester icons for fififolle, who has made this pairing her own. Screencaps by the inestimable lothy.

1. 2. 3. 4.
5. 6. 7. .

Icons

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:06:12 GMT

Stephen/Ryan for Sarah and Stephen/Lyle for Luka. :) I used a Daniel Craig picture from a Google search, and screencaps by lothy.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8.

Icons

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:30:58 GMT

Alick/Becker.fififolle made me post. The quote on #3 and #4 is supposed to be more decorative than legible; it's from Wicked, a musical: 'And if it turns out/It's over too fast/I'll make every last moment last'. Base pictures from imdb, a Ben Mansfield fansite and Google Images. These are all snitchable with credit, no hotlinking but you're all civilised enougj to know that already.

Also, I'm trying to improve my photomanip skillz so taking requests for icons. sarah_lilzfl has nicked Stephen/Ryan; I will be happy to do OCs, but for most of them, like Kermit or Ditzy, I'll need a pic provided because I am not surfing the net for Rusty Joiner or Kerry Degman on school internet!

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Drastic Action

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:47:57 GMT

Title: Drastic Action

Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Alick (Alexander) Fraser and Alex (Hilary) Becker, from corporal to sergeant and lieutenant to captain.
A/N: Okay... so I wrote this after Drunk and Sentimental, as Fakey made me. I suspect she just wanted to pretend Drunk and Sentimental was not all about the hurt/comfort Becker/Sarah, but the angsty Becker/Alick (Alick Fraser being the unfortunate redshirt who died in Drunk and Sentimental.) The git then got a life without my prior permission, making brief appearances in a number of fics and sharing the spotlight with Becker in Far From The Three and Worthless.

1. Autumn

They met in the autumn, when the leaves were falling and it was just cold enough to make the muddy Brecon Beacons horrible rather than unpleasant: Alex Becker was a second lieutenant, green as grass and twice as anxious about not screwing up, and Alick Fraser a corporal, popular and mild-mannered with a mischievous glint in his eye. Becker never understood why the older man went out of his way to make friends with him.

2. Spring

Alick’s birthday fell on the 25^th of March, the same day they were shipped out to Afghanistan. “It’ll be all right,” Becker promised, seeing Alick silent and pensive, and bought him a drink when they finally got to celebrate his birthday.

3. Summer

“You call this summer?” Becker demanded, batting away a cloud of persistent Scottish midges and glowering at the grey sky; Alick just laughed.

4. Winter

Becker’s face was like winter at the funeral, bones carved from immovable ice, overlaid with skin like snow that blankets and kills slowly: his eyes showed the only warmth- a hint of tears, held back by the cold of his composure.

He will cry on Sarah’s shoulder later, and the tears will thaw the ice away.

5. Amused

Becker gave his name as Alex, and the tall corporal’s blue eyes glittered with laughter.

“Something funny?” he asked.

“Nothing important.” Fraser gave an expansive wave of his arm. “We’re no short of Alexanders, aye? What wi’ you and Alex Gardiner over there, Alec in the corner, Sandy in the other corner- and me Alick –we could get a wee bit confused.”

6. Balance

He staggered, and a large hand seized the back of his tac vest and hauled him up. “Don’t give up on me now, lieutenant!” Alick’s voice was harsh, and Becker wanted to tell him I won’t but he had no spare breath to do it with.

7. Betrayal

“Ambush. Ambush! Get the fuck out!”

They retreated, hasty feet moving on automatic, and Becker found himself crouched in cover beside a familiar oversized figure and suddenly felt a lot safer.

8. Bunnies

He should not have been as hypnotised as he was by the sight of Alick munching thoughtfully on that chocolate Easter bunny.

9. Cemetery

It was a tiny bleak place on Skye, well out of the noise of Portree; Alick would have liked it, but Becker hated it, because it was too far away to visit, for some peace and a chance to grieve.

10. Chocolate

“Want some, Alex?” Alick broke off a piece of the chocolate bunny and held it up to Becker’s lips. Becker swallowed, and caught the other man’s eye: there was an unmistakable challenge there.

He took the chocolate.

11. Cranky

It said a lot about how well they knew each other that Alick only had to drop into Becker’s office in the ARC and note that the captain was knocking his head gently against the desk to work out that Lieutenant Lyle had been up to shenanigans again.

12. Curious

“Why are you never tired?” Becker demanded. “Up hill and down dale all sodding day long and you’re fine. How do you do it?”

Fraser laughed. “I grew up on Skye. Lots more hills there.”

13. Decisions

Becker couldn’t decide whether Alick was flirting with him and he didn’t know how to find out.

14. Destiny

Becker didn’t buy the idea of destiny any more: there was just no way Alick had been meant to be killed by an overgrown prehistoric pig.

15. First Glance

Men said you could pick them out at a glance; a sergeant (not a corporal any more) and a lieutenant (still not yet a captain), one much taller than the other, working in tandem and apparently afraid of nothing, dark silhouettes slipping from shadow to shadow, taking and giving orders.

16. Love

Alick was just stupid enough to fall in love with his superior officer, a man two years younger than him from a distinguished military family and Sandhurst, with the accent and connections to prove it.

17. Lust

Sometimes Alick more than took his breath away.

18. Energetic

“I didna realise grown men got sugar rushes,” Fraser said, eyeing him in disapproval. “I’ll keep ye away from chocolate in future.”

19. Famous

“Colonel Becker, can I suggest-“

“Oh God, my bloody father,” Becker hissed, turning a shade of brilliant red. “I told him not to come here!”

“Oh?” Alick cast a quick glance around the room, and stuffed him unceremoniously into a cupboard. “Lads, the lieutenant is no’ here, do I make myself clear? Shut up,” he muttered to the cupboard, which was (unusually for a cupboard) cursing, “you’ll thank me later.”

20. Fight

The sight of Alick a little battered, bloody and grimy, eyes alight with adrenalin and a fierce grin on his face should not have turned Becker on as much as it did.

21. Flame

“Arm-wrestling over a candle-flame?” Becker repeated, and paused thoughtfully, eyeing the competitors. “Given that’s Dawson and Hawkes there, is that a good idea?”

Alick leaned comfortably against the wall. “Oh, aye, until Dawson loses. At which point I expect we shall have to break up a fight.”

22. Found

“You’re a wreck, Sergeant!”

“I ken that fine, sir,” Alick said placidly, and smiled reassuringly at him before passing out in the middle of the medics’ ministrations.

23. Lost

How can you lose six men on a routine exercise? Becker fumed to himself, kicking the plaster cast on his broken leg until a nurse whisked past and snapped at him to stop it. He should have been out there with Alick and the others, just as missing as they were- and here he was, stuck in hospital.

Somehow he didn’t feel like counting his lucky stars for that.

24. Frustrated

“Ye’re a bloody tease, Alex!”

25. Giggly

“I shouldna find that as funny as I do,” Alick commented, grinning, watching Lieutenant Lyle- face contorted with fury at his men’s mocking laughter –trying to extract himself from a very muddy and rather deep ditch.

“Sweet revenge?” Becker suggested, and stopped bothering with not laughing.

26. Gun

There was something distressingly kinky about the way he couldn’t stop watching Alex cleaning and maintaining that shotgun, and something distressingly manipulative about the way the man always did it when he was around.

27. Knife

Alick didn’t have as large a collection of knives as Blade, but the knives he did have were all well-cared for, well-used, and utterly petrifying- and the thoughtful, absorbed, in-his-own-little-world look on Alick’s face as he tested the balance of one of them made Becker want to jump him. (It would never happen, of course. For one thing, he was reasonably sure Alick was straight, and for another- well, Alick was four inches taller than him and quite a lot stronger than him; jumping him would probably be a physical impossibility, even with the element of surprise.)

28. Heartache

“Alex! Becker! Wake up, idiot!”

“Yeah, yeah- just thinking...”

“Did it hurt?”

Becker gave the heckler the finger. It was stupid to be this unhappy when Alick was assigned to a different job than him, or to be this concerned about what would happen to him. They were just friends, and they hadn’t even known each other that long.

29. Justice

“It’s not fucking fair,” he said furiously to Sarah. “Alick was supposed to keep going and going and going- he wasn’t fragile, he just brushed off everything that got thrown at him, and he knew what he was doing and he was a better soldier than I was- he shouldn’t have died like that!”

Sarah put an arm around his shoulders and kindly refrained from saying that life wasn’t fair.

30. Leather

The only thing more sinful than Becker in that leather jacket was the smile he gave Alick when he caught him looking- and oh yes, Alick was going straight to hell...

31. Education

“What in hell makes you think hill-walking is fun?” Becker wanted to know, collapsing onto a handy rock and glowering at Alick. “It’s grey up here, the wind-chill factor is freezing my balls off, I swear to God it’s going to rain, and you think this is fun?”

“It’s not hill-walking, it’s Munro-bagging,” Alick corrected. “And although I canna do anythin’ about the weather, as for your second wee problem-“ a thumb stroked the sensitive skin under Becker’s ear, making him shiver and lean into the touch- “I think I can help ye there.”

32. Lessons

Becker learnt quickly; it was his saving grace, hidden behind a shield –not always quite the protective lie it should have been- of arrogance. So he learnt that lieutenant or sir, later captain, meant they were on duty and at work and some things were not appropriate, and in return he called Alick sergeant or Fraser. He learnt that Becker meant they were off duty but still with the lads, and some things were still not appropriate, and he stuck to calling the other man Fraser or sometimes Alick. And he learnt Alex meant all bets were off, and he preferred it to all the other names Alick called him- so he learnt how to get Alick to call him Alex, too.

33. School

The first time he visited Skye –it was too poisonous at home to think of going there, just now, and Alick had seen doubt in his eyes and immediately asked if he’d like to go to Skye with him- they walked past a primary school in Portree on their way to the train station, full of yelling and screaming kids. “I used to go there,” Alick said casually with a jerk of his thumb towards the riotous playground.

“No wonder you turned out such a thug,” Becker joked.

34. Teacher

Mrs. Josephine Macleod, Alick’s petrifying grandmother, had apparently once been a devil of a good teacher, capable of freezing teenage boys in their tracks at twenty paces and mind-reading; given the sharp glance she bestowed on Becker when she caught him watching Alick, and her immediate announcement that she only had one spare room fit for habitation and ‘one o’ you lads will just have to sleep on the floor’, Becker could well believe it.

35. Encounter

“Ah! Excuse me, ma’am!” Becker said, turning pink and trying to squeeze surreptitiously past Mrs. Macleod, soaking wet from the shower and wrapped in only a towel, but she refused to let him past and poked him with a sharp finger.

“You be good to my Alick, laddie.”

“I’ll try, ma’am.”

That earned him another sharp glance, which softened slightly after a moment. “I believe ye will. Trust Alick to pick a reasonable Sassenach...”

36. Naughty

“Alex! What ha’ ye been up to?” Alick demanded; years after they had first met, much of his accent was worn away- except in moments of stress or deep suspicion, and there was nothing to evoke the latter like that particular gleeful smile on Becker’s face.

37. Monsters

Becker prodded the creature gently with a toe, and looked silently at Alick, his mouth set in a grim line; they couldn’t be sure which of their bullets had killed it, so Miss Maitland was pouring scorn and breathing brimstone on both of them, just to make sure- the fact that it had been about to take a chunk out of her windpipe seemed to have passed her by.

38. Movie Night

Alick had fallen asleep; he always did during movies, but now he was snoring, so Becker poked him in the ribs. The older man shot upright, focussing on him, and there was a flicker of something Becker couldn’t read in those blue eyes- and then Alick rolled his eyes at him and settled back down again.

39. Need

“Help me,” Alick made himself say, eyes huge and full of fear, still shaking from the nightmare, and Becker wrapped his arms around Alick, hushing him, one hand brushing through thick short dark hair. He didn’t know the details of what happened on the op, and Alick can’t tell him, of course- but it must have been bad to frighten Alick that much, and Becker felt a tiny spark of pride when he realised that there might be as few as two people in the world Alick would show this much weakness to- and he was one of them.

40. Otherworld

You couldn’t get much closer to an otherworld than stepping through an anomaly, and Becker quelled a superstitious shiver with difficulty. He glanced at Alick, and saw that the sergeant was having even less success, probably not helped by a strong vein of Highlander superstition running through him- in fact, despite being a very lapsed Catholic indeed, he had just crossed himself.

41. Peaceful

“I see what you mean,” Becker said at last, sitting on a rock at the top of the fiendish hill Alick had just made him climb and staring out over Skye. “It’s...”

“Peaceful,” Alick suggested, standing beside him.

“Peaceful,” Becker agreed, “-but don’t take this as an excuse to drag me up any more of these hills again!”

Alick just laughed.

42. Promise.

“Try not to get yourself killed,” Becker said haplessly, staring at the creature-inflicted gash down Alick’s arm which he appeared to be ignoring, regardless of Corporal Prescott (better known as ‘Trouble’, as in ‘here comes trouble’) swearing and swiping at it with antiseptic, saline and butterfly stitches.

Alick smiled. “I’ll try, sir.”

43. Ritual

Neither of them understood what was so comforting about it, but in moments of severe stress and danger when it wasn’t yet time to fight and every nerve was vibrating with adrenalin the vague and embarrassed mutter of hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee from Alick’s direction eased the stress a little.

“It’s the ritual,” Alick always said firmly when questioned; he wasn’t religious, not any more, and always referred to himself as a very lapsed Catholic, and when Becker asked him he admitted he had no clue where the Hail Mary came from. “It’s the ritual that makes ye feel safe.”

44. Silk Sheets

“Grannie Macleod is a closet romantic,” Alick observed grimly, eyeing what his grandmother claimed was the only habitable spare room, necessitating one of them to sleep on the floor- the problem with that being that there was a double bed and approximately six square inches of floorspace in said spare room, not enough to fit either of them.

Becker grinned and sat down on the bed, bouncing slightly. “Is there a problem with that? Bed’s perfectly comfortable. Room for both of us...”

45. Sinful

“I think people call things sinful because they’re frightened of them,” Becker commented thoughtfully.

Alick stretched, cat-like. “I should ha’ a hard time being afraid o’ what we just did, Alex.”

“It doesn’t scare you sometimes, being this attached to someone? You don’t worry about them getting hurt?”

Silence, and Becker suddenly found himself in Alick’s arms, tucked close against the older man. “I do. But I ha’ the decency to keep it to myself.”

46. Skating

It was Alick who persuaded him to try the ice rink at the Natural History Museum, and therefore it was Alick’s fault that he kept falling over, getting cold and wet and grumpier by the minute. “I’m frozen,” Becker complained after one of these episodes.

Alick grinned. “I’ll thaw you out.”

47. Years

At the time of Alick’s death, Becker counted up and realised they’d only known each other five years- strange, it seemed so much longer.

48. Space

Becker took up so little space compared to him; tidier, shorter, he fitted himself neatly into a plane seat while Alick shifted uncomfortably, trying to fit all of his six foot three inches into a space designed for a shorter person, and then it was Becker’s turn to laugh at him.

49. Toys

Alick’s eyebrows were hovering somewhere around his hairline. “Is this wee Trouble’s idea of amusement?”

“No, I think it’s his idea of a birthday present,” Becker said, astonished, turning the handcuffs over and over in his hands. “It would be rude not to try them out, since they were a present...”

“Oh, aye?” Alick was still sceptical, but there was a smile curving the corners of his lips. “Well, then, Alex- no time like the present.”

“Oh, you think you’re so funny...”

50. Watching the Clock

Becker collapsed into a chair in the mostly empty rec-room, and Alick leaned over and stopped the stopwatch. “Ten minutes, thirty-two seconds. No’ bad. How was it?”

“No worse than usual,” Becker sighed, and closed his eyes, relaxing- and at that precise moment the anomaly detector went off.

“Oh, bugger!” they said in perfect unison.

You Want It

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:46:07 GMT

Title: You Want It
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: Juliet faces the choice she always wanted. Liz/Juliet double drabble.

A/N: This and Nothing Sweet About Me were written for Luka, who was kind enough to edit a significant chunk of Endgame for me: she prompted me with ‘scratch the itch’ or ‘lucky break’, and bunnied me with both. Hope you like it, Luka!

The letter was creased, and crumpled, and had been pored over relentlessly ever since it had arrived at the Sayers home the day before. It had been tucked into Liz’s schoolbag in an envelope, along with a note.

I’m too scared to show you this in person. I’m not sure what it means for us. Read it and tell me what you think. J.

J was Juliet, of course. There was no-one else it would be, and anyway Liz knew her own girlfriend’s handwriting well enough.

Liz read the letter again, scanning every word which accepted Juliet Sayers into the Royal Ballet Upper School, from address to signature. She picked up her mobile phone and dialled a number she knew off by heart, the familiar digits playing through her mind. It rang twice, and then Juliet picked up.

“Liz?” Her voice was half-eager, half-frightened.

“Ju.” Liz swallowed. “I read the letter.”

“I guessed you must have done.”

“Yeah. Look, Ju- I know it’s a boarding school and I know we wouldn’t see as much of each other if you said yes.” Liz paused. “But... this is your dream. I’m not going to stop you. You want it, you do it.”

Worthless

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:39:30 GMT

Title: Worthless
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG (language)
Summary: Colonel Becker meant to raise a fine boy, and he did- but he spent Alex Becker’s childhood telling him he was useless, and that leaves its marks.

Can be taken as part of a series with Before The Fall and Far From The Tree; for prompt ‘Legacy’ at primeval100. Apologies for my terrible, awful, no-good attempt to convey drunkenness/a Scottish accent, and the resulting creative grammar/spelling. Features Sgt. Alick Fraser, my redshirt OC who got a life against my wishes after dying in Drunk and Sentimental. Fifi and Fakey both slash him and Becker something rotten.

“Why do ye no think ye’re worth anything?”

The question was unexpected. Alex Becker glanced up at his friend, startled.

“I do think I’m worth s-something,” he pointed out, peering at his glass of whisky. “Fizz called me ananan arrogant bastard yes-yesterday.”

Possibly he’d had enough to drink.

“Ye dinna,” Alick disagreed. The only noticeable effect of the whisky on him had been to thicken his accent.

“All right. I din- don’t. Imeanyouknow. I’m stupid. Not good enough. Ju-just... pretend to be.”

He’d definitely had enough to drink.

“Why d’ye think that?” Alick asked.

“B-Because. My father told me so.”

This House Moves

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:32:16 GMT

Title: This House Moves
Fandom: Primeval
Rating: PG
Summary: This house moves that all love is not eternal. James Lester and Kathy Burke last almost twenty years.

A/N: A brief explanation, in case I make less sense than I think I do (perfectly possible.) I have told this story in eight drabbles, each under a heading based on the stages of a debate for reasons that will come clear the moment you read the first one. ‘This house moves’ is the formula for giving the idea (or motion) to be debated on, so ‘This house moves that tea should be outlawed’.

introductions by the chairperson

The debate is over, and Kathy’s team won. There is no doubt that she was the driving force behind it, but half of those who come up to congratulate the team speak only to the others- all men. This is 1987, not 1950! she thinks. Shouldn’t we be beyond this?

            She does not recognise the young man who approaches her. He is slightly older than she is, with clever blue eyes, and when he offers her his hand to shake his grip is as firm as hers. “I just wanted to congratulate you on your debating. Good arguments beautifully presented.”

the proposition begins

             “Rose Macmillan,” Kathy hisses, “is-“

              “- irritating?” James suggests as they turn the corner. “Grievously mistaken?”

              “Try ‘a slut’.”

               James laughs. “She is a little...”

              “Slutty! She was all over you!”

              “Shouldn’t she be?” he asks mildly, and he’s got one eyebrow raised and that semi-mocking half-smile on his face, and it slips out-

              “No! You’re mine!”

              “Really?” He sounds amused.

              Kathy lets out a stifled shriek of aggravation, seizes the lapels of his coat and yanks him down to her level, and at first teeth clash and noses bump but once they get started, it actually works quite well.

the opposition begins

              Someone bashes on the door of James’s room in halls. Kathy looks up from where she’s sitting on the bed with a file of notes on her lap. James, wallowing in textbooks, curses, jumps up and heaves the door open. “Oliver! Piss o- Ralph!”

              Kathy gathers that the visitor is not Oliver Yale, particularly because James has just seized the newcomer in a bear hug.

              They talk about how James wasn’t expecting this visit, and then Ralph glances questioningly at her.

             “Oh!” James says, and smiles at Kathy. “Ralph, this is Kathy, my girlfriend. Kathy, this is Ralph, my brother.”

the proposition’s rebuttals

               The wedding day goes well. The service is all right and the first dance makes a little part of Kathy’s heart melt, because James chose the song and he got it so impossibly right she almost cries. The dress makes her look oddly like a princess, which makes her slightly uneasy because she isn’t one and she hopes James understands that; she tells him, and he laughs and kisses the side of her neck, and informs her that he always saw her as more of a prime minister than a princess. She can’t help laughing.

               Some idiot takes a photo.

the opposition’s rebuttals

             One day James comes home and finds Kathy lying in an armchair in the living room, looking shattered.

“Children are monsters of Satan,” she observes.

             He goes to sit on an arm of the seat, running a hand soothingly over her hair. “What have they done?”

             Kathy closes her eyes in despair. “Jamie’s put poster-paint handprints on the wall, Nicky almost swallowed a pound coin, and Liz bit the au pair. She had hysterics.”

             “Liz or the au pair?” James asks thoughtfully.

Kathy snorts, and it’s almost laughter. “Liz. No, you idiot, the au pair. Honestly, who did you think?”

closing argument for the proposition

         It’s a physical, sick, solid blow to the stomach when they find out Jamie has leukaemia.

         Sweet little Jamie, four years old, had never been as sturdy as his older sister; he’d always been paler and thinner and more susceptible to colds, and lately he’d been even paler, and he bruised far too easily and became fretful, complaining of aches.

         “He has an excellent chance,” the doctor assures them, but Kathy’s vice-like grip on James’s hand tells him otherwise.

          Outside the doctor’s office she turns silently to him and buries her head in his shoulder and he clings to her.

closing argument for the opposition

          Their marriage has worked so well for so long, and now Kathy thinks it’s broken.

           Tonight, like last night, James is late home, and sometimes doesn’t get back till the next evening. He won’t tell her what his job is. He works on weekends. He’s called her from Cornwall when he’s supposed to be in London. She’s heard a woman’s voice in the background.

            She thinks he’s having an affair.

            He comes into the kitchen and sees her there, her eyes accusing.

            James can’t take the row that expression means, so he turns away.

Kathy reads the action entirely wrong.

judges’ decision

The decree nisi arrives in October.

James, in the new Battersea flat shared with the stubborn eldest daughter who wouldn’t leave him, reads it standing up and disposing of a small brandy after a bad day coping with Cutter. He blinks hard, and Liz looks at him like she’s worried.

Kathy, in the Fulham house, treads on Nicky’s football boots and sips her tea, then sits down and reads it right through. She only cries a little, even when Jamie hugs her and Nicky asks if she’s all right. The tears come later.

Both of them pretend it means nothing.